Gender and Violence in British India

The Road to Amritsar, 1914-1919

R. McLain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137448538
• eBook ISBN: 9781137448545
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In British India, the years during and following World War I saw imperial unity deteriorate into a bitter dispute over "native" effeminacy and India's postwar fitness for self-rule. This study demonstrates that increasingly ferocious dispute culminated in the actual physical violence of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919.

1

Resituating Gender and Violence during the Great War

This book investigates the multiple and contradictory ways in which the Great War tore at the gendered ideologies of the Indo-British relationship. It is my contention that the war of 1914–1918, along with the intense stress it placed on the British Raj’s dominant notions of colonial masculinity and femininity, ultimately culminated in the killing or wounding of over 1,600 Indian civilians by Gurkha soldiers under the command of General Reginald Dyer at the Punjab town of Amritsar in April of 1919.1 The killings at Amritsar marked a defining moment in Anglo-Indian relations, but too often the event is portrayed only as a catalyst for a triumphant interwar march toward Indian independence, or alternately as a singular lapse of judgment by one man, General Dyer, that undermined generations of generally well-intentioned colonial leadership in South Asia. I take issue with both of these views in that Amritsar is best viewed from the other direction, not as a beginning but as a tragic coda to the accelerating social and political anxieties that wracked the late-Victorian and Edwardian imperial and domestic public spheres just prior to the war.2

To be sure, World War I has much left to tell us about the indissoluble bond between gender and violence as conceptual guarantors for the empire’s political and military power, both at home and abroad.3 Conventional imperial wisdom held that the Briton alone possessed the inherently “manly” traits of logic and self-control necessary for good governance. This complemented the belief that India’s western-educated nationalist elite suffered from a crippling effeminacy of body and mind that precluded political power and independence. In between these masculine/feminine margins lay the subcontinent’s “martial races”—the Punjabi, Sikh, and Gurkha soldiers of the Indian Army whom the Raj considered masculine enough to fight side-by-side with, but who needed the guiding hand of the steady British officer to control their wild and child-like natures. By 1914, these variegated masculine/feminine identities had been firmly established in the political and popular culture of the colony.

The arrival of the war and India’s tremendous role in it threatened to upset these delicately balanced equations of imperial gender and power. Both regional and all-India nationalists increasingly used the conflict to challenge the tenets of colonial masculinity and resituate themselves as members of a “loyal opposition” rather than as radicals intent on destroying foreign rule. Indeed, the unusually hot summer of 1914 witnessed a striking imperial unity. Mohandas Gandhi had just arrived in London from South Africa, where he had lived for over 20 years, quite literally at the moment England had issued its declaration of war against Germany. He immediately rallied Indian students living in the metropole, organizing them into an ambulance corps for service on the Western Front. Donations and telegrams of support poured in from India’s conservative and loyal princely states, which, under autonomous rulers, technically controlled about two-fifths of the country.4 By the end of October 1914, a complement of over 24,000 Indian soldiers began to arrive in France, staving off disaster for a decimated British army. By 1917, this initial good feeling had deteriorated into an increasingly bitter dispute regarding the extent of post-war political reform in India. Moreover, the clash over India’s future drew extensively on the existing tropes of the effeminacy of the “educated” classes and the wildness of the hyper-masculine martial races in declaring the colony unfit for “self-rule.” The rhetorical ferocity of this debate, I argue, ended in the physical violence at Amritsar.

To be clear, I begin from the assumption that the alchemy of gender and violence was indispensible not only to the establishment and maintenance of imperial power, but also to the emotional appeal of nationalist anti-colonial resistance, whether in its “moderate” constitutional form or in the guise of bloody, revolutionary terror. Put more directly, it is historically improbable that modern empires could have endured solely by referencing the iconography of the European “man on the spot” and his counterpart, the dutiful imperial woman. Colonial power ultimately, and always, rests on the threat of coercion.5 Similarly, Irish, Indian, African, and Asian nationalists drew sustenance from the likeness of an irredentist manhood brought low by colonialism, yet salvageable through either a gradual and indirectly resistant demonstration of masculinity and ­self-sufficiency or, more extremely, murderous opposition. It follows, then, that if the maintenance of colonial masculinity implied the threat of violence, so too did challenges to its ideological potency. Both imperial coercion and the resistance to it, embodied in the multiple epistemological and physical violences of colonialism and anti-colonialism, relied on sheer bloody-mindedness as a functional means to an end.

This “functionality” and its means/ends rationality suggest two ­interconnected problems as well, both of which explain the lack of ­theorization about the mechanics of colonial violence in the imperial setting. First, violence was, and is, Janus-faced in nature. Violence was by definition conservative when protecting the empire, radical when in pure opposition to it, and surprisingly “moderate” when seeking a path somewhere between accommodation and rebellion. Gandhi intended his pledge to defend England in 1914 to be an indicator of the colony’s suitability for autonomy. Ironically, it meant fighting for the empire as a means of eventually breaking away from it.6 In this formula, India would reach par with the white settler colonies of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom emerged from the war with stronger nationalist identities and better economic positions vis-à-vis the metropole.7 More importantly for our purposes, it shows the limits of Gandhi’s concept of non-violence, or ahimsa. Second, the inherent ambiguity of colonial violence, and its functional role in the differential equations of colonial power, leads historians into an old trap, namely explaining the phenomenon as a by-product of imperial ideology rather than as a subject worthy of deeper consideration on its own merits, or demerits, as the case may be. Simply put, as a “signifier,” violence encompassed every masculine and feminine trope in the colonial environment; its cruel versatility demands that we at least ­consider how violence and gender operated across differing imperial ­terrains and chronologies.

My approach is bound to vex readers in two ways. First, there exists a lingering tendency to view hegemonic colonial violence as more “legitimate” because it ostensibly involved the preservation of “Order” by forces of the State. Second, despite the fact that gender as a “useful category of analysis” has become well-established in “new imperial” history, there will always be scholars who reject or downplay its analytical value. Herein lies the crux of the problem: too often the paternalistic, protective language of empire differed dramatically from the actuality of colonialism’s intense physical brutality, both in contemporary accounts and in later histories that relied on imperial word-of-mouth. As Mary Renda has so effectively argued in her study of early twentieth-century US intervention in Haiti, imperialism was, and is, “masked as benevolent by its reference to paternal care and guidance,” yet it is “structured equally by its reference to paternal authority and discipline. In a sense, paternalism should not be seen in opposition to violence, but rather as one of several cultural vehicles for it.”8 Purnima Bose and Laura Lyons’ claim that “brutality . . . far from being an anomaly, is a constitutive part of colonialism” takes on a tangible form when one consults the litany of carnage that is part and parcel of empire, whether in the indirect form of Indian famine policies or in the overt use of airpower to strafe civilians in “rebelling” villages in the mandate of 1920s Iraq.9

Violence, moreover, was never limited to faceless, institutionalized governmental forms, for cruelty in the colonial setting often expressed itself in intensely interpersonal ways reminiscent of racial violence in the American South. Jordanna Bailkin’s study of European homicides committed against Indians reveals that white authorities often downgraded murder charges through a rhetorical strategy that removed the intent to kill—the argument being that the robust Anglo-Indian had simply failed to recognize the frailty of the “native” before striking them.10 Indian Viceroy Lord Curzon (1899–1905) privately expressed his loathing for the open disdain his countrymen expressed toward “natives.” Nor, as Ivan Evans has suggested, was this limited to India. In prewar “shooting of native” cases, white platteland Afrikaners who murdered blacks often faced a cursory examination, whereas black assaults on whites usually drew a stiff sentence.11 Such individualized violence unsurprisingly came in the midst of “rape panics,” in which white women were supposedly threatened by “native” men. In the case of Amritsar there existed a similar “panic,” animated by months of heated rhetoric and an actual assault on an Englishwoman just prior to the mass shooting. These historical claims make even greater sense when placed against the tumult of the Great War era, when fin-de-siècle anxieties over the erosion of British power abroad, not to mention tensions at “Home” regarding Ireland, labor, women, and “traditional” societal and familial roles, lay thick and heavy in the British and imperial presses.

What makes the larger context of empire so disturbing though is not just its concomitance with violence, but also its genealogical links to the modern, mechanized mass homicides of twentieth-century Europe. Indeed, Hannah Arendt argued that imperialism’s emphasis on civilization, bureaucratic rationality, and racial difference was in fact a milepost on the road to the “Final Solution.” In her estimation, the murder of the Jews and racial Others amounted to nothing more than a form of “continental imperialism,” an inward-looking intra-European version of empire that carried out the same types of annihilative violence that stalked nineteenth-century Asia and Africa. Continental imperialism, however, lacked the “geographic space” that provided for colonialism’s forgotten massacres, many of which received little notice in Europe.12 The slaughter of Hereros, Hottentots, and Congolese was too geographically distant, and the belief in biological superiority and Social Darwinism so entrenched that most Europeans, particularly the outward-looking bourgeoisie who believed that colonial projects ensured national survival, simply accepted direct and indirect violence as part of the natural order of things. Horror and revulsion only came later, after the ideologies of empire were adapted to Endlösung and the victims shifted from being faceless and “uncivilized” “others” to neighbors who spoke the same language. While Arendt notes that British rule stopped far short of Belgian and German levels of atrocity, she nonetheless pointed to proposals by white officials in India to initiate famines, or “administrative massacres,” as a way of maintaining control over the country. Cooler and more humane heads prevailed, however, and the proposal was never carried out. Still, Arendt charged that once the “English conqueror in India became an administrator who no longer believed in the universal validity of law, but was convinced of his own capacity to rule and dominate . . . the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors.” The ideological techniques and physical technologies of ­nineteenth-century imperialism had become commonplace, “lying under anybody’s nose” and freely available for creating a race-based totalitarian government.13 Her words continue to resonate.

Violence in the name of “Order” and “Civilization” resides in the very ontology of empire—it cannot be parsed out. More to the point, it is a deeply flawed view that looks back on empire as a generally benign phenomenon punctuated by occasional violence that was always, somehow, exceptional to the overall tenor of colonialism. I utterly reject the notion that varieties of ruling practices and physical terrains make generalization about imperial violence impossible; multiple sites of empire simply mean multiple sites of violence. The frequency with which individual officials and soldiers rode, marched, or sailed to and from postings in Ireland, Africa, India, and Australasia is striking. And while it did produce varying practices of governance, what is more remarkable is the predictability of violent response to both real and perceived threats to imperial rule, whatever “style” of governance might be in vogue in a particular region. The urge to preserve “Order” was typical in colonial societies where a heavily outnumbered ruling class perceived the indigene, whether Irish, African, or Asian, as lacking the even more purposeful rioting of an English laborer. The child-like colonial subject had to be controlled by a chastising parental violence insomuch that children, like “natives,” understood the language of bodily force. Losing control of “natives” meant putting individual Europeans in danger, particularly when such resistance threatened to spill over into the European domiciled “civil lines.” The import of colonial discipline was not lost on Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, or Reginald Dyer, the commander at the city of Amritsar, also in the Punjab. Both were raised entirely or partly in Ireland and had experienced its tumult. O’Dwyer’s memoirs recounted agrarian attacks against his family’s estate, while Dyer...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• 1 Resituating Gender and Violence during the Great War
• 2 The Violent Mahatma: Gandhi and the Rehabilitation of Indian Manhood
• 3 Measures of Manliness: The Martial Races and the Wartime Politics of Effeminacy
• 4 Frontline Masculinity: The Indian Corps on the Western Front, 1914–1915
• 5 The Road to Amritsar
• 6 Epilogue: The Historical Stakes of New Imperial History
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index