As you might know, Elizabeth, Queen of of Great Britain died and her funeral was two days ago. She ‘ruled’ for a long time, coming to the throne in 1952 as the sun was setting on the British Empire and finally departing via a natural death in 2022. What caused the end of the most powerful empire the world had ever known? Where are all the players from then today? It is time for a historical retrospective.
No such retrospective can skip over Britain’s relationship with India and the influence of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich on Britain’s path, as malign as the latter might be.
First, let’s take stock. At the turn of the 20th century Britain had a firm hand on a huge chunk of the world. It was taking massive profits from the colonies.
If you read British History as told by the British, especially the Tories(the conservative party), you would get the impression Britain in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century was a land of swashbuckling entrepreneurs generating all kinds of wealth. The Empire itself was one of benevolent generosity; Britain gave all kinds of things to the colonies asking little in return, just occasionally exerting a firm but well meaning hand. Occasionally something horrible like the Jalianwallah Baugh massacre happened, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and in any case, General Dyer, the perpetrator of that atrocity was acting in his best judgement. No need to second guess the history.
The truth is of course, something very different. Britain was bleeding the colonies dry and India was the crown jewel of this bleeding. Indians were taxed to the point of near death, and sometime literal death. British rule was peppered by a huge number of mostly man-made famines. The tax money was spent on lavish lifestyles for the British rulers in India as well as purchasing goods made in Britain which were imported duty free into India, while every Indian effort was crushed through punitive laws and taxation.
It is said that there would be fights in the British Parliament for the senior positions in India - so sweet was the gig. You could go work for a few years, be waited on hand and foot, be paid a fortune and retire a lord in Britain. Churchill himself was stationed in Bangalore in the 1930s. His lifestyle was pretty sweet. Among other things he would have a barber waiting on him to shave him just as he woke up. All the while a famine was raging outside of the army cantonment he was in, a famine he never saw and never bothered to inquire about. No wonder he was so fond of the Empire.
Enter Gandhi. Ramchandra Guha, one of India’s foremost historians has written a comprehensive account of Mahatma Gandhi’s life in two volumes. The first covers his time in South Africa, the second his time in India leading the Indian freedom struggle.
In 1915 Gandhi returned to India after spending 20 years in South Africa working for the rights of the Indian community there. He spent the next thirty years fighting for India’s freedom based on his principles of satyagraha, non-violent civil disobedience. The most famous of his actions was the salt march, where he took a month long march to the sea to break the British monopoly on making salt and make some for himself.
He was a thorn in the British side as Guha’s meticulously researched book shows. They didn’t know how to handle him, alternately dismissing him as a crank and complaining about his annoying he was.
Gandhi’s efforts paid off with Indian Independence in 1947. Or did it? Did Independence come about due to this non-violent struggle or did the vicious war unleashed by the armies of the Third Reich have anything to do with it? This is a difficult question that historians struggle to answer.
All agree that by the time the war ended in 1945, Britain was spent. She was also deep in debt to America and also the British Government of India. (The debt to India was never paid btw.). Financially India was no longer a profitable enterprise for her; physically she was exhausted from 5 years of such vicious war, morally she was bankrupt, having insisted the war was a battle for freedom and democracy all the while denying freedom to the colonies.
After the war ended the government of Winston Churchill fell. The British voted in a labor government that was committed to the Independence of India. So fell into motion the a quick British withdrawal from the subcontinent, the partition of British India with its subsequent horrors, and the birth of two new nations, India and Pakistan. (A third, Bangladesh would be born in 1971 after the Bangladeshi war of Indepdendence from Pakistan.)
If the world war had not happened, if Hitler had not come to power and unleashed his horrors on the world, had the Imperial Japanese Army not set about conquering Asia, would Britain have set into motion this process?
Perhaps British would have hung onto India for quite a while longer, while continuing to extract their unholy profits, even though the civil disobedience had made these profits dwindle. Perhaps there might have been an eventual transfer of power in slow stages.
Would such a slower pace have facilitated a more orderly transition? Would this have actually been good for the subcontinent? Perhaps there wouldn’t have been such a hasty partition of the country and the grotesque violence that followed could have been avoided. Or perhaps the British would still he holding onto power in India in some way shape or form. Or perhaps some other violent cataclysm would have occurred that caused their exit.
We cannot know the counterfactuals. It is interesting though to review what Gandhi thought an effective non-violent response could be to a monster like Hitler, or even the marauding Japanese army. He suggested that it would come at a great cost. Many would have to lay their lives down in non-violent protest to convince Herr Hitler or the Japanese War council of the error of their ways.
This is a major head-scratcher; indeed, as Guha narrates, Chiang-KaSkek, the leader of China and his wife Madam Chang came to visit Gandhi. China at that time was struggling to resist a savagely brutal Japanese occupation. Gandhi and Chiang talked for a while. Chiang made clear his opinion to Gandhi - that non-violence would last 5 minutes against the Japanese.
History is complex that way and can hold multiple truths. Yes, the British were nasty shits, however compared to some of the other nasty shits of the time they were pretty decent. Gandhi spent all together 8 years in the jails of the British Empire. Not nice, however at least he wasn’t just disappeared as he might have been in Stalin’s Russia.
Gandhi was educated in Britain. By the time he came around some awareness had come to some sectors of Britain that we can’t just keep bleeding the place dry. So some opportunities began being opened up for Indians to participate in the economic, social and political life. Indeed the Indian National Congress, the political party that Gandhi led to secure India’s freedom was founded by an Englishman, the then retired civil servant Allan Hume. It was founded with the idea of allowing Indians a chance to participate in political life.
The British also did bring a lot of the new learning of Europe, from modern technology to some of the ideals of the enlightenment, even though they didn’t practice them very well. The time of British rule in India was also a time of social reform, including banning the practice of Sati(bride burning) and allowing widow remarriage. Gandhi himself dedicated a huge chunk of his time and energy to reform Hinduism from within, to rid it of the evil of caste discrimination and untouchability.
Where are the players today? Elizabeth came to the throne in 1952, after India had become independent and over the next two decades the rest of the colonies won their independence as well. Since then Britain has tried hard to reinvent itself, from becoming a financial services powerhouse and a cultural mecca via Cool Britannia to the latest attempt via Brexit.
India and Britain have settled into a warm friendship. In India, the legacy of Gandhi continues to be debated and has fallen out of favor in many places. A new muscular Hinduism has taken charge as was inevitable as I wrote in 2014 and as Salman Rushdie predicted in The Moors Last Sigh. Germany remain an economic powerhouse and has become a post-modern cultural powerhouse too. Japan, tamed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also continues to be an economic powerhouse while flying the flag of pacifism, though some say that is changing.
So, History, it is complex. You never know how things are going to turn out. Or will continue to turn out. As the Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi observed, moment to moment there is change. That is all.