KEEPING THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN:THE BRITISH BETRAYAL OF INDIA By Walter Reid, Viking, Rs 599
It is a perverse and revealing fact that the date of India's annual Independence Day celebration was determined by the whims and skillful bluffing of a member of the British royal family. At a press conference during which the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, extemporized for nearly an hour, a question from the gallery prompted him to reckon that Independence could occur on "about 15 August". "The date I chose came out of the blue," he explained later. "I was determined to show I was master of the whole event... I then went out to the 15th August. Why? Because it was the second anniversary of Japan's surrender".
Much else about the British withdrawal inflicted the same sort of la-di-da improvisation on the fate of the Indian people. The Indian Army was not divided until six weeks before Partition. The Punjab Boundary Force, which might have prevented atrocities, was not functional until just two weeks before Partition, and was disbanded under duress after only a month. Meanwhile a British official named Cyril Radcliffe, who previously had never travelled east of Gibraltar, was asked to determine the Pakistan-India border in only 38 days.
Yet the ruling class of the Empire had long planned for the flourishing of independent India to be the surest proof of their might and virtue. In his new book, Walter Reid quotes an 1833 speech by the historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay, to set out their expectations: "[I]t will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own." A 20th century form of this attitude is exemplified by Winston Churchill's argument, in a 1930 article for the Daily Mail, that the raj was bestowing on India "health", "tranquillity", and a "ceaseless forward march to civilization".
A historian whose area of focus is British politics and foreign policy, Reid takes seriously the Empire's stated aspirations to heroism and virtuousness. The scope of his most recent book is the last thirty years of the raj, from the first promise of self-determination for India in 1917 until Independence in 1947. It is a period that Reid describes as "an unsettling story of deceit and double-speak", with "death and suffering" as "the consequence of how Britain discharged her responsibilities". Though his subject concerns the tragedy that befell India, his main conclusions evaluate the actions of British politicians and refer to that country's reputation: "These squalid political years were not a part of her history of which Britain can be proud".
Reid describes his book as an attempt to judge colonial administrators "by the standards and attitudes of their times". He is a natural comedian of manners. "The Irwins were less pompous than the Readings," Reid writes in comparing viceregal families, "to the extent, that is, that they expected only three curtsies from ladies in the course of an evening, rather than seven... When tennis was played there were fifteen men to pick up the balls." He resurrects gossip of the 1920s with bracing astringency: "[F.E.] Smith soared across the political sky, a dazzling comet, finally and sadly falling to earth, burnt out, broken by drink, financing his elevated lifestyle by second-rate journalism." He recounts with great relish the dignified Lord Wavell's continuing to shave, unperturbed, as he receives the news in 1941 that he has been dismissed as Theatre Commander in North Africa.
The leading men of the raj attached their names to a series of Reforms, Declarations and Missions that sought to achieve British aims in India. Each of these various measures, however, ended up delaying meaningful changes to colonial rule. The 1909 Morley-Minto Reforms increased voting rights, but, Reid writes, "was in essence a device to devitalise Indian nationalism". The 1917 Montagu Declaration introduced the prospect of "self-governing institutions", but did not explain the powers such "institutions" would have and offered no timeline as to their "gradual development". The 1929 Irwin Declaration promised, again without any timeline, "dominion status", another "imprecise, almost metaphysical concept", writes Reid: "It was impossible for two people to be sure that they meant the same thing by the same words."
And so on. The British simply did not want to leave. Reid excellently captures their mentality in a quotation from a Colonial Office official, writing after the string of independences that followed World War II, who commented that, previously, "Dominion status for coloured colonial peoples, however sincerely professed as an objective, remained a castle in the air". Reid astutely notices that Lutyens' Delhi - "an extravagant, public assertion of the grandeur and permanence of the imperial project" - was not completed until the 1930s. As late as 1942, Viceroy Linlithgow was still imagining a future of "some scheme of government imposed by ourselves with, of course, the inevitable corollary that we shall remain there to hold the balance".
Here was the nub: achieving the lofty goals of a British-made independent India required communal harmony, but justifying the maintenance of the Empire required cultivating a division that would call for someone "to hold the balance". Following Britain's own proposal to divide India into a federation of Hindus, Muslims, and princely states, the Muslim League issued a call for a separate Muslim state in the 1940 Lahore Resolution. Linlithgow dismissed the idea of a partition as "silly" but decided "it would be a pity to throw too much cold water on it at the moment". The British found themselves bolstering the Muslim League even while abhorring the idea of partition. Whenever it was expedient, divide and rule won the day. The end of the raj always seemed, as Linlithgow said even in the final years, "very remote".
Reid's indictment is probing and unsparing and lucid. For all its grand hopes, the raj ended in hypocrisy and violence. By focusing entirely on the calculations and personalities of the British rulers, however, Reid leaves the unbalanced impression that they are the only ones to blame for the disaster of Partition. A telling omission occurs in his characterization of the 1928 Nehru Report: "Its recommendations can be ignored now, as they were in their own time". The British may have ignored Motilal Nehru's proposed constitution, but the Muslim League did not. Objecting to the abandonment of promises for communal representation made in the 1916 Congress-League Lucknow Pact, the League endorsed Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Fourteen Points, an alternative constitutional draft. The episode was an important rupture between the shared anti-colonial objectives of each party.
Reid's monochromatic British perspective leads to other assumptions and distortions. He repeatedly asserts, by way of criticism, that Jawaharlal Nehru was a "radical", but never explains what he means by the word. He disparages M.K. Gandhi's desire for the inclusion of Congress-aligned Muslims in the political process as "intricate and tiresome"; he finds the fact that Muslims supported Congress for so many years to be "surprising". As much as he deplores the effects of divide and rule, Reid can seem to share the tactic's presuppositions. He is just as Anglocentric in his account of the 1943 Bengal Famine, defending Churchill plausibly, blaming callous merchants fairly, but failing to mention that there was actually no significant shortage in the output or aggregate supply of food while the British presided over the deaths of millions of Bengalis. Colonial officials who instituted the Bengal Destitute Persons Ordinance - under which starving refugees were expelled to Calcutta's outskirts for the sake of wartime morale - evade Reid's scrutiny.
In an otherwise perceptive and judicious book, these oversights call to mind what makes Indian Independence Day so uncanny: the way in which colonialism denied Indians primacy in the making of their own history.
