Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress

by John R. McLane

Overview

Tracing the history of the Indian National Congress from its founding in 1885 until about 1905, Professor McLane analyzes its efforts to build a national community and to obtain fundamental reforms from the British. In so doing, he extends our understanding of the dynamics of Indian pluralism.

In its first two decades of existence, the Congress failed to inspire sacrifices from its members or to attract Muslims or Indians without an English education. The author explains this early stagnation in terms of developments within the Congress as well as outside in Indian society.

Originally published in 1978.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691635866
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1403
Pages:	418
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.40(d)

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Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress

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By John R. McLane

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10056-2

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CHAPTER 1

THE RULERS

A majority of the leaders of the early Indian National Congress had been educated in England, most had had English teachers, most drew their main political ideas from English traditions. All spoke English and used it to communicate with nationalist colleagues from other linguistic regions. In their professions, many of them had English superiors as well as English rivals. When Indians sought administrative change or constitutional reform, they had to ask English officials or English politicians. And in seeking reform, they looked for allies both in England and among the small band of sympathetic editors, missionaries, administrators, and other European friends within India. The tactics and rhetoric of pre-Gandhian nationalism were profoundly affected by the leaders' multiple dependencies upon the rulers' language, culture, and political divisions.

The British State

The intimate association with the English, however, should not obscure the basic conflict which existed between English national interests and the ultimate goals of the Indian national movement. The Indian National Congress was founded to gain Indians a larger share of political and economic power. That power at its higher levels was monopolized by the English. Indian demands in the 1870s and 1880s for liberalization provoked English assertions of the superiority of Western civilization and a determination not to compromise their monopoly. Few Englishmen doubted the necessity or stability of British rule. Most believed India was Britain's and would remain so indefinitely. It was, as Francis Hutchins has argued, the age of "the illusion of permanence." English rejection of nationalist demands, and racist arguments and behavior which accompanied the rejection, provided a powerful impetus to the growth of nationalism.

Most Englishmen in India seemed to feel the general principles guiding British administration, while subject to refinement and minor improvements, were satisfactory on the whole. As long as the natives did not rebel, and as long as India continued to be profitable for British public and private interests, the great majority of Englishmen were content with the autocratic character of the Raj. For the indefinite future, there was no need to share political power with Indians. To do so would lessen India's economic and strategic value.

The value of the Indian connection was obvious and growing in the last two decades of the century. As one official wrote in 1892, "if British rule should end, the value of the interests affected would be so great that practically no adequate compensation would be possible." Englishmen had invested heavily in Indian agricultural and extractive industries, including tea, coffee, jute, indigo, and coal; they had bought shares in the Indian railways, some of which had had a guaranteed rate of profit and had been located to serve British manufacturing and military needs; they were able to sell British textiles in a sizable market in competition with the young, unprotected Indian textile industry; and they owned the largest banks, insurance companies, export houses, and shipping lines. Almost one-fifth of the total British overseas investment was in India and about one-fifth of British exports went to India. In return, the Government of India sent about one-fifth of its annual revenues to Britain as payment for loans, investments, administrative services, and military supplies and personnel.

India was also vital to British economic and strategic interests in the rest of Asia and in east Africa. British Indian banks serviced British trade in the Indian Ocean and further east, and Indian labor was exported to build railways, mine minerals, and work on British plantations. In strategic terms, India was Britain's most valued possession, representing her "oriental barracks," a reservoir of military manpower, a subsidy for the cost of the British military establishment, and a potential second front against Russia. The Indian Army was used for imperial and expansionist purposes which the British public tolerated because India paid a major share of the cost. In the forty years after the Mutiny, the Indian Army went to China (1859), Ethiopia (1867), Singapore (1867), Hong Kong (1868), Afghanistan (1878), Egypt (1882), Burma (1885), Nyasa (1893), t n e Sudan (1896), and Uganda (1896). Although the Indian taxpayers' share of the costs was gradually decreased in response to nationalist complaints, India was still required to contribute to Britain's non-Indian interests. As late as 1908, the Liberal secretary of state for India, Lord John Morley, agreed to the War Office's request to increase India's annual contribution to English army reserves from £420,000 to £720,000. When Lord Kitchener objected, the War Office replied

The principles of fair dealing enunciated by Lord Kitchener might be applicable enough to two independent states in alliance with each other. They are inapplicable to a dependency inhabited by alien races, our hold over which is not based on the general goodwill of those disunited races.

India, in other words, was held as she had been taken — by the sword.

The sword, it was hoped, would remain sheathed except to awe the native population, and the ordinary work of administration was performed by the civilians of the Indian Civil Service. The largely British I.C.S. was a powerful opponent of nationalist aspiration in its own right. The more than 900 members were a well-paid elite who looked forward to a varied and exotic career and the option of retiring with a generous pension after 25 years. All but a few Indians were kept out by giving the I.C.S. entrance examinations in England in subjects which ordinarily required years of schooling in England. When British officials discussed changing this system in the late nineteenth century, they usually considered ways of restricting, rather than expanding, the trickle of Indians entering the I.C.S. By 1902, 40 of the 1,067 I.C.S. officers were "Natives."

Exclusion of Indians from high office in the allied services was even more effective than in the I.C.S. In 1907, "not a single post out of 278 paying Rs. 800 or more per year was held by an Indian in the forest, police, post office, telegraph, salt, survey, or political services of British India." Taking the civil services together, and using a lower salary base, in 1887 Europeans held 4,836 of the 8,840 posts paying Rs. 200 per month or more; in 1913 they held 4,898 out of 11,064. In both years, Anglo-Indians held a third as many as Indians and Burmans, so that Indians and Burmans held a mere 34 per cent of the total in 1887 and 42 per cent in 1913. The combined opposition of British administrators and British commercial and military interests to any relaxation of their privileged position continued until World War I to be an insurmountable obstacle to realization of the nationalist goal of Indianization of the Raj.

An earlier generation of Englishmen had held that preparation for self-rule was part of their mission in India. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as nationalists asked to share power and as Gladstonian liberalism declined in popularity in England, justification for continuing autocracy was frequently heard. James Fitzjames Stephen, Henry Maine, and others with Indian experience were among leading Liberals who joined Conservatives in suggesting that extending forms of democracy might inhibit creative individualism and initiative, that it might produce inefficient government, and that it would weaken the Empire. The strongly conservative current within the Liberal Party, which emerged clearly during the controversy over the Irish Home Rule Bill in 1886, meant that the leaders of both major British political parties were unsympathetic to the major demands of the Indian National Congress. The new conservatism was a retreat from the earlier "emphasis on moral force and the influence of the example of British character, to the less ambitious idea that India was held simply by military power."

Congress demands were not rejected indiscriminately. They were formulated in the vocabulary of English liberalism, they were advanced through constitutional channels, and they were supported by Liberal backbenchers and a handful of active and retired I.C.S. officers. Most specific policy demands were moderate and would not have fundamentally compromised British political and economic interests. Public commissions on education, civil service, finance, and famine listened to lengthy testimony from Indian and British witnesses and then recommended reforms along lines suggested by the more moderate critics. Nationalist requests for Indianization of the administration, for example, were considered by the Public Service Commission which was appointed in 1886. The commission rejected the demand for simultaneous I.C.S. examinations in India and Britain. As a consolation, though, a small number of posts were transferred from the I.C.S. to the Provincial Civil Service (the examinations for which were held in India), and the maximum age limit for entrance into the I.C.S. was raised from nineteen to twenty-three, making it somewhat easier for Indians to compete. However, these were minor changes. In 1915, more than 50 years after the first Indian was admitted, only 63 Indians, or 5 per cent of the total, were members of the I.C.S. Rapid Indianization began only with World War I.

The British were more accommodating to nationalist requests for representative institutions. Most district boards and municipal councils had large Indian majorities by the 1880s. Officials regarded local government as a training ground and safety valve for Indian political aspirations. However, educated nationalists were far more interested in the provincial and the Viceroy's legislative councils. Parliament enlarged the councils in 1892 for the first time in thirty years, and under the Councils Act of 1892 certain Indian political bodies were given the right to nominate members to the councils. But the role of the Indian minority in the councils remained an advisory one, and individual provincial councils met as infrequently as half a dozen times in some years.

The slight modification in the procedures for recruiting civil servants and the Councils Act of 1892 fell far short of Congress goals. Yet the administrations of Lord Lansdowne (1888-1894), Lord Elgin (1894-1898), and Lord Curzon (1898-1905) believed that the government had gone as far as it should in meeting Indian desires for participation in the public service and legislatures. Some officials felt that it had gone too far, that it should have reserved the 900 or so highest posts for Englishmen. Curzon wrote in 1900 that the absence of an absolute racial qualification meant these posts were "being filched away by the superior wits of the Natives in the English examination." He thought this "to be the greatest peril with which British administration in India was confronted." Attitudes of this sort were common. They meant that the government and the Congress had reached an impasse within a few years of the Congress's founding. It is not too much to say that between 1892 and 1907, no major reform was made in response to nationalist aspirations.

Efforts to Isolate the Congress

Although the Congress was not regarded as an immediate threat to the British, the government wanted to prevent it from becoming one. The government evolved a number of strategies for isolating and weakening the Congress. These strategies were most clearly articulated, and were apparently effective, during Lord Curzon's viceroyalty. Official control over education and the press was tightened, official pressure was applied to rural supporters of the Congress, the Congress was deliberately ignored in official speeches and documents, and an effort was made to project an image of the government as the special friend and protector of the rural classes against the educated classes of the cities who supported the Congress.

At the heart of the anti-Congress policy were efforts to win rural support for the government in order to remove the possibility that either landlords or tenants might find common cause with urban nationalists. Particular attention was given to the restoration of the Indian aristocracies' fading influence as "natural leaders" of society. This policy predated the Congress and was based on the notion that "the basis of internal order is ... to be found in the recognition of a patrician aristocracy of indigenous growth, and trained by past associations to control and lead." As an anti-Congress policy, it was reinstituted by Lord Dufferin, who complained that "at one time it was our policy to cut off the tall poppies." Dufferin intervened on the side of landlords in Bengal, Bihar, and Oudh to modify some of the protection I.C.S. members had written into tenancy bills during the drafting stage. Under Lord Curzon, the pro-aristocracy policy was pursued with determination on the grounds that since the government could offer little "which will fit in with the aspirations of 'young India,' it is most advisable to encourage in every way we can 'older India.'" This involved favoring non-Congress landlords in awarding appointments, titles, and honors, granting army commissions in the Imperial Cadet Corps to sons of aristocratic families, insisting that aristocrats develop a high conception of public responsibility and service, and enacting laws to keep landed estates from passing out of the hands of old families. Officials wanted more than that the aristocrats feel well disposed toward the Raj; they also wanted them to enter public life and compete with urban professionals. They encouraged landlords to educate their children so they would be prepared for this competition. And they advised them how to run their organizations.

Government protection and support were extended to small landholders as well as large. The statutory rights of protected tenants in Bengal, Bihar, and the North-Western Provinces and Oudh were increased in the 1880s. In both Bombay and the Punjab, legislation was passed to prevent the appropriation of land by money-lenders and other noncultivating groups. Many officials perceived this strengthening of the interests of landlords and the richer cultivators as a means of retaining the loyalty of rural India and of isolating urban nationalists from a potential source of danger to the British Raj.

There were periods between 1885 and 1905 during which British efforts to isolate the educated nationalists seemed to be working. The failure of the Congress to win over many Muslims and large landholders was evident by 1890. Moreover, from roughly 1890 to 1903, the Congress was beset by organizational problems and by some disappointing attendances. Curzon even predicted the collapse of the Congress. Yet each time official optimism rose, new crises developed which indicated that nationalism's appeal might easily spread beyond the university-educated classes.

Portents of Future Trouble

The comforting political placidity of the late nineteenth century was disturbed periodically by religious revival movements, by localized unrest and violence, and by natural catastrophe. None but the crisis of 1897 was major, perhaps, but each was worrisome and potentially dangerous to the Raj.

In the early 1890s, sections of "older India," with support from English-educated nationalists, were aroused against British legislation raising the legal age of marriage to twelve and against British tolerance of cow slaughter. The magnitude of Hindu feeling expressed over the Age of Consent Bill and the cow slaughter issue suggested there existed considerable latent support for anti-British movements outside the English-speaking classes. The refusal of most educated Indians to support the raising of the legal age of marriage indicated that English-educated Indians had realized their Westernized ways had alienated them from their countrymen and that they were now siding with the conservative "masses" against European civilization. The Congress's refusal to permit the Social Reform Conference to use its pandal in 1895 was further evidence of a growing Hindu reaction among the nationalists.

In the late 1890s, two major famines, judged by many to be the worst of the century, cast serious doubts on official estimates of increasing prosperity. The inability of poor Indians to survive disease during the famine was evidence of pervasive malnutrition; the death of at least six million Indians stricken with plague between 1896 and 1909 gave further confirmation. Soon after the twin disasters of famine and plague first appeared, a small group of Brahman conspirators, who perceived an erosion of Hinduism, assassinated two British officials responsible for enforcing unpopular plague regulations in Poona in June 1897, foreshadowing the larger terrorist movement which began in 1907.

In the same year as the Poona murders, Muslim tribesmen rose in a bloody rebellion along a lengthy section of the northwest frontier. This trouble on the frontier coincided with a marked increase of Indian Muslim interest in Middle Eastern affairs, stimulated by the Pan-Islamic movement and the 1897 Graeco-Turkish War. The exhortations by the Pan-Islamicists to regard the Sultan of Turkey as the political and spiritual leader of all Muslims made Englishmen apprehensive about future Muslim loyalty to British rule.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• Preface, pg. vii
• Abbreviations, pg. ix
• Glossary, pg. xi
• Introduction, pg. 1
• One. The Rulers, pg. 21
• Two. Congress Leaders, pg. 50
• Three. The First Years of the Congress and Allan Octavian Hume, pg. 89
• Four. Congress in the Doldrums, pg. 130
• Five. Moderates, Extremists, and the Congress Constitution, pg. 152
• Six. Toward the Integration of Indian Elites, pg. 179
• Seven. Congress and the Landlord Interest, pg. 211
• Eight. The Congress, Peasants, and the Alienation of Land, pg. 243
• Nine. Cow Protection and National Politics, pg. 271
• Ten. Cow Protection Riots and Their Aftermath, pg. 309
• Eleven. The Hindu Martial Revival and the Chapekar Terrorist Society, pg. 332
• Conclusion, pg. 359
• Bibliography, pg. 371
• Index, pg. 391