Spring Books II
A brief and anomalous era
Enoch Powell
Watershed In India 1914-1922 Algemon Rumbold (Athlone £14) 'Watershed' is neither the word nor the metaphor which I find compulsive when reflecting on the eight years of the Raj between 1914 and 1922. The word and metaphor evoked by the historical context, of which those years in India are a small part. is 'acceleration'. The more one contemplates the last century of the British Empire and Commonwealth — indeed of the whole relationship of the European nations with Asia and Africa — the more fantastic appears the rate of acceleration of events and developments. Forecasts and extrapolations from even the most recent periods have constantly been outstripped by the outcome. The generation which hastened the termination of the Raj in 1947 little thought the rest of the Empire would have followed it in 15 years; the Cyprus 'never' of a British minister in 1954, which would have been unchallenged a year or two earlier, was a laughing stock a year or two later; Harold Macmillan's 'wind of change' had turned into a hurricane almost before he got home. Nor is the phenomenon British; it is universal. The world of China and Vietnam in 1970 is far more remote from that of America and Vietnam in 1960, than the world of America and Vietnam in 1960 was from the world of France and Indo-China in 1950.
An end must come to this as to all accelerations, but while it lasts, it is breathtaking; and we enquire in bewilderment what the propellant forces might be. India between 1914 and 1922 is as instructive as any sample that could be selected. Sir Algernon Rumbold, who was an India Office civil servant somewhat later, from 1929 to 1947. has provided a painstaking administrative and political history. which furnishes the reader with the material for his own conclusions, though Sir Algernon himself expressly eschews them, 'proceeding', as he does, 'on the different basis that in 1914 it was not inevitable that some day the Raj would die, but by 1922 this was so, because a government on the run attracts ever declining support'. I myself, though I would have accepted that view during my own Indian years 1943 to 1946 and for a little longer, have come to the opposite opinion, and regard Sir Algernon's basis as an inversion of historical cause and effect and as consequently confusing the superficial with the fundamental.
We make with difficulty the effort of mind necessary to realise how brief and anomalous an era European empire in Asia and Africa was. Its utmost duration can be set at 1O years (say, in incaa, trom the conquest of Delhi to the 1947 partition); but even that period is a gross overstatement. A century (say, in Indian terms from the Mutiny to 1947) would be nearer the mark, and even that is too long unless one is thinking about specifically British rather than European imperialism. One reason at least for our faulty perspective — and it is relevant to the Indian 'watershed' — is the confusion of colonies of settlement. whether Anglo-Saxon or Hispanic, with colonies of subjugation. When Disraeli spoke in 1852 of 'these wretched colonies' he meant the white colonies. Right to the end in India, the false analogy with the colonies of settlement dominated constitutional thinking: hence the will o' the wisps of 'dominion status', 'responsible selfgovernment' and 'self-government within the Empire', which blinded most Europeans and Indians alike to the reality. Hence also that monstrous offspring of the Statute of Westminster, the post-1945 Commonwealth.
Brief as they were, the European empires of subjugation were even so only possible because of another delusion which rulers and ruled shared — the delusion of prestige, which substituted consent or acquiescence for naked compulsion and for a time made subjugation — the rule of 'other' by 'other' — appear natural. The prestige was administrative as well as technological, though the former ultimately rested on the latter: in a word, it was the presumption of superior competence. Hence the grand delusion, still not quite dispelled to this day, that selfgovernment is conditional upon minimum competence. Hence, in India and elsewhere, the notion of an almost infinitely long period of gradual preparation for independence, marked by successive constitutional 'reforms'. Hence, finally, the assumption that technology is communicable only within the medium of an entire political culture — a fallacy which ought not to have survived the RussoJapanese war but which in India lasted into the later stages of the second World war, when crash courses effortlessly converted primeval peasants into tank squadrons.
It is here I believe that we approach the secret of the historical acceleration. When prestige, as I have tried to define it. evaporated, the thin crust which had hitherto concealed the essential untenability of subjugation began to crack at an alarming and increasing rate, as the fallacy that competence was either indispensable or incommunicable exploded, and the world's political geography resumed a normal pattern which had been briefly suppressed by the freak of European supremacy. The first World war, just because it was a 'world' war, was a critical point in that evaporation of prestige. The historic statement to Parliament on 20 August 1917 (three months before the 'Balfour declaration' on Palestine!) classic in its formulation: 'the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual develop' ment of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as all integral part of the British Empire'. I have italicised the vital — and self-contradictorYf' terms. Whatever Curzon thought, `sel' government' and 'responsible government' could only mean parliamentary democracy in the British sense, and by tying the Indian future to the constitutional position of the white colonies, it meant that the axiom that external and internal self-determination are inseparable would apply to India as it %vast° be applied to those colonies, as dominions, between the two World wars.
The terms 'gradual' and 'progressive embodied an error: if a population—India was, already being called a 'nation' in the woriu of Woodrow Wilson — is to be self-governed sometime, there is no argument apart fro' the argument of force why, on demand, it is not to be self-governed now, or as nearlY instantaneously as Mountbatten could con; trive when it fell to him to apply the logie3v years later. It is not possible to retain CO" trol while accepting the object of refill" quishing it. Only tacit widespread accer tance of the fallacy of prerequisite cool' petence delayed the outcome so long. An even more glaring self-contradictioll, underlay the description 'an integral part the British Empire'. A parliament which ill, 1912 had enacted home rule for Ireland a1!
included a clause declaring the total anu undiminished authority of the British Par. liament might be deaf to the discord; ° British Empire whose Anglo-Saxon Part would continue until 1953 to assert its unit: by virtue of common allegiance to the Crown might suspend disbelief; but ail 'integral part' of a larger whole can not, hY definition, also be self-governed, though the successors of Curzon to this day areo engaged in a Swiftian search for 'ftl devolution' to an Ulster they officially reeii ognise as 'an integral part' of the Unite Kingdom. Thus in three years, between 1914 and 1917 India had passed from the incon' ceivability of independence in any f0re. seeable future to the acknowledged or, tainty of independence on a necessari.0 shrinking time scale. Curzon himself, lee prophetic words in June 1917, had sal inkling of the real propellant: 'Among the many lessons the war has taught us is tbef enormous weight of organised forces dd men, possessing the means, whether bl industrial devices or by numerical supe1i°r0 ity, of enforcing their views: and this is,t lesson which, if the East were to lear°11 thoroughly and act upon it unitedly, trig bring the mission of the West in India to an abrupt end.' Just so; the only necessary amendment is that, so inherently strong are the forces, once released, that they do not even need the factor of unity. I fundamentally disagree with the conclusion of the author that 'without the example of the British abdication in India and in particular the statement made in 1917, the middle of the 20th century might not have seen the massive move of dependent peoples to sovereignty'. This is Mrs rartington's mop, with a vengeance.
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