[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
events an honest administration sincerely desirous of pro-
tecting the poor and the masses of the community by stop-
ping corruption and oppression, which are too common
in all countries, and which are the special and poisonous
growth of Oriental despotism. Such a government [i.e. the
Raj] you do not want to control by these . . . majorities,
because to control them in that way prevents them carry-
ing out their duties impartially.2
Indeed, British hostility to the ‘educated native’
increased rather than decreased as the twentieth century
began. This was in direct ratio to the rate of Indian reform.
If more Indians were now aspiring to share in the adminis-
tration of the country, then British reactionaries were more
likely to ridicule and to diminish them, and so to try to
contain them. The ‘jumped-up Bengali babu’ had been an
object of ridicule and contempt during the second half of
the nineteenth century. So was ‘the copper-coloured pagan’
so strenuously denounced in the row over the Ilbert Bill,
with its proposal to allow Indians to practise as magistrates,
and even to try Europeans. As Indians gradually began to
avail themselves of the limited but developing opportunities
of gaining a university education within the subcontinent,
reactionary British wits took pleasure in joking about a new
Indian qualification: ‘B.A. (failed) Calcutta’. In all these
ways, some covert, some open, but all pernicious, the spirit
of Macaulay’s great Indian education reforms of the 1830s
was subverted by the growing need to keep India, with its
120
reform and conflict, 1905‒1919
expanding economy and its supplementary army, safely
within the Empire.
The Morley–Minto Reforms did not, as the pessim-
ists forecast, bring about a collapse of the Indian Empire.
Indeed, during the First World War (1914–18) India was a
pillar of strength in the Allied cause. Over two million
men were recruited. Indians fought in all the major
theatres of the war. They died in their tens of thousands
for a King-Emperor that hardly any had seen and for a
country that very few had visited. They also fought with
courage and loyalty in the bloody and incompetently led
invasion of Mesopotamia—the notorious ‘Mess-pot’ cam-
paign—in parts of German Africa, and especially on the
Western Front, where recent research shows that they were
too often put into more hopeless and hazardous positions
than European troops.
The slaughter on the Western Front was so appalling,
and the letters home of those able to write so disturbing,
that men of the 5th Light Infantry, stationed at Singapore,
mutinied when it was rumoured they were about to
embark for France. Several officers were murdered, and
gangs of mutineers killed several Europeans in Singapore
in acts of random violence. In the ensuing panic, a British
woman wrote: ‘The Indian Mutiny flashed into my mind;
also that we had no white troops.’3
Although the Singapore mutiny was crushed and
thirty-seven of the ringleaders publicly shot, far more
121
reform and conflict, 1905‒1919
difficult to contain were the worries of devout Muslim
troops, who were encouraged by their mullahs to object to
the Allied assault on Turkey—the homeland of the Otto-
man Emperor, the Caliph. The resulting Khilafat agitation
spread beyond the army and for a while posed a serious
threat to political stability in India.
Yet, despite all this, the Indian Army stayed over-
whelmingly ‘true to its salt’. In part to reward this invalu-
able loyalty, and partly from a commitment to gradual
political devolution, the British government decided to
acknowledge what they saw as India’s ‘maturing’ status
and value within the Empire. As a consequence, in 1917
India was invited by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd
George, to attend the Imperial War Conference held in
London as a full member. This meant that some Indians
represented India, together with their British colleagues,
at these crucial deliberations to discuss the planning and
running of the war. In this regard, India was now being
treated as a near equal to the established Dominions of
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. This
high level of involvement was carried into the peace nego-
tiations of 1918–19, when India was granted its own delega-
tion at the proceedings and signed the resulting peace
treaties in its own right.
Equally significant was the 1917 visit to India of the
Indian Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu. As a result
of his talks and meetings, Montagu made a significant
122
reform and conflict, 1905‒1919
pronouncement on the constitutional and political aims
of British rule in the subcontinent. The 1917 Montagu
Declaration stated that Britain’s constitutional objectives
were ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch
of the administration and the gradual development of
self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive
realisation of responsible government in India as part of
the British Empire’.4
Though a touch obscure to the Indian man or
woman in the street or the bazaar, this was a vital state-
ment of British policy. The crucial phrase was ‘responsible
government’, which meant, within the context of past
imperial evolution, the granting of a Westminster-type
constitution with the executive responsible to a fully rep-
resentative parliamentary assembly.
The central question for Indian nationalists, however,
was ‘when’? Although the commitment was undoubtedly
serious, did it depend for its implementation upon continu-
ing Indian ‘good behaviour’; or was it simply an attempt to
keep India ‘on side’ and loyal for the duration of an increas-
ingly costly and unpopular war? Reform, and the promise
of more to come, was especially useful as Indian Army casu-
alties mounted (over 62,000 died in the conflict), as prices
rose sharply in the bazaars and rents on the land, while
there were unexpected food shortages, and while the Raj
imposed heavy wartime restrictions upon the civil rights of
Indians to dissent, criticize, and object to the war.
123
reform and conflict, 1905‒1919
To add to their troubles, the British faced an even
more potentially threatening challenge with the return to
his native land of the British-educated barrister Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, following his remarkable success in
mobilizing local Indian political action against the white
supremacist regime in South Africa. There Gandhi had
developed a new technique of confrontation, satyagraha, or
‘the strength of truth’, whereby the weak could confront
the strong in a non-violent way and thus attempt to win
them over through example, restraint, and the power of
superior moral character.
Although the British rulers of India were slow to rec-
ognize the fact, satyagraha had the potential dramatically
to change the interaction between the Raj and its subjects,
chiefly through its capacity to mobilize and empower the
Indian masses to a hitherto unimaginable degree.
Although Gandhi did not unleash satyagraha upon
the British authorities on a national scale until 1919, he
achieved some remarkable local successes during 1917
and 1918 at Champaran, Kheda, and Ahmedabad. The
post-war period was to see an exceptional escalation in the
confrontation between the power of the Raj and the
demands of Indian nationalism.
124
8
Gandhi and the Fightback of
Indian Nationalism,
1919–1939
andhi’s arrival in India shortly after the out-
break of the First World War was to transform
the nature of the increasingly tense and bitter
struggle between the forces of Indian nationalism and the
entrenched power of the British Raj. Though first seen by
both the British and his fellow countrymen as a quirky,
bemusing, and lightweight figure, Gandhi was to con-
found both friend and foe with the potency and impact of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl freetocraft.keep.pl
events an honest administration sincerely desirous of pro-
tecting the poor and the masses of the community by stop-
ping corruption and oppression, which are too common
in all countries, and which are the special and poisonous
growth of Oriental despotism. Such a government [i.e. the
Raj] you do not want to control by these . . . majorities,
because to control them in that way prevents them carry-
ing out their duties impartially.2
Indeed, British hostility to the ‘educated native’
increased rather than decreased as the twentieth century
began. This was in direct ratio to the rate of Indian reform.
If more Indians were now aspiring to share in the adminis-
tration of the country, then British reactionaries were more
likely to ridicule and to diminish them, and so to try to
contain them. The ‘jumped-up Bengali babu’ had been an
object of ridicule and contempt during the second half of
the nineteenth century. So was ‘the copper-coloured pagan’
so strenuously denounced in the row over the Ilbert Bill,
with its proposal to allow Indians to practise as magistrates,
and even to try Europeans. As Indians gradually began to
avail themselves of the limited but developing opportunities
of gaining a university education within the subcontinent,
reactionary British wits took pleasure in joking about a new
Indian qualification: ‘B.A. (failed) Calcutta’. In all these
ways, some covert, some open, but all pernicious, the spirit
of Macaulay’s great Indian education reforms of the 1830s
was subverted by the growing need to keep India, with its
120
reform and conflict, 1905‒1919
expanding economy and its supplementary army, safely
within the Empire.
The Morley–Minto Reforms did not, as the pessim-
ists forecast, bring about a collapse of the Indian Empire.
Indeed, during the First World War (1914–18) India was a
pillar of strength in the Allied cause. Over two million
men were recruited. Indians fought in all the major
theatres of the war. They died in their tens of thousands
for a King-Emperor that hardly any had seen and for a
country that very few had visited. They also fought with
courage and loyalty in the bloody and incompetently led
invasion of Mesopotamia—the notorious ‘Mess-pot’ cam-
paign—in parts of German Africa, and especially on the
Western Front, where recent research shows that they were
too often put into more hopeless and hazardous positions
than European troops.
The slaughter on the Western Front was so appalling,
and the letters home of those able to write so disturbing,
that men of the 5th Light Infantry, stationed at Singapore,
mutinied when it was rumoured they were about to
embark for France. Several officers were murdered, and
gangs of mutineers killed several Europeans in Singapore
in acts of random violence. In the ensuing panic, a British
woman wrote: ‘The Indian Mutiny flashed into my mind;
also that we had no white troops.’3
Although the Singapore mutiny was crushed and
thirty-seven of the ringleaders publicly shot, far more
121
reform and conflict, 1905‒1919
difficult to contain were the worries of devout Muslim
troops, who were encouraged by their mullahs to object to
the Allied assault on Turkey—the homeland of the Otto-
man Emperor, the Caliph. The resulting Khilafat agitation
spread beyond the army and for a while posed a serious
threat to political stability in India.
Yet, despite all this, the Indian Army stayed over-
whelmingly ‘true to its salt’. In part to reward this invalu-
able loyalty, and partly from a commitment to gradual
political devolution, the British government decided to
acknowledge what they saw as India’s ‘maturing’ status
and value within the Empire. As a consequence, in 1917
India was invited by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd
George, to attend the Imperial War Conference held in
London as a full member. This meant that some Indians
represented India, together with their British colleagues,
at these crucial deliberations to discuss the planning and
running of the war. In this regard, India was now being
treated as a near equal to the established Dominions of
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. This
high level of involvement was carried into the peace nego-
tiations of 1918–19, when India was granted its own delega-
tion at the proceedings and signed the resulting peace
treaties in its own right.
Equally significant was the 1917 visit to India of the
Indian Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu. As a result
of his talks and meetings, Montagu made a significant
122
reform and conflict, 1905‒1919
pronouncement on the constitutional and political aims
of British rule in the subcontinent. The 1917 Montagu
Declaration stated that Britain’s constitutional objectives
were ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch
of the administration and the gradual development of
self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive
realisation of responsible government in India as part of
the British Empire’.4
Though a touch obscure to the Indian man or
woman in the street or the bazaar, this was a vital state-
ment of British policy. The crucial phrase was ‘responsible
government’, which meant, within the context of past
imperial evolution, the granting of a Westminster-type
constitution with the executive responsible to a fully rep-
resentative parliamentary assembly.
The central question for Indian nationalists, however,
was ‘when’? Although the commitment was undoubtedly
serious, did it depend for its implementation upon continu-
ing Indian ‘good behaviour’; or was it simply an attempt to
keep India ‘on side’ and loyal for the duration of an increas-
ingly costly and unpopular war? Reform, and the promise
of more to come, was especially useful as Indian Army casu-
alties mounted (over 62,000 died in the conflict), as prices
rose sharply in the bazaars and rents on the land, while
there were unexpected food shortages, and while the Raj
imposed heavy wartime restrictions upon the civil rights of
Indians to dissent, criticize, and object to the war.
123
reform and conflict, 1905‒1919
To add to their troubles, the British faced an even
more potentially threatening challenge with the return to
his native land of the British-educated barrister Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, following his remarkable success in
mobilizing local Indian political action against the white
supremacist regime in South Africa. There Gandhi had
developed a new technique of confrontation, satyagraha, or
‘the strength of truth’, whereby the weak could confront
the strong in a non-violent way and thus attempt to win
them over through example, restraint, and the power of
superior moral character.
Although the British rulers of India were slow to rec-
ognize the fact, satyagraha had the potential dramatically
to change the interaction between the Raj and its subjects,
chiefly through its capacity to mobilize and empower the
Indian masses to a hitherto unimaginable degree.
Although Gandhi did not unleash satyagraha upon
the British authorities on a national scale until 1919, he
achieved some remarkable local successes during 1917
and 1918 at Champaran, Kheda, and Ahmedabad. The
post-war period was to see an exceptional escalation in the
confrontation between the power of the Raj and the
demands of Indian nationalism.
124
8
Gandhi and the Fightback of
Indian Nationalism,
1919–1939
andhi’s arrival in India shortly after the out-
break of the First World War was to transform
the nature of the increasingly tense and bitter
struggle between the forces of Indian nationalism and the
entrenched power of the British Raj. Though first seen by
both the British and his fellow countrymen as a quirky,
bemusing, and lightweight figure, Gandhi was to con-
found both friend and foe with the potency and impact of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]