Watershed in India 1914-1922

This is a study of the management of British policy in India during the First World War and the four following years. Although the Indian Empire had in fact passed its zenith by 1914, it

then appeared to almost all contemporaries as likely to last indefinitely. Despite a slow extension of political interest among Indian intellectuals, there were no serious presures for drastic constitutional change. But things so changed that in 1917, at the nadit of Britain's fortunes in the war, the British Cabinct authorised a statement which, although they did not themselves fully grasp in implications, was soon generally assumed in India to be a commitment to an eventual transfer of power. In 1919, the British faced their most serious challenge in India since 1857; in 1921 a new constitution was introduced which was intended to be an experiment moving towards responsible government'; and by 1922 ambivalent handling of a series of agitations had pricked the government's reputation as being invulnerable. There was open talk in Indis, among Europeans as well as Indiam, of an early end to the Raj and in some areas a collapse of society seemed possible.

At that point opinion in Britain woke up and, under direct orders from the Cabinet, the Government of India re-established their control. They achieved this with remarkable case; but the damage which had been done to Beitinis perstiger was permanent. Although the autumn of the Raj lamed a further 25 years, im fate had been settled between 1914 and 1932: these years were the watershed of British rule in India, and indeed of the Brital Empine.

Some historians of the closing decades of the Indian Empire have been tempted to assume that, because British rule ended in 1947, ins end had always been inevitable; and that, because it was inevitable, it was a good thing. Some go further and deshace from those proposi tions that any British policies which delayed the denoorment were unwise or even perhaps wickind; and that the main, indeed perhaps the sole, objective of the Raj should have been to placate the Hindu politicians who led the Congress party. These writers import into the past the currently accepted anathema on 'colonialism, thereby darken ing historical judgment and selling their story backwards. Thus, measures taken by the British to check disorder, very similar in kind to those adopted by their successors for the same purpose, are often dubbed in quite serious works as imperialist repression.