Power and glory
Jan Morris
Birds of a Different Plumage Peter Mudford (Collins £4.95)
'Rummaging through the files of the Calgary Herald recently, looking for imperial memorabilia, I found an unusual speech reported. It was an imperialist address from the days of the old Empire, but it was a far cry from the usual self-congratulatory eulogy, familiar to addicts of imperial rhetoric from Hong Kong to Gibraltar. Mr Walter Millard, speaking to a local ladies' club about "The Relation of Energy to Human Progress," chose the Empire as an archetype of historical energy, but he did not dwell upon the glory, the scale or even the burden of it all. He spoke instead of the British Empire as an instrument of personal redemption. It represented, he said, "the privilege of every man to rind his scrap of truth and apply it to the advantage not of himself, but of humanity."
(found this very striking, for I too had lately taken to viewing the British Empire less in historical than in evolutionary terms. I had come to collate it with Teilhard de Chardin's conception of "in-furling" the infinitely slow, incessantly spasmodic movement towards the unity of mankind and the universal fulfilment. Chardin saw love and knowledge as the twin energies of that process, and I had been toying with the notion that while the arrogance, the greed and the brutality of the British Empire was energy gone to waste, the good in the adventure, the sacrifice, the courage, the idealism, the diligence, had contributed a sizeable quota to the universal stock of love and awareness.
Mr Millard, half a century ago, clearly had the same sort of vision: so in a less woolly way does Mr Mudford, the author of this book about Anglo-Indian relations between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. The theme of his book is familiar. The British, during their stay in India, were generally aloof to, contemptuous of, and ignorant about their Indian subjects. Their approach was narrow, their attitudes were parochial, and when they should have been studying the local cultures they were performing amateur dramatics at Simla, or hunting jackal at Ootacamund. Mr Mudford concedes periods of comparative rapport, but in general he believes the Anglo-Indian ear to have been a wasted opportunity. It could have fostered rapprochement, instead it perpetuated estrangement. This is hardly original thinking, and one can scarcely believe that Mr Mudford needed his bibliography of two hundred and sixty seven volumes to cement the thesis (but there, he is a professional academic, educated, we are quaintly told, "in England, the United States and Christ Church, Oxford"). But it is presented here in a new way, with a distinctly post-imperial sense of release, and with a kindly intention that Walter Millard would have liked. There is nobility to Mr Mudford's conception of Empire as a potential cross-fertiliser,' and he convincingly persuades us, with examples both Anglo and Indian, that the possibility really was there.
He might have been more convincing still if he had extended his examples further into our own century, for the soldiers and administrators of the Empire's last fifty years were the most genuinely enlightened of the lot, if hardly the most forceful. But there, of course, is the
rub. It was force that kept the Indian Empire in being, tacitly always, explicitly after the Ma' tiny. If it had not been for the threat of coercion all the positive achievements of Empire (which Mr Mudford begrudgingly admits) could never have happened. And the more resolutely ideological the imperialist, the more passionately he believed in Britain's providential purpose, the more dominant his posture was, and the greater the gulf between Briton and Indian. It is no good wishing history otherwise. OnlY very exceptional men, men out of their time, could make of the Raj a force for brotherhood, and few exceptional men made a career of Empire. Just as your average Englishman today, deposited with his possessions in Rhodesia or South Africa, very soon becomes as racialist as his neighbours, so your average Briton of the nineteenth century, unloading his trunks at Madras, naturally conformed to the values of his friends and colleagues. You, Mr Mudford or I might perhaps have behaved with more enlightenment, but the odds are heavily against it. When exceptional people did go to India, like exceptional people in South Africa they really did act as reconcilers. Mr Mudford quotes many happy exceptions to prove his sad rule, from William Jones the orientalist to G.O. Trevelyan of The Competition Wallah (and he might have added all those British soldiers, especially in the irregular regiments, who identified themselves so absolutely with their men as to be almost Sikhs or Gurkhas themselves). For people of lively mind and character it was obviously more interesting to learn the local languages, mix if one could with local society, and try to understand the local cultures even Mr Mudford could not complain about lack of interest in the local fauna and flora.
The crunch came when Britons who recognised the beauty and grandeur of the imperial idea found their sensibilities disrupted by its contradictions. Kipling was one of these the Kipling who celebrated the iron force of Empire in a hundred poems and ballads, but who also recognized its redemptive potential ,in the allegory of Kim. But the greates tof them was Curzon, the most aloof and patronising of inperialists, but the grandest nonetheless, and the most vividly conscious of Empire's duties and dilemmas. It was Curzon who ordered the invasion of Tibet, it was Curzon who said there was no Indian on the Executive Council because no Indian alive was competent enough, but it was also Curzon, as Mr Mudford handsomely reminds us, who wrote this: To feel that somewhere among those millions you have left a little Justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness and moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, ot a stirring of duty where it did not exist before that is enough, that is the Englishman's duty in India.
Paternalist of course, arrogant even, but there, to my mind, was the evolutionary force of the Raj, its contribution to the divine harvest a few seeds scattered here and there, in the passing of an age. To poets and philosophers its significance may seem smaller still, and Rabindranath Tagore thought the whole Anglo-Indian conflict to be no more than "a mist that will vanish, leaving no stain on the radiance of the Eternal". But then Tagore never had to build a bridge, feed a starving province, police a wild frontier or govern half a continent.
Jan Morris has most recently written Conundrum, a memoir.
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