Anatomy of the Raj – Russian Consular Report

The BookThis selection from Russian consular reports from Calcutta to St. Petersburg between the years 1912 and 1917 is available to the English-speaking readers for the first time. Translated, edited and with an introduction by the author the volume is an welcome edition to our library on the history of modern India in the early decades of the present century Primarily concerned with the period of Hardinge’s viceroyalty the Blue Book is replete with rare insights into the policy decisions of the British in India. In an impressive and densely documented introduction to the Blue Book the author has achieved singular distinction in tracing a meaning and a pattern in these disjointed official dispatches. He has sifted a rich range of original material drawn from public archives as well as private papers.
The author maintains that British response to Indian situations was determined but it lacked a firm consistency. The pyrrhic adventures of Curzon had been replaced by the cautious steps of Hardinge. Under the increasing strains of the war, the ascendancy of an endemic violent cult, growing pressure for concessions, the tenuous political internal security system of the country, the situation for the British had become desperate though not dangerous. The official reaction was given a fresh encouragement; commanding positions of Indian politics were sought to be manipulated; attempts were made to clothe the Raj with conservative public opinion as the capital of the empire moved away from the ‘pernicious’ influence of Calcutta to a more stable Delhi in search of the Mughal legitimacy. The work has an extensive coverage. The Delhi Durbar, the unpartition of Bangal, the Kanpur mosque incident, the rise of the young Turks within the Muslim League, the gradual disintegration of Turkey, the problems given rise to by the strategic and economic importance of Mesopotamia, Baghdad, Basra and Persian Gulf, the Ghadar movement, the Hindu and the Muslim university movements, the basic motivations of the education policy, the fiasco of the Islington commission, Indian’s contribution to the war, Gandhi’s last satyagraha in South Africa have been examined in the introduction with excellent cross-references. It is a study of the policies and responses of imperialism in India in an age of crisis making a decisive bid to maintain itself.

 

The AuthorSubash Chakravarty was educated at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He took his MA at the University of Delhi in 1960, followed by a Ph.d. in history at Cambridge University in 1967. From 1967 to 1968 he carried out research at the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi as its Senior Research Officer. He then taught history at St. Stephen’s College and the University of Delhi. In 1977 he received a Common-wealth Academic Staff Fellowship and spent a year at Selwyn College as a Visiting Fellow. In 1978 he was awarded a fellowship by the Indian Council of Historical Research to continue his work on the social and political history of India during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He is now Reader in modern Indian history in the University of Delhi.
Subash Chakravarty is a regular contributor in journals. His published works include: From Khyber to Oxus: A Study in Imperial Expansion, Orient Longman, Delhi 1976. He is, also engaged in writing a volume on the political architecture and town planning of Lutyen’s New Delhi.

 

PrefaceThe Russian Blue Book, containing secret consular despatches from Calcutta to St. Petersburg between the years 1912 and 1917, was published by the Soviet government in 1918 in keeping with the policy of friendship and amity with the peoples of the colonial world. Early in 1908 Lenin saw in the Russian defeat of 1905 by the Japanese, the Russian revolution of 1905, the revolution in Persia and the ‘young Turk’ revolution in Turkey, the signs of a forthcoming awakening of the oppressed peoples. “The revolutionary movement in various European and Asian states has recently made itself so felt that we are beginning to see emerging a new, incomparably higher, stage in the international proletarian struggle…. There is no doubt that the plunder of India by the English, which has been going on for centuries, and the current struggle of the ‘advanced’ Europeans againt Persian and Indian democracy, will nerve millions of proletarians in Asia to wage a victorious struggle (like that of the Japanese) against their oppressor.” It was maintained after the Chinese revolution of 1911 that the Asian bourgeoisie was capable of historically progressive action even though it was possible for forces represented by men like Yuan-Shi-Kai to succumb to narrow class interests. The empire, Lenin held in 1912, was basically a question of bread and butter for the British nation. He reminded the boastful claim of Cecil Rhodes: “If you do not want civil war, you must become imperialists.” The duty of the Soviet government, it was underlined, was “to shatter the centuries-long slumber” of the oppressed peoples of the East and to rouse them to fight imperialism. That obligation was almost mandatory for the East represented the ‘inexhaustible’ source of supply and the ‘most reliable’ rearguard of world imperialism.