Ayahs, Lascars and Princes

The Story of Indians in Britain 1700-1947

Rozina Visram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138921214
• eBook ISBN: 9781317415336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

People from the Indian sub-continent have been in Britain since the end of the seventeenth century. The presence of princes and maharajahs is well documented but this book, first published in 1986, was the first account of the ordinary people in Britain. This book will be of interest to students of history.

1. India and Britain

It is often forgotten that Britain had an Indian community long before the Second World War, and that the recent arrival of Asian people in Britain is part of the long history of contact between Britain and India. The arrival of Asians in Britain has taken place precisely because of these long-established connections.

Indian links with Europe go back 10,000 years. The East offered much which Europeans needed – spices, textiles and other exotic luxuries like carpets.¹ Traders travelled by the overland route through Constantinople and from there beyond, until Turkish hegemony effectively blocked this profitable trade route in the fifteenth century. There then followed a search for a sea route to India, and it was the Portuguese who came up trumps when Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut, on the west coast of India, in 1498,² a few years before the Mughal emperors established their rule over India.³ The Portuguese made Goa, on the west coast, their headquarters; and they were to remain there for over 400 years.⁴ Not wishing to be left out of this lucrative trade, other European nations – the Dutch, English and French – followed in the wake of the Portuguese.

The East India Company was launched in England in 1599 by a group of London merchants, with a capital of £30,000. On the last day of 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted the Company a charter which gave them the monopoly of trade with India and the East.⁵ The Company’s original goal was the spice trade of the East Indies. But the Dutch, who had beaten the English to that region, would brook no rivals, so the East India Company turned its attention to India for its field of commercial exploits. In 1608, the first Company ship called at Surat on the west coast, and in 1612 the Mughal emperor, Jehangir, granted the Company the vital ‘firman’ (mandate), allowing it the privilege of Indian trade.⁶ The seventeenth century saw a gradual expansion of factories round the Indian coast – Madras in 1640, Bombay (a wedding gift to Charles II from the Portuguese) in 1665, and Calcutta in 1690; and so the pattern of trade with India was built up.⁷

The East India Company operated from its headquarters in London. An imposing new building was erected in Leadenhall Street in 1726 as the permanent headquarters. To administer its vast interests, a Court of Directors of 24 members, elected for four years from the group of the original subscribers, was set up. Then there were the shareholders in the Company, and finally its various employees, both in London and in India. Labour was needed in London for its dockyards, warehouses, foundries, cordage works, saw mills and even slaughterhouses for cattle, which provided meat for the growing fleet of the East Indiamen which plied between India and England.⁸ For the purpose of administration, the Company divided India into three Presidencies – Madras, Bombay and Bengal, independent of each other and answerable only to the Court of Directors in London. In each of the Presidencies, a president (also known as the governor), supported by a council of senior merchants, exercised control. Below these came a strictly defined hierarchy of the Company’s servants: senior merchants, junior merchants, factors and writers, all recruited in England. Familiar British institutions, like the law courts, civic corporations, churches and theatres, were transplanted to the presidencies. And soon a growing band of attorneys, constables, churchwardens and artists went out to India to join the merchants and clerks. Their houses were separated from the ‘Black Town’, where the ‘native’ employees of the Company and the rest of the Indian population lived. As the East India Company was granted more trading concessions by the patronage of the Mughal emperors, so the Company’s commercial enterprises expanded, and more recruits went out from Britain to swell the size of the British population living in India. After 1660, the Company recruited British soldiers and ‘native sepoys’⁹ to protect its commercial concerns in India.

Since the overriding interest of the Company was trade and the profit motive, it did little to interfere with traditional Indian society or engage in military adventures – all of which cost money. It concerned itself only with providing the framework of stability required for trade to flourish. In the early years, many employees of the East India Company stayed on in India for long spells. Communications were slow and opportunities for a run back to England less frequent, so many reconciled themselves to this long exile by developing an interest in the country and its people. Few women went out to India from Britain, and so there was much mixing between black and white.¹⁰ But all this was to change in the second half of the eighteenth century.

By this time the Mughal Empire was very slowly beginning to crumble, faced by invasions from outside India, internal disputes and revolts from its Hindu subjects. In this fluid situation, it was the threat from a rival European nation that first stimulated the East India Company to embark on its expansionist forays into Indian territory. The French, who had been late arrivals on the Indian commercial scene – they began trading in 1664 – were by this time fast catching up in the share of profits from the Indian trade. And the British-French rivalry in Europe was dragged into India, where the French general Joseph François Dupleix faced Robert Clive, far away from the centre of European quarrels.¹¹ Having tasted victory against the French, Clive next turned to Bengal, which had succeeded in shaking off the authority of the Mughal emperor. Taking advantage of the friction which had developed between the Company and Bengal, Clive marched in, defeated the ruler of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, in 1757, and made the East India Company ruler of Bengal in all but name. In 1765, the Mughal emperor recognized the Company as his diwan (minister), granting it the authority to collect taxes. Bengal became virtually a Company province and so began the plunder of Bengal by the ‘nabobs’ who amassed vast fortunes which they returned to spend in England.¹²

Robert Clive’s conquest of Bengal heralded a change: not only had the East India Company become effectively ruler of Bengal, but it had laid the foundation of the British Indian Empire. Although trade was still the Company’s main objective, the conquest of Bengal began a new phase in the administration of its ‘provinces’. By the Regulating Act of 1773 (the first time that the British parliament had taken action to direct the affairs of the Company in India), Warren Hastings became Governor General, with authority to supervise the presidencies of Bombay and Madras. Hitherto these provinces had been autonomous, answerable only to the Court of Directors in London. Hastings thus became not only governor of Bengal, but also Governor General of all the Company’s commercial provinces in India. The administrative change that the Act implied was slow to come, however. This was partly because of Warren Hastings. He was a great admirer of Indian civilization, its artistic and cultural heritage. He and other ‘Orientalists’ studied Indian literature, languages, art and religion.¹³ Hastings set up the Asiatic Society in Bengal and a college of Arabic and Persian studies. Hastings also believed that the East India Company should govern India through the agency of Indians, and on Indian principles. He therefore confined himself to cleaning up the excesses of the nabobs, but otherwise left the details of Indian administration without much change.

But change did come. The India Act of 1784 set up a dual system of government. A tier of supervisory control was set up above the Court of Directors of the Company in London. Known as the Board of Control, this consisted of the President and six commissioners. It was the Board of Control that now appointed the Governor General in India; he was to be answerable not only to the Court of Directors of the East India Company, but also to the Board of Control in London. The Company still retained the trading monopoly in India, but Indian administration was recast. The Company’s servants could now hold either an administrative or a commercial post in India, but not both as previously. More important, Indian administration was Europeanized; the top and middle rungs of power were now reserved for Europeans only, Indians being relegated to the bottom levels of public service. The style of administration changed as well. Cornwallis, who succeeded Warren Hastings as Governor General, believed that England ruled India for India’s ‘own good’. Unlike Hastings, he did not consider there was anything to admire in the ancient Indian civilization. And so he proceeded to govern India on European principles and values. This trend set by Cornwallis was to gather pace.

The nineteenth century reinforced this changing relationship. It also introduced a more expansionist phase in the Company’s administration. In 1813, the East India Company’s new Charter abolished its trading monopoly in India. This was the era when belief in free trade predominated. India was, therefore, opened up to all traders from Britain, who were eager to flood India with British manufactured goods. Free trade also implied a search for new markets in India, so the East India Company (which still retained administrative control of India, although it had lost its trading monopoly) embarked on a policy of conquest. The Company’s expansionist policy was facilitated by the declining Mughal power. So with judicious self-interest, combined with military force – and all in the name of peaceful trade – the East India Company began the policy of playing off one prince against another, interfering in the internal affairs of the states, or lending ‘help’ to a ‘friendly’ state against its enemies. In this way British rule was extended over a large part of India. By the 1850s Britain ruled India.

Because it had been relatively easy to conquer India, and to do so in a short space of time, the British believed that the reason for this success lay in the superiority of Europe over Asia, and above all in the superiority of the British over all other peoples. Flushed with their success, they did not think that there could be other, more complex, reasons for it. The Christian missionaries, who after 1813 were free to go to India to spread the Gospel,¹⁴ reinforced this view of the Indian subcontinent. Their ideas were to influence the governing of India. The Utilitarians and the Evangelicals considered the Hindu religion to be one ‘grand abomination’, and India to be full of ‘dark and bloody superstition’. They therefore regarded it as their ‘moral duty’ to spread ‘western enlightenment and reason’ throughout India.¹⁵ They brushed aside the Orientalists’ arguments that India was a ‘moral and civilized’ society and did not need the fare offered by the missionaries.¹⁶ And so began the ‘reforming’ phase of Indian administration.

Those Indian social and religious practices which the British regarded as ‘barbaric’ were abolished; land tenure was ‘reorganized’, often with disastrous results for the social and economic fabric of India. Indian classical education was reformed. Macaulay believed the ‘great object of British government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India’. And so, with his Education Minute of 1835, he set in motion the anglicizing of Indian education. Under the Governor Generalship of Lord Dalhousie reforms gathered speed; Indian laws, customs and practices were all remodelled on the English pattern. British technological and material ‘benefits’ were grafted on to Indian society. More Indian states were annexed.

The driving force behind this ‘civilizing’ zeal remained the inherent belief prevalent in mid-Victorian England that the British were culturally and racially superior to the mass of their subjects in India and elsewhere in the Empire. As British rule was consolidated over India, more ‘sahibs’ and ‘memsahibs’ (their wives) arrived from England. Since communications had improved, they tended to stay for shorter periods than their predecessors. Not only did they believe themselves to be superior, they made sure that the Indians acknowledged them as such. Locked in this racist attitude, the British rulers isolated themselves and their memsahibs in a rigid hierarchy of class system, lording it over the conquered ‘natives’ with a high hand. A correspondent to The Times wrote,

I must say that I have been struck with the arrogant and repellent manner in which we often treat natives of rank, and with the unnecessary harshness of our treatment of inferiors. The most scrubby mean little representative of la race blanche … regards himself as infinitely superior to the Rajpoot with a genealogy of 1,000 years.¹⁷

The Indian National Rising of 1857 was a shock to the British. In a bid to rid the country of foreign rule, Indians resorted to arms and fought ferociously for 14 months. The British retaliated with unprecedented savagery and the reprisals against the perpetrators of the so-called ‘Mutiny’ were terrible. But in many ways the Rising marked a watershed in British administrative practice in India (and in many other parts of the Empire, since the British never forgot the lessons of 1857). In the wake of the Rising, the East India Company’s rule was wound up, and in 1858 India came under the direct rule of the British Crown. Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of November 1858 declared:

We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our subjects, and those obligations, by the Almighty God, we shall faithfully and conscientiously fulfil … We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in any wise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal protection of the law.

The Proclamation also laid down the principle of noninterference with the religious beliefs and practices of the Indians. But in granting this ‘benevolence’ to her Indian subjects, Queen Victoria was at pains to point out that ‘in their prosperity will be our strength; in their contentment our security’.

In 1858 Indian administration came directly under the control of Whitehall with the Secretary of State for India and his Council responsible for the affairs of India.¹⁸ The Governor General, as the direct representative of the monarch, took on the additional title of Viceroy. They were answerable to the British parliament where ultimate authority resided. In 1877 Queen Victoria assumed the title of Empress of India or Kaiser-i-Hind.

The Indian National Rising also put an end to the aggressive policy of imperial expansion and headlong reform of Indian society on western lines. The British propped up the power of the princely states and the landed classes, rewarding loyalty and thus building up a stratum of society with a vested interest in the Raj. All the same, the steady growth in western education and western institutions continued. Roads, railways and irrigation schemes were extended. At lower levels of administration they employed Indian bureaucrats who collaborated in the maintenance of the Raj. The policy of racial separateness became even more rigid and elaborate. 1857 convinced the British that they ‘belonged to a race whom God has destined to govern and subdue’.¹⁹ The majesty of government, the pomp and protocol surrounding the Viceroy grew more complex: all designed to dazzle the ruled and maintain the authority of the rulers.

The government became more autocratic and centralized. Power, at all levels, was concentrated in the hands of the rulers. When the first slow steps at representative government came it was at the local government level only, ‘allowing the Bengali Baboo to discuss his own schools and drains’.²⁰ This was the ‘concession’ granted to educated Indians in the government of their own country in the 1880s. However, by the last decade of the nineteenth century educated Indians, the product of British education, became critical of the ‘un-Britishness’ of British rule. The Indian National Congress, moderate in its sentiments, demanded a share in the government of India.

Surrounded with pomp and prestige and convinced in the words of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy from 1899 to 1905, that Indian improvement could only be realized through ‘the unchallenged supremacy of the paramount power’,²¹ the British government carried on ruling India. Indian self-government – if it was considered at all – seemed a very distant and remote possibility. However, events like the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the First World War changed the nature of nationalists’ aspirations. Self-government became the goal. The British government responded to this both by granting concessions in order to silence agitation, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. India and Britain
• 2. Chattels of the Empire: Servants and Ayahs
• 3. Sailors who Filled the Gap: the Lascars
• 4. Towards an Asian Community in Britain: Individuals and Interests
• 5. Early Challengers to the Empire
• 6. Soldiers of the Empire in Two World Wars
• 7. Radical Voices
• 8. Princes, Students and Travellers
• 9. Into the Twentieth Century: Indian Influences in Britain
• Appendices
• Notes
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index