Time Cooks All Beings

Four quarters, four statements about what Time does and to whom. The verse is carried in the Mahabharata and has never left the language. It is often read as consolation offered to the suffering, which is a small misreading beside the one that matters. The beings being cooked in this account, the creatures being gathered in, the sleepers being watched - these are not the occupied. They are the occupiers. Bharata is what endured. The Empire is what Time was working on the whole time, and it did not notice, because that is the nature of the process. Each of these four books takes one quarter and reads the British occupation of Bharata against it.

This book takes the first quarter.

Pacati is a kitchen verb. It is what fire does to rice, what the stomach does to a meal, what the season does to fruit on a branch. It is not a blow and it is not a shattering; it is heat held steady against a thing until the thing is no longer what it was. Sanskrit uses it for digestion and for ripening and for cremation without changing the word, because it considers these to be one process observed at different speeds.

There is no violence in the verb, and that is exactly where its terror lies. What pacati names is not something done to you at a moment you could point to. It is something being done to you continuously, at a temperature low enough that no single day announces itself, until the substance has changed and there is no going back.

So the question the quarter forces is a simple one: who is in the pot.

In 1900 the answer looked settled to everyone in London. An empire held a fifth of mankind, its ships carried the trade of the world, and the men who planted a two-thousand-mile thorn hedge across somebody else's country to tax their salt were entirely certain that they were the ones applying the heat.

They were not. They were the meat. Every rupee drained out of Bengal, every famine let run while the grain went out through the ports, every statute declaring that an Indian might not be armed or judged or printed in his own tongue, went into an account that had started accruing the moment the first ship arrived in the garb of trade. Two centuries of cooking Bharata were two centuries of the Empire cooking itself, and it could not see this, because pacati announces nothing on any given morning.

What follows is the heat. Bharata is what endured it. Britain is what it consumed.

There was a hedge.

It ran for more than two thousand miles across the subcontinent, from the Himalayan foothills down toward Orissa — a living barrier of thorn and prickly pear, in places twelve feet high and as many thick, planted, watered, weeded and patrolled by some twelve thousand men. It had one purpose. On one side of it salt was cheap; on the other side salt carried the tax the Government of India levied on it, and the hedge existed so that no Indian could carry a basket of cheap salt across the line to his own village without meeting a customs officer.

Men were searched at the hedge. Carts were unloaded at the hedge. A woman walking home with salt for her family was, at the hedge, a smuggler.

This is what an empire is when nobody is being shot. It is not an event. It is the weather — a set of arrangements so total and so unremarkable that they become the shape of the day. The hedge was grubbed up in 1879 because a more efficient method of collection had been devised. The tax stayed. Sixty-one years later a thin man in a loincloth would walk two hundred and forty miles to the sea and pick up a handful of it, and the world would treat this as a symbol, when it was in fact a very literal act about a very literal grievance that had been grinding on for a century.

Understand the hedge, and the rest follows.

The hedge was not an excess or an aberration. Somebody costed it, somebody staffed it, somebody drew its route on a map and somebody audited its returns, and it stood for decades because it paid. That is the character of the whole enterprise, and it is the thing most accounts of the Raj decline to say plainly: nothing in it was carelessness, and nothing in it was mercy. The famines were policy. The statutes were designed. The concessions were timed. Even the acts that read as decency on the surface - a promise, an inquiry, a commutation, a wreath - were instruments, issued at moments of exposure, priced to cost the exploitation nothing, and every one of them left the extraction running and the killing available.

What was done in 1857, and what was written in 1858

The war that began at Meerut in May 1857 was fought for eighteen months and lost, and the manner of its suppression was understood at the time to be part of the point.

Villages along the Grand Trunk Road were burned as columns passed. Men were hanged from trees and roadside gallows in numbers nobody troubled to record, on the evidence of an accusation. At Kanpur, James Neill ordered that captured men be brought to a house in the town and made to lick clean a portion of its bloodstained floor before being taken out and hanged — and, where their faith forbade it, be defiled with beef or pork first, so that the execution should destroy the man twice. At Delhi, after the recapture, the killing ran through the city for days, and three princes of the Delhi household who had surrendered were shot at a gate by Hodson and their bodies displayed.

And there was the practice that the age itself found sufficiently expressive to photograph and to paint: prisoners lashed across the muzzles of field guns and blown apart, in the presence of assembled troops and townspeople. It was chosen deliberately. Death by cannon scattered a man's remains beyond the possibility of the rites his religion required, and everyone administering it knew that.

When the fighting was over, the East India Company - a chartered trading corporation that had spent a century acquiring a subcontinent - was wound up, and the Crown took the country directly into its own hands. On the first of November 1858, at durbars staged across a country still under military occupation, a Proclamation was read out in the name of Victoria.

It was an instrument of pacification, and it was issued from weakness. Eighteen months of burning villages had established that terror by itself would not hold the country, so the terror was now to be paired with a term. The Proclamation disclaimed any desire to impose Christianity. It undertook that the ancient rights and usages of India would be respected. And it declared, in language nobody could later pretend to have misunderstood, that subjects of whatever race or creed should be freely and impartially admitted to offices in the government, the duties of which they might be qualified by their education, ability and integrity to discharge.

None of this was a gift and none of it was owed to any generosity. It was a concession offered by an occupation that had just finished learning the cost of dispensing with concessions.

That last undertaking is the foundation stone of the Crown Raj, and it is the only reason the document is worth quoting. It was printed, circulated, translated, and quoted back at the government by two generations of Indian petitioners who took it at its word.

Keep it in view. Everything that follows is measured against it - not because the promise deserved belief, but because the Raj spent the next ninety years insisting it was the kind of state that kept its word.

The arithmetic

In 1750 the Indian subcontinent produced roughly a quarter of the world's manufactured goods. By 1900 it produced under two per cent. Settled

This did not happen through the impartial operation of markets. British cloth entered India at nominal duty while Indian textiles entering Britain met tariffs designed to be prohibitive; and when the mills of Lancashire had matured, the direction of the trade reversed permanently, so that a country which had clothed much of the known world became a supplier of raw cotton to the machinery that had replaced it. Dhaka, whose muslin had been fine enough to draw comparisons with woven air, subsided into a provincial town. Bentinck, the Governor-General, reported in 1834 that the misery had few parallels in the history of commerce, and that the bones of the cotton weavers were whitening the plains of India. He was not an enemy of the Company. He was its highest officer, writing home. Nothing was altered in consequence. The report was filed and the tariffs stayed exactly where they were, which is the useful thing to know about British candour: it was never in short supply, and it never cost the policy anything.

Beneath the trade sat the land. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 fixed Bengal's revenue demand in perpetuity and vested collection in zamindars who could be dispossessed by public auction for a single default — which produced, within a generation, a stack of intermediaries between the man who ploughed and the man who received, each taking a layer. Elsewhere the state assessed the cultivator directly and adjusted the demand upward as cultivation improved. In neither system was the demand suspended because the rains had failed. Revenue was collected in famine years. It was collected from districts where people were dying, because the assessment was the assessment.

And there was opium. The Government of India held a monopoly over its manufacture in Bengal: the crop advanced to cultivators on terms they could not refuse, processed at Patna and Ghazipur in factories the size of small towns, packed into chests and auctioned at Calcutta for one destination. Through much of the nineteenth century the opium revenue ran at something near a seventh of the total revenues of British India — a scale of dependence that has no polite description. When China attempted to stop the traffic, Britain fought two wars to compel it to continue, using an Indian-grown drug, Indian revenue, and Indian sepoys.

Dadabhai Naoroji spent decades assembling the ledger of what he called the drain: the annual, permanent, one-directional transfer for which nothing came back — the Home Charges, the pensions of retired officials living in England, the interest on debt India was made to carry for wars fought in Britain's interest, the cost of a civil service Indians were substantially excluded from. He published the accounts in 1901 under a title chosen with some care. He did not call the rule cruel or alien. He called it un-British, appealing, as the moderates of his generation still did, to the standard the rulers claimed for themselves.

They were not lying about the standard. They simply did not consider it to extend this far east.

Against all of which stands the great counter-claim, then and now: the railways. India received one of the largest rail networks in the world, and this is offered as the settlement of the account. What is less often mentioned is how it was financed. British companies were guaranteed a fixed return of five per cent on capital, payable out of Indian revenues whether or not the line earned a rupee — a guarantee that removed any incentive to build cheaply and produced construction costs among the highest anywhere on earth, charged to the Indian taxpayer. The routes ran from the interior to the ports, and from the cantonments to wherever troops might be needed. They were an instrument, and they worked as intended. A gift is not something the recipient is billed for.

The famines

Between 1876 and 1878 the rains failed across Madras, Bombay, Mysore and Hyderabad. Between five and ten million people died. Contested The figure is imprecise because nobody with authority was counting, and it has been fought over ever since by people with an interest in the lower number.

What is not contested is that during those years India exported record quantities of wheat.

Lytton's government held that relief which interfered with the price mechanism would do more harm than good, and that charity indiscriminately given would breed dependence in a population already inclined to it. Richard Temple, despatched to bring relief expenditure under control, fixed the ration for an adult performing hard manual labour in a relief camp at one pound of rice a day. Officials who tried to give more were overruled. Men who could not reach a camp, or who were turned back from one for failing a distance test, died where they stood.

On the first of January 1877, with the famine at its height, Lytton convened at Delhi an Imperial Assemblage to proclaim Victoria Empress of India. Princes came with retinues. There were tents to the horizon, salutes, a specially composed march. It ran for a week.

Famine returned in 1896 and again in 1899, and killed on a comparable scale. By then the machinery of relief had been codified into Famine Codes, and the codes are often produced as evidence of a lesson learned. What they established was a procedure - tests of destitution, distance rules, wage scales pitched below subsistence - and a procedure does not reduce deaths, it regularises them. The exports continued. What changed was that the dying now had paperwork.

The law

An empire that governs a fifth of humanity with a few thousand officials does not do it by force. It does it by statute — and the statutes of the Raj record its convictions more plainly than any private letter.

The Arms Act of 1878 required a licence to possess a firearm. Europeans were exempt. Not exempt by administrative convenience, not exempt by oversight, but exempt by category, written into the text, so that the line between the man who might be armed and the man who might not was not a line of loyalty, rank, education or conduct. It was a line of race, and Parliament had put it in the law.

In the same year the Vernacular Press Act empowered the government to seize the presses of newspapers publishing in Indian languages. The English-language press was untouched. A seditious sentence was seditious in Bengali and permissible in English, because the danger was not held to reside in the sentence.

These were not emergency measures. This was the ordinary law, in ordinary years, in a country at peace — enacted twenty years after the Crown had promised, over the sovereign's name, that race would be no bar in India.

Bengal, 1905

Curzon partitioned Bengal in October 1905, dividing the province along a line that separated its Muslim-majority east from its Hindu-majority west. The administrative case was that Bengal was too large to govern. The other case, which officials made to each other in writing, was that Bengal's educated class was the most troublesome in India and would be weaker in two pieces than in one.

The response was not a petition. It was a boycott. Foreign cloth was burned in public. Students left government colleges. Shops that stocked Manchester goods found nobody entering them. Swadeshi — one's own country's making — moved in a matter of months from a slogan to an economy, and the men who gave it a voice were Bal Gangadhar Tilak in Poona, Bipin Chandra Pal in Bengal and Lala Lajpat Rai in Punjab, whom the country took to calling by a single compound name, as though they were one thing.

They were answered as one thing. The Bengal Provincial Conference at Barisal in 1906 was broken up by police who lathi-charged delegates in the street for the offence of shouting Bande Mataram. Pal was jailed in 1907 for declining to testify against Aurobindo Ghose. Tilak had already been convicted of sedition once, in 1897, for what he had printed; in 1908 he was convicted again and sentenced to six years' transportation to Mandalay in Burma.

And in the same years a younger answer appeared, one the Congress had no name for. At Muzaffarpur in April 1908 two young men from Bengal threw a bomb into a carriage they believed carried a magistrate notorious for his sentences on students. He was not in it. Two Englishwomen were, and they died. Prafulla Chaki shot himself rather than be taken. Khudiram Bose, who was eighteen, was tried and hanged that August, and went to it composed enough that the fact was reported with unease in the English papers.

Within a year Bengali weavers were selling dhotis with his name woven into the border, village singers had a song about him, and a boy hanged at eighteen had become the one thing the Government of India could not confiscate.

The partition was annulled in 1911, and the annulment is usually offered as proof that agitation worked. In the same announcement the capital was moved from Calcutta to Delhi - out of the province that had proved ungovernable, to a city with no such habit. The line on the map was withdrawn; the division it had been drawn to manufacture was left standing, and would be collected on later. By then it had also produced a generation that had stopped petitioning.

Punjab, 1907

In 1907 the Punjab government moved a Colonization Bill to tighten its hold on the canal colonies — land that Punjabi cultivators had been induced to settle and improve, now to be held on terms that made them tenants at the state's pleasure, with inheritance restricted and fines imposed at an official's discretion. The province erupted. The agitation ran through the spring behind a slogan that became a folk song across the countryside: pagṛī sambhāl jaṭṭā — hold on to your turban, farmer.

Two of its leaders were removed without trial. Lala Lajpat Rai was deported to Mandalay in May. So was a young agitator from Lyallpur district named Ajit Singh.

In September of that year, in the village of Banga in that district, Ajit Singh's brother Kishan Singh became a father. The child's grandmother named him the fortunate one — bhaganwala — because his father and his uncle had come out of confinement near the time of his birth.

He was called Bhagat Singh.

He grew up in a house where prison was an ordinary feature of family life and where the men held a settled view of what the government was. When he was eight, the newspapers carried the executions of the Ghadar men — Punjabi emigrants, many of them former soldiers of the Indian Army, who had sailed home from California and British Columbia intending to raise the army against the occupation and who had been caught, tried by special tribunal and hanged at Lahore Central Jail. Among them was Kartar Singh Sarabha, aged nineteen, who went to the gallows without any evident interest in living.

Bhagat Singh would carry Sarabha's photograph in his pocket for the rest of his life.

The war, and the second promise

India gave to the war something over a million men sent overseas and some seventy-four thousand dead, in France and Mesopotamia and East Africa and Gallipoli. It gave a hundred million pounds as an outright contribution to the British exchequer, and more in loans, extracted from the revenues of a country whose people were already at the edge. Prices roughly doubled. When the influenza came in 1918 it killed, by the lowest serious estimate, twelve million Indians, and probably far more.

Against this stood a promise, made in the Commons in August 1917 by the Secretary of State for India: the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government. It was made in the third year of a war Britain was not winning, at a moment when more Indian men and more Indian money were required, and every load-bearing word in it - increasing, gradual, progressive - was chosen to commit the government to nothing on any date.

The second promise in writing, sixty years after the first.

The answer arrived in March 1919. It was called the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, and it allowed detention without warrant; trial without jury, in camera, by three judges from whom there was no appeal; and the binding-over of a released man, restricted in his movements and required to report himself to the police. The wartime emergency powers were to be made permanent in peacetime, and were to apply to Indians.

Every single non-official Indian member of the Imperial Legislative Council voted against it.

It passed anyway. This was the constitutional arrangement functioning exactly as designed: the Indian members were there to be consulted, and consultation had no purchase on the outcome. Muhammad Ali Jinnah resigned his seat in protest and wrote to the Viceroy that a government which passed such a law over the unanimous opposition of the country's elected representatives had forfeited its claim to be called civilised.

In the streets the objection was compressed into three words that needed no rendering into legal English. No vakil, no dalil, no appeal. No lawyer, no argument, no appeal.

Amritsar, April

On the tenth of April the Punjab government arrested two of Amritsar's most respected men — Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal, a Muslim and a Hindu who had been addressing the same crowds together, which was itself among the things the administration found intolerable — and removed them from the city without notice.

A crowd went to the Deputy Commissioner's residence to ask for them. It was fired on at a railway bridge. Men were killed. The city then did what cities do when their people are shot in the morning: it burned banks, it killed five Europeans, and it left an Englishwoman, Marcella Sherwood, beaten in a narrow lane called Kucha Kaurianwala.

On the eleventh, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer arrived and took charge.

The thirteenth of April was Baisakhi. It is the Punjabi new year and the founding day of the Khalsa, and in 1919 it was also the day of the annual horse and cattle fair, so the city held not only its own people but villagers who had walked in from the surrounding districts for the festival and the market. Many of them had no way of knowing what had been proclaimed that morning through parts of the city by a small party moving on foot, and could not have read it if they had.

In the afternoon they began making their way toward a walled patch of open ground near the Golden Temple, entered by a lane narrow enough that two men passed abreast with difficulty, where a public meeting had been called.