In the prologue to 'India after Gandhi', Ram Guha writes
Because they are so many, and so various, the people of India are also divided.
Hindus aren't divided. There is no secessionism where Hindus are in the majority. Why? Hindus have learned from bitter experience that it is better to hang together rather than once again experience Islamic salami tactics or else once again risk falling under foreign hegemony.
It appears to have always been so.
Only in the sense that every nation, every city, every family is divided.
In the spring of 1827 the poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
a pensioner of the British
set out on a journey from Delhi to Calcutta.
to ask for an augmentation of his pension. The Capital of British India was Calcutta.
Six months later he reached the holy Hindu city of Banaras.
Which had come under direct British rule in 1775. Sadly, Delhi, though under British rule, wasn't under direct British rule. Still it was doing a lot better than it had before, first the Maratha & then the Brits took it under their wing.
Here he wrote a poem called 'Chiral-i-Dair' (Temple Lamps), which contains these timeless lines: Said I one night to a pristine seer (Who knew the secrets of whirling Time), 'Sir, you well perceive, That goodness and faith, Fidelity and love Have all departed from this sorry land. Father and son are at each other's throat, Brother fights brother. Unity and Federation are undermined. Despite these ominous signs Why has not Doomsday come?
This is a stereotypical 'shehr ashob' type lament. Ghalib's purpose is to praise Benares, the holy city of the Hindus, as the reason God hasn't destroyed the world. Ghalib believed that the Brits would like a sentiment of this sort because it pointed to how much better cities under British rule were doing.
Ghalib's poem was composed against the backdrop of the decline of the Mughal Empire.
which happened before he was born.
His home territory, the Indo-Gangetic plain, once ruled by a single monarch, was now split between contending chiefdoms and armies.
Nope. There had been British paramountcy since 1803. No wars had been fought since then.
Brother was fighting brother,
only in the privacy of their own home in directly ruled British regions. Even in protectorates, fratricide was becoming punishable rather than the conventional method of inheriting property.
unity and federation were being undermined.
Because the Brits had defeated the Marathas 25 years ago. But British unity was unimpaired. There was no question of 'Federation'. Britain had a unitary government & it exercised direct control over its three Presidencies in India.
But even as he wrote, a new (and foreign) power was asserting its influence across the land in the form of the British,
It had gained control of Delhi when Ghalib was 6 years old. The third Maratha war, in 1819 meant that even the home territory of the Marathas & Rajputs to the South West of Delhi came under their paramountcy. Incidentally, the Brits were in India before Ghalib's ancestors arrived.
who were steadily acquiring control of the greater part of the subcontinent.
The Sikhs, under Ranjit Singh, were the only power the Brits were reluctant to tangle with.
Then in 1857 large sections of the native population rose up in what the colonialists called the Sepoy Mutiny
Ghalib suffered greatly because of this. Like the Emperor, he knew the Brits were the best thing to have happened to Delhi in a long while. When Nehru became Prime Minister, the Muslim population of Delhi fell from one third to about 5 percent.
and Indian nationalists later referred to as the First War of Indian Independence
Veer Savarkar invented the term in 1909. It was taken up by Bose's INA which fought alongside the Japanese. We don't refer to it as the Second War of Indian Independence because it was utterly shit.
Some of the bloodiest fighting was in Ghalib's home town, Delhi - still nominally the capital of the Mughals
It was all they had. Agra, Ghalib's birth place, was under direct British rule and saw little in the way of fighting during the Mutiny.
and in time to become the capital of the British Raj as well. His own sympathies were divided.
His financial interest was not. He was a pensioner of the Brits. So was the Emperor who, later on, would give Ghalib an appointment at Court for the modest salary of Rs 50 p.m.
He was the recipient of a stipend from the new rulers,
Because his Uncle had surrendered Agra fort to the Brits when Ghalib was 6 years old
yet a product of Mughal culture and refinement.
i.e. was ignorant and stupid.
He saw, more clearly than the British colonialist did then or the Indian nationalist does now, that it was impossible here to separate right from wrong,
Nonsense! It is wrong to do stupid shit which will cause you to lose your wealth and perhaps even your life. It is right to try to get more money by being good at your job.
that horrible atrocities were being committed by both sides.
The Mutineers started it, the Brits ended it. Many of the Indians who supported the Brits gained greatly thereby.
Marooned in his home, he wrote a melancholy account of how 'Hindustan has become the arena of the mighty whirlwind and the blazing fire'. 'To what new order can the Indian look with joy'?' he asked.;
Ghalib wrote in a pre-Islamic Persian style. He believed this work of his would help him curry favour with the Brits. But they weren't greatly impressed.
An answer to this question was forthcoming. After the events of 1857 the Crown took over control of the Indian colonies.
Direct control. There already was a Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India, commonly known as the Board of Control, was created in 1784 through the East India Company Act 1784 . It was formally established on September 4, 1784, to supervise the East India Company's administrative and political activities in India. From 1853 onward selection of officers was through competitive exams. But Macaulay & Co had actually passed a law some 20 years previously with that purpose. It wasn't implemented.
A sophisticated bureaucracy replaced the somewhat ad-hoc and haphazard administration of the old East India Company.
Not really. The 'Competition-wallah' was trained by the older Haileybury-educated Collectors.
New districts and provinces were created.
As had previously happened.
The running of the state was overseen by the elite cadre of the Indian Civil Service supported by departments of police, forests, irrigation, etc. Much energy (and money) was spent on building a railway network that criss-crossed the land.
This had begun in 1853. My point is there was continuity between the rule of the Company & direct Crown rule.
This contributed enormously to the unity of British India,
No. What united British India was the fact that the British were united. Railways did not prevent India being partitioned.
as well as to its stability, for now the rulers could quickly move troops to forestall any repeat of 1857.
But they had dealt with 1857 easily enough. The truth is the Bengal Army was mismanaged.
By 1888 the British were so solidly established in India that they could anticipate, if not a thousand year Raj, at least a rule that extended well beyond their own lifetimes.
That was the case after Trafalgar. The British Raj depended on the supremacy of the Royal Navy. Britain could keep its Empire so long as it faced no mightier foe on the Continent. Since the Indians were technologically backward & shit at fighting, they posed no great danger.
In that year a man who had helped put the Raj in place
It was in place before he was born in 1823. The Haileybury Training College had been set up in 1806.
gave a series of lectures in Cambridge which were later published in book form under the simple title India.
Some chaps at Uni would sit the Indian Civil if they wanted a safe, but boring job variegated with dysentery & malaria.
The man was Sir John Strachey. Strachey had spent many years in the subcontinent, ultimately becoming member of the Governor General's Council. Now in retirement in England, he set his Indian experience against the background of recent political developments in Europe.
as opposed to what? Ancient developments in Africa?
Large chunks of Strachey's book are taken up by an administrative history of the Raj, of its army and civil services, its land and taxation policies, the peculiar position of the 'native states'. This was a primer for those who might work in India after coming down from Cambridge.
Unless they got some less shitty berth.
But there was also a larger theoretical argument to the effect that 'India' was merely a label of convenience, 'a name which we give to a great region including a multitude of different countries' .
True enough. It included Aden & Burma. Singapore had been part of British India till 1867 after which it became a separate Crown Colony.
In Strachey's view, the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the 'countries' of India. 'Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab."
But a Bengali Judge or District Collector were posted to the Punjab, he would quickly come up to speed. A Scottish Judge would be if transferred to a Spanish bench. Strachey wasn't a real smart dude.
In India the diversities of race, language and religion were far greater.
But the diversity of the British Empire was exponentially greater.
Unlike in Europe, these "countries" were not nations,
They were just as much 'nations' as the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots & so on.
they did not have a distinct political or social identity.
Sure they did. They were either British subjects or British protected subjects.
This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, 'is the first and most essential thing to learn about India - that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious' .
A.O Hume, who was 6 years younger than Strachey, had just set up the Indian National Congress. Some senior officers wanted reform. Others didn't. Why? It would dilute the power of the Collector. As a matter of fact, Ripon's reforms were, speaking generally, rendered infructuous by the officials. But, the INC would grow and grow.
There was no Indian nation or country in the past, nor would there be one in the future. Strachey thought it 'conceivable that national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries', but 'that they should ever extend to India generally, that men of the Punj ab, Bengal, the North-western Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place ofthe various nations ofEurope.'
Guha is pretending that Strachey wasn't reacting to a particular development- viz. the foundation of the INC & Ripon's liberal reforms.
Strachey's remarks were intended as a historical judgment.
No. They were a counter-move to the spirit of reform & the foundation of the INC. Both would diminish the power & autonomy of the bureaucrats.
At the time, new nations were vigorously identifying themselves within Europe on the basis of a shared language or territory, whereas none of the countries that he knew in India had displayed a comparable national awakening.
No. Strachey was aware that there was an Indian nationalism as represented by the INC. Linguistic sub-nationalism- e.g. Orissa's desire to separate from Bengal- was a slightly later development. But, because Religion trumps Language in India, reorganisation of Provinces on a linguistic basis is sufficient.
But we might also read them as a political exhortation, intended to stiffen the will of those in his audience who would end up in the service of the Raj.
Civil Servants understood that if they became accountable to Local Councils, then their lives would become more complicated. India might be a shithole, but you didn't have to kowtow to local notables there if you were an ICS officer. By contrast, the civil servant in UK had to brown-nose local councillors & the gentry & so forth.
For the rise of every new 'nation' in India would mean a corresponding diminution in the power and prestige of Empire.
No. If the INC could gain countervailing power so as to make Ripon's Resolution of 1882 work, then the power & prestige of ICS officers, not the Empire, would diminish.
Ironically, even as he spoke Strachey's verdict was being disputed by a group of Indians.
Indians in London in the 1860s had been promoting a Nationalist agenda.
These had set up the Indian National Congress,
It was a joint project with ICS officers like Hume & Wedderburn as well as Indian notables like Naoroji & Surendranath Bannerjee.
a representative body that asked for a greater say for natives in the running of their affairs. As the name suggests, this body wished to unite Indians across the divisions of culture, territory, religion, and language, thus to construct what the colonialist thought inconceivable - namely, a single Indian nation.
Guha is suppressing the fact that some British ICS officers were involved. It was advantageous for the Brits to cultivate a sense of Indian Nationalism so as to make the place self-administering & self-garrisoning just like the settler colonies. The country would then be able to contribute more to Imperial Defence while representing a bigger market. As the US & Germany rose by 'Listian' means, the notion of 'Imperial Preference' first advocated by Chamberlain in the early 1900s, gained adherents. Also Westminster didn't want to spend a lot of time passing laws for India.
Very many good books have been written on the growth of the Indian National Congress, on its move from debating club through mass movement
e.g. cow protection? AO Hume advocated it.
to political party,
it was deeply divided between Moderates & those who wanted to chuck the Brits out bag & baggage.
on the part played by leaders such as Gokhale, Tilak and (above all) Gandhi in this progression. Attention has been paid to the building of bridges between linguistic communities, religious groupings and castes. These attempts were not wholly successful, for low castes and especially Muslims were never completely convinced of the Congress's claims to be a truly 'national' party. Thus it was that when political independence finally came in 1947 it came not to one nation, but two - India and Pakistan.
The Hindus chose to hang together precisely because of the Muslim threat. The Muslims chose to go their own way because Gandhi was shit. The Dalits didn't matter in the slightest.
This is not the place to rehearse the history of Indian nationalisms
India is one nation. It has only one nationalism. Sadly, it is wholly Hindu in origin & trajectory. Even A.O Hume was a Vedantin. Annie Beasant, a Theosophist, knew more about stuff like prarabdha karma than Gandhi. Admittedly, this was because Gandhi was stupid & ignorant. Still.
I need only note that from the time the Congress was formed right up to when India was made free - and divided - there were sceptics who thought that Indian nationalism was not a natural phenomenon at all.
Guha thinks India is an 'unnatural nation'. It is no such thing for Hindus.
There were, of course, British politicians and thinkers who welcomed Indian self-rule and, in their own way, aided its coming into being. (One of the prime movers of the Indian National Congress was a colonial official of Scottish parentage, A. O. Hume.)
A vegetarian Vedantist who advocated cow protection. These aren't typical Scottish traits.
Yet there were many others who argued that, unlike France or Germany or Italy, there was here no national essence, no glue to bind the people and take them purposively forward.
There were plenty who said the same thing about France, Germany & Italy. This can take the shape of a North South split- e.g. Occitan sense of grievance (Vergonha)- or an East West split- e.g. Germany. Will Britain break apart & Scotland go its own way under the SNP? I have no idea.
From this perspective stemmed the claim that it was only British rule that held India and the Indians together.
This could also be said of the United Kingdom. As a matter of fact, even the British Army could not keep Southern Ireland part of
Among those who endorsed Jolt Strachey's view that there could never be an independent Indian nation were writers both famous and obscure. Prominent in the first category was Rudyard Kipling,
a fan of the Punjab Civil Service. But he was also critical of the bureaucratic red-tape & corruption that characterised the Raj.
who had spent this formative years in - and was to write some of his finest stories about-the subcontinent. In November 1891 Kipling visited Australia, where a journalist asked him about the 'possibility of self-government in India'.
At the time, the Viceroy & Secretary of State were focused on the Russian threat. They wanted to concentrate power rather than devolve it.
'Oh no!' he answered: 'They are 4,000 years old out there, much too old to learn that business. Law and order is what they want and we are there to give it to them and we give it them straight. '
Fair point. India was very poor. It couldn't afford much more than a 'nightwatchman state'. The problem was, as Kitchener would report, the Indian Army was shitty. 60,000 Russians could defeat a quarter of a million Sepoys.
Where Kipling laid emphasis on the antiquity of the Indian civilization, other colonialists stressed the immaturity of the Indian mind to reach the same conclusion: namely, that Indians could not govern themselves.
Yet, if it continued to stagnate economically, there would be no other alternative. It simply wouldn't have the money to pay for Oxbridge ICS men.
A cricketer and tea planter insisted, after forty years there, that chaos would prevail in India if we were ever so foolish to leave the natives to run their own show. Ye gods! What a salad of confusion, of bungle, of mismanagement, and far worse, would be the instant result. These grand people will go anywhere and do anything if led by us. Themselves they are still infants as regards governing or statesmanship. And their so-called leaders are the worst of the 1ot.'
Oddly, the tea plantations survived well enough into the Sixties.
Views such as these were widely prevalent among the British in India, and among the British at home as well.
The Brits also thought that giving women the vote was a terrible idea.
Politically speaking, the most important of these 'Stracheyans' was undoubtedly Winston Churchill
He was 14 in 1888. During his 'wilderness years', in the Thirties, he was the chief of the 'die-hard' Empire Loyalists. Indeed, he was considered a bit cracked on this topic. Senior Tories piloted through the 1935 bill which he hated.
In the 1940s, with Indian independence manifestly round the corner, Churchill grumbled that he had not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.
But the British Army performed badly- unless you compare it to the French Army which was completely useless.
A decade previously he had tried to rebuild a fading political career on the plank of opposing self-government for Indians.
This was unpopular. Westminster wanted shot of India. Churchill had his own health & financial problems. Still, his books were selling well. But his fundamental economic beliefs- free trade & the gold standard- had become wholly unviable.
After Gandhi's 'salt satyagrafra' of 1930 in protest against taxes on salt, the British government began speakng with Indian nationalists about the possibility of granting the colony dominion status.
Viceroy Irwin (later Lord Halifax) had suggested, in November 1929, that Dominion status was the goal for India. By 1931, Baldwin was openly supporting this policy. Churchill's attempted rebellion was a miserable failure. This had nothing to do with the salt satyagraha. It was Motilal & C.R Das who had first raised the issue when salt taxes were raised. Gandhi's agitation was bound to fail because salt didn't matter. It was land taxes/rents which were of concern to the masses- more particularly after the Great Depression & consequent fall in agricultural prices hit the country.
This was vaguely defined, with no timetable set for its realization. Even so, Churchill called the idea 'not only fantastic in itself but criminally mischievous in its effects'.
Tories thought the fellow had gone potty. Churchill never had any influence over Indian policy. Even the one Viceroy he chose- Wavell- defied him by demanding the complete evacuation of White people from India.
Since Indians were not fit for self-govermnent, it was necessary to marshal 'the sober
Churchill was often drunk.
and resolute forces of the British Empire' to stall any such possibility. In 1930 and 1931 Churchill delivered numerous speeches designed to work up, in most unsober form, the constituency opposed to independence for India.
He failed. What Guha isn't saying is that India could have got, in 1924, what Egypt. Ireland & Afghanistan had got 2 years earlier.
Speaking to an audience at the City of London in December 1930,
they wanted to be told that Churchill would lead a vast army of special constables to beat the fuck out of the revolting proletariat. They didn't want to hear about India. Killing darkies far far away won't keep you safe from striking workers closing down your factories.
he claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then 'an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu'.
Churchill was the original author of the Ambedkarite philosophy. Brahmins are very evil.
Three months later, speaking at the Albert Hall on 'Our Duty to India'
he was addressing the India Empire Society composed of elderly shitheads who had served in India. They even had an Indian member- a Muslim.
- with his kinsman the Duke of Marlborough presiding - Churchill argued that 'to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins [who in his opinion dominated the Congress Party] would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence'. If the British left, he predicted, then the entire gamut of public services created by them -the judicial, medical, railway and public works departments - would perish, and 'India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations ofthe Middle Ages'.
Churchill said some stupid shit. The result was that his own party shunned him. He was denied any Ministerial position. Why is Guha focussing on him? The answer is that he thinks he himself is justified in calling India an 'unnatural nation'. Yet, for Hindus, it is entirely natural.
Guha writes as though he has never visited India or had any sort of family or other connection with it. He takes it for granted that India is an 'unnatural nation' & people are little better than monkeys. The plain fact is, no diplomat posted to India- or any statesman with the slightest knowledge of it- has said that there was a risk of a military coup in that country. It was somewhat surprising that it became dynastic but even so the dynasty needed to hold periodic elections. In any case, assassination tempers autocracy.
This is sheer nonsense. When Nehru died, nobody anywhere thought the Army would take over. True, a few years previously some stupid journalist mentioned General Kaul- but he fucked up in 1962 and, in any case, was not popular in the Army. Oddly, in 1964, the CIA, the KGB & Britain's MI5 were all rooting for Sastri. But he died soon enough. After Indira & her father were the only Prime Ministers to die in office. Nobody thought the Army would take over after either event. Both chose their successor. Monsoon failure occurred in 2002, 2009 & 2023. Nobody talked of 'countrywide famine'. No 'secessionist movement' has caused anybody to think India would disappear. The outcome was always obvious. As in British times, the insurgency would be crushed with varying degrees of brutality. Guha lives in a fantasy world. So do many academics teaching worthless shite. But that is because non-STEM subjects are adversely selective of imbecility.
Guha genuinely doesn't know the answer to the question 'why is there an India at all'
The answer is Hindus need to solve collective action problems peculiar to themselves. Independence & Democracy was a way to legitimize reform of Hindu Personal Law as well as alter the balance of power between 'castes' & regions. Also, Hindus wanted to be able to defend themselves against invaders or the 'salami' tactics of aggressive, non-Indian, religions or ideologies.
If you don't know why India exists, you can say nothing interesting or informative about its recent history. But, since academic historians are shitheads, it really doesn't matter what shite they write.
