Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

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СКАЧАТЬ the Prime Minister indicated with a sigh his willingness to accept even that. An hour later, shoulders sagging, Mountbatten emerged from the portal of Downing Street. He knew he was condemned to become India’s last Viceroy, the executioner, in a sense, of his countrymen’s fondest imperial dream.

      Getting back into his car, a strange thought struck him. It was exactly seventy years, almost to the hour, from the moment his own great-grandmother had been proclaimed Empress of India on a plain outside Delhi. India’s princes, assembled for the occasion, had begged the heavens that day that Queen Victoria’s ‘power and sovereignty’ might ‘remain steadfast forever’.

      Now, on this New Year’s morning one of her great-grandsons had initiated the process which would fix the date on which ‘forever’ would come to an end.

      

      History’s most grandiose accomplishments can sometimes have the most banal of origins. Great Britain was set on the road to the great colonial adventure for five miserable shillings. They represented the increase in the price of a pound of pepper proclaimed by the Dutch privateers who controlled the spice trade.

      Incensed at what they considered a wholly unwarranted gesture, twenty-four merchants of the City of London gathered on the afternoon of 24 September 1599 in a decrepit building on Leadenhall Street. Their purpose was to found a modest trading firm with an initial capital of £72,000 subscribed by 125 shareholders. Only the simplest of concerns, profit, inspired their enterprise which, expanded and transformed, would ultimately become the most noteworthy creation of the age of imperialism, the British Raj.

      The Company received its official sanction on 31 December 1599, when Queen Elizabeth I signed a royal charter assigning it exclusive trading rights with all countries beyond the Cape of Good Hope for an initial period of fifteen years. Eight months later, a 500-ton galleon named the Hector dropped anchor in the little port of Surat, north of Bombay. It was 24 August 1600. The British had arrived in India. Their initial landing was a modest one. It came in the solitary figure of William Hawkins, Captain of the Hector, a dour old seaman who was more pirate than explorer. Hawkins marched off into the interior, prepared to find rubies as big as pigeons’ eggs; endless stands of pepper, ginger, indigo, cinnamon; trees whose leaves were so enormous that the shade they cast could cover an entire family, potions derived from elephants’ testicles to give him eternal youth.

      There was little of that India along the Captain’s march to Agra. There, however, his encounter with the great Moghul compensated for the hardships of his journey. He found himself face to face with a sovereign beside whom Queen Elizabeth appeared the ruler of a provincial hamlet. Reigning over 70 million subjects, the Emperor Jehangir was the world’s richest and most powerful monarch, the fourth and last of India’s great Moghul rulers.

      The first Englishman to reach his court was greeted with a gesture which might have disconcerted the 125 worthy shareholders of the East India Trading Company. The Moghul made him a member of the Royal Household and offered him as a welcoming gift the most beautiful girl in his harem, an Armenian Christian.

      Fortunately, benefits of a nature more likely to inspire his employer’s esteem than the enrichment of his sex life also grew out of Captain Hawkins’ arrival in Agra. Jehangir signed an imperial firman authorizing the East India Company to open trading depots north of Bombay. Its success was rapid and impressive. Soon, two ships a month were unloading mountains of spices, gum, sugar, raw silk and Muslin cotton on the docks along the Thames and sailing off with holds full of English manufactures. A deluge of dividends, some of them as high as 200%, came pouring down on the firm’s fortunate shareholders.

      The British, generally, were welcomed by the native rulers and population. Unlike the zealous Spaniards who were conquering South America in the name of a redeeming God, the British stressed that it was in the name of another God, Mammon, that they had come to India. ‘Trade not territory’, the Company’s officers never ceased repeating, was their policy.

      Inevitably, however, as their trading activities grew, the Company’s officers became enmeshed in local politics and forced, in order to protect their expanding commerce, to intervene in the squabbles of the petty sovereigns on whose territories they operated. Thus began the irreversible process which would lead England to conquer India almost by inadvertence. On 23 June 1757, marching through a drenching rainfall at the head of 900 Englishmen of the 39th Foot and 2000 Indian sepoys, an audacious general named Robert Clive routed the army of a troublesome Nawab in the rice paddies outside a Bengali village called Plassey.

      Clive’s victory opened the gates of northern India. With it, the British conquest of India truly started. Their merchants gave way to the builders of empire; and territory, not trade, became the primary concern of the British in India.

      The century that followed was one of conquest. Although they were specifically instructed by London to avoid ‘schemes of conquest and territorial expansion’, a succession of ambitious governor generals relentlessly embraced the opposite policy. In less than a century a company of traders was metamorphosed into a sovereign power, its accountants and traders into generals and governors, its race for dividends into a struggle for imperial authority. Without having set out to do so, Britain had become the successor to the Moghul Emperors.

      From the outset, her intent was always one day to relinquish the possessions she had so inadvertently acquired. As early as 1818, the Marquess of Hastings noted: ‘A time, not very remote, will arrive when England will, on sound principles of policy, wish to relinquish the domination which she has gradually and unintentionally assumed over this country.’ Empires, however, were more naturally acquired than disposed of and the moment foreseen by Hastings was to be considerably more remote than the Marquess might have imagined.

      British rule nonetheless brought India benefits of considerable magnitude, Pax Britannica and reasonable facsimiles of Britain’s own legal, administrative and educational institutions. Above all, it gave India the magnificent gift which was to become the common bond of its diverse peoples and the conduit of their revolutionary aspirations, the English language.

      The first manifestation of those aspirations came in the savage Mutiny in 1857. Its most important result was an abrupt change in the manner in which Britain governed India. After 258 years of fruitful activities, the Honourable East India Company’s existence was terminated. Responsibility for the destiny of 300 million Indians was transferred to the hands of a 39-year-old woman whose tubby figure would incarnate the vocation of the British race to dominate the world, Queen Victoria. Henceforth, Britain’s authority was to be exercised by the crown, represented in India by a kind of nominated king ruling a fifth of humanity, the Viceroy.

      With that change began the period the world would most often associate with the British Indian experience, the Victorian era. Its predominant philosophy was a concept frequently enunciated by the man who was its self-appointed poet laureate – Rudyard Kipling – that white Englishmen were uniquely fitted to rule ‘lesser breeds without the law’. The responsibility for governing India, Kipling proclaimed, had been ‘placed by the inscrutable decree of providence upon the shoulders of the British race’.

      Ultimately, responsibility was exercised at any given time by a little band of brothers, 2000 members of the Indian Civil Service, the ICS, and 10,000 British officers of the Indian Army. Their authority over 300 million people was sustained by 60,000 British soldiers and 200,000 men of the Indian Army. No statistics could measure better than those the nature of Britain’s rule in India after 1857 or the manner in which the Indian masses were long prepared to accept it.

      The India of those men was that picturesque, romantic India of Kipling’s tales. Theirs was the India of gentlemen officers in plumed shakos riding at the head of their turbaned sepoys; of district magistrates lost in the torrid wastes of the Deccan; СКАЧАТЬ