The Mutiny is a central event in Indian history, rather like the Civil War. It is not merely regional. Here is an article:
History Today
By Washbrook, David
Magazine: HISTORY TODAY, September 1997
AFTER THE MUTINY: FROM QUEEN TO QUEEN-EMPRESS
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David Washbrook on how the trauma of mutiny was catalyst to a new imperial vision - courtesy of skillful Victorian public relations for the subcontinent.
The Great Mutiny and Civil Rebellion of 1857 had many effects on the relationship between Britain and India: but one of the most visible was a change in its forms of rulership and sovereignty. Until the Mutiny, the British had been content to leave the status of their government in India on a curious theoretical footing, which cloaked effective practice behind convenient fictions.
In formal terms, India was not directly ruled by the British Crown but by the English East India Company, which was a chartered monopoly corporation beholden, in the first instance, to its directors and shareholders. However, the Company gained its charter to trade from the Crown and (after 1773) from Parliament, which had progressively whittled away its commercial privileges and sought to direct its administration. But the Company's rights to exercise government in India did not derive from Britain in the first place, but from the Mughal emperor, whose nawab (deputy) it claimed to be. Yet as, since 1824, it had refused to present nazrana (gifts) to him and had kept him a virtual hostage in Delhi, it was arguable whether, by Indian custom, it continued to retain much of his izzat (honour). What status the Company's government possessed at law - and under whose law - was extremely unclear: its Governors General issued legislation `by authority' without ever stating exactly whence this authority was supposed to come.
But the Mutiny put the informality of British power in India to a severe test. The rebellious Indian sepoys (soldiers), who had first raised revolt at Meerut, headed for Delhi where they `liberated' the emperor and persuaded him to declare Company rule illegitimate. An octogenarian drug-addict, Bahadur Shah was in no position to dispute the point and became, briefly, a leading symbol of the insurrection. After the Mutiny had been suppressed, the British decided that even hostage emperors offered too much risk to fortune. Bahadur Shah was forced to abdicate, while Captain Hodson summarily executed his immediate heirs. On August 2nd, 1858, Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria was declared Queen of India. The East India Company was dissolved and its government passed directly to the British Parliament, where a Secretary of State for India was appointed to the Cabinet. In January 1877, the prime minister of the day, Benjamin Disraeli, altered the Queen's title to that of `Queen Empress of India'.
In immediate and practical terms, these shifts in title had little impact on British-Indian relations or on the structures of Indian government. The Company's judicial and bureaucratic systems were received wholesale into the new colonial state and the imperial economy and polity continued along established pathways. Yet, rhetorically and psychologically, the shifts were important and can be seen to have represented in symbolic terms changing responses to the complex problems which the British Empire faced in India in the years after the Mutiny and leading up to the First World War.
The Mutiny, which had seen the British lose control of much of the central Ganges valley, gave the imperial system a profound shock. Although its eighteenth-century antecedents had lain in Indian forms of government and its initial policies had stressed continuity with India's own traditions, the state presided over by East India Company in the nineteenth century had progressively come to see its purposes in a more radical light. The pre-Mutiny generation of British administrators had few doubts about the superiority of their own civilisation and many had committed themselves to transforming Indian society on its model.
But the Mutiny provoked a serious re-evaluation of Britain's `mission' in the subcontinent. One theory of revolt, popular in certain quarters, was that it reflected a reaction against precipitate interference in indigenous traditions. Hindu and, more particularly, Islamic religious leaders had been driven into rebellion by the threat posed to their values by Christianity and Rationalism.
A second and related theory saw the problem more in economic and institutional terms. The encouragement given by the Company to the development of a competitive market economy had both undermined traditional `aristocracies' and placed substantial sections of the peasantry under threat from merchants and money-lenders. Such theories moved the post-Mutiny Raj towards a more conservative agenda. Law courts and legislatures were called upon to foreswear interference in Indian custom and religion and to shoulder the burden of protecting tenants and landlords alike from the social consequences of economic failure. Indian society was now to be distanced from the modern world and preserved in its traditional and hierarchical forms.
Yet other analyses of the Mutiny promoted other policy inclinations and modernity was not easily denied access to the plains of Hindustan. The revolt, most obviously, had first arisen in the Company's army where a thin cadre of British officers had sought to discipline a mass of Indian troops. To prevent a recurrence, British line regiments were brought to serve in India on a much more regular basis and the `white' segment of the army was substantially increased. But this substantially increased, too, the European population in India, which was further promoted by improved means of transport and communications. Could indigenous society be preserved in all its `traditionality' while becoming, simultaneously, host to an ever expanding European presence?
The same dilemma affected many other areas of the state. In a variety of ways, the Mutiny introduced the principle of `representative' government into India. Another theory of revolt attributed it to lack of consultation between British and Indian authorities and gave rise in 1861 to the creation of a Viceregal Council which included Indian members. At a more local level, the costs of suppressing the Mutiny had burdened the government with heavy debts and necessitated a devolution of power. To raise more taxes, municipalities were authorised to associate `respectable' Indians with their administrations, eventually by means of election. Although these beginnings were very limited in scope, they set a crucial precedent. But how far was a `traditional' society compatible with principles of competitive political representation?
Elsewhere, too, the novel pressures of the Victorian Age bore in on India. Railway-building, which had begun just before the Mutiny, proceeded at a much greater pace thereafter, transforming commercial and demographic possibilities. Industry arrived in the 1860s, converting Calcutta and Bombay by 1901 into the second and third largest cities in the entire British Empire, overshadowed only by London. Western education also began to find a deeper response. The Indian Universities Act, passed in the same year as the Mutiny, established new institutions at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, which attracted an ever larger flow of Indian talent and introduced it to both the mysteries and the powers of Western knowledge. By the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Macaulay's dream of a nation of `brown Englishmen' was ceasing to be a mere fantasy. But would `brown Englishmen', travelling the railways to offices and business premises in the major megalopolises of imperial wealth and power, be content with the rights and privileges merely of `traditional' subjects?
British rule in the years after the Mutiny faced many divergent pressures. How far should it go in accommodating India to the new forces economic, technological, cultural and social - then re-constituting the modern world? Might it not be more prudent to preserve a `traditional' India which, whatever the price of its stagnation, would more easily accept an inferior colonial status and continuing British domination? These questions became the more urgent as the nineteenth century wore on and British world economic and political power were challenged by a reviving France and Russia and a new Germany and United States. British answers were often contradictory, but they rarely failed to appeal to the `mystique' attached to Queen Victoria's Crown.
The initial effects of Victoria's assumption of the throne of India were very much to emphasise the modern side of the colonial paradox. In responding to the `grievances' against British rule expressed during the Mutiny, the new regime offered Indians glimpses of a future of unlimited `moral and material progress', which became theirs by right as full `subjects' of the Queen's Empire. On November 1st, 1858, a Royal Proclamation was issued to `the Princes and Peoples of India', whose words were later to come back and haunt British colonial governors. While generally re-affirming all existing rights and privileges, the proclamation also announced that: `We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects' and that `it is our further will that ... our subjects of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our services, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability and integrity, duly to discharge'.
This vision of equal rights for Indians with British `subjects' under the Crown proved a powerful magnet in attracting Indian opinion in the new `colony', especially the opinion of the Western-educated most qualified to benefit. This was not least because the social reality of India contrasted so starkly with the proclamation's aspirations. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, the Company's government had, as much by institutional practice as by any formal declaration, made itself progressively more `British' and come to enforce a de facto race hierarchy in many areas. The Queen's sentiments appeared to challenge this and to construct a multi-racial imperial identity giving all her subjects equal access to the privileges accruing to members of the most powerful empire that the world had ever seen.
In another way, too, direct rule by the Crown opened possibilities for Indian advancement. It brought `Indian affairs' much more centrally into British politics and emphasised metropolitan responsibilities for conditions in far-distant Eastern colonies. Previously, the anomalous status of the Company's India had been convenient in guaranteeing that large parts of its government could take place behind closed doors and that moral culpabilities could be deferred onto other authorities. Parliamentary debates on India had been confined to occasional scandals and to the renewal of the Company's charter, which took place only every twenty years. Now, however, a regular forum for more continuous dialogue was created and the ability of Indian administrators to conceal their deficiencies was reduced. By the 1870s, this was to have some important consequences.
In 1876, a serious famine had broken out in southern and western India, killing several million people. Official propaganda on the progress brought by British rule stood contradicted by the visible evidence of mass starvation. Pressure exercised by the British Parliament called the Indian administration to account and played a role in constructing a more adequate famine code to deal with similar eventualities in the future. Equally, in 1878 the then-Viceroy, Lord Lytton, had launched a gratuitous, expensive and ultimately disastrous war in Afghanistan. Public reaction against this debacle was to prove so strong that it led to the defeat of Disraeli's government at the General Election of 1880.
Taking advantage of the new conduits created after 1858, Indians themselves also began to make their presence felt in the imperial metropolis. After the 1860s, when competitive examinations were established for entry to the Indian Civil Service, a steady stream began to seek higher education at Oxford, Cambridge and London. When the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885, it established a permanent standing committee in London to pursue a programme aimed at opening up the services to the competition of the talents, reforming judicial administration and increasing Indian representative rights. In the 1890s, an Indian businessman resident in Britain, Dadhabai Naoroji, stood at the polls and was elected as a Liberal member of the `imperial' Parliament itself.
These activities brought some rewards. The viceroyalty of Lord Ripon (1880-85) was particularly distinguished for its responsiveness to Indian opinion. Ripon extended the powers of local self-government and introduced electoral procedures into them, and, through the notorious Ilbert Bill, even sought to remove racial privileges from the practices of the law courts. Ripon's government represented something of a honeymoon period in the early formation of `modern' Indian politics, helping to imbue them with a strong sense of loyalty to the Empire and the Queen. Those politics pursued far more a liberal than a nationalist agenda and sought the increasing integration of Indians into the British Empire. They betrayed few thoughts of separation or `independence': annual sessions of the Indian National Congress were opened and closed to the strains of `God Save the Queen'. The Crown here was seen to symbolise a future of multi-racial amity and joint Indo-British co-operation.
Yet this was a future which by no means all among the British welcomed. The warnings issued after the Mutiny about the dangers of interfering with Indian `tradition' remained on the table - and tradition could hardly be interfered with more thoroughly than by a process converting India into a replica of Liberal Britain. Moreover, among British elites the values of liberalism and progress themselves were starting to face rejection. The onset of `mass' society brought signs of a deepening cultural pessimism and a turning back to pre-industrial traditions to suggest alternative possibilities for the future.
The Mutiny had also sharpened racial tensions between Britons and Indians, which now found new forms of justification in the `scientific' theories becoming fashionable in post-Darwinian Europe. If the supremacy of the white races was a fact of nature, what point was served by setting multi-racialism as a goal for the British Empire? Further, as the British economy came under increasing international competition and as British world power was threatened from new quarters, ought not the Empire to be seen, first and foremost, as a means of securing the wealth and prestige of Britons themselves - if necessary at the expense of their `colonial' subjects?
Even by the 1870s, these questions - which betokened a hardening British `nationalism' - were beginning to affect metropolitan politics, giving rise to a new kind of conservation which, in turn, preached a New Imperialism. Under Disraeli's government (1874-80), this New Imperialism reached out to Queen Victoria's India. In January 1877, she was proclaimed 'Queen-Empress' amidst extraordinary scenes of display. At an imperial durbah (public ceremony) held in the old Mughal capital of Delhi, she was represented as the direct heir of the Mughal dynasty in whose name her Viceroy proceeded to receive the ritual fealty of India's remaining princes and maharajas. Her erstwhile symbolic role, as India's link to a modern future, was abruptly terminated. Now she stood for, and took her legitimacy from, the Indian past: a past captured in a pseudo-historical pageant, at times bordering on pantomime kitsch, wherein she became the Great Mughal and committed herself to sustaining, changeless and unchangeable, the hierarchical order of a traditional Indian society.
The pantomime was presided over by Lord Lytton, a minor Romantic poet whom Disraeli had plucked from an undistinguished diplomatic career to be Viceroy of India and co-architect there of his New Imperialism. Although Lytton's talent for the picturesque may temporarily have dazzled India's eyes, and his emphasis on the `glories' of the Mughal past have flattered its sense of history, the real meaning of the change in imperial style was not long in becoming apparent. If Indian society was to be `returned' to its historic traditions, it could have no claims on a modern future where British interests must predominate.
Elsewhere, Lytton launched an attack on Indian claims to racial equality and participation in the imperial state. In 1878, he passed a Vernacular Press Act which clamped down on the free expression of political opinion. In 1879, within months of the ending of the Great Famine, he pushed measures through his Executive Council, against the concerted opposition of most of its members, removing India's residual forms of tariff protection and opening its economy to unrestrained exploitation by British business. In the same year, he also began to campaign against Indian entry to the Indian Civil Service. Most famously, he fomented a war with Afghanistan, which served British strategic interests against Russia far more than it contributed anything to India's own security but cost the Indian tax-payer 4 million.
Lytton's viceroyalty, with its centrepiece of the imperial durbah, signalled a conservative counter-offensive against the nostrums of liberal imperialism, which was to last through the rest of Victoria's reign and up to the First World War. Although it never succeeded in forcing an entire abandonment of the liberal agenda, it exercised a dominant influence over British imperial ideology. In 1883, Ilbert's Bill to bring racial equality to the judicial system provoked a `White Mutiny' among European residents in India and had to be modified almost out of existence. In 1886, measures were introduced to restrict Indian entry and to preserve the `British' character of the Indian Civil Service. By 1913, a Government of India would even pass legislation designed explicitly to protect `the mystique of the white race'.
This deepening racism had its counterpart in an intellectual veneration of Indian tradition, typified in Kipling's classic writings, as the true repositary of Indian culture and identity. But, given also Kipling's stridently critical view of `the Babu' the Western-educated Indian -there was little doubting the political implications of such nostalgia. While the Queen-Empress invoked her Mughal heritage, Indians could not expect to gain any more rights under their British conqueror than they had possessed under her Central Asian predecessor.
Yet the shift in royal symbolism was to be bought at a heavy price. By changing the focus of the monarchy's appeal, from the future to the past, Lytton also set another train of history in motion. Invited to seek the roots of their identity in their own traditions, Indian intellectuals soon began to doubt both that the Mughal heritage was truly theirs and that their past contained any reasons to accept British supremacy. Parallel to the imperial `invention of tradition', a romantic voyage of Indian self-rediscovery began to get under way. Conducted preponderantly by the high-caste Hindus, who had first been drawn to Western education, it produced visions of an Indian civilisation based on Hinduism, which was inimical alike to the rule of Muslim Mughals and Christian British.
For some years, the romantic reconstruction of Hindu India remained a literary phenomenon with few immediate political implications. But, following the viceroyalty of that paragon of the New Imperialism, Lord Curzon (1898-1905), it exploded into action and revealed its full political meaning. If India's identity lay in its own past and if that past pre-dated both Mughal and Briton, then an authentic Indian `nation' must be independent of both as well. The political movement which arose in reaction to Curzon's partition of Bengal made a definitive break with the imperial ideal in its several senses. Indian nationalists now looked to the ancient Hindu world for their inspiration, even introducing as the Indian National Congress' anthem a hymn which invoked the `glories' of Bengali Hindu resistance to the Mughals. And they redefined their future political trajectory to insist on the severance of ties with Britain. The Swadeshi campaign of 1905-08 called for a boycott of British goods, the independent development of the Indian economy and a new programme of `rational' education and cultural regeneration.
The invocation of Indian tradition, undertaken by Lord Lytton, produced consequences unforeseen at the time but perhaps obvious in retrospect. It provoked the emergence of an Indian national identity which rejected incorporation with and subordination to the British Crown. The passage from `Queen' to `Queen-Empress' set the British monarchy in India on a path which by 1947 would see the King-Emperor George VI, albeit under rather different circumstances, passing into history alongside Bahadur Shah.
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