CHAPTER X

THE COMPLETION OF THE COMPANY'S WORK

Dalhousie

1848-1856

THE Governor-Generalship of Lord Dalhousie is not only the last important stage, it is also the culmination, of the marvellous history of the East India Company. Dalhousie was a man of immense ability and energy, untiring industry, inflexible will, absolute honesty of purpose, and real devotion to the greatness of his own country and the welfare of her Indian subjects. For sheer force of personality two only among the long line of Governors deserve to be compared with himWarren Hastings and Wellesley. He was a greater man than Wellesley, because he took a far deeper view of the problems of government; he was a lesser man than Hastings because he lacked Hastings' generous humanity, his power of reading the minds of his colleagues and understanding the point of view of the millions whom he so resolutely laboured to serve. But not even Hastings took a more lofty view of his duty, or was more unsparing of himself; not even Wellesley was more masterful, more entirely responsible for the policy of the government which he controlled.

Dalhousie was a Scotchman bred on the Shorter Catechism, and he had a sort of ferocious logicality of mind and a resolute thoroughness which were curiously un-English: he was not a man of compromises and half-measures. Penetrated by a sense of the splendour of the Indian Empire, and of the vast

services which it could render to its subjects, he deliberately set himself to extend the control of the central government to the greatest possible extent over the whole population, to round off the Empire's boundaries, and so far as possible to put an end to the anomalies of dependent and often misgoverned states; at the same time, with a sort of fierce zeal, he laboured to accelerate the introduction of Western civilisation. Both processes he carried out with such swiftness and such sweeping thoroughness that while, on the one hand, India made more rapid progress in the eight years of his rule than in any other period of equal length, on the other hand her slow-moving and conservative people were perturbed and distressed by the feeling that their whole world was being turned upside down. This sense of unrest contributed in no small degree to bring about the appalling thunderbolt of the Mutiny which swiftly followed Dalhousie's retirement, and brought the era of the Company to a sudden close. Yet it would be a manifest injustice to think of Dalhousie solely or chiefly as the precursor and the partial cause of the Mutiny. His work was not destroyed by it, but survived the storm unimpaired, and indeed largely helped to subdue it. The distinctive features of Modern India have been far more deeply influenced by Dalhousie's work than by the Mutiny itself or by the constitutional adjustments which followed it.

Two great wars were waged during his reign, the second Sikh war and the second Burmese war. Both were followed by the annexation of large and rich provinces, the Punjab and Pegu (lower Burma). These annexations added to the homogeneity as well as the extent of the Empire. The first brought it to its natural frontier on the north-west, the mountains of Afghanistan; the second completed its control over the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal by uniting the two disjoined provinces of Arakan and Tenasserim, annexed in 1825. These two new provinces, and especially the Punjab, gave to the Governor-General an opportunity in which he rejoiced, of showing what miracles could be wrought in a short time by efficient administration (No. 136). But the wars were not

of his making. Both were defensive wars, brought on in the one case by the turbulent pride of the Sikh army, unable to digest its previous defeat; in the other case by the Burmese Government's self-complacent insolence and disregard of treaties. Though he certainly welcomed the rounding off of the frontiers, and undertook with zest the organisation of new provinces where he was unhampered by the compromises of predecessors, Dalhousie would willingly have avoided war in order to devote himself to the work of internal reorganisation in which he delighted; and he was probably sincerely opposed, as he repeatedly asserted, to wars of aggression against neighbouring states. He made haste, for example, to blot out the memory of the Afghan blunder by making friends with Dost Mahomed, and he established with the Gurkhas of Nipal relations of greater cordiality and confidence than had existed for many years.

But though he did not desire war, yet when war had to be waged he threw his whole strength into it; in all the long list of British Indian campaigns there is probably none which was more efficiently organised than the Burmese campaign of 1852. And when a war was over, Dalhousie had no tolerance for halfmeasures. His logical mind found no satisfaction in the establishment of dependent states with nerveless governments half controlled by English Residents. He was for outright annexation and immediate and efficient reorganisation. Note with what downright sledge-hammer arguments he justifies his complete suppression of the Sikh rule in the Punjab (No. 135).

He had equally little patience with the dependent states under "subsidiary alliances " which occupied the greater part of the area of India, and many of which were very inefficiently governed. The subsidiary system (which had been Wellesley's chief implement for the extension of British power) was an abomination in his eyes, for it ensured to the protected prince complete security to waste the revenues of his province on selfindulgence if he liked, while it imposed upon him no obligation to provide decent government. If it had been possible, Dalhousie would probably not have hesitated to abolish all the

dependent states and bring the whole of India under a single just, efficient, and systematic rule. Of course it was not possible. The Company was pledged to the dependent states by a whole series of treaties; and even apart from that, the wisest students of Indian affairs did not share Dalhousie's view but believed that the existence of the native states was a good thing in itself, that it need not necessarily result in misgovernment, and that these states gave opportunities for invaluable experiments in the adjustment of East and West, and formed a most useful training-ground for Indian statesmen. Later experience has shown that men of the school of Henry Lawrence and Sleeman were right; and while some native states still stand in need of regulation and control, others have done quite admirable work. Variety is always preferable to a rigid uniformity. But though Dalhousie's view was one-sided, it was the product of his burning zeal for good government.

It was this point of view which led him to adopt the measures for which he has been most severely and most justly criticised, and which contributed in a large degree to produce the unrest that found its vent in the Mutiny. Starting with the postulate that it was not only the right but the duty of the paramount power to lose no legal opportunity of suppressing dependent states and substituting its own direct rule (see No. 137), he carried out a series of annexations on a very great scale the result of which was to bring under direct British rule an area of about 150,000 square miles previously ruled by dependent princes. His chief justification for these annexations was what has been called "the doctrine of Lapse," the doctrine that on the failure of direct heirs the dependent State lapses to the paramount power unless a new arrangement is made. In applying this doctrine he simply declined to recognise the Hindu practice of adoption, though it had been repeatedly recognised by the British Government in earlier years, and was regarded as having the fullest religious and legal sanction. On these grounds he annexed the great province of Nagpur-the Mahratta realm of the Bhonsla family-though in this case he

had some justification in the fact that the Raja had not actually nominated an heir before his death (No. 138); and a number of smaller states including Sattara and Jhansi, though in the case of Sattara the original treaty with the Company (1819) had guaranteed the State in perpetuity to the reigning prince and his "heirs and successors," a phrase which certainly, by Hindu law, covered an adopted son (No. 139). On the same ground he cancelled or revised the huge pensions paid to several dethroned or degraded princes, notably the ex-Peshwa (who had been made Raja of Bithur and had adopted Nana Sahib as his son), the nominal Nawab of Bengal, and the nominal Nawab of the Carnatic. As these pensions formed a great drain upon the resources of the Empire for no equivalent return, the suppression of them is capable of defence. But they left a great bitterness in the dispossessed, and a feeling of nervousness and insecurity among the surviving princes. This had its effect in the Mutiny. Two of the most implacable enemies of British power in that great upheaval were among the victims of the doctrine of Lapse: Nana Sahib of Cawnpore, and the fierce, heroic Rani of Jhansi, who, woman though she was, fought to the bitter end. Again, the Nizam was forced to yield the rich province of Berar, which had been the reward of his faithfulness to the paramount power in the Mahratta wars, in order to pay off arrears due for the subsidiary force maintained for his defence. Finally, the oldest ally of the Company, the Nawab-Vizier (now called the King or Shah) of Oudh, was dethroned, and his whole realm directly annexed, as a punishment for misgovernment. This, the last and the most striking of Dalhousie's annexations, contributed more directly to the Mutiny than any of the rest; Oudh was almost the only region where the rising was supported not only by soldiers but by many of the landholders. Yet it is the most defensible of all the annexations. The anarchy and oppression that reigned in Oudh were hideous beyond words. They had been the cause of continual protests on the part of the British Government for more than fifty years; and the treaty of 1801, on which the Nawab's security rested, had