lessons from british raj

Today West and East face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as religious war. Lessons can be learned from the mistakes of British imperial arrogance in India 150 years ago, and its misplaced idealism.


By William Dalrymple

In early May 1857 – almost exactly 150 years ago – the British Empire found itself threatened by the largest and bloodiest anti-colonial revolt against any European empire anywhere in the world in the entire course of the 19th century. There is much about the history of British imperial adventures in the East at this time, and the massive insurgency this provoked, which is strikingly and uneasily familiar to us today. There are also many lessons that can be learned from the mistakes that the imperial arrogance, as well as the misplaced idealism, of the British led them to make.

The British had been trading in India, in the form of the East India Company, since the early 17th century. But this commercial relationship changed during the 18th century as the power of the Mughal Empire began to fade. To protect its trade, its rights to extract minerals, and its wider geopolitical interests, the company began to recruit local troops and conquer territory.

Then at the end of the 18th century a new group of conservatives came into power, determined radically to expand British power: the Governor General, Lord Wellesely, the elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, called his new aggressive approach the Forward Policy. It was in effect a Project for the New British Century, as Wellesley made it clear he was determined to establish British dominance over all its European rivals – especially the French. He also firmly believed it was better pre-emptively to remove hostile Muslim regimes that presumed to resist the West’s growing power. There were, as ever, many voices in the more rightwing sections of the press who supported this view. The puppet Muslim allies who effectively allowed the Empire to run their affairs could stay for the time being, but those governments that were intent on resisting the advance of the West were simply not to be tolerated any longer.

Against a ‘furious fanatic’
Nor was there any doubt who would be the first to be targeted: a dictator whose family had usurped power in a military coup. According to British sources close to government he was “a cruel and relentless enemy”, an “intolerant bigot”, a “furious fanatic” who had “perpetually on his tongue the projects of Jihad”. This dictator was also deemed to be an “oppressive and unjust ruler… [and a] perfidious negotiator”.

Wellesley had arrived in India in 1798 with specific instructions to effect regime change and replace Tipu Sultan of Mysore with a western-backed puppet. First, however, Wellesley had to justify a policy whose outcome had already been decided. Wellesley began to mobilise his forces: military, logistical but most importantly rhetorical, for to get agreement for an expensive and divisive war is never easy, and it is only by marshalling a body of apparently convincing evidence against your opponent that the belly-aching anti-imperialists at home – in this case the coterie that had gathered around Edmund Burke – could be shut up.

It was with this in mind that Wellesley and his allies began a comprehensive campaign of vilification against Tipu, portraying him as a vicious and aggressive Muslim monster who planned to wipe the British off the map of India. This essay in imperial villain-making duly opened the way for a lucrative conquest and the installation of a more pliable regime which allowed the conquerors to give the impression they were handing the country back to its rightful owners while in reality maintaining firm western control.

The British progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers to annexing even the most pliant Islamic states. In February 1856 they marched into Avadh on the lame excuse that the Nawab was “excessively debauched”.

To support the annexation, a “dodgy dossier” was produced before parliament, so full of distortions and exaggerations that one British official who had been involved in the operation described the Parliamentary Blue Book on Oudh as “a fiction of official penmanship, [an] Oriental romance” that was refuted “by one simple and obstinate fact”: that the conquered people of Avadh clearly “preferred the slandered regime” of the Nawab “to the grasping but rose-coloured government of the Company”. In this way, by early 1857, the East India Company was directly ruling about two-thirds of the subcontinent.

Ruled and redeemed
Many British officials who believed in the “forward” policy were also nursing plans to impose not just British laws and technology on India, but also British values. India would be not only ruled, but redeemed. Local laws which offended Christian sensibilities were abrogated: the burning of widows, for example, was banned. One of the Company directors, Charles Grant, spoke for many when he wrote of how he believed Providence had brought the British to India for a higher purpose: “Is it not necessary to conclude that our Asiatic territories were given to us, not merely that we draw a profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, the light of Truth?”

If the tracts of the missionaries reinforced Muslim fears, increasing opposition to British rule and creating a constituency for the rapidly multiplying jihadists determined to stop the rule of the kafir infidels, so the existence of “Wahhabi conspiracies” to resist the Christians strengthened the conviction of the evangelicals that a “strong attack” was needed to take on such “Muslim fanatics”.

The reaction to this steady crescendo of insensitivity came in 1857 with the Great Mutiny. Soon after dawn on 11 May 1857, the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was saying his morning prayers in his oratory overlooking the river Jumna, when he saw a cloud of dust rising from the far side of the river. Minutes later, he was able to see its cause: 300 East India Company cavalrymen charging wildly towards his palace.

The troops had ridden overnight from Meerut, where they had turned their guns on their British officers, and had come to Delhi to ask the Emperor to bestow his blessing on their mutiny. Shortly afterwards, the sepoys entered Delhi, massacred every Christian man, woman and child they could find, and declared the 82-year-old emperor to be their leader. Later they stood in the Chandni Chowk, the main street of Delhi, and asked people: “Brothers: are you with those of the faith?” British men and women who had converted to Islam – and there were a surprising number of those in Delhi – were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately. As a letter sent out by the rebels’ leaders subsequently put it: “The English are people who overthrow all religions… As the English are the common enemy of both [Hindus and Muslims, we] should unite in their slaughter… By this alone will the lives and faiths of both be saved.”

Before long the insurgency had snowballed into the largest anti-colonial revolt against any European empire in the 19th century. Of the 139,000 sepoys of the Bengal army all but 7,796 turned against their British masters. In many places the sepoys were supported by a widespread civilian rebellion. Atrocities abounded on both sides.

Though it had many causes and reflected many deeply held political and economic grievances – particularly the feeling that the heathen foreigners were interfering with a part of the world to which they were entirely alien – the uprising was nevertheless articulated as a war of religion, and especially as a defensive action against the rapid inroads missionaries and Christian ideas were making in India, combined with a more generalised fight for freedom from western occupation.

‘Suicide ghazis’
Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, there were many echoes of the Islamic insurgencies the US fights today in Iraq and Afghanistan: in Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the resistance fighters described themselves as mujahideen or jihadists. Indeed, by the end of the siege, after a significant proportion of the sepoys had melted away, the proportion of jihadists in the rebellion’s storm centre of Delhi grew to be about half of the total rebel force, and included a regiment of “suicide ghazis” who had vowed never to eat again and to fight until they met death at the hands of the kafirs, “for those who have come to die have no need for food”.

The siege came to its climax on 14 September 1857, when British forces attacked the city. They proceeded to massacre not just the rebel sepoys and the jihadists, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. In one neighbourhood alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 unarmed citizens were cut down. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded one young officer, Edward Vibart.

“It was literally murder … I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful… Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference...”

Those city dwellers who survived the killing were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Delhi, a bustling and sophisticated city of half a million souls, was left an empty ruin. Though the Mughal imperial family had surrendered peacefully, most of the emperor’s 16 sons were tried and hung, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked: “In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar,” Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister the following day. “I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.”

The captured emperor was put on trial and charged – quite inaccurately – with being behind an international Muslim conspiracy to subvert the British Empire, stretching from Mecca and Iran to the walls of the Red Fort. Contrary to the evidence that the uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, the British prosecutor argued that, “toMusalman intrigues and Mahommedan conspiracy we may mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of 1857”. Like some of the ideas propelling more recent adventures in the East, this was a ridiculous and bigoted over-simplification of a far more complex reality. As today, politicians found it easier to blame mindless “Muslim fanaticism” for the bloodshed they had unleashed than to examine the effects of their own foreign policies.

Reinforcing hatreds
Yet the lessons of the bloody uprising of 1857 are very clear. No one likes people of a different faith conquering them, taking their land, or force-feeding them improving ideas at the point of a bayonet. The British in 1857 discovered what Israel and the US are learning now: that nothing so easily radicalises a people against them, or so undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the East. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the others.

The violent suppression of the great uprising of 1857 was a pivotal moment in the history of British imperialism in India. It marked the end both of the East India Company and the Mughal dynasty, the two principal forces that had shaped Indian history over the previous 300 years, and replaced both with undisguised imperial rule by the British government. Shortly after Zafar’s corpse had been tipped into its anonymous Burmese grave, Queen Victoria accepted the title “Empress of India” from Disraeli, initiating a very different period of direct imperial rule.

Yet in many ways the legacy of the period is still with us, and there is a direct link between the jihadists of 1857 and those we face today. For the reaction of some of the Muslim ulema after 1857 was to reject the West and the gentle Sufi traditions of the Mughal emperors, who they tended to regard as western puppets; instead they attempted to return to pure Islamic roots. So was founded a Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband which went back to Koranic basics. One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaida, the most radical Islamic counterattack the West has yet had to face.

So does history repeat itself: not only are westerners again playing their old game of installing puppet regimes, propped up by western garrisons, for their own political ends, but more alarmingly the intellectual attitudes sustained by such adventures remain intact. Despite over 25 years of assault by Edward Said and his followers, old style Orientalism is still alive and kicking, its prejudices quite intact, with Samuel Huntingdon, Bernard Lewis and Charles Krauthammer in the roles of the new Mills and Macauleys. Through the pens of neo-con writers, the old colonial idea of the Muslim ruler as the decadent Oriental despot lives on; and as before it is effortlessly projected on to a credulous public by warmongers in order to justify their imperial projects.

Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as religious war. Suicide jihadists fight what they see as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are slaughtered. As before, western evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of “incarnate fiends” and simplistically conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with “pure evil.” Again western countries, blind to the effects of their foreign policies, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked – as they see it – by mindless fanatics. There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke, those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.