David Gilmour - The British in India : Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience

Humphrey Trevelyan, Political Agent in central India, greets Bhawani Singh, the young Maharaja of Chhatarpur, at the latters investiture in 1942.

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To Ramachandra Guha and Sujata Keshavan

and of course for Sarah

In the thirty years since I began research in the archives of British India, I have accumulated debts to many archivists and librarians as well as to individuals who have conserved the letters and diaries of their ancestors and who have generously allowed me to study them. Most of the research for this book was done in the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge, the Imperial War Museum in London, the National Army Museum, the National Library of Scotland, the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi, the Bodleian Library and Balliol and Oriel Colleges in Oxford, and above all in the old India Office Library, which moved across the Thames to become the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library and is now called the Asia, Pacific and African Collections. I would like to thank the staff of all these institutions. I am also grateful to the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA), not only for its work on the preservation of British burial grounds but also for its compilation of cemetery records, its publication of recollections of the Raj, and its excellent journal, Chowkidar , edited by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones.

Many people, some of whom are alas now dead, encouraged me to use the papers and documents in their possession. They include Denis Blakeway, Roger Bramble, Richard Calvocoressi, Anne Chisholm, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, Tam Dalyell, Wendy M. Davis, Richard Dawkins, Martin Fearn, Antoinette Galbraith, Patsy Grigg, Francis Hamilton, the Marquess of Lansdowne, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, Sara Morrison, Nigel Nicolson, Jean Phillips, the Marquess of Salisbury, Helen Shaw Stewart, Xan Smiley, Bridget Swithinbank, Anne Tatham, Judy Urquhart, Audrey Verity and Ben Watson. My thanks to them all.

Many other individuals, in Britain and in India, have helped me in diverse ways, and for their assistance I would like to thank Ram Advani, Antony Barnes, Richard Bingle, David Blake, Mark Brayne, Margaret Cassidy, Alec Cobbe, Charles and Monika Correa, Sunanda and Sumita Datta-Ray, Keshav Desiraju, Patric Dickinson, Sir Stephen Egerton, Lord Egremont, Lawrence Fleming, Alan Gordon Walker, Major Humphrey Gore, Sir Max Hastings, John Hemming, Caroline Jackson, Subinda Kaur, Kate Kee (Trevelyan), Susanna Kerr, Sujata Keshavan, Sunil Khilnani, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Arvind Mehrotra, Nandini Mehta, David Morton Jack, Brigitte Nix, V. C. Pande, Jane Pomeroy, Phillida Purvis, Shashi Sen, Geetanjali Shree, Anne Stephens, Richard Symonds, Gina Thomas, Lord (Hugh) Thomas, Riccardo Tomacelli, Deirdre Toomey, Sriram Venkatakrishnan, Charles Vyvyan, and Tim and Erica Watson.

The historians Judith Brown, Ramachandra Guha and Srinath Raghavan have each read the entire manuscript, and so have my wife, Sarah, and my son, Alexander. I am grateful to them all first for the undertaking and subsequently for their wisdom and advice.

Gillon Aitken, a child of the Raj, was my agent for many years until his death in 2016. He gave me much encouragement for this book, as did his partner in the firm, the wise and supportive Clare Alexander. Once again I have been very fortunate with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. At Penguin the incomparable Stuart Proffitt has been an inspirational editor, Ben Sinyor and Richard Duguid have overseen the publication process with cheerful efficiency, and Sarah Day has been a copy-editor both intuitive and precise. At Farrar, Straus and Giroux the book was accepted by the wonderful Elisabeth Sifton, my editor for many years, and was subsequently handled with enthusiasm and skill by Laird Gallagher. My thanks to all.

As usual I have relied heavily on Sarah and my children for their support during a book which has taken an inordinately long time to research and write. The decision of three of my children to have babies during the month scheduled for the final chapter may have delayed the book a little, but it added to the gaiety of life and helped preserve the sanity of the author.

A few years ago the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly was surprised to learn that he had Indian ancestors. Appearing on the BBC television programme Who Do You Think You Are? , he was hoping to find out which country his great-grandmother Florence had been born in, Ireland or Scotland. In fact, as he soon discovered, she was born in India, in Bangalore, the daughter of Daniel Doyle, a labourer from County Wicklow who had enlisted in the British Army as a youth and was sent to India in 1856. For a few years in the south her fathers career had prospered. From a rifle regiment he was transferred to the Royal Horse Artillery, a more prestigious unit, where he received three good conduct medals and was promoted from gunner to corporal. Yet that, alas, was the high point of his career. To the amusement of his irreverent great-great-grandson, Daniels name was soon appearing repeatedly in the Regimental Defaulters Book; his misdemeanours were unspecified but seem to have consisted chiefly of violence and drunkenness. Eventually he was court-martialled and reduced to the ranks, and in 1866 he was admitted to hospital in Bangalore suffering from diarrhoea, dysentery, alcoholism and syphilis.

Salvation for Doyle came three years later with his marriage, after which his army report rated him as regular, good and temperate. The agent of this remarkable transformation was his wife, Margaret, the daughter of John OBrien, another Irish soldier in India, a private in the Madras Fusiliers whose regiment had been sent north to help counter the Rebellion of 1857.

As Connollys story suggests, much of Britains relationship with India, especially at a personal and popular level, has very quickly been forgotten. One cannot help wondering why his maternal grandmother, to whom he was very close, never told him that her own grandparents had lived in India and that her mother had been born in Bangalore; if she had been ashamed to admit her Indian ancestry, she could have left that bit out. The story also indicates how much of the British-Indian relationship, again at a personal level, was accidental. Most British people did not go to India to conquer it, govern it or amass a large fortune there. When Daniel Doyle enlisted in the 3rd Battalion of the 60th Rifles, he did not know that he would be sent to India and spend half his active life there as a soldier who would never be called upon to fight a battle. Like private soldiers, many British women and children lived in India by accident, without having chosen to do so; chance or unexpected circumstances had brought them there. If we look merely at Connollys own profession, the theatrical, we find a good number of future actors living fortuitously on the Subcontinent: a list of those who were born in India, or went to school or spent parts of their youth there, would include Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon, Norman Wisdom, Lindsay Anderson, Spike Milligan, Tom Stoppard, Felicity Kendal and Joanna Lumley, many of whom will appear later in this book. If we examine an even smaller profession, that of writers, we find that Thackeray, Kipling, Saki, Orwell (and Orwells second wife, Sonya) were all born in India.