Imperialism’s Day

The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805–1905
by Ferdinand Mount
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 757 pages, $39.99

The British Empire in India was “unmentionable” in Britain for decades after the Second World War; the “memory of it was a huge embarrassment”, Ferdinand Mount says in The Tears of the Rajas. Similar distaste seems to apply here for the British imperialism that established modern Australian society.

Were the imperialists goodies or baddies? Mount seems to be saying that for India, as for most things, there is no easy answer; it’s more a question of how it was done. And the comparisons with Australian history are striking. The book reads like a case study in imperialism in its own right. The broadly common pattern goes back at least to Rome.

Both British India and modern Australia evolved from small coastal enclaves, which became bases for an immense spread that the founders did not really imagine. Throughout the nineteenth century sheep, to some extent cattle and later gold were the main impetus for European Australia spreading to dominate the continent. In India, there were no such wide, lightly populated spaces. Mount indicates that few people made much money from it, not even the East India Company.

The Indian host society was of course immensely bigger and more developed than that of indigenous Australia. Mount doesn’t say it directly, but implies there is something in the argument that for Britain India was middle-class welfare rather than avaricious capitalism. Even by the early nineteenth century, “imperial over-reach” was beginning to show.

The chief agents of the imperial spread were territorially ambitious desk-bound bureaucrats at East India Company headquarters in Calcutta, rather than agricultural land seekers or the company and government chiefs in London and the administrators out in the regions—who generally counselled caution, with limited success. In Australia, too, and in North America, the authorities in London tried without much success to slow down or stop the rush inland.

The East India Company was the main agent of imperial spread in India from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, gaining indirect control over the 563 age-old Indian principalities which covered most of a sub-continent more than half the size of Australia but densely populated by more than 100 million people. Pre-European Australia, by contrast, had no more than a million people in about 600 language groups, organised in little more than small family-based communities and with no knowledge of farming, building or writing. The East India Company also had a minor commercial role in the early days of settlement in New South Wales.

The Portuguese and later other European traders and adventurers began visiting India in the 1490s—about the time Columbus sailed from Spain in the opposite direction. In time the Europeans established trading posts and then small trading colonies, sometimes by force, sometimes by arrangement with local rulers. As operations expanded, the English government in 1600 gave the British East India Company a monopoly over Britain–India trade. It had the sub-continent at its feet after Britain defeated France in the Seven Years War in 1763 and the French lost interest.

Summarising, the British filled a space formerly occupied for two centuries by the Mughal empire, which originated in Afghanistan, one of several invaders that over thousands of years had surged down from the surrounding mountain barrier onto the fertile, populous Ganges plain. The Mughal empire declined from the mid-1700s and the British rose gradually in its place, without any sharp conflict. The Indians had long been accustomed to some rule by culturally different powers.

Australia, by contrast, had never been invaded, barely more than glimpsed, until the Sydney settlement in 1788. The Aborigines had had minimal contact with the outside world, other than visits from Indonesian fishermen (and the calamitous smallpox and possibly other diseases they brought).

“John Company” (one of several nicknames for the East India Company) was the main British presence in India until the British government absorbed it in 1858, after the Great Mutiny. It had become practically a government in its own right, working closely with the London government of the day. The Company established Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1641 as its operating centre and later expanded to bases in Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai). It had its own regional armies, numbering a quarter of a million troops towards the end, mostly Indian “sepoys” in the lower ranks under mostly British officers. The officers doubled as the Company’s main administration in the field. There was also a much smaller regular British Army presence, with troops moving on periodically, much as in colonial Australia. In parts of Australia, too, the British used mounted and armed Aboriginal police, under white officers, to try—with mixed success—to keep the peace in remote areas.

In India, one after another raja, nabob, nizam, sultan or other local prince succumbed to the modern charm, money or military force from Calcutta, and Company “residents” moved in with them, a combination of diplomat, manager and defender. The Company charged a land tax for its services. Ferdinand Mount suggests some of this was genuine protection, but some was “protection” mafia-style.

Mount offers some candid comments on the governors-general who oversaw Company operations in India, including some big imperial names, suggesting that they were careerist ex-politicians surrounded by pomp, intoxicated by the prospect of becoming even more important, and captured by Calcutta office modernisers, who pretended to know more about India than they really did. While Mount does not have much time for the governors-general, most of the hereditary rulers they dominated do not come across well either. Perhaps the ancient princely system was in decline anyway, with autocracy, inefficiency, corruption, disorder, fratricide, treachery, rebellions from below and miscellaneous other wars and violence. In one area bandits so regularly stole the crops that the peasants eventually did not bother to sow them.

Many of the princes seemed to the British decadent, with variations on what seemed like harems and indulgence, though Mount describes only a few and they might not be typical. Many also combined what impatient, “tidy-minded” Britons saw as sloth with magnificently graceful architecture and poetry. The British gradually suppressed practices such as burning widows and the killing of unwanted babies.

Two centuries ago such small kingdoms and principalities, often functioning within empires, were still the main way of ruling the world but few now remain, exotics like the Persian Gulf emirates. One can see how intoxicatingly tempting they must have been to the brash desk-bound “modernisers” in Calcutta headquarters, who seized opportunities to put before the governors-general prospects for an indirect takeover that would bring glory to their careers. This was despite the typical advice from above and below urging caution. (Mount says the term “moderniser” originated in colonial Calcutta.)

The book is partly based on letters home, especially from Mount’s great-great grandfather, John Low, a Fifeshire Scot who joined the Company’s Madras Army as a cadet officer in 1805 and rose to become a knighted general. Mount remarks that letters home probably filled many a dull and lonely hour. This makes for a mid-ship view of imperialism, from officers on the spot, living alongside the rajas and often out of sympathy with head office.

Theirs does not seem a great life, far from home, often lonely and bored, with few white women. The easier race relations of earlier times, including intermarriage, Eurasian children and a little local corruption, had brought their own problems and by the nineteenth century were discouraged. The Company army was a notch down socially from the regular army, which also had troops in India, but on a rotating basis. The Company army was not well paid until slow promotion led to more senior ranks.

John Low spent thirty-eight years in India before he could manage a trip home to Fifeshire, a four-month sail via Cape Town. Most Company servants never got home at all, such was the terrible death rate of adults and their children. Most were motivated by doing a good job and hoping for promotion, without any special sense of mission. In many families India service became a family tradition. Company officers were mostly from middle-class families and disproportionately from rural Scotland and Ulster.

It is instructive that this book says little at all about the Indian people. In this respect the letter writers seem similar to Roman colonisers, who mostly wrote about their own kind and deprived posterity of what would have been treasures of knowledge of their world. Australian administrators were little better. One way and another a few enthusiasts in both countries did record a lot about the native peoples, though historians wish there was more.

Mount makes two particularly strong cases against the Calcutta bureaucracy. One, still resonating, is responsibility for the debacle of the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, to unseat the “brutal but forceful” warlord Dost Mohammad and to check Russian ambitions, followed by calamitous withdrawal two years later with 75,000 soldiers dead and close to financial disaster for the Company, which was stuck with the bill.

The decision to invade Afghanistan, Mount says, was taken by George Eden, Lord Auckland, Governor-General of Indian from 1836 to 1842. He was reluctant at first but “worked on by zealots of the modernising school”. The British government and India House (London company head office) had often expressed anxiety about securing the North-West Frontier, but no more than that, notwithstanding later attempts to blame orders from London. People in India at the time did not think the orders had come from London, Mount says. He adds:

It was the self-appointed mission of successive governors-generals to prove them [requests from London for caution and economy] wrong and to demonstrate that adding to the Indian Empire brought profit as well as power, if allied with rapacity and daring. London might make its preference for non-intervention more or less explicit but the feisty men on the spot never let up.

The other, worse disaster, was the overbearing spread of British influence in the 1850s, a principal cause of the disastrous mutiny and massacres of the Great Mutiny. There is dispute over both the causes and the death toll, Mount says, but he gives a total of a million or more Indians and 13,000 Europeans dead. The spark was a revolt by sepoys (Company Indian troops under white officers) over being ordered to bite cartridges to use in their guns. One of many provocative rumours to spread was that the cartridges contained animal fat; either from pork (sacrilegious to Muslims) or beef (sacrilegious to Hindus) and an outrageous affront to higher-caste troops.

There are doubts about whether the cartridges indeed contained fat, and about whether there was background organisation or the revolt was entirely spontaneous, but the issue set fire to a seething pile of Indian resentment, often hate against the feranghi (foreigners) controlling their society. Partly it was economic, Mount says: sepoys as second-class soldiers paid at half the European rate; princes stripped of real power in their principalities; jobs lost because of increasing British imports; peasants and landlords alike angry at higher taxes to pay for modernisation; peasants just avoiding tax. Partly it was over a real or perceived threat to Indian culture and religion. Some forced conversions to Islam in earlier centuries had left a legacy of sectarian sensitivity and by the 1850s over-enthusiastic British evangelicals were moving in, though they were hardly a real threat. As with ultra-radical activity anywhere, criminal elements and wild rumours stoked the fire further.

Some saw it as a colossal disaster for the rising British Empire, others as the dying protest of medieval India. Today in India it is often referred to as the First War of Liberation. Mount says both sides today would be before war-crimes tribunals over the months of savagery and massacre that followed, fuelled by race hate and fear.

In Australia, the chief Aboriginal reactions came as the pastoral booms appeared to climax and possibly become overbearing, in the south-east from 1838 to 1843 and in Queensland around 1860. The usual observation in these pioneering times was that, if they were treated with respect, the local Aborigines would accept the newcomers.

Mount allocates abundant responsibility in India to Calcutta excesses, but it was also a time of rapid, often unsettling change worldwide—the telegraph, railways, steamships (soon to be followed by the Suez Canal), surging world trade, burgeoning demands in the West, at least, for democracy.

The prime personal culprit, as Mount presents it, was James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of India from 1848 to 1856, an ardent moderniser who introduced the sub-continent to primary education, railways, the telegraph and large-scale irrigation. He forcibly annexed part of Burma and the Punjab for the empire and toppled several principalities. Mount describes him as “arrogant” and ignorant of Indian sensibilities, disdaining advice to be cautious, ruthless if not unscrupulous and double-dealing in undermining local aristocrats. The “tears of the rajas” of the title were wept by the princes who found their positions weakened by supposedly more advanced Britons.

Dalhousie was savagely criticised in the politicised recriminations in London that followed the horrors of the Mutiny and led to the government absorbing the Company and introducing direct rule, largely through more deals with the princes. It became “the Raj”. Over the years that followed, however, as the sun shone ever brighter and wider over the empire, he came to be seen as one of its heroes.

Ferdinand Mount is a journalist and novelist, and a distant cousin of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who also had forebears in India. From an Australian viewpoint at least, less family detail and more general description and context—especially maps—would have been welcome.