The book is divided into three parts, one dealing with governance of India under Company rule, another on India’s progress between 1858 and 1947 and the last on Indian influence on western life and culture, a fascinating picture by itself.
Writing the history of any country can be a very tricky exercise, the problem is how to interpret events. There is no such tiling as the only truth. Historical events have many faces and a historian has to be careful how to interpret them.
Michael Edwardes has written about the British in India from 1772 onwards. He calls it a survey of the nature and effects of alien rule. Says the Prefaces: “The theme of this book is the meeting of two civilizations and its consequences in the fields of human and state activity.”
Edwardes wakes no claim to be exhaustive. As he puts it, “it is not an orthodox history of British India but a survey of aspects of British rule which are seldom dealt with in any detail in the more usual of histories where political events are given the largest space.”
In many ways the author is objective in his approach, which is saying a lot. Not that he is hesitant to slow the weaker side of Hinduism. Take, for example, ‘suttee’. He calls it a “practice of long standing in India and virtual widows usually died in company with their husbands”. Aurangzeb was opposed to it.
In 1780 the diseased Rajah of Marwar was joined to death by 64 wives and a Sikh prince of the Punjab took with him ten wives and no less than 800 concubines. Adds Edwardes: “Such holocausts as these were not offensive to Hindus.” Can one accept such a generalisation?
Before one starts to flick through the pages, one must read the Preface in which the author confesses that he has left out discussing about the Princely States and the work “is by no means exhaustive”. But be handles major events like the Armed Forces’ revolt of 1857, the founding of the Indian National Congress, the reformist movements in the country with commendable objectivity. Such is the thorough research done by Edwardes that one hesitates to a take subject after subject for critical analysis. About the so-called ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, for instance, he says that the sepoys “believed with some justification” about the greased cartridges.
But he also says that by the end of 1856 “the whole of India – and particularly the north – was uneasy”. Nearly every class of India had been shaken in some ways by the reforms and political changes instituted by the British. The old order was due to change and the Sepoy Mutiny (Edwardes does not call it the First War of Independence) merely was the culmination of a clash of civilizations.
Summarising the event Edwardes says: “One of the principal fatcors in the suppression of the mutiny was the fact that most of the leading rebels were united only on one simple issues the ejection of the British. When this seemed impossible to achieve, everything else fell to pieces.”
India witnessed several British Viceroys come and go, one of the most effective one being Lord Dufferin. It was during Dufferin’s time that the Indian National Congress was born. According to Edwardes: “Congress had its origins not so much in the spontaneous desires of Indians as in the considered policy of the government.”
Dufferin was uncomfortable with the Bengali baboos whom in dismissed as “most irritating and trouble¬some”. When Dufferin arrived as Viceroy in 1884, his first task was to try and Quieten the unrest caused by Lord Ripon’s well-intentioned but basically weak administration.
How was he to smoothen Bengali angst? And how was he to smoothen relations with the vocal Hindu middle class? How was that to be achieved? There was a formed British civil servant, Allan Octavian Hume, who had a plan to set up a ‘national Congress’. Dufferin thought that it was a good idea.
Writes Edwardes though: “It has been suggested that Hume and Lord Dufferin were entirely responsible for the birth of the Congress. But there is no satisfactory evidence for this, there seems little doubt, however, that Dufferin welcomed Hume’s idea of a ‘safety valve for the escape of great and growing forces generated by our own actions’ and gave the proposal his support”.
So, for the British, the Indian National Congress was “a safety valve” and was motivated “by purely liberal and humanitarian feelings”. To quote Edwardes again: “The memory of the Mutiny was still strong in India and no right-thinking persons wanted a repetition of it.”
Edwardes has a lot to say about the national leaders of that period like Mahadev Govind Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Dadabhai Naoroji, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, not to speak of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
Of the latter, Edwardes says that “Savarkar had a terrorist past and he was strongly critical of Gandhi and of Congress”. Of the Hindu Mahasabha that he founded, Edwardes says that it was openly anti-Muslim and part of its public platform was that Indian Muslins must be reconverted to Hinduism.
Many more leaders come into the picture and the author has much to say about Gandhi and his contemporaries. Not forgotten are Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant and Swami Vivekananda. Of Gandhi the author says, the Mahatma “was a remarkably good judge of character” and was “able to see in Jawaharlal Nehru the liberal moderate hidden behind socialism and Marxist jargon”.
The book is divided into three parts, one dealing with governance of India under Company rule, another on India’s progress between 1858 and 1947 and the last on Indian influence on western life and culture, a fascinating picture by itself. The book tells it all, including the relationship between Hindus and Muslim. The Marathas don’t get any support at all and we are told that “wherever they went they left destruction and death between them – a debatable comment.
Edwardes has no love for the British Rule. Says he: “It should be clear from the preceding pages that the impact of British rule upon the complex societies of India was essentially disruptive. The process of government, of law, of economic theories and practice all ended to distort – in some cases break – the traditional web of human relationship”. And no wiser words were said about Britain’s rule of India.
[alert type=”e.g. warning, danger, success, info” title=””]India witnessed several British Viceroys come and go, one of the most effective one being Lord Dufferin. It was during Dufferin’s time that the Indian National Congress was born. According to Edwardes: “Congress had its origins not so much in the spontaneous desires of Indians as in the considered policy of the government.”[/alert]
Late M. V. KAMATH
