The development of self-government in India, 1858-1914

Front matter

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1858-1914

Prefatory Note

The conviction that the political development of India was to be one of the most important problems before the world in the next twenty years, was the primary motive in undertaking the investigation of the development of self-government in India during the years from the mutiny to the outbreak of the world-war.

The period since 1914 has been obscured by the censorship, propaganda, and misinformation to such an extent that partisanship, which has no place in such a treatise, has no means of being controlled or evaluated. This investigation has, therefore, been confined strictly to developing a background for a comprehension of the forces and movements at work in India.

Since the war new figures, such as Ghandi, and new methods or modifications of methods, such as non-co-operation and the Hindu- Mohammedan entente, have come, but at this date little essential alteration has been effected in the current of events, the outcome of which must be awaited with anxious concern not only by the British Empire but by the world at large.

A personal debt of gratitude is owed to the courteous authorities of the University of Chicago Library, the Massachusetts State Library, the Columbia University Library, and the Library of Congress for their invaluable assistance in this work; and a still deeper obligation for the inspiration and assistance of the members of the faculty of the University of Chicago.

Aden, Arabia March 20, 1922

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER

PAGE

I. Introduction i

Introduction

English rule in India the most colossal missionary enterprise in history The establishment of British rule in India

The East India Company

Footholds

Madras, 1639 Bombay, 1662 Bengal, 1765

Expansion, centering largely around Bengal and up the Ganges Valley

Rivals: Mughals, French, Mahrattas The problem encountered by the English in their attempt to Anglicize India

The territorial immensity of India

The enormous population

The climate

Race antipathy The attitude assumed by England

The liberal policy — governing for the good of India

The conservative policy — the exploitation of India The execution of the policies

Black spots on England's record

The good side The degree of success achieved

Material

Moral

The form of government possibly the most enduring of all the English contributions Ihe forces enabling England to maintain her supremacy

The divisions of India

Military superiority and precautions The attitude of the natives toward England

Lack of love for English rule

Preference for English over any other foreign domination

The development of self-government in India is a drama for the last act of which the curtain has not yet risen, and it would perhaps be premature to even assert that the stage has yet been set for it, although there are stirrings and noises that seem to indicate that the scene-shifters are at their work.

When the last curtain does finally fall, however, whether it be on a new nation or on a new self-governing colony of the British Empire, it will be the finale of one of the most colossal missionary undertakings in history, an attempt by a nation to impose its civilization on a continent teeming with a population seven fold its own in numbers, thousands of miles distant, and already equipped with highly developed, complex civilizations which were hoary with antiquity before the dawn of history rose upon its own existence.

The development and continuance of the political dominion over India which alone has made the experiment possible has been on the whole a purblind process, made up of opportunism, mingled with an occasional stroke of audacious genius. Its motives have been predominantly commercial, colored by the impulses characteristic of imperialism and blended at times with lofty idealism.

It- is not the purpose of this thesis to trace the growth of the British power in India, but certain of its broad features may well be brought to mind. It began with the operations of the British East India Company, a typical chartered trading company, which received its first charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600. Steady and strong support from the English government and people, in its rivalries with the Portuguese, Dutch, and later with the French, eventually enabled it to drive them from the field.

The Company secured its first territorial foothold in 1639 at Madras, where Francis Day built Fort St. George. In 1662 Bombay came to England as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza, of Portugal. Charles II turned it over to the Company, which for safety against the Mahrattas made it the west coast base. The third leg of the tripod on which England has built up its supremacy in India was obtained in 1765, when the Company secured the diwani of Bengal.

From these three centers, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in Bengal, England spread her power out over the country in the years of the dissolution of the Mughal Empire of Delhi, engaging in a death struggle with the French, the Mahrattas, and the Sikhs for the estate. Bit by bit as necessity required or opportunity offered, Clive and his coadjutors and successors added to the English territory.

The Ganges Valley, which proved the easiest prey, was the first and most persistently exploited field. Consequently, most of the annexations were made to Bengal. Madras took very nearly its present shape as a province at the fall of Tipu Sultan in 1799. Bombay secured practically all of its provincial territory at the close of the third Mahratta war in 1818. With these exceptions most of the rest of the acquired areas went to Bengal and resulted in its governor being elevated to a position of supremacy over Bombay, Madras, and the rest of India. The unwieldiness of its bulk necessitated the erection of parts of its territory into new provinces, and the creation of the governor-generalship dimmed the glory of its governor, but Bengal retained its political pre-eminence until 191 1 when the capital was removed to "Delhi of the Great Mughal."

The process was not uniform, however. In all the provinces large enclaves and bits of territory have continued under their native rulers who acknowledged the suzerainty of England, and who are controlled entirely by her in their foreign relations, and whose internal administration is supervised to a varying extent by her officials. These native states lie beyond the scope of a study of the development of self-government in British India. Each has its own history, and for the great progress which, in certain instances like Baroda, has been made, England has been only secondarily responsible through advice and example.

Within her own territories it has been otherwise. The problems of government have been innumerable, and the difficulties enormous, perhaps insurmountable, but in meeting them, England has had a free hand. Her work is her own. She is entitled to the credit for her successes, but must, on the other hand, bear the blame for mistakes. Particularly is this true since 1858, when the political dominion of the East India Company was abolished and the British government itself took charge. It is with that date, then, that we begin our study.

The development of self-government has until very recently been only one insignificant aspect of the administrative phase of the work of England in India. To get it in its proper setting and perspective, and to appreciate how great even that part of the work has been, some realization of the problem is necessary even at the risk of platitudes.

The India 1 which confronted England was a continent as large as Europe west of the Vistula, and with thirty millions more people, full of ancient nations, of great cities, of varieties of civilization, of armies, nobilities, priesthoods, and organizations for every conceivable purpose from the spread of great religions down to systematic murder. It was the birthplace of two of the great religions of the world and the battle ground of three, or, counting Christianity, of perhaps four. Among its peoples religious animosity still smoldered with a fury and fanaticism never

1 Meredith Townsend, "Will England Retain India ? " Contemporary Review, LIII (1888), 795-96.

equaled in the West. No practice seemed too cruel or degrading according to occidental standards to be jealously cherished by some Indian sect as an all-essential to be defended and preserved even in certain instances at the cost of life itself.

Within its confines were twice as many Bengalis as there were Frenchmen in Europe. The Hindostanees, properly so called, outnumbered the whites in the United States in 1888. The Mahrattas would have filled Spain. The people of the Punjab with Scinde would have doubled the population of Turkey. These were but four of the more salient divisions. As for the whole population, one modern agitator said, " If every native were to spit in a tank, there would be enough to drown every European in India"; 1 or in the words of Lord Curzon, "The English in India are indeed little more than a little foam on a dark unfathomed ocean." 2

The people were of all imaginable types. Some were the fighting races of the north, whose males were as big, as brave, and more reckless of death than those of the white races, and numbered in 1888 at least one hundred and twenty million. At the other extreme were the docile, depressed, servile millions of outcasts, and the timid aboriginals of the jungles. On the one hand were the intellectual and cultured Brahmins, on the other, the Ghonds and Bhils.

Over five hundred languages were spoken within its limits, comprising fourteen major groups. There were tens of millions of peasants whose hoarding had made of India for ages the great absorbent of the precious metals; tens of millions of peasants beside whose poverty fellahs were rich, for when all is said, India has long been, as far as the masses are concerned, the poorest of the great countries of the world. Its millions of artisans, ranging from the men who have built its wonderful palaces to those who, nearly naked and almost without tools, do the humblest work, have toiled unceasingly in vain efforts to escape the famine which has continued to stalk through the land.

Such were some of the material aspects of the situation that has confronted the English. On the political side and more specifically bearing on the development of self-government, Lord Lytton put the problem thus:

It must, however, be remembered that the problem undertaken by the British rulers of India [a political problem more perplexing in its conditions

1 Enroll, "The Recent Crisis in India," Nineteenth Century Review, LXII (1907), 202.

and as regards the results of its solution more far-reaching than any which since the dissolution of the Pax Romana, has been undertaken by a conquering race] is the application of the most refined principles of European government and some of the most artificial institutions of European society to a vast oriental population, in whose history, habits, and traditions they had had no previous existence. Such phrases as "Religious Toleration," "Liberty of the Press," "Personal Freedom of the Subject," "Social Supremacy of the Law," and others, which in England have long been the mere catchwords of ideas common to the whole race and deeply impressed upon its character by all the events of its history and all the most cherished recollections of its earlier life are, here in India, to the vast mass of our native subjects the mysterious formulas of a foreign and more or less uncongenial system of administration, which is "scarcely if at all intelligible to the greater number of those for whose benefit it is maintained. It is a fact which when I first came to India was strongly impressed on my attention by one of India's wisest and most thoughtful administrators. It is a fact which there is no disguising, and it is also one which cannot be too constantly or too anxiously recognized, that by enforcing these institutions we have placed and must permanently maintain ourselves at the head of a gradual but gigantic revolution, the greatest and most momentous social, moral, and religious, as well as political revolution which perhaps the world has ever witnessed. 1

Added to all this was a climate which, even when unmixed with alcohol and modified so far as medical science is yet able, makes permanent settlement forever impossible for a northern white race. 2 The race problem in its narrow social sense of racial antipathy was not of particular importance until the last half -century, but it is now steadily becoming' an increasing and more menacing difficulty.

Such were the conditions with which England was confronted. What was the goal which England set up to guide her in dealing with the situation, and what were the motives which impelled her to seek to imprint her civilization on the millions of India ? No aim was ever held very clearly or steadily in mind, but there seems to have been a conviction that things English were the best in the world and must be carried wherever Englishmen went in their quest for wealth or power. To this major premise was added the minor, that what was good for the Englishman must be good for the natives and therefore must be given them. As Fraser's Magazine put it in 1873:

1 Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Governor-General of India, XVII (1878), 176.

2 Sidney Jones Owen, "The Stability of Our Indian Empire, ''Contemporary Review, XXXI (1877), 495-

We have been induced to act thus from the conviction, which is so strong among us that it almost amounts to a mania, that because these are English institutions, and have conduced to make England great and prosperous, therefore they must inevitably have the same effect in India. 1

Still farther in the background were the impelling motives that brought England into India in the first place and still keep her there. Originally it was the desire for commercial gain that lured the ships of the East India Company to Surat and the Malabar Coast. When the disorder consequent on the crumbling of the Mughal Empire reduced the profits of legitimate trade, the opportunity for deriving even greater returns by participating in the wars of the country and jealous rivalry with the French impelled the Company to embark on a career of territorial aggrandizement that lasted until the Crown assumed control, and may be said to have been continued by it down to the present day. Under the Crown, however, it has been rather more of a question of staying and retaining India in perpetuum as part of the British Empire than of advancing the frontiers.

In regard to this there have been, broadly speaking, two general classes of arguments and theories as to the proper policy to pursue. The first has been that of the Liberals: that England, since she was in India as the governing power, must act as a species of patron saint to guide the natives in the paths of progress, and that her policy should be framed primarily for the good of India. The other contention has been that the English were in India first of all for the same reason which brought their forefathers there in the first place — the good of England— and that Indian interests were but secondary, and to be considered only when convenient.

The justification of the one attitude was its altruism and idealism. The reasons advanced to support the other view were: the anarchy and horrors which would follow leaving India to the "natives," and for the prevention of which England was entitled to remuneration; the great commercial profits to be derived from the commercial exploitation of the country; the financial gains to be drawn from its government in the form of salaries and pensions for officials and soldiers; its value as an outlet for the activity of England's surplus youth; its military value as a training ground for England's army; and lastly its political worth as an important element in England's political and international prestige. To secure and maintain these advantages India must be held in close

1 " S," "The Functions of Government in India, " Fraser's Magazine, LXXXVIII (1873), 208.

leash by military force, and in consequence the adherents to this type of theory have opposed all concessions and advocated repression.

In the words of Herbert Taylor in 1881:

All self-deception must be cast aside, with all expression of Pharisaical philanthropy; and we must boldly acknowledge what nine out of ten of us deny with our lips, though confessing in our hearts, that we are in India primarily for our own national good. 1

Mr. McLean, M.P., 2 repeated this thought in 1889 when he said: Let us have the courage to repudiate the pretence which foreign nations laugh at, and which hardly deceives ourselves, that we keep India merely for the benefit of the people of that country, and in order to train them for self-government. We keep it for the sake of the interests and the honour of England, and the only form of government by which we can continue to hold it in subjection is that of a despotism. 3

On the whole the expressions of the liberal view have been the most frequent. For instance, John Bright in 1858 said: "You may govern India, if you like, for the good of England, but the good of England must come through the channel of the good of India." 4

Gladstone in his Limehouse speech said that, "Our time in India depended on our stay there being profitable to the people and our making

them understand that It will not do for us to treat with contempt

or even with indifference the rising aspirations of this great people." 5

. Lord Northbrook in the same vein said : "Never forget that it is our duty to govern India not for our own profit and advantage but for the benefit of the natives of India." 6

1 Herbert Taylor, "The Future of India," Contemporary Review, XXXIX (1881), 475-76.

2 Voice of India, VII (1889), 302.

3 See the following articles for additional illustrations of the exploiter's views. "The English in India," Westminster Review, LXIX (1858), 199 et seq; "The Climate and the Work," Cornhill Magazine, VI (1862), 244; M. E. Grant-Duff, "India, Political and Social," Contemporary Review, XXVI (1875), 857-86; H. G. Keene, "John Bull's Eastern Estate, " Westminster Review, CXLVII (1897), 357-66; Arthur Sawtell, "India under British Rule," Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, XXXVII (1906), 291; George Chesney, "The Value of India to England," Nineteenth Century Review, III (1878), 227-38; H. Fielding Hall, "The Competition Wallah," Fortnightly Review, XCIX (1913), 279-89. The soundness of the arguments thus advanced has at times been denied. In this connection see the following articles: M. E. Grant-Duff, loc. cit.; Grant Allen, "Why Keep India?" Contemporary Review, XXXVIII (1880), 544-56.

4 Parliamentary Debates, N.S., Vol. CLI (1858), col. 346. ^ Ibid., 4th Ser., Vol. Ill (1892), col. 94.

6 Bernard Mallet, Thomas George, Earl of Northbrook, p. 135.

In 1892 Mr. McNeal said in Parliament, "Englishmen or Europeans ought to leave India if they did not stay there for the benefit of the people." 1

A. G. Leonard in 1909 repeated the same thought in the Westminster Review. 2 He wrote:

As a point of honour alone, it is obviously our duty to do nothing in India that will earn for us the hatred of her people and the subsequent reproach of humanity, when in the days that are to follow the history of our relations with her shall come to be written. It is within our reach on the contrary to make our administration of India a living monument of British greatness and humanity that will earn for Great Britain an enduring and imperishable fame

To arrive at this climax we must not only care for and foster Indian interests as they were one with ours, but also make it our business to develop the capacities and energies of the people as we develop our own.'

As far as the actual government has gone, it seems not to have mattered so very materially which of the two policies had its exponents in power. On the whole the Liberals have stood for the more generous policy and the Conservatives for the more selfish. Actually their behavior has been very much alike. The Liberal Lord Ripon gave a tremendous impulse to self-government, particularly in rural tracts, but he, on the other hand, abolished the duty on cotton, as the natives believed in the interests of the Lancashire mills. It is true that with the exception of the Indian Councils Act of 1892 which inaugurated the right of interpellation and enlarged the legislative councils, extending to them the elective principal and increasing their right to discuss the budget, all the extensions of self-government have been by the Liberals, but the execution of the reforms have been carried out by the Conservatives with very much the same spirit. As a rule the good of England has in practice been sought by both in what they regarded as the good of India.

2 Major A. G. Leonard, "How to Reform India," Westminster Review, CLXXI (1909), 627-28.

3 For other elaborations of the liberal attitude see the following: "The English in India," Westminster Review, LXIX (1858), 203; "Self-Government in India," British Quarterly Review, XXXVIII (1863), 432; Journal of the National Indian Association, 1872, p. 90; "Duties of England to India," Fraser's Magazine, LXIV (1861), 674-77; A. P. Sinnett, "Anglo-Indian Complications," Fortnightly Review, XL (1883), 409; A. Hobhouse, "Last Words on Mr. Ilbert's Bill," Contemporary Review, XLIV (1884), 400-401; C. H. T. Crosthwaite, "The New Spirit in India," Blackwood's Magazine, 1906, pp. 403-14.

INTRODUCTION Q

There have, it is true, been occasional black spots on England's record which must not be forgotten in an impartial survey. Most of them seem to be attributable either to race feeling or weakness in certain individuals intrusted with enormous power. Let two instances suffice.

In January, 1872, there occurred an insignificant rising among a sect called the Kookas. No lives were lost, and in their attack on a fort the Kookas seem to have merely attempted to bind and not to kill. They were easily suppressed. Fifty prisoners were taken. Without any semblance of a trial the English official had them all blown from the cannon's mouth. He was dismissed from the service, but no other action was taken. 1

The treatment of the natives by individual Englishmen has often been domineering and even brutal. Occasionally there have even been cases like the following one described by William Bonnar.

Not so very long ago I heard a civil surgeon gaily tell at a mess dinner how the other day he had felt constrained to teach a native somewhat forcibly his respectful duty to the "Ruling Race." The "nigger," as he put it, had his whiskers and beard tied up, as all natives like to have them when travelling, when he met him on a country road. The doctor pulled him up and demanded to know why he had not undone his face cloth when he saw a Sahib coming. Then suddenly remembering that he had a pair of forceps in his pocket, he dismounted, and taking the poor man's head under his powerful arm extracted two of his teeth, saying, "Now tie up your mouth, my man. You have some excuse now." 2

Such instances, however, are very much the exception. Over against them should be set the manner in which the settlement officers work among the people and the conduct of British officers in dealing with famine and in taking their lives in their hands to combat epidemics such as cholera and plague. 3 Instances also are numerous of life-long intimate friendships between Englishmen and natives and of the preference by the natives for English officials to those of theii own race. 4

1 James Routledge, English Rule and Native Opinion in India, p. 100.

2 William Bonnar, "The English in India," Contemporary Review, LXVIII (1895), 566.

3 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, XXXVIII (1906-7), 150.

1 1n this connection see: J. Anderson, "Indian Self-Government, " East and West Magazine, VI (1907), 337-47; John Morley, " Signs of the Times in India, " Edinburgh Review, CCVI (1907), 297; Sir Bampfylde Fuller, "Quo Vadis," Nineteenth Century Review, LXV (1909), 714.

io THE DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-GOVERNMENT IN INDIA

How successful England has been in Anglicizing India cannot be answered. On the material side England has performed marvels in the construction of a steadily growing network of hospitals, roads, transportation and irrigation canals, railways, and telegraph lines. She has given India a postal system. Englishmen and English capital have, for the most part, built and operated the cotton and other factories, created its tea, jute, indigo, and rubber plantations, and developed its mines and oil wells.

Economically speaking, however, the success and value of these measures is disputed by many of the educated natives, perhaps on account of sentimental bias. They contend that the expense involved constitutes a "drain" to England that has been variously estimated at from eighteen to hundreds of millions of pounds a year, in the form of salaries, pensions, various home charges, interest on investments, and similar items. 1 This it is claimed has more than offset the benefits derived from the development projects and even those from the pax Britannica and the English administrative system. This seems more than doubtful, but does derive some color from the fact that India as a whole is appallingly poverty- and frequently gruesomely famine-stricken.

On the moral side the English government has been able to do less. Suti and Thugi were suppressed, but Queen Victoria's proclamation in 1858 announced a policy of religious neutrality which has been strictly adhered to. In India the religious comes so near to being synonymous with social that it has been possible for the government to do but little.

The English government is only incidentally responsible for the tremendous transformation now in progress in native thought in India. It is but one phase of the mental revolution in the oriental mind throughout the East, and is to be primarily attributed to the same causes — the shrinkage of the world by improved means of communication and the readjustments necessitated by new machines, new processes, and new

1 Among the estimates the following are a few examples. A Hindu, "The Grievances of India," Dark Blue Magazine, III (1872), 325: 10,000,000 pounds a year and the support of 80,000 Britons. H. M. Hyndman, "Bleeding to Death, " Nineteenth Century Review, VIII (1880), 165: 20,000,000 pounds a year. J. S. Keay, "The Spoliation of India, " Nineteenth Century Review, XIV (1883) , 5, 16 : 30,000,000 pounds a year in "direct tribute"; 70,000,000 pounds a year, total drain. E. Pratt, "India and Her Friends," Westminster Review, CXLVII (1897), 646: 30,000,000 pounds a year. A. Sawtell, op. cit., p. 290: 200,000,000 pounds a year. Saint Nihal Singh, "Unrest in India," Arena, XXXVIII (1907), 604: 20,000,000 pounds annually. Parliamentary Debates, 4th Ser., Vol. Ill (1892), col. 106: 13,000,000 pounds annually for salaries alone.

thoughts. England at most has only modified it slightly in India. If anything she seems to have retarded it, as compared to the same movement in China and Japan.

What England has been able to accomplish on the social and moral side has been almost entirely through education. This problem of educating, even in the elements, the enormous population has been attacked by the government, the missionaries, and by the Hindus and Mohammedans themselves, but the progress made has been relatively insignificant. The surface only has been scratched. Some thousands of as keen minds as exist anywhere in the world have been given university educations, some millions have been taught to read and write some language, but the hundreds of millions can do neither.

As yet the time has been too short to judge as to the permanence 1 and depth of the English influence either on the material or moral side. It seems inconceivable that India should ever discard England's material contribution to the development of the country, but it will be no great marvel if the most enduring imprint left by England on Indian life will prove to be that made by the political mold, and the most significant work done by England in India will be found to have been the development of self-government in the country and the transplanting to India of English political institutions and ideals.

In England's effort to solve the problem of Anglicizing India, she has so far succeeded in maintaining her all-essential political supremacy largely through two conditions. The first and most important of these has been the infinite number of divisions and antagonisms — religious, racial, social, and political — which divide India and which enabled the East India Company to establish its dominion by conquering the country in sections and playing one native unit off against another.

It has, since the days of the Company, also precluded any unity on the part of the masses. Had England's rule been harsh, doubtless something of the nature of a united front might have been patched up, and of late among the upper classes there have been symptoms of an inchoate national sentiment which may ultimately permeate the lower strata and produce a united India. As yet, however, the antagonism of race to race, caste to caste, and religion to religion has been far greater than any aversion to British rule. Any tendency to unity has been further checked in all except the English-speaking classes by the barrier of language, which has prevented any real combination between groups.

'For some estimates of the reality and permanence of English achievements in India, see: M. E. Grant-Duff, op. tit., pp. 866 et seq.; G. Wegener, op. cit., pp. 960-77.

The second factor in England's supremacy has been her immense military and material superiority over any force in India. The English army in India has been maintained in the vicinity of seventy-five thousand men, not at first glance a large force to dominate three hundred millions, but ample as long as it is in possession of all the artillery and all the higher officers of the supplementary Sepoy forces, and when backed by a prestige that has never been allowed to be marred by an unretrieved defeat, and faced by a disarmed and hopelessly divided population.