This unusual book, a revealing account of the last 30 years of British rule, undermines any idea that withdrawal involved honourably assisting India towards Independence. As early as 1833, T.B. Macaulay told the House of Commons that transforming ‘a great people sunk in the depths of slavery and superstition’ and making them ‘desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own’. Instead, the Raj ended horribly as Britain, in Walter Reid’s own words, just scuttled off. For Reid, the complete failure to prepare India for independence was the betrayal of a trusteeship which the colonials had themselves proclaimed, a betrayal in which the entire British political class willingly colluded.
The First War of Independence had enabled the British government to move in, and the Government of India Act 1858 ended the dominance of the East India Company; thenceforth a viceroy would rule for the monarch but would do so under a political master, the Secretary of State for India. The supposedly independent Indian princes were as subordinate to the British as all other Indians, and Victoria became the Queen Empress.
Shoddy treatment
When the First World War broke out, a million Indian volunteers fought for the empire. Those killed were shovelled into mass graves; white troops killed got single marked graves, or were named on monuments. India’s contribution raised Indian expectations, but after the war only Canada, Australia, and New Zealand made significant progress towards full self-government. India got the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, the Rowlatt Act, much of which was proposed by the police. The Act was soon repealed, but by then the Jallianwala Bagh massacre had exposed the Raj’s dependence on force.
Growing resistance caused only cosmetic changes. Edwin Montagu, the India minister, and Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, proposed self-governing institutions — but solely to bring about ‘responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.’ The resulting Government of India Act 1919 put three Indians on the seven-member Executive Council and expanded the electorate to five-and-a-half million (out of 263 million), but gave the viceroy all the real power. Mahatma Gandhi saw through this but others did not, and communal bickering in the provincial councils dissipated energies which could have been focused on independence.
The colonials had a genius for exploiting their subjects’ attitudes; Gurkha troops at Amritsar admitted enjoying killing plainspeople, and some Hindus celebrated air attacks on Pathans in 1923. Reid also quotes a 1943 army inquiry as saying ‘the Sikh would at heart enjoy nothing more than hammering Muslims.’ He mentions only the meaningless promises in the Indian Councils Act 1909 and not the Act’s creation of communal electorates, but he also shows deep divisions in the British Conservative Party, with even sops to India provoking fierce controversy; prime ministers often sent special emissaries to India to divert them from leadership challenges at home. Indian leaders, however, seem not to have exploited British divisions; Lord Linlithgow, appointed viceroy in 1936, thought negotiations were paralysed by the combination of British political dishonesty and Indian political stupidities.
British racism
Reid is frank about British racism, though between the wars India was not uppermost in most voters’ minds; the Great Depression saw 70% unemployment in some areas, and recruitment to the Indian Civil Service fell sharply after 1919. Yet the elites still fought to retain dominance over India despite the emergence of Gandhi, who was always beyond their comprehension and who knew that satyagraha would provoke the colonials to violence.
The pretences had to be maintained, and Reid, who handles a wide range of sources adeptly, details the propaganda fed to a credulous and imperialist press. From Delhi, Lord Reading told London how dangerous communalism was, but under orders he successfully split the Congress, the Muslim League, and the Khilafat Movement from one another. Reading’s successor, Lord Irwin, got Indian goodwill by leaking sections of his Declaration in 1929, but the document made no definite promises, and the Government of India Act 1935 said nothing about dominion status.
Among the others who figure is Winston Churchill, who always hankered after an empire as it had been a quarter of a century before his birth, and was openly contemptuous of Hindus in particular; yet, whatever Churchill said about the condition of the then Untouchables, the Raj did little to change that. Churchill was more moderate in office, but Reid’s contention that the wartime diversion of food to troops was militarily justified neglects British and Indian work which concludes that the Bengal famine was a crime against humanity. Reid is also dismissive of Subhas Chandra Bose, despite British documents which show how much the colonials feared Bose.
World War II led to exit
It may ultimately have been the Second World War that made the British leave. Linlithgow, supposedly slow of mind, declared war for India using powers the monarch at home had lost in 1688, but by 1945 the London government owed India £1.2 billion and was being drained by the U.S. Lend-Lease agreement, which was finally paid off only in 2006. The ruling Labour Party gave Earl Mountbatten orders which are now familiar; by then too, over half the working class, as against a fifth of the upper classes, favoured withdrawal. Yet even the Labour government, craving great-power status in a post-war triumvirate, wanted India to become a dominion. Mountbatten’s predecessor, Earl Wavell, had stopped trying to make sense of anything London did. For Reid, the whole story is one of procrastination and deceit; he provides ample evidence, and the continuing legacy includes some of India’s most repressive legislation. That, however, needs another book; the author and the publishers have done well with this one.
Keeping the Jewel in the Crown: The British Betrayal of India ; Walter Reid, Birlinn, ₹ 374.
