British Behavior in India After 1857.
British in India thought themselves to be entitled. They assumed that these natives are a fallen civilization whose only purpose is to serve the superior White race. They also assumed that the natives had accepted their second place on the planet.
The British roamed around like White Mughals. They took over the Mughal harem facilities. William Dalrymple documented this in his work White Mughals. The fact remains that India was a recreational spot for British subjects who opted to work for the East India Company. Sex and alcohol were available in abundance.
What British did not realize that Mogul were accepted as the emperor but not out of choice. People had suffered under Mogul for over 200 years. The last ruling Mogul Aurangzeb was bigot who took pleasure in inflicting pain upon Hindus. There were severe restrictions on Hindu celebrations, religious, or traditional. Conversion had become an industry. Jaipur Museum has the Firman of Aurangzeb specifying the rates of payment to be made for conversion to Islam.
In these circumstances the British rule was a liberal regime which left them alone to manage their own affairs. British mistook this situation as a blind acceptance of their rule through the proxy of salary paid Mogul Emperor.
British were not a great military power until they assembled the local armies. Every major British victory in India was achieved through treachery rather than martial courage.
Deceit as a Military Doctrine
A brief look at the military campaign of British would reveal this fact.
Plassey (1757): Lord Clive did not win Plassey through military genius. He won by bribing Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah’s army, to stand down during the battle. Clive even forged signatures on secret agreements to cheat his own co-conspirators. Plassey was not a battle; it was a real estate transaction.
The Subsidiary Alliance: Lord Wellesley invented a system of “friendly protection.” The British offered to station troops in a kingdom to protect the native ruler. The ruler was forced to pay for the maintenance of the British army. When the payments drained the kingdom’s treasury dry, the British annexed the state to collect the debt. It was protection racketeering disguised as friendship.
The Doctrine of Lapse (Escheat): Lord Dalhousie invented a legal trick stating that if an Indian ruler died without a direct male heir, his kingdom was annexed by the Crown. The British simply refused to recognize the ancient Indian legal right of adoption. Through this paper trick, they seized Jhansi (Rani Lakshmibai’s state), Satara, Nagpur, and Sambalpur without firing a shot.
The Annexation of Awadh (1856): For nearly a century, the Nawabs of Awadh had been Britain’s most loyal allies, lending them money and troops. The British repaid this century of loyalty by annexing Awadh in 1856 under the invented excuse of “misgovernance,” stripping Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of his crown.
In the last two battles and similar other annexations the British revealed their hand. They were not here to be satisfied with just the revenue. They wanted to suck India dry of its resources. They wanted to take away every shred of sovereignty away from local rulers. This gave rise to the war of 1857. Needless to say that it was only one of several other factors.
War of 1857
The trigger was a cartridge.
In 1857, the British introduced the Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle across the Bengal Army. The new cartridge had to be bitten open before loading. The grease used to seal it was widely reported to be a mixture of beef fat and pork fat. For Hindu soldiers, touching beef was a religious violation. For Muslim soldiers, touching pork was forbidden. The British had, in one administrative decision, managed to simultaneously offend every soldier in the Bengal Army.
On March 29, 1857, Sepoy Mangal Pandey of the 34th Bengal Infantry at Barrackpore attacked two British officers and called on his regiment to revolt. He was arrested, tried, and hanged on April 8.
The British dismissed it as an isolated incident.
On May 9, 1857, at Meerut, eighty-five soldiers of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry refused to use the cartridges. They were court-martialled, stripped of their uniforms, and sentenced to ten years of hard labour in front of their own regiments. The next morning, May 10, their comrades broke into the jail, freed them, killed their British officers, and marched to Delhi.
Within weeks, the rebellion had engulfed Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, and Jhansi. Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, whose kingdom had already been stolen through the Doctrine of Lapse, took command of its defense herself.
The British response was systematic terror. Captured soldiers were strapped across the mouths of artillery cannons and blown apart. The method had a name: the devil’s wind. Villages believed to have sheltered rebels were burned. Summary hangings required no trial.
When Delhi was retaken in September 1857, British officer William Hodson intercepted the sons and grandsons of Bahadur Shah Zafar at the Khooni Darwaza (the Bloody Gate) and shot them at point-blank range. He sent their heads to the Emperor as a message.
Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor, was tried in a kangaroo court and exiled to Rangoon, Burma, where he died in 1862. He was not permitted to return to Indian soil. He is buried in Rangoon to this day.
The British called the events of 1857 a Mutiny. Indians call it the First War of Independence.
The distinction is not semantic. A mutiny is a breach of military discipline. A war of independence is a civilization refusing to accept subjugation. The British chose the word precisely because it denied the legitimacy of the resistance and reduced a continent-wide uprising to a disciplinary problem.
Aftermath of War
It turned out that the Harams enjoyed where English officers were the source of the intelligence failure which contributed to the annihilation of British. Therefore, the first thing British did after coming into power was to destroy the Mogul Haram. Read about it here in detail.
The next thing to do was to transport the last Mogul to Burma. Rest of the Mogul descendants, those who did not run away, were executed or transported to Port Blair cellular prison referred to in chapter 2.
But the British sex addiction needed to be fed though some other means. So they created official brothels in each cantonments. They exploited local girls there and literally threw them out when they fell ill. Read about it here.
The reversal of misfortune of British in 1857 war embolden them to be more brutal. Now they were to reveal their true face as they were now in direct control of India. Queen had taken over the reigns of India from East India Company. India had become British India.
Engineered Famines: Administrative Mass Murder
When brute force could not be used in the open, administrative paperwork achieved the same result. The famines that swept India under British rule were not natural disasters; they were state-sanctioned mass murders executed through logistics and tax extraction.
The Great Famine of 1876 to 1878 killed between 5.5 and 10 million people across central and southern India. The Viceroy, Lord Lytton, enforced strict laissez-faire market policies. While millions starved, Lytton insisted on exporting record quantities of Indian wheat to England.
In 1877, as thousands died daily of starvation, Lord Lytton organized the lavish Delhi Durbar to proclaim Queen Victoria “Empress of India.” Thousands of guests feasted for a week while the surrounding countryside starved. The minimal relief camps Lytton established provided daily rations lower than those later documented at Buchenwald concentration camp.
First World War
The victory of British over Germany came with two fortunes. The first was war reparations from Germany. The second was the carve-up of Arabia, from whose sands oil would later be discovered. The British drew the map of the Arab world and installed loyal rulers as kings in the newly created countries. Those borders, drawn in London, are still bleeding today.
Over 1.5 million Indian soldiers served in the First World War. They fought in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, East Africa, and the Western Front. The Indian Army suffered approximately 74,000 battlefield deaths. Their contribution was decisive. It was never acknowledged in any British history taught in British schools.
Far from gratitude, the British responded to Indian wartime sacrifice with tightened repression. The Rowlatt Act of 1919 allowed imprisonment without trial and without appeal. It was the reward India received for bleeding for Britain.
British follow the only pattern they know. The more powerful they feel, more repressive they got. Worst was to follow soon.
Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
On April 13, 1919, the festival of Baisakhi, a crowd of approximately 15,000 to 20,000 people gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed public garden in Amritsar, Punjab. Most had come for the festival. Some had allegedly come to protest the Rowlatt Act.
General Reginald Dyer arrived with 50 soldiers. The armoured cars he had brought could not fit through the garden’s narrow entrance. Dyer gave no order to disperse. He gave no warning. He positioned his troops at the only functional exit and ordered them to fire in cold blood.
His troops fired 1,650 rounds in approximately ten minutes, directly into the crowd. The garden’s walls prevented escape. People jumped into a well inside the garden to avoid the bullets. The well was later found to contain 120 bodies.
The official British death toll was 379. The Indian National Congress counted more than 1,000 dead and 1,500 wounded.
At the Hunter Commission inquiry, General Dyer testified without remorse. He stated that he would have used the armoured cars and their machine guns if they had fit through the entrance. His intention, he said, was not merely to disperse the crowd but to produce a “moral and widespread effect.” The phrase was a euphemism for ‘terror’. He wanted the people of India to be terrified of White man.
The Hunter Commission censured General Dyer. He was asked to resign. He was not prosecuted. He was not tried.
The reaction of British society was the true revelation about their nature which once again reinforces the title of this series “British ‘Are’ Failed Human’. The British society failed, yet again.
The House of Lords passed a motion supporting General Dyer. The conservative newspaper The Morning Post raised £26,000 in public subscription for him, calling it a tribute to the “Saviour of the Punjab.” Rudyard Kipling praised him. General Dyer himself later said: “I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would remember.”
Winston Churchill, in one of his rarer decent moments, condemned the massacre in Parliament as “a monstrous event.” Nobody listened.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Governor Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the civilian head of Punjab who had not been present at the garden but had publicly approved and defended General Dyer’s action, called the massacre “correct” and praised it in his memoirs.
Jallianwala Bagh ended any remaining Indian illusion about British intentions. A young man named Udham Singh, who had been present in the garden on April 13, 1919, waited twenty-one years. On March 13, 1940, in London, he shot and killed Lieutenant Governor Sir Michael O’Dwyer. Terror replied with murder. No civilian was injured.
When brought before the court, Udham Singh gave his name as Ram Mohammad Singh Azad: a Hindu name, a Muslim name, a Sikh name, and the word for freedom, all in one. It was a deliberate statement. The massacre had not divided communities. It had united them. He wanted the court, and through the court all of Britain, to understand that every community in India stood behind the act.
Udham Singh was hanged on July 31, 1940. He is remembered in India as a martyr. Irony is that Gene Sharp’s followers now hang his picture on the wall.
General Dyer already died in his bed in 1927. Lieutenant Governor O’Dwyer was shot dead in London in 1940.
Bengal 1943: The Last Act of Brutality
If anyone believed the British had evolved into a civilized administration by the 20th century, the Bengal Famine of 1943 proved that their core brutality remained unchanged.
Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet implemented a “Denial Policy” in Bengal under the pretext of preventing a Japanese invasion from Burma. British authorities confiscated or destroyed over 66,000 local boats, the primary transportation for food, fish, and agricultural trade across the Bengal delta.
Simultaneously, Bengal’s grain reserves were systematically seized and shipped abroad to build up food stockpiles for British troops in Europe and the Mediterranean.
When Viceroy Lord Wavell and local administrators begged London for emergency grain shipments from Australia or North America, Churchill repeatedly refused. In private Cabinet meetings, Churchill expressed open contempt for the dying Bengalis, stating that the famine was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and asking bitterly why Gandhi had not died yet.
About 2 or 3 million Bengalis starved to death in 1943. The food existed in the world. The ships were available. The death toll was a conscious decision made in London.
Loss of Moral Mandate and the Nurtured Exit
In Indian political philosophy, a ruler who starves his people loses the moral right to rule (Raja Dharma). By 1943, the British had burned their last shred of moral authority in India. They were no longer viewed as an empire; they were viewed as a criminal organization.
The British knew they could no longer hold India by force. The Royal Indian Navy mutinied in 1946, Indian soldiers in the British Indian Army were no longer reliable, and the economic toll of World War II had left Britain bankrupt.
They had to run. But they needed to leave with their reputation intact to protect their long-term economic interests. How they engineered that exit, and what it cost India, is the subject of the next chapter.
References:
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Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, 2001. ISBN: 978-1859847398. (Documenting Lord Lytton’s 1876 famine, wheat exports, the 1877 Delhi Durbar, and the Buchenwald calorie ration comparison).
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Mukerjee, Madhusree. Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of Bengal during World War II. Basic Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0465020003. (Detailed historical documentation of the 1943 Bengal Denial Policy, 66,000 confiscated boats, grain stockpiling, and Churchill’s refusal of relief ships).
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Bhalla, Sandeep. How Britain Robbed Ten Percent of India’s GDP in 1947. URL: https://sandeepbhalla.in/how-britain-robbed-ten-percent-of-indias-gdp-in-1947/ (Documenting the British exit, unpaid war debt, and economic robbery of India).