Commuting in from a south London suburb, I sometimes met former planters eager to talk with me, as we trundled past narrow Victorian terraces; the buildings, sullen in thin, grey rain, summed up the widespread indifference among Britons to many who had run their former empire. I wondered how my interlocutors coped with their loss — of the space and the light, of the big wooden-framed houses with creepers on the pillars and views over two ranges of hills to jagged, towering walls of rock and ice beyond.
Yet the planters may have known little of other British lives in India; Steve, the chef at my local pub in another city, used to tell me how, trained for Murmansk but sent to Bengal, he and his barrack-mates spent the war’s closing months playing football with Bengali sides.
Mosaic of stories
David Gilmour has attempted the immense task of describing millions of lives led by Britons over three centuries both in imperial Britain and in India. This is a mosaic of hundreds, possibly thousands, of stories, in a thematic account ranging from motivations and intentions through working lives to the colonials’ social experiences — intimacies, domesticities, leisure, and etiquette.
The detail, drawn from a colossal amount of material, is extraordinary but not oppressive, and shows the complexity of this tangled history. Through the 18th century and into the 19th, it was predominantly English men who went to India to make money and go into politics back home. Enough succeeded to comprise a tenth of parliament, but many Scots went east to pay for unprofitable estates, or because they were second sons in family firms.
The East Indiamen were very corrupt; in a reference to the 1834 Poor Law, the reformer John Bright called the empire ‘a gigantic system of outdoor relief’ for the aristocracy.
The book’s themes themselves travel, from voyages and journeys to and within India (one officer, stranded all night on a mudbank, was not eaten by crocodiles) to the work of the colonials, from the end of the Company’s monopoly to many facets of imperial rule. The old Company hands thought the new exam-recruited Indian Civil Service officers frightful specimens from a lower class (these passages are delicious) but the latter were efficient, and their presence resulted from Britain’s cleanup — itself derived from reforms the government had imposed on the Company — of the home civil service.
The stories indirectly show the origins and development of the Indian Army, the Indian Medical Service, the railways, and the Indian Civil Service. No one kind of person was involved, of course, and at least some of the people were astonishing characters, immensely energetic and committed to establishing education and other systems (one official solemnised his own marriage, but the courts, possibly if improbably presaging Wittgenstein, ruled the ceremony invalid). Many were open to what they encountered; for a long time, Indians accepted without query decisions by British magistrates and senior officials, as they thought the rulings would be free of caste or religious bias.
Colonial life
The social side occupies Gilmour most, and he rightly spends time on the lives of colonial women, almost all of whom made their own worlds without the props of official standing and duties.
The Indian elites figure often, and the scale of killing on various maharajas’ hunts is startling.
The author might have said more about class distinctions among the colonials (of which, for example, M.S.S. Pandian wrote), though he notes that English officers found Scots colleagues less easy to rank socially. He is candid about the quiet reopening of army-approved brothels after British temperance crusaders had got them closed and venereal diseases spread rapidly. He is also uncensorious about sexual liaisons between colonials and Indians in all classes , and about adultery among the colonials themselves.
The thematic approach and the focus on colonial society, however, mean that crucial context often disappears. Indians played a progressively greater role in running imperial India, but by the early 1860s colonial disapproval of long-standing intimate involvements between the colonials and their subjects caused a ‘forfeiture of understanding’, with serious consequences for the nature of colonial rule — which nevertheless needed Indians’ ‘tacit consent’.
Yet Gilmour never considers what Indians were supposed to consent to, and misses the intensification of colonial racism in this period; furthermore, there is no mention of the mass destruction of colonial documents as Independence approached. Such material as still exists at Hanslope Park may never be declassified.
Slips and misses
Some of the author’s language and terminology might also raise eyebrows; the name of one river is variably spelt, other names are misspelt (the East India Company spelt Sind correctly as Sindh), the First War of Independence is called the Rebellion, the princely states — whose political role is omitted — are sometimes called native states, and regional languages are called vernaculars. Ronald Ross becomes ‘Robert Ross’, and Gilmour may even, if unwittingly, aid the Scottish independence movement by spelling Kirkcaldy ‘Kirkaldy’.
Gilmour is often uncomfortable about the fact of empire, but the texture, the inherent asymmetry, of everyday relations between the colonial rulers and their subjects rarely features.
The book concludes with an excerpt from Manmohan Singh’s speech accepting an honorary Oxford doctorate, but whether that helps Gilmour confirm what look like consequentialist assumptions that colonial rule was not so bad after all is another matter.
The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience ; David Gilmour, Allen Lane/ PRH, ₹999.
