The Brexit of 1947: ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab’

BOOK EXCERPT

The differences between the countries of Europe, said the British then, were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Jun 24, 2016 · 03:14 pm

Ramachandra Guha

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. In that year a man who had helped put the Raj in place gave a series of lectures in Cambridge which were later published in book form under the simple title India. The man was Sir John Strachey. Strachey had spent many years in the subcontinent, ultimately becoming a 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.

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. 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’.

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.’ In India the diversities of race, language and religion were far greater. Unlike in Europe, these ‘countries’ were not nations; they did not have a distinct political or social identity. 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’.

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 Punjab, 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 of the various nations of Europe.

Strachey’s remarks were intended as a historical judgement. 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. 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. For the rise of every new ‘nation’ in India would mean a corresponding diminution in the power and prestige of Empire.

Ironically, even as he spoke Strachey’s verdict was being disputed by a group of Indians. These had set up the Indian National Congress, 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.

Very many good books have been written on the growth of the Indian National Congress, on its move from debating club through mass movement to political party, 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.



This is not the place to rehearse the history of Indian nationalism. 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. 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.) 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. From this perspective stemmed the claim that it was only British rule that held India and the Indians together.

Among those who endorsed John 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, who had spen 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’. ‘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.’

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. A cricketer and tea planter insisted, after forty years there, that

    “[c]haos 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 lot.

Views such as these were widely prevalent among the British in India, and among the British at home as well. Politically speaking, the most important of these ‘Stracheyans’ was undoubtedly Winston Churchill. 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.

A decade previously he had tried to rebuild a fading political career on the plank of opposing self-government for Indians. After Gandhi’s ‘salt satyagrafra’ of 1930 in protest against taxes on salt, the British government began speaking with Indian nationalists about the possibility of granting the colony dominion status. 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’. Since Indians were not fit for self-government, it was necessary to marshal ‘the sober 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. Speaking to an audience at the City of London in December 1930, 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’. Three months later, speaking at the Albert Hall on ‘Our Duty to India’ – 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 of the Middle Ages’.

A decade and a half after Winston Churchill issued these warnings, the British left India. A time of barbarism and privation did ensue, the blame for which remains a matter of much dispute. But then some sort of order was restored. No Germans were necessary to keep the peace. Hindu ascendancy, such as it was, was maintained not by force of arms but through regular elections based on universal adult franchise.

Yet, throughout the sixty years since India became independent, there has been speculation about how long it would stay united, or maintain the institutions and processes of democracy. With every death of a prime minister has been predicted the replacement of democracy by military rule; after every failure of the monsoon there has been anticipated country wide famine; in every new secessionist movement has been seen the disappearance of India as a single entity.

Among these doomsayers there have been many Western writers who, after 1947, were as likely to be American as British. Notably, India’s existence has been a puzzle not just to casual observers or commonsensical journalists; it has also been an anomaly for academic political science, according to whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty do not make a nation, still less a democratic one. That India ‘could sustain democratic institutions seems, on the face of it, highly improbable’, wrote the distinguished political scientist Robert Dahl, adding: ‘It lacks all the favourable conditions.’ ‘India has a well-established reputation for violating social scientific generalizations’, wrote another American scholar, adding: ‘Nonetheless, the findings of this article furnish grounds for skepticism regarding the viability of democracy in India.’

The pages of this book are peppered with forecasts of India’s imminent dissolution, or of its descent into anarchy or authoritarian rule. Here, let me quote only a prediction by a sympathetic visitor, the British journalist Don Taylor. Writing in 1969, by which time India had stayed united for two decades and gone through four general elections, Taylor yet thought that

    the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge.

    It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit.

    I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.

The heart hoped that India would survive, but the head worried that it wouldn’t. The place was too complicated, too confusing – a nation, one might say, that was unnatural.

In truth, ever since the country was formed there have also been many Indians who have seen the survival of India as being on the line, some (the patriots) speaking or writing in fear, others (the secessionists or revolutionaries) with anticipation. Like their foreign counterparts, they have come to believe that this place is far too diverse to persist as a nation, and much too poor to endure as a democracy.

Excerpted with permission from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, Ramachandra Guha, Picador India.

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Britain and Europe: A long history of conflict and cooperation

History Remembered

British history is deeply connected to Europe and whatever the result of its referendum, this will continue.

Image credit:  Wikimedia Commons

Jun 23, 2016 · 11:30 pm   Updated Yesterday · 09:54 am

Brendan Simms, The Conversation

Britain’s referendum on the EU marks another step in the country’s long and troubled history with its European neighbours. Divorce or not, Europe will continue to have a huge influence over British politics and society – history has a few lessons for us here.

Europe made the UK. The emergence first of England as a nation state was the product of European pressures – to defend itself against Viking raids. So was the formation of the United Kingdom, which rallied England and Scotland against the France of Louis XIV.

Moreover, Europe has almost always been more important to us than the rest of the world. The 18th century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, for example, spoke of a “Commonwealth of Europe”, long before the British Commonwealth of Nations was even thought of.

The nature of the European challenge varied greatly over time. It was always strategic. In the Middle Ages the main enemy was France. In the 16th century and early 17th centuries it was Spain. From the late 17th to the early 19th century it was France again; in the mid to late 19th century it was Tsarist Russia. Then, in the early and mid-20th century it was first the Kaiser and then Hitler’s Germany; and then Russia again – with a brief interruption after the fall of the Berlin Wall – from the end of World War II to the present day.

Very often, the danger was also ideological. From continental heresy in the Middle Ages, through counter-reformation Catholicism (which also become a synonym for absolutism and continental tyranny) in the 16th and 17th centuries, French Jacobinism in the late 18th century, right and left wing totalitarianism in the 20th century, to Islamist terrorists arriving from Europe as migrants today.

Furthermore, Europe has profoundly shaped domestic politics in the UK. It has been the subject of argument without end for hundreds of years. In the 16th and 17th century there were furious debates over the best way to protect Protestantism and parliamentary freedoms in a Europe in which both were under severe attack.

Anti-Jacobin sentiment in 18th century British papers.Library of Congress

From the 18th century onwards, Britons disagreed on the best strategy for maintaining the European balance of power. The prevailing orthodoxy among one side of parliament (the Whigs) looked to alliances and armies on the continent. The Tories on the other side called for greater restraint and more focus on the country’s naval and colonial power. Throughout these debates, some argued for military intervention on the continent and interference in the internal politics of sovereign states there, while others demanded equally passionately that Britain should stay out, for reasons of pragmatism, as well as principle. Both views are well represented in both major political parties today.

Of each other’s making

If Europe made Britain, then Britain also made Europe. The British shaped Europe in their interests and increasingly in their image. Their military presence and reputation on the continent was usually formidable, from the iconic victories at Agincourt, Dunkirk, Blenheim, Dettingen, Waterloo, in the Crimea, during the two world wars to the deterrence in Europe under NATO. It was enhanced rather than reduced by the fact that many of these triumphs were secured with the help of coalition partners.

Britain played an important, and often a decisive role in most of the major European settlements since the late 17th century: the treaty of Utrecht, which enshrined the principle of the “balance of power”, through the Congress of Vienna, which remodelled Europe after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars – right down to the treaties on European Union we have today.

Plus, Britain saw and realised its security through the power of ideology. This began with the defence of the Protestant interest in the 16th and 17th centuries, the protection of European “liberties” in the 18th century, the promotion of liberalism in the 19th century, and the spread of democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Euroscepticism and engagement has a long history. US Library of Congress

Britain has therefore been distinctive in Europe. Its European story is not merely separate and equal to that of the continent, but fundamentally different and more benign. The British pioneered two innovative forms of political organisation: the nation state as represented in parliament and then the concept of multinational union based on a parliamentary merger of Scotland and England.

Over the past 500 years, by contrast, Europeans have explored political unhappiness in many different forms. These have ranged from absolutism, through Jacobinism, Napoleonic tyranny, Hitler, Soviet communism, to the well-meaning but broken-backed European Union today.

Continental Europe, in short, had failed before 1945, and even now the European Union is only failing better. Unlike virtually every other European state, which has at some point or other been occupied and dismembered, often repeatedly, England and the United Kingdom have largely – with very brief exceptions – been a subject of European politics, never merely an object.

This should not be an occasion for British triumphalism. On the contrary, whatever the outcome of the referendum on membership, the European Union is not the UK’s enemy. The failure of the European project, and the collapse of the current continental order, would not only be a catastrophic blow to the populations on the far side of the channel but also to the UK, which would be directly exposed to the resulting storms, as it always has been.

Brendan Simms, Professor in the History of International Relations, University of Cambridge

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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