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FEW EVENTS IN INDIAN HISTORY have been analysed and debated, romanticised and demonised as the mutiny of 1857. The apocalypse that started with an insurrection by sepoys in Meerut on 10 May has variously been described as India’s First War of Independence, the Great Uprising, the Sepoy Rebellion or simply as the Indian Revolt. None of these terms, however, reflect the true nature of a sequence of events that culminated in the dethronement and deportation from Delhi of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775–1862), the end of East India Company rule and the proclamation of Queen Victoria (1819–1901) as empress of India. The first large-scale uprising against British rule was also a colossal failure that saw horrendous atrocities committed by both sides. It would reset the relationship between Britain and its ‘jewel in the crown’. It would also bolster the arguments of those wanting to take greater military and administrative control of India while providing an inspiration for Indian nationalists fighting for independence.
The upheavals of 1857–1858 raise many questions. What were the true causes of the rebellion? Why was it confined mainly to the north – Delhi, the United Provinces, parts of Central India and Bihar – and not pan-Indian? Plenty of groups had a legitimate grievance against the British – Sikhs, Marathas, Rajputs and Gurkhas – but remained aloof. If it was ‘anti-colonial’, why did it not affect those cities where colonisation was felt most strongly, such as Calcutta? The bulk of India’s princes stayed neutral or even lent their forces to suppress the mutineers.
Part military rebellion, part peasant revolt, part holy war, the rebellion raged for more than a year, but from the very beginning there was a lack of unity and purpose. Although the sepoys secured the blessings of Bahadur Shah, who became a figurehead for both Hindus and Muslims, he could give only moral support. The fact that the rebels put their faith in a symbol of defunct Mughal legitimacy made the rebellion distinctly backward-looking. Had it succeeded, it is doubtful whether any regime or system of government that replaced the Company Raj would have improved the lives of those who had taken up arms. Princes who took advantage of the unrest were interested only in re-establishing the old feudal order. The rebellion’s scattered and divided leadership offered no coherent program for change. But the changes that came in its wake were profound, and would influence the course of India’s history well into the twentieth century.
STOKING THE FLAMES
The underlying causes of the 1857 revolt have their roots in the evolution of British attitudes towards India since the late 1700s. The prevailing wisdom – that India should be governed by its laws and that the ruling class be treated with respect – was eroded by Lord Cornwallis’s reforms, which effectively banished Indians from all administrative and legal posts. The impact was felt acutely in the army, where it was impossible for an Indian soldier to reach the rank of an officer, let alone a junior subaltern. Close contact between English officers and those under their charge became the exception rather than the norm. Writing after the rebellion, the sepoy Sita Ram Pande (c. 1795–c. 1873) recalled that when he joined the army in the early part of century, ‘the sahibs’ mixed with their Indian servants and subordinates: ‘When I was a sepoy the captain of my company would have some of the men at his house all day long and he talked with them … I know that many officers nowadays only speak to their men when obliged to do so.’ The alienation between ruler and ruled extended to the private sphere. At the close of the eighteenth century, one in three Company employees left part of their estates to their Indian bibis, or consorts. By the middle of the nineteenth, almost none did so.
The consolidation of British rule after the defeat of the Marathas boosted British confidence. As the predominant power on the subcontinent, the British embarked on a mission to ‘civilise’ their subjects. One of the conditions of the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1813 was to allow Christian missionaries to operate in India. It won the support of the anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce, who equated emancipating Hindus from the ‘wickedness and cruelty of idolatry’ with abolishing the slave trade. Drowned out in the shrill rhetoric of the times was the advice of Warren Hastings. Coming out of retirement, he testified for three hours before a parliamentary committee examining the EIC charter. His warning was clear: ‘A Surmise had gone abroad that there was an intention of forcing our Religion on the Natives. Such an opinion propagated among the Native Infantry might be attended by dangerous consequences.’ Indeed, he added, it ‘might create a religious war’.
Images such as this, taken from an 1833 edition of Penny Magazine, helped reinforce attitudes among many in Britain that India was a land inhabited by superstitious heathens.
The pace of reform would pick up considerably under Lord William Bentinck (1774–1839), the governor-general from 1828 to 1835. Serving twice as prime minister, the great-great-grandfather to Elizabeth II was convinced that the British had ‘a great moral duty to perform in India’. At the top of his to-do list was abolishing the practice of sati, in which a Hindu widow would immolate herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband, sometimes against her will. The practice, which first appeared during the Gupta era, was particularly widespread among Rajputs and in Bengal, where more than 300 instances were recorded in 1803–1804 within a 50-kilometre radius of Calcutta. While the prevailing wisdom had been that the ‘rites and superstitions of the Hindu religion should be allowed with the most unqualified tolerance’, sati crossed a line. During the tenure of Lord Minto (1751–1814), who became governor-general in 1807, colonial officials sought to regulate the practice by making it mandatory for a police officer to be in attendance to ensure there was no coercion, and that the widow was not under sixteen years of age or pregnant. Minto’s successor, Lord Hastings (no relation to Warren), declared sati an ‘outrage against humanity’ but believed that to abolish the practice would be ‘perilous’ and had the potential to incite unrest in the army. Bentinck found himself torn between sending ‘hundreds of innocent victims to a cruel and untimely death’ and jeopardising ‘the safety of the British Empire’. Making the case for its abolition, he argued that Britain was strong enough to resist any challenge to its rule and that the landowning zamindars would support such a move. Laws making sati illegal were passed in Bengal in 1829 and in Bombay and Madras shortly afterwards.
The laws had the support of Hindu reformers such as Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), who cited cases where women were forced on the funeral pyre by relatives who would inherit their properties, or who unsuccessfully tried to flee before being ‘carried back by their relations and burnt to death’. Fluent in English, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, in addition to his native Bengali, he championed women’s rights and petitioned the government to limit the amount that the peasants could be asked to pay landowners. Although he was a Brahmin, he was critical of the caste system, which he said ‘has been the source of want of unity among us’. Roy spent three years in England, impressing all those he met, including the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wanted him to sit in the House of Commons.
Rammohun Roy, dubbed the father of modern India, was the first educated Indian to advocate for his country’s freedom through constitutional means.
Elites such as Roy were a tiny minority. Indian society in the early 1800s was still overwhelming peasant-based, with more than 70 per cent of the population engaged in agriculture. Average life expectancy was around twenty-six years. But historiography is also changing our view of India in the period following the disintegration of the Mughal Empire. The traditional characterisation of eighteenth-century India as ‘an epoch of decay, chaos, greed and violence’ has been overtaken by new research showing economic growth, urbanisation and commercialisation, particularly in the more dynamic northern regions. Indian families were smaller than those of Europeans, largely due to female infanticide, high child mortality and child marriage which often led to early widowhood. An 1822 survey of cities such as Calcutta, Dacca and Allahabad found that the average size of households was between 3.5 and 4.1 persons; by comparison the average in England at the time was 4.75. Yet the pitiful condition of women in early-nineteenth-century India was never in doubt. As the Bengali social reformer Ishwarchandra Vidya lamented: ‘In a society in which the menfolk have no mercy, no religion, no sense of justice, no sense of good or bad, in which mere conventionality is considered the chief activity and the supreme religion, let no more women be born.’
Bentinck’s civilising zeal extended to education, where a debate ensued between the Orientalists, who argued for traditional learning in classical languages such as Sanskrit and Persian, and the Anglicists, who wanted to promote Western learning in English. If Indians wanted to study the Bhagavad Gitā, the latter view contended, they could get as much from an English translation as from the original Sanskrit. The divide did not run along racial lines. Among those supporting the Anglicists was Rou, who argued that modern education was the ‘key to the treasures of scientific and democratic thought of the modern West’.
The matter was finally settled by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), the son of an evangelist, who became the first law member on Bentinck’s administration. Reflecting his utilitarian belief in the superiority of European culture and science, Macaulay declared that the old languages of India contained ‘neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them’. His objective was to create ‘a class of persons Indian in colour and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in moral and in intellect’. Macauley famously pronounced that he could not find one Orientalist ‘who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.
MACAULEY ON EDUCATION: ‘We shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.’
The criticism Macauley endures today is at least partly negated by the zeal with which he embarked on creating a uniform penal code for India and designing the Indian Civil Service. Often contradictory systems of Hindu and Muslim law operating side-by-side in conjunction with Company regulations had created a legal quagmire, made worse by Cornwallis’s insistence that no Indian should preside over courts of law. Macaulay’s new criminal code restricted the death penalty to crimes of murder and treason. In an effort to bring uniformity to existing laws, the code enshrined a woman’s right to property almost half a century before similar laws came into force in England. Today’s frustratingly slow but surprisingly resilient Indian bureaucracy owes its longevity to Macauley’s framework. Without it, India may not have survived as a nation following the traumas of Partition.
The influx of missionaries boosted the numbers of Europeans in India not connected with the EIC or its various armies, though the numbers were still small – rising from around 2150 ‘non-officials’ in 1830 to 10,000 in 1850. European professionals ranged from undertakers, taxidermists (to stuff tigers bagged on hunting expeditions), distillers and billiard-table makers. Men vastly outnumbered women, giving rise to the so-called ‘fishing fleets’ – the thousands of young British women who sailed to India desperate to find a ‘£300-a-year man – dead or alive’ – a reference to the average annual salary of a junior officer in the Indian Civil Service.
Bentinck ended his tenure in India disappointed. His proposal to admit Indians into the senior ranks of the Company was never implemented by its directors in London. He also sought to raise the salaries of Indian judges tenfold; the Company merely quadrupled them. Nor did his reforms suppress the increasingly hawkish voices in the Company’s ranks. Writing in 1820, Sir Charles Metcalfe (1985–1846), a former Resident in Delhi, declared: ‘I abhor making wars, and meddling with other states for the sake of our aggrandisement – but war thrust upon us, or unavoidably entered into, should, if practicable, be turned to profit by the acquisition of new resources, to pay additional forces to defend what we have, and extend our possessions in future unavoidable wars.’
This attitude backfired when Britain became entrapped in the First Afghan War, described by the author James Morris as ‘the worst disaster to overtake the British in the East prior to Japan’s World War II invasion of Malaya and capture of Singapore exactly a century later’. The cause of the war was Lord Palmerston’s anxieties about Russia’s intentions towards India. The British prime minister feared that the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohammad (1793–1863), was too sympathetic towards Russia and would look the other way as Czarist troops marched down the Khyber Pass and invaded India. The first major conflict of the Great Game, as the scramble for spheres of influence in Central Asia between Russia and India was dubbed, ended with a widescale uprising against the British occupation and the wholesale slaughter of its retreating army and hundreds of civilians by Afghan tribals. Despite being promised safe passage, thousands of British soldiers and Indian sepoys, as well as women and children, were massacred as they made their way from Kabul. The only survivor of the retreat was William Brydon (1811–1873), a surgeon with the Army Medical Corp, who stumbled into the British garrison at Jalalabad on his half-dead horse. For days afterwards, fires were lit and bugles sounded to attract survivors, but none arrived.
Lady Elizabeth Butler’s painting Remnants of an Army, depicting Dr William Brydon reaching the safety of Jalalabad fort, was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1879.
More successful, but no less brutal, was the British annexation of Sindh in 1843. Following two short wars fought between 1845 and 1849 with the Sikhs, Britain added the Punjab and Kashmir to its empire. Under the terms of the Last Treaty of Lahore, signed in 1849, the infant Sikh Maharaja Duleep Singh (1838–1893) was forced to surrender the Koh-i-Noor diamond to the Queen of England. After being temporarily misplaced by John Lawrence, a member of the triumvirate of British officials who took over the administration of the Punjab, the brilliant was found by his valet and entrusted to the new governor-general, Lord Dalhousie (1812–1860), who transported it from Lahore to Bombay. When Queen Victoria received the stone at Buckingham Palace in July 1850, she was unimpressed, noting in her diary that ‘it is not set ‘à jour’ & badly cut, which spoils the effect’. The diamond’s reputation for bringing bad luck – several of its owners had either died or lost their thrones shortly after taking possession of the stone – may have dulled Victoria’s enthusiasm. Furious at her reaction, Dalhousie would later write, ‘If H.M. thinks it brings bad luck, let her give it back to me. I will take it and its ill-luck on speculation.’
Opinion on Dalhousie’s legacy as governor-general is divided. Remembered for bringing the railway to India, initiating a series of needed irrigation projects and stringing thousands of kilometres of telegraph lines across the country, his nine-year tenure is held by some as one of the most successful of any administrator. Under his watch, new laws were introduced, allowing widows to remarry, Hindu converts to Christianity to retain their inheritance rights and different castes to mingle in railway carriages. But however noble in intention these reforms were, they constituted a flagrant breach of Hindu customs on religion and caste.
His most controversial legacy, however, was to invoke the ‘doctrine of lapse’, a policy that had existed on paper since 1841 but never been implemented. The doctrine held that Britain, as the paramount power, could take control of a princely state whose ruler was either manifestly incompetent or whose death triggered a succession crisis. Believing that the states were a bulwark against modernisation, the doctrine became an opportunity, in Dalhousie’s words, for ‘getting rid of those petty intervening principalities which may be a means of annoyance, but which can never, I venture to think, be a source of strength’.
Nearly a dozen states would come under this interventionist policy, the most important of which was Awadh, a rich province that lay between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. Once considered one of Britain’s strongest allies, Awadh was a major source of soldiers for the British Army and bought large quantities of British goods. The capital, Lucknow, combined ‘the monumental magnificence of Shah Jahan’s Delhi with the scented allure of Scheherazade’s Baghdad’. The British had long concluded that conduct of the nawabs of Awadh left a lot to be desired. William Sleeman, who was appointed Resident in Lucknow in 1848, described the province as ‘a scene of intrigue, corruption, depravity, neglect of duty and abuse of authority’. Its ruler, Wajid Ali Shah (1822–1887), was said to spend his time in ‘delights of dancing and drumming, and drawing, and manufacturing small rhymes’ – a reference to his love of Urdu couplets.
In January 1856, Shah was asked to sign over his state to the East India Company. He refused, but instead of calling for a rebellion, he sent an envoy to Britain to plead his case before the Queen, the parliament and the press. When that failed and the province was annexed, he moved into a sprawling mansion on the banks of the Hooghly in Calcutta, where he created the city’s first private zoo with a menagerie of monkeys, bears, tigers, a rhinoceros, a snake pit and 18,000 pigeons. He spent much of his leisure time flying kites – a sport he excelled at.
‘DILLI CHALO!’
The decision to annex Awadh angered sepoys in the Bengal army, most of whom came from the province. Adding to their grievances was an 1834 ruling that widened the army’s recruitment base, threatening what had been the near monopoly of high-caste Brahmins. Another order in 1856 made all recruits liable for overseas service, causing affront to orthodox Hindus, who believed that crossing the kala pani, or black waters, would break the rules of caste.
Dalhousie was not around to see anger he had sown flare into open rebellion. He left India in February 1856, handing over the governorship to Lord Canning, just as the annexation of Awadh was being formalised. While the doctrine of lapse is often cited as one of the main causes of the rebellion of 1857–1858, other important factors were at play. The first Indian account of the rebellion, written by the Muslim leader Sayyid Ahmad Khan in 1873, argued that the ‘mutineers were for the most part men who had nothing to lose’, and the uprising was not an attempt by the Muslim elite ‘to throw off the yoke of foreigners’. William Dalrymple puts the cause down to imperial arrogance and self-confidence. ‘So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects, and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyse their own position with any degree of accuracy.’
Most historians agree that the final indignation was the introduction of the new Enfield rifle. Though it was easier to load and much more accurate, rumours soon spread among sepoys that its cartridges were greased with tallow made from cows, which was degrading to Hindus, and pig fat, offensive to Muslims. To make matters worse, the end of the cartridge containing the powder had to be bitten off so that the charge would ignite. Unease over the use of the cartridges sparked a protest at Barrackpore in Bengal in March 1857. Order was quickly restored, but not before a rebel sepoy named Mangal Pandey (1827–1857, today celebrated as the mutiny’s first martyr and glorified in a Bollywood blockbuster) was executed. A month later, fires were lit at Ambala cantonment, leading to the regiment being disbanded.
By May, the unrest had spread to Meerut. Believing they would be defiled en masse if they used the cartridges, eighty-five sepoys staged a mutiny. As they were captured and led off to start ten years’ imprisonment, the remaining sepoys revolted, setting fire to their barracks and shooting every European in sight, accompanied by shouts of ‘Dilli chalo!’ (‘On to Delhi!’)
The sepoys marched on the old Mughal capital, reaching it on the morning of 11 May. By nightfall, the city was in their hands. They were received by Bahadur Shah Zafar, who still resided in the Red Fort, the traditional seat of Mughal power, but whose status had been reduced to ‘King of Delhi’. More of a philosopher and poet than a military leader, Zafar provided a moral sanction for the rebellion but little else.
Peasant leaders now joined in the revolt, attacking British garrisons in the vicinity of Delhi and Meerut. By the beginning of June, the unrest had spread to the area around Kanpur (then Cawnpore), where the worst of the massacres of Europeans took place. Nana Saheb (1824–1859), the son of the last Maratha Peshwa, declared his support for the mutineers. After two weeks of bombardment, he offered the 400-strong British community safe passage out of the cantonment. But as the residents boarded boats to take them down the Ganges, they were attacked by sepoys. Saheb rescued about 200 women and children and locked them up in the Bibighar, or Ladies’ House, to use as a bargaining tool in case of a British attack. When a British relief force converged on Cawnpore, sepoys attacked the Bibighar, executing those inside. Their bodies were cut up and thrown down a well. As John Keay describes it, ‘Their slaughterhouse methods, clumsy rather than sadistic, constituted an atrocity which would haunt the British till the end of their Indian days.’
Canning’s attempts to suppress the rebellion were stymied by a lack of British troops. Thousands had left India to fight the Crimean War and had yet to be replaced. There were just 45,000 British soldiers in India in 1857, half of them in the Punjab. Communications between different army divisions was crude and, with rebellions breaking out across a wide swathe of northern India simultaneously, forces were overstretched. The first breakthrough came when Brigadier General Henry Havelock defeated Nana Saheb at Cawnpore just days after the massacre.
Using recruits from areas not affected by the mutiny, the British were able to turn the tide of the rebellion. After the recapture of Delhi in September 1857, the focus of military operations shifted to Lucknow, where the British commissioner, Henry Lawrence, had fortified the Residency with trenches and booby traps. Among the 855 British troops and officers barricaded inside the grounds was Dr Brydon, the only survivor of the retreat from Kabul. Just over 1000 civilians, most of them Europeans, were also crowded into the 33 acres of the compound. Brydon would survive the siege, but not Lawrence, who was killed by a shell that landed in his room. It would take two relief columns to break the siege and bring the survivors to safety.
Still revered for her bravery by many Indians today is the Rani of Jhansi, Lakshmi Bai (1828–1858). Born in Varanasi, she excelled at horse riding and swordsmanship from an early age. Marrying into the royal family of Jhansi, she found herself regent when her husband died before she had produced an heir. Despite the local British representative expressing confidence in the young widow’s ability to lead her state, Jhansi was annexed under the doctrine of lapse. When the rebellion broke out, she declared that she hoped the rebels would go ‘straight to hell’. But in early 1858, as British reinforcements from Bombay were advancing towards Jhansi, she decided to throw in her lot with Nana Saheb’s protégé, Tatya Tope (1814–1859). After the British laid siege to Jhansi, Bai led the resistance herself, before donning a disguise and, according to legend, escaping the fort by leaping over the ramparts on her horse. In June 1858, she and Tope managed to seize Gwalior despite its impregnable fortress and determined to make a last stand. But after holding the fort for only three weeks, Lakshmi Bai died in a hail of British bullets. The fall of Gwalior signalled the end of the main phase of the rebellion.
Had the rebels been able to combine their forces and take both the Punjab and the Deccan, they might have succeeded in driving the British from Indian soil. Instead, the rebellion became a patchwork of isolated insurrections. It was not until 8 July 1859 that Canning was finally able to declare that peace had been restored.
Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi, defiantly rode her horse through enemy lines, her sword raised in the air, to become an icon of the freedom movement.
British reprisals were severe. Revenge was the order of the day. Summary executions became the norm, with mutineers sometimes being tied to the mouths of cannons and blown to pieces. Others were made to lick the blood from floors where Europeans had been killed. Depending on their religion, some had beef or pork stuffed down their throats before being hanged. Bahadur Shah Zafar was put on trial for supporting the mutineers. He was then transported to Rangoon. Denied paper or pens, he used charcoal to scrawl couplets on the walls of the house where he was incarcerated. He died in 1862 after developing paralysis of the throat and was buried in an unmarked grave in a compound near the Shwedagon Pagoda.
AN ANOMALY BECOMES AN ANACHRONISM
Even before the revolt was over, Britain’s parliament set up a royal commission of inquiry to investigate its causes. Known as the Peel Commission, it recommended a significant increase in the number of European troops and a decrease in the proportion of native soldiers. A ratio of one British soldier to every two Indian sepoys was maintained in the Bengal presidency, where the revolt had started, and one to three in the presidencies of Bombay and Madras. Recruitment would favour those regions that remained neutral or sided with the British. To avoid the possibility of the sepoys forming a united front in the future, the Commission recommended that native regiments be composed of different nationalities and castes. The governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, was one of those pressing for such reforms, declaring, ‘Divide et impure was the old Roman motto and it should be ours.’ Subsequent British policies would see the principle applied more widely, setting Hindu against Muslim and leading to the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.
In many ways, the events of 1857 came as a long overdue opportunity to take action against the East India Company. As British historian Percival Spear points out, the Company ‘was held to have failed to gauge Indian opinion, to be inert and backward looking. The occasion of the Revolt was thus a convenient way to end an administrative anomaly which had become an anachronism.’ In Britain, public unease about the Company’s role in stoking the grievances that led to the mutiny was also growing. The outcome was a complete overhaul of the way in which India had been ruled. Passed by parliament in 1858, the Government of India Act transferred power from the East India Company to the Crown. The Company closed for trade in 1874, ‘unhonoured and unsung, but maybe not altogether unwept’. In 2010 it was relaunched as a luxury foodstuff brand in London.
PAX BRITTANICA
On 1 November 1858, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation that was partly a mission statement setting out how India would be administered and partly a set of preventative measures to ensure that British rule in India would never be threatened again. Read out in multiple languages in all main Indian cities and towns, the proclamation stated, ‘In their prosperity will be our strength; in their contentment our security.’ British officials were ordered to abstain from interfering with Indian beliefs and rituals, however ‘abhorrent’ and ‘primitive’ they might be. Victoria also disavowed any ‘desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects’. The Anglicist cause, championed so enthusiastically by Macaulay and others half a century earlier, had effectively been reversed.
The doctrine of lapse was also scrapped. The British ‘desire no extension of Our present territorial possessions’, the Queen’s proclamation insisted. Instead of liquidating the princely states, the directive became to transform their rulers into allies. Some 560 princely states would remain nominally independent, with the day-to-day running of their administration in the hands of local rulers but with British residents and political agents to keep a watchful eye over them. Foreign and defence policy would be in the hands of the Crown.
Landowners – such as those in Awadh, who had their lands confiscated before 1857 – were now allowed to retain their holdings in perpetuity. By making them local magistrates, they became incorporated into the new ruling structure as rajas and rais. Indian affairs were now overseen through a ministerial portfolio, with a secretary of state for India based in London. Governors-general became viceroys. Enjoying absolute power and ruling over one-sixth of the world’s population, they were handsomely rewarded, receiving up to £25,000 per annum, the highest salary of any public official in Britain.
Finally, Victoria proclaimed that Indians had a right to take part in the management of their country by holding positions in the Indian Civil Service, whatever an individual’s ‘education, ability and integrity’ qualified him for. This last concession was more in spirit than in practice. Competitive examinations were held in English at a level of mastery that few Indians had. Even fewer could afford a fare to London to sit the examinations. By 1870, there was only one Indian member of the civil service.
A lasting legacy of 1857 was an elevated level of racial arrogance among the British towards India. Mutiny memorials to the British dead sprung up in Delhi, Cawnpore and Lucknow, but as Nehru would later complain, there were no memorials to the Indians who had died.
By 1901, there were almost 170,000 Europeans in India, around 90 per cent of whom were British. Of these, around half were soldiers and their families. The remainder worked on the railways, as tea and coffee planters, as business owners or as middle management in textiles and other industries. The ‘club’ became the focus of social life, a bulwark against ‘native’ society. Dances and theatrical productions, bridge and lawn parties, tennis and polo tournaments were the orders of the day. Homes away from home, the clubs had gardens filled with rose and petunias that barely survived in the tropical heat. Kitchens served Anglo-Indian fare: ‘bottled peas, pseudo-cottage bread, fish … pretending to be plaice, more bottled peas … trifle, sardines on toast’, to quote E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Indians were prohibited from the clubs – with the notable exception of freemason lodges.
Cut off from social intercourse with Indians due to caste and race barriers – except perhaps for those household servants doing all the domestic chores – many European women found India a lonely and frustrating country. Others, such as travel writer Fanny Parkes, enjoyed ‘the pleasure of vagabondising over India’ and left behind vivid descriptions of the land and its people. But Parkes was the exception rather than the rule. Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Windsor and the future Edward VIII (1841–1910), was shocked by ‘the rude and rough manners’ of many Britons he met during his tour of India in 1875–1876. He was particularly offended by their reference to Indians, ‘many of whom sprung from great races, as “niggers”’. The proportion of Indians in the civil service would never exceed 6 per cent. Given the insipid racism that prevailed, it was not hard to see why.
In 1876, the Queen announced to the British parliament that her Indian subjects were ‘happy under My rule and loyal to My throne’. On the advice of Indian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, she adopted the title of ‘Empress of India’ and, for the benefit of her Indian subjects, ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’. The title was suggested by the Hungarian Orientalist G.W. Leitner because it conveniently combined the imperial titles of the Roman ‘Caesar’, the German ‘Kaiser’ and the Russian ‘Czar’ – and there was less chance of it being mispronounced. To confirm the new title, Viceroy Lord Lytton (1831–1891) spared no expense, organising an Imperial Assemblage in Delhi in January 1877. Among the 84,000 who attended were sixty-three ruling princes and hundreds of chiefs and nobles, as well as former members of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s household. The Empress was represented by a bejewelled crown resting on a gilded cushion. ‘The union of India with England has been asserted to be indissoluble,’ officials proclaimed.
The ‘indissolubile’ union had grown closer with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which shortened the travel time between India and England by two weeks. A year later, the two countries were connected via an undersea telegraph cable that revolutionised communications. Public works assumed greater importance. The railway network grew from 13,500 kilometres in 1860 to 25,500 kilometres by 1890. Land under irrigation expanded rapidly with the building of the Ganges Canal and other massive projects. By 1891, more than 10 million acres, supporting one-eighth of India’s population of 285 million, was under irrigation.
If all this infrastructure was meant to bolster the legitimacy of British rule over India, it failed. As the scholar Jon Wilson points out, neither the railways nor the canals had much effect on ordinary Indians. New settlements or canal colonies were created in the Punjab, but the initial boom was usually followed by a long decline in agricultural productivity. Similarly, railways could not compete with bullock carts for transporting heavy goods, and human-powered river transport was cheaper than steam-powered vessels. ‘Without the kind of political leadership able to coordinate the productive activity of Indians for the benefit of society as a whole, the dreams of “improvement” projected by the prophets of modernity in the 1840s and 1850s ended up as illusory fantasies,’ Wilson writes.
Nor did the canals prevent a series of devastating famines in the 1870s and 1890s, due to a protracted drought that caused crop failures. The famine of 1877, which claimed up to 5.5 million lives in the Deccan, coincided with Lytton’s ostentatious Assemblage. A die-hard Tory, Lytton believed that free-market forces were the best way to resolve the problem. Grain continued to be exported during the famine. He also insisted that taxes be collected from peasants in the Deccan, prompting the editor of the Indian Herald to complain that ‘millions had died for the axiom of the political economy’. Perhaps distracted by his disastrous decision to embroil Britain in the Second Afghan War, Lytton was unmoved by the images of skeletal villagers being published in newspapers in India and abroad, declaring, ‘Mere distress is not sufficient reason for opening relief work.’ A royal commission into the famine produced a report that was widely criticised as a whitewash. It exonerated the government for its failure to prevent the famine and its mishandling of the crisis. Most importantly, it contained no practical measures to avoid a repeat of the disaster.
The horror of the 1877 famine came to the attention of the British public thanks to reporting by journalists, and to photographs, sometimes taken by missionaries, published in newspapers and magazines.
The contrast between Queen Victoria’s insistence that her subjects were happy and loyal and the realities on the ground did not go unnoticed. Stirrings of anti-imperial protest were just around the corner. The moniker of ‘India’s first revolutionary’ is generally applied to Vasudev Balwant Phadke (1845–1883), who led an uprising in the countryside around Pune composed of low-caste tribals demanding independence for India. Phadke was arrested in 1879 and sentenced to transportation to Aden. He escaped jail in 1883, but was captured soon after. He died after going on a hunger strike, an ominous precursor to what would become a potent weapon against British rule in the decades to come.
By the late 1890s, revolutionary societies were being set up in Maharashtra and in Bengal. Even Britain’s supposedly loyal civil servants were getting anxious about the inevitability of future famines and the need for a safety valve to keep discontent spilling over once again into a full-scale revolt.