BOOK: Patrick French, "Liberty or Death"

Patrick French: Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division. London: Flamingo, 1998. (First ed.: HarperCollins, 1997.) 0006550452. xxv + 467 pp.

Yet another book about India that I bought a long time ago (some 15 years ago, in this particular case) and only got around to reading it now. I probably wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't found it at a deep discount in a bookshop at the time, as I'm not *that* interested in the subject of Indian independence; but now that I've read it, I have to say that it was actually quite interesting, and certainly well written.

I was also intrigued by the title, though one associates its more with the Greeks than with the Indians; and I remembered it vaguely as the title of a novel that I read long ago in the early years of this blog. I see now in the wikipedia that many other revolutionary groups also used this slogan, but I can't see any specific connection to India, nor do I remember noticing any references to this slogan in French's book, despite its use as the title, except briefly in the introduction (p. xxv) and one instance of Bose's supporters using it in 1943 (p. 205).

The book does have one or two features that I found a bit odd. As French explains in his introduction, the British government used to have its spies keep an eye out on various Indian independence activists, both in India and in Britain, and the files of these intelligence agencies remained classified until French, in the process of working on this book, got the government to release them (p. xxi). I imagine it is every historian's dream to be able to tap into a fresh and previously unaccessible store of primary source material, so we can't blame him for making use of it in this book; but I couldn't help feeling that the way he made use of it was somewhat incongruous. Most of the time his book tells a perfectly ordinary story with characters whose activities were a well-documented matter of public record — your viceroys, your Congress politicians and the like — but then every now and then, our attention is suddenly and briefly diverted to some obscure official from the Indian Political Intelligence or some other such spying organization, without it ever being particularly obvious why we should suddenly be interested in them or whether their activities really had any material impact on the larger story. You can't help feeling that he included them simply because that's what his fresh new source material was about, so he was damn well going to include these things in his book.

The other odd thing is his concern that “by approaching the past through documents and dignitaries, I risked writing bureaucrat's history rather than living, human history” (p. xxiii), and to ameliorate that he occasionally interrupts his historical narrative with a page or two about his conversations with random people in India whom he encountered while doing research for the book. It's not that these passages aren't also interesting to read (I particularly liked the section where he follows the route of Gandhi's salt march; p. 74), but they don't really improve your understanding of the historical period that the book is supposed to be about; they would fit better into a travel book instead of a history book; and besides, I think a bureaucrat's history focused on documents and dignitaries is precisely how history should be written — those are the things that matter, and not the everyday lives of random unimportant people. If what you really want to be is a collector of anecdotes and teller of tales, that's fair enough, but you shouldn't mix that up with the practice of writing history. It's sad to think that the field of history has sunk so low that a historian now feels compelled to apologize for not focusing enough on random nobodies.

One thing I liked about the book is that it's fairly broad in its coverage. It starts around 1900 (early enough that when we first meet Nehru, it isn't Jawaharlal but his less well known father Motilal) and doesn't end with independence, but also contains a few chapters about its aftermath: the partition of India and Pakistan, with the enormous amount of violence that accompanied it; subsequent political developments in both countries (it was depressing to see how quickly Pakistan descended into its now seemingly permanent condition of military dictatorship, p. 365); the civil war in Pakistan that led to the establishment of an independent Bangladesh; and in an excellent couple of chapters at the end of the book, French spoke to a wide selection of people who still remembered the partition and whose lives had been impacted by it. At the time of the writing of his book — and I suspect it is not much different now, some 25 years later — there still existed whole communities of people who were basically stuck on the wrong side of a border. (An interesting observation from p. 381: noting the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s, French says that “most political commentators” think that “Hindu extremism has reached its peak, and will now decline into oblivion”. Alas, that was more than 20 years ago, and we can now see that just the opposite happened, and the BJP has been ruling India for a decade now.)

I also liked French's many concise and interesting judgments on the various politicians involved in the story. For example, as someone who mostly knew about Gandhi from watching the famous biographical film in which he had been played by Ben Kingsley, I was interested to see here that the real Gandhi “was an emotionally troubled social activist and a ruthlessly sharp political negotiator” and “a crafty Gujarati lawyer” (p. 17). Jinnah was a “cadaverous chain-smoker” (p. 230) and, somewhat surprisingly for the leader of the Muslim League and hence practically the founder of Pakistan, a ham sandwich enjoyer :)) (p. 63).

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Despite starting earlier and ending later, the bulk of the book deals with the period from approx. 1920 to independence. The Indians had expected that their loyalty during WW1 would be rewarded with greater autonomy after it, but the reforms introduced by the British after the war were minimal and kept the vast majority of power in British hands. This disappointment “marked the start of serious agitation” (p. 37) and transformed the Indian National Congress into a truly mass movement. British rule was based on “legal authoritarianism rather than arbitrary totalitarianism” (p. 37), and so they couldn't really do much to seriously suppress the movement once it grew large enough (p. 52).

Indeed I couldn't help feeling, as the story progressed, a sense of inevitability about it — British rule in India had always relied on the fact that, at some level, Indians basically accepted it, and once this ceased to be the case there was no way the British could have kept India short of going full Nazi on it; and they weren't willing to go as far as that. You can't help feeling that this must surely have been obvious to them in 1920 if not earlier, so that instead of dragging their feet for another few decades and then leaving in a positively unseemly haste once things really got out of control, they could have preserved some dignity by exiting earlier, before it became obvious how powerless they were to direct the course of events.

Instead, they just made matters worse by trying to delay the inevitable. As time went on, Indian demands grew and British concessions were invariably too little and too late. “The reforms of 1919 might well have appeased political India in 1909; the reforms of 1935 would have evoked enthusiasm in 1919” (p. 96). Of course, at the same time I don't doubt that even if the British had given them greater concessions earlier, the Indians would still have kept on raising their demands all the way to full independence; so in that sense it doesn't really matter what the British did or didn't give and when.

An example of such a concession was the introduction of provincial autonomy in the 1935 Government of India Act (p. 150). As a result, from about 1937 onwards the regional governments of India were in the hands of the Congress (p. 108), and the British were less and less able to exert any control over what was going on.

The British set up a secret agency called Indian Political Intelligence to spy on Indian activists (p. 98). This occasionally provided them with useful information, but of course couldn't really change the flow of events in any major way.

I was interested to see that it was only in the late 1930s that the Muslim League became a true mass movement (p. 113). Initially it was small and was dismissed by Congress as irrelevant, which was probably harmful in the long run (p. 111). Its first demands for something resembling an autonomous Pakistan only appeared with the Lahore Resolution of 1940 (p. 124), though they were a bit vague on the details.

An interesting detail: at the start of WW2, the then Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on behalf of India, without consulting the Indian politicians (p. 120); this naturally caused much resentment, even though otherwise they'd likely have been in favour of such a declaration. But I was surprised to see that a separate declaration of war by India was even necessary; I didn't think it had enough autonomy for that (unlike, say, Canada or Australia) — after all, it wasn't even a dominion yet. Linlithgow accompanied his declaration with the bizarre statement that India could not “accept the dictation of a foreign power in relation to her own subjects”; French remarks that the irony “was probably lost on him” (ibid.). The Congress responded by withdrawing from participation in provincial governments (p. 121). The British lost the “moral argument” by claiming they were fighting WW2 to liberate occupied countries and yet continuing to occupy India themselves (p. 141).

Churchill, who was the prime minister during most of the WW2, was heavily against any sort of autonomy for India, and probably did more harm than good with his stubbornness on the subject (p. 130); but even he could not prevent the inevitable. The British lost a lot of prestige after their defeats in Southeast Asia in 1942; there was a “popular feeling in India that their British rulers were no longer invincible” (p. 135). Moreover, some pressure to make concessions to India also came from the Americans, who were not fond of the British Empire and whom Churchill couldn't afford to ignore since Britain increasingly depended on U.S. support in the war (p. 137).

[Incidentally, there is a pleasantly wacky paragraph about plans that Roosevelt discussed with a “Professor Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution” on how to “cross-breed and develop ‘an Indo-Asian or Eurasian or (better) Euroindasian rase’ as a counterbalance to the ‘nefarious’ Japanese. [. . .] The idea was that certain ‘racial crossings’ were good, while others were dangerous.” Roosevelt insisted “that Japanese-European and Chinese-Malayan crossings were ‘bad’, while Chinese-European were ‘not all that bad’ and Dutch-Javanese were positively ‘good’. Roosevelt was especially concerned with an indigenous ethnic group in Japan who went by the intriguing name of the ‘Hairy Ainus’, and wondered in what way they differed from the other Japanese, apart from their hirsute appearance.” (Pp. 138–9.) Not that I really have anything against this sort of good old-fashioned racism — at least it has the virtue of being honest, unlike the present-day quasi-religious insistence that all groups of people are somehow equal — but the part that amazes me is how they came up with this insane shit in the first place. How did Roosevelt even come to form an opinion as to whether Chinese-Malayan hybrids are better than Dutch-Javanese ones or vice versa? When did he even meet any Malayans or Javanese? If you asked me which of those two groups is better than the other, I could only say that I haven't got the foggiest idea, but here's Roosevelt having very definite and firm preferences regarding them...]

The British were not keen to make big concessions, and the Congress was not willing to accept small ones, figuring they could get better terms later since British power was obviously on the wane. The gap between the two sides is illustrated by the failure of the Cripps mission in 1942: Cripps tried to come up with a compromise, but it was rejected by both sides, being far more than Churchill was willing to give and far less than the Congress was willing to accept (p. 147).

The Indian nationalists decided to embark on a wide-ranging campaign of civil disobedience, the Quit India Movement (p. 151). The British, for their part, were willing to suppress this sort of thing pretty heavy-handedly since India was of great strategic importance during the war, both as a source of soldiers and on account of its production (p. 133). As soon as the Quit India campaign began, the British arrested the Congress leadership and kept them in (admittedly fairly comfortable) imprisonment for most of the rest of the war (p. 156). Initially the British even planned to deport them out of India, to Aden, though this last part of the plan foundered on bizarre legal complications: they couldn't legally be detained while in transit at sea, and moreover the Governor of Aden indicated that there was no room for any additional nonwhite people in his colony :))) (p. 153).

Protests, strikes, riots, sabotage etc. spread over large parts of India, and the “authorities responded with public floggings, the burning of villages and collective fines” (p. 159); they shot at protestors and raped the women (ibid.). “India was spiralling out of control” (p. 161). “By the end of 1942, sixty thousand people had been arrested” (p. 161) and the Quit India movement was mostly suppressed (p. 169). British rule over India lost all legitimacy and could thenceforth only be sustained by the means of repression (p. 160). Anglo-American relations also deteriorated as the Americans now saw that the British were more interested in preserving their control of India than in fighting against Japan (p. 162).

I liked this wild idea by Field Marshal Wavell, who was appointed as the new Viceroy of India in mid-1943: he proposed that the leading Indian politicians should be told that Britain was committed to giving India self-government as soon as possible, and they “would then be put into a room, with access to a secretariat of experts on matters such as constitutions, international law and so forth, and be left there until they reached a solution” (p. 177). Of course, nothing came of this; Churchill and his ministers “were not amused; the last thing they wanted was a Viceroy who showed initiative” (ibid.). The idea reminds me of how the Bosnian war of 1992–95 was ended when Bill Clinton shut the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia into a U.S. Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, and told them they aren't getting out until they sign a peace treaty :))

Unlike Churchill, who had something of a visceral hatred of Indians and couldn't stomach the idea that the British Empire might be coming to an end (pp. 188–9), Wavell was a realist and surprisingly open-minded for a former military officer. He understood that what Britain would sooner or later have to do in India was something rather akin to a military retreat (pp. 260–1), and that such things are best done in an orderly manner and in accordance with a plan prepared in advance. He constantly urged the Cabinet to give him some sort of definite instructions as to what kind of policy to pursue towards India, but they just ignored him and dragged their feet (p. 194). Meanwhile, law and order were deteriorating in India; by 1944 Wavell observed that “HMG has no longer the power to take effective action” (p. 191). It became clear that after the war British rule could only be maintained if a large number of troops were deployed in India to suppress popular unrest — something that was both politically and financially impossible (pp. 189, 289).

A funny anecdote about Major Peter Coats, whom Wavell brought on as a sort of “major domo at Viceroy's House”: “When an eminent Indian visitor complained that there was a rat in his room, Coats replied: ‘Ah, a rat, sir. Those are for our most distinguished guests, the others only get mice.’ ” (P. 180.) :)) I wish the visitor had then asked how distinguished one would have to be to get a cat :)

Another thing that caused great damage to British reputation in India was their unwillingness to do anything about the great famine in Bengal in 1943/44 (p. 183); Wavell, who was viceroy at the time, urged the British government to do something, but they ignored him. (He noted later that they were much more interested in preventing famines in Europe than in India; p. 194.) This lack of British response to the famine even induced some Indian soldiers to defect to Bose's “Indian National Army”, which fought alongside the Japanese (p. 206).

An interesting observation from p. 197: the British Empire, at that time, “was no longer turning a profit [. . .] with the exception of Malaya, all the imperial colonies were losing money from the 1920s onwards”. It would have made financial sense for the British to cut their loses and let their colonies go, but “[t]he belief in Empire remained long after its practical uses had evaporated”. This sounds very interesting and I should like to read more about it at some point. How could the Empire be losing money like that? Was Britain spending too much money on paying its bureaucrats and soldiers there, and on building infrastructure and the like? I suppose they should have reduced these expenditures to a level which the local economy of a colony could support, even if that meant that some colonies made progress more slowly. As it was, the British seem to have been getting the worst of both worlds: they were getting hated by the natives and also losing money in the process.

I was surprised to read how popular Bose is in modern India (or was, at any rate, when French was writing this book in the late 1990s): “Some more extreme Indian politicians are currently calling for the erection of a statue of Adolf Hitler, using the inverse logic that since Hitler was a supporter of Bose, he must have been a great man.” :)) (P. 202.) French interviewed a manufacturer of statues, who told him that statues of Bose were now much more popular than those of Gandhi or Nehru (p. 203). In actual fact, Bose's INA had been strategically irrelevant, and its main contribution to Indian independence may have been the fact that, when the British put some of its senior officers to trial after the war, this added to the anti-British feelings in India, since most Indians saw the INA people as “simply patriots who had been caught on the losing side” (p. 210).

The British, contrary to what was later sometimes believed in India, were not actually keen to divide their old colony into two countries, i.e. India and Pakistan (p. 222); but after the WW2 they reluctantly had to admit that such a division might be necessary, since on the one hand the Congress and the Muslim League were unable or unwilling to work together, and Congress was getting so strong that if they started a large-scale uprising Britain would have been unable to suppress it (p. 217). Accordingly, Wavell drew up a secret plan of how the country might be divided; the biggest problem were the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab, where the population was about 50% Muslim and 50% non-Muslim (pp. 219–20). New elections were held in 1945/46, with Congress getting the vast majority of non-Muslim votes and the Muslim League the vast majority of Muslim ones (the Muslim voters weren't necessarily quite sure what sort of country Pakistan might be or what its boundaries might be, but saw it as their best hope for protection from being oppressed by the Hindus); pp. 223–4. This success of the Muslim League meant that the Congress could no longer afford to ignore it as they had hitherto done (p. 226).

In the spring of 1946, the British government sent a delegation to negotiate with Indian nationalist politicians, both Hindu and Muslim, but without much success because both groups were too stubborn. The British proposed an independent India as “a loose federation of Hindu-majority, Muslim-majority and Princely States”, with provinces being able to form “groupings [. . .] with a large degree of autonomy” (p. 237). This could help avoid the issues of splitting Bengal and the Punjab, and Jinnah even accepted the idea in principle (p. 240), but then the whole thing failed because he and the Congress could not agree on the details of how the groupings should work (p. 243).

Wavell decided to form an “interim government” of Indian nationalist politicians, hoping this would help keep the peace; however, the Muslim League refused to participate (p. 249) and a series of riots erupted anyway, with thousands of people killed in Calcutta (p. 252). The riots continued and increased, so that by late 1946 “much of northern India was [. . .] heading towards anarchy” (p. 268).

An interesting side effect of the establishment of the new interim government was that the Indian Political Intelligence, an organization which the British had built up to spy on the Indian nationalist politicians, now came under the control of one of the most powerful of these politicians, Vallabhbhai Patel. He decided to keep the IPI's surveillance activities going, but direct them against extremist groups only, rather than against mainstream Congress politicians like himself; and he made sure that the intelligence thus collected was available only to him and his colleagues from the Congress, but not to the Viceroy (pp. 258–9, 267).

In early 1947, the British government decided to definitely withdraw from India by June 1948, and announced that “power would be handed over come what may, even if necessary ‘to the existing provincial governments’ ” (p. 277), i.e. if the Indian politicians at the national level couldn't by then agree on questions of federation or partition etc. This spurred them to action, and in March 1947 the Congress accepted the partition into India and Pakistan, provided that Bengal and the Punjab get split between the two countries; Jinnah had to agree with this, knowing that the British would be leaving soon and he couldn't get a better deal from the Congress later (pp. 277–8).

An interesting observation from p. 291: what took place at Indian independence was not a case of “grassroots liberation” or “revolutionary transformation”, but simply “a transfer of power”.

Mountbatten, the new Viceroy since February 1947, began negotiating with the Indian politicians on the details of the transition, but his options were limited by the fact that “[t]he British were no longer in a strong enough position to impose a settlement on India” (p. 296). He proposed a “Balkan plan” according to which each province and princely state could decide for itself whether to split up, become independent or join some larger grouping (p. 297); but this was unacceptable to the Indian politicians, and would probably have led to chaos. What was eventually adopted was the alternative plan written hurriedly by V. P. Menon, a high-ranking Indian civil servant; this provided for two separate independent countries, India and Pakistan, with provinces such as Bengal and the Punjab deciding for themselves whether to be divided (p. 301). Menon accomplished in some three hours what others had been unable to do in years.

With the British gone, the princely states could theoretically be independent again but in practice all were pressured into joining one or the other country (mostly India; pp. 312–13). The princes were supposed to keep a share of the taxes from their former territories, but I was saddened to read, on the wikipedia, that both India and Pakistan unilaterally deprived them of these revenues in the early 1970s (pp. 367–8).

State assets had to be divided in great haste, which was no simple thing, but it also had its ludicrous aspects: in Delhi, “senior civil servants who had opted for Pakistan were turfed out of their buildings, and ‘in some cases they have had to move tables and chairs out and are working under the shade of trees’ ” (p. 315). The army was likewise split into two, with soldiers “given a matter of days to decide” which country to join (p. 343). A British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was brought in at the last moment to define the details of the border between the two countries, in a little more than one month (p. 324; he seems to have made an honest effort, but it was “an impossible job”, pp. 330–1).*

[*Later, a Bangladeshi general, complaining about Radcliffe's complicated boundary line which “curved backwards and forwards over either side of riverbanks”, joked that “the British could never draw a straight line!” (P. 410.) I guess the joke is that in other parts of the world, the British had drawn plenty of straight lines, and those usually weren't liked any better by the locals either...]

Interestingly, many at the time of independence thought the partition into India and Pakistan was something unnatural, and expected the two countries to merge again soon (p. 306). Others thought, until the massacres began in the lead-up to independence, that the two countries would remain on friendly terms and people could easily move from one to the other and back (pp. 323, 401), that “the relationship between India and Pakistan would be similar to that between Canada and the United States” (p. 351). “There was a stunning incapacity among politicians of all kinds” as to how much violence would accompany the partition (p. 344); about a million people ended up getting killed (p. 349). Houses of people who fled across the new border for safety were seized by corrupt officials instead of being used to house refugees who had moved across the border in the opposite direction (pp. 394, 401).

A funny joke from p. 332, told to the author by an old Sikh: “If a Sikh has one bullet left in his gun, and he sees a Muslim, a Hindu and a Britisher coming towards him, which should he shoot? The Muslim — you only shoot Hindus and Britishers for pleasure.” :)))

Another Sikh joke from p. 398: around the time of the partition, some Muslims caught a Sikh and threatened to kill him unless he converted to Islam. He converted, but then told them to kill him anyway. They asked why, and he replied: “Because when you kill me one more Muslim will be gone from this earth.” (P. 398; told to the author by a Muslim in Lahore.) I remember hearing a similar joke except it was a Jew who, on his deathbed, asked for a priest, saying he intended to convert to Christianity ‘because it's better if one of them dies than one of us’ :))

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So, I enjoyed reading this book, and the only thing I disliked is something that the author can in no way be blamed for, namely that the subject-matter is a bit sad and depressing. Imagine if this were a fictional story, a movie set in a galaxy far away or something of that sort, in which a great people, after a patient struggle of many decades, led by a group of surprisingly clever and upright politicians, finally won its freedom from the evil empire that had been oppressing them — there would have been a happy end to the movie at that point, and that would have been it. Here in the real world, we get a million people massacred, tens of millions displaced, and the nation gets split into three squabbling corrupt authoritarian shitholes, each worse than the other. You can't help wondering if it hadn't been possible to manage things differently somehow, to get a better outcome.

The best thing of all, in my opinion, would have been for the British to never have colonized India in the first place; then it would have developed in an organic fashion; perhaps it would have unified like Germany or Italy did in the 19th century, or perhaps it would have remained split into a plethora of states, but either way there would be something ‘natural’ about this state of affairs, which is not the case about the present-day division into three countries.

Or alternatively, given that the British *had* colonized India, they should have given it independence earlier, before the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims got too bad, and before independence they should have reorganized it into a loose confederation where each province or princely state was nearly autonomous; that, again, would have reduced the need for massacres and mass expulsions.

Or the British should have kept ruling India for much longer than they had, using as much oppression as necessary to maintain control, waiting for as long as it took the local population to grow less religiously zealous, less excitable and less prone to political corruption; at that point it might have been possible to give them independence without the whole thing turning sour immediately afterwards. In practice, of course, this solution never happens in cases of decolonization; the point at which a colonized nation becomes too strong for its colonizers to keep controlling it invariably comes much sooner than the point where it would be capable of governing itself well; the result, inevitably, is that it gets independence too early and then governs itself badly.

So perhaps, in the end, horrible though the aftermath of Indian independence was, it was simply the least bad of the realistically available possibilities, perhaps the only possibility. The British did not wish to leave earlier than they did, and weren't able to stay longer than they did, so the current outcome was the only one possible. And that's what makes the whole thing rather depressing. Another proof, if any further proof were necessary, that it would have been better not to colonize India in the first place.

ToRead:

• Katherine Mayo: Mother India. A “hugely popular 1920s compendium of bigotry and prejudice about the failings of Indians” (p. 93). :))
• David Cannadine: The Pleasures of the Past (1989). A collection of essays, quoted here on p. 289 for his remarks on Mountbatten as “the pioneering and pre-eminent de-imperialist” for his role in the British withdrawal from India and its transition to independence.