Debating a world at war

To understand the complex and interlocking historiographies that frame this article, we begin here by considering how the story of Indian anti-colonial nationalism has dominated the study of modern Indian history. The study of the First World War has focused on key political episodes during the war—the unification of the ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ factions of the Indian National Congress (1915–1916), the coming together of Congress and the Muslim League under the Lahore Pact of 1916, and the initiation of the Home Rule Leagues in the same year, which called for dominion status for India.Footnote ⁶ The Ghadar movement (1915) and introduction of the Montague-Chelmsford reforms of 1919, which deepened devolution and expanded representational bodies, have also been of considerable interest to historians because of their political implications for the rise of nationalism.Footnote ⁷ These larger narratives do not examine the impact of the war on India as a ‘home front’,Footnote ⁸ but, rather, focus instead on tracing the causal roots of the popular upsurge in post-war nationalist movements to the economic hardship produced by the war. The economic impact of the war has been interpreted largely in terms of increasing inflation, the imposition of heavy taxes, the adverse impact of colonial monetary policy on India, industrial expansion resulting from wartime shortages and labour unrest, and the post-war slump of the Indian economy.Footnote ⁹ This scholarship focuses on the coercion that marked the large-scale recruitment of soldiers in the rural hinterland,Footnote ¹⁰ and assumes that economic dislocations caused by the war fed nationalist resistance during the Rowlatt Satyagraha (1919) and the Non-Cooperation Movement (1921–22).Footnote ¹¹ Despite the importance of the two Indian war loans (raised through coercion) in contributing to popular political mobilization, little is known about how they came to be imposed on India. Historians mistakenly locate the war loans as the necessary outcome of the rise in Indian national debt as a consequence of increased military expenditure during the war.Footnote ¹² Instead, this article argues that the imposition of the war loans was a response by the colonial state to the conservative British press calling into question the value of India's contribution to the imperial war effort.

A renewed interest in the global dimensions of the First World War has contributed to a re-examination of the war from the vantage point of non-European participants in the conflict, including those from colonial South Asia.Footnote ¹³ However, as yet, no systematic attempt has been made to examine how India figured in press coverage of the war and propaganda—an especially serious omission given its far-reaching implications for political developments in India. Also neglected is the important role that the British press played in exposing the medical breakdown during the Mesopotamian campaign and its impact on colonial governance.Footnote ¹⁴ The history of the press in colonial India and in the settler colonies discusses the period of the First World War only in passing.Footnote ¹⁵ Chandrika Kaul's discussion of the censorship of the Indian press and the use of British newspapers for First World War propaganda by the India Office forms a notable exception.Footnote ¹⁶ Simon Potter's history of the imperial news system, which examines the relationship of news agencies from the settler colonies with the British government shows that they facilitated news censorship in the colonies to maintain morale and boost contributions to the imperial war effort.Footnote ¹⁷ Historians of South Asia interested in reconstructing the home front in major Indian recruiting regions have used news reports as sources, but without paying adequate attention to press censorship or the use of the press in war propaganda. Although the experience of Indian soldiers in British war hospitals has received some attention, their use in war propaganda has not been adequately examined.Footnote ¹⁸ This article examines more closely how India was used in war propaganda by the British press. In doing so, it analyses the imperial loyalism of the early war effort and shows that the exposé by the Northcliffe press of the Indian government's role in causing the Mesopotamian medical breakdown led to important political consequences in India.

Despite greater and longer involvement of Indian soldiers on the Mesopotamian and East African fronts, the literature on India and the First World War has focused largely on the Western Front.Footnote ¹⁹ Since the colonial Indian state nourished sub-imperialist ambitions in West Asia and East Africa, these campaigns were also politically significant.Footnote ²⁰ Historians who have examined the Mesopotamia campaign have tended to focus on operational or military histories.Footnote ²¹ The impact of the Mesopotamia Commission, which condemned the Indian government's prosecution of the war in West Asia, has received some attention, with historians tending to re-examine the conclusions of the Commission and whether or not its condemnation of actors in India was politically motivated.Footnote ²² Such re-examinations of the politics of the Commission would be more useful if they did not focus merely on British politics but also paid attention to political developments in India.

The tendency to view the history of the British press during the First World War within a national framework has obscured the entanglement of British newspapers with the British empire. The wartime censorship of the British press and the rising influence of press barons such as Northcliffe have been important themes in the domestic history of the British press during an imperial war.Footnote ²³ The historiography of the British press during the war does not examine how it perceived and portrayed colonial India's contribution to the war effort. The history of British First World War propaganda has a similar blind spot towards the empire, focusing on the activities of Wellington House, Beaverbrook's role in war propaganda, and on propaganda in neutral countries and the British home front.Footnote ²⁴ An analysis of news coverage of colonial India is useful in understanding how the empire was presented to the British public during the war.Footnote ²⁵ Propaganda on the home front focused on justifying Britain's role in the war by drawing on a language of patriotism, on maintaining recruitment and civilian morale, and on black propaganda against Germany. The use of propaganda to create sympathy and support for Britain in neutral countries has received much attention, but only passing mention is made in this historiography to propaganda about or in the empire, despite its importance to the war effort. This article focuses attention on the role of the British press in creating positive imperial war propaganda through reiteration of Indian loyalty, India's enthusiastic contribution to the war effort in the early phases of the war, and on Indian soldiers on the Western Front. News agencies such as Reuters cooperated clandestinely with the British government, which used Reuters’ networks to distribute propaganda within the empire and control the flow of news to the colonies during the war.Footnote ²⁶ This article provides a detailed examination of British press coverage of India's participation in the First World War from a wide political spectrum. It focuses not only on war propaganda by Northcliffe's imperially minded newspapers as well as prominent liberal papers but also news reports from a range of lesser known newspapers such as the right-wing Daily Express and the popular radical working-class evening daily, Star. While the focus of current articles on India in British war propaganda remains on the early phases of the war, which stressed the loyalty of India to the British empire, this article shows—for the first time—the important role played by the Northcliffe press in breaking this early consensus to report on the medical breakdown in the Mesopotamian campaign. Similarly, the historiography of British politics during the First World War acknowledges the significance of press intervention in politics during the war, especially in the reconfigurations of H. H. Asquith's government in 1915 and 1916, and on Lloyd George's manipulation of the press, but is oblivious to the imperial implications of this politics.Footnote ²⁷ This article shows conclusively that the focus on the Mesopotamia scandals was an important part of the attacks on the Asquith government by conservative British newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mail, and the Morning Post. While newspapers across the political spectrum were critical of the highest levels of the British administration in India after the exposé of the medical breakdown in Mesopotamia, news coverage varied considerably according to their political leanings. Thus, the Manchester Guardian sought to use this indictment of colonial governance to promote devolution of power in India in keeping with its liberal principles. Although the Northcliffe press had muted its negative coverage of the colonial Indian government after the Mesopotamia Commission Report, the Morning Post continued in its acerbic criticism until it had forced the colonial government to commit to making further contributions to the imperial war effort by raising ill-advised war loans in India. In focusing on the British press, the intention here is not to restore an older imperial historiography that treated political developments in Indian history as outgrowths of British political ideologies and influences. Indeed, press coverage of Indian finances shows the disproportionate influence exercised by the British press in shaping colonial policy. While the British press's criticism of the colonial state as a rigid bureaucracy hastened constitutional reform, its shrill demands for greater extraction of Indian economic resources imposed two war loans on a colony that was witnessing what has been called a ‘massive plunder of Indian human and material resources’ during the war.Footnote ²⁸ On the other hand, the Indian press was heavily censored and its protests against the severity of coercion during drives to raise funds for the imperial war effort were ignored.

The next section discusses how India and Indian soldiers on the Western Front were portrayed in early war propaganda by the British press. It delves deeper into the nature of war propaganda relating to India by juxtaposing its various aspects—the celebration of Indian soldiers’ valour; the military and financial aid rendered by the colonial Indian state and its allies, the princely rulers; the meanings of imperial loyalty in the early stages of the war; the role of medical arrangements for sepoys in boosting propaganda; the prominence in the British press's coverage of the ethnic customs of Indian soldiers; imperial anxieties regarding Muslim colonial soldiers and miscegenation that might result from the proximity of Indian soldiers to white women. In providing an overview of these developments, this article argues that the effusive celebration of Indian loyalty was to provide, ironically, the ballast for concerted criticism of colonial Indian governance as later news coverage in the conservative British press harped on about India's failure to adequately contribute to the imperial war effort.

Indian loyalty on the Western Front: press and war propaganda

By September 1914 Indian soldiers had been dispatched to France to fight on the beleaguered Western Front. They were deployed less than two months after the outbreak of hostilities at a time when there were no other standing armies in the British empire to supplement the heavily depleted British forces at the front. Indian sepoys therefore gained high visibility in the British press.Footnote ²⁹ The colonial state was keen to manage the flow of information about Indian soldiers and the war in India. Therefore, before discussing the positive propaganda regarding Indian soldiers, it is important to acknowledge the use of censorship to manage the flow of information to India about the war.Footnote ³⁰ Telegraph censorship and the Indian chief censor controlled war news sent to India, even from British newspapers. Reuters was also used by the India Office to provide positive publicity for the Indian effort and suppress news considered inimical to British rule in India.Footnote ³¹ As Kaul points out, censorship in India was distinct from censorship in Britain and the dominions since the Indian government had a long-established tradition of controlling the press through punitive legislation embodied in successive press acts, censorship, emergency powers, and the imperial control of news reporting through explicit restrictions on access to information in India.Footnote ³² The colonial state recognized that ‘prompt dissemination of accurate war news in the Dependency is of great importance’ due to the ‘rapidity with which wild rumours are spread among the Indian populace’ and the possibility of German spies influencing the rumours circulating in India.Footnote ³³ To facilitate this, Francis Younghusband was appointed to the India Office in 1914 to prepare telegrams with news regarding the war for distribution to Indian newspapers by the Indian government. Since Indians perceived British newspapers to be faithfully reflective of British public opinion and they could reach Indian soldiers on the Western Front, the India Office sought to influence British news coverage on Indian matters by promoting news stories that celebrated Indian support for the war and downplaying threats to the security of the empire. Some of this was achieved through informal contacts between Austen Chamberlain, secretary of state for India from May 1915–July 1917, leading British journalists, and the two Indian viceroys who served during the war—Lord Hardinge (1910–16) and Lord Chelmsford (1916–21).Footnote ³⁴

In the opening months of the war, the British press therefore presented a positive image of Indian soldiers as loyal subjects who had gallantly come to the rescue of the British empire in its time of need.Footnote ³⁵ The British press had been largely supportive of the war and had enthusiastically conducted positive propaganda in support of war aims, to keep up both recruitment and civilian morale.Footnote ³⁶ As Kaul points out, the India Office was also keen to ensure ‘a steady flow of favourable news’ at the beginning of the war.Footnote ³⁷ News of Indian soldiers was a popular item in British newspapers during this early phase and the India Office sought to ‘guide’ news coverage through the appointment of F. E. Smith as a representative of the Indian press on the Western Front in 1914. In his reports, Smith privileged stories of heroic achievement of the Indian army over those of high casualties.Footnote ³⁸ Offers of service and gifts for the war effort from Indian princely rulers, the Indian government, and nationalist politicians, who were deemed to ‘speak for native India as a whole’, were interpreted as proof that India, like the British settler colonies, gave its consent to British imperial rule.Footnote ³⁹ Contributions to the war effort by India were seen as evidence that the British empire continued to enjoy popular support among its South Asian subjects.Footnote ⁴⁰Punch concluded that this support was a direct result of Britain's civilizing mission's purported claims to ‘improve’ colonial society:

Such portrayals were fairly representative and reinforced British home front propaganda that the Allied cause was just and moral.Footnote ⁴² Recruitment drives exhorted men from Britain and the colonies to do their duty for king, country, and empire.Footnote ⁴³ Newspapers proclaimed that Indian offers of service, men, and material for the war testified to the popularity of British imperial rule, being material demonstrations of Indian ‘loyalty’ and the desire of Indian subjects to serve the empire.Footnote ⁴⁴ Messages by nationalist Indian politicians in the Legislative Council asserted the righteousness of the British cause and reiterated that India's contribution was a demonstration of its duty and gratitude to empire.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is important to link such protestations with conceptions of imperial patriotism and citizenship if we are not to dismiss all evidence of Indian cooperation with the British during colonial rule as ‘collaboration’, with all its negative connotations. This article thus initiates a closer examination of ‘imperial loyalism’ in colonial India.Footnote ⁴⁶ Viceroy Hardinge had deployed Indian soldiers to France in the hope of pandering to Indian notions of ‘parity’ with Europeans and to foster enthusiasm and support for the war in India.Footnote ⁴⁷ Responding to this gesture, nationalist politicians in India represented the Indian contribution to the war as an act of imperial citizenship, which was expected to be acknowledged by greater self-government after the war.Footnote ⁴⁸ Santanu Das, in his analysis of the effusive Indian loyalty to be found in publications associated with the early years of the war, argues that it arose from an ambivalent ‘knotting’ together of Anglicization and ‘an incipient nationalist consciousness’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, the response in India, including from nationalist leaders like M. K. Gandhi,Footnote ⁵⁰ was a reiteration of their adoption of ideas of imperial citizenship which located Britishness as an identity based on a notion of a shared culture of ‘language, laws, institutions, and attachment to the empire’ rather than an ethnic identity.Footnote ⁵¹ Potter and Andrew Thompson have posited that this notion of Britishness was especially relevant to discussions of settler colonies’ relationship to Britain. Thompson's arguments for reconceptualizing ‘loyalism’ in colonial South Africa apply to India before the First World War as well. Thompson shows that the loyalty of South Africans ought not to be narrowly conceptualized as loyalty to the British government or to ‘Anglo-Saxon Imperialism’ but to an idea of ‘Britain’ that included a ‘generalized loyalty to a “British way of life”’ or ‘commitment to a certain set of “liberal” imperial values’.Footnote ⁵² Das's findings echo Thompson's conclusion that imperial loyalty was often undergirded by local patriotism and regional identities, even when they were critical of the economic impact of empire.Footnote ⁵³ Monger also argues that British patriotism during the First World War spoke in several registers, with a supra-national patriotism that overlapped with the empire.Footnote ⁵⁴

Portrayals in the press emphasized how German plans to incite Indian Muslims and other British colonial subjects to overthrow the British empire had come to naught.Footnote ⁵⁵ Pan-Islamic sentiment was at the heart of German and Ottoman propaganda and aroused considerable anxiety among British authorities due to the large number of Muslim soldiers in the Indian Army.Footnote ⁵⁶ News coverage of the Indian forces on the Western Front and of India's war effort therefore sought to emphasize that Indian Muslims had remained loyal to the British empire.Footnote ⁵⁷ The British press made much of claims that some Indians perceived the war as a holy war in which the British empire and its Allies were on the side of right.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, evidence of dissatisfaction with colonial rule was discounted in the British press as no more than ‘mischievous rumours’. News of the desertion of Indian soldiers to the German side was represented in terms calculated to minimize its effect on the morale of Indian soldiers on the Western Front and on the British population,Footnote ⁵⁹ even as events such as the mutiny in Singapore and the foiled Ghadar movement in India gave the lie to an imperial propaganda that focused on celebrating the loyalty of the colonies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Since the colonies’ contribution to the war effort and the affirmation of the British cause as a just cause significantly enhanced morale, it was necessary that any evidence of colonial resistance should be explained to the British.Footnote ⁶¹ British press propaganda thus emphasized the harmonious working together of sepoys and British soldiers at the front,Footnote ⁶² the welcome accorded to Indian soldiers by the French population, and the cordial relations between Indian troops and the French civilian population.Footnote ⁶³

The haste in deploying sepoys to a European theatre had overturned a pre-war decision to reserve Indian troops for frontier campaigns and not having them fight a European enemy. Given that Indian soldiers were outfitted for frontier warfare, their clothing and equipment were particularly ill-suited to the much colder climate and conditions of service on the Western Front. The inability to evacuate sick and wounded Indian soldiers to India or Egypt meant that hospitals had to be hastily improvised for Indian soldiers in Britain and this early disarray led to criticism of poor medical arrangements for loyal colonial soldiers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Hospitals opened in Brighton and southern England were placed by Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, under the charge of Sir Walter Lawrence, who was designated the commissioner for the Indian sick and wounded. Lawrence's arrangements were advertised as tangible demonstrations of British paternalism and benevolence towards their Indian subjects and stressed imperial partnership in the war.Footnote ⁶⁵ The India Office and officials charged with administering these hospitals were keenly aware of the possibilities and dangers presented by them for wartime propaganda and ensured that accounts and images of the excellent hospital arrangements made for Indian troops in Britain were widely distributed.Footnote ⁶⁶ Lawrence followed a deliberate policy of using Indian military hospitals on the Western Front as centrepieces of imperial war propaganda, arguing that ‘Indians who have been tended in hospital in England will take back to India tidings of goodwill and kindliness, and feelings of gratitude and respect.’Footnote ⁶⁷ He emphasized that the good treatment of Indian troops in hospitals on the Western Front and in England would translate into political gains in India: ‘I never lose an opportunity of impressing on all who are working in these Hospitals that great political issues are involved in making the stay of the Indians in England as agreeable as possible.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Hardinge was also convinced of the ‘excellent political results in India’ of news of hospital arrangements in Britain.Footnote ⁶⁹ Lawrence advocated publicizing these hospitals since they reflected well on both the War Office and the Indian Medical Service.Footnote ⁷⁰ Public opinion in India was also the considered target of those associated with hospital arrangements on the Western Front: ‘everything should be done to encourage responsible people, who understand India and carry any weight in that country, to visit the Hospitals [in England]’.Footnote ⁷¹ The lavish setting of the Brighton Royal Pavilion, which was converted into a hospital, was meant to evoke ‘Eastern’ splendour and was widely used in propaganda.Footnote ⁷² The British press played an important role in transforming medical arrangements for Indian soldiers in Britain into centrepieces of propaganda in Britain and across South Asia.Footnote ⁷³ The British press's predilection for news stories about Indian soldiers and their ‘exotic’ ethnic practices was in line with this portrayal of Indian war hospitals in south England. It portrayed the tolerance of colonial subjects’ ethnic and religious diversity as an imperial generosity, which was believed to have created a feeling of deep loyalty towards the empire.Footnote ⁷⁴ The portrayal of the eating practices of Indian soldiers was especially popular in the press and was meant to foreground British tolerance of different cultural mores.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, some of this attention was also aimed at reassuring Indians that sepoys’ ethnic practices were being scrupulously respected, in order to ensure continuing recruitment from the Indian ‘martial races’.Footnote ⁷⁶

However, the presence of Indian soldiers and the celebration of their martial prowess also created unique challenges to the imperial gender order when liaisons began to develop between Indian sepoys and local British women, with all the attendant anxieties about miscegenation and the blurring of racial boundaries.Footnote ⁷⁷ This led to the introduction of strict discipline in Indian war hospitals in Brighton, which required Indian soldiers to be practically imprisoned within the hospitals to prevent contact with British women.Footnote ⁷⁸ To compensate for the considerable dissatisfaction that this created among Indian soldiers, special ‘amusements’ were organized.Footnote ⁷⁹ Brighton's cinemas ran special shows for the Indian troops and drives were arranged for them in motor ambulances. Indian officers went on weekly conducted tours of London,Footnote ⁸⁰ which focused on royal figures and the grandeur of Britain—all meant to inspire awe and reverence for the empire.Footnote ⁸¹ This positive propaganda was aimed at maintaining recruitment in regions such as Punjab, from where a substantial proportion of the British Indian army was recruited, and to sustain the commitment of material and financial resources from the rest of the Indian civilian population.Footnote ⁸²

The severe medical breakdown in the Mesopotamian campaign from October 1915 brought propaganda by the Indian government under considerable strain, despite the existence of a particularly rigorous local censorship regime, even greater than in the Dardanelles campaign. As Arnold Wilson, then deputy political officer in Mesopotamia, pointed out, military censorship, which applied both to the letters from the front and those of the official press correspondent, was meant ‘less to prevent information reaching the enemy than to prevent the public in India and at home becoming aware of the appalling sufferings that were being endured by our troops’.Footnote ⁸³ Thus, even Edmund Candler, a journalist appointed the ‘official eye witness’ for the campaign by the British government, was subjected to close censorship soon after his arrival in December 1915. His dispatches were censored thrice: in the field in Basra, again in India before they reached London, where they were censored again.Footnote ⁸⁴ Even generals’ letters sent from the Mesopotamian campaign were censored.Footnote ⁸⁵ Despite such elaborate arrangements, the scandalous medical breakdown in Mesopotamia became a major topic of debate in the British press. The next section takes a closer look at the much more negative coverage of the severe shortages that occurred in the Mesopotamia campaign from early 1916, which saw the Northcliffe press exposing government incompetence during the war and employing the trope of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’. It shows that the Northcliffe press was undeniably influential in demanding a commission to investigate the humiliating military reversals in Mesopotamia and determining its scope of enquiry. The ire of the conservative press, which included vitriolic attacks from the Morning Post, came to focus on the figure of the finance member of the colonial Indian government, William Meyer, who was singled out for blame for the failure to provide essential supplies and medical aid to soldiers in Mesopotamia. Meyer was seen as the personification of a rigid bureaucracy—styled ‘hill-top’ government—which failed to adequately mobilize India's economic resources for the imperial war effort.

Politics of scandal: the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’ in the Northcliffe press

The Northcliffe press broke news of the medical breakdown in the Mesopotamian theatre. Early reports published in The Times from March 1916 were based on letters privately sent by soldiers from the front, and confirmed by its Bombay correspondents, about severe shortages in medical supplies and in essential personnel such as nurses and doctors.Footnote ⁸⁶ Correspondence to newspapers from relatives of soldiers quoting private letters from the Mesopotamian front painted a picture of suffering soldiers and aroused public outrage:

Correspondence from the public commending The Times for breaking news of the long-standing breakdown confirmed the image of the Northcliffe press as the champion of the soldier.Footnote ⁸⁸ Northcliffe, the proprietor of both The Times and the Daily Mail, had fashioned himself as a watchdog representing public interest by using his papers to advocate an efficient prosecution of the war, especially by bringing government errors to the attention of readers.Footnote ⁸⁹ In this, the Northcliffe press was following an established genre of news reporting which had developed over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—uncovering defects in British defence policy in the face of official inaction.Footnote ⁹⁰ The breakdown in Mesopotamia thus became one in a series of military disasters reported by the Northcliffe press in late 1915 and 1916, as it mounted criticism of government handling of the war and the endemic indecisiveness that had marred the Asquith coalition.Footnote ⁹¹ Yet such was the enormity of the Mesopotamia scandal that Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times, insisted that it made ‘Crimea seem [like a] trivial joke’.Footnote ⁹²

The neglect of the wounded—who were crowded on unsuitable river transport and left unattended for days—evinced intensely angry reactions since medical services during war had become essential to morale.Footnote ⁹³ Liberal newspapers, such as the Manchester Guardian, Daily News, Daily Chronicle, and the radical Star, also shared the public indignation at disclosures of the horrors wounded soldiers had endured on the Mesopotamian front and criticized the Indian government for failing to make adequate medical arrangements.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such cross-party indignation reflected a wider shift in attitudes towards medical care for soldiers during the First World War to keep up the morale of both fighting men and of their families on the home front.Footnote ⁹⁵ This also went against new military practices wherein medical and sanitary arrangements on the front were expected to be efficient and work as part of a war machine, with an emphasis on conserving both manpower and resources by treating wounded or ill soldiers and returning them to the fighting line.Footnote ⁹⁶

The reporting on the scandal in the Northcliffe press initiated parliamentary discussions and significantly shaped the questions that were raised.Footnote ⁹⁷ Accusing the government of excessive secrecy and concealing evidence of incompetence to retain power, the Northcliffe press vociferously demanded that parliament discuss the scandal.Footnote ⁹⁸ Correspondents to The Times were suspicious of ‘the question being shelved by the authorities’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Politicians, including Lord Midleton, secretary of state for India from 1903–05, and Lord Sydenham, as well as important officials such as Chamberlain and Lawrence, had been receiving private reports of the breakdown since early 1916.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Politicians alarmed by reports of the breakdown felt able to publicly raise questions in parliament once it had been reported in the press.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Continuing shortages of food and medical supplies months after news of the scandal broke in Britain strengthened calls in parliament for an official enquiry into the mismanagement of the campaign.Footnote ¹⁰² In the face of the mounting evidence being revealed to the public, Chamberlain was forced to admit that a ‘lamentable medical breakdown’ had taken place in the Mesopotamian campaign,Footnote ¹⁰³ despite earlier attempts to inquire into the breakdown confidentially through the Vincent-Bingley Commission.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The emotive language of exposé and reform used by the Northcliffe press was particularly effective in bringing down public opprobrium on the Indian government, given the increased political influence of the press during the war. This distrust of the Indian government's statements on the breakdown was also evident in parliament.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Even despite such criticism, the Northcliffe press, with its long-standing tradition of being sympathetic to imperial interests and paying greater attention to Indian news, took a less harsh view of the culpability of the Indian government for the scandal than did the arch-conservative Morning Post. Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The latter's news reports condemned the Indian government of being an ‘absolootely nootral [sic]’ country as it ‘[did] not want to be bothered about a distant and disagreeable conflict’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Criticism of the Indian government aimed at discovering further lapses was strong in both parliament and the British press as 1916 drew to a close.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Mesopotamia breakdown, which was characterized variously as the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’, ‘Mesopotamia scandal’, and the ‘terrible story of Mesopotamia’, created a trope for criticizing the colonial state which was widely used in both the British and Indian press. Private reports of mismanagement by the Indian government leading to poor arrangements for soldiers and the disclosure thereof in sensationalized news became a pattern which was repeatedly utilized to criticize the colonial regime. This was especially evident during the Karachi troop train disaster in July 1916,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ which was widely covered in the press, with questioning in parliament.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The death of soldiers in a hospital ship due to adverse weather conditions also drew a prompt response from both the India Office and newspapers.Footnote ¹¹¹ The Morning Post reported instances of poor medical arrangements and overcrowding in Indian hospitals,Footnote ¹¹² while the Daily Mail ran several reports on the poor quality glasses supplied by the Indian government.Footnote ¹¹³ So effective did the trope of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’ become that Indian newspapers even used it to criticize the Indian government for the breakdown of medical arrangements in the Afghan campaign in 1919.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The role of the conservative British press in instigating the Commission and in shaping its enquiry and report has not been sufficiently acknowledged.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Northcliffe press vociferously demanded an investigation into the mismanagement of the campaign—thus sustaining public attention on the issue. Two of the claims they repeatedly made were instrumental in initiating the enquiry and in setting the terms of the investigation. The Northcliffe press claimed that the decision to advance to Baghdad was an opportunistic one made by the government to seek a victory in Mesopotamia in order to detract attention from the failures in the Dardanelles.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The second claim which determined the shape of the Commission's enquiry was the demand that responsibility be fixed for the Mesopotamian disaster and that there should be consequences for politicians and senior officials. Questions asked in parliament clearly echoed the Northcliffe press's criticism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As demands for parliamentary scrutiny of the Mesopotamia campaign mounted, Asquith's government was forced to accede to the setting up of the two commissions to enquire into the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia campaigns.Footnote ¹¹⁸

In news coverage of the enquiry into the breakdown, the Northcliffe press again took the lead in reporting embarrassing incidents, which prompted questioning in parliament. By repeatedly suggesting that the Commission was an exercise in whitewashing that would fail to assign responsibility, the Northcliffe press ensured that its preoccupations influenced the official line of enquiry into the campaign. The persistent insinuations by the conservative press, especially by the Morning Post, that the Commission might cover up evidence of the government's culpability seems to have influenced its report, which specifically addressed those aspects of the expedition that had been stressed in the press campaign.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Asquith was to single out the Daily Mail for its spiteful coverage and raising a clamour for punishment of highly placed politicians and officers,Footnote ¹²⁰ even as vicious attacks on Hardinge and other officials were made in the radical sections of the conservative press.Footnote ¹²¹

The Commission's report, made public on 27 June 1917, clearly laid the blame on the Indian government's financing of the campaign.Footnote ¹²² It caused a veritable storm in news coverage, with newspapers in both Britain and India criticizing the colonial government. So closely had the Northcliffe press followed the enquiry that Dawson crowed to Northcliffe after the release of the report that The Times had had a ‘considerable score over it … [W]e had managed to get the whole pith of the Report extracted for us in advance and had time to discuss it at leisure. No other paper even attempted to do it justice.’Footnote ¹²³ The quality liberal newspapers were more restrained in their reporting of the shocking revelations made by the Commission than the popular evening daily, Star. The latter, like the conservative press, was emphatic in its condemnation of the politicians responsible for the medical breakdown, singling out prominent conservatives such as Arthur Balfour, Chamberlain, and Curzon for criticism.Footnote ¹²⁴ However, unlike the conservative press, liberal newspapers did not interpret the Commission's report as an indictment of the Asquith government.Footnote ¹²⁵

Debates about India's financial contribution to the war had become a popular theme in the Northcliffe press. There was broad consensus in the conservative press that the cost of the Mesopotamian campaign should be borne not by the British exchequer but by the Indian government. Lovat Fraser argued that ‘overburdened England’ should not have to pay for the campaign,Footnote ¹²⁶ which Barnes maintained was being fought to ‘defend the Indian people from the horrors of a German invasion’.Footnote ¹²⁷ The Northcliffe press was sharply critical of the fact that the Indian government was not paying for the cost of the Mesopotamia campaign. Both The Times and the Daily Mail explained to their readers that under existing agreements, all overseas expeditions in the service of imperial defence were to be borne by Britain and not by India, even if Indian forces were deployed. British newspapers argued that since these campaigns were meant to protect British India, the cost ought to be borne by the Indian and not the British government.Footnote ¹²⁸

The Indian government was portrayed in the conservative press as shirking from contributing adequately to the war by failing to increase taxation during what was portrayed as a time of prosperity. William Meyer, the finance member of the colonial Indian government from 1913–18, came to be seen as the embodiment of a parsimonious and rigid Indian administration, characterized as ‘hill-top government’ in the conservative British press for its failure to take ‘outside opinion’ into account.Footnote ¹²⁹ Meyer was especially blamed for the colonial state's failure to release adequate funds for the campaign and medical care of soldiers. In a news report titled ‘William Meyer: The Man who Grudged the Money’, the Daily Mail argued that the finance member had continued the pre-war policy of cutting military expenditure even during the war.Footnote ¹³⁰ The Indian government's severe parsimony towards the British army on the Mesopotamian front was contrasted with the budget speech made by Meyer in March 1915, in which he had waxed eloquent on the ‘healthy condition’ of Indian finances.Footnote ¹³¹The Times acknowledged that reports of this speech were compared by suffering soldiers in Mesopotamia with their own lack of necessities, leading to the widely held conclusion that the Indian government's economizing had caused the breakdown.Footnote ¹³²

Nor was this view entirely confined to right-wing opinion. The Liberal Sir Victor Horsley and independent-minded Conservative MP Aubrey Herbert had both written from the front similarly blaming the Indian Finance Department for depressing expenditure on the army and on medical care.Footnote ¹³³ Lloyd George's War Memoirs were particularly critical of the Indian government's parsimony, and lack of efficiency and organization.Footnote ¹³⁴ Old India hands such as Hugh S. Barnes (who was not disinterested due to his growing interests in Middle Eastern oil) argued in a letter to The Times that there was no excuse for the Indian government's parsimony, as ‘[f]inancially … the Budget show[ed], the Indian Government has been hardly touched by the war’.Footnote ¹³⁵

Correspondents to The Times were even more strident in their criticism of Meyer, with former government officials writing to point out instances when the Finance Department had cut expenditure proposed by military and Indian Medical Service officers.Footnote ¹³⁶ Letters to the editor also pointed to the fact that there had been a long tradition of reducing military expenditure in India, with Meyer's predecessor Guy Fleetwood Wilson reputed to have boasted at the end of his term in India ‘Thank God. I've bled the Army white.’Footnote ¹³⁷ Others pointed to the long-standing policy of retrenchment in military expenditure as manifested, for instance, in the Nicholson Commission (1913), charged by the Asquith government, of which Meyer had been a member, with the brief to reduce military expenditure in India just before the war.Footnote ¹³⁸ Such strictures on Meyer and the colonial state showed no awareness of the fact that the systemic neglect in the Indian army was the result of a peculiar pattern of colonial finance, which gave the military first call on the government's budget but also sought to curtail its ever-burgeoning demands.Footnote ¹³⁹ Nor were they aware that this form of finance led to much greater defence expenditure in colonial India, while starving spending on infrastructure and welfare. The Times attributed the viciousness of the attacks on Meyer partly to prejudice against his German-sounding surname.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The Mesopotamia Commission Report's attention to the Indian Finance Department was clearly linked to the outcry in the conservative British press about India's failure to contribute adequately to the defence of the British empire.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The report revealed that the shortcomings of the medical arrangements had been the result of mismanagement by army authorities and the constant scrutiny by the Indian government's Finance Department of the details of military medical expenditure. This observance of ‘due economy’ was a direct result of the close financial supervision of military expenditure by civilian authorities as well as a military bureaucracy aimed at curbing it.Footnote ¹⁴²

The Morning Post was to push the opinion that ‘the financial resources of India should be expended in the cause of Empire’ to its fullest extent.Footnote ¹⁴³ It characterized India as lacking in ‘patriotic spirit’ at a time when ‘the whole British Empire—India included—[was] fighting for dear life against the most formidable foe which has ever arisen’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It claimed that ‘though India is rolling in wealth, not a penny is allowed to be raised for the common cause. Even the elementary wants of our wounded and suffering soldiers cannot be met.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The Indian government's failure to raise an internal war loan to meet the costs of the war was roundly criticized in the conservative British press. This reflected a wider shift in emphasis in British home front propaganda away from valorizing the sacrifice of life to sacrificing resources, with an increased emphasis on the need to raise funds through war loans and savings schemes.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ British imperial organizations such as the British Empire Union, critical of the finance policy of the Indian government, demanded that India ‘show her patriotism by raising a War Loan to help the Empire’. It criticized the failure of the Indian government to raise revenue for the imperial war effort by imposing a high income tax and a ‘super tax’ on the jute, tea, and iron firms that were making ‘enormous profits out of the war’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ So effective was this criticism that by the close of 1916, the secretary of state for India was questioned in parliament about the inadequacy of India's contribution to the war effort.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Although it was universally acknowledged that the Indian government's policy of economy had been responsible for the severe breakdown of the campaign, the grounds on which the colonial government was criticized by both the British press and the Commission deserve closer attention. The British press and the Commission alike proceeded from the assumption that the colonial state had failed to treat the resources of India as an extended imperial home front from which men and resources should have been extracted in the same way as they were being drawn from Britain or the settler colonies. These assumptions have been unreflexively reproduced in much of the historiography of the campaign, which often ends up assigning responsibility to the Indian government for its failure to commandeer men and resources sufficiently to ensure the success of the campaign.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Such a skewed perspective ignores that colonial India could not be characterized as a ‘home front’ in the same way as Britain, Australia, or Canada. Neither were Indian resources at the disposal of a British government in a manner comparable to the settler colonies. Indian finances were much more heavily committed to imperial defence in peacetime than in the settler colonies. Increasing economic demands during the war deepened the danger of straining the colonial regime in India both economically and politically. The threat of invasion never loomed as large over the Indian ‘home front’ as it did in Britain. It was difficult to explain to Indian subjects why they should make contributions to the war in the form of subscriptions to war charities or through a war loan raised by the government since the defence of the empire had no tangible benefit for a people governed without representation and since most had no friends or family fighting on the front.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As excessive military expenditure in India had been criticized by nationalists for decades before the First World War, expanding it to meet the demands of the Mesopotamia expedition without devolving power to Indians was to court political disaster. Indeed, in contrast with the Northcliffe press and arch-conservative newspapers like the Morning Post, sections of the liberal press conceded that the Indian contribution to the war, especially in the early phase, had been considerable. The liberal Daily News acknowledged that the pre-war push for economy criticized by the Mesopotamia Commission had resulted from the fact that military expenditure constituted one-third of India's revenue while Britain's expenditure on its military before the war had been less than one-sixth of its revenue.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Indeed, defence expenditure in India had risen by 300 per cent during the war.Footnote ¹⁵² Such admissions were nevertheless rare even in liberal newspapers, which hardly covered the ‘Mesopotamia scandal’.Footnote ¹⁵³

Demands for the raising of a war loan in India were to have significant political repercussions in South Asia, which are assessed in the next section. It is argued that the impact of the scandal accelerated reform of the colonial Indian administration, which led to the devolution of power under the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919. Such was the sensitivity of the colonial administration to the British press that both the liberal and conservative remedies to the scandal were adopted even as it sought to suppress news of the breakdown in India through censorship. Despite this, the Indian press was strident in its rejection of the right-wing press's strictures on the inadequacy of India's war effort. As the next section demonstrates, the Indian nationalist press's riposte to the conservative press was surprisingly in tandem with colonial officials such as Meyer and the Pioneer, which was sympathetic to the colonial state. In considering the long-term impact of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’, the next section concludes by examining the unanticipated consequences of the war loan, especially in spurring on anti-colonial protests in 1919. It will also examine how historiography on the Mesopotamia campaign has tended to echo the conservative British press's preoccupations of assessing the objectivity of the Mesopotamia Commission as well as the culpability of the various political figures caught up in the scandal.

The long shadow of the Mesopotamia scandal in colonial India

On 20 August 1917, barely a month after the resignation of Chamberlain, the new secretary of state for India, the radical Liberal Edwin Montagu,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ made a declaration regarding colonial policy that was to have very significant repercussions for anti-colonial nationalist politics.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The Government of India Act of 1919, which emerged from his declaration and hastened the devolution of power to Indians through Dyarchy, has been studied at length.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Although constitutional reforms were being considered by the Indian colonial state from 1915, an important driver for the announcement and its timing was the desire to make political concessions that would sustain the Indian war effort.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In 1917 demands for the reform of the Indian military administration had been raised in parliament, which increased pressure on the India Office and the highest echelons of the Indian government.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Although Chamberlain explicitly disavowed any attempts to make the discussion of the Mesopotamia Commission Report into ‘the text for a great Debate upon the future of the Indian Empire’, Montagu asserted that the Mesopotamia debacle required extensive reform of the Indian government.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Indeed, Montagu's criticism of the colonial Indian government as a ‘statute-ridden machine … [which] was too wooden, inelastic, and antediluvian’ echoed the conservative press's trope of ‘hill-top government’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Montagu's views on the need to politicize the colonial administration, which had governed bureaucratically and despotically, also echoed the liberal British press's coverage of the deficiencies of Indian government in 1916 and 1917. Both the Manchester Guardian and Star claimed that the debacle in Mesopotamia was due to the ‘autocratic’ nature of the Indian government, which needed greater public scrutiny.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Although their analysis varied in tone and emphasis, liberal newspapers suggested that making the Indian government responsible to Indian public opinion was the surest means of avoiding such scandals in the future.Footnote ¹⁶² The minority report by Josiah Wedgwood was quoted approvingly for recommending that

While some of this evoked conservative papers’ denunciation of the Indian government as ‘hill-top government’, the emphasis was not on demanding a greater contribution from India but on acknowledging that the Indian government could not commit further resources to the war effort because it was not answerable to those it ruled. The Daily News carried an article by Nihal Singh arguing that the ‘Mesopotamia failure’ could have been avoided if Indian administrators had not lived in ‘splendid isolation, aloof from the people in whose name they act’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Quality liberal newspapers repeatedly referred to constitutional reform being imminent when reporting parliamentary discussions of the Commission.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Given the support of the liberal press for Irish demands for home rule, it was not surprising that it tended to lean towards sympathetic coverage of the Indian Home Rule League Movement rather than baiting Indian administrators and attacking the Asquith coalition.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

The impact of British opinion—both conservative and liberal—on the colonial administration was considerable. Questions in parliament on the continuing inadequacy of medical arrangements in Mesopotamia had proved extremely embarrassing for the secretary of state for India throughout 1916 and 1917, as Chamberlain admitted to Chelmsford:

The military secretary of the India Office, E. G. Barrow, characterized the Morning Post's news coverage of official ‘muddles’ regarding medical arrangements for soldiers as ‘particularly venomous’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ What were characterized as ‘very savage’ newspaper attacks on hospital administration in India, especially by the Morning Post, continued throughout October and November 1916.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Chamberlain frequently pressed the Indian government to respond to complaints and news reports, for instance, those regarding overcrowding in army hospitals in Bombay and Coonoor.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Chamberlain was very sensitive towards private reports of poor medical arrangements: ‘I am very uneasy. These reports reach home in private letters. It was in this way that I first came to know of the Mesopotamia breakdown, and I fear the repetition of a similar scandal in India.’Footnote ¹⁷¹ Viceroy Chelmsford felt that the ‘attitude of distrust’ towards the Indian government fostered by such news reports in Britain was ‘gravely embarrassing’.Footnote ¹⁷² The well-established trope of the Indian medical scandal and its deployment in the press exerted considerable pressure for reform at the highest levels of Indian government, with the viceroy admitting to concern about reports ‘on the alleged scandals with regard to soldiers returning from Mesopotamia. I have to keep a constant eye on them, as correspondence goes home and then you are troubled and everybody else is troubled.’Footnote ¹⁷³ The India Office was also alive to the Post’s ‘agitation … against the Government of India and Sir William Meyer’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Chelmsford concurred that there existed ‘a considerable agitation’ in the British Tory press, especially in the Morning Post, against the Indian government.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Before turning to consider how the conservative British press's loud criticism led to the imposition of a war loan in India, it is important to acknowledge here that this was accompanied by a concerted effort to restrict the flow of information to India regarding the breakdowns in the campaign. The severe censorship of the press in India was considered important to shield the colonial regime from news of public criticism of the Indian government and the setting up of the Commission to investigate the breakdown.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

The chairman of the Commission, George Hamilton, ensured that the Commission did not go to India as this would have made it ‘the receptacle of every conceivable gossip and complaint. Its operations … [would] seriously impair the authority and undermine the prestige of the Government…’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Chamberlain too felt that the enquiry would amount to ‘the trial of high officers of Government of India [which] would be fraught with grave dangers to the authorities of your [Indian] government if it takes place in the presence of Indian public …’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Despite such precautions, in his speech to the Imperial Legislative Assembly in 1916, Chelmsford had to admit that the ‘breakdown on the medical side in Mesopotamia had brought a storm of obloquy on [the] Indian administration’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This was especially embarrassing when he spoke to raise funds for the war effort.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Press censorship in India sought to suppress news about parliamentary debates that were critical of the Indian government's official machinery following the publication of the Mesopotamia Commission's report. Chamberlain was all too aware that the report laid the Indian government open to criticism in India at the height of the Home Rule League movementFootnote ¹⁸¹ and Viceroy Chelmsford expressed his dismay at the report's ‘disastrous effect upon the position and prestige of the Government of India … [as] it comes at a peculiarly unfortunate time when the Government of India is face to face with a big political agitation …’.Footnote ¹⁸² Parliamentary criticism of the Indian government was not reported by Reuters either,Footnote ¹⁸³ but Indian newspapers were aware of the censorship and expected to find out more through British newspapers which arrived after a delay in the post as it came by sea. The Capital derisively quipped that news about the reception of the Mesopotamia Commission might never reach India if the post carrying English newspapers was fortuitously sunk due to enemy action.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Indian newspapers condemned deliberate attempts by the press censor at Simla to withhold news critical of the ‘authors of the Mesopotamia muddle’ while privileging opinion repudiating the Commission.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Another newspaper asserted that ‘the whole truth about the [Mesopotamia] bungle’ had not been told due to the press's fear that the Defence of India Act would be used against them.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Having examined the role of the British press's critique of the colonial administration in accelerating reform and devolution, it is worth considering the other important development arising from this critique, which was to hasten the spread of anti-colonial nationalism: the demands to raise a war loan in India. These had accompanied the influential criticism by the conservative British press of Meyer in particular, and were to play an important role in stoking anti-colonial protests in 1919. This growing anti-colonial nationalism in India was accompanied by the redefinition of Britishness and imperial citizenship across the empire, producing imperial fault lines reflected in the very different postures adopted towards Meyer in the British and Indian press. Indian newspapers’ responses to British conservative press’s tirade against Meyer's financial policies in India during the war were significantly different.

The British conservative press's criticism of Meyer was reprised in the more conservative ‘Anglo-Indian’ press, that is, newspapers in India which represented the views of the British community based in India. This included the Capital, which was vehement in its criticism of Hardinge, Chamberlain, and Meyer after the publication of the Commission's Report.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The animosity towards Meyer arose because he had introduced an income tax during the war which was unpopular with the British community in India.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Although Indian newspapers made use of the tropes of ‘hill-top government’ and ‘Mesopotamia muddle’ to disparage the colonial government, despite their divergent political leanings, there was considerable hostility within the Indian nationalist press to demands made by conservative British newspapers for increased contributions to the war. Indian newspapers took exception to the British press's insufficient acknowledgement of the considerable sacrifices made by Indian people to the war effort.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Some Indian newspapers demanded that greater publicity be given to India's contribution in terms of men and material to the war effort to counter the British press's criticism.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Senior colonial administrators claimed that it ignored the considerable funds that India had already committed to the war.Footnote ¹⁹¹ The Leader claimed that ‘the petty, spiteful, attacks of the Anglo-foreign press are strongly resented throughout the country’.Footnote ¹⁹²

The raising of an internal war loan in India had been precluded in the first two years of war due to the emphasis in Indian finance on balanced budgets. The Indian colonial state was painfully aware that the nationalist critique of the economic impact of excessive military expenditure by the colonial state had made it increasingly difficult to service the needs of the metropolis while holding on to Britain's political and economic dominance in India. Meyer and the Finance Department's measures to curb Indian military expenditure, which were lamented in the British press and condemned by the Mesopotamia Commission Report, had emerged from a system of regulating the ever-expanding military expenditure of colonial India, which had been a matter of concern since the eighteenth century. On the one hand, as the ultimate guarantor of British rule in India, the military had maintained a pre-eminent claim on the resources extracted by the colonial regime.Footnote ¹⁹³ On the other, to check the possibility of creating large deficits due to costly colonial wars, over the nineteenth century, a system of surveilling military expenditure had developed. The emphasis on balancing budgets and fiscal prudence had initially emerged from persistent criticism of excessive military expenditure by the expanding colonial state from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

The Pioneer, which was considered ‘the organ of the Indian government’, thus responded to attacks regarding the insufficiency of India's war effort by asserting that the financial requirements of the army had been fully and readily supplied by the Indian Finance Department.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Given that the colonial administration was keen not to provide further ballast to economic nationalist critiques of British rule as impoverishing India through heedless extraction of resources, it is not surprising that Indian nationalist newspapers also contested claims in British conservative newspapers that India was ‘an untouched mine of gold’, whose resources had not been sufficiently channelled into the British war effort.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Nationalist newspapers in India, such as the Tribune, argued that, given India's impoverishment, its contribution to the war had severely taxed the country. It decried criticism in the British press of the colonial government for not providing even greater financial help.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

Yet, before the war, Meyer had been at the receiving end of trenchant criticism by nationalist Indian newspapers for implementing balanced budgets that were accompanied by low expenditure on education and other ‘ameliorative services’ ‘beneficial’ to Indian taxpayers.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ On this, he had been at loggerheads not only with nationalists but also with colonial administrators such as John Hewett, who had been associated with the development of industries in the United Provinces in the pre-war period and had found the experience of working with Meyer frustrating due to the latter's disregard of ‘matters of cardinal importance connected with the development of India’.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The tendency to check military expenditure had been further exacerbated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries due to Indian nationalist criticism of such expenditure as wasteful since it served to buttress the empire, but did not leave enough resources for ‘developing’ India.Footnote ²⁰⁰ In the face of nationalist criticism, finance members were able to claim that India's material progress was proceeding satisfactorily by showing a balanced budget. Gladstonian principles, which had become pillars of Indian public finance, valorized anaemic levels of public expenditure, balanced budgets, eliminating the national debt by devoting budgetary surpluses to it, and stringent control over government expenditure.Footnote ²⁰¹ This emphasis on balancing budgets meant that only those ‘developmental’ schemes that were expected to yield a profit would be considered for financing by the colonial state.Footnote ²⁰² Thus, it might have been reasonable to suppose that the Indian nationalist press would join the conservative British press in criticizing Meyer as this same principle had brought him under attack for his rejection of the proposal to build a railway in Mesopotamia, which had worsened the shortage of medical supplies at the front.Footnote ²⁰³

Under attack from the conservative press for having made an inadequate contribution to the war effort, Meyer sought to strike a chord with Indian nationalists when he claimed that ‘We do not think … [the Tory and Northcliffe press] will ever be satisfied until the last drop of India's blood is sucked.’Footnote ²⁰⁴ Although Meyer claimed that ‘[t]he Government of India have no … excuse to be influenced to far-reaching decisions by the mean, misinformed and misdirected criticisms of the Northcliffe deal in England and India’,Footnote ²⁰⁵ he introduced an internal war loan in India in March 1917.Footnote ²⁰⁶ His proposal to make a special contribution of £100 million to the war on behalf of the Indian government was also meant to silence criticism in the British press. As Meyer explained in a speech to an Indian audience, the Indian government's financial contribution to the British war effort was increased in direct response to criticism in the British press:

Such statements did not, however, prevent Indian newspapers from criticizing imperial control of Indian finances and the pre-eminence of the British over the Indian press in determining Indian financial policy: ‘While it [the colonial government] has shown remarkable activity in unjustly putting down the Indian press and platform, an impression prevails largely, that it is helpless before the strong influentially backed organs of the English and Anglo-Indian Press.’Footnote ²⁰⁸ Nationalist critics of colonial rule played upon the widening gap between the imperial rhetoric of ‘material progress’ and the economic hardships produced by the diversion of Indian revenues into the war effort. The additional financial burden imposed by the loan was criticized by Indian nationalist newspapers, which denounced the drowning out of demands for ‘schemes of development’ by the ‘din of war’.Footnote ²⁰⁹

Thus, the two war loans in India were introduced in a significantly different political atmosphere from that which gave rise to the initial spurt of protestations of loyalty by Indian political leaders. By 1916, such protestations had given way to the more militant agitation of the Home Rule League movements. These were to be followed immediately after the war by waves of growing political protests against the colonial state, fuelled considerably by the economic hardship created by the war and forced contributions to the war effort.Footnote ²¹⁰ The Indian war loans opened in March 1917 and June 1918 collectively raised £75 million.Footnote ²¹¹ Collections from a public weary of contributing to the war effort and unwilling to contribute further were marked by official coercion. Vernacular newspapers, despite the punitive censorship, reported this coercion.Footnote ²¹² As the Hindusthan asked rhetorically: ‘Is it right to make the war loan a success by resorting to terrorism?’Footnote ²¹³ Indeed, so marked was the frustration of the Indian public with increased war collections that ‘Our Day’ collections announced towards the end of 1917 were widely characterized as ‘Aur de’, which translated as ‘give more’.Footnote ²¹⁴ Several witnesses to the committee investigating the 1919 disturbances claimed that these had emerged from dissatisfaction with the colonial administration, arising partly from the use of force to increase subscriptions to the war loans.Footnote ²¹⁵ Fazl-i-Husain, an important political leader in Punjab, called these forced contributions ‘compulsory voluntary aid’,Footnote ²¹⁶ while another witness testified that ‘people were bullied, beaten and coerced’ to raise funds for war loans in Punjab.Footnote ²¹⁷ This coercion was seen to have fed directly into the ‘Rowlatt disturbances’ in April 1919—characterized as ‘the biggest and most violent anti-British upsurge which India had seen since 1857’.Footnote ²¹⁸ During the protests, crowds attacked symbols of British authority such as post offices and railway stations across much of Punjab and in several cities, including Lahore, Amritsar, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Calcutta, and Bombay.Footnote ²¹⁹ These protests and their suppression marked a turning point in the anti-colonial nationalist movement and they were followed by an era of mass nationalist protests, such as those during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22. Similarly, India's economic relationship with Britain underwent a marked transformation after the war which meant that only the most ingenious financial manipulation could allow Britain to generate economic benefits from India.Footnote ²²⁰

Despite the existence of this rich history of transnational connections between propaganda, news, war, and politics, historians examining the Mesopotamia Campaign have tended to restrict their analysis to themes that dominated the reporting of the Mesopotamia breakdown. While the criticism by the Indian press of demands for an increased contribution to the war effort has not found its way into the historiography of the Mesopotamian scandal, the British press's demand for the punishment of colonial officials such as Hardinge and criticism of the Indian government have been widely featured in the scholarship of the campaign.Footnote ²²¹ Historiography on the Mesopotamia campaign and Commission has tended to focus on the veracity of its findings and whether or not responsibility for the breakdown was correctly apportioned.Footnote ²²² In an early study of the campaign, A. J. Barker's claim that the Mesopotamia Commission Report was politically motivated seems to reprise debates in the British press regarding who was ultimately to blame for the breakdown—the British or ‘home’ government, the colonial Indian administration, or the ‘men on the spot’. He argues that the restriction of the terms of the Commission to the period before the British authorities took charge indicates that any blame for the breakdown should be laid at the door of the Indian government, and the British government's conduct of the war should not be scrutinized. Barker suggests that the Commission failed to take into account the logistical difficulties of organizing a campaign in the difficult terrain of the region.Footnote ²²³ Both Paul Davis and John Galbraith have also resuscitated discussion in the British press regarding who was to blame for the breakdown in the campaign. Davis disagrees significantly with Barker regarding the Commission being politically skewed, but nevertheless frames his discussion of it in terms set out in the British press during the war.Footnote ²²⁴ The impetus of some of this historiography comes from initial characterizations of the Commission as a whitewashing exercise in the conservative British press, which was expected to pin individual responsibility for systemic failures on politicians or senior administrators. Other historical assessments have examined the light that the campaign can throw on the fall of the Asquith government and British politics of the time.Footnote ²²⁵ A narrow focus on such themes unwittingly reproduces the imperial biases of the British conservative press. Although the Northcliffe press's coverage of the Mesopotamia breakdown was meant to embarrass Asquith and undermine his government, the fallout of the Commission's findings for the Indian government was considerable and deserves to be analysed for a better understanding of the significance of the war for economic and political developments in India. The focus needs to shift away from these long-standing concerns about the campaign or an assessment of individual figures towards the interweaving of these histories with developments in colonial South Asia.

Politics of reform: nationalism and empire after the war

Post-colonial historiography tends to minimize imperial influences on Indian political development, while privileging the agency of Indian actors. As a result, it tends to ignore aspects of Indian history that reveal their complicity in imperial projects. Engaging again with articulations of imperial loyalty during the First World War is useful when examining the nature of Britain's cultural imprint on Westernized Indian elites acting as intermediaries between the colonial state and Indian society. Further, by focusing on supra-national connections this article shows the impact such connections had on the ability to sustain the British empire during a moment of imperial crisis by facilitating the redistribution of resources from the Indian colonial economy to the imperial war effort. It assesses the changing political meaning of a colony's ‘contribution’ to a distant conflict, the preponderance of the metropolitan press in reconfiguring key ideological underpinnings of colonial politics and economic control, and how the outbreak of the war was viewed in colonial politics and the wider imperial context.

The British press had celebrated concrete manifestations of Indian loyalty to the empire in the form of contributions of men and material in the early phases of the war. The rhetoric of loyalty used for this contribution did not permit any discussion of the constitutional arrangements for dividing the costs of military campaigns. It ignored that the division of the costs of the campaign for the defence of the empire between the Indian colony and the British metropole had been a contentious part of colonial politics. The use of the Indian army as an imperial gendarme and the heavy weight this placed on India's finances had led to the evolution of an elaborate system of checks on India's military expenditure. In the atmosphere of wartime propaganda to spur the British settler colonies onto greater commitment to the war effort, the Northcliffe and Tory press used the rhetoric of colonial contribution for imperial defence to characterize India's financial contribution as having fallen short.

The scandalous Mesopotamian medical breakdown opened up space for criticism of the Indian government by the British press, marking a turning point in British perceptions of colonial rule in India and of the empire in India. As this article argues, the Northcliffe and Tory press's exposé of the breakdown raised questions about the campaign which clearly informed discussions in parliament and even influenced the scope of investigation by the Mesopotamian Commission. Although the medical breakdown loomed large in this exposé of a colonial scandal, the one concrete consequence of it was not the reform of Indian military medical care but rather the increased financial burden of the war on the Indian exchequer.Footnote ²²⁶

British newspapers, reflecting an increasing focus on rallying the British public and empire towards a sacrifice of resources (rather than men) to win the war, demanded an increased Indian financial commitment to the war effort, with only a superficial interest in reforming colonial finances or medical arrangements for the Indian army. Instead, despite declarations by the viceroy and finance member that India had been ‘bled white’ by its contributions to the war effort, the British press sought to increase India's contribution to imperial defence. The nationalist press in India stridently criticized such demands, contending that government expenditure on imperial defence would further marginalize schemes to ‘develop’ India.Footnote ²²⁷

Despite Chamberlain's exhortations against transforming the parliamentary debate on the Mesopotamian breakdown into a re-evaluation of the entire system of Indian government, calls to initiate constitutional reforms were made by liberal politicians like Montagu and liberal newspapers like the Manchester Guardian.Footnote ²²⁸ As Chamberlain's successor in the India Office, Montagu's drive for substantial constitutional reform was accepted in Britain largely due to the persistent criticism of the Indian government in the British press after the Mesopotamian debacle. Within India, attacks from the Tory press had also led to a shift, with the dashing of Indian nationalist hopes that contributing to the British war effort would introduce Indian self-government and earn India a status within the empire similar to the settler colonies. The extension of wartime restrictions on political protests through the Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre led to a growing realization of illiberal and racist conceptions of empire. Efforts by the colonial government to appease criticism of the British press increased the economic burden of war for the Indian population and were clearly responsible for the groundswell of popular protests during the Rowlatt Satyagraha (1919) and the Non-Cooperation movement (1921–22).Footnote ²²⁹

An exclusive focus on British/imperial politics, the historiographies of the British press, of British wartime propaganda, and the Mesopotamian campaign ignores the interrelatedness of colonial, metropolitan, and imperial politics, and therefore systematically overlooks the implications of the Mesopotamian breakdown for South Asian history. That the Tory or Northcliffe press, with their imperial sympathies, were unwilling to take into account the burden of the war effort on colonial subjects can be countenanced, but the neglect by First World War historiography of Indian perspectives and the colonial context is far more problematic. By bringing into a single frame of analysis the British press's critique of the Mesopotamian medical breakdown and the implications of it for India, and by juxtaposing discussions of Indian loyalism during the war with nationalist and imperial critiques of India's contribution, the interplay of newly emerging Indian nationalism with supra-national British patriotism within the empire can be revealed. Such an approach reveals the imperial fault lines exposed by India's participation in the First World War.