Churchill's Secret War Read online

  The level of taxes that the Company had grown to expect could not be met because there were now far fewer plantings of rice to tax. With no hands to tend them, a third of Bengal’s fields returned to jungle. Most of the province was a fertile delta, formed over millennia by the Ganga and its distributaries: in the absence of cultivators its natural state was tropical forest. The impenetrable growth invaded formerly prosperous villages and shadowed tiny hamlets where the few inhabitants lived in terror of the jungle’s rampaging elephants and man-eating panthers. In 1780, two battalions of sepoys—native soldiers in the employ of the British—trying to force their way through Birbhum (a district considered at one time to be “the highway of armies”) found “all the way a perfect wilderness” infested with tigers and bears. Communications broke down throughout Bengal because the postmen began to get carried off by wild animals. Many of the surviving villagers deserted their lands and, led by Hindu sadhus or Muslim fakirs (men of religion), took to waylaying British consignments for grain or cash and looting any fields of rice they could find. The rebellion was the first of innumerable peasant and tribal uprisings that would harass the British Raj for the rest of its reign.20

  Bengal’s capital city of Murshidabad, where the dead had lain in piles on the street, fed on by dogs, jackals, and vultures, never recovered from the famine and its aftereffects. By 1771, Calcutta—which historian Narendra K. Sinha states “was well supplied with grain at a time when many places from which it was brought were destitute”—stood alone in all of Bengal as an island of wealth. Desperate people trekked to Calcutta in search of food. “I have counted from my bed-chamber window in the morning when I got up forty dead bodies lying within twenty yards of the wall, besides many hundred lying in the agonies of death for want, bending double, with their stomachs quite close contracted to their back-bones,” wrote a correspondent who signed himself J.C. in The Gentlemen’s Magazine, and who did not care to have the dying so proximate. “I have sent my servants to desire those who had strength, to remove further off.”21

  UNTIL THE FAMINE broke out, few people in the United Kingdom comprehended the source of the East India Company’s profits. “Numerous fleets of large ships, loaded with the most valuable commodities of the East, annually arriving in England in a constant and increasing succession” had given rise to a misconception, a parliamentary committee subsequently observed. “This export from India seemed to imply also a reciprocal supply, by which the trading capital employed in those productions was continually strengthened and enlarged. But the payment of a tribute, and not a beneficial commerce, to that country, wore this specious and delusive character.” The depopulation that resulted from famine eventually led to a steep drop in the Company’s revenues, burst the speculative bubble in its shares, forced it to seek a loan from the Bank of England, and laid its affairs open to scrutiny. Clive, deemed by some to be the richest man in the United Kingdom, had become a member of the House of Commons—but was obliged to answer to Parliament for corruption. He was charged with having received in India valuable gifts that were deemed to belong rightfully to the Company. Although he was cleared of blame, for unknown reasons Clive took his own life in 1774.22

  The British Parliament gave the East India Company a loan of £1.4 million and appointed Warren Hastings, a gifted protégé of Clive, as the first governor-general of India. Hastings instituted an English-style legal system in Bengal, basing certain of its aspects on what he understood to be local custom. He also sought to repair the Company’s fortunes by canceling the portion of Bengal’s revenues that were to go to the emperor in Delhi, and by subjugating Oudh, a prosperous kingdom west of Bengal, and subjecting it to rigorous tax collection. As a result, Oudh became “forlorn and desolate” and in 1784 underwent famine. Hastings returned to England a rich man, but he, too, had to answer for his foreign adventures.23

  In an impeachment trial that dragged on for nine years, statesman Edmund Burke accused Governor-General Hastings of venality and brutality. The Company’s revenue collectors, Burke charged in some of the most sensational testimony of the time, had stripped naked the wives of tax defaulters, dragged them from their homes, “put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies.” Although Burke’s outrage was genuine, historian Nicholas Dirks argues that his crusade had a deeper motive. Burke hoped to cleanse the emerging empire of corruption and cruelty—and to ensure that its benefits flowed not just to employees, shareholders, and directors of the Company but, more broadly, to the people of the United Kingdom. He succeeded in his greater objectives. In the end Hastings was acquitted but, according to Dirks, “Empire emerged from the trial stronger than ever.”24

  IN 1793, AFTER a period of anarchy and intermittent famine that lasted two decades, Governor-General Charles Cornwallis reformed the land revenue system in Bengal. (He had earlier commanded the British forces that were forced to capitulate to George Washington’s army in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781.) Cornwallis returned to the zamindars their hereditary role of collecting taxes and fixed the annual revenue owed to the state (at £2.68 million) in the hope that such a permanent settlement would inspire them to tend their fiefdoms. Using the steady income from Bengal that Cornwallis’s reforms assured it, the East India Company went on to conquer or otherwise annex kingdoms in central, southern, and western India. Compliant princes were permitted to continue ruling their kingdoms, as long as they paid a retainer for protection by the Company’s troops. Bitter campaigns in the northwest ended with the fall of the Sikhs in 1849, bringing the border of the Raj to the edge of Afghanistan.25

  In most of the newly conquered territories, the Company gathered its own land tax, which again it called rent. A levy of up to a third of the potential crop, which was often more than the harvest actually produced, ultimately became the norm for rent across much of India. As a result of the relentless benchmark of rent—in contrast to the Mughal tax, which varied with the harvest—land rapidly passed out of the hands of farmers and into the possession of moneylenders. An elderly peasant explained to a revenue official the essential insecurity of the system: “They told me that the river was passable at such and such a ford,” he said, “and on their word I tried to cross it, but fell into a deep hole and was nearly drowned. They told me, when I struggled back to shore, that the average depth was quite safe. But that would not have kept me from drowning.” To pay their rent after a poor harvest, farmers had to mortgage their future crops and eventually their plots, ultimately losing everything to usurers and ending up as laborers working for low wages in what had been their own fields. In the past, a peasant’s land was secure even if he could not pay taxes. But British law in India invariably upheld the rights of creditors, who became critical cogs in the machinery of revenue extraction. 26

  A variety of economic traumas, ranging from the ravages of war and exactions of rent to natural calamity, led to a series of famines all over India. The Madras region, for instance, suffered famine in 1783, 1792, 1807, 1813, 1823, 1834, and 1854. Unlike the Bengal famine of 1770, the nineteenth-century calamities excited little comment in England, where influential scholars such as James Mill argued that poverty rather than wealth was India’s intrinsic and unvarying condition. Hindu legal codes contained guidelines for helping ordinary people through “seasons of calamity,” and Mill pointed to the existence of such regulations as evidence that “a state of poverty and wretchedness, as far as the great body of the people are concerned, must have prevailed in India” in the past, just as in the present.27

  Mill asserted that the British conquest of India was ordained by the inexorable progress of humankind. Ascendant societies had many enemies; as a result, he wrote, “one of the first applications of knowledge is, to improve the military art.” Superiority in the battlefield was a sign of cultural advancement. Muslims such as the Mughal emperors had ruled India for centuries, which indicated to Mill that their civilization was superior to that of Hindus—and the reins had naturally passe
d from them to Christians.28

  The distinction between Hindus and Muslims, originally one of uncountable fissures in multifarious India, had sharpened with colonial attempts to classify the subcontinent’s populace. Having encountered Muslims for centuries, the British believed that they knew them: a valiant, warlike, monotheistic people who, despite being occasionally savage, deserved respect. Indian Muslims were in truth far more varied and sophisticated than such a caricature would allow; Sufi saints, for instance, preached love rather than war. But once Muslims had been pegged, Hindus came to be defined by their perceived differences with their Islamic compatriots.29

  Hindu was originally an ancient Arab or Persian appellation for anyone living east and south of the Indus River: it signified residence rather than religion. The myriad beliefs of Hindus, ranging from the extreme nonviolence of some to the human sacrifices by others, could scarcely be classified as a single faith. Nevertheless, Mill and others believed Hindus to be endowed with distinct characteristics, at the core of which lay effeminacy and its corollary, dishonesty. Unable to face what Mill called “the manliness and courage of our ancestors,” the defeated Hindus with their “slavish and dastardly spirit” were wont to employ “deceit and perfidy” in achieving their ends. Over time, educated Indians came to internalize such distinctions between Hindus and Muslims—although the illiterate continued to worship at one another’s shrines.30

  A succession of nineteenth-century authors developed the argument that British rule conferred the benefits of a superior civilization to a people who had hitherto floundered in superstition and strife, and was justified thereby. In 1885, Tory politician Lord Randolph Churchill elaborated on the theme. “Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over a surface of, and keeping calm and quiet and unruffled by storms, an immense and profound ocean of humanity,” he declared. “Underneath that rule lie hidden all the memories of fallen dynasties, all the traditions of vanquished races, all the pride of insulted creeds; and it is our task, our most difficult business, to give peace, individual security, and general prosperity to the 250 millions of people who are affected by those powerful forces; to bind them and to weld them by the influence of our knowledge, our law, and our higher civilisation, in process of time, into one great, united people; and to offer to all the nations of the West the advantages of tranquillity and progress in the East. That is our task for India. That is our raison d’être in India. That is our title to India.”31

  BENEATH THE SHEET of oil, the colony bubbled and foamed. Between 1760 and 1850 the Company’s troops had to be diverted to suppress more than forty serious rebellions in different regions. In 1857, the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Plassey, central and northern India erupted in unison, with thousands of villagers joining sepoys of the Indian Army and disaffected princes in violent opposition to British rule.32

  A medley of social and economic grievances had combined to produce the Sepoy Mutiny, as the British called it, or the Rebellion of 1857, as historians know it today. Many of the sepoys were onetime farmers who resented the deprivations that had forced them to enlist as mercenaries, the racial discrimination that kept them from ever becoming officers, and the threats to religious purity entailed by certain army practices. Villagers hated the new revenue system, and royals feared the loss of their kingdoms. The most memorable of the rebel commanders was the Rani of Jhansi, who ruled a small principality in central India, and who led into battle not only her own forces but also those of two nawabs. Her death by gunfire, when she was about twenty, marked the end of the uprising. It was a bloody affair indeed. The rebels killed several hundred white men, women, and children; the 50,000 British soldiers imported to put down the uprising avenged these murders a thousand times over. Such at least was the claim of General Hugh Rose, who sacked the city of Jhansi.33

  After suppressing the rebellion, the United Kingdom dissolved the East India Company and formally assumed the reins of government. On November 1, 1858, Queen Victoria proclaimed that henceforth the British Empire would be ruled for the benefit of all its subjects. In practice, control over India would rest with the British public, acting through their Parliament and a secretary of state for India based at the India Office in London. The governor-general in Calcutta acquired the title of viceroy, underlining his status as the Queen’s representative. Loyal native princes retained their kingdoms but remained subservient to the viceroy. A “mutiny charge” of £50 million, the cost of importing British soldiers to put down the uprising, was deducted from the colony’s account.34

  Military strategists decreed that sufficient numbers of white troops should always be stationed in India to forestall further mutinies. And British officers painstakingly rebuilt the native portion of the Indian Army with “martial races”—mainly tall and light-skinned farmers from the northwest. They were Sikh, Muslim, or Rajput, the last group being Hindus who were believed to have retained fighting qualities possessed by their ancestors. Furthermore, because sepoys of diverse regions and religions had united in attacking their superiors, the generals segregated such groups and trained the regiments so that “Sikh might fire into Hindu, Gurkha into either, without any scruple in case of need.” (Gurkhas are a mountain-dwelling people from Nepal.) By the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian Army was a formidable force called up in British battles from Africa and Afghanistan in the west to Burma and China in the east.35

  EVEN AS THEY brought the recalcitrant sepoy under control, the British rulers of India came to perceive an even more potent threat: the educated Hindu male, or babu. Many of the babus were conversant with Western thought and were asking to be treated according to Enlightenment principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. A few had entered the Indian civil service by traveling to London to take the requisite examinations, and their presence in the system emphasized the conflict inherent in the British Raj. Equality under the law was held by the conquerors to be one of the great benefits bestowed upon Indians, but native judges were not permitted to preside over cases involving whites. In 1883, Lord Ripon, one of the rare liberals who attained the office of viceroy, resolved to remove this discrepancy—only to provoke a furious outcry. For, as historian Thomas Metcalfe points out, it was “no easy matter at once to treat Indians and Europeans equally, and then to claim the right to rule a conquered India.” All said and done, it was faith in racial superiority—the belief that natives were incapable of the supervisory tasks that whites performed—that supplied the theoretical foundation of the British Raj.36

  English men and women, many of them based in Calcutta, penned furious attacks on the babu (often spelling it baboo to suggest a link with the primate). Mill had declared that “the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave,” and the popular historian Thomas Babington Macaulay had dwelt on the emasculation of Bengalis, who’d “found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins” of the prince Siraj-ud-daula. Several authors now embellished these images. The writer Rudyard Kipling repeatedly portrayed the Bengali civil servant as a nincompoop who in a crisis fled the scene and left the real men to pick up the pieces. It was the Bengali male’s “extraordinary effeminacy,” as evinced by his diminutive physique, his flowing clothes, and his worship of goddesses, that best illustrated why he, and by extension India, had to be guided by the firm, benevolent hand of a supremely masculine race.37

  Even as the babus realized with a shock how contemptible they were to the British, a popular novel suggested how they might prove their manliness. In 1882, a Bengali civil servant named Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay had dramatized in the novel Anandamath the insurrection that followed the famine of 1770. In a conscious response to Macaulay’s jibes, the writer imagined the rebels as warrior-saints who readily shed blood in defense of their motherland. The novel was a covert call to arms that offered visions of heroic self-sacrifice to angry youths and inaugurated an era of Bengali militancy.

  A rather more sedate group of Indians, mainly lawyers and civil
servants, came together in Bombay in 1885 to form the Indian National Congress. They hoped to articulate native grievances and seek redress from within the British imperial system, and over the next two decades they won greater representation for Indians on legislative councils. (These had negligible power but would form the basis of the more substantive legislatures of the future.) In 1905, when Viceroy George Nathaniel Curzon announced a plan to sever the large and unwieldy province of Bengal into two parts, the Congress initiated a mass public protest.

  The province was to be divided into a predominantly Hindu western fragment and a largely Muslim eastern one. “Bengal united, is power, Bengal divided, will pull several different ways. . . . [O]ne of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule,” explained a British civil servant. Curzon, who regarded Muslims as potential allies against the largely Hindu nationalists, visited the city of Dacca in eastern Bengal to inform the region’s Muslim zamindars how partition would enhance their influence. In 1906 the All India Muslim League came into being in Dacca and declared its support for the viceroy’s partition plan.38

  The Congress, which opposed partition, introduced a powerful weapon of Irish invention: a boycott of British goods. Thousands of students foreswore foreign fabrics. Bonfires flared on Calcutta’s streets, consuming jackets, trousers, and other Western clothes. In the first year of the agitation alone, the importation of cotton goods fell by a quarter. Dadabhai Naoroji, a mathematician and businessman who headed the Congress, declared the greater goal of the movement to be swaraj, or self-rule. In 1911 a new viceroy succumbed to the persistent economic pressure and revoked the partition.39