British Raj

"We divide and you rule. The moment we decide not to divide you will not be able to rule."

"It is one of the great achievements of our rule in India that, even if they do not entirely carry them out, educated Indians do accept British principles of justice and liberty. We are condemned by Indians not by the measures of Indian ethical conceptions but by our own, which we have taught them to accept. It is precisely this acceptance by politically conscious Indians of the principles of democracy and liberty which puts us in the position of being able to appeal to them to take part with us in the common struggle; but the success of this appeal and India's response does put upon us the obligation of seeing that we, as far as we may, make them sharers in the things for which we and they are fighting."

"Looking back today over the years, we may well be proud of the work which our fellow citizens have done in India. There have, of course, been mistakes, there have been failures, but we can assert that our rule in India will stand comparison with that of any other nation which has been charged with the ruling of a people so different from themselves."

"May I recall here a thing that is not always remembered, that just as India owes her unity and freedom from external aggression to the British, so the Indian National Congress itself was founded and inspired by men of our own race, and further, that any judgment passed on our rule in India by Indians is passed on the basis, not of what obtained in the past in India, but on the principles which we have ourselves instilled into them."

"English rule has enabled India still to retain her identity and social type; it has awakened her to herself and has meanwhile, until she became conscious of her strength, guarded her against the flood which would otherwise have submerged and broken her civilisation. It is for her now to recover herself, defend her cultural existence against the alien penetration, preserve her distinct spirit, essential principle and characteristic forms for her own salvation and the total welfare of the human race."

"English rule has by its general principle of social and religious non-interference prevented any direct and violent touch, any deliberate and purposeful social pressure; but it has undermined and deprived of living strength all the pre-existing centres and instruments of Indian social life and by a sort of unperceived rodent process left it only a rotting shell without expansive power or any better defensive force than the force of inertia."

"Was it necessary for the rumours of your riches to penetrate through to the climate where artificial needs have no limits? Soon new foreigners approached your frontiers; inconvenient guests, everything that they touched belonged to them: your squabbles maintained, and aggravated, by Agents who are powerful, and what is more, motivated by self-interest, so that your disputes become eternal: it is no matter that they have invaded your market, have tripled the price of basic foodstuffs, and as to merchandise, have altered its quality; manufacturing industry almost annihilated, the workers fleeing to the mountains, the dying son asking his father what he had done to these foreigners who take away rice from his mouth: nothing touches them, or softens their hearts: your gold, one said to the Peruvians, to the Mexicans: here, the revenue of Hindustan, that is what we demand, even at the cost of rivers of blood."

"India’s independence “can be dated to the 1840s, when calls for independence from the British began."

"Far away in time, in the dawn of history, the greatest race of the many races then emerging from prehistoric mists was the great Aryan race. When that race left the country which it occupied in the western part of Central Asia, one great branch moved west, and in the course of their wanderings they founded the cities of Athens and Sparta; they founded Rome; they made Europe, and in the veins of the principal nations of Europe flows the blood of their Aryan forefathers. ... At the same time, one branch went south, and they crossed the Himalayas. They went into the Punjab and they spread through India, and, as an historic fact, ages ago, there stood side by side in their ancestral land the ancestors of the English people and the ancestors of the Rajputs and of the Brahmins. And now, after aeons have passed, the children of the remotest generations from that ancestry have been brought together by the inscrutable decree of Providence to set themselves to solve the most difficult, the most complicated political problem that has ever been set to any people of the world."

"Difficult as the course is, the dangers do not come from the difficulties; they come from extremists in India and at home. I will tell you what I mean. I am firmly convinced that such writings as appear in such papers as the Daily Mail will do more to lose India for the British Empire, will do more to cause a revolutionary spirit, than anything that can be done in any way by anyone else. I got many letters, I need hardly say, of all points of view. I had a very characteristic one last week...It was from a colonel; he was an old man, you could tell that by his writing; and he used this phrase: He said, "You and Lord Irwin are negrophiles." Perhaps he was a member of the United Empire party. That is not the way to cement the Empire. This sort of thing, and the spirit behind it, will break up our Empire infallibly, and that is what I am out to fight."

"Everyone knows that if the people of India could be unanimous for a day, they might sweep us from their country as dust before a whirlwind."

"The English looked upon India as the keystone of the imperial arch, but did the arch only exist to support the keystone? What in terms of economic and strategic advantage did England get in return for this immense imperial structure spread-eagled from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal? Wherein lay that value of India which alone could justify – and more than justify, if India were to be profitable – the burdens and risks that England had assumed in the Middle East and Asia? In the first place, India added nothing to the industrial capacity of the empire. Out of every hundred Indians, seventy-one worked on the land and only twelve in any kind of industry... Except for chromium, manganese and jute, India was also devoid of discovered or exploited sources of strategic raw materials. As a market for British products, India in 1913 was nearly equalled in value by France and Germany together (£70,273,221 as against £69,610,451), and outweighed by the "white" dominions. As a source of imports into Britain, India was worth less than half the "white" dominions. As a field for British investment, India rated as not much more important than Argentina, and half as important as the United States. Thus, when India's importance to England as a source of economic advantage or strategic raw materials is compared to other countries both inside and outside the empire, there was nothing remotely to justify the unique and immense diplomatic and strategic responsibilities that India entailed... For the British, having given themselves such vast trouble to conquer and to hold India, had neglected adequately to exploit it."

"In the Great War India raised 1,440,437 soldiers, all volunteers... The total number of men raised in India was no more than 0.3 per cent of her population, compared to 12.4 per cent in the British Isles, 11.6 per cent in New Zealand and about 8 per cent in Canada and Australia. Of the Indian total, only 877,068 were combatants, while India sent overseas no more than 621,224 officers and men; Canada, on the other hand, from a population of only 7,600,000 sent abroad 422,405 men... Of the troops India did send overseas, only 89,335 went to swell British strength on the decisive front in France and in the battles with England's principal enemy, Germany. Against these 89,335 troops sent to France must, however, be set the 15,000 British troops retained in India to secure internal order... Thus India's military contribution to the British struggle with Germany in the Great War was in fact both relatively and absolutely negligible. When therefore a final balance is struck of the value of India to Britain in the Great War, value both economically and militarily, there is only the item of a net gain of 74,000 soldiers to set against the colossal, expensive and vulnerable British involvement in territories stretching from Malta to Rangoon, from the Himalayas to East Africa. The whole British position in the Middle East and Southern Asia was in fact a classic, and gigantic, example of strategic over-extension. Far from being a source of strength to England, India served only immensely to weaken and distract her."

"India was like colossal mansion standing in the middle of a vast but ill-cultivated estate; it conferred prestige, it made the owners feel grand, and, by the cost of its upkeep, threatened them with ruin. For how could a nation of only 45,000,000 people, an industrial power not only out-matched in size but in performance by great rivals, find the diplomatic and strategic strength to carry India without dangerously weakening itself? ... Even had the British governing classes thought in terms of a colossal economic transformation of India, their powers of bringing it about were limited. The Indian Mutiny had shown the dangers that a small occupying force ran in trying to interfere with deeply entrenched prejudices, customs and patterns of life... "Five Year Plans" for India were simply not in the British mind. The corset of good and honest government and the benefit of public works were as much as the British could hope to achieve, and as much as their imagination compassed. Only the Labour Party thought of Indian problems primarily in economic terms, and then not from the point of view of British advantage... India was indeed "a mischievous encumbrance", to be rid of with all convenient speed... Yet during and after the Great War the British governing classes failed to perceive that self-interest demanded the handing over of India to some Indian régime as quickly as it could be arranged."

"Thus the British constructed their own illogical dilemma and locked themselves up in it: India was a liability; therefore we could not abandon it. Or, to put it in another way, even if we had no need of India, India had need of us, and we ought to fulfil that need even at our own cost. For in the last resort the place of India in the British mind was founded not upon calculation but upon love... For the clue to all the agonising of the British over India between the world wars was that, whatever their political differences of opinion, they were thinking primarily not of British interests, but of Indian interests, as they conceived them."

"Moral idealism not only prevented the British from leaving India between the world wars, it also created the peculiarly disadvantageous circumstances in which they stayed on. For it was the moral idealism of the liberals – first of the Liberal Party proper, and later of liberals in the Labour and Conservative parties – which gratuitously helped in raising up Indian discontent and the demand for independence in Britain's face. British higher education in India...turned out not the engineers, scientists and technicians which India needed, but unemployables of "liberal" education, good at best for low-grade clerking, but believing themselves to be a deprived élite – apt material for political dreaming and scheming... The form of British education in India was a fundamental mistake. As the chief executive of a great American company...told an American journalist in the 1920s: "If I were running the country, I'd close every university tomorrow. It was a crime to teach them to be clerks, lawyers and politicians till they'd been taught to raise food." Having created an intelligentsia, the British proceeded to encourage it, step by step, to entertain larger and larger political ambitions."

"This intelligentsia which spoke so confidently for "India", voicing "India's" demand for freedom and "India's" right to self-rule, numbered in truth less than one in a hundred of India's population. There was no need to take them and their secondhand liberal clichés seriously at all. The British had won India by the sword, and more than that, by the moral ascendancy behind the sword... India was accustomed to autocracy; the British sat comfortably enough in the throne vacated by the Moghuls, and until liberals created an Indian intelligentsia and told it that autocracy was wrong, no Indian resented autocracy. And even by the time of the Great War it was not the people at large but only the intellectuals who resented it... There was therefore no inevitable process of history to put a term to English rule in India. In 1914–18 the future of English rule in India lay still entirely in English hands. It depended on English nerve... Indeed the history of the French, Habsburg and Russian monarchies showed clearly enough that there could be no half-way or quarter-way houses between total autocracy and total abdication. If an autocracy can no longer rule by force of will and force of guns, concessions cannot preserve it, but only determine the manner of its extinction. Yet in 1919–21 the English continued to pursue the liberal fantasy of enlisting the goodwill of the Congress movement, and it was...this policy of appeasement that really brought about the revolutionary change in the position of the English in India."

"Like you, I believe strongly that where there is a revolutionary element expressed in action, one must act resolutely. My reading of Indian history has led me to believe that a Government founded so completely as ours is upon prestige can stand almost anything except the suspicion of weakness."

"To me it is frankly inconceivable that India will ever be fit for Dominion self-government."

"I have always placed my highest and most permanent hopes upon the eternity of the Communal situation. The greater the political progress made by the Hindus, the greater, in my judgment, will the Moslem distrust and discontent become. All the conferences in all the world cannot bridge over the unbridgeable, and between these two communities lies a chasm which cannot be crossed by the resources of modern political engineering."

"The Romans were great conquerors, but where they conquered, they governed wisely. The nations they conquered were impressed so indelibly with the intellectual character of their masters, that, after fourteen centuries of decadence, the traces of civilisation were still distinguishable. Why should not we act a similar part in India? There never was a more docile people, never a more tractable nation. The opportunity was present, and the power was not wanting. Let us abandon the policy of aggression, and confine ourselves to a territory ten times the size of France, with a population four times as numerous as that of the United Kingdom. Surely that was enough to satisfy the most gluttonous appetite for glory and supremacy. Educate the people of India, and govern them wisely, and gradually the distinctions of caste would disappear, and they would look upon us rather as benefactors than as conquerors. And if we desired to see Christianity, in some form, professed in that country, we should sooner attain our object by setting the example of a high-toned Christian morality, than by any other means we could employ."

"I do not now make any comment upon the mode in which this country has been put into possession of India. I accept that possession as a fact. There we are; we do not know how to leave it, and therefore let us see if we know how to govern it. It is a problem such as, perhaps, no other nation has had to solve. Let us see whether there is enough of intelligence and virtue in England to solve the difficulty. In the first place, then, I say, let us abandon all that system of calumny against the Natives of India which has lately prevailed. Had that people not been docile, the most governable race in the world, how could you have maintained your power for 100 years? Are they not industrious, are they not intelligent, are they not—upon the evidence of the most distinguished men the Indian Service ever produced—endowed with many qualities which make them respected by all Englishmen who mix with them? I have heard that from many men of the widest experience, and have read the same in the works of some of the best writers upon India. Then let us not have these constant calumnies against such a people."

"The task of the wise government of so vast an empire may be an impossible one—I often fear it is so—we may fail in our efforts, but, whether we fail or succeed, let us do our best to compensate for the wrong of the past and the present by conferring on the Indian people whatever good it is in our power to give them."

"The best justification for the despotic system described is to be found in the administration of British India. That administration is no doubt in some respects imperfect. … But it is incomparably better than the administration of any subject territory by an alien and distant race of conquerors than has ever been before. It had in particular attained three great objects. It has established perfect internal peace and security through a vast area, much of which is still inhabited by wild tribes; it has secured a perfectly just administration of the law, civil as well as criminal, between all races and castes; and it has imbued the officials with a feeling that their first duty is to do their best for the welfare of the natives and to defend them against the rapacity of European adventurers. These things have been achieved by an efficiently organized Civil Service inspired by high traditions, kept apart from British party politics, and standing quite outside the prejudices, jealousies, and superstitions which sway the native mind. Only through despotic methods could that have been done for India which the English have done."

"[H]e would say that he doubted whether it was possible for anyone who had not visited India, even Members of Her Majesty's Government, to realize how incredibly strong, and, at the same time, how incredibly slender, our position in India was. It was strong far beyond ordinary human strength so long as we showed ourselves capable of ruling; but it was weaker than the weakest the moment we showed the faintest indications of relaxing our grasp."

"The rescue of India from ages of barbarism, tyranny, and internecine war and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilisation constitute upon the whole the finest achievement of our history."

"Why is it that the principles of Government and lessons of history which we have learnt in our experience with the great self-governing dominions, which we have learnt in Canada, in South Africa and in Ireland, apply only in a limited degree to India? It is because the problem of Indian government is primarily a technical one. In India far more than in any other community in the world moral, political and economic considerations are outweighed by the importance of technical and administrative apparatus. Here you have nearly three hundred and fifty millions of people, lifted to a civilisation and to a level of peace, order, sanitation and progress far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves or could maintain. This wonderful fact is due to the guidance and authority of a few thousands of British officials responsible to Parliament who have for generations presided over the development of India. If that authority is injured or destroyed, the whole efficiency of the services, defensive, administrative, medical, hygienic, judicial; railway, irrigation, public works and famine prevention, upon which the Indian masses depend for their culture and progress, will perish with it. India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages. The question at stake is not therefore the gratification of the political aspirations towards self-government of a small number of intellectuals. It is, on the contrary, the practical, technical task of maintaining the peace and life of India by artificial means upon a much higher standard than would otherwise be possible. To let the Indian people fall, as they would, to the level of China, would be a desertion of duty on the part of Great Britain."

"During the 1935 Parliament debates on the Government of India Act, Sir Winston Churchill opposed any policy tending towards decolonization on the following ground: 'We have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except perhaps for the Depressed Classes [= the SC/ STs], who are the native stock.'"

"The world never yet beheld such a compound of jobbing, swindling, hypocrisy, and slaughter, as goes to make up the gigantic scheme of villainy called the “British rule in India”. I have a presentment...that God's chastisement upon us as a nation will come from Hindostan. ... Your energies could not be more worthily employed than in trying to avert from us this judgement, by endeavouring to do justice to the Indian population."

"The British Government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom, but has debased it economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. We believe that India must sever the British connection and attain purna swarajya, or complete independence...We hold it to be a crime against man and God to submit any longer to the rule that has caused this disaster to our country. We recognize, however, that the most effective way of gaining our freedom is not through violence."

"As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we shall drop straight away to a third-rate Power."

"India was the pivot of our Empire. If this Empire lost any other part of its dominion we could survive, but if we lost India, the sun of our Empire would be set."

"Powerful empires existed and flourished here (in India) while Englishmen were still wandering, painted, in the woods, and while the British Colonies were still a wilderness and a jungle. India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind, than any other terrestrial unit in the universe."

"George Curzon was likewise determined to prevent famine from being used as a cause for reform. With hunger spreading on an unprecedented scale through two-thirds of the subcontinent, he ordered his officials to publicly attribute the crisis strictly to drought. When an incautious member of the Legislative Council in Calcutta, Donald Smeaton, raised the problem of over-taxation, he was (in Boer War parlance) prompdy "Stellenboshed." Although Curzons own appetite for viceregal pomp and circumstance was notorious, he lectured starving villagers that "any Government which imperilled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralised the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime.""

"England's industrial supremacy owes its origin to the vast hoards of Bengal and the Karnatik being made available for her use....Before Plassey was fought and won, and before the stream of treasure began to flow to England, the industries of our country were at a very low ebb."

"My Lords, the key of India is not Merv, or Herat, or Candahar. The key of India is London. The majesty of sovereignty, the spirit and vigour of your Parliaments, the inexhaustible resources of a free, an ingenious, and a determined people—these are the keys of India."

"It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade."

"Commerce on the sea is monopolized by the British even more than transport on land. The Hindus are not permitted to organize a merchant marine of their own; 90 all Indian goods must be carried in British bottoms, as an additional strain on the starving nation's purse; and the building of ships, which once gave employment to thousands of Hindus, is prohibited."

"I have seen a great people starving to death before my eyes, and I am convinced that this exhaustion and starvation are due not, as their beneficiaries claim, to over-population and superstition, but to the most sordid and criminal exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history. I propose to show that England has year by year been bleeding India to the point of death, and that self-government of India by the Hindus could not, within any reasonable probability, have worse results than the present form of alien domination."

"Let me tell you at once that the newspaper accounts at home of the various visits, ceremonies and receptions have almost invariably been hopefully exaggerated... [People at home] think my tour is a success, and I must reluctantly tell you that it is no such thing... I make it my business to talk to as many of our people out here as I can – soldiers, civil servants, and, more especially, the police, who from the nature of their work, can normally give a more accurate picture of the whole situation out here than anyone else; and as regards the present conditions of life in India they one and all say the same thing – that they won't let their sons come out here to earn a living in the Indian Army, Indian Civil Service etc. etc., and that not now would they even recommended these services to any good fellow. The reason for this is, that India is no longer a place for the white man to live."

"Lord Elphinstone had said as far back as 1851 that “Divide et empera was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours”. Many other British politicians, historians and bureaucrats, in Britain as well as in India, had made similar statements of British policy. The British had never tried very hard to hide the game they had played in the past, and were planning to play in the future. But the [Indian] national leaders who read or heard these statements became agog with excitement as if they had uncovered a ‘dark secret’, and could now answer comfortably all questions regarding the ‘communal problem’ [the Hindu-Muslim divide]."

"The British were perhaps the most successful pirates in history. They came to India, pillaged the country in the name of trade and then enslaved it in the name of civilization."

"If we are to receive self-government, we shall have to take it. We shall never be granted self-government. Look at the history of the British Empire and the British nation; freedom-loving as it is, it will not be a party to give freedom to a people who will not take it themselves."

"The English have taught us that we were not one nation before and that it will require centuries before we become one nation. This is without foundation. We were one nation before they came to India. One thought inspired us. Our mode of life was the same. It was because we were one nation that they were able to establish one kingdom. Subsequently they divided us."

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn."

"Thailand has railways and the British never colonised the country,... In 1885, when the British invaded Burma, the Burmese king was already building railways and telegraphs. These are things Indians could have done themselves."

"The Government of India is the most arduous and perhaps the noblest trust ever undertaken by a nation."

"The Portuguese, Dutch and English have for a long time, year after year, been shipping home the treasures of India in their big vessels. We Germans have been all along left to watch it. Germany would do likewise but hers would be treasures of spiritual knowledge."

"You can choose any single area, take for example India: England did not acquire India in a lawful and legitimate manner, but rather without regard to the natives’ wishes, views, or declarations of rights; and she maintained this rule, if necessary, with the most brutal ruthlessness. Just as Cortés or Pizarro demanded for themselves Central America and the northern states of South America not on the basis of any legal claim, but from the absolute, inborn feeling of superiority (Herrengefühl) of the white race. The settlement of the North American continent was similarly a consequence not of any higher claim in a democratic or international sense, but rather of a consciousness of what is right which had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority and thus the right of the white race."

"Shoot Gandhi and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established. You will see how quickly they will collapse as soon as you make it clear that you mean business."