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Overall, however, the Indian peasantry were unlikely
to cause serious trouble for the Raj. The most potentially
difficult Indians in the late-Victorian era were the edu-
cated ‘babus’. These men were the products of the system
of English education in India, and may well have gradu-
ated from Calcutta or Bombay universities. Inevitably,
they held a very difficult position in society. In effect, they
had been transformed into brown Englishmen, but in
practice were denied the chance to get the best administra-
tive jobs in their own country.
As a consequence, they often used their wasted talents
in criticizing the Raj. Lord Lytton wrote scornfully of
them in 1877: ‘The only political representatives of native
opinion are the Babus, whom we have educated to write
semi-seditious articles in the native Press, and who really
represent nothing but the social anomaly of their own
position.’15
Lord Mayo was scornful and resentful of the part that
he perceived the babus generally playing:
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the raj at its zenith, 1858‒1905
In Bengal, we are educating in English a few hundred
Babus at great expense to the State. Many of them are well
able to pay for themselves and have no other object in
learning than to qualify for government employ. In the
meantime we have done nothing towards extending
knowledge to the million. The Babus will never do it. The
more education you give them the more they will keep to
themselves and make their increased knowledge a means
of tyranny.16
For many British in India, and at home, the prospect
of admitting the babus, or indeed any Indians, to a real
share of power under the Raj was unthinkable. John Stra-
chey, a member of the Viceroy’s Council in the 1860s and
1870s, thought that power could not be entrusted ‘to the
hands of Natives, on the assumption that they will always
be faithful and strong supporters of our government. In
this there is nothing offensive or disparaging to the Natives
of India. It simply means that we are foreigners, and that,
not only in our own interests, but because it is our highest
duty towards India itself, we intend to maintain our
dominion.’17
Predictably, Curzon was much more outspoken,
unreasonably so. In 1901 he stated that the strength of his
position as Viceroy lay in ‘the extraordinary inferiority in
character, honesty and capacity of the Indians. It is often
said why not make some prominent native a member of
the Viceroy’s Executive Council? The answer is that in the
whole continent there is not an Indian fit for the post.’18
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the raj at its zenith, 1858‒1905
Many British liberals and radicals saw things differ-
ently. In an article written in 1877, the great Liberal leader
William Ewart Gladstone looked more sympathetically at
Indian hopes and aspirations:
The question who shall have supreme rule in India is, by
the laws of right, an Indian question; and those laws of
right are from day to day growing into laws of fact. Our
title to be there depends upon a first condition, that our
being there is profitable to the Indian nations; and on a
second condition, that we can make them see and under-
stand it to be profitable. . . . It is high time that these
truths pass from the chill elevation of political philosophy
into the warmth of contact with daily life; that they take
their place in the working rules, and that they limit the
daily practice, of the agents of our power. . . . For unless
they do, we shall not be prepared to meet an inevitable
future. We shall not be able to confront the growth of the
Indian mind under the very active processes of education
which we have ourselves introduced.19
The more enlightened attitudes of people like Glad-
stone were often fiercely resented by members of the British
community in India. Many of them felt that Indian
advancement threatened their high-salaried jobs and their
social position, quite apart from the foundations of the
Empire in India.
In 1883 the bitter controversy over the Ilbert Bill
showed the deep prejudices of many of the British in India.
The Bill, named after the legal member of the Viceroy’s
105
the raj at its zenith, 1858‒1905
Executive Council, proposed that, since many Indians
were becoming qualified to act as magistrates, they should
be allowed to practise, and to try Europeans brought before
them. Many of the British community were incensed at
this proposal. One of them, Mrs Annette Beveridge,
insisted that the Bill would subject ‘civilized women [i.e.
Englishwomen] to the jurisdiction of men who have done
little or nothing to redeem the women of their own race,
and whose social ideas are still on the outer verge of civil-
ization’.
The editor of the Friend of India weighed in: ‘Would
you like to live in a country where at any moment your
wife would be liable to be sentenced on a false charge, the
magistrate being a copper-coloured Pagan?’20 The hyster-
ical reaction to the Ilbert Bill worked. The measure was
amended so that Europeans would be tried only by an all-
white jury.
Despite its high-minded official aspirations, British
rule was based on the fundamental belief in the superiority
of Europeans over ‘natives’. Blatant racial prejudice was
commonplace in British India. Some of its manifestations
were supposedly humorous, like the newspaper advertise-
ment that read: ‘wanted Sweepers, Punkah Coolies, and
Bhisties [water carriers] for the residents of Saidpur. None
but educated Bengali Babus who have passed the Univer-
sity Entrance Examination need apply. Ex-Deputy Magis-
trates (Bengali) preferred.’21
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the raj at its zenith, 1858‒1905
Sometimes satirical British writers aimed at bigger
and more sensitive targets, like the anonymous author of a
poem that openly mocked the Muslims:
O grim and ghastly Mussulman [Muslim]
Why art thou wailing so?
Is there a pain within thy brain
Or in thy little toe?
The twilight shades are shutting fast
The golden gates of day,
Then shut up, too, your hullabaloo –
Or what’s the matter, say?
That stern and sombre Mussulman,
He heeded not my speech
But raised again his howl of pain,—
A most unearthly screech!
‘He dies!’– I thought, and forthwith rushed
To aid the wretched man,
When, with a shout, he yell’d—‘Get out!
I’m singing the Koran!’22
All too frequently, the British might simply kick Indi-
ans out of their way or cuff their servants about the ears.
Wilfrid Blunt, while in India, objected to a British passen-
ger on a train in a station threatening some nearby Indians
with a stick. The passenger was indignant ‘at my venturing
to call him to account. It was his affair not mine. Who was
I that I should interpose myself between an Englishman
and his natural right?’23 To his credit, Blunt eventually got
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the raj at its zenith, 1858‒1905
the irate man to apologize, but such contrition was not
always forthcoming.
On the other hand, the British observer, writer, or
parliamentarian who visited India and dared to criticize
the Raj was likely to be even more unpopular than the
awkward, ‘jumped-up’ babus. It was assumed, of course,
that these visitors never understood India at all: ‘Mr Cox,
the member of Parliament—perhaps you may remember
him?’ ‘A little red-haired fellow, was he? Who wrote a
book about India on the back of his two-monthly return
ticket?’24
Kipling also wrote scathingly of ‘Pagett, M.P.’:
Pagett M.P. was a liar, and a fluent liar therewith,
He spoke of the heat of India as ‘The Asian Solar Myth’,
Came on a four months’ visit to ‘study the East’ in
November,
And I got him to make an agreement vowing to stay till
September.
April began with the punkah, coolies, and prickly heat,
Pagett was dear to mosquitoes, sandflies found him a
treat.
He grew speckled and lumpy—hammered, I grieve to say, [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]

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