Crowds gather at Government House in Calcutta to hear Queen Victoria’s Proclamation ‘to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India’ on November 1st, 1858. The Government of India Act that August had transferred control over India from the East India Company, a government agency, to the Crown itself. John Bright MP had urged Parliament, though without success, to take a different course, and begin a process that would lead step-by-step towards the establishment of five or six sovereign Princely States, governed by Indians and in an Indian manner.
Part 1 of 2
I SAID then that I did not believe,* as I have said now, that a Government in Calcutta could ever efficiently direct the affairs of that country or legislate for it; that it could not do its duty to nations speaking twenty languages, comprising, as it is said, now more than 200,000,000 of people — one-sixth the population of the globe.*
I argued that it was necessary, and would some time become imperative, that the Government of India should be so changed that it should be divided into five or six separate and entirely independent presidencies;* that by that means the government of every district should be brought nearer to the people. And thus if the time should come — and it will come — when the power of England, from some cause or other, is withdrawn from India, then each one of these states would be able to sustain itself as a compact, as a self-governing community.
* In a speech in the House of Commons on June 24th, 1858.
* In 2019, the population of India was believed to stand at a little over 1.35bn, almost a fifth of the global population. From Bright’s remark, we may deduce with reasonable confidence what his attitude to the European Union — population (2020) about 445,000,000, with 23 official languages — might have been.
* See a map of British India in 1880 at Wikimedia Commons, showing the various Presidencies and Provinces at the time.
Précis
In 1877, John Bright told a meeting of the India Association in Manchester that nineteen years earlier, when the British Raj began, he had urged parliament to plan ahead for Indian independence. He guessed that centralised government of so many people and languages was not sustainable, and advised them to prepare the Princely States for self-government. (55 / 60 words)
Part Two
The Maharaja of Travancore, Ayilyam Thirunal Rama Varma, in 1875 or 1876, shortly before John Bright gave this speech to members of the Indian Association in Manchester. The Madras Presidency repeatedly praised the progressive governance of Travancore, where the Maharajah’s capable Dewan (chief administrator) Sir T. Madhava Rao reduced taxes and state debt while helping to develop agriculture, education, healthcare and transport. Bright, however, believed passionately that such Indian Princely States were not simply to be congratulated; they were to be readied for the independence they deserved.
I BELIEVE that it is our duty not only to govern India well now for our own sakes and to satisfy our own conscience, but so to arrange its government and so to administer it that we should look forward to the time when India will have to take up her own government, and administer it in her own fashion.*
By doing this, I think we should be endeavouring to make amends for the original crime upon which much of our power in India is founded,* and for the many mistakes which have been made by men whose intentions have been good. If we seek thus to deal with those millions, and men in after ages condemn our fathers for the policy which for the time bound India to England,* they may award praise to us and to those who come after us for that we have striven to give them that good government and that freedom which He who is supreme over all lands and all peoples will in His own good time make the possession of all His children.
* Bright did not think this could be done straightaway. Although he recognised that his proposal for moving towards six or seven strong and independent states was controversial, “that would be a thousand times better than our being withdrawn from it now when there is no coherence amongst those twenty nations, and when we should find the whole country, in all probability, lapse into chaos and anarchy, and into sanguinary and interminable warfare.”
* Bright had said earlier, “the empire has been built up by means which I am afraid have been instrumental in building up almost all great empires, by ambition, and crime, and conquest.” Bright was of course not so naive as to suppose that rival European Powers in India such as the French, the Dutch or the Portuguese would have done better, or left India alone. “There is nothing in the world more clear than this,” Bright added a little later, “that India is essentially a country at this moment of great and abject poverty, and that the reputation of its wealth has only been founded upon the fact that it is a country which marauders have always found it easy to plunder.”
* One such critic in Bright’s own day was Major Thomas Evans Bell, a former employee of the East India Company. When Bell went on a speaking tour of the USA, Bright wrote to him a strongly-worded letter telling him that if Bell wanted to help India, instead of scolding the British for yesterday’s mistakes he might like to scold the Americans for today’s high tariffs on Indian trade. See The Righting of Wrongs.
Précis
Bright stressed that readying India for self-government would not only benefit Britain in the sort term, but also lead later generations to look back with pride on their forefathers, and make up for some of the British Empire’s misdeeds; for self-governance is a blessing that God wishes to give all nations in due time. (54 / 60 words)
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