The force of justice

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, debates about the dualistic nature of British character took account of the reinforcement and perpetuation of historical myths in Britain and the development of symbiotic relationships with notions of the ‘other’ or ‘outsider’ as ‘barbarian’ or ‘savage’. In a sense, the attempt to reinforce the notion of the superiority of British character and portray the British as a race of ‘gentlemen’ was the result of an organic crisis of gargantuan proportions. There was an attempt to re-establish the hegemonic boundaries of Britain's elites through the implicit unimpeachability of British power and character. One of the most visible examples of British character was that of the colonial administrator and the army officer, locked into their world of honour, decency, and ‘playing the game’. As a result of their schooling and upbringing, the officer and gentleman was not thought to possess the degenerative traits believed to be present within the character of many other groups, both within and outside Britain. Late nineteenth-century public schools developed a unifying ethos, which gloried in gentlemanly pursuits. In an atmosphere that bred ‘mental flexibility rather than imaginative foresight’, working hard and playing the game were the principal objectives.Footnote ³ Sub-rational indoctrination engendered a deference to authority and an unquestioning group loyalty that transferred neatly from the school to the administrative and military elite.Footnote ⁴ It was in the ‘heaven born’ of the colonial administration and the officer corps of the military that the public school spirit, with its ‘gang mentality’, belief in ‘character’, love of honour, and loyalty to empire, reached its zenith. Crucially, these officers and gentlemen ‘were alarmingly sure they had the right and the duty to mould the societies they dominated precisely because they were men of good character and the natives were not’.Footnote ⁵ Further to this, the British officer and gentleman had to maintain his prestige in a world that was ‘terribly masculine’: even if they ‘were not all gentlemen [they] all had to behave, sober or drunk, as if [they] were’.Footnote ⁶ The drive to maintain and reinforce the myth of British character through the concept of the ‘officer and gentleman’ was a necessary adjunct in the development of the systematic body of knowledge needed to reinforce and develop the notion of colonial superiority.Footnote ⁷

There had always been debates over the use of force during colonial encounters. There is no doubt, however, that the technological superiority of European forces in the confrontations that occurred between British and Indian armies during the pacification of the sub-continent was overwhelming. A major issue for the British during this early conquest was how to use force against a people whose eventually acquiescence would be required.Footnote ⁸ Certainly, even vociferous critics of imperialism such as J. A. Hobson had recognized that violence involving the ‘slaughter or extinction of the lower races’ was probably necessary in order to establish colonies, as had been evident in the case of the indigenous peoples of Australia, Africa, the United States, and New Zealand.Footnote ⁹ Nevertheless, after colonies had been formally established, a certain level of violence—both official and unofficial—needed to be maintained. This was particularly so in a country like India, which, it was argued, had a long and violent history. There were those like Edmund Burke (and later, Sir Robert Peel) who realized that British conquest had rested on the power of the military—British rule, however, needed be through a government that operated with ‘justice, kindness and wisdom’, one which ‘recognised the interests’ of the Indian people as a whole.Footnote ¹⁰ Boyce, though, argues that ‘swift decisive action’ as a means to control rebellion ‘was embedded in British thinking’ and that British power was ‘absolute’, founded on ‘conquest’ and not on ‘consent’.Footnote ¹¹ Nevertheless, when in 1818, Mountstuart Elphinstone became ‘Sole Commissioner for the Territories Conquered from the Paishwa’, he championed a British system of administration which, he claimed, differed significantly from any previous methods of control. Elphinstone, who had served on Wellesley's staff at the battle of Assay, been British envoy to Kabul, resident at Poona, and governor-general of Bombay, claimed the Paishwa's rule had been based on despotic and costly rituals of public punishment, in which Indians were rewarded well and punished hard. Conversely, he told how the English would rely on ‘the force of justice’, which required inquiry and due legal process, a system he believed would be ‘less revolting to humanity’.Footnote ¹²

Certainly, contact between Indians and Europeans was an operational necessity and, though it is evident that large numbers of Indians were treated relatively well, many were treated very badly indeed. In the mid-nineteenth century, spice merchant Frank Brown told how ‘the stories [which] circulated in England of the maltreatment of Indian servants were not exaggerated’.Footnote ¹³ Brown claimed that he knew of one man who kept an ‘orderly purposely to thrash the others’.Footnote ¹⁴ These were not simply ‘stories’; when Charles Dilke travelled in India in the 1860s he soon realized the frequency of assaults when he found notices in all the hotels in which he stayed, requesting that gentlemen should ‘not to strike the servants’.Footnote ¹⁵ Recourse to justice seemed impossible when a servant, plantation or factory worker might have to leave his family at the mercy of a hired mob and undertake an arduous journey to Calcutta, in order to lay a charge against a European. The hiring of mobs became well documented in industrial disputes: Bhattacharya relates the case of a planter who organized an attack on the house of a well-to-do Indian during the indigo revolt of 1860. The house was looted and a number of servants were killed or wounded, though when the sub-inspector of police arrived some time later, he simply removed the injured servants to ‘places of imprisonment’.Footnote ¹⁶ Frequent displays of colonial power occurred during the latter part of the nineteenth century as the government used ‘appropriate’ exemplary force against various groups. These people were involved in agitation over issues as diverse as cow killing, conditions in the jute mills, the failure of the authorities to control the excess of moneylenders or revenue protests. These displays were thought necessary to control a country always believed to be on the verge of descent into anarchy and mob violence. When the Mappilas rose at the end of the nineteenth century, they were dealt ‘severe measures’, as the governor of Bombay thought that ‘the safety of the public require[d] that they be destroyed as if they were mad dogs’.Footnote ¹⁷

There is no doubt that the mutiny of 1857 saw a sea change in attitudes towards Indian colonial subjects. The fear of further rebellion brought about a reorganization of the military and placed further emphasis on the development of the apparatus of control. It seemed that state violence would have to continue in new forms if a ‘benevolent’ colonial state was to survive in a country where the indigenous population greatly outnumbered colonial troops. The new forms of violence were, in a sense, dualistic, in that they existed on distinct official and unofficial (individual) levels. However, if the late-nineteenth century colonial state in India needed to continue a policy of aggression against its subjects, it now found itself constrained by Victorian notions of moral empire rooted in the cult of the officer and gentleman. A major problem for the British was their overtly emancipatory rhetoric, which championed individual rights to self-determination and protection under the law. Exemplary punishment, previously a feature of controlling indigenous populations throughout the British empire, was now considered unacceptable by many in Britain and India. Nevertheless, the violent hangover from the disturbances of 1857 had a considerable psychological effect on Europeans in India. This was exemplified in 1872, when Mr Cowan, the deputy commissioner of Ludhiana, had 49 Sikh ‘fanatics’ blown from the guns, despite being ordered to send the men for trial.Footnote ¹⁸ In fairness, the government of India maintained that they ‘deplored’ the action (which they described as both illegal and barbarous) and Cowan was removed from the service (though in 1873 he was ‘compensated’ by being appointed as an envoy to Kashgar).Footnote ¹⁹ Writing in 1935, General Sir George Macmunn, when discussing the blowing of Indians from the guns (which he thought ‘far more humane than that of impromptu tree hanging’), maintained that the practice had served to act as a ‘terrifying deterrent’.Footnote ²⁰ However, if justice for Indians became an important issue post-1857, Europeans were still exonerated in cases of murderous assault. Viceroy Lord Lytton wrote to Queen Victoria complaining of the difficulty that could be encountered in trying to obtain a conviction for murder against a European in India. This difficulty arose, he ingeniously explained, as the ‘natives’ of India were particularly susceptible to an enlarged spleen, a condition whereby only a ‘slight shock’ could cause death.Footnote ²¹

The idea that the use of force was a natural remedy permeated all areas of colonial thinking. One principal myth was that Indians were simply not impressed by leniency and that they ‘welcomed’ a firm hand. This thinking was prevalent throughout the empire: in Africa, Europeans dealt severely with the indigenous populations as it was argued that Africans disliked fines and ‘preferred flogging as a punishment’.Footnote ²² Many critics of empire argued that British rule in India was ‘predisposed to tyranny because it lacked the organic and popular basis which lay at the root of political liberty at home’.Footnote ²³

Some feared that this ‘illiberal and autocratic’ system might return home with Indian administrators and ‘infect’ domestic institutions.Footnote ²⁴ Certainly, Naoroji has questioned whether officials ‘trained up and accustomed to despotism’ might have returned home and ‘influence[d] the English character’.Footnote ²⁵

Nevertheless, in India, a kind of benevolent despotism became the mode of operation and was instilled subliminally from an early age into white children who quickly learned that to give an order and have it acted upon was the norm. In an ingenious attempt to construct a discourse in which the British were not culpable, the development of ‘little despots’ was said to have been ‘quickened by the treatment the children received at the hands of [the] Indian servants’.Footnote ²⁶

If a form of despotism and racial arrogance developed in the administrative, business, and military elite, it is no wonder that the lower echelons saw Indians as legitimate targets for their violence. Like John Stuart Mill before them, many British in India now accepted despotic qualities of brutality and injustice as both inevitable and beneficial to colonized (and, implicitly, less civilized) peoples. Some argued that the liberal notion of a separation between physical and moral force did not apply in India. Legal member of the government of India, Sir James Fitzjames Stephens, wrote how an ‘absolute’ government, founded on conquest and having ‘no justification for its existence except that authority’, should not ‘shrink from open, uncompromising, straightforward assertion of it, seek to apologize for their own position, and refuse, from whatever cause, to uphold and support it’.Footnote ²⁷ In this spirit, many soldiers, administrators, planters, and businessmen went about their daily businesses with an arrogance borne out of an implicit belief in recourse to violence. Motilal Ghose, editor of the Amrita Bazar Patrikia, complained about canal officials who carried out ‘Government orders at the point of a bayonet’.Footnote ²⁸ Official coercion was considered a necessary means of ‘ordering’ a society that had become increasingly tied to a world economy and in which compliant subjects, or rather workers, were crucial. The economic imperative was evident: for example, when ‘indulgence in assaults [threatened] pecuniary loss to the commercial world, its representative in the press [could] use much stronger language than any official could venture to indulge in on the subject’.Footnote ²⁹

Violent treatment of indentured labour and concomitant abuses in the judicial system seemed to conspire to protect the guilty from prosecution. Ultimately, the force of capital was too great for the control of labour to be left to liberal democratic political systems and violence became the obvious mediator. Eminent Bengalis Rabindranath Tagore and Bipin Chandra Pal saw the direct link between economic domination and racial discrimination; Tagore knew that ‘Manchester and Birmingham indigo planters and tea planters’ were king.Footnote ³⁰ The logical progression in many parts of the British empire was an imperial legal framework, created in theory to defend the rights of rulers and ruled alike, though offering in practice a differential in the application of law depending on whom it was applied to. In Seistan, for example, a British officer beat a man thought to be an Afghan, for impertinence; when it was found that the man in question was, in fact, a Belgian, the British officer admitted to a ‘technical’ assault. In the same city, officials ‘insisted’ on the public flogging of a ‘Topchi’ who assaulted a British subject.Footnote ³¹

Nevertheless, the British had always insisted that a codified system of law would be introduced in order to bring justice to ‘all’. The Indian Penal Code, a reformed English model drafted in 1860, ought to have offered substantial protection for Indian subjects, but abuses in the courts continued unabated. Serious indignation erupted within the white community when attempts to offer a fairer system of trial by jury were put forward. The Ilbert Bill (1883), which in its original proposal would have given Indian magistrates the right to try Europeans for certain offences, saw European indignation and arguments erupt against the measures. Meetings were held in India, and in Britain the Bill was condemned in the Lords. Eventually it was introduced in a new form, one in which trial by a majority white jury would be the right of any European. Accordingly, many Indians thought, ‘the white community had simply been given a new privilege in exchange for an old one’.Footnote ³²

The use of force in the colonial situation was underpinned by contemporary deterministic philosophies about the relative worth of subject populations. This meant that the legal system in India was simply not able to process cases involving Indians and Europeans. By the end of the nineteenth century, assaults had reached embarrassing proportions. In addition, the sentences awarded to Indians were certainly disproportionate to those imposed on Europeans. A soldier who kicked an Indian to death and a colliery owner who shot an Indian dead both received one year's ‘rigorous’ imprisonment, while an Indian cook who threatened his employer with a knife received precisely the same sentence.Footnote ³³ Correspondingly, an Indian who killed a soldier while defending himself from a drunken attack was sentenced to ten years' transportation on a charge of culpable homicide.Footnote ³⁴ As the administration of the colonial state often required close contact between rulers and ruled, the position of the average Indian during the latter part of the nineteenth century was perilous indeed.

Yet, as the century came to its close, even though overt displays of colonial violence were still used to impose order on large-scale agitation, the new age of ‘moral’ empire meant that individuals needed more subtle, covert, and economically efficient methods of control. For Foucault, the eighteenth-century state in Europe had moved on from overt, public displays of absolutist violence to the ‘subtle calculated technology of subjection’, be it in the factory, school, asylum or prison.Footnote ³⁵ Accordingly, and accompanying more formal methods of control, the colonial state engineered order through a covert panopticism during which easily ‘observed’ Indians were liable to the instant ‘justice’ of the state through the acts of individual Europeans. Unfortunately for the British, the emergence of the new technologies that had aided the development of the colonial information apparatus also allowed for the wider dissemination of information among the Indian masses. Thus, the ‘ordering’ of Indian society through assault, murder, and the concomitant abuses within the judicial system became relatively well publicized during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Through new technology, these events were inculcated into the everyday experience of a population becoming relatively more politicized.

At the forefront of this process were the Bengali intelligentsia, who had been pushing for an adherence to the norms of law based on ideas of those like Mill and Mazzini. Mill's On Liberty contains the exhortation that: ‘the aim of patriots was to set a limit on the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community. . . the establishment of constitutional checks’.Footnote ³⁶ These texts were taken as a template for the programmes that would question the legal practices of the administration as the century wore on.

This rise in Indian aspirations and confidence partly conditioned the climate in which a sea change occurred, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, collisions between Indians and Europeans were significantly reduced. A number of reasons might be suggested for the reduction in acts of violence; it may have been related to the advances in technology, change in government policy, criticism voiced by liberals in both Britain and India over the treatment of subject populations or the developing character of Indian nationalism. The government of India certainly made gestures towards improving relations, even inserting instructions in official handbooks imploring administrators to show ‘patience and courtesy towards all members of the public’.Footnote ³⁷ Ray attributes the emergence of volunteer movements during the Swadeshi agitation to the ‘almost miraculous cessation of the murderous assaults on Indians by Europeans’.Footnote ³⁸ It is certain that the appearance of these units was an indication of organization and resistance and they certainly played a significant part in the process of national awakening. However, the reduction in collisions occurred prior to the critical Swadeshi period and Ray places too much stress on Indian agitation, not recognizing the crucial element in the process—that of the viceroy, Lord Curzon.

Order over justice

At the commencement of his viceroyalty, Curzon had seemed a little unsure about the frequency with which assaults occurred or the sheer scale of judicial injustice. However, after only a short time, he confided that the ‘question of outrages committed in India upon ‘natives’ [had] for some time been occupying [his] attention.Footnote ³⁹ The viceroy confessed that these incidents ‘ate into his very soul’ and indicated that, if they reflected ‘a deliberate temper [he would] take steps to interfere’.Footnote ⁴⁰ He believed that these sorts of outrages should not occur in a country under British rule and, in his judgement, the fact that ‘everybody, commanding officers, officials, juries [and] departments should conspire to screen the guilty’ was ‘a blot on the British name’.Footnote ⁴¹ Curzon wondered ‘what [was] to be done about those cases in which soldiers were acquitted in defiance of all law and justice?’Footnote ⁴² The viceroy wrote how he hated ‘to see a British official not slaving his heart out, a department slack or careless, society frivolous or rotten, Tommy Atkins course [sic] and contemptuous [or] the English ideal shattered or impaired’.Footnote ⁴³ Curzon would soon become a figure of intense dislike for many individuals across the whole strata of officialdom. His continued attempts to curb institutionalized racism and violence and to exert his moral authority would clearly expose the tensions beneath the surface of the Raj.

Around the time the new viceroy arrived in India, there was a coalescence of the rising interest in nationalism, a perceived deterioration in British prestige, reputation and character, and an increased nervousness of the state. Accordingly, Curzon placed great faith in—and much emphasis on—the conduct of his ‘gentlemen’ administrators and military officers. Secretly however, the viceroy believed many of his administrative and military staff would find it difficult to live up to his exacting standards, simply because of their deficient characters. Paradoxically, Curzon risked damaging the very reputation he wished to uphold as he engaged in a head-on and very public battle with those who wished to gloss over collisions. Crucially, the Curzon viceroyalty coincided with—and, arguably, aided the development of—a nationalist movement increasingly willing to challenge the edifice of colonial power in India. This power was built on the implicit and explicit notion of the threat and the use of violence and, importantly, on the twin concepts of race and class. However, if violence was to be an integral element of control, then imperial discourse had to both de-legitimize Indian responses to that violence and ultimately direct the blame for collisions towards the ‘lower orders’. Curzon often described offences as being committed by British ‘soldiers’. His correspondence usually avoided apportioning blame to the officer class because, like many of his contemporaries, he held a healthy contempt for the lower classes both at home and in the colonies. To Curzon, the emancipation of the masses in Britain had been the greatest horror, and he worried over the ‘appalling prospect’ of the loss of the ‘formidable powers which had been concentrated in parliament’ to ‘other’ social classes, ‘even the property-less’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, the British empire ‘was first and foremost a class act’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Curzon's moral campaign certainly challenged the orthodoxy of a covert and unspoken protection for those Europeans who engaged in institutionalized or random individual violence. When pursued in the House of Commons, inquiries about collisions were usually dismissed with the notion that they occurred infrequently and were ‘not very numerous’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indians were often blamed for bringing the violence on themselves. It was also argued that the perpetrators were to be found mostly in the lower ranks of the military. It was predominantly the ‘course [sic] and contemptuous’ Tommy AtkinsFootnote ⁴⁷ who delivered the kick or fired the gun that killed or maimed an Indian. Commander in chief, Lord Kitchener would later comment that ‘nowhere in the world, in South Africa [or] Egypt. . . [had] he known British soldiers behave with the license and carelessness that they [did] in India’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although the low class British soldier may have been considered dangerous and difficult to control, even the poor Tommy was exonerated to a certain extent: actions were ascribed to a series of events outside his control that induced him to commit an offence: it was the heat of the night, the apoplexy that this heat induced, and the general conditions of service in India. Curzon admitted that military personnel in India caused such ‘terror’ with their drunkenness and lust that the ‘the inhabitants of a village [would often] flee at the approach of British soldiers’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Although contemporary correspondence tends to infer that ‘Tommy Atkins’ or the British ‘soldier’ committed the majority of offences, analysis of reported cases not only challenges the notion of collisions being confined to the lower ranks but suggests that a deeply rooted, institutionalized, conspiratorial cover-up was taking place within the civil and military administration.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indian responses to colonial violence were often portrayed as a childlike reaction against the ‘medicine’ that was required to ‘tame’ the feckless Oriental spirit. Subsequently, violence became endemic, as it was implicitly rooted in the ‘ways of knowing’ and the ‘ways of doing’ that were part of colonial modes of power and knowledge.

The nationalist press became vociferous in its condemnation of the British, maintaining that the moment a European saw a ‘black man their brains are on fire’.Footnote ⁵¹ They considered the behaviour of European women ‘even worse’, calling them ‘vindictive she snakes’ who would bite ‘anyone whose sole fault may be that his shadow fell upon them’.Footnote ⁵² Many Europeans also blamed the worsening relations with Indians on the presence of white women in India. It was argued that although women arrived in India as ‘perfectly reasonable, decent English girls’, their metamorphosis into ‘awful old harridans’ was a forgone conclusion.Footnote ⁵³ Women were accused by some officials of lowering British prestige by fleeing to the hill stations during hot weather and carrying on all sorts of immoral practices. Rabindranath Tagore seemed extremely disappointed in English women whom he thought might have played a part in bridging the gulf between the two races. Many of the accusations against white women may be rooted in the desire of the British administration to find alternative explanations for the development of an anti-British attitude. However, it seems likely that a large number of women would have become enchanted by the same illusions of grandeur which afflicted many men in India and which on occasion produced such incredible arrogance.Footnote ⁵⁴

Abuses against Indians were compounded by the relatively large numbers ‘accidentally’ injured or killed as British army personnel were supposedly out shooting game.Footnote ⁵⁵ A complete ignorance of Indian customs led to numerous disagreements and scores of court cases as soldiers shot game on the outskirts of villages and either killed a peacock or ‘casually peppered a dog’. Indians were killed in incidents that might have been simple accidents or the result of sheer carelessness, as a boy, a woman or a man behind a bush were mistaken for game, or they might just have happened to walk into the line of fire. Confrontations would occur as a verbal disagreement over the killing of an animal escalated. Hearing of yet another case, Curzon wryly commented how four soldiers had set out to shoot game:

The viceroy directed his efforts towards reducing hunting ‘accidents’ by introducing new shooting pass rules, though he reluctantly admitted that this move meant he was ‘denounced by the British soldier throughout the country’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In a Minute on the revision of the shooting pass rules, the viceroy initially maintained the government line in which he reinforced notions of British character and temperament, while carefully denigrating Indian responses to violence. He stated that the blame for shootings could be divided equally between both parties, simply because Indians had lately become more self-assertive, being ‘inspired by British example and teaching, with notions of personal rights to which he [the Indian] was formerly a stranger’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Curzon not only thought that ‘respect for the British uniform [was] not what it was’, but those Indians—who now knew that the law could protect them—were not averse to instigating ‘trumped up charges’ against British soldiers.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, Curzon also noted that British soldiers were the ‘likely cause of much of the agitation’,Footnote ⁶⁰ and the new rules limited the number of men allowed in each shooting party and insisted that an interpreter be present on all occasions.

During the first year of his viceroyalty his campaign was given impetus by a ‘horrible outrage’ that occurred in Rangoon. An elderly and respectable Burmese woman named Mah Goon was dragged along a road by 40 drunken men of the West Kent Regiment before being raped. The secretary of state for India told Curzon that this regiment had been one of the worst with regard to discipline and fighting on the northwest frontier campaign. He went on to say that that they were ‘largely recruited in the east and south of London and [that this particular] offence was one which only town hooligans would be likely commit’.Footnote ⁶¹ The rape was not immediately reported through official channels as Sir Frederick Fryer (the lieutenant governorFootnote ⁶²) ‘did not attach much political or administrative importance to it’.Footnote ⁶³ In fact, Mah Goon had been raped in a public place in front of two Burmese witnesses and then raped repeatedly on a hillside, by ‘perhaps 15 or 16 men [who] were seen going in and out of the hollow to which she had been dragged’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The viceroy only got to hear of the attack through newspaper reports. The whole series of events surrounding the prosecution of five of the men was a complete sham. Four of the soldiers had initially admitted that they had ‘connection’ with the woman, though they claimed they had paid her (the arresting police officer maintained she had no money on her when she was found). When taken before the cantonment magistrate all the men refused to say anything, on the advice of an officer. In three separate trials an all-male European jury acquitted the men, despite the testimony of European, Indian, and Burmese witnesses.Footnote ⁶⁵ During one attempt at prosecution, not only was the woman deemed insane but also ‘the Recorder summed up in a low voice so as the jury did not quite hear the main points and did not understand the case properly’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The case against all the accused, except one, collapsed, as he admitted ‘being with the woman’. A collective punishment was ordered and this resulted in the resignation of the commanding officer, the discharge of the soldiers thought to be involved, and the posting of the whole regiment to Aden, popularly thought of as the worst posting in the empire.Footnote ⁶⁷

Though punishment of a kind was eventually arrived at, this case perfectly illustrates the conspiracy of silence that operated in any case involving Europeans and Indians. Importantly, it exposes the weakness of the legal system as a method for protecting colonial subjects. The lieutenant governor freely admitted that any jury in Rangoon could ‘never be relied upon to bring in a correct verdict in any case in which Europeans [were] concerned’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Secretary of state, Lord Hamilton wrote to Curzon and implored him to be ‘cautious and circumspect in anything [he might] propose [against the soldiers]’. This, he believed, in a rather confused way, would bring on board Anglo-Indian opinion and give the best chance of diminishing ‘this class of offence’.Footnote ⁶⁹ As for Mah Goon, her brother told how she had been just ‘sick’ before the attack, but subsequently her mental condition had deteriorated.Footnote ⁷⁰

Events during the Rangoon trial were symptomatic of colonial attitudes to indigenous women in general. Scores of cases were reported in the press concerning the treatment of Indian women in public places. It was thought that travelling on the railways had become unsafe for females because of drunken soldiers, and women were regularly assaulted during plague inspections.Footnote ⁷¹ Reporting on a woman who had been held prisoner and ‘outraged’ by a European customs official, the Prayag Samachar wondered why the British called for the emancipation of Indian women when this would only lead to a worsening of their circumstances when they were able to move about more freely.Footnote ⁷² Europeans made sweeping judgements concerning the affairs of Indian women and this affected important decisions made in relation to their treatment by the courts. High Court judges were likely to use incredibly disparaging remarks in the case of women; one commented after acquitting a defendant of rape that:

Curzon had also become aware of a number of violent deaths of ‘punkah coolies’. This was believed to be one of the more common types of assault by military personnel in India.Footnote ⁷⁴ Military barracks were fitted with fans driven by ‘coolies’, who had to pull on a rope throughout the night in order to operate the fan. It was often the case that an assault would occur after a soldier awoke to find the fan had stopped, upon which he would go outside and kick the offending Indian with such force as to cause serious injury or death. Despite evidence to the contrary, these murderous attacks were usually blamed on the climate, the ‘poor wretched Tommy’ usually being ‘on the verge of heat apoplexy’ when he committed this type of offence.Footnote ⁷⁵ Assaults of this kind were so prevalent that, in 1900, Curzon raised the issue of fitting motorized fans in barracks. Subsequently, the government of India announced their intention of seeking some method of mechanical ventilation of barracks precisely in order to ‘remove from the vicinity of the men, the coolies, whose inefficient pulling of punkahs undoubtedly, in the majority of instances’ led to this type of assault.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, the technology was new and, though experiments were undertaken in 1901 and some mechanical fans were working a year later, the frequent breakdowns initially negated large-scale installation.Footnote ⁷⁷ The viceroy was much criticized for the expense involved in introducing electric fans. Lecturing to the Army Temperance Association, however, he championed his cause, believing that it would lead to the diminution of one of the most frequent causes of collision between soldiers and natives.Footnote ⁷⁸

During 1902, a number of high profile cases increased Curzon's determination to curtail collisions, though this further incurred the wrath of many in India and Britain. One case—that of the 9^th Bengal Lancers—illustrates the level at which the conspiracy of silence operated and exposes the extraordinary efforts that were used to defend the reputation of the British. This elite regiment had arrived in India on 9 April 1901 after two-and-a-half years in South Africa. ‘There was general carouse [sic] and heavy drinking’Footnote ⁷⁹ during which a cook named Atu was severely beaten, allegedly for failing to procure a prostitute. The man died eight days later from his injuries. Both he and other witnesses consistently maintained that men of the 9^th Lancers were responsible for the attack. Prior to the cook's death, no attempt was made to investigate the assault as the commanding officer simply claimed that ‘owing to the evidence being entirely native’, it would be ‘impossible to bring the guilty man to justice’.Footnote ⁸⁰ No member of the regiment was called to give evidence to the court of inquiry, which was of a most ‘perfunctory character’, being presided over by two captains and one subaltern. The second court of inquiry failed to obtain any further evidence with which to prosecute a conviction.

In November 1902, the case was scrutinized in the Commons where the delegitimization of Indian evidence was cleverly woven into a deterministic debate around Indian character. It was argued that not only was ‘native evidence notoriously unreliable’ but ‘anyone acquainted with India [would] know of the four-Anna witnesses who surround the courts there, and. . . [were] prepared to give evidence for either side’.Footnote ⁸¹ Nevertheless, it was suggested that the evidence given by the injured cook could not be looked upon as a dying declaration, and also that the collective punishment which was eventually inflicted on the regiment was believed to be ‘antiquated, barbarous and vindictive. . . [and which, it was believed was] Chinese in origin’.Footnote ⁸² A number of MPs attempted to shift the blame by the most fallacious argument, claiming the regiment were subject to the accusation purely because of their prominent part in the Punjab War and the disturbances of 1857. The secretary of state rounded up his disposition on the case by commenting on the success of British rule over ‘coloured races’ in comparison with other European nations. This, he believed, was due to the British method of establishing authority associated with ‘perfect equality under the law’, which, he argued, was the foundation of British power. Yet the viceroy remained unconvinced, as he had been less than satisfied with the actions of senior officers. They had discredited the dead cook, calling him a ‘drunkard and a liar’, and had even attempted to pass the blame on to another regiment. The murder was widely discussed in India and Britain, with even the king commenting on the affair, thinking the treatment of the cook unduly harsh.Footnote ⁸³ Only two months after Atu's death, a member of the same regiment killed a ‘punkah coolie’ after kicking him with such force that he ruptured his spleen. The offender was taken before a civil court and fined 100 Rupees.Footnote ⁸⁴

The government of India eventually inflicted a collective punishment on the Lancers: all officers were recalled and all leave cancelled until June 1903. The regiment was moved to a less popular posting and extra sentries were posted on all buildings. They were also ordered not to attend the Durbar at Delhi, though that part of the punishment was later remitted. It was thought the case would make it very difficult for Curzon at the Durbar, and the viceroy agreed that the 1,200 officers of the 9^th Lancers who would be present would be ‘cursing him’. Nevertheless, he believed that this was ‘the price a man had to pay’ in India if he was to ‘stand up against the crimes of his fellow countrymen or to hold the scales with an even hand’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The overwhelming force of European racism overcame all protestations from the more enlightened individuals who were present and the procession at the Durbar turned into a show of public support for the Lancers. The assistant commissioner for the Punjab noted how Curzon was the ‘only one who did not get a really good cheer’, and that his speech was interrupted by ‘idiots who took it into their heads to cough and choke so it was difficult to hear what he said’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The viceroy's former aide-de-camp certainly believed that the Curzons must have been ‘somewhat put out of joint by the very feeble reception they got’.Footnote ⁸⁷ While the character and behaviour of certain sections of the military caused exasperation, the violence that occurred where there was close contact between European civilians and Indian labour enraged the viceroy.

Curzon confided his fears about the behaviour of the managers of the Assam tea plantations to Hamilton. They were often engaged in violent disputes with Indian workers. Tales of the kidnapping of men, women, and children for labour in the plantations caused widespread ill-feeling in India. The commissioner of Assam admitted that on a visit to a tea garden in 1886, he had seen three ‘coolies’ being ‘flogged with a stirrup-leather, for desertion’.Footnote ⁸⁸ While the indenture system in Assam was the source of much discontent, comparatively ‘few difficulties in Bengal or other planting districts where the laws of supply and demand operated’ were experienced.Footnote ⁸⁹ In Assam, various penal Acts armed the planters with powers of prosecution and arrest, bordering on outright slavery.Footnote ⁹⁰ There were considerable problems concerning local gang-men, who controlled the labourers by imposing severe restrictions on their recruits as they stood to lose financially if workers absconded. If a labourer did manage to escape from a plantation, the local ferrymen were paid for every person they caught.Footnote ⁹¹ On a number of Assamese plantations, a workforce—already suffering an abnormally high death rate through disease and unsanitary conditions—were continually abused. It was thought that the particularly unhealthy tea gardens of upper Assam were only operable because of restrictions placed on workers who, given the opportunity, would have demanded higher wages or simply left.Footnote ⁹²

The viceroy wrote to the chief commissioner of Assam complaining that he rarely saw a planter's case from any other province and that they only seemed to arise where a penal contact prevailed.Footnote ⁹³ Curzon agreed with the reformer Henry Cotton's condemnation of the conditions under which the ‘coolies’ worked, though the viceroy believed Cotton had gone ‘too far in representing the planters as “inhuman” monsters’. He was concerned that Cotton might ‘reduce the province to utter confusion’—above all, the viceroy wanted ‘order over justice’.Footnote ⁹⁴

The nationalist press seized upon the ill-treatment of ‘coolie’ labour and held this up as another example of white racism. At the beginning of 1903 the government had issued a circular designed to introduce a procedure for grievances against employers, though the planters complained this unduly favoured the workers. The managers thought they would have to spend valuable time travelling to court and back as the procedure allowed for workers to have a complaint heard by a judge before it was laid as a criminal charge.Footnote ⁹⁵ Unfortunately, government support for workers’ rights was not particularly effective as early legislation was all but neutralized by the planters, who used the power of partisan courts and sections of the Anglo-Indian press to justify their actions.Footnote ⁹⁶ The formidable power of the planters was bolstered by groups like the European and Anglo-India Defence Association, which acted as the political arm of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce. It had successfully campaigned against the Ilbert Bill and often challenged sentences imposed on Indians accused of assaulting Europeans when it thought them too lenient. The Anglo-India Defence Association, though, maintained its ‘main business. . . [was simply to] guard the legal interests of Europeans and to secure them in lawful enjoyment of their rights’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The planter's legal power to arrest and flog ‘deserters’, in particular, fuelled deep resentment. In order to deflect criticism, the viceroy simply claimed that the plantation managers, were ‘drawn from a most inferior class of Englishmen and Scotchmen’ [sic], while admitting in official correspondence that they were often guilty of the most ‘serious acts of lust and oppression’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Curzon noted:

The viceroy did admit that the Assam planters ‘must often resent what appears to them to be a malevolent bureaucratic streak in officialdom’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He realized, however, that it would be impossible to obtain a conviction against a European in Assam as ‘the local magistrates and judges, who [were] in with the planters [fined them] a mere bagatelle of 50 or 100 Rupees’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Curzon had taken two cases of this kind to the High Court in Calcutta where both had been thrown out and, though he believed he had the evidence to ‘frame an indictment against these courts that would convulse the country from end to end’, he felt simply powerless to interfere.Footnote ¹⁰² He thought that the ‘feebly manned’ High Court would never ‘sentence a European to death for the murder of a native’.Footnote ¹⁰³ J. A. Godley, permanent under secretary at the India Office, thought it would be as ‘likely for an Englishman to receive fair treatment from a jury of Boers as an Indian receive a fair trial from a jury of Englishmen’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Although Europeans had the right to a jury that was at least half comprised of their peers, it was often difficult to raise that many white businessmen in many districts. Curzon complained that this meant a couple of ‘callow subalterns’, the youngest and least useful, were often recruited from the local cantonment. This had led to a scandal, as the young officers involved as jurors in one trial ‘had distinguished themselves by talking about the matter while the case was still on, in the club, and by asking their friends what line they should take’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Further to this, intrusion into work and leisure time meant that the ‘intelligent men [were often] exempted’ while the ‘less intelligent [were] made to serve’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ On the odd occasion that a planter was jailed there was a general uproar from the European community. The ‘Travancore planters case’ stirred the Indian press and the white community into a frenzy, as two Europeans stood trial for killing a man by tying him to a tree and beating him over a period of many hours. In this instance, a defence costing £400 and a plea that they only tied him up so as to prevent any blows falling on ‘dangerous’ parts of his body failed to convince the Madras High Court and both planters were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In another notorious case, a planter named Peter Bain beat an absconding ‘coolie’ to death and abetted in the beating of the man's wife and niece who absconded with him. Bain was acquitted of murder and sentenced to six months' simple imprisonment. However, Curzon ordered a retrial at the Calcutta High Court, causing protestations from the ‘Bengal Chamber of Commerce, the Calcutta Trades Association, the Calcutta Baled Jute Association, the Calcutta Tea Traders Association and the Calcutta Fire Insurance Agents Association’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Curzon reported how Calcutta ‘went wild’ as Bain had the murder charge reduced to one of simple ‘hurt’, though the European and Anglo-India Defence Association were still up in arms over this case, insinuating that the government needed an object lesson on the scale of the Ilbert agitation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In an attempt to impose structure and order on the random acts of planter violence, Sir Charles Elliot, chief commissioner for Assam, maintained that the managers in the tea gardens were like the commander of a ship. Accordingly, when an assault took place it was not a case of ‘man against man, but of one in authority and hundreds under his orders’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

However, the Bain trial prompted questions in the House of Commons (on 30 March 1903) as to the possibility of transferring such cases to districts where the jury would not be made up of planters or persons connected with the tea industry.Footnote ¹¹¹ Curzon resignedly admitted, ‘when the coolies are slaves the masters are not fond parents’.Footnote ¹¹² As for the jury system, the viceroy was perplexed after a judge admitted that even though a serious miscarriage of justice had taken place in one of the cases that came before him, he dared not order a retrial, as he was certain that a new jury would produce the same result.Footnote ¹¹³

Workers were assaulted for the most trivial reasons. Joy Lal, a young worker on the Dhendai tea estate, was accused of stealing knives and forks and was killed by two Europeans who admitted that they had ‘cuffed him’. However, the men were at a loss to explain the 200 wounds and 200 to 300 bruises found on his body. They claimed to have left the boy alive and that persons unknown must have killed him afterwards. Not a single man in the garden would make a statement in the men's defence. In court, a number of witnesses testified that they had seen the men beating the boy for about two hours. However, the judge claimed that the witnesses were not considered trustworthy and that they looked to be overacting somewhat. In summing up, he argued that the case ‘ought not have been committed for trial’ and fined the two men 175 Rupees.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Away from the plantations, there were numerous examples of civilian collisions with Indians. Many alleged assaults were the result of incredible racial arrogance. A High Court registrar, for example, assaulted an Indian who entered the court by the judge's entrance. A European (who was allegedly not even arrested afterwards) shot six members of a wedding party because they passed by his house and refused to stop their music when ordered to do so.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Recourse to justice often led to the ‘victim’ being admonished; a Brahmin who had the impudence to ‘come into the presence’ of a European railway official with his slippers on was subsequently beaten with those slippers. Dismissing the case, the judge claimed that this was ‘more a lesson in manners than an assault’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The collisions that occurred in railway carriages must have been frequent, dramatic, or both, as these incidents worked their way into contemporary Bengali fiction.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Injustice became so flagrant that it had a marked effect on new arrivals in India, who soon had their illusions about the integrity of the British race dashed. A High Court judge arrived in India as an assistant magistrate with a belief in the ‘uprightedness’ [sic] of the English race. He later recounted how after a year of dealing with a number of ‘gentlemen’ he was ‘not inclined, for the rest of his judicial career, to draw a sharp line between the trustworthiness of the west and that of the east’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Curzon had little confidence in the future: lamenting the death of Queen Victoria, he wrote how relations between Europeans and Indians were now getting worse and that this would lead to a ‘white caste’, which was no good at all for India or the empire.Footnote ¹¹⁹

High-profile incidents continued to occur. Mr Martin, the manager of the Sangramgar Colliery near Ranigang, incensed at having a magistrate find against him over a right of way, sent a cart along a disputed road. When Bistu Bowri halted the cart, Martin stormed to the scene and shot the man dead. At trial, Martin claimed he accidentally shot Bowri after being attacked by ‘100 men’, who caused him to fall to the ground whereby his gun went off in his pocket. Although evidence showed that the bullet had been fired from above the victim, Martin was acquitted. The ‘miscarriage of justice was so flagrant’ in this case that Martin was retried at the insistence of the local government.Footnote ¹²⁰ The ‘evidence in court was so overwhelming that the jury found him unanimously guilty of culpable homicide’.Footnote ¹²¹ The judge ordered three years’ rigorous imprisonment, though this was reduced to one year on appeal.Footnote ¹²² In the well-publicized ‘Cawnpore mill murder’ case an overseer, Mr Greenwood, severely beat an Indian worker at the Muir Mills. The man was left badly injured and lying on the ground for three hours before he was taken home where he subsequently died of his wounds. The judge commented that the imposition of a fine of 200 Rupees was ‘harsh’ as the defendant had shown remorse, and the usual amount for ‘simple hurt’ ought to have been in the region of 1–40 Rupees. The judge claimed to be sceptical over Greenwood's ultimate responsibility, believing the death might have been caused by the improper use of a catheter by an Indian medical assistant.Footnote ¹²³ This case drove Curzon to wearily proclaim that this was an example of ‘British justice in the twentieth century’.Footnote ¹²⁴

A push with the foot

Curzon clearly understood that collisions risked damaging the reputation of the British. His fears reflected the tension between moral authority and physical force and, despite criticism, he was adamant that assaults should stop. He wrote to Secretary of State Lord Hamilton, commenting that:

The viceroy remained convinced that the actions of British subjects in India reflected directly upon British ‘character’ and, therefore, on British officials, the office of the viceroy, and ultimately the empire itself. He thought ‘the things that English officers and gentlemen [would] do in [India] pass[ed] belief’ and said he could give ‘scores of illustrations’.Footnote ¹²⁶ The nationalist, Bipin Chandra Pal also believed that the ‘deterioration of British character in Indian eyes might be a source of serious trouble to the Government’ because by committing an offence against an Indian ‘no European outrages the social order to which he belongs’. Pal thought that the secret of England's power lay in a prestige, which was not a prestige of arms but one of character.Footnote ¹²⁷ He also thought that there was only one man who appeared to have ‘a proper appreciation’ of the problem—and that was Curzon.Footnote ¹²⁸

Increasing press scrutiny fuelled resentment against the British and Curzon became acutely aware that public opinion in India was:

Nationalist newspapers continued their campaign of highlighting injustice and, though Bengal may have been the centre of disloyal publications, other provinces were no less venomous in their treatment of Curzon and his administration. In 1903 the assistant to the inspector general of Police in the Punjab noted that there was little change during that year in the tone of the press, though ‘such change as occurred was, it must be recorded with regret, for the worse’.Footnote ¹³⁰ He reported:

Press indignation was fuelled by the reporting of assault cases that collapsed as a result of seemingly improbable medical evidence. Victims would be described as having had a ‘big spleen’ or an ‘enlarged liver’, either or both of which had resulted in premature death, coincidentally occurring during an assault. In the Punjab, for example, a Lieutenant Smith kicked his syce (groom) with such force that he ruptured his spleen, but was acquitted when it was claimed the victim's spleen was already enlarged. The Oudh Times thought it was now time to remove the distinction made in murder cases between those who were killed with an enlarged or a healthy spleen.Footnote ¹³² Repeatedly, the blow that killed was described as a mere ‘push with the foot’ and the resulting sentence was levelled accordingly. When Henry Wilson, the stud groom for the governor of Bombay, killed a syce by rupturing his spleen, the charge of causing death by a rash and negligent act was reduced to ‘simple hurt’, which carried a small fine (in this case 25 Rupees). The nationalist press kept up its campaign: the Indian Spectator adamantly arguing that ‘no man dies of simple hurt’.Footnote ¹³³ The Hitavadi marvelled that a European accused of killing a man was acquitted when the civil surgeon described the injuries as resulting from blows from a fist or a slipper, despite the conclusion drawn by the post mortem report that the man must have died from injury caused by a ‘fall’.Footnote ¹³⁴

A number of senior British figures were becoming aware of the discontent that the assaults were causing in India. Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne commented how he thought the ‘highest credit’ was due to Curzon for his stance against the outrages, though he also attempted to shift the blame onto the ordinary soldier.Footnote ¹³⁵ Commander in chief in India, Lord Kitchener, who was initially sceptical about the number of fatal assaults, later admitted, ‘he [had] completely come round’, after receiving information of four cases of assault in one week, ‘two of which had resulted in death’.Footnote ¹³⁶

Although there are just a few cases of assault recorded officially (only 189 between 1880 and 1899Footnote ¹³⁷), the actual figure has been estimated at 500 per province per year.Footnote ¹³⁸ Many Indians felt powerless, though the Prabhat argued that both low-class and ‘respectable’ Europeans would be less inclined to assault if an attack were returned blow for blow. The editor believed that only when Europeans realized that they may be assaulted in return would relations improve.Footnote ¹³⁹ Bipin Chandra Pal's New India called for the organization of Indian youth for physical training, purely in order for them to be more able to respond to attacks from Europeans.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ However, many were terrified into silence by fear of repercussions. The press published numerous stories concerning those that had stood up to or given evidence against Europeans; in the infamous Fort William murder case a soldier, jailed after a complaint was made against him by an India tailor, emerged from two weeks’ incarceration and promptly shot his accuser.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Even the bail system seemed inoperable in cases of Indian resistance. When Chandi Persad was thrown into jail for threatening a European, the district magistrate asked for 50 sureties of 1,000 Rupees, then refused to accept any ‘offered by even the most respectable men in the neighbourhood’.Footnote ¹⁴² Sir John Thompson, assistant commissioner in the Punjab, told how his bearer had said that ‘the native cure for hiccoughs was to accuse a person of theft [whereby he becomes] so frightened, he is cured at once’.Footnote ¹⁴³ For the Hitavadi, the question was simple, if Indians were subjects of the queen, why did they not ‘obtain justice from Englishmen?’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Victims of assault were not always low-status workers or servants. The randomness of the violence meant that it affected the whole strata of Indian society. Surendranath Bannerji, addressing the annual Congress at Lahore in 1900, recounted how three drunken soldiers had murderously assaulted his friend, a Dr Sircar.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

However, though the continued injustices were becoming widely reported, the first few years of Curzon's viceroyalty elicited little support for his campaign from senior figures in India and Britain. It was thought that ‘only two Europeans had been hanged for the murder of an Indian since the mutiny’ of 1857Footnote ¹⁴⁶ and Curzon now believed that ‘there [would] be no change in India [unless] a British soldier [was] sentenced to death for the murder of a native’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The viceroy continued to observe the committals and trials of Europeans and he was not surprised when a soldier who had bayoneted a ‘punkah coolie’ to death was acquitted on the grounds of insanity. This soldier, like others he had heard of, seemed to ‘posses the peculiar gift of passing with startling swiftness from the full possession, to the complete loss of his faculties’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The colonel who conducted the soldier's defence had declared that he was ‘liable to impulsive insanity’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

George Hamilton resigned as secretary of state in September of 1903 and Curzon wrote to him, and pleaded:

With the departure of Hamilton, Curzon lost an ally in his fight against injustice though, privately, a number of officials voiced support.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The incoming secretary of state, St John Brodrick, had become a close friend of Curzon's at Balliol College (although they had previously had a disagreement that had led to a complete halt to their correspondence for three monthsFootnote ¹⁵²). Brodrick was sceptical over the culpability of Europeans. In response, Curzon told him how ‘the number of cases in which an unprovoked assault is delivered by natives [was] infinitesimal, [he] could not recall three since [he had] been in India’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Curzon was adamant that ‘in every case without exception which [he] had personally examined, investigations showed that these collisions were the result of provocation given in the first place not by the black man but by the white. . . in 19 out of 20 cases the cause of the mischief was that the English soldiers were either after a woman or were drunk’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The viceroy vehemently dismissed the accusation that Indians were ‘becoming more aggressive in their assaults upon the English soldier’; this, he insisted, was simply ‘not born out by the figures and facts’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

By 1904, the strain of office was beginning to depress the viceroy. He wrote how ‘friends at home hardly [understood his] position’ and, but for the few things he still felt he had to do, he was ‘ready to go tomorrow’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ At the end of April 1904 Curzon returned to England for a period of leave.

As his campaign was having a marked effect, acting viceroy Lord Ampthill quickly sensed that on his return to India Curzon would ‘not be welcomed by many sections of the community’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Europeans felt they were ‘now cheeked by even the lowest class of natives in an intolerable way’ and as they could no longer deliver an assault with impunity, they believed they were ‘quite helpless’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ When a European now ‘raised his stick to chastise an insolent native the latter frequently threaten to tell the Lord Sahib’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Curzon agreed that one result of his campaign was that Indians were increasingly confident,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ could take more ‘liberty of speech and action, and [were] very impertinent and sometimes aggressive where [they were] once sulky and cowed’.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Curzon had an uneasy home leave: his relationship with Brodrick had become strained as he felt left out of government of India business,Footnote ¹⁶² his wife gave birth to their third child, but suffered very bad health that nearly resulted in her death, and the viceroy had his usual back problems to cope with. His holiday had ‘been one of almost continuous pain and depression’.Footnote ¹⁶³ Though Ampthill expected to see the usual robust-looking viceroy on his return to office, ultimately he would be ‘talking to a man whose capacity for continued work in India without permanent injury to his health [was] waning’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Curzon maintained that he might be able to eat a grouse, but would be unable to pursue one for 300 yards.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ On his return to India in early December 1904, the viceroy continued his work in a distinctly hostile environment. However, he was rather pleased with the effect of his campaign against collisions, and would later tell how it had produced ‘a greater success than [he] ever deemed likely’ and this was evident by the ‘small place now occupied by such incidents in the newspapers’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

A flood of ignorant and pernicious calumny

Curzon's campaign against collisions between Europeans and Indians had certainly been relatively successful. However, its inconsistencies appear puzzling. His attitude was brave and progressive because it flew in the face of contemporary dogma and risked exposing and infuriating those in the administration, military, and business communities who believed in institutionalized violence as a means to an imperial end.

Certainly, many shared Curzon's belief in a more liberal attitude towards Indians. Francis Younghusband, the leader of the Tibet mission of 1903–04, thought the British ought to take more care in choosing men for office and, though he did ‘not wish to contend that [they] should go about slapping every “baboo” on the back and offering them a drink’, he believed a more cordial relationship between Europeans and Indians was the only way to continue British rule.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

However, there were also many who believed, either explicitly or implicitly, that violence was a necessary means of ‘ordering’ colonial society. The viceroy, on the other hand, understood only too well that defending the ‘character’ of the British was paramount. He saw continuous injustices as a threat to the stability of British rule in India. He then had to temper this realization with his personal fear of press criticism that might result in too much focus on a particular case or on the wider issues surrounding the moral justification for British rule. His campaign was confused in the sense that he attempted to impose his will on officials who needed more than orders from above to change their deep-seated beliefs and attitudes. Europeans were subliminally conditioned by socio-religious dogma and it would be many years before their attitudes could be reshaped to a more liberal worldview. Those who tried, like Annie Besant, for example, failed precisely because the problem was so great.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Curzon was certainly ‘of his time’; he thought, for example, that Bengalis were ‘contemptible’, though he championed the Burmese as an eminently acceptable subject race. It may be no coincidence that, while there was a continuous flow of seditious material being published in Bengal, relatively little appeared in Burma.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Nevertheless, the viceroy's ethnic preferences were understandable, given contemporary dogma that constructed a class-based hierarchy in which certain groups were reduced to stereotypical representations of the ‘other’.

Attempts by senior officials to direct the blame for offences towards the lower ranks of the military and civilian population were part of such essentialized representations. The British always claimed that it was the ‘private, corporal or the sergeant in the army, the railway guard and the station master’—the ‘lowest rung of European officialdom’—who were the most conspicuous offenders in outrages against Indians.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Analysis shows, however, that officers and high-ranking officials perpetrated a significant number of assaults. After one of Lord Ampthill's aide-de-camps kicked an Indian to death, Curzon commented that the kick was once again represented as a mere ‘push with the foot’ and that this phrase was now an ‘Indian classic’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The secretary of state thought that ‘if the personal staff of the viceroy or Governor so conduct themselves’ what could be expected from ‘the average Englishman’.Footnote ¹⁷² Senior officers attempted to deflect criticism by actively engaging in outright denials and refutation when the reputation and therefore the character of the British gentleman were brought into question. In relation to the Lancers, Sir Bindon Blood, general officer commanding of the Punjab, maintained that those who accused soldiers of ‘habitually’ mistreating Indians were ‘unpatriotic’ and held ‘harmful delusions’ about India.Footnote ¹⁷³ Nevertheless, not only were officers and gentlemen directly and indirectly involved in collisions, they had also imbibed an institutionalized commitment to both promote and inflict violence upon Indians.

Yet, British rule could not rest on violence alone. This would bring too high a moral and physical cost. British rule in India depended also on prestige and moral authority. The two sources of power collided whenever an Indian was assaulted and failed to secure justice through the legal system. Curzon's efforts to underpin the second pillar of the Raj—its moral authority—cost him dearly and he made many British enemies. Even though outwardly he was conducting a campaign against injustice, his correspondence with the secretary of state and other individuals seems to suggest that he also ‘buried’ information. The negative and accusatory press, directed at him personally and the government of India in general, drove him to despair. He believed it unjust and unfair and resented the fact that his position as viceroy prevented a public defence of his position. At one point, he said that if the accusations continued, the government of India would be compelled to make a statement:

What seemed to particularly irk Curzon was that he believed that even though he was one of the most important figures in the British empire, ‘his’ authority was hamstrung in relation to the administration of impartial justice in India. The viceroy believed in the cult of the gentleman and the constant collisions challenged that belief. Importantly, Curzon felt able to challenge the status quo as he feared no one—simply because he thought none more important than he.

During Curzon's viceroyalty there was a battle of wills. The press played on collisions to damage the reputation of their colonial masters. He fought his campaign in order to reduce the incessant press abuse and to defend the character of the British. The viceroy truly believed that the maintenance of character was crucial to the furtherance of British rule in India. Nevertheless, his actions impinged on the way in which violence was administered in India and this instilled a new confidence into the nationalist movement, arguably hastening the challenge to British rule.

It was natural that Curzon would attract the wrath of large numbers of the military and administrative elite, for he was undermining one of the foundations of colonial power. The threat and use of violence were considered necessary weapons in the armoury of psychological and physical methods used for the control of colonial peoples. Concomitantly, the implicit knowledge that the legal system would ordinarily protect a European committed for violence against an Indian was widespread and necessary.

The disproportionate sentences awarded to Indians were based on the need to protect prestige and to instil fear into those who challenged their colonial masters. Violence needed to be administered but controlled. Witness the elaborate mechanisms employed to check violence between British soldiers and their superiors, for example, then contrast this with the ease with which a soldier of any rank could kill an Indian, followed only by the most perfunctory investigation and trial.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ More intelligent British officers and administrators such as Curzon realized, however, that successful rule depended on respect as well as fear. The precious capital of moral authority could not be frittered away in acts of casual violence.

Humanitarian sentiment as well as realpolitic impelled some criticism of collisions. Those in Britain who were concerned with the treatment of colonial peoples kept up their campaigns, either asking questions in the House or writing directly to the government. Joseph Clayton, secretary of the Indian Humanitarian Committee, wrote to Brodrick and asked him to look into the excessive use of corporal punishment in the South Sylhet district, where the sentences were so heavy that on occasion the full number of lashes could not be inflicted.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Beyond such lobbyists, muscular Christian officers in India, while they saw a need to chastise their subjects ‘for their own good’, disavowed boorish behaviour and its accompanying gratuitous violence. Boredom and its concomitant, drink, certainly played a part in many cases of assault and murder.

This, however, only offers a limited insight into why a perpetrator committed a particular act; it goes no way towards explaining why the colonial state allowed offences to be prosecuted with such little enthusiasm. The reasons underpinning the refusal to pursue justice with any real vigour were conditioned by contemporary deterministic philosophy and the colonial state's need for ‘order over justice’. It was imperative that the state defended the myths of the officer and gentleman and, as part of this process, it freely promulgated the notion that the lower ranks were incapable of controlling their urges. It was only when knowledge of the abuses became widespread that certain members of the British and Indian governments began to consider how collisions might be curtailed. It was also clear that considerable resistance would be offered by the system, which was built on the implicit and explicit notion of the use of violence, to any attempts to curtail collisions.

From the time of East India Company rule, the British had neutralized all other claims to the legitimate use of force in India. Alongside a coercive power structure, it constructed a judicial, administrative, and ideological system which, in the majority of cases, did not recognize the guilt of its officers and gen tlemen in incidents of violent conflict between Indians and Europeans. Curzon's ‘crime’ was to challenge this orthodoxy at a time of nervousness for the British imperial state. The logical inconsistencies within his approach exposed how the colliding bases of British authority in India—moral authority versus institutionalized racism and violence— would become the crucial element in debates over the legitimacy of the Raj. These tensions would eventually be laid bare even more clearly by Gandhi's non-violent campaigns.

Finally, as an exemplar of contemporary attitudes to violence against colonial subjects, the following tells us a great deal: a British officer, writing to a friend who was about to come out to India as an administrator enthused, ‘it's a ripping feeling knowing I can kill a native a year now, without un-pleasant fuss being made of it, I shall certainly expect that of you’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷