HISTORY, AS WE DON’T KNOW IT

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

With sections titled Reshaping the story, Retelling the story and Reviewing the story, Roderick Matthews leaves readers in no doubt as to where he’s headed with Peace, Poverty and Betrayal.

The point is not to ask whether British rule in India was a good thing or a bad thing; like all governments it can be seen as both, he posits.

The thrust of his argument is that it “brought sufficient benefit to enough people to have survived for so long”.

He lists the positives to make his case: A full time paid police force, a citizen’s right to sue the government, the end of religious discrimination in access to public service employment, education as a state obligation, a codified criminal law, to name just a few. And enlists the support of Anglophiles such as Dwarkanath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Which, of course, goes against the current tide of anti-Raj literature by writers and historians of both Indian and British origin.

It has become fashionable to demonize the East India Company, as Matthews notes.

His could be seen as a contrarian view, specially since he chooses to describe popular feeling against the Raj as “misdirected and inflated anger, focused on trivialities like the Koh-i-noor diamond”.

One might ask if looting of the crown jewels would be viewed as trivial, but if one resists the whataboutery, there is much to learn and think about in this work.

Matthews takes the divide-and- rule policy head on. History books present an oversimplified version of a chaotic period, he writes, one that is full of “anachronistic moral judgements and contemporary political purposes”.

He holds that, in fact, “the British took an absolutely central role in unifying modern India – though not always in the ways they sometimes thought”.

British leaders believed that British rule was something Indians could unite behind. Nationalists, from the 1880s on, saw it as something Indians could unite against.

He presents another interesting argument against the prevalent belief that the British ruled through divisive policies. To give this belief credence, writes Matthews, is to infantilize Indians.

He acknowledges the contributions of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda, and that “Under the colonial regime, however, the Indian contribution had to remain unacknowledged, for if Indians could do this kind of work for themselves, what exactly was the British rule for?”

He describes the Vivekanada-Gandhi approach as both modern and distinctly Indian, explaining its wide appeal.

It treated Indians as individuals with choices, and choice and modernity go together. Swaraj was a national issue, but it was also personal.

Cornwallis, Curzon, Dalhousie, Hastings, Mountbatten, Wellesley... Matthews not only fleshes out the characters we know from history books and either respect or revile, he also introduces names that had an impact on India and yet remain largely unknown.

Among them: Sir William Jones who learned Sanskrit and translated Sacontala by Kalidas, directly influencing Goethe’s ideas about drama.

Sir Thomas Munro, who emphasized “moderate land revenue assessments and the impartial enforcement of justice”.

Mountstuart Elphinstone, “who was fiercely against Christian evangelizing in India and strongly in favour of the teaching of Indian languages”. Matthews notes the irony in the fact that his name decorates Elphinstone College, opened in 1835, which taught a Western-style syllabus.

Sir William Henry Sleeman who studied thuggee and was against the annexation of Awadh.

Thomas Babington Macauley, whom the Indian historian KM Panikker hailed as a “second Manu” for his drafting of the codes of civil and criminal procedure.

Sir William Hunter who standardized the English spelling of Indian place names – many of which have now been changed, so there goes that.

Allan Hume, who flirted with Theosophy before becoming a devotee of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa.

And I am willing to bet that many of us didn’t know that Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. 

It’s not like Matthews gives the British raj a free pass, holding them accountable for things that have been less than obvious to many of us.

Had that government been clever enough to create economic growth at the same time as accommodating local demands for political inclusion, then those demands might have been controlled and directed, much as Canadian demands had been managed in the 1860s. But in India the government chose to fight foreign wars, spend money on self-aggrandizing durbars, and sit by while famine ravaged the land. This was the greatest betrayal: that the newly educated, aspiring middle classes could not find adequate reward for their skills or sufficient inclusion in the political life of the emerging garrulous, interconnected India.

He describes another betrayal, at a time of “modest demands and elaborately loyal language” used by Indian leaders driven by the faith that the British would play fair: 1905 and the partition of Bengal, the most egregious act of betrayal to date.

Matthews also gives the British a failing grade for bringing such little prosperity to India while taking so much.

Continuing poverty in India was not the result of deliberate destruction, but it was certainly a matter of under-stimulation, and calculated reorientation and manipulation of the Indian economy.

However, he maintains that “the preferred British option was the maintenance of a unitary India, inside the commonwealth” and points to a mound of official documentation in support of this theory.

A unitary India outside the Commonwealth was obviously undesirable, and any division into two states carried multiple risks. Not even the creation of two states that remained within the Commonwealth would avert the danger of war between them, while having one in and one out carried the risk of having to back one against the other.

Roderick Matthews specializes in Indian history and politics. His great-grandfather tutored the young Nehru through his Harrow entrance exams and one of his great-grandmothers cared for Gandhi when he fell ill in London in 1914.

His may not be the popular view, but it is a scholarly, erudite one. It is perhaps not what those consumed by nationalistic fervour in India these days wish to hear, but is certainly worth a read for a broader understanding of the intertwined stories of two nations.

The rest, as they say, is history. Which will be revisited, reassessed, and yes, rewritten.