Play It Again, Sahib

Anderson’s distinction might seem awkward; many in Britain would see little contradiction between the two. To Indians the difference is more readily apparent. Imperial Rome was sustained for centuries partly because citizenship—and higher advancement—was open to all comers. It was not unusual for a Spaniard to govern Gaul or a senator to come from Germany. The idea of Rome was not ethnic.

Imagine if the British empire had followed this pattern. Not only would the Indian Civil Service have been opened up to people of brown skin much sooner—it was not until the early 20th century that such avenues became available—but they would also have taken up posts in other parts of empire, including London itself: a Malay viceroy of India, an Indian governor of South Africa, perhaps even an Indian prime minister of Britain? Certainly an American.

Counterfactual musings of this kind might seem idle. But they do serve the purpose of sharpening one’s understanding of what actually did happen. Judd, a London-based historian, is the latest in a long line to produce a general account of Britain’s imperial engagement with India. His book, The Lion and the Tiger (India is the tiger), offers no new material and makes no claim to fresh interpretations.

Given the wealth of general histories of the Raj—most recently from Lawrence James and John Keay—it’s hard to see why Judd took the trouble. But at just 200 elegantly written pages, his book is at least sweeter on brevity. In places it is also thought-provoking. Yet one’s final impression is that Judd would have better applied his mind to more focused questions.

With the condescension of posterity, many people, (not just Indians), caricature the Raj as an era when mutton chop-whiskered, pith-helmeted racists pillaged a land of which they knew little. This conventional wisdom does a disservice both to history, which normally comes in subtler shades, but also to the many amateur British orientalists and enthusiasts who opened up vast troves of academic inquiry to Indians of future generations. It’s also grossly unfair to the many officers and district collectors who gave tireless, if paternalistic, service to the communities they governed without falling sway to corruption or tyranny.

Yet it’s undeniable that by maintaining the sharp distinction between the rulers and the ruled—a divide that worsened as the Victorian era moved on—the Raj was essentially racist.

It is no good arguing—as many in Britain do—that words such as "racist" are ahistorical, or that since the term is new-fangled, it was meaningless to the actors themselves. I doubt very much there is a Latin phrase for racially tolerant. But the Romans—and the Mughals for that matter—faced no censure when inter-marrying with the populations they governed.

More to the point, there were many Victorians, including Queen Victoria, who felt disquiet and expressed distaste on hearing tales of what we would call racism. The word might be modern. But there were Victorians who were racist and there were those who were not.

I have heard people defend Winston Churchill’s disparaging views on Indians with the same logic—that hindsight is facile. But a majority of Churchill’s fellow parliamentarians—including my maternal grandfather, Godfrey Nicholson, a Conservative MP, who was passionately in favour of Indian home rule—knew why Churchill was wrong without the benefit of modern vocabulary.

History, they say, has to be rewritten from the vantage point of each new generation. As a contemporary Briton from a society that can hopefully make some claim to be reinventing itself as multiracial, questions such as these loom larger.

Judd provides a polished introduction for readers coming fresh to the absorbing history of the Raj. But if you have digested a few in this genre, it is hard to sustain interest in another rehearsal of the Clives, Hastings and Curzons who bestrode India.

To be sure, Indian historians—both Marxist and liberal—have provided scholarly interpretations of the Raj from many vantage points, including the subaltern. But there is a foreign and non-academic market out there that is largely bypassed. They have little taste for nostalgia. But they are open to original history. Judd might address his next book to them.

(The author is the New Delhi-based South Asia bureau chief of the Financial Times.)