CHAPTER 11
AT the time of the clash between China and Japan, the surprising fact in the rest of Asia was that most of it was under western government. Much of India, for example, had been under British rule for 150 years. Nearly all the rest of the region had also passed into the empires, or spheres of interest, of one European Power or another. Two ancient, but comparatively small, countries, Persia and Thailand, were the only exceptions. They owed their preservation to uncommon adroitness, aided by the fact that in each case two foreign Powers were competing for dominance over their territories.
From the beginning of the 1920s India, the heart and core of this series of subject countries, had made a resolute and persevering effort to throw off western rule. It was a fair deduction that, if it succeeded, an end would be put to the lesser imperialisms of Europe in Asia. Their circumstances were in some respects dissimilar: their end would be the same. All Asia would be free. Moreover India had so central a position in Asia, was a country with such prestige and resources, that the way in which it reacted to the issues of the time would have the deepest consequences for its neighbours. An account of the war requires therefore that the affairs of India should be followed, that its quarrel with Britain should be recorded, that the degree at different times of its pro-Japanese sentiment should be remarked, and its role in Japanese strategy examined. It demands also an inquiry into the different quality of British imperialism from Japanese which made the British Empire, even in its decay, by contrast so durable.
The major part of India was conquered by Britain between 1757 and 1820. The form of conquest was straightforward military annexation, but of a somewhat unusual kind. The conquest was not premeditated by Britain. A British trading company, the Honourable East India Company, had begun to trade peaceably in India. It was sucked into intervening in the management of Indian affairs by the anarchy which followed the downfall in the eighteenth century of the Moghul Empire. Out of its activities, the British Government, which had gradually assumed control of the political responsibilities of the Company, eventually found itself the master of a great military empire.
The British Raj was unique in having been set up by a people which used no large standing army of its own countrymen for the purpose. Alone among governments which pursued an active imperialist role Britain operated with such a small army of its own that its aims seemed derisory. It was much too small for Britain to have played any notable part on the continent of Europe, and it might have seemed too small to undertake operations on other continents. The Empire was won, not by British forces in the main, but by dexterous political manoeuvre, and by the Indian forces who chose to fight on the British side in a situation where there were several claimants for their arms. The East India Company, which was in India for trade, became, to all intents and purposes, one of the native powers between which India was divided; and from being one of these native powers it became gradually the paramount native state. It raised and paid for native armies which won for it territories for which it had to provide an administration: and this, though informed by British concepts, continued in many respects the traditional administration. The predominance of the Company was due primarily to the coherent political organization which it imported into India. It was also due, initially, to superior military technique, but when other native powers through foreign advisers imported the technology, it was due to superior discipline and organization.
Those statesmen of the Company who had conceived the policy, and saw where it tended, had usually to draw along their reluctant colleagues, who were always saying that a trading company had no right to be considering policies which would thrust upon it unwelcome political responsibilities. Nevertheless the bolder spirits prevailed, and they succeeded in their manoeuvres with startling ease. Thus Britain, which was five thousand miles away, found itself with an Empire which it had never, in its deliberate moments, set itself to acquire. It had gained it with the minimum military force; and it held it by the stiffening effect of a garrison of British troops which, in normal circumstances, amounted to no more than 60,000 men. It would have been impossible with such a puny force to have held down a genuine national movement, and to have ruled India by the sword. British Government thus rested, in the deepest sense, upon the consent of the people to be governed. Its continuance depended on the tacit ballot that this government afforded benefits which the majority of the people accepted, either from apathy or from general appreciation of it.
The reason why the British had made such an easy conquest of the country was that for the most part a stubborn defence was never encountered. The country changed hands while the peasantry, from which a popular army would have had to be recruited, looked on. This followed an old tradition of India. Observers of the country from earliest historical times had often exclaimed with wonder at the detached attitude of the peasantry, who went on with agricultural tasks, ignoring a pitched battle of their betters which might be taking place a few hundred yards from them, and on which their destiny depended. Not all the conquests were as easy as this. The East India Company had to fight hard, for instance, against the Marathas and Sikhs, who both had organized military kingdoms of a formidable nature. But even with them, the kingdoms were the armies: once these were defeated the East India Company had no more to do: there was no great popular resistance to wear down. Popular feeling against the foreigner interfering in the political affairs of the country is mainly a product of the twentieth century.
In this take-over of India there was no intention on the part of the British to produce a social transformation. As regards forms of society, the British were willing to leave things put. This was in some part due to the fascination and esteem which Indian life, in all its astonishing variety, exercises over the spirits of those who encounter it. It was also due to the realization that any interference with existing customs was likely to cause trouble. For example, the British were at first reluctant to give any countenance to Christian missionaries. Later, with the growth of evangelism in the nineteenth century in England the resistance to missionaries was partly eroded; but the mutiny of 1857, which stemmed from the mistaken belief of Indian soldiers that the British intended to force Christianity upon them, demonstrated the wisdom of non-interference. Thereafter social change was on the whole carefully refrained from. Profound social changes did, in fact, take place, but these were the inevitable result of the impact of a modern, highly industrialized society, such as Britain became, on an archaic, predominantly agrarian one. They were part of a world-wide trend, and not peculiar to the relations of Britain and India.
It was in the sphere of politics and administration that the struggle for sovereignty developed in India, and it was here that interesting forms were evolved. Nearly all the strains of thought in political philosophy in Britain during a century and a half found at one time or another reflection in the institutions of India. At the end of the eighteenth century the main pre-occupation was to protect the individual citizen against arbitrary power, and to put government in the shackles of regular procedure controlled by courts. Then for a while the dominant interest was the philosophy of utilitarianism. One Governor General, Lord William Bentinck, was a close disciple of Bentham, and for forty years James Mill, and his son John Stuart Mill, held key positions in the office of the East India Company. Certain questions were endlessly discussed, for instance, the case for direct administration by the British and the case for indirect administration; the duty of the government to promote change, and its duty to shield people against too rapid change; the virtues of control from above and the virtues of self-government; and the discussion resulted in action, or in some cases inaction – for instance, after the mutiny of 1857 there was no extension of direct British rule. Some of the shrewdest minds in Britain, from Victorian times to the late 1930s, found the Indian Government more malleable to ideas than society in the West. A philosophically inclined visitor to India towards the end of the nineteenth century said that a trip there was like re-living his life as a student of politics at Oxford.
The civil service in British India became remarkable for its quality. In the kingdoms and empires of the sub-continent in the past, the central governments found it traditionally very hard to get anything done. Their acts might be sporadically vigorous and imaginative, but the sum total of their deeds was slight: it disappeared quickly in sand. The Indian Civil Service, first instituted by the British, and then increasingly operated by both British and Indians, gave India for the first time an instrument by whose means government could carry out reforms which were pushed through to the end. Such was the prestige, the intelligence, and the standard of service to the community of this body of men that, even when the freedom struggle was at its height, distinguished Indian families, including the Nehrus, sent some of their sons into government service while others were operating in the opposition movement. The ideal of the Indian Civil Service was to gain willing acceptance of the policies and actions of the Government. To be compelled to use force at all was, therefore, regarded as a mark of failure; and its excessive use was rarely forgiven. This was a reflection of the fact that from the beginning of the Raj the number of Englishmen in India was far too small for them to govern the country arbitrarily and with incessant use of force. In the last years of British rule the British members of the administrative class of the civil service numbered less than a thousand, and in the subordinate services they hardly existed, whereas the population of India by the beginning of the war had swollen to 350 million, or one sixth of the population of the world.
Although, through the British period, government was carried on chiefly by the civil service, India was also by stages equipped with free institutions. Because Britain, in the grip of nineteenth-century liberal ideas, knew only one way of being politically constructive, it instinctively introduced into India representative councils and assemblies and the whole apparatus of liberal democracy. At the beginning these councils were largely consultative, but they contained seeds which grew, and which decided that the struggle for freedom in India would take the form of a demand for parliamentary rule.
Constitutional reforms in India were partly a response to, and partly they stimulated, the Indian national movement. That the transition from subjection to independence in India came in the end with such remarkable ease and restraint on both sides was due chiefly to three things: the liberal institutions set up in India by the British; the genius of Mahatma Gandhi, for many years the leader of the national freedom movement; and the quickening of a new age in Asia, and new ideas and a new type of British personality in India, as a direct result of the Japanese War.
On the Indian side, a vital factor in the struggle for independence was the emergence of a new Indian middle class. This class adopted English as its language, and owed its existence to the mass of institutions which the Raj fostered. Some members of it adapted themselves so phenomenally well to English culture that they became, to all intents and purposes, Englishmen. They lived in English style. They spoke English in their homes. Perhaps there is no comparable case in modern history of a class taking over so completely and with such ease the culture and language of another people: the parallel in the past is the assimilation of Latin culture by the provincials of the Roman Empire. Not that these families lost all touch with India; the women especially carried on the old Indian tradition, and in the deeper layers of the mind, the Indian structure persisted. But in practical action most of the men thought, felt, acted like Englishmen, and made very much the same value judgements. This victory of an alien personality was seen at times as a doubtful advantage to India; its psychological effects were frequently lamented by the social group in which it took place; but in the long run such fusions of culture are prized by the countries in which they occur, provided the assimilation is complete. The most surprising instance of this deep westernization is usually masked. Gandhi, the man under whose leadership the independence of India was achieved, a man who always stressed that he was a Hindu, the heir of the Hindu tradition; who wore Indian clothes, or very few clothes at all in the manner of Indian holy men, was nevertheless profoundly influenced by ideas from Britain. Equality of citizens, non-doctrinaire socialism, his apotheosis of the individual conscience, his social experimentation, prohibition, feminism, nationalism itself – this was the British tradition, not perhaps of government, but of radical non-conformism. Here, it might be said, was an example rare in history, of Rome making Greece its captive, not vice versa.
This westernized Indian middle class, though numerically very small, became immensely important, and in the eyes of the rest of the world, it was Indian, spoke for India, represented India. As it matured, it inevitably took to nationalism, and the Indian patriot became the most typical example of the nationalist in his time. He was the most eloquent in denouncing imperialism – often in admirable English prose. He demanded the most fiercely to be liberated. He was the most confident, and with reason, of being able to operate by himself the institutions amongst which he had passed his life. Some years before the First World War, Indian nationalism was already vigorous. At first the nationalists had been divided between revolutionaries and constitutionalists. The revolutionaries, who carried on old Indian traditions of romantic protest, wanted root and branch overthrow of British rule, and terrorism seemed to be their best instrument. By contrast, the constitutionalists did not expect to end British rule by a lightning stroke; but by forming political parties, by entering the representative assemblies, by propaganda, and by accepting and operating the political systems which Britain had set up, they expected to be able to bring enough pressure to bear on the Government to make their voice felt in its decisions. They were buoyed up and encouraged by the support which they received from radicals in Britain. This active lobby in Britain for Indian independence was an important factor convincing Indian nationalism that constitutionalism would give results. After a time, terrorism lost its glamour, and the majority of nationalists opted for constitutional action, or only mildly unconstitutional action; and, with aberrations at times when crises came to a head, they remained faithful to this course.
On the British side there were, at times, explosive strains. There were, occasionally, violent men in the civil service and in the Army, and until the end the danger existed below the surface that in an emergency they might react brutally. Once violence had started it would have grown by its own momentum and both sides might have drifted into open war. An outrage occurred shortly after the First World War in the massacre at Amritsar. This town in the Punjab was the scene of demonstrations in which mobs got control of the city and martial law was proclaimed in the area. An Indian assembly convened in defiance of an order, was caught in a walled space, with inadequate exits, and a British general, General Dyer, ordered troops to open fire. As a result, nearly four hundred unarmed people were killed. That this atrocity should have taken place, and even been approved by a section of British opinion, was a shock to Indian leaders. But there were denunciations in London; those in Parliament were led with much force by Winston Churchill. The repudiation by the British Government of General Dyer was one of the factors which strengthened Indian nationalism in its belief that it could win freedom by relatively restrained means.
The chief organ of the freedom movement, the Indian National Congress, was led during the crucial years by one of the most extraordinary figures of history, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s outstanding qualities were a combination of a peculiar gentleness with inflexible determination; his religious temperament, natural in an Indian, was allied with a practical ability, unusual in seers, to shape events to some extent in the light of his understanding. Gandhi made Indian nationalism self-confident; he fed it with imaginative ideas and moral fire. Avoiding the dreary tactics of terrorism and guerrilla warfare, he perfected the weapons of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance. Some of his methods, at first, struck his lieutenants in Congress as too ingenuous; for instance, Gandhi proposed a famous march to the sea, to defy the law and make salt, on which there was a very light tax. Congress regarded it as a useless demonstration and agreed to it only in order to humour him. But it set India alight, and demonstrated a method of inducing popular uprisings which was to be of first importance to Congress in their later campaigns. He pursued his ends undeviatingly, but discriminated about means; thus, in the greatest of human traditions, he made politics a branch of ethics. The moral reason for all his major decisions was clearly laid in view, and even if a sophisticated onlooker might sometimes have thought that he deceived himself, and that the moral judgements on which he based his actions were sometimes the flexible handmaids of political experimentation, his concern with principle was authentic, never hypocritical, and it affected those who dealt with him. An English judge, sentencing him on one occasion to a prison term ‘for sedition’, addressed Gandhi, as he stood before him in the dock, in words which illustrate the effect he had on his political opponents:
It would be impossible to ignore the fact that in the eyes of millions of your countrymen you are a great patriot and a great leader. Even those who differ from you in politics look on you as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life…∗
The whole character of Indian history in this period is the collusion, unspoken and hardly admitted, between the British power and Gandhi. For thirty years they fought each other, but cooperated tacitly in preventing the fight from getting out of hand. Both acted as if guided by the maxim of Machiavelli that you should treat your enemy as if he may one day become your friend. Because of the phenomenon of Gandhi’s personality, a momentous struggle for freedom was fought, resolutely on both sides, but with an almost cheerful cordiality on both sides, and in a way which enabled both sides to be reconciled and to cooperate when it was over.
The climax of the struggle before the war was the civil disobedience campaign of Congress in 1930. Civil disobedience covered a variety of activities aimed at bringing government to a standstill – strikes, boycotts of British goods and services, and especially of foreign cloth, non-payment of taxes, and massive demonstrations, which were remarkably non-violent in the main, but on a scale large enough to alarm the authorities. The police took prisoners on a large scale: the prisons were overflowing, and special camps had to be organized. By these means the British Government in India felt that it had been able to prevent revolution and to maintain its power. But the years 1931–2 marked a watershed. The Government realized that although a rebellion had been broken, it could not repeat the operation, and that, if it tried to do so, it would strain too far the allegiance of the Indians in the civil service and the police. The issue from this period became the timing of the programme for self-government. While some of the diehards among the British held back on grounds of prestige, in other quarters in England and in British India there was anxiety on the more reasonable grounds that India was full of centrifugal and communal strains, and too hasty a withdrawal might lead to breakdown of government.
Congress, on the other hand, regarded the Government of India Act of 1935 as insufficient, although they were about to give it a trial. This Act had been thrashed out in a series of monumental deliberations in London, in which Mahatma Gandhi had taken part as the representative of Congress. It provided for parliamentary government and democratically elected Indian Ministers both in the central government at Delhi, and in the provinces. It retained, however, a British authoritarian element in two vital subjects: foreign affairs and defence. The demand of Congress at this time was for full Dominion status.
On 3 September 1939 the war began between Britain and Germany, and India was declared by the British Government to be also at war. It had no adequate cause of dispute with Germany to justify this declaration, and the Indian leaders said so forcibly. Nehru, it was true, and the more liberal leaders of Congress, shared the sense of outrage at Nazi misdeeds which was experienced by similar leaders in Europe. Nehru, while visiting England in the previous year, had written in the Manchester Guardian criticizing the policy of appeasement towards Germany. Gandhi, writing in his own newspaper, Harijan, after war broke out, expressed condemnation of Hitler and moral support for Britain and France, although as a pacifist he also condemned the fighting. The more reactionary Indian leaders were indifferent: not that they would have condoned Germany’s brutalities had they credited them, they wrote them off as inventions of British propaganda. But since no attempt had been made to consult Indian opinion through any representative institutions, how, asked the Indians, could there be any sincere talk of a war for democracy when the war was begun in such an undemocratic way? As a result, the Congress Party resigned from the Government, withdrew from the eight provincial Ministries which it held, and recorded its extreme disapproval of all the acts of British officialdom.
Yet India did not protest very effectively against the German War. Several divisions of its Army fought in the Middle East, gaining battle honours of which even Indian nationalists were, paradoxically, rather proud. In one province of India the war was genuinely popular. This was in the Punjab, which was traditionally the chief recruiting ground for soldiers, and where the provincial government had not considered resigning. The Punjab actively demonstrated in favour of the war, and regarded as enemies those who were lukewarm in its service. Surprisingly accurate knowledge of the ups and downs of war strategy began to circulate in Punjab villages. Elsewhere the war, simply as war, began to appeal to the so-called martial classes. Anything to do with it – news about it, the social and economic changes consequent on it – interested them as trenching on their monopoly in life.
But by the rest of India the war was treated with indifference: with neither the excitement caused by the sense of genuine change in the air, nor with the alarm caused by the knowledge that India was compassed about by real dangers, some of which might soon hit India very hard. The fact that the war was to be enlarged, that a new enemy was at hand by means of whom the war would be transformed, that through no initiative of its own India was to be placed in its vanguard, and that invasion was to be a very near possibility, would jerk it out of its previous apathy. It would go to bed at night and get up in the morning with war at its elbow, instead of viewing it academically at a safe remove. The extension of the war would be the signal for a new phase of the freedom struggle to begin.