Book Reviews

THREE BOOKS ON BRITISH INDIA

The first Mackinlay to set foot in India arrived in 1852 on his own sailing ship, the King Alfred, which according to the log was less stylish than it sounds. Since then our family have had a continuous presence on the sub-continent, mainly in Calcutta and I was born on the North West Frontier in the BMH Quetta. Many readers will have similar connections. Most of us grew up speaking a cod version of Urdu with sunlit memories of lush gardens, big verandas and the comfortable security of living in the nicer part of town. I still love India. My Urdu is somewhat eroded and the blank spaces are filled with Nepali words.

In the last five years these bright memories have become darkened along with the whole story of our colonial past in India. Although a recent YouGov poll found that 59% of the population still felt that the British Empire was something to be proud of, 19% – mostly young people, were actively ashamed of it. At present the young are winning the argument; our past is under attack, statues are being defaced, in Parliament Square Winston Churchill has been graffitied as a racist, university lecturers who equivocate on the subject are going down like ninepins and the media is searching hard for yet more evidence of British misdeeds in India.

The shrillest of these attacks have been led by Sashi Tharoor who, when I knew him, was a civil servant in the UN Secretariat wearing sharp suits and speaking with a posh English accent. Now that he is the Lok Sabha member for Thiruvanathapuran, Tharoor has taken on a home spun look and has a pretty confrontational line of nationalist rhetoric, mostly aimed at the British. In 2015 his attack on the colonial British at the Oxford Union went viral which prompted him to rush out his book, apparently written in 12 days. Tharoor’s message is absolute; throughout their presence in India the British acted cynically and rapaciously at all times. There was no white man’s burden, it was an entirely exploitative relationship which left India in a far worse condition in every sense than when the British first anchored off the Gujarat coast in 1608. The British, he maintains, held India solely for their own benefit and during the centuries that followed funded their overseas footprint from their depredation of India. Far from uniting India they left it more divided than ever and India’s political problems today are a direct consequence of British rule.

Although British and Indian critics have dismantled many of Tharoor’s arguments, as a polemic attack it succeeded, the mud has stuck, the Inglorious Empire version of our history is now widely cited by academics and BBC commentators. Sashi has made us think there is indeed more to say about the conduct of the British Raj than the Jewel in the Crown version of our relationship. East India Company officials did behave in a rapacious fashion, especially in the 1700s when there was a very limited sense of their having a civil responsibility for the population.

Much of Tharoor’s book however is argued in absolute terms and the personalities he uses to typify the British are familiar demons: Clive, Curzon, Dyer and so on. They are presented as Bollywood villains and there is no attempt to understand the British in India as cognitive beings or to explain their actions in the context of the 18th Century – as opposed to the 21st Century.

In a contemporary door stopper of a book (700 pages) Ferdinand Mount provides another version of British India. Mount is not afraid to engage with

the bad behaviour of East India Company officials, however his style is less inflammatory and the reader is gradually drawn into a more balanced and personal account through the lives of the Low family. They came from Fife and Mount is himself directly related to them. Robert Low was the first to leave the family home on Clatto Hill to seek his fortune. He joined the 1st Battalion of the Madras Native infantry in 1771. He was followed by his sons and grandsons and the story of the British in India is told through their family letters and records.

The Lows were successful. As staff officers they witnessed at first hand the East India Company campaigns of subjugation as well as the negotiating ploys of rulers and generals. It was a dangerous time and many of their contemporaries lie buried in graveyards across India. Commanding native infantry in the 1770s required guts and a flare for communication. The sepoys of John Company battalions only marched towards the enemy guns if their officers led from the front. And when the dust of battle settled military commanders, such as Robert and later John, had to think and act as diplomats, negotiating in a courtly version of Urdu to secure the most favourable treaty. The Laws were also district officers: as such they were required to be “hard active men in boots and breeches, who lived in the saddle, worked all day, ate and slept where they could, had no family and a few belongings that could be slung onto the back of a camel.” The Company’s initial strategy for holding territory by the sword was exploitative and successive Lows became agents of that policy; Tharoor insists they were all looters and villains, whereas in Mount’s version the Lows were developed as credible characters, who despite being the reluctant instruments of John Company, had courage and integrity. The significance of Mount’s story is that the Lows represented a class who were more complicated than Bollywood villains and cannot be convincingly judged by the 2020 standards of a youthful minority who twitter and shout in the streets.

William Dalrymple’s book The Anarchy arrived on the bookstands during the troubled winter of 2019 when we were searching for reliable experts to tell us about our imperial past. His title The Anarchy refers to the same period as Mount’s book – the end of the Mughal Empire and the military campaign to subjugate the sub-continent. In stark contrast to Shashi Tharoor’s twelve-day compilation, The Anarchy took more than six years to research and write. Dalrymple lives in India and his previous books on this period were written with the benefit of a long experience of the

The Relief of Lucknow, 1857 by Thomas Jones Barker

country and its people. For this book he translated unpublished material from the Mughal court as well as making some spectacular discoveries in the Rajasthan Research Institute and the National Archives of India. The result is that the Mughal and Nabob leaders in his narrative are presented with an intimacy which is reinforced by his choice of Mughal miniature paintings. These illustrate rulers and emperors dancing, riding to war or relaxing with their women. The British and French characters are also drawn in detail, nevertheless Dalrymple’s inherent sympathy is for the subjugated races. As the title suggests this is an account of a regime collapse and the struggle among local power-holders and the British to seize the space left by the charmless and puritanical Emperor – Aurangzeb. India Company, a trail blazing private stock company founded in 1599. In the succeeding centuries it grew into a state within the British Empire, successfully evading parliamentary control before it fell apart 250 years later. He explains the evolutionary processes which took place: how it grew from a trading company to become an army of conquest; how its officials changed from being cautious diplomats to rapacious looters; how this private company became a war machine that even Parliament could not control; above all how – having secured territory – the Company moved from unlicensed rapacity to a form of husbandry. During the anarchy there were no heroes: British, French, Mughals, Rohillas, Marathas and Nawabs – they all behaved atrociously.

In corporate terms the East India Company was wildly successful and Dalrymple’s text is peppered

with 18th and 19th century profit figures that translate into today’s money as hundreds of millions and later billions of pounds Stirling. Their ruthless trading behaviour was epitomised in the nature of Robert Clive. Clive grew up on a small family estate in Shropshire and from the start was a pugnacious and unruly child who fought his way through several schools and then without completing his education joined the Company as an accountant. Dalrymple describes him as a street fighter, violent, ruthless and quick to size up an opponent and then at the right moment deliver a blow that turned things to his favour. In 1746 while still an accountant he escaped from the French at Madras by taking charge of a group of straggling sepoys and leading them with great skill in local skirmishes. Once recognised as an effective military commander he rose swiftly through the ranks of the Company’s military force.

The worst excesses of the East India Company took place during his tenure as Governor General. By now the Company was holding a sizeable territory and their district administrators were authorised to tax the population. After military actions it was normal for John Company soldiers and mainly the officers to loot the opposition and their territory. During this period of intense predation and lawlessness there was also a prolonged drought. These conditions caused a disastrous famine and the numbers of dead and dying were too vast to hide. The news reached London with reports of Company officials grain-hoarding and profiteering from the situation while around them thousands perished. London was horrified and Clive was pilloried by the press; cartoonists demonised him as Lord Vulture. On his return to England he was called to defend himself in Parliament. But Clive, by now one of the richest men in Europe, succeeded in defeating the motion after a compelling two-hour speech in the house. The company had become too big to fail, too many members of parliament were now themselves investors, the East India Company’s survival was also the nation’s. Dalrymple’s narrative ends thirty years later in 1803 with the recall of the then Governor General Richard Wellesley, who had spent a great deal of money in the conquest of the remaining territories, assisted by his brother Arthur. The era which provided our generation’s glowing images of British India from Kipling to the Jewel in the Crown came later, by which time John Company had disappeared except in memory.

Dalrymple is seldom judgemental, nevertheless he manages to arouse our condemnation by presenting awful accounts of treachery, pillaging and slaughter not just by the British, but by all the parties involved. Throughout he is concerned only with the key figures and there is not much effort to engage with the characters at the front lines, the British officials, the native officers and the rank and file. Nor does he provide any insight on how successfully they worked together, especially when their collective grit won the day. He does describe the occasions when John Company battalions snatched victory from certain defeat and he does point to a unique quality that the British led forces had – which it appears their opponents had not. It was not a matter of superior field artillery or adopting the modern tactics of European armies – it was more about standing together and facing the enemy.

Human history has been defined by empires. Two thousand years later the bad behaviour of the Romans has been airbrushed from their popular image and in time who can say what will be the accepted version of the British. Right now with the benefit of these three books, we can listen calmly to the youthful noises in the street and follow the advice of Times columnist Mathew Parris who says: be proud of the good we did and be ashamed of our wrongs.

THE BRAVE SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH

Lieutenant Colonel Denis O’Leary OBE MC*

Brown Dog Books

The Brave Shall Inherit the Earth is the motto of the Rajputana Rifles, the oldest rifle regiment in the pre-World War 2 Indian Army. It is a fitting epitaph to this remarkable young officer who commanded the mortar platoon in 3/6th Rajputana Rifles during the 14th Army’s invasion of Burma in 1944.

Denis O’Leary OBE MC came from a family of soldiers in the pre-war Indian Army; his father was also RajRif. Just out of officer training, a practising Catholic, handsome, athletic, twenty years old, Denis joined 3/6th Rajputana Rifles on the eve of Field Marshal Slim’s invasion of Burma in 1944.

This book is a story of his Platoon and Battalion in that Homeric engagement. It is also a book about the close friendship and camaraderie formed between a British Officer and his Rajput and Punjabi ‘Mussalman’ soldiers in that campaign.

There is none of the customary hatred of the enemy in this book; the first dead Japanese that Denis comes across in the jungle hills of Manipur haunts him for the rest of his life. He comments that “We had been fortunate in our introduction to war. It had been a gradual process.” Luckily Denis learnt quickly and by the time he came to his Kurukshetra – a decisive battle to hold Pear Hill against suicidal Japanese attacks during the Irrawaddy crossings – his metal had been tested and forged.

During this battle, in which he won his first MC, he was badly wounded by shrapnel from an artillery shell and evacuated back to India for the rest of the war, only re-joining his beloved battalion in pre-

Independence Burma, which this account also covers.

Denis O’Leary was life-long soldier, he is a modest historian, he writes simply but eloquently. I know of no book so hauntingly beautiful about something so savage as war: Patrick Davis’ A Child at Arms is the nearest comparator that I know.

Rick Beven