Intelligence and Imperial Defence

British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904-1924

Richard James Popplewell, Richard J. Popplewell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780714645803
• eBook ISBN: 9781135239336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is the first book to appear on British intelligence operations based in both India and London, which defended the Indian Empire against subversion during the first two decades of the twentieth century. It is concerned with the threat to the British Raj posed by the Indian revolutionary movement, the resulting development of the imperial intelligence service and the role it played during the First World War.

1
British Intelligence in Nineteenth-century India

Espionage in India has a very ancient history. There are extensive references to spies in the most ancient Hindu religious texts. In the Rigveda and other epics, watchers, or spasas keep mankind under surveillance on behalf of the thousand-eyed god, Varuna. These religious works contain unambiguous prescriptions for the conduct of earthly affairs:

As the wind moves everywhere and penetrates all created beings, so also should the king penetrate everywhere by the means of his unidentified agents.¹

The recorded history of espionage in India begins with Kautilya’s classic treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, which was probably written around 300 BC.² It is the earliest extant book dealing systematically with espionage, though it explicitly draws on several earlier Indian works.³ According to tradition, and possibly historical fact, Kautilya was the chief adviser to the Chandragupta Maurya, who founded the first great Indian empire in 321 BC. In the extent of their conquests, the Mauryas far exceeded any previous Indian rulers. By the death of Chandragupta’s successor, Bindusara, in 272 BC, the Mauryan Empire controlled virtually all the Indian sub-continent. This success was the result not only of the Mauryas’ prowess on the battlefield, but more importantly stemmed from the centralized administration which they imposed. Espionage played a key role in this system, and helped to maintain the Mauryan Empire for almost one and a half centuries before its end around 180 BC.

According to the Arthashastra, both domestic and foreign espionage was essential to the security of the state and the maintenance of large networks of spies was one of the ruler’s most important duties. The Arthashastra describes no less than 28 distinct categories of agents, with over 50 sub-types. Their tasks included the prevention of treason among high officials and the monitoring of public opinion, as well as fighting crime.⁴ Spies were generally indispensable to the preservation of a vast, heterogeneous empire with poor communications. Though a prescription for ideal government, the Arthashastra undoubtedly describes a state of affairs approximating to reality. The greatest Mauryan emperor, Ashoka, who ruled 268–31 BC, referred in inscriptions to agents who brought him news and generally kept him informed on public opinion.

Over a millennium later, spying was just as important to the Mogul Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was the next to equal the Mauryan in geographical expanse. The Mogul central government maintained a network of news-writers or intelligence-gatherers who reported on its noble officials or mansabdars and on the local notables or zamindars who formed the base of the administration. The zamindars were themselves obliged to supply regular reports on local conditions.⁵

What of the third empire to control the Indian sub-continent? The period between 1761, when the French presence was virtually destroyed, and the suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1858 saw the establishment of British rule in India. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the British presence in India was still essentially that of a trading colony, whereas by 1858, they had direct control of two-thirds of the sub-continent. Almost all the rest of India was in the hands of native princes, who were in no position to oppose Britain’s wishes. The only really independent territories left were the tiny French enclaves at Chandernagore and Pondicherry, and the Portuguese presence at Goa.

British government in India retained many elements of continuity with the Mogul administration.⁶ In particular the British, like the Moguls, depended upon a relatively small, elite and largely foreign civil service to run their empire, namely the famous Indian Civil Service (ICS). At the beginning of the twentieth century the ICS numbered only 1,300. Like the Moguls, the British were obliged, because of India’s poverty, to leave the lower administration poorly paid, badly motivated and native-staffed. But one of the most notable differences between the two empires was the unwillingness of the British to continue the Mogul practice of controlling both civil service and population through the extensive and systematized use of espionage. A strong aversion to the use of spies was one of the alien traditions of government which the British brought to India.⁷

There are many reasons why one might expect the British to have used espionage in India. To begin with, there is Kipling’s depiction of the Raj in his novel Kim, which is just as dependent upon its secret agents as those of the Maury as and the Moguls.⁸ It is surprising that the British did not revert to native traditions of intelligence-gathering at an early date. Apart from the continuing inadequacy of the Indian bureaucracy, there are other reasons why any government in India might feel the need for domestic espionage. First and foremost is the volatile nature of Indian society, which has always been deeply divided by race and religion. This problem was exacerbated by the vast size of the sub-continent. The difficulties of procuring information about outlying areas, and about movements of public opinion, were enormous. In many ways, therefore, the British Indian Empire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries AD might have seemed to have been in as much need of spies as the Mauryan Empire of the third and fourth centuries BC.

The period in which the Indian Empire was founded was characterized by a great ignorance on the part of the British of the vast territories which they were taking over. This may be seen even as the result of their military success, for in expanding so rapidly their resources became overstretched. Even when British rule was firmly established, in the second half of the nineteenth century, members of the ICS were often very poorly informed of local conditions. In 1863, the Chief Justice of Bombay, where the British had been long established, complained:

the Chief administrators of our vast Indian Empire … are often, if not habitually, in complete ignorance of the most patent facts … around them.⁹

There was, however, one key difference between the Mogul and British administrations. Since the senior officers of the British Army and of the administration were all white and thousands of miles from home there was no danger of their turning against the central authority, unlike the Mogul officials whom they supplanted. In this respect at least, the nineteenth-century British had less need of an espionage service than the Moguls.

The Government of India was slow to place intelligence in any form on a regular footing. It finally did so not for political reasons, but in order to deal with organized crime. The gradual collapse of the Mogul Empire from the end of the seventeenth century onwards had resulted in a massive breakdown of law and order in large areas of central and northern India. Just one aspect of this general problem was the growth of thuggee, a religiously inspired form of banditry. The Thugs were a fraternity of murderers whose activities stretched throughout India, though they were particularly prevalent in the northern provinces and in the central Deccan. The Thugs murdered and then robbed their victims in honour of the Hindu goddess Kali. Typically they would strangle their victims with a cloth which had a coin dedicated to Kali knotted into one of its corners. Thus they were able simultaneously to profit themselves and to perform acts of religious devotion - though which aspect of their craft most motivated them is open to question.¹⁰ Significantly, the Thugs included many otherwise monotheistic Muslims in their ranks. The British involved in the suppression of Thuggee, however, believed that the Thugs considered ‘the persons murdered precisely in the light of victims offered up to the goddess’.

For a long time the British government knew almost nothing of the Thugs’ existence. Captain (later Colonel Sir) William Sleeman, magistrate in the district of Nursingpur in central India from 1822–24, and who was later to be in charge of the destruction of the Thugs throughout India, recorded that

if any man had then told me that a gang of assassins by profession resided in the village of Kundélee, not four hundred yards from my court, and that the extensive groves of the village of Mundésur, only one stage from me … was one of the greatest bhils, or places of murder, in all India… I should have thought him a fool or a madman; and yet nothing could have been more true: the bodies of a hundred travellers lie buried in and among the groves of Mundésur …

The British first became aware that the Thugs were a problem in 1810 when some of their Indian soldiers failed to return from leave. It turned out that in each case these sepoys had joined groups of other travellers on their way home, and after two or three days were never seen again. Over the next few years the British acquired more evidence of the seriousness of the problem in central India. Yet they took no more than local measures to deal with it.

The British decision to destroy the Thugs root and branch came as part of a general drive towards more efficient government which started under Lord Bentinck, who was Governor-General in the years 1828–33.¹¹ In 1830 Bentinck established the famous Thagi and Dakaiti Department with William Sleeman as its first General Superintendent. The highest total strength of officers in the Department during the campaign against the Thugs was just 18, though their duties covered not only British India, but the princely states as well. None the less, the establishment of the Thagi and Dakaiti Department marked the beginning of a concerted British campaign against the Thugs.

British tactics were straightforward and effective. Their immediate aim was to obtain information which they did by offering captured Thugs the choice of hanging or turning approver. Philip Meadows Taylor, an officer of the Thagi and Dakaiti Department, recalled that

when they found that their only chance of life lay in giving correct information, they unequivocally denounced their associates.

By 1837, 483 Thugs had become informers. The British had to build a special jail at Jabalpur in the Central Provinces to keep them safe from their former associates who were still at large. After they had secured informers, the British verified their evidence by exhuming the corpses of the Thugs’ victims. This led them to the discovery that Thuggee existed on a large scale throughout the whole of India. It later proved that between 40 and 50 gangs of Thugs had been at work, murdering possibly 20–30,000 people a year. One Thug admitted to have been ‘directly concerned in the murder of seven hundred and nineteen persons’, and boasted to his captors that if he ‘had not been in prison twelve years, the number would have been a thousand!’¹² In its first five years, the Thagi and Dakaiti Department’s operations led to the conviction of over 3,000 Thugs. Meadows Taylor stressed the thoroughness of the operations which the Department conducted in collaboration with the provincial police forces. He claimed that

no body of men could traverse the country in any direction without being subject to the strictest scrutiny by the police, and by informers who were stationed with them upon all the great thoroughfares and in the principal towns.

By 1863 the Thagi and Dakaiti Department had extirpated the Thugs from British India but it continued to work against them in the princely states.¹³

The discovery of the scale of the Thugs’ operations over the 20 years between 1810 and 1830 revealed the great inadequacy of the British government’s information about the land it ruled. The revelations about the Thugs had great impact not just on India, but also in Britain itself, where any literature on the subject sold very well to a horrified but inquisitive public. None the less, this failure of criminal intelligence did not lead the Government of India to question whether the information at its disposal about other aspects of Indian society or politics might be deficient.

The British most seriously lacked information about one key element in Indian society: the native army. On 10 May 1857 they were caught completely by surprise when the Army of Bengal mutinied. The immediate cause was the issue of cartridges for the new Enfield rifles with which the sepoys had recently been equipped. Before use, soldiers had to bite the cartridges. The problem for Indian soldiers was that they were greased either with beef fat, which made them contaminating to Hindus, or with pork fat, which Muslims could not eat. The threat of religious defilement proved the spark that lit a powder-keg of grievances which had built up in recent years within the ranks of the Army of Bengal. By the end of May 1857 the revolt had spread over large areas of north-central India.

This is not the place to discuss the causes of the Indian Mutiny. Suffice it to say that they were extremely complex and that the British had anticipated none of them. The surprise of the British government at the outbreak of the Mutiny, like its unawareness of the scale of the Thugs’ operations up to the 1830s, shows its failure both to understand Indian conditions fully or to obtain information about them. This was not, however, a failure of a British intelligence organization, because there was no organization systematically gathering political intelligence in British India.

By the middle of 1858, the British had suppressed the Indian Mutiny but at considerable financial cost to the Home Government, which in return took over formal control of India from the East India Company. An immediate precaution was the reorganization of the Indian Army, within which the proportion of native to British troops was reduced. The Mutiny may also have prompted the Government of India to improve its knowledge about the sub-continent. As one writer has noted:

Towards the end of the century the British, concerned to know what was happening in the country lest tension should erupt as unpredictably and savagely as in 1857, and anxious to make the best use of limited resources, began to make a wide range of inquiries into such matters as educational standards, access to administrative posts, or the transfer of land between social groups.¹⁴

The less tangible consequences of the rebellion may have been just as important. It is often said that the British were left with a ‘mutiny complex’, which amounted to a sometim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 British Intelligence in Nineteenth-century India
• 2 The Reform of Indian Intelligence under Lord Curzon
• 3 The Development of Indian Domestic Intelligence, 1904–14
• 4 Bengal, 1905–14
• 5 The Surveillance of Indian Revolutionaries in Great Britain and Europe, 1905–14
• 6 North America, 1905–14
• 7 India, 1914–18
• 8 Bengal during the Great War
• 9 British Intelligence and the Indian Revolutionary Movement in Europe, 1914–19
• 10 British Intelligence in North America, 1914–18
• 11 British Intelligence in the Far East, 1914–18
• 12 India, 1919–24
• 13 British Intelligence in North America and the Far East, 1918–24
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index