Indo-British Relations Over Three Centuries

The two World Wars and Gandhiji have brought about a radical change in our attitude to the whole question. Time was when Surendra Nath Banerjee, the thunderer of Bengal, thrilled his audiences at the annual sessions of the Congress with graphic descriptions of the anarchy and ruin of the eighteenth century from which India was rescued by the arrival of Britain as a ministering angel… The benefits of British rule in India was the staple of lectures and essays and some of our latter-day nationalists began their careers by winning a prize or two for the best exposition of these benefits. At the present moment it needs an effort to recall such sentiments, and a much greater one to understand or sympathise with them. Now the current has set strongly in the reverse direction and the universal feeling in India is that the best service that Britain can do to India is to terminate her rule there…

The attitude of Englishmen to India has also changed with circumstances. Those who came out to India for trade, administration or soldiering were readier to mix with the people of the country… But the centenary of Plassey which witnessed the first real threat to British rule in India from inside exposed the weakness of the English hold on India. This was never forgotten and its memory influenced every branch of the administration afterwards. General Dyer’s ‘deliberate act of terrorism’ at Amritsar in 1919 was but an extreme manifestation of the distrust and fear that have soured the relations between Englishmen and Indians in India. The storm raised by the Ilbert Bill during Lord Ripon’s Viceroyalty was another, not so extreme, but not less significant… The hostile and superior attitude of the generality of latter-day Englishmen to everything Indian, found its typical expression in the hectoring periods of Macaulay in his celebrated minute on Indian education.

The Englishmen with no personal knowledge of India who took an interest in Indian affairs always comprised two categories: A Liberal group, typified by Burke and Mill, standing up for high ideals in the administration of India as a trust to be discharged by preparing India as early as may be for assuming the responsibilities of political independence in the modern world; an imperialist group which, without openly repudiating the ideals for which the Liberals stood, still calculated that four shillings in every pound of Britain’s national income came from India and hoped somehow to be able to keep its hold firm on this asset for all time. Both have influenced English legislation on India and Indian administration for good and for evil… Nevertheless, the Indian Independence Act 1947 deserves to be hailed as the triumph of the Liberal principles. England is truly the seed-plot of freedom, and the English Parliament the Mother of Parliaments…