BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY
The basic fact which has governed the whole evolution of British rule in India is that we went there in the first instance as traders, and not as conquerors. For trade meant co-operation. There could be no successful trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to co-operate with them in trade. That we ever went to India at all was due to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to the sea in ships and to trade with distant lands. When the rise of great Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, blocked the overland trade routes from Christendom into the Orient, our forefathers determined to emulate the example of the Spaniards and Portuguese and open up new ocean highways to the remote markets credited with fabulous wealth which would have been otherwise lost to them indefinitely. The handful of English merchant-venturers who under Queen Elizabeth's charter first established three hundred years ago a few precarious settlements on the far-flung shores of a then almost unknown continent no more dreamt of ruling India than did the great East India Company of which they had laid the foundations when it first sought to extend its trading operations into the interior and sent an embassy to court the goodwill of the mighty Moghul emperors then at the height of their power. Throughout those early days co-operation between Indians and Englishmen, though then for the sole purpose of trade, was the principle that guided British enterprise in India, and the venturers would never have grown and thriven as they did had they not laid themselves out to secure the confidence and co-operation of the Indians who flocked to their "factories." At home too it was not dominion, but the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which, like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day, attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India Company consent to depart from their policy of absolute non-intervention in the internal affairs of India. Nor was it till, in the course of the great duel between England and France for the mastery of the seas which only ended at Trafalgar, the genius of Dupleix threatened the very existence of the East India Company that the British nation began to face the responsibilities of British dominion in India as the only alternative to the greater danger of French dominion. It was the French challenge to Britain's position all over the world far more than any deliberate policy of conquest in India that drove successive agents of the East India Company to enlarge the area of British authority, and successive Governments at home to acquiesce and aid in its enlargement, until ultimately the whole peninsula was made subject to the paramount British power from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.
But even that long period of irresistible expansion was a period of almost constant co-operation between British and Indians. The East India Company extended its authority quite as much by a system of alliances with indigenous rulers, who turned to our growing power to save them from destruction at the hands of Haidar Ali or of the Mahratta confederacy, as by mere force of arms, and, when it had to use force, its most decisive victories in the field were won by armies in which Indian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops. At Plassey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, when the destinies of India were still in the balance, the British, though the backbone of the Company's forces, formed only a tithe numerically of the victorious armies that fought under Clive and Munro. The traditions of loyal comradeship between the Indian and the British army, only once and for a short time seriously broken during the Mutiny of 1857, can be traced back to the earliest days of British ascendancy, just as the map of India to-day, with hundreds of native States, covering one-third of the total area and nearly one-fourth of the total population under the autonomous rulership of their own ancient dynasties, testifies to the wisdom and moderation which inspired the policy of the East India Company in preferring, wherever circumstances made co-operation possible, co-operation based upon alliances to submission enforced by the sword.
In the same spirit there grew up at home with the extension of British dominion in India a definite determination on the part of the British Government and the British people to control the methods by which British dominion was to be exercised and maintained. So when the British in India ceased to be mere traders and became administrators and rulers, they had behind them not only the driving power, but the restraining force also, of a civilisation which was producing in England new conceptions of personal rights destined profoundly to affect the relations between those who govern and those who are governed. Those conceptions which underlay both the great Cromwellian upheaval and the more peaceful revolution of 1688 were at first limited in their application to the free people of Britain, but they began before long to influence also the attitude of the British people towards the alien races brought under their sway. The motives which prompted English colonial enterprise in its earliest stages did not differ materially from those which prompted the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French. All were impelled primarily by the desire to attain wealth. But whilst our competitors never got much beyond that stage, and for the most part imagined that the only way to attain wealth was by a crude exploitation of subject countries and peoples, the British were saved from similar short-sightedness by the very different spirit with which the development of their own national institutions had imbued their rulers at home. By the middle of the eighteenth century a British Government had a very different sense of its responsibilities to the British people for the welfare of the nation as a whole from that which any continental ruler had been taught to entertain in regard to his own people. That sense of responsibility the British Government and the British people applied in a modified form to the administration of their Indian possessions.
So long as British settlements were confined to trading factories on the shores of the Indian Ocean, the problems of administration were simple. The three "Presidents" who with their large and rather unwieldy Councils carried on at the beginning of the eighteenth century the affairs of the East India Company on the west coast, at Madras and in Bengal were chiefly concerned with commercial operations, and they provided in their own way and out of their own resources for the maintenance of the public peace within the narrow areas subject to their jurisdiction. But matters assumed a very different complexion when instead of merely taking abundant tithe of the wealth acquired by the enterprise and ability of British traders in a far-away land, the British people had to lend financial and military assistance in order to rescue the East India Company from destruction at the hands of their French rivals as well as from the overwhelming ruin of internecine strife all over India. The grant of the Diwani to the Company by the titular Emperor of Delhi gave the Company not only the wealth of Bengal, the richest province in India, but full rights of government and administration, which were at first ruthlessly exercised with little or no regard for the interests of the unfortunate population, who alone gained nothing by the change. The magnitude of the financial transactions between the Company and the British Government, which was sometimes heavily subsidised by the Company's coffers and then in turn compelled to make considerable advances in order to replenish them, and the splendour of the fortunes amassed by many of the Company's servants who returned from India to spend them in ostentatious luxury and in political intrigue at home, combined with the brilliant achievements of British arms on Indian soil to focus public attention on Indian affairs. They became one of the live issues of British party politics.
There was much that was squalid and grossly unjust in the rancorous campaigns conducted first against Clive and then against Warren Hastings. But behind all the personal jealousies and the greed of factions there was a strong and healthy public instinct that the responsibilities assumed by the East India Company were greater than a trading association could safely be left to discharge uncontrolled, and that the State could not divest itself of the duties imposed upon it by the acquisition of vast and populous possessions. It would be idle to pretend that the British people already entertained any definite conception of a tutelary relationship towards the peoples of India, or were animated by purely philanthropic solicitude for the moral welfare of India. But the passionate oratory of Fox and Burke and their fervid denunciation of oppression and wrongdoing in India awoke responsive echoes far beyond the walls of Westminster. In 1762, when France had claimed, in the course of the peace negotiations which led to the Treaty of Paris, the restitution of the possessions she had lost to the East India Company, the British Government pleaded the absence of "any right of the Crown of England to interfere in the legal and exclusive property of a body corporate." Only eleven years later, the House of Commons passed resolutions to the effect that "all acquisitions made under the influence of military force or by treaty with foreign princes do of right belong to the State," and the Commons had the country behind them. From 1773 onward British public opinion never hesitated to support Parliament in claiming and exercising supreme control over Indian affairs.
A very brief survey of the long series of enactments in which Parliament, asserting the right of "eminent dominion over every British subject in every country," gradually established its authority over Indian administration and moulded it to the shape which it virtually preserved until the Crown assumed direct sovereignty in 1858, shows how steadily the strengthening of Parliamentary control kept pace with the extension of British dominion in India. The first of these legislative measures was Lord North's Regulating Act, which was passed in 1773, just eight years after the East India Company had acquired for the first time the right of revenue and civil administration over vast territories in Bengal and in the Madras "Northern Circars," and thereby taken over the duties of government in respect of a great native population, absolutely alien in race, in religion, and in customs. Lord North's Act did not attack directly the problem of Indian government, but it sought to facilitate its solution by the East India Company itself by reforming its constitution at home, where the jealousies and intrigues of rival factions in the Board of Directors had often reached the dimensions of a public scandal, and by centralising the Company's authority in India, where, as the result of recent developments which had now established the centre of British gravity in Bengal, the post of Governor-General was created for the Bengal Presidency and invested with powers of control over the other Presidencies, Madras and Bombay, which had hitherto enjoyed a status of practical equality. At the same time an attempt was made to strengthen control from home by enjoining upon the Governor-General to keep the Board of Directors in London fully informed and to abide by its instructions, whilst a check was placed upon the executive authority in Bengal by the creation of a Supreme Court in Calcutta from which the present High Court is descended.
The defect of this legislation—a defect inherent to the situation in India itself—was the dualism it created by endeavouring to enforce Parliamentary restraints upon a Company which derived its title to government over the greater part of its possessions from the irresponsible despotism of the Moghul emperors. The Company was thus made to serve two masters, and at the same time it remained essentially a great trading corporation whose commercial and fiscal interests were always liable to conflict, and sometimes did conflict, with its duties towards both masters. The total collapse of the Moghul Empire removed before long one of the ambiguities of this situation, but the other endured in a greater or less degree until the East India Company itself disappeared, though every subsequent measure of Indian legislation at home tended to bring the Indian executive more and more fully under the control of the home Government.
Eleven years later Pitt's famous Government of India Act of 1784 marked a very important step forward. Another great war had been brought to an end by the Peace of Versailles in 1783, and whilst at its close we had lost the greater part of our North American Colonies, the genius of Warren Hastings had saved and consolidated British power in India. It was easy to criticise, and if we are to judge in accordance with modern standards, it is doubtless right to condemn some of the devices to which he resorted in the course of the long struggle he was often left to wage with little or no help, and sometimes in the face of active obstruction from those who, at home and in India, should have been the first to support him. Whatever his errors may have been, they were more than atoned for by the cruel persecution to which he was subjected whilst England was harvesting the fruits of his energy and courage. Pitt's Act was in fact the solemn consecration of all his greatest achievements, whilst it brought India into closer and more direct relationship with the Crown. Not the least of the difficulties with which Hastings, the only Governor-General appointed by the East India Company, was confronted arose from frequent opposition in his own Council, where he was merely primus inter pares. Pitt took care to provide against the recurrence of similar trouble in the future. But having strengthened the Governor-General's position, he took away the right of appointing him from the Company and transferred it to the Crown. Nor was that all. The Company itself was placed under the effective control of the Crown by the establishment in London of a Board of Control, of which the President was ultimately to develop into the Secretary of State for India, over the Courts of Directors and Proprietors. In substance, if not in form, India was already becoming a Dependency of the British Crown.
Nor was Pitt's Act concerned only with the relations of the Company to the Crown. Its numerous and very drastic provisions for the prevention and punishment of the corruption and oppression which had become rampant amongst the Company's servants after the grant of the Diwani testified to the determination of Parliament, whilst acquiescing in the extension of the British dominion, to uphold and enforce at the same time in the governance of Indian peoples the principle of justice for all to which the British people had gradually fought their way. A strong impetus was thus given to the great reforms already initiated by Clive himself, and still more drastically by Warren Hastings, which, within the framework as far as possible of the old indigenous system of judicial and civil administration, built up on solid foundations of integrity and efficiency a capacious and elastic structure easily extended to the vast territories that were still to pass under British rule. But then no more than at any later period could the machinery of government have worked smoothly, or even at all, without the co-operation of the Indians themselves, who were recruited in large numbers into the Company's service. Respect for their traditional customs and beliefs, and encouragement, of which Warren Hastings was the first to recognise the importance, to Indian education, though still only on the old lines with which Indians were already familiar, secured the growing loyalty of their co-operation. Then, as now, it was nowhere more effective than in the judicial administration, and side by side with new tribunals, which conformed with Western jurisprudence, the old ones, purified and reorganised, continued to dispense justice in accordance mainly with Hindu and Mahomedan and Indian customary law. With the consolidation of the British Paramount Power Indians learnt to identify it with their ancient conception of the State, and the Company's service came to enjoy the popularity and prestige which had always attached to the service of the State under their indigenous rulers and even under Mahomedan domination.
The renewal of the Company's Charter, which took place at intervals of twenty years, dating from Lord North's Act of 1773, afforded a convenient opportunity for the revision, when required, both of its relations to the Crown and of its methods of government in India. The abrogation of its trading monopoly in 1813 was mainly a concession to opposition at home, quickened by the loss of the European markets which had been closed against Great Britain by Napoleon's continental system, and for the renewal of its Charter the Company had to surrender its trading monopoly. It was the first step towards the abrogation of all its trading privileges twenty years later, when the Company, finally delivered from the temptations which beset a commercial corporation, became for the first time a purely governing body, free to devote its entire energies to the discharge of the immense responsibilities that had devolved upon it. This was, however, only one, though not the least significant of the momentous changes that accompanied the renewal of the Charter in 1833.
The trend of events in Europe after the peace in 1815 had tended to accentuate the profound divergency of views between Great Britain and the leading continental Powers in regard to fundamental principles of government, which, dating back to the seventeenth century, had been arrested at the close of the eighteenth by the exigencies of common action against the excesses of the French Revolution and the inordinate ambition of Napoleon. Under the auspices of the Holy Alliance, the continent of Europe was drifting into blind reaction. The British people, on the contrary, were entering upon a further stage of democratic evolution at home, and, under the influence of new liberal and humanitarian doctrines, their sympathies were going out abroad to every down-trodden nationality that was struggling, whether in Greece or in South America, to throw off the yoke of oppressive despotisms. Their growing sense of responsibility towards alien races which they themselves held in subjection was manifested most conspicuously in the generous movement which resulted in the abolition of slavery in our West Indian Colonies. It could not fail to be extended also to India. Under Lord Hastings British dominion had again rapidly expanded between 1813 and 1823, when he left it firmly established from the extreme south to the Sutlej in the north. Then ten years of internal and external peace had followed in which the educational labours, chiefly in Bengal, of a generation of great missionaries began not only to meet with unexpected reward in India itself, but also to stir the public mind at home to new aspects of a mission which came to be regarded as providential, and to the moral duties which it imposed upon us in return for the material advantages to be derived from political dominion. Some of our great administrators in India were themselves beginning to look forward to a time, however far distant, when we should have made the people of India capable of self-government—not yet, of course, on the lines now contemplated, since even in Great Britain self-government was not established then on a broad popular basis. As early as 1824 Sir Thomas Munro, then Governor of Madras, raised in an official minute the "one great question to which we should look in all our arrangements: What is to be their final result on the character of the people?" The following passage in that remarkable document may be commended to our faint-hearted doubters of to-day:
Liberal treatment has always been found the most effectual way of elevating the character of any people, and we may be sure that it will produce a similar effect on that of the people of India. The change will no doubt be slow, but that is the very reason why no time should be lost in commencing the work. We should not be discouraged by difficulties, nor, because little progress may be made in our own time, abandon the enterprise as hopeless, and charge upon the obstinacy and bigotry of the nations the failure occasioned by our own fickleness in not pursuing steadily the only line of conduct on which any hope of success can be reasonably founded. We should make the same allowances for the Hindus as for other nations and consider how slow the progress of improvement has been among the nations of Europe and through what a long course of barbarous ages they had to pass before they attained their present state. When we compare other countries with England, we usually speak of England as she now is. We scarcely ever think of going back beyond the Reformation, and we are apt to regard every foreign nation as ignorant and uncivilised, whose state of government does not in some degree approximate to our own, even should it be higher than our own was at no distant date.
We should look upon India not as a temporary possession but as one to be maintained permanently until the natives shall in some future age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for themselves and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such a time shall arrive it will probably be best for both countries that the British control over India should be gradually withdrawn. That the desirable change contemplated may in some after age be effected in India there is no cause to despair. Such a change was at one time in Britain itself at least as hopeless as it is here. When we reflect how much the character of nations has always been influenced by that of governments, and that some, once the most cultivated, have sunk into barbarism, while others, formerly the rudest, have attained the highest point of civilisation, we shall see no reason to doubt that if we pursue steadily the proper measures, we shall in time so far improve the character of our Indian subjects as to enable them to govern and protect themselves.
It was a splendid vision for a great British administrator to have entertained nearly one hundred years ago, though, with no self-governing Dominions in those days to point a better way, the only possibility that could occur to Munro's mind in the event of its fulfilment was an amicable but complete severance of our connection with India; and it is well to be reminded of the faith that was already in him and not a few other experienced and broad-minded Englishmen in India as well as at home, now that many of us are inclined to contemplate only with scepticism and apprehension an approach to its fulfilment on the new lines which the evolution of the British Empire and of democratic government throughout all its component parts, neither of which could then be foreseen, have in the meantime suggested.
Indians were at that time already employed in large numbers in the Company's services, but only in subordinate posts, for which in most cases their educational backwardness alone fitted them, and only as an act of grace on the part of their British rulers. Parliament had recognised the right of the Indian people to expect from us the benefits of good and honest government—perhaps as a duty which we owed to ourselves as much as to them—but it had not yet risen to a recognition of their right to any active share in the government of their country.
One of the first questions to come before the new Parliament elected after the great Reform Bill was that of the renewal of the Company's charter in 1833. The Parliamentary Committee appointed to inquire and report on the subject struck a new note when it laid distinct stress on the Indian point of view. It admitted frankly that "Indians were alive to the grievance of being excluded from a larger share in the executive government," and proceeded to state that in its opinion ample evidence had been given to show "that such exclusion is not warranted on the score of their own incapacity for business or the want of application or trustworthiness." Accordingly, when the Charter was renewed, Parliament laid it down that "no native of the said Indian territories, nor any natural British-born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment under the Company." This was the first substantial promise given to India that British rule was not to spell merely the unqualified dominion, however beneficent, of alien rulers. It invited the co-operation of the subject race, instead of merely postulating unconditional submission. It heralded at the same time the introduction of Western education, without which the promise would have been empty.
The problem of Indian education had occupied the minds of far-sighted Englishmen from the days of Warren Hastings, who had been the first to provide out of the Company's funds for the maintenance of indigenous educational institutions, and it had been definitely provided in the renewal of the Charter in 1813 that the Company should set aside a certain portion of its revenues to be spent annually upon education. But long delays had been caused by an interminable and fierce controversy over the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more suitable vehicle for the diffusion of education. The champions of English were much encouraged by the immediate success which attended the opening of an English school in Calcutta in 1830 by Dr. Alexander Duff, a great missionary who was convinced that English education could alone win over India to Christianity, and Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7, 1835, disfigured as it is by the quite unmerited and ignorant scorn which he poured out on Oriental learning with his customary self-confidence, finally turned the scales in favour of the adoption of English as essential to the spread of Western education. One of the immediate objects in view—and incidentally as a measure of economy—was undoubtedly the training of Indians, and in much larger numbers, for the more efficient performance of the work allotted to them in the administrative and judicial services of the Company. But if Macaulay was quite wrong in imagining that Western education would assimilate Indians to Englishmen in everything but their complexions, he was by no means blind to the larger implications of the new departure he was advocating. Like other great Englishmen of his day, he believed that good government and, still less, mere dominion were not the only ends to which our efforts should be directed. "It may be," he declared, "that the public mind of India may expand under our system until it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come, I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history."
Peace and law and order British rule had restored to India, and its foremost purpose henceforth, as set forth by Lord William Bentinck, a great Governor-General, imbued with the progressive spirit of the best Englishmen in India, to which Parliament had given a fresh impetus, was to be the diffusion of Western education. "The great object of the British Government," he declared, "ought to be the promotion of English literature and science, and all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone."
India seemed for the next twenty years to respond enthusiastically to the new call. Not only were the new Government schools as well as the older missionary schools thronged with Indian students who displayed no less intelligence than industry in the acquisition of Western learning, but the rapid assimilation of Western ideas amongst the upper classes, especially in Bengal, was reflected in the social and religious reform movements initiated by Western-educated Indians touched with the spirit of the West. Already in 1829 Lord William Bentinck had been supported by a considerable body of Indian public opinion in prohibiting the barbarous custom of Sati, i.e. the self-immolation of Hindu widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Government, however, rightly felt that, except in regard to practices of which it could not tolerate the continuance without surrendering the principles of humanity for which it stood, it was for the Indians themselves and not for their alien rulers to take the lead in bringing their religious and social customs and beliefs into harmony with Western standards. Nor was there any lack of Indians to give their countrymen that lead—amongst them several high-caste Brahmans, Ram Mohun Roy first and foremost. They were resolved to cleanse Hinduism of the superstitious and idolatrous impurities which, as they believed, were only morbid growths on the pure kernel of Hindu philosophy. The Brahmo Somaj, the most vital of all these reform movements, professed even to reconcile Hinduism with theism, though without importing into the new creed the belief in any personal God. British administrators watched and fostered the moral and intellectual progress of India with increasing confidence in the results of Western education, and none with more conviction than Lord Dalhousie, a high-minded and dour Scotsman, who was the last Governor-General to serve out his time under the East India Company. Other aspects of his policy may have been less wise. The extension of British rule to the Punjab became inevitable after a Sikh rising compelled him to complete what his predecessor, Lord Hardinge, had begun, and break once and for all the aggressive power of the Sikh Confederacy; but the rigorous application to the native States of the doctrine of lapse or escheat whenever the ruler died without a recognised heir, and the forcible annexation of the kingdom of Oudh as a penalty incurred by the sins, however gross, of the reigning dynasty have been often condemned as grave errors of judgment. They were not, in any case, errors that can be ascribed to the lust of mere dominion. Dalhousie was convinced that Indian progress would always be hampered by the continuance of native administration under such rulers as the kings of Oudh. If he was bent on extending the area of British dominion, it was in order to extend the area within which Britain was to be free to discharge her civilising mission without let or hindrance, and not least by the furtherance of education. If he took a legitimate pride in the introduction into India under his auspices of the two great discoveries of applied science which were just beginning to revolutionise the Western world, viz. railways and telegraphs, together with unified postage, it was because he regarded them as powerful instruments of education. The impulse given by him to public instruction even in the new provinces recently brought under British control prepared the way for the great educational measures of 1854 which marked a tremendous stride forward on the road upon which Macaulay's Minute had started India just two decades before. It was to Dalhousie that Sir Charles Wood addressed his memorable despatch which contained, as the Governor-General frankly acknowledged, "a scheme of education for all India far wider and more comprehensive than the local or Supreme Governments could have ventured to suggest." Its main features were the establishment of a department of Public Instruction in every province to emphasise the importance attached by Government to the educational purpose of British rule; the creation of Universities in each of the three Presidency cities, and of Government colleges of a higher grade, and training colleges for teachers, and the bestowal of grants-in-aid on private educational institutions. The claims of vernacular education were not forgotten, nor the vital importance of promoting female education, by which "a far greater proportional impulse is imported to the educational and moral tone of the people than by the education of men." The despatch mapped out a really national system of education worthy of the faith which the British generation of that day had in the establishment of an intellectual and spiritual communion between India and the West. The initial steps immediately taken by Dalhousie to carry the provisions of that despatch into execution are enumerated in the masterly Report drawn up by him on his way home in 1856, reviewing every aspect of his administration during his eight years' tenure of office—an administration which virtually closed, and not unworthily, perhaps the noblest period of British rule in India, when men of the intellectual and moral elevation of Bentinck and Munro and Metcalfe and Elphinstone and Thomason, and Dalhousie himself, humbly but firmly believed that in trying to found "British greatness on Indian happiness" they were carrying out the mission which it had pleased Providence to entrust to the British people. Dalhousie's parting hope and prayer, when he left India, broken in health but not in spirit, after eight years of intensely strenuous service, was that "in all time to come these reports from the Presidencies and provinces under our rule may form in each successive year a happy record of peace, prosperity, and progress." His immediate successor, Lord Canning, was moved to utter some strangely prophetic words before he left England: "I wish for a peaceful term of office. But I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, no larger than a man's hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin." Within less than a year the cloud arose and burst, and he had to face the outbreak of the Mutiny and see all the foundations of co-operation between Indians and British rudely shaken, which a broad and liberal policy of "peace, prosperity, and progress" seemed to have so well and truly laid.