The British Raj
The British Achievement in India. By H. G. Rawlinson. Hodge. 15s.)
A FEW weeks ago two old friends from India sat in a London club discussing Hyderabad, Kashmir and the many other problems of India and Pakistan. After a time the conversation came round to Mr. Rawlinson's recent book, and a sharp disagreement arose at once. One of the two men, a scholar, and well versed in Indian history, spoke disparagingly of the book as inaccurate and super- ficial. The other, an intelligent business-man, with no preten.ions to scholarship, was loud in its defence. " For many years," he said, "I have been looking for a simple and brief account of the British achievement in India. At last I have found it."
It would be easy to defend either of these views, but there can be no doubt that the business-man's judgement was the more significant. Now that Britain has handed over her stewardship it is right that British people should want to assess its character, and Mr. Rawlinson's book provides, in a readable and at times lively form, the outline of British Indian history on which such a judge- ment can be based. It is true that the book is marred by many in- accuracies. Some of these—as for example where it refers to Lord Charles Cavendish Bentinc.k, or again where intervention in the formation of the Interim Government of 1946 is ascribed to the Nawab of Bengal—are no doubt the result of faulty proof-reading. Others, however, are of a more serious character, and are illustrated by the incorrect statement that " the first person to introduce a regular system of revenue collection was the great Emperor Akbar." It is perhaps surprising that so sound a historian as Mr. Rawlinson should have overlooked the work of.Sher Shah in this field. .
There is, moreover, a certain superficiality about many of the author's judgements, and he is too ready to believe in the almost immediate effect of political events on economic conditions. Like many other historians of India, he exaggerates the immediate economic effects of Company misrule in the few years following the assumption of the Dewani, while elsewhere he perhaps over-states the subsequent recovery. In spite of these defects, however, the book gives a clear picture of British policy in India, and brings out well the struggles between the Anglicists and the Orientalists, . though the author himself is perhaps inclined to err on the side of Macaulay.
The best parts of the book are those dealing with the two most masterful of Governors-General, Dalhousie and Curzon. There can be no doubt that these were the two greatest rulers of. India after the time of Warren Hastings, but their very greatness bred in
them, an impatience with lesser men and with unreasoning prejudice, which unfitted them to secure the devotion of their Indiati subjects. Each of them adopted a progressive policy in advance of Indian contemporary thought, and so laid up trouble for his successor. Mr. Rawlinson's treatment of these two great men is sound and balanced. In the sphere of foreign policy the author comes out as a scathing critic of the Forward School, though it may be doubted whether he fully appreciates the reality of the nineteenth-century Russian menace by which that School was prompted, or the way in which the Forward Policy suffered by the absence of continuous and whole- hearted support from England.
The author's account of the steps preparatory to self-government is clear and correct. It leaves no room -for doubt as to Britain's consistent honesty of purpose in the last thirty years, and so enables the reader to see the transfer of power as but the final act in a policy which Britain deliberately, set before itself many years previously. This book is not for specialists, but will make the British achieve- ment in India clear to the general reader, and it should, be on the shelves of every library.
P. J. GRIFFITHS.
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