On November 30th, 1888 the Viceroy of India Lord Dufferin gave a speech at a St. Andrew’s Day dinner. At that speech, he discussed the up-and-coming Indian National Congress and the class of people from which it arose, calling them “the product of the system of education which we ourselves have carried on… [a] microscopic minority… who may be considered to possess adequate qualifications… for taking an intelligent view of those intricate and complicated economic and political questions affecting the destinies of so many millions of men” (Grover 183). Nehru had a similar diagnosis as Lord Dufferin, identifying the class which he himself belonged to: “the English-educated class, small in numbers and cut off from the masses, but still destined to take the lead in the new nationalist movements” (Nehru, Quest 215). If we read the speech of Lord Dufferin and of Mr. Nehru, we can clearly see that on this question, they did not fundamentally disagree that the class of men who made up the early days of the Congress was a group of men who were both equally “small in numbers and cut off from the masses” as well as a “microscopic minority.” The question is then posed as to why this English-educated elite came to head the national movement. Surely this wasn’t an inevitability; history could have taken a different turn and a whole other class of men could have been the ones to claim lordship over India. The reasons why the Congress scarcely represented the people can be traced back to the very same reasons as to why Britain was able to establish its domain over India. When we fully appreciate these facts, then we can see why exactly it was that the biggest mutiny the British encountered did not in fact originate from Indian institutions, but from the very institutions which they themselves created.
To understand “India” before the British Raj, we have to understand that the usage of the word “India” should be thought of more as a geographical location than as a single people that saw themselves as part of a nation. More accurately, we should say that India was as diverse, or even more so, than Europe. A land where peoples have come and gone, where different peoples established organized societies at various points. There was no modern division of India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bengal. There was no modern national consciousness of India projecting itself to the world as a Hindu nation. This point is important to note because when the British arrived, they were not necessarily seen as hostile foreign invaders. Power was not centralized into a single authority, so some wanted to establish relations with them, while others did not. To those who allied with the British, it brought on them a certain degree of profit and security because the princes could solidify their reign through British army techniques and weaponry. They were just another people in a subcontinent that contained lots of other peoples. To the peasant, they had no conception of “India.” What difference does it make to a peasant who lives in a village absorbed in village life who rules in the cities?
The village system was the very bedrock of society. To form a national consciousness, necessarily the village life had to be seriously impacted. In 1830, a British governor in India named Sir Charles Metcalfe described the village as follows:
The village communities are little republics having nearly everything they want within themselves; and almost independent on foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. The union of the village communities, each one forming a separate little State in itself … is in a high degree conductive to their happiness; and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence. (Nehru, Quest 197) In the beginning, when the British came to India, they relied on intrigue and webs of alliances. Around the time when the East India Company began to give way to direct rule from the British government, the life of the peasant began to be more and more impinged upon. Nehru indeed says as much himself: The little village republic could not keep cut off from the world when the world came knocking at its gate. The price of articles in one village immediately affected prices in another, for articles could be easily sent from one village to another. Indeed, as world communications developed, the price of wheat in Canada or the United States of America would affect the price of Indian wheat. Thus the Indian village system was dragged, by the force of events, into the circle of world prices. The old economic order in the village went to pieces and, much to the astonishment of the peasant, a new order was forced on him. Instead of growing food and other stuffs for his village market, he began to grow for the world market. (Nehru, Quest 199) The British bring this nascent country of India kicking and screaming into the 19th century. No longer could the peasant afford to ignore the goings-on happening outside of his village. The world’s business suddenly began his business. From that moment on, that is when the true birth of the modern nation-state of India came into being. Suddenly there was an underlying something that brought all the subjects of the British Raj together.
The colonial apparatus created the class that was best able to answer and see India as not just an ancient battleground where peoples rise and fall, but a modern nation-state. This was an entirely new conception of India. Only in the context above can we truly understand Nehru’s reflections:
India was in my blood and there was much in her that instinctively thrilled me. And yet I approached her almost as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent I came to her via the West, and looked at her as a friendly westerner might have done. I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity. And yet doubts arose within me. Did I know India? (Nehru, Discovery 50) These were the types of questions that the men of the Congress had to reckon with. That is what brought them together. That is what ultimately drove them apart. It almost sounds silly for one of the most famous Indians to be asking himself what India is, but if we keep in mind that this question was only beginning to be answered in the early days of the Congress and even today maybe still has not been fully answered, then we can begin to understand why Mr. Nehru spoke in these words.
The English-educated class was both the most well-equipped to even begin to pose these questions but also a class cut off from the average peasant who was both illiterate and had probably never seen a European in their lives. If they were to rebel against anybody, it would more likely have been their money lender than a British official. Yet, being the most well-equipped, that does not necessarily mean that only they could have led the nationalist movement. In this, we can see the failures of prior opposition against the British, which had ultimately been unsuccessful. For example, in the Battle of Plassey, not only did the British have more Indian troops than British troops, but it was due to Mir Jafar’s betrayal, Siraj-ud-Daulah’s commander-in-chief, that the British were able to establish dominance over Bengal. The mutiny’s failure in 1857 was largely because the sepoys tried to reestablish the past—a thoroughly unconvincing ideology and movement that was doomed for failure in the modern age. Again, the British fought with double the number of loyal Sepoys (with Sikhs playing a large role) compared to British regulars. In both cases, we can see that if “Indians” had not been fighting and collaborating with the British, either might have resulted in failure, and history would have been different. To get “Indians” to see and identify themselves as “Indians,” that was the ultimate success story of the men of the Indian National Congress.
Ultimately, what brought the Congress together was a man named Allan Octavian Hume. Hume was guided both by his many years of service to the British Empire and by his personal theosophic beliefs. Except, to concentrate on Hume would be missing the forest for the trees. Hume served as the catalyst; if it had not been him, it could have been in the form of another organization under different leadership and structure. More important than any individual are the underlying currents which I have discussed that led to the prominence of this English-educated class. Though from the beginning the INC was smeared in British organizational structures due to his having devised the original structure where he drew from his administrative and organizational experience. Yes, I do think Lord Dufferin was quite astute in his words. His words actually sound quite prophetic. He said of the Congress, “These persons ought to know that in the present condition of India there can be no real or effective representation of the people, with their enormous numbers, their multifarious interests, and their tessellated nationalities” (Grover 184).
The Indian National Congress was a product of British rule. It was born and fostered from the ideals that the British themselves had conferred onto India. Yet, for these same reasons, the men whom it produced were separated from the peasants of the country. Maybe urban elites, but the people were not interested in the social and political ideas beyond an independent India—and they eventually went on to largely reject them. The deep struggles that came about in India with religious division, economic inequality, and ideological fragmentation were natural outcomes of the party’s origins. At the core lies the very paradox of Indian nationalism: a small minority who were nurtured and later grew up to demand estrangement from the very people who taught them. You drop the rhetoric and the centrist appeal, and you are left with a party that is not what it claims.
Works Cited 🔗
Chandra, Bipan, et al. India’s Struggle for Independence: 1857–1947. EPUB ed., Penguin Books, 1989.
Metcalf, Barbara D., and Thomas R. Metcalf. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2006. EPUB file.
Jawaharlal Nehru, and J. F. Horrabin. India’s Quest. Asia Publ. House, 1963.
Grover, B. L. A Documentary Study of British Policy Toward Indian Nationalism, 1885-1909. Delhi: National Publications, 1967. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/documentarystudy0000grov.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1946. PDF ed., Internet Archive, archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.98835.