Richard Holmes
SAHIB
The British soldier in India
572pp. HarperCollins. £20.
0 00 713753 2
David Gilmour
THE RULING CASTE
Imperial lives in the Victorian Raj
383pp. John Murray. £25.
0 7195 5534 5
US: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $27.
0 374 28354 0
Vyvyen Brendon
CHILDREN OF THE RAJ
362pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20.
0 297 84729 5
The British experience in India was one of the longest and most significant in the Imperial story. Beginning with the formation of the East India Company under Elizabeth I in 1600, it only ended formally and officially in 1947. The relationship between Britain and the subcontinent, of course, continues today through many shared, though sometimes disputed, memories of an interactive if complicated past, the use of English by Indian writers, the passions inspired by international cricket, the ubiquitous Indian restaurant, the presence in the United Kingdom of a substantial immigrant population deriving from the former Indian Empire, and much else besides.
India has always retained an exotic, faraway and seductively oriental appeal in the British imagination; the country was also the source of vast profits and a haven for investment; the Indian Army was an invaluable and free (at least for British taxpayers) extra resource for the British armed forces, allowing Britain to avoid Continental-style conscription until the crisis of 1916, as well as enabling it to punch above its weight in international military terms. Above all, India symbolized Imperial grandeur, and seemed to underwrite Britain’s superpower status for most of the nineteenth century and some of the twentieth – as the Viceroy Lord Curzon expressed it, a touch dramatically, in 1901, “As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straightway to a third rate power”. The three books reviewed here address some of the most important and weighty themes of British rule. Two of them deal with the massive twin pillars of the Raj, the Army and the Indian Civil Service; the third looks at what living in India – or in between India and Britain – was like for thousands of British men and women and especially their families. All three books are packed with fascinating primary material, well written and nicely produced.
Fundamentally, British rule rested on the capacity of the armed forces to maintain control over a huge and sometimes turbulent and resentful Indian population, as well as on finding sections of the population to collaborate with the Raj. Fairly early on, the British realized that as long as they adroitly exploited the religious, linguistic and historical divisions that marked Indian society they were relatively safe. Right up to Independence in 1947, therefore, and despite some perilously close-run episodes like the Great Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the Quit India disturbances of 1942, British rule was maintained as much by loyal Indian troops as by British regiments.
Richard Holmes is ideally qualified to examine the role of British soldiers in the conquest and holding of India from about 1850, though his account ends at the outbreak of the First World War. Sahib is crammed with extracts from letters, diaries and the books published by some of those who had served in the sub-continent to satisfy the curiosity of readers in Britain. As a result, an immensely vivid picture of the broad sweep as well as the small detail of military service in India is offered.
During the early expansion and conquests of the East India Company, British soldiers were able to receive prize money from their exploits. For instance, Holmes quotes testimony from the 1849 capture of Multan. Ensign Alfred Bassano wrote: “We rummaged about, finding boxes full of gold and silver coins, strings of pearls and bars of gold said to be worth fifty pounds each . . . . Officers in the fort fingered a little, including Brigadier Harvey . . . . the Governor General has, however, decided that Multan is to be looted for the benefit of the troops. So I look forward to some prize money”. At the same time, Private Waterfield described “a Nottingham chap, who was loaded with gold from head to foot” and, who, anxious to escape the prize agents, butted his head on the corner of a wall, reported himself injured and was carried away “a few thousand pounds richer than when he went in”. After the Great Rebellion of 1857–8, and the bringing of East India Company territory (roughly two-thirds of the whole) under the control of the Crown as British India, such licensed freebooting was frowned on, and a more responsible approach to the Indian population was encouraged.
This did not, however, stop the debauchery, the drunkenness and the gambling, the recourse to Indian “concubines”, and the casual brutality visited upon Indian servants. It is worth noting that Curzon, during his viceroyalty from 1898 to 1905, anxious to demonstrate to Indians that British rule was even-handed, several times intervened to ensure that British troops were properly punished for outrages such as gang rape and the beating of a servant to death.
The main thrust of this thoughtful and excellent book, however, is to explain not only how a relatively small number of British troops achieved the conquest and domination of India, but also why they went in the first place and what they made of it all once there. Here the richness of the material offered is overwhelming. Professor Holmes does not adopt a particular line on the rights and wrongs of British rule, noting the differing points of view and concentrating instead on the accounts of what actually happened. He also examines the complex but warm relationships that often existed between British units and Indian ones, for example showing how during the mid-nineteenth century, including the 1857 uprising, Punjabi – that is Sikh – troops and Scots soldiers fraternized, and how Arthur Lang noted that “after the pipers had finished playing I found knots of mingled Hielanders [sic] and Sikhs and Afghans each jabbering away in his own language, not in the least understood by one another, but great friends”.
In The Ruling Caste, David Gilmour, a biographer of both Kipling and Curzon, scrutinizes the work and lives of the elite of the Indian Civil Service, and although the book is subtitled to suggest it deals with the Victorian period, regularly examines events of the early twentieth century. Central to his book is the unravelling of the puzzle that perplexed Stalin, von Ribbentrop and many other foreign observers, namely how barely a thousand British ICS (Indian Civil Service) personnel managed to rule both British India and the princely states with a combined population of well over 300 million during the first part of the twentieth century. Very few statesmen, from Bismarck to Theodore Roosevelt, doubted the quality of British rule, and, in a fascinating episode, when Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the rebel Indian National Army, flew to Berlin during the Second World War to solicit help from Hitler, the Führer dismissed him, taking the view that Indians needed to be civilized by another hundred years of British rule. How was the Indian Empire administered with such apparent zeal, efficiency, high-mindedness and impartiality? Even Indian nationalists were more likely than not to agree with such an assessment. One reason for this perception was that the ICS was manifestly neither venal nor corrupt in the way in which, for example, some officials and officers of the old East India Company had been. There are, however, other forms of corruption, including assumptions of racial superiority and the conviction that the ICS always knew best. As Gilmour points out, during the 1970s not only did Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism encourage the view that Imperial rule was invariably self-serving and its motives inherently evil, but, in addition, researchers in the United States began to question and undermine the prevailing benign view of the work and aims of the ICS.
Gilmour comes to the sensible conclusion that none of these rather absolutist views is valid, and that the men of the ICS displayed a mixture of motives, skills and temperaments. He has approached the subject through an analysis of a number of individuals, “coming to the institution through its members, not the other way round”. In the process, he paints clear portraits of some of those whom he calls reactionaries, reformers and thinkers, as well as of the extraordinarily outspoken Charles James O’Donnell, a junior magistrate and an Irish Nationalist, who favoured Home Rule for India as well as Ireland and who amazingly escaped dismissal from the service despite a penchant for publicly attacking his superiors and generally stirring up trouble. Gilmour reminds us of the wide-ranging responsibilities of the District Officers, the “Pooh-Bahs” of the ICS: “The DO did not run the railways or the telegraph or the Army – though he had the power to call out troops in an emergency – but he was responsible for almost everything else”. Often a DO in his early twenties would arrive fresh from his ICS training at Oxford to rule single-handedly a district half as big as Wales. Gilmour is also good at explaining the structure of the service overall, from the District Officers to the Magistrates, Residents, Political Agents, Deputy Collectors, Lieutenant Governors, and so on.
Although ruling India was overwhelmingly seen as men’s work, hundreds of thousands of British women and children also experienced life under the Raj. Recently there have been several studies of the complex experience of the memsahibs and their families in the subcontinent, including Elizabeth Buettner’s very good Empire Families (2004). Vyvyen Brendon’s Children of the Raj is another very valuable contribution. Ranging from the 1760s to the 1960s, the book makes use of a prodigious amount of primary material, including interviews with many who are still alive and spent their childhoods in India. The result is a very readable, thorough and entertaining account of the tribulations and joys of life in India. Despite the swarms of ayahs, servants, cooks and gardeners, the going was often tough for British families. One reason for this was the constant threat of illness and disease and the high rate of infant mortality. Then there were the long separations from parents, when children were packed off to boarding schools – many of them harsh and of poor quality – either in India or in Britain. There was sometimes the danger of harm through rebellion and war, from the earlier wars of conquest, to the great Sepoy uprising of 1857, frontier conflicts, internal disorder as well as the Japanese assault on Burma and beyond during the Second World War.
Above all, Brendon has listened attentively to the varied voices of hosts of children. Despite the brave and plucky fronts so often presented in most of the letters home, there is also a common and pervading sense of pain, loss and dislocation. It now seems beyond doubt that one of the highest prices paid for Britain’s lengthy supremacy in India was borne by the children of the Raj.
It is now nearly sixty years since British rule ended and the Indian Empire was dismantled, but the fascination engendered by that long, complex, glorious, shameful, creative, and often violent and painful association remains undimmed. Each of these excellent books goes a long way to explaining why that should be so.
