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00:00A century and a half ago, an entire subcontinent lay under British rule.
00:12India.
00:14There, 8,000 miles from London, some 250 million people owed allegiance to the British crown.
00:29India was more than the jewel in that crown.
00:33It was the rock on which the whole British empire was built.
00:37Because from here, Britain could control an entire hemisphere.
00:42It's no wonder that the greatest monuments of the British empire were built in India.
00:47Calcutta is still dominated by the British answer to the Taj Mahal, an edifice designed
00:52to overawe a subject people, the Victoria Memorial.
00:58The memorial is just a tiny white island in the sea of Bengalis who inhabit this huge
01:03city.
01:04The amazing thing, when you come to think of it, is that just a few thousand Britons
01:09were able to rule not just Bengal, but the whole of India for the greater part of two
01:14centuries.
01:18Such monuments expressed total imperial self-confidence, but they concealed the insecurities that
01:25haunted the tiny population of Britons in India.
01:30The surprising thing isn't that British rule eventually ended, but that it lasted as long
01:35as it did.
01:37With all its marble grandeur, the Raj was the conundrum at the heart of the British
01:42empire.
01:43How on earth did the Victorians do it?
02:05At the apex of the British empire was Victoria, the great white queen on whose dominions the
02:10sun never set.
02:15And here at Osborne on the Isle of Wight was one of her favourite country retreats.
02:23Osborne harks back to an earlier era, but behind the traditional façade lay the high-tech
02:31key to Victoria's global rule.
02:36The Renaissance style, art and architecture were deceptive.
02:44Victoria and Albert were never entirely backward-looking.
02:47This fresco at Osborne doesn't look exactly modern, but if you look closely, you can see
02:51that Britannia, receiving the crown of the sea from King Neptune, is attended by industry,
02:57commerce and navigation.
02:59The royal couple understood full well the link between Britain's economic and naval
03:03mastery and our imperial power.
03:12From Osborne, the queen could look across the Solent to Portsmouth, then the world's
03:16biggest naval base.
03:18Nothing better symbolised the technical lead Britain had established at sea than HMS Warrior.
03:26She was protected by five inches of modern armour plate, and armed with the latest breech-loading
03:33guns.
03:36Below decks, her huge engines harnessed together the strength of steel and steam.
03:44Ships like these put the Royal Navy in a league of its own.
03:47At no other time in history has one power so completely dominated the world's oceans.
03:54Small wonder Queen Victoria felt secure by the seaside.
03:59In her writing room at Osborne, the queen attended assiduously to her correspondence.
04:04But as she sat at her elegant writing desk, she didn't need to rely solely on paper, pen
04:09and post to keep in touch with her far-flung empire.
04:13Because in her lifetime, a new invention revolutionised global communications.
04:19Telegrams coming in from India.
04:21Had a long talk with Lord Beaconsfield after tea about India and Afghanistan.
04:27And the necessity for our becoming masters of the country, and holding it, urged strongly
04:34on the government to do all in their power to uphold the safety and honour of the empire.
04:40By the 1870s, telegrams could be sent from here to India in a matter of hours.
04:46It illustrates perfectly how the world changed during Queen Victoria's long reign.
04:51It shrank, and it did so mainly because of British technology.
04:58The global communications revolution emanating from Britain's high-tech economy made this
05:03the age of imperial rapid reaction.
05:06The telegraph, the railway line and the steamship together were the iron network that simultaneously
05:11shrank the world and made Britain's control over it complete.
05:16This was what one Victorian memorably called the annihilation of distance.
05:23It was crucial that technology could annihilate distance when Britain's principal source of
05:28military power lay on the other side of the world.
05:35The Indian army numbered 180,000 men, as one politician put it.
05:40India is an English barrack in the oriental seas from which we may draw any number of
05:45troops without paying for them.
05:51The Indian army was also dependent on technology, not least the developing science of cartography.
06:01Knowledge is power, and knowing where things are is the most basic knowledge a government
06:05requires.
06:07As important as the telegraph and the technology of domination was the theodolite.
06:16So from the 1770s onwards, the British had made huge efforts to make accurate maps of
06:21India.
06:28From south to north, the survey of India created the first definitive atlas of the subcontinent,
06:34a vast compendium of geographical information immaculately set out on a scale of four miles
06:40to the inch.
06:43But as it climbed northwards into the Himalayas, the survey took on a new significance.
06:48Where, after all, did British India actually end?
07:01On the other side of India's northwestern mountains lay another European empire with
07:05similar aspirations, Russia.
07:15Across the Himalayas, Britain and Russia conducted the world's first Cold War.
07:25But the spies in this Cold War were surveyors.
07:29The great survey of India became inextricably bound up with espionage, the great game as
07:34they called it.
07:38At times it really did seem like a game.
07:41British agents ventured disguised into uncharted territory, measuring distances with the aid
07:46of worry beads.
07:48These were the original James Bonds, equipped with all the gadgets and ciphers the Victorian
07:53equivalent of Q could dream up.
07:57If new territory could be mapped, it could be labelled.
08:00And if it was labelled, it could be owned.
08:06And the northwest frontier wasn't the furthest extremity of British India.
08:10Thanks to modern technology, the Raj could reach right across the Indian Ocean.
08:22In 1866, the British Empire faced a hostage crisis.
08:26A group of British subjects were imprisoned by the Emperor Theodore of Abyssinia, who
08:32felt Queen Victoria hadn't given him the respect he deserved.
08:37Defiantly, he marched the hostages in chains to his mountain fortress at Magdama in modern
08:44day Ethiopia.
08:47Nobody messed with Queen Victoria's subjects like that and got away with it.
08:52Something had to be done, and fast, and that meant it was time to send for the British
08:56Empire's rapid reaction force.
09:01All that was needed to mobilise the Indian army was a telegram from Whitehall.
09:07And within just a few months, a fleet of 280 ships set sail from Bombay with an army of
09:1313,000 men.
09:15The expedition perfectly combined Indian muscle with British technology.
09:24In command was Lieutenant General Sir Robert Napier, a military engineer of genius.
09:33Slowly but inexorably, Napier marched his men across the desert to Magdala.
09:41In just two hours, the British force annihilated Theodore's army and torched the fortress.
09:48Not one of Napier's men was killed, and the hostages were freed.
09:53It was a classic mid-Victorian surgical strike, or as they said at the time, butcher and bolt.
10:02The fact that Indian troops could be deployed as far afield as Ethiopia and with such success
10:08spoke volumes for the way India had changed since the 1857 mutiny.
10:15Here in Lucknow, the expatriate community had endured a gruelling siege in which 2,000
10:20of them had died.
10:23But the British were determined to learn from the bitter experience of the mutiny.
10:27In its aftermath, security became the paramount concern.
10:33India was about to enter the age of modern town planning.
10:39To retake Lucknow, the avenging British troops had needed to fight their way into the city
10:43through a maze of alleyways.
10:46For the military engineer accompanying the troops, this was an experience not to be repeated.
10:52The engineer's name was Robert Napier, the very same man who led the British to victory
10:59so ruthlessly at Magdala.
11:01And his approach to the Lucknow problem was in much the same vein.
11:06By the time Napier had finished, he'd managed to demolish two-fifths of the old city and
11:11added insult to injury by turning the principal mosque into a temporary barracks.
11:16And it was all paid for by the inhabitants, who weren't allowed back in until they'd coughed
11:21up.
11:23All suburbs and cover, which would interrupt the free movement of troops, must be swept
11:27away, so the troops may move rapidly in any direction.
11:33The broad boulevards Napier built ensured that British troops would have a clear field
11:38of fire in the event of native unrest.
11:43Even the railway station was redesigned with social order in mind.
11:47Its long platforms were perfect for disembarking reinforcements, should they be needed.
11:54It was part station, part stronghold.
11:58The way Napier re-engineered Lucknow illustrates one of the basic and inescapable facts about
12:03British rule in India.
12:05Its foundation was military force.
12:07The army here wasn't just an imperial strategic reserve, it was also the guarantor of internal
12:13stability in Britain's Asian arsenal.
12:17But British India wasn't ruled solely by the mailed fist.
12:21It also had its mandarins, and it was the daily grind of administering India that would
12:27test the British to breaking point.
12:48Across the Indian subcontinent, in a vast network of local districts, British civil
12:53servants did what the Victorians did best.
12:57They ruled.
13:02But they had to do so in conditions Britons simply weren't designed for.
13:11At around this time of year, towards the end of March, the Indian plains become oppressively,
13:17intolerably hot.
13:18It's 45 degrees in the shade, and what's more, it's going to stay like that right through
13:23the monsoon rains until late September.
13:26Before the advent of air conditioning, India in the summer was a house of torment for Europeans.
13:31Just imagine being locked in a sauna for six months, and you have some idea of what it
13:35was like.
13:40All summer, the British yearned to escape from the enervating heat of the plains.
13:48The answer to their prayers turned out to lie in the foothills of the Himalayas, where
13:53the midsummer weather offered a passable imitation of the climate back in the old country.
14:14There were quite a few of these lofty refuges for sun-scorched Britons, but the hill station
14:19I'm going to now was in a league of its own.
14:22I'm taking the very same train that was taken by countless British administrators and soldiers,
14:27not to mention their wives and sweethearts.
14:29Some of them came up here on leave to promenade, party, and pair off, but most came here to
14:35work for the simple reason that for half of every year, this little village was the seat
14:40of government for the whole of India.
14:46This is Simla.
14:58What was once the summer capital of the Raj is 7,000 feet above sea level, and more than
15:031,000 miles away from the official capital in Calcutta.
15:09Perhaps it was the altitude, but something seemed to come over the British when they
15:13escaped up here.
15:17Here begins the story where every right-minded story should begin, that is to say, at Simla,
15:24where all things begin and many come to an evil end.
15:30Rodyard Kipling, then a journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette, understood this
15:35strange little hybrid world better than anyone.
15:39There are garden parties, and tennis parties, and picnics, and luncheons, and dinners and
15:45balls, besides rides and walks, which are matters of private arrangement.
15:51And most enticing of all, for Kipling, as for others, was the presence all summer long
15:57of the wives of officials still working in the plains.
16:04Many came to Simla to escape not just their spouses, but India itself.
16:09Not Kipling.
16:12He was forever ducking and weaving through the native quarter, bantering with Hindu shopkeepers
16:17and Muslim horse traders in search of good copy.
16:22This was the real India, and Kipling found it intoxicating.
16:29The heat and smells of oil and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat and darkness,
16:35and dirt and lust and cruelty, and above all, things wonderful and fascinating innumerable.
16:50At night, Kipling even took to visiting opium dens.
16:54He thought the drug an excellent thing in itself.
17:00Indeed it was, as the opium monopoly was one of the Indian government's main sources of revenue.
17:15Kipling loved the teeming anthill of Indian life, and it troubled him that the viceroy
17:20and his advisers should choose to spend half the year indulging in amateur dramatics in
17:25the splendid isolation of Simla.
17:32Kipling's sympathies were always with those of his countrymen who stuck it out down in
17:36the plains.
17:37Above all, the district officers of the Indian civil service, sweltering in their sun-baked
17:42outposts.
17:44They may have been cynical, seedy and dry, as Kipling himself once said.
17:49They may have been betrayed by their wicked wives up in the hills.
17:52But the men in the plains for Kipling were the real heroes.
17:56It was they who held the Raj together.
18:00The Indian civil service was tiny.
18:03There were seldom more than a thousand British officials ruling a population which, by the
18:07end of British rule, exceeded 400 million.
18:11Was this the most efficient bureaucracy in history?
18:15Only Kipling concluded, if the masters of India worked like slaves.
18:22They die or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or brokered in health
18:27and hope, in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war.
18:36The way Kipling described it, the Indian civil service, doesn't sound a particularly attractive
18:40career option.
18:42And yet competition for places was fierce, so fierce that selection had to be based on
18:46one of the toughest exams in history.
18:49Here are some of the questions that 18-year-olds had to tackle back in 1859.
18:53Let's start with logic and mental philosophy.
18:58Question one.
18:59State and illustrate the nature of definition.
19:03Hmm.
19:04How about this?
19:07Classify fallacies.
19:08Well, I can't do either of those.
19:10I'll try mental and moral philosophy.
19:14Specify as far as you are able the particular duties coming under the general head of justice.
19:21Well, things had certainly changed since the days of Warren Hastings, when jobs with the
19:25East India Company were bought and sold as part of a system of aristocratic patronage.
19:31The Victorians had loftier aspirations.
19:34They wanted India to be ruled by the ultimate academic elite, impartial, incorruptible and
19:41omniscient.
19:44The young men who opted for the rigours of the subcontinent tended to be those whose
19:48prospects at home were modest.
19:51The bright young sons of provincial professionals who were willing to cram for the sake of a
19:56prestigious job overseas.
19:58Men like Devon-born Evan McConaughey.
20:02McConaughey's great-uncle and elder brother had both been Indian civil servants.
20:07In 1887, after two years of cramming, he passed the ICS entrance exam and set off for Bengal.
20:16McConaughey found his new life surprisingly enjoyable.
20:21Imagine then the young assistant setting forth on horseback on a crisp November morning after
20:26a good monsoon.
20:28He has few cares.
20:30His heart is light and it must be a dull soul that does not respond to the vision.
20:36On the way, there will be villages to inspect, perhaps, if time permits, a quiet shoot.
20:43But the lot of an expatriate Mandarin wasn't entirely happy.
20:49There was the tedium of hearing appeals against tax assessments and the loneliness of being
20:54the only white man for hundreds of miles.
20:59When I first started out, none of my office staff spoke English and I rarely met another
21:04district officer.
21:06For seven months, I scarcely spoke English and was thrown very much on my own resources.
21:15One white man and his resources ruling an alien multitude.
21:20That was the story in districts all over India.
21:25Yet reading between the lines of a memoir like McConaughey's, you begin to notice a
21:28crucial reality.
21:31Everything he and the other district officers did was dependent on another, much larger
21:36tier of bureaucracy below them.
21:39The heaven-born, as they liked to call themselves, would have been impotent without an auxiliary
21:44force of civil servants who were actually Indians.
21:51That was the unspoken truth about British India.
21:54It wasn't, as McConaughey himself acknowledged, a conquered country, or at least it didn't
21:59feel like one to him.
22:01It was only the Indian rulers who'd been supplanted or subjugated by the British.
22:06The Indian landowners and merchants carried on much as they had before.
22:10Indeed, for many of them, British rule was an opportunity for self-advancement.
22:14But the real key to the emergence of a pro-British Indian elite was education, at places like
22:20this.
22:23As early as 1817, a Hindu college had been founded in Calcutta by prosperous Bengalis
22:29eager for Western education.
22:31But in 1835, the creation of a new class of British-educated Indians became government
22:37policy.
22:38The man responsible was the historian, liberal politician, and Indian administrator Thomas
22:44Babington Macaulay.
22:47For Macaulay, what the empire needed were people who may be interpreters between us
22:51and the millions whom we govern.
22:54A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals,
22:59and in intellect.
23:02By the 1870s, Macaulay's vision had been in large measure realised.
23:05There were 200,000 Indian students in English-speaking secondary schools.
23:11One of them was a bright young Bengali named Janakanath Bose.
23:15Educated in Calcutta, Bose was called to the bar in 1885, and by the end of his career
23:21had been appointed to the Bengal Legislative Council.
23:25Bose's ascent brought him considerable wealth, enough to buy this mansion in the fashionable
23:31district of Calcutta.
23:33It also brought him honours from the British, the title of Rai Bahadur, an Indian knighthood.
23:39The truth was that imperial rule depended on securing such local collaboration.
23:45It was easy enough in colonies like Canada or Australia, where white settlers were in
23:51a clear majority, but in India they were a tiny minority.
23:56Somehow or other, the Indians had to be involved in their own government, but that was the
24:00one thing the white settlers here simply couldn't swallow.
24:07London liberals like Macaulay saw no alternative but to co-opt an elite of Anglicised natives.
24:13But the men on the spot preferred to keep the natives down.
24:17To them, the products of the Bengali colleges were insufferable jumped-up baboos.
24:25To co-opt or to coerce?
24:27That was the great imperial dilemma.
24:30And on its horns not just India, but colonies as far away as Jamaica were to be impaled.
24:51The Caribbean had once been the centre of the most extreme form of racial coercion.
24:57But abolition had done little to improve the lot of the average black Jamaican.
25:06Power and wealth remained firmly in the hands of the white planters.
25:12I heard a voice saying, tell the sons and daughters of Africa that a great deliverance
25:18will take place for them from the hand of oppression, for said the voice, they are oppressed
25:24by government, by magistrates, by proprietors, by merchants.
25:33In the 1860s, a wave of religious fervour swept across the island.
25:39The talk was of a day of judgment when divine retribution would be meted out.
25:44In Morant Bay, a Baptist deacon named Paul Bogle issued a call to arms.
25:50Blower your shells, roll your drums, war is at hand from today to tomorrow.
25:58The police tried to arrest Bogle.
26:02That was the cue for bloody fighting in the streets.
26:05The governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, knew exactly what to do.
26:09He proclaimed martial law.
26:11Within a month, 400 people had been executed, 600 flogged,
26:16and a thousand homes had been razed to the ground.
26:19But the white planters who cheered Eyre on as he smashed the rebellion,
26:23were not the only ones who had been killed.
26:25They were the ones who had been beaten to death.
26:27They were the ones who had been beaten to death.
26:30But the white planters who cheered Eyre on as he smashed the rebellion,
26:35were in for a shock.
26:37People in London were outraged by the crackdown, and that included the government.
26:44Eyre was recalled to London and hauled before a royal commission
26:47for the indiscriminate way he'd strung up, not just Bogle,
26:50but a wholly innocent pillar of the black community named George William Gordon.
26:55A landowner, a former magistrate, in short, a West Indian baboo.
27:03London's liberal intelligentsia were appalled by the execution of a man
27:07who was like them in everything except the colour of his skin.
27:11The Morat Bay affair exposed a fundamental tension within the British Empire.
27:17Here in Whitehall, liberal ideas were in the ascendant,
27:20and that meant the rule of law came first, regardless of skin colour.
27:24But British colonists, the men and women out there on the spot,
27:27increasingly regarded themselves not just as legally,
27:30but as biologically superior to other races.
27:33Sooner or later, these two visions,
27:35the liberalism of the centre and the racism of the periphery,
27:38were bound to collide again.
27:44Race was becoming an issue in all the British colonies,
27:47in India as much as in Jamaica.
27:50And no-one took the issue more seriously than the expatriate business community.
27:56Victorian India was booming on a wave of British investment.
28:01Kanpur, on the banks of the River Ganges,
28:04was a thriving centre of cotton and wool manufacturing,
28:07the Manchester of the East.
28:08The Industrial Revolution had been brought here by Hugh Maxwell,
28:12whose family had been settled in Kanpur for three generations.
28:16Maxwell was one of those hard-faced Scotsmen
28:18who were doing well out of the empire.
28:20He saw the world, literally, in terms of black and white.
28:25There was a profound difference between the attitudes of the official class
28:28and those of the business community.
28:31Men like Maxwell felt threatened by the rise of an educated Indian elite,
28:35not least because it implied that they themselves might be dispensable.
28:39After all, why shouldn't an educated Indian be every bit as good
28:42at managing a family?
28:45Why shouldn't he be running a textile mill as a member of the Maxwell dynasty?
28:52All over India, there had been a creeping segregation.
28:56Towns like Kanpur were cut in two,
28:58the neat bungalows of the white community on one side,
29:02black town on the other.
29:08Liberals in London might look forward
29:10to a future of Indian participation in government.
29:13The Indian patriots used the language of the American South
29:16to disparage the natives as niggers,
29:19and they expected the law to uphold their superiority.
29:26But this Asian version of apartheid was about to be challenged
29:30by a mild-mannered liberal lawyer from Oxford.
29:34Courtney Peregrin Ilbert had never visited India
29:38until he was appointed law member of the Viceroy's Council.
29:41But no sooner had he set eyes on Calcutta's High Court
29:45than Ilbert began to meddle
29:47in matters old India hands like Hugh Maxwell took very seriously indeed.
29:55Although Indians could be members of the civil service,
29:58up until 1883, Indian magistrates weren't allowed
30:01to conduct criminal trials of white defendants outside the big cities.
30:06In the eyes of the liberals running the empire, this was simply wrong.
30:10So Ilbert drafted a bill to do away with it.
30:13Under his bill,
30:14Indian magistrates would now be able to sit in judgment on whites.
30:19Justice would become colourblind.
30:23To the expat community,
30:25the Ilbert Bill was an intolerable assault on their privileged status.
30:29Their reaction was so violent that people spoke of a white mutiny
30:32as opposed to the Indian mutiny of 1857.
30:35It all began here, at Calcutta's Town Hall.
30:38Within just a few weeks of the Bill's publication,
30:40thousands of irate Britons gathered inside
30:43to hear a series of inflammatory speeches against the native civil servant,
30:47the despised Bengali baboon.
30:52These men are not fit to rule over us.
30:54They can't judge us, and we will not be judged by them.
30:57Men, now cry out for power.
30:59To sit in judgment on and condemn the lion.
31:04And barely the jackass kick his at the lion.
31:12Across the street in Government House,
31:13Ilbert and his colleagues were taken aback by the reaction.
31:17But rather than meet the white backlash head-on,
31:20they simply headed for the hills.
31:26After all, it was time for the Viceroy's annual retreat to Simla.
31:31Far from the bully boy businessmen of Calcutta.
31:41Here at Chapsley, his elegant house in Simla,
31:44Courtney Ilbert sat out the summer,
31:46desperately hoping the row over his Bill would go away.
31:50A rather timid little lawyer who'd been parachuted into India
31:53from Balliol College, Oxford,
31:55Ilbert had completely misread the mood of the men in the planes.
31:59As to the kind and amount of feeling which the Bill was likely to excite,
32:03I had no knowledge of my own,
32:05and certainly did not anticipate such a storm.
32:08I am intensely sorry that the measure should have disclosed
32:12and intensified racial animosities.
32:16It was a perfect illustration of the perils of ruling a continent
32:19from a mountaintop.
32:21All Ilbert had done was exchange an ivory tower in Oxford for one in Simla.
32:29Across the country, in the baking heat of the Indian summer,
32:33the agitation spread.
32:35Committees were formed, money was raised,
32:37as non-official British India mobilised.
32:41In Kanpur, the incandescent mill owner Hugh Maxwell
32:44joined the chorus as it approached its crescendo.
32:49The native mind is unfit to appreciate and sympathise
32:53with European ideas of administering the land.
32:56It is the same ideas of administering the government of a country and people.
33:03This white mutiny was intimately bound up
33:06with the original Indian mutiny 25 years before.
33:10Here in Kanpur, every white woman had been slaughtered
33:13and a legend had sprung up, not just of murder, but of rape,
33:17as if every Indian man just waited the opportunity
33:19to get his hands on a memsab.
33:22In the same vein, the anti-Ilbert campaign had a recurrent theme,
33:26opposed by Indian magistrates to white women.
33:29Somehow the Ilbert Bill threatened to knock down the walls
33:31not just of the cantonment, but of the bungalow bedroom.
33:35150,000 white people, who claimed to rule over 300 million brown people,
33:40regarded equality before the law as the high road to interracial rape.
33:45Fancy, I ask you, Britishers,
33:47her being taken before a half-clad native to be tried and perhaps convicted.
33:53What would please our fellow subjects more
33:55than to bully and disgrace a wretched European woman?
33:59The higher her husband's station and the greater respectability,
34:02the greater the delight of her torturer.
34:08All these fears, political, racial and sexual,
34:12simmered together through the summer.
34:16When the government finally returned to Kolkata that December,
34:19the city was at boiling point.
34:23Outside Government House, the viceroy was booed.
34:26There was even talk of kidnapping him.
34:32This was the crossroads for British India.
34:35Should it be governed as Ilbert and the Liberals believed,
34:38without regard to colour?
34:40Or should it, as Maxwell and the expats insisted,
34:43be a racially segregated society?
34:47Petrified by the scale and ferocity of the white mutiny,
34:50the Liberals caved in.
34:53The Ilbert Bill was emasculated,
34:55giving British defendants the right to be tried by a white jury
34:58rather than an Indian magistrate.
35:01Yet this cop-out was profoundly dangerous for the future of the Raj.
35:04To Indian magistrates and their friends,
35:06the contempt with which they were regarded
35:08by the majority of expatriates was now out in the open.
35:12Another really important consequence of the Ilbert Bill became apparent.
35:16Not so much the white mutiny as the Indian reaction to it.
35:20The Ilbert Bill had united educated Indians of all regions and religions
35:25to produce, for the first time, a genuine national movement.
35:30It was the beginning of the end for the alliance between British Mandarins
35:33and the English-speaking Indian elite.
35:37Just two years after the white mutiny,
35:40the Indian National Congress was founded.
35:43It was to be the crucible of Indian independence.
35:46And from the outset, it attracted stalwarts of all religions.
35:50It was the elite of that educated class that served the British Raj.
35:55Men like Janakarnath Bose and another Indian lawyer
35:59by the name of Motilal Nehru.
36:01Nehru's son would be the first Prime Minister of an independent India.
36:06Bose's would lead an Indian army against the British in the Second World War.
36:11India was the foundation of Britain's worldwide empire.
36:15If the British alienated the Anglicised elite,
36:18that foundation would begin to crumble.
36:20Could another section of Indian society be found to prop up the British Raj?
36:26Bizarrely, the alternative to Asian apartheid seemed to lie
36:30in the social system the British understood best.
36:33Their own.
36:50For many British officials in India,
36:52toiling for years on end in a far-flung land,
36:55the thought of home provided consolation in the heat of the plains.
37:01But as the Victorian era drew to a close,
37:03confusions began to creep in about both home and India.
37:09Expats dreamt nostalgically of an unchanging rural England.
37:15Of squires and parsons and deferentials.
37:18Parsons and deferential villagers.
37:22It was an essentially Tory vision of a traditional hierarchical society
37:27ruled by landed aristocrats in a spirit of benign paternalism.
37:32The fact that Britain was in reality an industrial giant
37:35where most of the population lived in cities was somehow forgotten.
37:40People back in Britain had an equally unrealistic view of India.
37:44Queen Victoria was delighted when Parliament bestowed on her
37:47the title of Empress of India in 1877.
37:52But she never actually went near the place.
37:55What Victoria preferred was for India to come to her.
37:59In later years, her favourite servant was an Indian named Abdul Karim.
38:04He came here to Osborne in 1870.
38:06He came here to Osborne in 1887
38:08as the personification of the Queen's imagined India.
38:11Courteous, deferential, obedient, faithful.
38:19Towards the end of her life,
38:20Queen Victoria added a new wing to Osborne House,
38:23which she decorated in a riot of Indian style.
38:27It looks like something straight out of the Red Fort at Delhi.
38:31But again, it's a backward-looking house.
38:34But again, it's a backward-looking vision,
38:36giving no hint of the new India the British were building,
38:40of cotton mills, of railways.
38:42It's a fantasy.
38:44What would happen if that fantasy collided with the reality?
38:49In 1898, a new Viceroy of India was appointed.
38:53His was neither a liberal nor a racist vision.
38:56It was one based on ineffable, crashing snobbery.
39:00My name is George Nathaniel Curzon.
39:03I'm a most superior person.
39:06My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek.
39:09I dine at Benham once a week.
39:14When he took up his post at the Viceroy's Palace in Calcutta,
39:17Curzon wasn't yet 40.
39:19But it was a job for which he'd long felt himself to be predestined.
39:25Small wonder.
39:26A century before, the Viceregal Palace had been designed
39:29as an exact copy of the Curzon's ancestral pile in Derbyshire.
39:36To a Tory aristocrat like Curzon,
39:38Indian society could never be as simple as black and white.
39:42Raised to think of himself as close to the pinnacle
39:45of a pyramid of social status,
39:47extending downward from the monarch,
39:49Curzon thirsted after social hierarchy.
39:52He and those like him dreamt of replicating in the empire
39:56what they most liked about England's feudal past.
40:00A previous generation of British rulers
40:02had immersed themselves in Indian culture
40:04to become true Orientalists.
40:07But Curzon was what you might call a Toryentalist.
40:12Curzon despised liberal mandarins like Courtney Hilbert.
40:16But he despised the expatriate bigots like Hugh Maxwell even more.
40:21They might be white, but they were also lamentably common.
40:27Curzon preferred the company of his fellow aristocrats.
40:31And if they were posh enough,
40:33he didn't care that their skin was brown rather than white.
40:40In fact, about a third of the subcontinent was made up of princely states
40:44where traditional maharajas remained nominally in charge.
40:49These were the people Curzon felt should help him rule India.
40:52I have always been an ardent well-wisher of the native princes,
40:56but I believe in them not as relics, but as rulers,
40:59not as puppets, but as living factors in the administration.
41:03I want them to share the responsibilities
41:06as well as the glories of British rule.
41:17The high point of Curzon's rule was a spectacular display of power.
41:22It was a display of pomp and ceremony,
41:24which he personally staged to mark the accession of Edward VII,
41:29the Delhi Durbar.
41:35The howders rocked,
41:36and one just carried away the impression of black-bearded kings
41:40who swayed to and fro with each movement of their gigantic steeds.
41:47It was the perfect expression of Curzon's theme park,
41:51the feudal view of India.
41:55But in putting his money on the maharajas,
41:57Curzon was forgetting who really mattered in India.
42:02The true foundation of British rule wasn't the maharajas on their elephants,
42:06it was the Anglicised lawyers and civil servants Macaulay had called into being.
42:10The maharajas belonged to the past.
42:12The future lay with India's urban elites.
42:15The trouble was, they were just the people that Curzon regarded as a threat.
42:21Two years after the Durbar,
42:22Curzon deliberately attacked the urban educated Indians.
42:28He announced that Bengal,
42:29the very heartland of the emerging nationalist movement,
42:33would be partitioned.
42:35The decision unleashed the worst political violence since the mutiny.
42:42At first, the authorities assumed it was the work of hooligans,
42:45but this was modern terrorism,
42:48nationalism plus nitroglycerine,
42:51and the ringleaders were anything but poor coolies.
42:55One of them, Aurobindo Ghosh,
42:57had been head boy at St Paul's School in London
43:00and a scholar at King's College, Cambridge.
43:03He'd even passed the ICS exam,
43:05only to be rejected by the service for missing the horse riding test.
43:11The British had produced a Frankenstein's monster,
43:14Anglicised Indians,
43:16who wanted to get rid of the British themselves.
43:18Ghosh was one of more than 20 young men
43:20tried for terrorism in this courthouse at Alipore.
43:25Yet the Alipore case was revealingly different
43:28from the Marant Bay trials more than 40 years before.
43:31Instead of the summary justice meted out then,
43:34the trial lasted more than 30 weeks,
43:36and in the end, Aurobindo Ghosh was acquitted.
43:39Even the two ringleaders' death sentences were never carried out.
43:42And in a final, humiliating climb-down,
43:46the partition of Bengal was finally revoked.
43:58Instead, the British decided to move their capital to Delhi,
44:02the ancient seat of the Mughal emperors.
44:07Unlike commercial contrary Calcutta,
44:10this would be a capital altogether more suitable
44:13for a toriental viceroy.
44:17New Delhi is the British Empire's one aesthetic masterpiece,
44:21the ultimate façade of a supremely self-assured power.
44:27The architects crowned their creation
44:30with an inscription on the walls of the Secretariat
44:32that must be the most condescending
44:34in the entire history of the empire.
44:38Liberty does not descend to a people.
44:41A people must raise themselves to liberty.
44:45It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.
44:52Not Curzon's words, but in their tone, distinctly Curzon-esque.
44:56These government buildings in New Delhi were a breathtaking bid
44:59to match the architectural achievements of the Mughals.
45:03But who paid for them?
45:04The answer was the Indian taxpayer.
45:07Clearly, until they had earned their liberty,
45:09the Indians would have to carry on paying
45:11for the privilege of being ruled by the British.
45:13And even Curzon himself admitted,
45:15British rule may be good for us,
45:17but is neither equally nor altogether good for them.
45:24By now, the British had governed India for more than 100 years.
45:27Yet the average Indian was scarcely a penny richer.
45:31Indian nationalists complained that the wealth of their country
45:34was being drained into the pockets of the British.
45:37But what they were really objecting to was the fact
45:40that it wasn't draining into their pockets,
45:42which it would if they ruled India.
45:47The reality was that Indian nationalism was fuelled
45:50not by the impoverishment of the many,
45:52but by the exclusion of the privileged few.
45:55In the age of Macaulay, the British had called into being
45:57an English-educated elite on whom their rule came to depend.
46:02In the age of Curzon, these people were dropped
46:04in favour of decorative but largely defunct Maharajas.
46:08The result was that by the twilight years of the Empress Queen's reign,
46:12British rule in India resembled one of those palaces Curzon so adored.
46:17Outside, it looked simply splendid.
46:19But downstairs, the servants were busy turning the floorboards into firewood.
46:35Far-cooled, our navies melt away, on dune and headlands sinks the fire.
46:41Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
46:48Judge of the nations, spare us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget.
46:54Well, Kipling wrote those foreboding but clear-sighted words in 1897
46:59to mark Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee.
47:02And sure enough, like the proud citadels of Nineveh and Tyre,
47:06most of Curzon's works in India haven't endured.
47:10I think this disused, forgotten backyard in Lucknow,
47:14full of imperial icons, perfectly fit for the occasion.
47:18Disused, forgotten backyard in Lucknow, full of imperial icons,
47:23perfectly symbolises the transience of what he was trying to achieve.
47:37In truth, by the turn of the century,
47:39India was no longer the be-all and end-all of British power.
47:48Elsewhere in the empire, a new generation had come of age,
47:52men who were convinced that if the empire was to survive,
47:55it had to expand in new directions.
48:00As far as they were concerned, it was quite simple.
48:03The empire had to drop the pomp and get back to its roots,
48:07to penetrate new markets, to settle new colonies,
48:10and, if necessary, to wage new wars.
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