Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  In every age there are certain articles of faith which society accepts unquestioningly, with or without evidence; often, indeed, in the face of inconvenient facts. The faith may be religious, moral, or political. During the last quarter of the twentieth century it has become political. Creeds, like streams, gather strength as they narrow, thriving on bigotry—at present, liberal bigotry. In our time the institution of European colonialism is condemned as an abomination. No defense of it is admissible. The transformation of former colonies into emerging nations is regarded as inherently benign, one of the few great achievements in a troubled century. Africa, we are told, is free. Certainly it is free of foreign administration, but the question of whether the people of Libya, Uganda, Angola, or Katanga enjoy political freedom—not to mention the four freedoms, from fear and want and of religion and speech, proclaimed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941—is so provocative that raising it is bad taste. Yet despite the hopes raised by Gandhi and his gifted successor, Jawaharlal Nehru, the results of their statecraft are rather different from those they anticipated. The old Indian Empire is now split into five nations. In all of them the beneficence which was expected to replace the departed Raj is, if present, extremely well camouflaged. This is not an argument against the rise of national pride in what we have come to call the Third World. To disapprove of what Macmillan called “the winds of change” would be like passing judgment on the decline of Rome, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution. History can never be put in the dock. But before examining it, one should clear the mind of cant.

  In 1885 a clique of upper-class Indians established, as an annual custom, a three-day Christmas-week picnic. They called it the Indian National Congress. Except in 1906, when its members approved a mild resolution favoring some form of Indian self-government in domestic affairs, the congress had no political overtones until 1920. Nevertheless, the damage to imperial authority had been done long before that. It is obvious now that the ultimate failure of the Raj was social, not political. Lord Willingdon told Boothby he once invited a distinguished Indian prince, a friend of his, to lunch at Bombay’s Yacht Club. When they were ordering drinks, a porter came over and told Willingdon: “I am sorry, your Excellency, but the secretary has asked me to tell you that niggers are not allowed in this club.” Boothby himself agreed with Clemenceau’s observation that Englishmen and Indians in the Raj “do not mingle at all.” Had the picnickers of 1885 included English families, the congress might have remained a frolic. Like Gandhi, who conceived of England as “a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization,” the original congressmen were fervent anglophiles.261 But this, from the British point of view, was less a blessing than it seemed. The most sophisticated of them spent several years in the Mother Country—Gandhi was admitted to the Inner Temple, one of London’s four law colleges (“inns of court”)—or sent their sons there: Jawaharlal Nehru, like Churchill, attended Harrow. Inspired by the liberal idealism of their English teachers, they returned home with a new sense of purpose, which grew, after the Armistice, when they followed the events in Ireland with intense interest. Under Gandhi’s guidance the congress became a mass movement, with Indian freedom as its objective. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, became co-founder of the Swarajya party. Hind Swaraj is a subtle Hindi phrase; under Motilal it was translated as “Indian home rule,” or the achievement of dominion status; later, when his son rose to power, it came to mean independence—a socialist republic.

  In either case, the task confronting the congress was almost beyond imagining. Ireland was difficult, but in India the problems of nationhood were increased a thousandfold. The Raj wasn’t even entirely British; France ruled five small colonies there and Portugal three. The subcontinent’s vast population, which increased by some thirty-four million each decade, was divided into four dominant ethnic strains: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, and Negroid. They spoke 225 main languages; each of the most popular 12 was the native tongue for at least ten million Indians. The illiteracy rate in the Indian Empire was 88 percent; the average diet, between six and seven hundred calories a day. Idols, and there were thousands of them, were worshiped by Hindus, Moslems, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians, and the possibilities for religious conflict were limitless. Moslems regarded swine as unclean. To Hindus, cows, monkeys, and the waters of the Ganges were sacred. Assam head-hunters knelt before the skulls of their victims and chewed their fathers’ bones, regarding the marrow as an aphrodisiac. To offer a Sikh a cigarette, or to light up near one of his shrines, could be suicidal. Hindus and Moslems were forever stalking one another with daggers, swords, spears, and torches. The followers of these warring faiths did not live apart; they mingled daily. Segregating them, even roughly, would require the relocation of between fourteen and sixteen million people. Moreover, native rulers and their subjects often prayed at different altars. The nawab of Junadagh was a Moslem; 81 percent of his people were Hindus. The maharaja of Kashmir was a Hindu; of his four million Kashmiris, 80 percent were Moslems. “India is an abstraction,” Churchill said. “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.”262

  Two out of every three Indians were Hindus. Because of their beliefs, seven hundred million cattle roamed unharmed in a country which always teetered on the brink of starvation and sometimes plunged into famine. Hinduism is an exquisite maze of twistings and circlings and doublings-back, of poetry and philosophy and taboos, of hauntingly lovely corridors and frightening tunnels into the darker places in the human mind, and many pilgrims from the West, having studied it, have emerged the better for the journey. One of them, Frank Lloyd Wright, once told a group of fellow architects that Hindu thought takes a longer route on its way to reach a conclusion and “gathers more richness along the way.” In an illustration which would almost certainly have baffled Churchill, Wright drew a diagram:263

  To those who have not mastered it, the reasoning in the Bhagavad-Gita or the more complex Upanishads can be immensely frustrating. A single idea sets off a series of cerebral reactions so complex that one may become quickly, and hopelessly, entangled—as in the Dharma Chakra, or Wheel of Asoka, now displayed on the Indian flag. The wheel dates from 228 B.C., and its hub, rim, and spokes blend concepts of light, truth, simplicity, compassion, renunciation, humility, faith, strength, fellowship, and interdependence, all entwined in an image which links, reinforces, and merges them. You do not have to understand it to feel its conceptual power, but the learned Hindu will pity you for your ignorance. He will also feel superior to you in other ways. High Brahmins, for example, seem to their Western friends to bathe incessantly. They are probably the cleanest people in the world. To them, Englishmen and Americans are coarse and crude, with unspeakable personal habits.

  But the social expression of Hinduism is the doctrine, or, more accurately, the practice, of caste, and though its scholars find the subject distasteful, the historical origins of this pernicious system lie in a racism starker than any bigotry found in the veld of South Africa or the red clay of northern Georgia. Over a thousand years before the birth of Christ, Aryans of uncertain origins conquered the black Dravidian and Munda natives and imposed a hierarchical structure on the entire subcontinent. Brahmanism and its major gods—Siva, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, and the creator Brahma—evolved through successive generations, but the basic principle, or lack of it, endured: the lighter your skin, the higher your caste. Historically, the four great castes are the Brahmins, scholars and priests; Kshatriyas, soldiers and administrators; Vaishyas, merchants; and Sudras, servants and manual laborers. Gandhi was a Vaishya; Nehru, a Kashmiri Brahmin. But there are countless subcastes, including one for prostitution: if a girl is born into it, she spends her life as a whore; if the child is a boy, he will be a pimp until, having raised another generation of whores and pimps, he dies. You can see his sisters and daughters today, locked in the Cages of Bombay.* One caste makes beds, another washes dishes, a third dries them—which is why eve
ry British household in the Raj required swarms of servants. Any member of any caste would perish before moving his own garbage, which is the duty of those who have no caste at all—the Untouchables. There were between sixty and seventy million Untouchables in Gandhi’s day. He called them harijans (“beloved of God”) and worked hard to better their lot, but even Mahatma (“great-souled”) Gandhi never suggested the abolition of caste, a reform which, Churchill held, would be absolutely necessary before India could be considered civilized.

  Vaishyaism was not the only theological influence in Gandhi’s childhood home. Jainism was also esteemed there, and his respect for it was to shape the destiny of the subcontinent. Jains believe in tolerance, vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and ahimsa, the doctrine of the sanctity of every living creature. A devout Jain will not even swat a mosquito. Gandhi never went that far, but his belief in nonviolence was absolute. That was why he had become a stretcher-bearer, not a soldier, in the Boer War, and satyägraha, Hindi for “nonviolence,” was to be his most effective tactic in the struggle for Indian independence; among its subsequent converts were American civil rights workers, who adopted it in the 1960s. Punishing a man who keeps turning the other cheek is frustrating and, eventually, pointless. Beginning in the 1920s, Raj policemen arrested thousands of the Mahatma’s satyägrahis, who cheerfully lined up outside prisons, waiting to be escorted to their cells. Unfortunately, the tension between Hindus and Moslems mounted as their enthusiasm for the movement grew; and the possibilities of violence multiplied. The Mahatma sought to overcome it by calling for national unity, coining the slogan “Hindu-Moslim ek hai!” (“Hindu and Moslem are one!”) Few accepted it, however, and after a series of sinister ritualistic murders a congress mob stormed a police station in the United Provinces and slew the constables. Gandhi called off his campaign. His people, he said, had failed to grasp his message. But the British, who had been itching to get their hands on him, arrested him just the same, and on March 18, 1922, he was tried for sedition in what the docket called “Case No 45 of the Ahmedabad Sessions, Rex Imperator v Gandhi.” The evidence was a series of articles he had written in his political journal, Young India. He pleaded guilty and asked for penal servitude: “To preach disaffection towards the existing system of Government has become almost a passion with me… I am here therefore to submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me, for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.” The puzzled young English magistrate paid tribute to his sincerity and sentenced him to six years, adding: “I should like to say in doing so that if the course of events in India should make it possible to reduce the period and release you, no one would be better pleased than I.”264

  Gandhi was out in two years. He found his movement was in disarray. It had split into two factions over whether or not to accept a British invitation to join local legislatures. More depressing, the enmity between Hindu and Moslem members was deepening. Gandhi fasted for three weeks; it solved nothing. In London, Birkenhead, adamantly against any concessions to congress demands, was winning every skirmish. Immediately after the war Parliament had authorized an investigation of the Indian political scene by a royal commission. Appointing the members was F.E.’s job. In 1927, after a long series of delaying actions, he named a panel of undistinguished British back-benchers—not a single Indian—under the chairmanship of Sir John Simon, of whom Birkenhead said patronizingly: “How much better in life and how much more paying it is to be blameless rather than brilliant.”265 By the fall of 1929 Simon and his colleagues (who included the still unknown Clement Attlee) were completing a ponderous document which, when published the following year, would omit any mention of dominion status, the key issue in India. Then Lord Irwin surprised everyone by facing the issue squarely. He asked Labour’s William Wedgwood Benn, father of the future Tony Benn and later Birkenhead’s successor in the India Office, to summon a conference which would include, not only Britons, but also members of the congress and representatives of the maharajas ruling India’s princely states. Wedgwood Benn was delighted. Depressed by the stodgy Simon Commission, Labour had been searching for some way to mollify the Indian nationalists. Here, clearly, was a superb opportunity. Notice of the conference was published in the Indian Gazette of October 31, 1929. The same issue carried Irwin’s declaration that granting dominionhood was implicit in the humane, enlightened tradition of the Raj, and Baldwin’s endorsement of this position.

  Uproar followed. Birkenhead furiously attacked Irwin in the House of Lords. Lord Reading, following him, said flatly: “It is frankly inconceivable that India will ever be fit for Dominion self-government.” In the House of Commons, Baldwin was facing a revolt. Tories were questioning, not only his wisdom, but also his integrity. On October 23, when Winston was visiting the War Museum in Richmond, examining a tattered Confederate flag, the Conservative leader had informed the shadow cabinet of Irwin’s coming statement and added that he approved of it. Churchill would disagree, of course, and so would the City, with its massive investments in the subcontinent, but Baldwin believed that the voters, weary of India, would be glad to shuck off the burden. With the exception of Sir Samuel Hoare, the prime minister’s senior colleagues had told him they thought it would be a mistake to support the viceroy. They thought they had convinced him. And now he had done it anyway. Three of them threatened to resign. Faced with the possibility of a party split, he offered lame excuses. He had acted in his “personal capacity,” he said, not as leader. They weren’t having any of that. Then he told them he had been under the impression that Irwin had spoken out at the urging of the Simon Commission. But the commission hadn’t completed its inquiries, and friends of its members knew the report would be weak. The shadow cabinet meeting broke up in confusion. To make sure his views were understood, the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, son of the great prime minister, wrote Baldwin: “I need not say what a shock it was to learn that the declaration was to be made before anything had been laid before the country, though we had appointed a Commission for this very purpose.” He felt mortified: “What a dislocation! Poor Conservative Party!” Salisbury regarded Indian self-government as an “extreme absurdity” and hoped “you will be able to stop it, to convince the Gvt and to convince Edward Irwin that the Party will be shaken to its centre” if this line were not abandoned. He ended: “We must resist it.” George Lane-Fox sent Irwin word that the Tories were “not very comfortable” with his position. Geoffrey Dawson, who thought the viceroy was right, nevertheless wrote him: “The tide here is running pretty strongly against your ideas, and you cannot hope to carry them out by depending on the Labour Party alone.”266

  Baldwin refused to budge. As leader of the Conservatives and a superb politician, he had resources stronger than his party critics’, even though they constituted, at that time, a majority. The whips belonged to him, and also the party machine, including the constituency committees and associations. He could count on the support of The Times and of Reith at the BBC. Most of his MPs were indebted to him in one way or another. He called in these IOUs and had just about suppressed the rebellion when, on Tuesday, November 5, Winston Churchill returned from the United States.

  Earlier, Irwin had urged Churchill to update his views on India by talking to some members of the congress. Winston had replied: “I am quite satisfied with my views on India, and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indians.” Since leaving Bangalore in 1899 he had taken little interest in the subcontinent. He seems to have been unaware that the Simon Commission and all that followed were the consequences of a pledge made by Lloyd George in 1917, defining England’s aim in India as “the granting of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.” But although Winston had seldom thought of the Raj, his feelings about it were strong. No Englishman was more persuaded of Queen Victoria’s wisdom in saying, “I think it very unwise to give up w
hat we hold.” Indeed, that summed up his attitude toward the entire Empire. He considered it, among other things, a matter of national self-interest. To Churchill, Amery observed, “England is still the starting point and the ultimate object of policy.” The Empire gave Britain its prestige; it made Britain the world’s most powerful nation. Without its imperial possessions the country would be merely an obscure island lying off the European continent. England deprived of its imperial possessions would, for him, be like Samson shorn of his hair or Antaeus without his feet on earth. Moreover, his vision of India, in particular, was crowned by a romantic nimbus. It was the magic land he had known as an impressionable young cavalry officer, a realm of rajas’ palaces, the Taj, shikar, bazaars, fakirs, temples, shrines, and howdahs, a symbol of imperial splendor and proud glory, Britian’s most priceless possession. To yield it, he said, would be “a hideous act of self-mutilation.”267

  Many, including some who were close to him, concluded that he lived in the past, a “mid-Victorian,” as Amery called him in August 1929, “steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern view.” Certainly Churchill often quoted pronouncements about the subcontinent made long ago by men now deep in their graves. One of them, indeed, was Lord Randolph: “Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity.” Another was Lord Morley: “There is a school of thought who say that we might wisely walk out of India and that the Indians could manage their own affairs better than we can. Anybody who pictures to himself the anarchy, the bloody chaos that would follow from any such deplorable step might shrink from that sinister decision.” And, from J. R. Seeley’s Expansion of England, published in 1883, when Winston was an Ascot schoolboy, he remembered the judgment that British withdrawal from the subcontinent would be “the most inexcusable of all conceivable crimes and might possibly cause the most stupendous of all conceivable calamities.”268