Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

first Englishman to reach his court was greeted with a gesture which might have disconcerted the 125 worthy shareholders of the East India Trading Company. The Moghul made him a member of the Royal Household and offered him as a welcoming gift the most beautiful girl in his harem, an Armenian Christian.

      Fortunately, benefits of a nature more likely to inspire his employer’s esteem than the enrichment of his sex life also grew out of Captain Hawkins’ arrival in Agra. Jehangir signed an imperial firman authorizing the East India Company to open trading depots north of Bombay. Its success was rapid and impressive. Soon, two ships a month were unloading mountains of spices, gum, sugar, raw silk and Muslin cotton on the docks along the Thames and sailing off with holds full of English manufactures. A deluge of dividends, some of them as high as 200%, came pouring down on the firm’s fortunate shareholders.

      The British, generally, were welcomed by the native rulers and population. Unlike the zealous Spaniards who were conquering South America in the name of a redeeming God, the British stressed that it was in the name of another God, Mammon, that they had come to India. ‘Trade not territory’, the Company’s officers never ceased repeating, was their policy.

      Inevitably, however, as their trading activities grew, the Company’s officers became enmeshed in local politics and forced, in order to protect their expanding commerce, to intervene in the squabbles of the petty sovereigns on whose territories they operated. Thus began the irreversible process which would lead England to conquer India almost by inadvertence. On 23 June 1757, marching through a drenching rainfall at the head of 900 Englishmen of the 39th Foot and 2000 Indian sepoys, an audacious general named Robert Clive routed the army of a troublesome Nawab in the rice paddies outside a Bengali village called Plassey.

      Clive’s victory opened the gates of northern India. With it, the British conquest of India truly started. Their merchants gave way to the builders of empire; and territory, not trade, became the primary concern of the British in India.

      The century that followed was one of conquest. Although they were specifically instructed by London to avoid ‘schemes of conquest and territorial expansion’, a succession of ambitious governor generals relentlessly embraced the opposite policy. In less than a century a company of traders was metamorphosed into a sovereign power, its accountants and traders into generals and governors, its race for dividends into a struggle for imperial authority. Without having set out to do so, Britain had become the successor to the Moghul Emperors.

      From the outset, her intent was always one day to relinquish the possessions she had so inadvertently acquired. As early as 1818, the Marquess of Hastings noted: ‘A time, not very remote, will arrive when England will, on sound principles of policy, wish to relinquish the domination which she has gradually and unintentionally assumed over this country.’ Empires, however, were more naturally acquired than disposed of and the moment foreseen by Hastings was to be considerably more remote than the Marquess might have imagined.

      British rule nonetheless brought India benefits of considerable magnitude, Pax Britannica and reasonable facsimiles of Britain’s own legal, administrative and educational institutions. Above all, it gave India the magnificent gift which was to become the common bond of its diverse peoples and the conduit of their revolutionary aspirations, the English language.

      The first manifestation of those aspirations came in the savage Mutiny in 1857. Its most important result was an abrupt change in the manner in which Britain governed India. After 258 years of fruitful activities, the Honourable East India Company’s existence was terminated. Responsibility for the destiny of 300 million Indians was transferred to the hands of a 39-year-old woman whose tubby figure would incarnate the vocation of the British race to dominate the world, Queen Victoria. Henceforth, Britain’s authority was to be exercised by the crown, represented in India by a kind of nominated king ruling a fifth of humanity, the Viceroy.

      With that change began the period the world would most often associate with the British Indian experience, the Victorian era. Its predominant philosophy was a concept frequently enunciated by the man who was its self-appointed poet laureate – Rudyard Kipling – that white Englishmen were uniquely fitted to rule ‘lesser breeds without the law’. The responsibility for governing India, Kipling proclaimed, had been ‘placed by the inscrutable decree of providence upon the shoulders of the British race’.

      Ultimately, responsibility was exercised at any given time by a little band of brothers, 2000 members of the Indian Civil Service, the ICS, and 10,000 British officers of the Indian Army. Their authority over 300 million people was sustained by 60,000 British soldiers and 200,000 men of the Indian Army. No statistics could measure better than those the nature of Britain’s rule in India after 1857 or the manner in which the Indian masses were long prepared to accept it.

      The India of those men was that picturesque, romantic India of Kipling’s tales. Theirs was the India of gentlemen officers in plumed shakos riding at the head of their turbaned sepoys; of district magistrates lost in the torrid wastes of the Deccan; of sumptuous imperial balls in the Himalayan summer capital of Simla; cricket matches on the manicured lawns of Calcutta’s Bengal Club; polo games on the sunburnt plains of Rajasthan; tiger hunts in Assam; young men. sitting down to dinner in black ties in a tent in the middle of the jungle, solemnly proposing their toast in port to the King Emperor while jackals howled in the darkness around them; officers in scarlet tunics pursuing rebellious Pathan tribesmen in the sleet or unbearable heat of the Frontier; the India of a caste unassailably certain of its superiority, sipping whiskies and soda on the veranda of its Europeans Only clubs. Those men were, generally, the products of families of impeccable breeding but less certain wealth; the offspring of good Anglican country churchmen; talented second sons of the landed aristocracy; sons of school-masters, classics professors and above all of the previous generation of the British in India. They mastered on the playing fields and in the classrooms of Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Haileybury, the disciplines that would fit them to rule an empire: excellence at ‘games’, a delight in ‘manly pursuits’, the ability to absorb the whack of a headmaster’s cane or declaim the Odes of Horace and the verses of Homer. ‘India’, noted lames S. Mill, ‘was a vast system of outdoor relief for Britain’s upper classes.’

      It represented challenge and adventure, and its boundless spaces an arena in which England’s young men could find a fulfilment their island’s more restricted shores might deny them. They arrived on the docks of Bombay at nineteen or twenty, barely able to raise a stubble on their chins. They went home thirty-five or forty years later, their bodies scarred by bullets, by disease, a panther’s claws or a fall on the polo field, their faces ravaged by too much sun and too much whisky, but proud of having lived their part of a romantic legend.

      A young man’s adventure usually began in the theatrical confusion of Bombay’s Victoria Station. There, under its red brick neo-Gothic arches, he discovered for the first time the face of the country in which he’d chosen to spend his life. It was usually a shock, a whirlpool of frantically scurrying, shoving, shouting human beings, darting in and out among jumbles of cases, valises, bundles, sacks, bales, all scattered in the halls of the station without any apparent regard for order. The heat, the crisp smell of spices and urine evaporating in the sun were overwhelming. Men in sagging dhotis and flapping night shirts, women in saris, bare arms and feet jangling with the gold bracelets on their wrists and ankles, Sikh soldiers in scarlet turbans, emaciated sadhus in orange and yellow loincloths, deformed children and beggars thrusting out their stunted limbs for baksheesh, all assailed him. The relief of a young lieutenant or newly appointed officer of the ICS on boarding the dark green cars of the Frontier Mail or the Hyderabad Express was usually enormous. Inside, behind the curtains of the first-class carriages, a familiar world waited, a world of deep brown upholstered seats and a dining-car with fresh white linen and champagne chilling in silver buckets; above all, a world in which the only Indian face he was likely to encounter was that of the conductor collecting his tickets. That was the first lesson a young officer learned. England ran India, but the English dwelt apart.

      A harsh schooling awaited the empire’s young servants at the end of their first passage to India. They were sent to remote posts, covered by primitive roads and jungle tracks, inhabited, if at all, by only a few Europeans. By the time they were twenty-four or twenty-five, they