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Raj: The Making and
Lawrence James writes history books for the general reader. His publications include The Iron Duke: A Military Biography of the Duke of Wellington and The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. His latest book, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India features his characteristic plethora of anecdotal details. He cites contemporary journals, plays, poems, short stories, novels, and films. Not only well-known literary works like those of Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, but also adventure stories from magazines such as Chums. Not only films like Gunga Din, The Man Who Would Be King and The Chess Players, but also The Drum. James cites Charles Dickens writing about India on 4 October 1857: "I wish I were commander-in-chief in India. I would do my utmost to exterminate the Race..." How valid is James's claim of presenting a balanced account? Let's take a look, for example, at how James describes the impeachment of Warren Hastings, an early governor general of the East India Company? Warren Hastings had been appointed to succeed Robert Clive, the notorious founder of the Company's Raj in Bengal. James devotes several paragraphs on Hastings: ". . . born in 1732 into a family of decayed gentry whose last days of glory had been under the Tudors. Hastings was proud of his surname and ancestry, and among the luxuries he purchased on his first return from India in 1765 was a carriage 'of a pleasant pompadour' emblazoned with the ancient arms of his family. This dashing, crimson vehicle and sundry other luxuries were paid for by the 30,000 pounds he had brought back from Calcutta, some of it made in private trade and the rest from gifts received for helping nawabs on and off their thrones....Hastings had exceeded his brief, which had been to collect taxes, maintain civil order, administer justice..." (The nawabs paid him gifts for removal from their thrones?!) Compare this with the description in Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India, fifth edition, 1997. First, Wolpert quotes Clive: "Clive himself had reported in 1765, 'such a scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption, and extortion was never seen or heard of in any country but Bengal; nor such and so many fortunes acquired in so unjust and rapacious a manner.'" Clive knew only too well whereof he spoke. Wolpert continues, "In the wake of British spoilation, famine struck and in 1770 alone took the lives of an estimated one-third of Bengal's peasantry ....What finally roused the British parliamentary concern over the state of Bengal was not the plight of India's peasantry, but the company's professed inablility to pay a promised annual tax of 400,000 pounds to the treasury in 1767.... As Edmund Burke was soon to declaim in the Commons, 'new flights of birds of prey and passage' continue to leave Britain's shores for India, 'animated with all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth'" And what was Hastings defense? Wolpert writes: "Hastings saw nothing at all wrong with 'squeezing' wealthy natives to support India's 'pacification'; in fact, he was amazed to find so many Englishmen back home whose moral scruples and feelings about the sacrosanctity of property led them to think otherwise. 'I enlarged and gave shape and consistency to the dominion which you hold,' Hastings subsequently protested to his directors. 'I preseved it; I sent forth its armies with an effectual but economical hand, through unknown and hostile regions, to the support of your other possessions . . . I gave you all, and you have rewarded me with confiscation, disgrace, and a life of impeachment.'" Hastings's reminder in the parliament that he had excellled his predecessor, Robert Clive, was persuasive. He was acquitted. Wolpert could have added here: So it was that the Sanskrit word "loot" entered common English vocabulary. The above contrast between Wolpert's and James's treatments of the topic illustrates the glossing that permeates all over Raj. However, it must be noted, James does occasionally present the Indian point of view. Madan Lal Dhingra was a young Punjabi student of engineering in London in 1909 when he read an Indian magazine describe Sir William Curzon Wyllie as "one of the old unrepentant foes of India who had fattened on the misery of the Indian peasant." Dhingra shot Wyllie dead. At his trial, writes James, Dhingra defended himself, "as an Indian patriot, alleging that the British had murdered 80 million Indians and had stolen 100 million pounds from India." But then, James goes on to dismiss Dhingra's speech merely as "garbled." Moreover, James fails to find any space in his 722-page book for mention of Indian martyrs like Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh. Udham Singh avenged the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre by killing, years later in London, the then governor of Punjab, Michael O'Dwyer. This kind of selective omission can produce only distorted pictures. Another example. Here's James describing the state pageantry at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897: "The Queen Empress expressly asked that Indian horsemen escort her carriage on its journey through London.... A voice in the crowd shouted, 'Three cheers for India' and there was a hearty response. The spectators were watching more a display of imperial muscle, for among the contingents were Sikhs, once Britain's fiercest enemies and some of the Queen's most loyal subjects and bravest soldiers." One asks, were not the Pathans, Punjabi Muslims, Dogras, Gurkhas, equally loyal -- for they, like the Sikhs, did not side with the mutineers in 1857. Nor does James anywhere allude to the awesome Sikh contribution to India's freedom struggle against the British. As Maulana Azad has written, the Sikhs, who constitute less than 2 percent of India's population, were Britain's strongest opponents: "Out of 2125 martyrs, 1550 or 75 pecent were Sikhs; out of 2600 deported to Andaman, 80 percent were Sikhs; out of 127 Indians sent to the gallows, 92 percent were Sikhs." Some loyalty! In his epilogue, James lists railways as one of the prominent benefits of the Raj. Like other Anglophilic Raj apologists, he fails to observe that China and Japan acquired railways without British colonial rule. Same holds for other Western technology. Two of the stark statistics that reveal the colonial plunder and neglect are: At the end of British colonial rule, life expectancy in India was 27 years and literacy 8 percent; after fifty years of independence, life expectancy is 62 years, and literacy 52 percent. Anglophilic apologists, take note: British colonial rule in India was the organized banditry that financed England's Industrial Revolution. In one of the blurbs on the book's jacket, Jan Morris, author of Fifty Years of Europe says "This is a wonderful book about the British presence in India, first to last. My guess is that it will remain unsurpassed in our generation as a scholarly survey for the educated general reader." Caveat emptor. The educated general reader will, I submit, find Wolpert's widely used college text-book, which devotes 215 pages to British colonial rule in India, far more insightful and balanced. Wolpert, who has taught Indian history at the University of California for forty years, presents first-rate scholarship with admirable lucidity. Moreover, Wolpert's book is free of the kind of absurdities in James's Raj; for example, Thomas Roe congratulated Jehangir on building the Taj, Omichand was a Sikh merchant who financed the defection of native troops at Plassey, and Kunwar Mahendra Pratap was a dethroned minor Muslim raja of Walter Mittyish disposition. Mr. James, the niggers are not amused. This book was originally published in London in 1997 by Little, Brown, and Company, a distinguished publishing house. Neither their editorial staff nor that of the American publisher, St. Martin's Press, caught these lapses. Some book critics have noted the recent decline in editorial standards in book publishing. This book amply illustrates their observation. ====================================== |
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