A complex fate
J. Enoch Powell
Britain and India: the Interaction of Tw°, Peoples M. E. Chamberlain (David and Charles £5.25)
I never meant to stay in India.* When wangled for myself a 'passage to India' out of Middle East Command in 1943, my objectives were South-East Asia and the Far East. But India claimed me almost from my first moment there. I started to love, and to learn thirstily. I bought and read omnivorously — anything about India that I could lay hands on. Yet from that day to this I never found a book to equal Dr Chamberlain's Britain and India in giving in so small a compass (onlY two hundred and thirty five pages) so balanced and accurate an assessment of that unique episode in human history, the British connection with India.
The story is one full of contradictions and fantastic improbabilities. It is impossible for those who saw and experienced the British Raj to convey the sensation of it to others; and when the last of that generation are gone, it will be 'as a tale that is told,' a sealed book, a room to which the key is lost. Above all there will be no one to believe how inevitable it all seemed — to Indians as well as British — while it lasted, a sort of dream which was dreamt jointly for two centuries by the inhabitants of the sub-continent and by what Curzon called the "speck of white foam upon a dark and thunderous ocean."
No empire was ever like it: from the Asiatic empire of Russia to the American empire of Spain, there was no parallel to the handful of civilians and soldiers from an island oceans, away, who stepped into the shoes of MogInn and Mahratta and felt themselves to be both Indian and British.
Even to the very end the shared hallucina: tion persisted. I remember in the winter 0! 1945-46 cycling by myself along an open NO near Muttra, when a young Brahmin drev, , alongside me and after some conversation in ' Urdu between us, pointed to his home sorn hundred yards from the road and suggested go there with him for a drink of water. While my hosts used a brass vessel, I drank frorn 3 rough earthen tumbler, which, on thanking them and taking my leave, I smashed on the ' ground to show that I knew it could n°t anyhow be used again. "He is a Hindu," theY ' said to one another with a smile. There is ha sense in which it had been true: the Britis"; were married to India, as Venice was marrieu to the sea. Dr Chamberlain finds a place for all th,e strands that were woven into the magic cor° from the seventeenth to the twentieth cent , tury. There was the determination of the India Company to have no territorial or tical responsibilities; and there was also to` vacuum of power, in Bengal and in the pee; i can, into which the trading company Waa drawn, so that in a generation it grew to he vast military and administrative enterprisli governing, directly or as suzerain, all, a% more than all, that the Moghul emperors ha held at the height of their power. Wed carried paradox continued: the very men '" carried through that conquest, who organis` ' In this review, as in the title of the book, "India .s used in its pre-1947 meaning.
the wide territories, and who extended the dominion to the escarpment of the Himalayas, were convinced, and repeatedly and clearly declared their conviction, that British rule in India was a transitory anomaly, of which the end must be prepared for, even though it could not be foreseen. Then came in mid stream the still inscrutable event of the Mu tiny, incapable of being fitted into any known category, neither pure military insurrection nor yet national uprising, but nevertheless creating a new paradox: at the same time as it revealed to both Indians and British the depth of the true gulf between them, it seemed to banish the idea of a temporary sojourn and replace it with that of a beneficent but enduring destiny. The contradictions persisted to the end. The assimiliation of European, and specifically of British, political ideas by Indians, and the Peculiar contemporary development of those ideas in the 'white' dominions of British settlement, made it inevitable that the future of the Indian Empire should long be seen on both sides as "progressive realisation of res ponsible government in India as an integral Part of the British Empire" (the famous formula of 1917), while every would-be step towards that goal made the impracticability of reaching it more evident. The coincidence of independence and partition was the supreme and final irony: the unity of the sub-continent, Which was a product of the British connection, had to be sacrificed to the logical con sequences of democracy in a country whose profound communal divisions were neither of British making nor British desiring. There was even a posthumous flight of fantasy, in the invention of republican status Within the Commonwealth, an absurdity Which was specially devised to meet the case of India and for which the British Nationality Act 1948 paved the way by severing the con nection between allegiance and the status of British subject, while continuing nevertheless to attach to that status all citizen rights Within the United Kingdom. It is typical of the Painstaking and balanced quality of Dr Chamberlain's work that in two pages she Provides an impeccable analysis of the Indian settlement in East Africa and of the tragic dilemma which the UK manufactured for itself as an indirect consequence. While probably the first impulse to Conquest in India arose from Britain's European exigencies (above all, the struggle With France in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century), the possession of India subsequently produced a reverse effect, and went far to subordinate Britain's natural insular interest in maintaining the European balance of power to consideration for the security of the 'route to India.' For a century and a half the British were so prone to think of their nation and empire as Britain plus India, that British policy in Africa, in the Mediterranean, and in Continental Europe was predominantly Indo-centric. And the grin
remained after the Cheshire cat had gone. In 1965 Sir Anthony Eden could still speak and
act under the belief that the Suez Canal was the jugular vein of the empire," when there Was no longer an empire and if there had been, the Canal would not have been its Jugular vein. Contrariwise, the economic effect upon the UK of the Indian Empire was grossly exaggerated by both the British themselves and the rest of the world: the extent to which Britain had a "revenue from India" and to which the economic development of India was distorted or hampered through its being governed by Britain is judiciously and fairly examined by Dr Chamberlain and found, though not non-existent, to be usually greatly overestimated.
The Rt Hon Enoch Powell was formerly Conservative MP for Wolverhampton SouthWest.
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