NOT TO BE CITED WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION
Keynote Address at the Australian Historical Association conference,
Adelaide, July 2012.
India and Australia: Distant Connections
Prof. Sir Christopher Bayly, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge,
[email protected]
Speaking to any group of scholars of India or Australia about the
connections between the two countries, one collects a range of fascinating
anecdotes from across the colonial period and the early years of Indian
independence. I’ll set the mood of ‘distant connections’ with a few
anecdotes which intrigue me. Particularly appropriate to us here today is the
case of Colonel William Light (1786-1839), Surveyor General of New South
Wales, and founder of this city of Adelaide along with several of its parks
and gardens.1 William Light was, of course, the son of Francis Light, a free
trading maverick only formally under the authority of the East India
Company, who founded the colonial settlement of Penang on the Straits of
Malacca in 1783. Light’s relationship with the Company was distant and
controversial. But Penang became a key settlement in what was then called
‘India beyond the Ganges.’ The younger Light went on to fight with the
Madras army in India between 1805 and 1808. Penang and Adelaide were
both broadly part of Britain’s Asian and Pacific Empire which grew rapidly
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to replace the Atlantic colonies after the American War of Independence. I
shall return to this theme shortly.
Other Indian –Australia connections intrigue me. The role of Indian
officials in the beginnings of the Swan River wine industry; Baluchi
dromedaries in the Australian Desert; my grandfather’s tales of Indian and
Australian troops in Allenby’s Palestine campaign of 1917, among them.
Examples like this of connections in trade, migration and war between
India and Australia are legion and many of them have been brought happily
together in Colonial Cousins a book by Joyce Westrip and Peggy Holroyd
two self-styled ‘old India hands’ now resident in Australia. In this lecture,
however, I want to locate incidents, connections and movements such as
these more firmly in patterns of colonial governance and the social and
intellectual history of both former colonies. I’ll move chronologically,
considering both connections and also radical disconnections between the
two colonial situations.
My themes include race, gender, colonial violence ‘governmentality’ and
political representation. I start with the years from the founding of the
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Botany Bay colony in 1788 to the end of the Napoleonic wars, which were
contemporary with the key phases of the conquest of India by Cornwallis,
Wellesley and their successors.
The age of conquest and settlement.
These years were a period of almost permanent international war. Though
the possibility of a direct French attack on India was chimerical, French
proxies existed in the subcontinent and French warships continued to sail the
India and Pacific Oceans. The expansion of the British Empire in India and
the creation of new settlements in Australasia were at least justified by, if
not provoked by the ‘French threat.’ Quite early on, therefore, military stores
and personnel were passing between Bengal and New South Wales.
This was an era across the British Empire when a more authoritative form of
government came into being to fortify the colonies against foreign enemies
and to discipline recalcitrant settler and military agents. The coup of the
New South Wales Corps against Governor Bligh in 1806 arose in a situation
not unlike the Mutiny of the British officers of the Madras Army in 1809
The attempts of the Governor-General of India, Richard Wellesley, to clamp
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down on the disorderly servants of the East India Company in Madras
paralleled Governor Macquarie’s disbanding of the New South Wales Corps
and his authoritative and interventionist government. These Anglo-Irishman
and Highland Scotsman of the British imperial fringes attempted to enforce
sobriety and morality on the European inhabitants of Calcutta and Sydney
respectively.
There were, of course, large differences between the two situations which
should not be lost sight of in the comparisons and connections which I am
outlining. At least half the roughly 5,000 settler population in Australia in
1800 were convicts or ex-convicts. While whites in India were similar in
number there was no equivalent penal element in the subcontinent. Indeed,
the East India Company, tried strongly to exclude convicts and ex-convicts
from its territories when they passed by on board ship. More fundamentally,
the whites in India were surrounded by an indigenous population of
perhaps150 million whereas the Aboriginal population was no more than a
few hundred thousand and militarily and politically less able to protect itself.
Nevertheless, some of the same fears and concerns about relations with the
local people were common to both situations. The mood in India turned
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against mixed-race people and mixed race unions. Cornwallis banned
Eurasians from holding Company office because many of them were
Catholics, or paradoxically, potential revolutionaries, or indeed both.
Attitudes to sexual relations between Aboriginals and white settlers were the
cause of even greater concern amongst the elite than in India, with the
puritanical Governor Phillip attempting to limit such relationships. What
might be called ‘civilizational racism’ long predated ‘scientific racism.’ Still,
its effects were constrained, as Damon Salesa has shown. Racial mixing
between settlers and aboriginal peoples was more common than once
believed, while India, and later, Burma came to support large Eurasian
communities.
Yet this was not merely a period of authoritative government and warfare.
The Enlightenment spirit, represented pre-eminently by Joseph Banks,
reached the elite of the two continents. The Sydney and Calcutta botanical
gardens were testament to this and strikingly similar in conception. This was
the period of the flowering of Oriental study in India in the Calcutta
Madrasah and the Calcutta Oriental Society. In Australia, early forays were
made into Aboriginal ethnography while artists such as Augustus Earle and
Balthazar Solvyns sketched and catalogued types of ‘native people.’
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Comparing the paintings of William Hodges in Australia and India reveals
interesting differences: Australia was wild and ready for colonisation; India
the scene of a decaying civilisation ripe for paternalist conquest. Distant
artistic and scientific connections between India and Australia stretched on
through the colonial period. Personnel moved from the Geological Survey of
India to Australia and museums in India and Victoria worked together under
the sometimes suffocating embrace of the British Museum.2 Enlightenment
orientalism has, of course, been seen as a form of ‘epistemic violence.’ Yet
these visual and literary representations could also feed into forms of local
patriotism, including indigenous patriotism, in both locales.
The age of reform and coercion.
Over the last generation historians have reassessed the years between
1815 and 1860 in both India and Australia. Once seen as an ‘age of reform’,
mirroring British domestic reform, when more rational government of
colonial territories replaced the earlier autocratic and military order of the
Napoleonic years and ‘the old corruption’, the emphasis has now fallen on
wars of subjugation and the oppression of indigenous people. The influence
of the Subaltern studies group in Indian historiography turned scholars to
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consider these wars of subjection. The shift was announced in Australian
popular history by Robert Hughes and Geoffrey Blainey, but has been
consolidated in the academic literature by Henry Reynolds, Richard Broome
and Lyndall Ryan. What was regarded as genocide in Tasmania was put side
by side with the expropriation of Aboriginal land, accompanied by numerous
massacres and punitive expeditions during the early nineteenth century, as
settler society turned inland and the pastoral economy grew in importance.
Some estimates suggest that the Aboriginal population dropped from
600,000 to 300,000 between 1821 and 1850, a result of expropriation,
disease and famine, though there has been some modification of these
figures, especially in the case of Tasmania.
In the Indian case, the colonial period histories and works such as Percival
Spear’s History of India (1963), tended to jump from Wellesley’s wars of
conquest in the 1800s to the 1857 rebellion. But wars of colonial conquest
and indigenous revolts persisted through the whole period. The pressure on
the Indian population was only increased by famine during the trade
downturn of the 1830s, which affected both India and Australia and occurred
at the height of the reform debate. While no mass killing comparable with
the Tasmanian case occurred, periodic massacres of civilian populations
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took place, as at the Rajasthan city of Bharatpur in 1826 and after the
capture of Maratha territories during the wars of the 1840s. British seaborne
aggression against Indian principalities characterised as ‘piratical’ was a
feature of this period both on Gujarat coast and further East in the straits of
Malacca and later the Torres Strait.3
What explains this expansion of colonial coercion? The economic
impulses are fairly clear in both cases. The growing Australian settler
population required land as the export of wool became the colonies’ most
important source of revenue. In India, land itself was not the issue so much
as land-revenue. The Indian authorities needed to pay for the large armies
which had grown up during the revolutionary and Napoleonic conflicts and
were now used across the British Empire. Forcing local rulers into
subsidiary treaties or directly appropriating the revenues of recalcitrant
Indian allies was the standard form of imperial expansion and by no means
effected in an ‘absence of mind.’ Temporarily restrained during Bentinck’s
rule as Governor General in the 1830s, this process of revenue coercion was
resumed vigorously after 1848. Retired soldiers, Indians in one case and
settlers, with some so-called Australian Native Police Units, in the other,
were settled by local governments on land-grants in the colonial peripheries.
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These increased local conflict while at the same time pushing colonial rule
further into the interior of the two continents.
A second reason for the violence of colonial consolidation was,
paradoxically, the persisting militarism of colonial society and even its recalibration in supposedly liberal Britain. After the Napoleonic wars, many
former soldiers of all ranks migrated to the colonies. As warfare became
more technical and mechanised after 1840, military academies were founded
in Britain and overseas.4 While British Indian government seemed to be the
norm, military government played a larger part than ever in areas such as the
Punjab after the Sikh wars of the 1840s and the whole ideology of martial
races was consolidated and propagated. Continuous eruptions of local
conflicts invigorated the military element in Australia, though nothing
occurred here on the scale of the Maori Wars of New Zealand, where many
thousands of British troops were tied up in fierce conflict for several years..
Finally, we come back to the idea of race itself. To many white Australians
these conflicts with the Aboriginal peoples were ‘Black Wars’. In India,
whatever the influence of orientalism or missionary discourse, the idea of
‘bagging a nigger’ was widespread well before the atrocities connected with
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the Indian Rebellion of 1857-9. This settler racism was supported by popular
racial sciences such as phrenology long before more thoroughly scientific
racism came into vogue in the second half of the century.5
I have dwelt on these features of the early-nineteenth century because
subjugation and appropriation were common to both India and Australia
during this period, though they manifested themselves in different forms.
From an early date Indian historians of India, of course, made these points.
Bholanath Chunder Ghose, for instance, collected stories of British atrocities
around the cities of Allahabad and Kanpur during the so-called Mutiny. One
even hears the occasional Aboriginal voice: ‘Why am I fighting you?
Because you buggers should not be on my land’; this cited by Stuart
Macintyre. Yet this lurch in postcolonial historiography to an emphasis on
coercion should not, in my view, entirely detract from the older
characterisation of the ‘age of reform’ because India and Australia both
appropriated and were influenced by the discourse of rights, reform and
representation, which we associate with British politics during this period.
Indeed, the development of concepts of political representation were and
coeval with and constructive of the idea of race.
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Samuel Marsden’s appearance in Australia and the expansion of mission
activity was more or less contemporaneous with the growth of Serampore
and other Indian missions after the first revision of the East India
Company’s Charter in 1813. Debates about the possibility of converting
Aboriginal peoples pitted proto-racialist ideas against those of human
atonement, but highly selective atonement, in both contexts. Yet an equally
significant comparison lies in the area of the demand for settler rights which
was common in the two colonial settings. This came to the fore as the
number of free settlers expanded in Australia and increasing numbers of free
traders and enemies of the East India Company’s ‘despotism’ reached India
after the relaxation of the Charter Acts in the 1810s and ‘30s.
Of course, the scale of the issue varied hugely between India and
Australia. The Company, and the Crown government after it, was extremely
hostile to colonisation and the acquisition of land by whites, as this might
impede its trade. Conversely, the local governments in Australia believed
that the expansion of settlement was the only guarantee of ‘progress’ and
wealth, as Alan Atkinson noted. Nevertheless, the number of whites in India
grew significantly to the extent that Peter Marshall argued in the 1980s that
this was a ‘settler society in the making.’ In particular, significant numbers
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of Scots and Irish arrived both in India and Australia as agricultural
depression hit Britain after the end of the wars. Much of the Company’s
army in India was of Gaelic-speaking Irish origin.6 Some former soldiers
stayed on in the subcontinent. Others fathered children by Indian women.
An important development was the rapid expansion of newspaper
readership after 1800. Bengali and English newspapers flourished in India,
while the Australian press began to voice more radical demands for settler’s
rights. Important here was William Charles Wentworth’s The Australian.
Macintyre writes that it ‘agitated for an extension of freedom, an unfettered
press; a more inclusive jury system. A more representative legislature,’
These words could be applied almost exactly to the liberal press that
appeared in Indian port cities, in particular to the Bengal Herald of James
Silk Buckingham, a nonconformist, sailor, champion of Indian lascars or
seamen and fierce enemy of the Company monopoly and its executive
power. The fundamental difference between the Indian and Australian case
is that educated Indians were part of the agitation to limit the Company’s
powers and in particular to extend membership of grand juries to Indians,
who were debarred on the grounds that they could not take a Christian oath.
Eventually, this concession was made in theory, though in practice Indians
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were not appointed to juries until the 1840s, even though many lower level
judicial offices were held by them. In Australia, Aboriginal people were not
able to sit on juries or to hold judicial office until well into the twentieth
century.
Another key issue was the freedom of the press from government
regulation. Here it is interesting that something like a trans-colonial public
sphere had come into existence soon after 1815. The Anglo-Indian press, of
which some Indians such as Rammohan Roy were proprietors and
contributors, kept a weather eye on the situation in other colonies. On the
issue of juries they noted that Chinese, Indians and Malays had been
admitted to civic bodies and theoretically onto juries in Singapore. The
British governor of Ceylon had also enlisted Sinhalese and Tamils into
juries.7 More striking yet, freed slaves and respectable local Africans served
as jurymen in Sierra Leone. The issue about whether juries should comprise
only certain property holders or all free men resonated from Peel’s London
to Sydney. Indians continued to observe Australian developments closely.
For instance, in 1829 they reported that the attempt of the Government of
New South Wales to restrict the press by imposing a tax of four pence on
each newspaper was frustrated by a large agitation.8
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Even before Buckingham began his campaign of obstruction and agitation
in India, however, another key figure in British and imperial radicalism had
illustrated this shift from legally-garnished factionalism to a new more classbased set of ideological position. This was Joseph Hume9, who came from a
relatively poor background but had shone in medical studies at the
University of Edinburgh. Attached to an East Indian Regiment during Lord
Lake’s wars of conquest against the Marathas in 1802-3, he prospered as an
interpreter, having mastered ‘native tongues.’ Returning to Britain like any
eighteenth-century nabob, he entered Parliament as a Tory through the
‘rotten borough’ of Weymouth in 1812 and married the daughter of an East
Indian director. This inauspicious start for the key figure of early nineteenthcentury British trans-national radicalism was rapidly erased when Hume fell
out with his patron, Spencer Perceval, on issues relating to sinecures and
workers’ rights and was dropped at the subsequent general election.10
Here ideology triumphed decisively over patronage, a premonition of the
new face of British politics. Following a period of reflection and social
observation, Hume once again entered Parliament in 1828, now as a radical
influenced by James Mill, Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. This was no
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mere theoretical conversion. Hume worked to establish schools for working
people, tried, alongside Buckingham to end the flogging of seamen and the
poor treatment of Indian lascars.11 His early Indian experience made him a
powerful opponent of the Company in Parliament and around the country.
As Frederick Watkinson has shown many radicals of this period also paired
the release of Greece from ‘Ottoman tyranny’ with the abolition of the East
India Company. Hume’s career in regard to Greek independence was
somewhat tarnished, though, by the financially dubious consequences of the
Greek Loan which came to light in 1826.12 Yet he pushed relentlessly for the
freeing of Asian trade and Indian and mixed race rights until his death in
1855. Australia also constantly came into the purview of Hume and other
reforming radicals. During the Parliamentary debate on the extension of the
franchise to the South Australian legislature in 1841, he noted that colonists
took out much property ‘but it was only in a few colonies that they were able
to exercise their property… the best means of promoting the prosperity of
the colonies would be, by enabling them to govern themselves.’13
Radical political activity linked freedom of trade with local self
government and the creation of a civil society and this became more
insistent as the Chartist movement came to a head. Two typical figures who
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built careers in Australia and India respectively were J. D. Lang and George
Thompson. Lang was a Scots Presbyterian, republican and advocate of
Australian nationhood and independence. From 1857 to 1852 he carried on
campaigns in Australia and Britain to try to promote cotton cultivation in the
Moreton Bay area. He canvassed Cobden, Bright and Hume, the Manchester
Chamber of Commerce and the Anti-Corn Law League. Paul Pickering notes
that he showed no great concern for the fate of the Aboriginal people even
while he was agitating for the end of slavery in the USA.14
George Thompson (1804-78), Lang’s Indianist alter ego, was in many ways
a younger version of Buckingham. He emerged as an opponent of slavery in
Liverpool and later became an associate of Joseph Hume in the National
Parliamentary Reform Association. He also visited the United States on
several occasions to agitate against slavery and was considered by John
Bright to have been ‘the liberator of the slaves in the English colonies’.15 An
MP, prophetically, from Tower Hamlets in East London, though never
directly involved with Chartism, he emphasised the need for Indians to
organise and bring their grievances to the attention of the British electorate
because it was the British people that ‘make Parliament’ in his words.
Thompson viewed the Indian associations as the equivalent to the electoral
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reform societies with which he had worked in the 1820s in Britain.
Important here was the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge
which had been founded about 1840, mainly by former members of Henry
Derozio’s Calcutta Academic Association. The Society debated matters such
as the status of women, vernacular education, the value of knowledge,
‘Hindustan under the Hindu rulers’ and Indian civil and social reform.16 It
included Christians such as K.M. Banerjea, and reform-minded Brahmo
Hindus. Thomson himself appears to have been a Unitarian, ‘devoted to the
Being who was maker of all men’.17
India diverges from ‘the British World, 1850-1914.
What we see in these movements is a political sentiment which crossed the
British world and was appropriated by settlers and expatriates in both
Australia and India. Indian self-organisation was stimulated by newspapers
and the increasing presence of British liberals and radicals. After 1850,
however, the political future of the two dependencies diverged substantially.
The Australian colonies achieved a significant degree of local autonomy
after 1842, establishing full male suffrage well before Britain. This was an
act of self-assertion against the Imperial Government, as Marilyn Lake and
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Henry Reynolds show. Initially in the 1850s, even aboriginal men were
allowed to vote, though by 1902 these rights had largely been rescinded and
they were not accorded to Indian and Chinese immigrants.
In India, by contrast, the Crown government which took power after the
trauma of the Great Rebellion conceded Indian representation with extreme
caution. Small propertied electorates were established in municipal and
district boards in the 1880s and limited provincial legislatures in 1892 and
1909. As late as 1935 only something like 15% of the Indian male
population could vote and the legislatures and executive bodies were packed
with government officials and stymied by the representation of special
interest groups, British businessmen and conservative Muslims, in particular.
Much of the subcontinent was ruled by princely collaborators with colonial
rule. The supposed juvenile status of Indian people was used to justify this
political divergence and was endorsed even by advanced liberals such as
John Stuart Mill.
Yet British economic and strategic interests were also crucial. Australians
freely sent troops to all Britain’s colonial wars through to 1914. Indian and
Australian soldiers met for instance on Chinese soil during the Boxer
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rebellion. But in order to retain and pay for the new Indian army which was
recruited form the Punjab and North-west, the British were clear that they
had to maintain a despotic colonial government in the subcontinent. Equally,
by overpricing the Indian rupee in relation to sterling Britain continued to
benefit from the Indian economy, even as her industrial and commercial
preeminence came to be challenged by other European nations and the USA.
Indigenous bodies were also exploited in more mundane ways. ‘Blackbirding’ the kidnapping of local people for labour in the Torres Straits and
Pacific was paralleled in India and Mauritius by the expansion of indentured
labour, often secured coercively
Still, as the Indian National Congress came to be a political force after
1885, Australian colonial autonomy and later the Australian Federation itself
became an icon for India’s liberal politicians. The country’s preeminent
liberal politician, Dadabhai Naoroji, later an MP in London, modeled his
concept of freedom within the British Empire on the Australian case.
Another leading liberal, Surendranath Bannerjea, called on Britain to free
India as she had freed Australia and Canada at the Imperial Conference of
1909. These public men, though, still had in mind a limited propertied male
franchise. Even a full manhood franchise would have been unthinkable since
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it would have given the vote to lower castes, the equivalent of Australia’s
aboriginals or Asian immigrants.18
Indian nationalists also made a critical comparison between the abject
poverty of India with its constant famines and the prosperity of Australia.
Here the gold rush, the rapid expansion of wool production for the British
market and the small size of the population had guaranteed one of the
highest standards of living in the world by 1900. Naoroji himself, author of
Poverty and Un-British rule in India, made a striking observation.
Australia with a tiny population of four million bought annually £20 million
of British goods, while India with 150 million bought a mere £25 million,
despite the existence of some protective tariffs.19 If Indian production and its
nascent industries were protected in the same way, the country would begin
to prosper. Australia, by contrast, could embark on a virtuous economic
cycle without protection. Money flowed in from gold mining and with new
settlers. Easy money could be raised on the London market for investment
and a quiet process of import substitution began which did not scare the
British government. Even so, the Protectionist Party emerged in Australia in
the 1890s with rather similar aims to the Indian National Congress.
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Australian politicians very widely endorsed the Anglo-Boer War which
Indian nationalists from Rabindranath Tagore to R.C. Dutt denounced as an
aspect of the ‘new imperialism,’ an unjust conflict which would cost India
dear at a time when the peasantry was struggling to survive. Here, though,
they did have the support of the Australian leftist, H. B. Higgins, a protosocialist of Protestant Irish origins and nationalist beliefs. Higgins
denounced Rhodes and the warmongers as bourgeois, while at the same time
attacking the local bourgeoisie for draining the resources of ordinary people
in Australia by buying up cheap land and getting free access to railways,
irrigation and water.20 Higgins, however, vehemently denounced Chinese
and, by extension, Indian immigration as a bourgeois plot which would full
Australia with inferior races and debase its white population. This was a
leftist version of the ‘global colour line.’
For the Indian elite, therefore, Australia was a political icon, but it was a
flawed one. As ‘White Australia’ legislation came increasingly into force
after 1900, Indians began to see the Dominions and the USA as bastions of
racial prejudice, a position endorsed by Mohandas Gandhi, then a young
lawyer in South Africa. Another trope emerging from the speeches and
writings of Indian politicians was the fate of the Aboriginal peoples. During
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times of famine and economic recession, some far-fetched analogies
between these vastly disparate ‘native peoples’ were made.
This whole genre reached its climax in a series of no less than twenty
articles, entitled ‘A Dying Race’, specially written by Lieut. Col. U. N.
Mukerjee MD for the Bengalee newspaper in 1909. The race in question
was- counter-intuitively- the teeming population of Bengali Hindus. The
author was particularly insistent on the superior racial efficiency of Bengal’s
Muslims and held before his coreligionists the fate of becoming an
endangered species like the ‘Amerindians of Hispaniola, the Aborigines and
Maoris.’21 But the situation in Australia at this time was, in fact, dire. As
Patrick Woolf argues the seizure by the authorities of mixed race children
and their disposal in white families constituted a form of ethnocide by
stealth.
Wars and Independence.
This age of creeping racial eugenics, economic and political liberalism
was abruptly shattered in both countries by the shock of the First World War
and the Bolshevik Revolution. While some Irish Australians objected to
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supporting Britain, particularly after the Dublin rebellion, the majority
believed it right to fight for the Empire even though the issue of conscription
proved divisive. In India, by contrast, opinion was broadly undecided or
hostile to war. Gandhi, of course, argued for non-violence, though,
intriguingly, he encouraged volunteering for the ambulance services and
civilian labour for the war fronts. But Muslims and many Sikhs and Hindus
were troubled by the war against the Ottoman Empire and the Khalifa.
Indian troops in Mesopotamia were demoralized and there was a serious
mutiny in Singapore in 1915. Indian casualties were relatively light by
comparison with the 60,000 suffered by Australian troops. Yet the war
radicalized Indian politics, just as the Dardanelles fiasco recreated
Australian identity.
Prices shot after 1916 and collapsed immediately afterward giving rise to
great rural tension as landlords, tenants and the government battled to
sustain their income. Labourers and soldiers returned from the war fronts to
unemployment, but bringing stories of the folly and failure of Europeans.
Distant rumours of the Bolshevik revolution reached remote villages. Most
important, the defence of the Ottoman Khalifat proved one of the great
motivators for Gandhi’s First Non-cooperation movement, though the Turks’
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own abolition of the office ultimately served to undermine it. Equally, the
passage of soldiers and labourers across the world provided the basis for the
Ghadr or insurrection movement. Australia, of course, suffered social
conflict after the War and the Dardanelles fiasco spread disillusion with
Britain. But the imperial connection remained intact, not least because
Australia was beneficially tied to London by exports and finance.
The fate of India and Australia during the inter-war years vividly
illustrates the difference between an autonomous Dominion and what was
still basically a dependency. Certainly, the Australian economy had a bumpy
ride during the 1920s and suffered badly from the onset of the Depression in
1929. Wool and wheat prices collapsed, which meant that the Australia was
unable to pay the interest on its very large loans, predominantly from British
investors. In a move towards what we would now call austerity, Federal and
state expenditure was cut along with wages. By 1931 a massive 28% of the
population was unemployed and this added to the large number of disabled
war veterans. Differentials in living standards widened and shanty towns of
the unemployed sprang up on the edge of cities, something inconceivable in
the 1890s, when Australians had the highest living standards in the world.
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Indian raw material exports of cotton and jute and tea suffered equally
badly, but with its vast population of impoverished farmers and huge
subsistence market the financial shock was relatively milder, though even a
small drop in living standards had a huge effect. In some respects India even
benefited slightly from the Depression. Since wages were so meager, Indian
manufactures became more attractive because prices were so low. Even in
the 1920s, partly in response to the financial crisis at the end of the War, the
colonial government had slapped higher tariffs in British cotton import.
This, of course, was a move to help the Government of India’s finance and
not a socially progressive economic move. But the result was a steady
expansion of cotton manufacturing in Bombay and Gujarat, which continued
into the 1930s.
After 1930, however, the different political status of the two countries
magnified the difference, making it extremely difficult for India to even
begin to counteract the effects of the Depression. When Britain left the Gold
Standard in September 1931, Sir George Schuster, finance member of the
Government of India, tried to de-link the Indian Rupee from Sterling
because the artificially high valuation of the Rupee damaged Indian exports.
London refused to allow this, so deflation and depression created a vicious
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circle. By contrast, Australia was able to devalue its currency against
Sterling by about 25%. The UK Treasury attempted to stop this, too, but
here the relative autonomy of the Dominion and the Australian states proved
its worth. Australia later benefited from Sterling’s abandonment of the gold
standard.
This, ironically, compounded India’s problems because cheap wheat from
Australia, and other basic commodities, now flooded the subcontinent and
the Indian authorities were once again unable to take remedial action since
they could not apply a protective tariff. The income of Indian farmers fell
sharply leading to an outflow of gold from the rural economy and indeed out
of the country altogether. Gold, of course, had increased massively in price
since the UK left the gold standard. This meant that the British Government
of India was the great gainer because the outflow of gold allowed it to
continue to remit interest and salaries from India to the U.K; the notorious
‘home charges.’ The Indian farmer was necessarily the great loser.
One should not underestimate the distress suffered by Australia in these
years. Labour unrest was endemic, particularly in the coal and steel sector.
Yet the fact that the country could control its currency and tariffs limited the
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damage. Exports recovered rapidly after 1932 and capital began to flow into
local industrial activity which had long been stagnant. Australia’s relative
weight in the Empire’s counsels also allowed it to negotiate a preferential
tariff for British imports and greater access to the British market for its
farmers. Consequently, Australia’s external debt eased. India’s meanwhile
increased until the approach of the Second World War forced the British to
finance the re-equipment of the Indian Army. When the War ended, Britain
was net debtor to India for the first time in two hundred years, a factor which
was by no means unrelated to the relative speed with which Britain gave the
subcontinent its independence.
Both India and Australia, then, were faced with political dissidence from
the rural and urban working classes. Both sets of governments clamped
down hard on Communist activity and coerced labour unions back to work.
In India this continued even after Congress governments took limited power
in the provinces in 1937. Yet radical politics continued to develop beneath
the political surface in both societies. Intriguing points of convergence have
been documented by Heather Goodall. Indian indentured labourers and
illegal immigrants had spread into Australia in greater numbers during the
pre-First World War boom. A few married Aboriginal women and their
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descendants became active in aboriginal rights movements in the 1920s and
‘30s. Again, Indian seamen in Australia joined their Australian labour union
colleagues in a boycott of Dutch vessels during the Indonesian independence
struggle of 1945-7.
Meanwhile, neither government did much to alleviate discontent through
active state intervention. Australians were much better off because
politicians before 1914 had introduced a degree of social security, including
old age pensions and even maternity allowances, albeit racially exclusive
ones. Yet laissez faire economics remained politically dominant, even when
it was beginning to be abandoned in 1930s Britain. India, with no state
provision to speak of, fared even worse. Indian nationalists, such as Nehru’s
confidant, G. B. Pant were well aware of this. We find Pant in vigorous
dispute in 1936 with the Finance Member of the Indian Government, Sir
James Grigg. Pant argued that if Great Britain had already moved away from
laissez faire and was inspired in its programmes of house-building by major
economists and politicians, such as Lloyd George, Roosevelt, John Maynard
Keynes and Harold Laski, how was it that the Indian Government still
adhered to rigid ideas of small government?22 Only planning during the
1939-45 war -and independence itself- ultimately shifted the Indian
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government towards state intervention. Much the same can be said of
Australia, where conservative hostility to higher taxation stymied social
legislation until the troops returned from the War in 1945.
The Second World War, indeed, proved to be the critical rupture in
relations between the two countries and the United Kingdom. Even though
two million Indian troops fought against the Japanese, in The Middle East
and on the Western Front, it was the 60,000 who fought with Subhas
Chandra Bose and the Japanese against the British who provided the iconic
image of the end of Empire. Unable to convict the leaders of the Indian
National Army, impoverished by wartime expenditure and now debtor to
India, the benefits of Indian Empire for Britain now paled into insignificance
compared with the costs. The fall of Singapore not only furnished the great
majority of Bose’s troops, but the apparent abandonment of Australia by the
British, pushed Prime Minister John Curtin decisively towards an American
alliance.
After Empire
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I now move on to my final historical period: Independence and Partition in
South Asia and the great expansion of the Australian economy after 1945.
Australian nationalism had always been constrained by its external
patriotism- its links with Britain. These links were progressively frayed: the
Dardanelles, Singapore, Britain’s international decline and, most seriously,
the decision to join the Common Market, which effectively turned
Australians into aliens. The old ‘anglosphere’ or ‘British world’ dissolved.
In Australia, as in India, for instance, legal thought and practice finally
managed to extricate themselves from the straightjacket of the precedents of
English Common Law.
Yet, though there was much talk of a new nationalism in Australia in the
1960s and ‘70s, James Curran and Stuart Ward recently argued that it
remained ‘an unknown nation’, unsure of its identity, still agonizing over the
flag, the monarchy and its internal colonialism. By comparison, Indian
identity was apparently more robust. It had been fired by British atrocities;
Gandhi’s great anti-colonial movements; the memory of the Indian National
Army and war with Pakistan, which followed the appalling blood-letting of
the Partition massacres. This is perhaps an oversimplification. Historians
have increasingly drawn attention to the fact that many major Congress
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leaders, such as Vallabhbhai Patel, were more like soft Hindu populists than
secular Indian nationalists in the manner of Nehru. The rise of the Hindu
right in the 1980s posed a distinct challenge to Indian identity and the role of
Muslims in the country. Equally, the Dalit or untouchable movement
initiated by B. R. Ambedkar challenged Hindu and Indian identity from a
different direction, even as it transformed democracy into a contestation of
caste groupings. It may be better to see both nations entering a period of
uncertainty after the death of Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s ‘Emergency’, on
the one hand, and the easing of Cold War tensions following the end of the
Vietnam War, on the other.
Yet, if the nation remained surprisingly inchoate, the state did not. In
both India and Australia the state grew in size, strength and determination to
intervene in economy and society throughout the period from 1945 to 1990.
Even an avowed conservative, such as Robert Menzies, used state power
vigorously to develop the economy and Australia’s military resources. The
supposed Communist threat acted as an incentive to expand welfare
provision, while the momentum of wartime planning was maintained.
India’s own state socialism, reflected in the centralized economic planning
of figures such as P. C. Mahalanobis, was spurred on by the desperate drive
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to diminish the country’s poverty, while also protecting its neutral stance in
the Cold War. Australia became a partial nuclear state- through the British
connection. Similarly, Indira Gandhi pushed forward with India’s nuclear
programme in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the size of the public sector massively
increased from its small dimensions in the colonial period in both societies.
In India large numbers of demobilised soldiers were recruited into the
battalions of Armed Police in the later 1940s, while state and local
governments absorbed numbers of disadvantaged people through the system
of caste reservations. This efflorescence of the state was perhaps the most
striking rupture with the colonial period in both India and Australia.
Finally, attitudes to race and gender shifted considerably. The ‘white
Australia’ policy was abandoned and numbers of both Indians and Chinese
entered the country as settlers, though this did not end agonizing over
immigration and racial difference, as Robin Jeffrey, has recently reminded
us. Equally, the state became proactive in defence of the ‘rights’ of
aboriginal peoples, protecting their land and restoring objects and human
remains sequestered from them during the colonial period. In India, all
vestiges of white privilege were, of course, swept away in 1947. Many
Eurasians actually migrated from India to Australia in consequence. But in
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India the fate of the aboriginal peoples was somewhat different. Colonial
paternalism had to some degree protected the so-called ‘tribals’ of the inland
and forest belts, such as the Nagas of Assam. Once they became Indian
citizens, however, the state tended to remove its protection. The result has
been the sequestration of tribal land by wood and mineral companies and
more recently the emergence of so-called Maoist armed resistance.
Concluding thoughts.
The organizers of this Conference rightly argued that since this was an
Australian Historical Congress, Australia should be invoked in this address.
Since links between India and Australia are now the source of public and
educational discussion in this country, I was urged try to consider both
continents in this lecture. Despite my sophomore status in Australian history,
this also gave me the opportunity to think about imperial and global history
from a rather different perspective and I want to end with a few more
general issues.
What does a study of comparisons, connections and contrasts between
these two very different former dependencies of the British Empire teach us
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as world historians? First, there is an important negative point. In our desire
to break down national and area studies we should not give way to
‘amorphous, a-historical and agent-less conceptions of globalization and
diasporic connectivity’, as Frederick Cooper puts it.
This is a position now endorsed by many historians and anthropologists
who have become wary of the ‘cult of globalization.’ Not only did much not
‘move’ and was not ‘connected’ but, in the case of India and Australia,
differences in scale and culture were enormous. One of the failings of the
old top-down imperial history was that it assumed that the influence of
metropolitan ideas, practices and discourses were un-problematically
appropriated in vastly different colonial settings. The switch from an
imperial history of slow constitutional evolution, still in vogue when I
entered the profession, to today’s emphasis on epistemic or actual colonial
violence has not quite dispelled the problem of generalized comparison. For
instance, the violence of white settlers against Aboriginal people at Skull
Camp or Murdering Island was of a different order, and had radically
different consequences from the massacre perpetrated by a colonial army,
substantially composed of South Asian troops, at Amritsar, for instance. The
Bengali Hindus never went the same way as the Aboriginal people as Col.
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Mukherjee feared they would. Scale and time period remain fundamental
constraints on historical comparison.
Yet a wholesale retreat back to national and area studies or to a novelistic
‘history of experience’ of individuals and families would risk forfeiting
some of the most interesting changes in historical sensibility which have
emerged over the last generation. We have become aware of how rapidly
ideas and practices moved across the globe through print word of mouth and
actual physical transport, long before the present age of globalization. The
trick is not to assume that these movements were simply ‘influences’, but to
show how they were received, transformed, cannibalized, to use Appadurai’s
phrase, or rejected by wholly different affective communities and units of
attachments and mobilization across the world. For the colonial period,
Europe should often be ‘provincialised’, but the use and abuse that Europe’s
concepts and practices made possible for settlers and subject peoples in their
own life-worlds, cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, this awareness must
always be carefully located in place and time.
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1
William Light, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article 16646.
2
Crosbie, p. 126,
3
forthcoming study by Simon Layton.
4
Forthcoming study by Mark Condos.
5
Shruti Kapila, ‘Race matters’, MAS.
6
Crosbie
‘Joseph Hume on the East India Judges Bill, 1825, Oriental Herald, July-Sept 1825, pp.
173-4.
7
8
Bengal Hurkaru, 17 Dec. 1829.
9
Paul Ziegler, Joseph Hume. The people’s MP (Philadelphia, 1985).
10
Miles Taylor, ‘Biography of Joseph Hume’, Liberal Democrat History Group, 30 October 2010.
11
See. E.g, The Examiner (London), 1 January 1826.
12
Ibid.
13
(South Australia, Hansard, 4 February
1841.
Paul Pickering. ‘The highway to comfort and independence. A case study of radicalism in the British
world’, History Australia, 5,1, 2008, pp. 061-0611.
14
15
Dictionary of National Biography (1917), 19, p. 691; George Jacob Holyoke, Sixty
years of an agitator’s life (London, 1892), 1, p. 98; Majumdar, Political thought, pp. 1705.
16
Mitra, Hare, pp. 64-65.
17
Addresses delivered at meetings of the native community of Calcutta and on other
occasions by G. Thompson (Calcutta, 1843), p. 5.
18
Marilyn Lake, ‘Self-government’, Princeton, NJ, 2012.
19
Ibid., p. 229.
20
H. B. Higgins, ‘Australian Ideals, The Austral Light, January 1, 1902, pp.9-10.
21
H. Mukerjee, ‘A dying race 1’, Bengalee, 1 June 1909.
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22
Ibid., pp. 140-1.
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