LionAndTiger excerpt

From The Lion and the Tiger by Denis Judd  While the British East India Company was asserting its control over indigenous people and pushing aside its European rivals, it also suffered a crisis of conscience over its standards of administration. The basic problem was how to control the widespread corruption of company officials. ... These problems had been brought dramatically to the public's attention during Warren Hastings's Governorship of India, in 1773-85. Ironically, Hastings had been sent out to India to end corruption. He had to return to England, however, to face charges that he had himself been guilty of the same misdemeanours. ... In 1788, three years after returning home, Hastings was impeached - that is, brought to trial - before the House of Lords. ... The impeachment of Hastings can be seen as part of a large and more important debate about the purpose of the Company's rule in India. Millions of non-European subjects had been acquired with the annexation of Bengal: should commercial interests dominate the Company's policy-making? Or did British administrators have a duty to protect their Indian subjects and to improve the quality of their lives? This notion fed into the concept of the 'civilizing mission', which was to become so central to the spread and organization of the British Empire worldwide. ...     The 1857 revolt provoked other feelings of British outrage. Perhaps the most persistent of these, as well as the most unreasonable, was a sense of betrayal. The sepoys that rose in rebellion, the civilians that abetted and sometimes joined them, the few local princes who lent support to the uprising were all caricatured and vilified as ungrateful and treacherous wretches, violently rejecting the manifold benefits bestowed by Britain's civilizing mission in the subcontinent. It is not difficult to see why this response took place. The rebellion seemed to be a fundamental reaction against the prevailing Victorian belief in progress. A nation that was not merely the world's leading industrial and commercial power, but one that was apparently extending to the Indian subcontinent the same concrete reforms that were paving and lighting the streets of Britain's cities, believed that it had ample cause for self-congratulation. As Queen Victoria's reign unfolded, the idea of Empire was increasingly a source of pride to British people, and the alleged achievements of British rule were generally taken for granted. The conquest, control, and reordering of indigenous societies in India and elsewhere also enabled the dispossessed of Victorian Britain to luxuriate in an unaccustomed feeling of superiority and virtue. Rage at the rebels' delinquency included even those at the bottom of the domestic social structure, as illustrated in the cartoon of a begrimed dustman and sweep discussing 'this 'ere Hingia bisinis' and agreeing that 'it's just wot yer might expeck from sich a parcel o' dirty black hignorant scoundrels as them.' ...     As for the symbolic significance of ruling India, for a whole variety of reasons, some of which were paradoxical, complex and instinctive, few of those prominent in British public life would have dissented from the view, first expressed by Lord Curzon in 1901, that the loss of India would mean that Britain would 'drop straight away to a third-rate power.' The end of Empire thus seemed to be inextricably bound up with the fate of the British rule in India. Interestingly, even Hitler believed that the British Raj both signified Britain's global status and was an admirable example of an Aryan civilizing mission. 

© Denis Judd