33
Chapter II
NASCENT NATIONALISM IN THE PRINCELY STATES
While political questions, the growth of polity in British India and its ripple effect in the Princely States vexed the Crown of England and the
Government of India, the developments in education, communication and telegraphs played the well known role of unifying India in a manner hitherto unknown.
It was during the viceroyalty of Lord Duffrine that the Indian
National Congress was formed under the patronage of A.O. Hume. In
1885, and throughout the second half of the 19th Century, there existed in
Calcutta and other metropolitan towns in India a small but energetic group of non-official Britons-journalists, teachers, lawyers, missionaries, planters and traders - nicknamed ’interlopers’ by the Company’s servants who cordially detested them. The interlopers brought their politics into India and behaved almost exactly as they would have done in England. They published their rival newspapers, founded schools and missions and 34
organised clubs, associations and societies of all sorts. They kept a close
watch on the doings of the Company’s officials. Whenever their interests
were adversely affected by the decisions of the government, they raised a
hue and cry in the press, organised protest meetings sent in petitions,
waited in deputations and even tried to influence Parliament and public
opinion in England and who by their percept and example they taught their
Indian fellow subjects the art of constitutional agitation.'
In fact, the seminal role of the development of the press in effective
unification within the country and in the spread of the ideas of democracy
and freedom that transcended barriers which separated the provinces from
the Princely India is not too obvious. It was the press which established
regular contact between the moffusil and metropolitan centres, between one province and another and between the British provinces and the Indian
States. All those who could read English were therefore able to know what was happening all over the country. In the beginning of the nineteenth
century it took about a month before newspapers reached from Calcutta to
Bombay. But after the introduction of the steam navigation in the eighteen
thirtys, the time was shortened to less than a fortnight. The Indian owned 35 press was closely modelled upon the English owned press and though its influence in the first half of the Nineteenth Century was almost entirely local, it carried news about other provinces of India to a large number of people served by it within a particular region. Perhaps the earliest and the most significant effect of the growth ol the Press in India was to reinforce the cultural and social bonds that already existed between different communities in the country and bring them into closer and more intimate contact with each other. The press which may be said to have had a meaningful ^genesis in Bengal was a concurrent development with the growth of political consciousness and constitutional agitation in India.
However, it was Maharashtra, with epicenters in Bombay and Poona, that carried the torch to unexpected heights with vociferous newspapers and journals that were in Marathi, English as well as bilingual. In a vast country like India which had few representative institutions and where forms of agitation were either underdeveloped or only resorted to spasmodically, the press provided a regular, easy and potent means of constitutional agitation. 36
It was not long before that the Fourth Estate in India established itself as a tribune of the people and a permanent opposition to the government by the early years of the twentieth century that brought the
Viceroyalty of Lord Curzon to a close. In a Report on Native Press (1905) in the Presidency of Bombay- it was recorded that "out of the total of 171 newspapers and 45 periodicals 27% were in the city of Bombay, 16 or 9% were in the Native States. Of the 171 publications 83 or 49% were in the hands of the Brahmans of whom 31 were Chittapavans and 19 were
Deshasthas. Of the newspapers, 14 or 8.5% were in English 56 or 34% in
Marathi, and the rest were in either Gujarathi, Hindi, Kanarese, Urdu, bilingual or even trilingual. More over the circulation registered a sharp increase for example the Dyan Prakash, a Marathi daily moved from a circulation of 250 to 1200." It was ironical that English education, which had been deliberately introduced in Maharashtra by Monstuart Elphinstone and his successors to wean the people from the old feudal order and to strengthen their loyalty to British rule, produced the very class which was a challenge to that rule. 37
The life and career of Sardar Gopal Hari Deshmukh (1823-92), author and social reformer, popularly called ’Lokhitwadi’, is illustrative of the influence that new education initiated by Elphinstone and nurtured by his successors had on the first generation of progressive Maharashtrians brought up in British India and the Princely States. Rao Bahadur G.S.
Sardesai, the author o f ’Marathi Riyasal:’ writes that the Deshinukhs hailed from the village of Pavas in the Konkan. They were chittapavans who had migrated to the court in Poona during the times of Peshwa Sawai
Madhavrao in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Deshmukhs who had been one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Peshwa regime, had suffered under the British conquest of 1818’ having lost a large part of their extensive estate. It is known that Hari Govind Deshmukh was in the employment of Bapu Gokhaie, the general of the Maratha armies. Gopal
Hari, the son of Hari Govind was educated at the Poona English School
(est. 1823) and was employed as an Assistant Translator of Government
Records. He joined the Bombay Judicial Service in 1852 and retired as
Judge of the Small Cause Court in 1879. Gopal Hari Deshmukh was member of the Bombay Legislative Council from 1880-82 and was 38 appointed Diwan of Ratlam in 1884. He died in 1892. He was given the honorific ’Rao Bahadur’ and created first class Sardar of the Deccan.
Deshmukh was not soured by the misfortunes that had befallen his family during his father’s life time nor alienate him from the new order. On the contrary he tried to hasten the process of reconciliation with the British rule. He was one of the founders of the Dyanaprakash in Poona and a pioneer of Marathi journalism. He considered the British conquest of
Maharashtra fundamentally different in that the British had finally put an end to anarchy and introduced standards of efficiency in administration.
In ’Shatapatre’, a collection of hundred letters he addressed to the people of India, published in the ’Prabhakar’ of Bombay, between the years
1848-50, Gopal Hari openly admired the new concepts that the British had introduced into Indian policy. He wrote at length about equality before law, freedom of speech and worship but especially of the maxim that the state existed for the welfare of the people and not for the aggrandizement of a family or caste. Foreign rule, with all its faults, struck Deshmukh as a necessary stage in the training of the country for self government. He held up before his compatriots the vision of an Indian Parliament, but he 39
argued that the political reforms of the West, could not be adopted without
purging Indian society of outdated ritual, glaring caste inequality and grievous disabilities imposed on women/
On 1st February 1852 with his associate Yashwantrao Madhav Raste,
Gopal Hari founded the Deccan Association for the purpose of "ensuring
security of land tenure, cheap and speedy justice, allocation of salt tax (later
made famous by the Mahatma’s Dandi March in 1921), equalization of customs duties on export and imports, an increased expenditure on education and public works, the prevention of ’drain’ of Indian capital to
Britain, preference to educated Indians in public employment, equal number of Europeans with natives to have seats in the Legislative Council of India".
But the Poona Deccan Association died a premature death as local British officers nipped it in the bud.
Fifteen years had to pass before Poona saw the birth of another organisation called the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (PSS) or the Poona
Association. It was only after 1870 that the PSS gained momentum. The
Sabha during its first ten years represented the intelligence and wealth of
the local community. While most of its members were Hindus, the Sabha 40 also had a fair number of Parsis, Muslims and Christians. It must be mentioned that of the Hindus, the majority were Brahmins. This was not unusual when we consider the fact tiiat the Brahmins were the traditional as well as the modern elite of Poona and the Deccan in general. The more progress!^ of the Indian Princ£S_- Aundh, Akalkot, Jaurkhindi, Jath
Kurunwad and Sangli — Chitpavan brahmans all, were not just members, but office bearers, though figure heads. While in the early years the
Sabha’s most active members were G.V. Joshi, S.H. Sathe’ and S.H.
Chiplonkar,^ it was "the arrival in Poona in November 1871 of Mahadev
Govind Ranade then subordinate judge, that infused new life and vigour into the Sabha"^ Ranade though a government servant took a keen interest in public affairs. He was a versatile man — a scholar, a judge, an educationist, a religious and social reformer, an economist and a politician.
Soon he became the mentor of the Sabha. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha did much to stimulate political activity in Western India. Thanks to the example and exertions of the Sabha, political associations grew up in many parts of the Deccan, spanning the Bombay Presidency. These associations were closely modeled on the Sabha and maintained contacts with it. The 41 reasons for the ultimate success of the Sarvajanik Sabha was its representative character. In order to become a member of the Sabha a person was required to produce a ’Mukhtiarnama’ (Power of Attorney) signed by at least fifty adults, authorising him to speak on their behalf on public matters.* Within four months of its launching the Sabha had about
100 members who had acquired mukhatiarnamas from about 7,000 people.''
The years that closed the decad
Indian armies were sent to Afghanistan fighting disastrous wars causing ripples throughout the subcontinent. Lord Lytton’s undisguised racial- slanted policies, especially towards the vernacular press antogonised educated Indians. These were also the years of the mysterious ’Ramoshi’ rebels led by Vasudev Balwant Phadke, an obscure brahmin youth, who organised dacoities in the famine ravaged countryside and whose "...mind was turned against the English and 1 wish to ruin them. From morning till 42 night, bathing, eating, sleeping, I was brooding over this, and I could get no proper rest. At midnight I used to get up and think how this ruin might be done until I was as one mad." Phadke was arrested on 21st July 1879 and incaserated at the Yeravada Jail in Poona from where he was sentenced to transportation for life and sent to Aden. He died in 1883 while making a vain attempt to escape. While it is true that Phadke had a personal grievance against the British in that he had been refused leave to visit his dying mother when employed in the Military Accounts Office in Poona, the
British were alarmed at the gentry who seemed to admire Phadke and gave him an ovation at the Poona Railway Station when he landed there on his way to the Yeravada Jail.
In fact Sir Richard Temple, the Governor of Bombay, seemed to have become obsessed with the thought of a Maharashtrian resurgence that would inevitably challenge British Imperialism. In his book ’Men and
Events of My Times in India’.Temple describes how armed with a book on Maratha history he would comb the western ghats hoping to find "the lairs, the retreats and strangleholds in this mountain range which had sustained the Maratha resistance and baffled the armaments of the Afghan 43
horse or the artillery of the Great Mughal". This preoccupation so
completely seized Sir Richard Temple that he failed to see that it wasn’t imaginary guerrillas hiding in the Western Ghats, but the products of
’English’ schools and colleges in Maharashtra that would oppose the
British. He wrote to Lord Lytton on 9th July 1879, "barely sixty years have elapsed since the Chitpavan ceased to be rulers -- the memory of all this is still to this day comparatively fresh in the minds of Natives, fresher far than the memory of the great political events of Indian History. Now the Chitapavan tribe still exists in vigour and prosperity. They are inspired with national sentiment and with an ambition bounded only with the bounds of India itself..."
The movement to establish schools and colleges that imparted
’English’ education independent of government aid or sponsored schools was begun by Bal Gangadhar Tilak" and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar.‘“ The
Fergusson College and the New English School in Poona were the outcome of the innovative and dedicated mission that Tilak and Agarkar had undertaken. Bal Gangadhar Tilak belonged to a Chitapavan brahmin family whose family had migrated to Poona from Ratnagiri in 1867. Though Tilak 44 lost his father in 1872, he was able to complete his education and graduated from the Deccan College, Poona in 1876 in the first division, with mathematics as one of his subjects.
Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, unlike Tilak who had inherited a sizeable patrimony, grew up in oppressive poverty and would have been obliged to abandon studies and take up a job at the age of twelve, had it not been for a kindly relative who offered to finance him. Despite the obvious differences of background that Tilak and Agarkar came from, they seemed to have a community of thought and were imbibed with a desire to devote themselves entirely to public service. Inevitably the two were drawn together and their college years standing together at the very threshold of life."
In the Indian Princely States through out India, and particularly in western Maharashtra the Curzon years were catalytic phase that spawned political awareness and subsequent popular movement in the Indian States.
It was Curzon’s zeal and indefatigable efforts to force the rulers to become responsible and ensure sound and justifiable government to their subjects, that resulted in the Viceroy’s backing up his repeated, strongly worded 45
speeches with issuing executive orders to achieve the goal. It is, however,
true that the underlying emotion to Curzon’s unbridled vigorous actions vis
a vis the Indian Princes was the imperialist views which dictated to him that
the Princes must be used to subserve Imperial Interests. In fact Curzon
found the Princes so lacking in ‘intelligence’ and ‘devotion to duty’ that
they made on the whole ’a disappointing study’.'" In his public utterances,
though he referred to them as ’partners and colleagues’ he was exasperated
by the frequent foreign tours that the Princes undertook. The Gaikwar of
Baroda and the Maharaja of Puddukotai frequently incurred Curzon’s wrath.
Especially the latter who had contrived to spend a mere two years in his
State (in Tamil Nadu) since his accession to the gadi in 1894. Curzon did
not really object to the Princes who wished to pay homage to the King
Emperor in England. What he found unacceptable was their extravagant
spending sprees at the expense of their States. But there was yet another
reason. "Nothing could nauseate him more than the spectacle of what he
once described as "English ladies... of the highest rank curtseying before
the most insignificant princes and treating them as if they were royalty."'-’
This and the general uncontrolled expenditure of the revenues of their 46 states'* Ciirzon tried to force the Princes to accept the scrutiny of their
Civil Lists. His policy towards the Princes was based upon the contention that it was the duty of the Princes actively and vigorously work towards establishing their place in the Imperial system. To this end he made tireless efforts to translate principle into practice. "Each year political officers were expected to submit voluminous administrative reports on the states under their control. These reports included discussions on the character and capacity of the princes and their advisers and their attitudes towards the government." Curzon’s ultiinate intention was that the Foreign Department should prepare a ’Native States Year Book’ which would provide an index by which the normality or abnormality of any particular state in any detail of its administration might at once be tested.The proposal was never implemented but the axe still fell heavily on those who showed no signs of responding to Curzon’s shock therapy.'^
Curzon made a personal study of twenty states that were under the control of the governments of Bengal, Madras, the Northwest Frontier
Province and the Punjab. He concUulcd that "no less than eleven states have been or are the subject of the gravest suspicion’. Curzon thought that 47 the condition of the State of Patiala in the Punjab was particularly serious.
"The premier Sikh Prince Maharaja F British administration cannot escape responsibility., by a lack of persistence, continuity and definite principles in methods we have brought about results of which we deplore."'*^ Curzon tried to devise a scheme in which the Princes of India could participate to improve their caliber because he recognised that left to themselves the Princes of India would find it singularly impossible to effect any self improvement in the foreseeable future. His proposal of establishing a Council of Princes consisting of twenty-five princes who contributed to the Imperial Troop Service was a non-starter. However one of his ideas - the Cadet Scheme — did fructify. At the time of the Boer War in South Africa, Curzon had suggested a "cadet scheme to enable selected princes to become eligible for commission 48 in the Indian Army." In May 1905 the Maharaja of Bhavnagar and the heir to the Maharaja of Jaipur were granted commission having served a three years probationary period as cadets.H is primary motive in introducing this scheme appears to have been the urge of offer a meaningful occupation to the Princes, and save them "from bejewelled frivolous idleness". In perhaps his most profound utterances on the states the Viceroy declared, "There is not a day in my life in which I do not say to myself ’What is going to happen to this country in 20 years or 50 years hence?’ And I say with the profoundest conviction that any Viceroy or any Government that adopted the attitude of letting all these Princes and Chiefs run to their own ruin, would be heaping up immeasuraliie disaster in the future.""' The fact was that while Canning’s ’breakwater’ theory confirmed that the princes had potential as imperial allies., it was only Lord Lytton and Lord Curzon who actually tried to convert theory into a workable model. But the half-hearted and erratic effort failed to integrate the Indian states within the framework of the empire, as the Mughals had done so successfully before them. This unsuccessful policy was perhaps more due to the fact that the British supremacy had become unchallengeable since 49 1857 and there seemed no pressure to contemplate a political partnership with the States. The storm of the national movement was not yet even a distant threat. On the other hand the British did seem to realise that they had, by creating guarantees to perpetuate the Princely order, created a system which made it possible for the princes to be neglectful of their administrative responsibility.^- While the British after 1857 stood steadfast in their guarantees to tiie Princes, they were almost reluctant to adopt the kind of change of policy and procedure required to ensure effective and pertinent surveillance of native rulership in the States. Curzon recognised that the States had to be maintained, under the governance of their hereditary rulers who enjoyed the loyalty and respect of the subjects as this would relieve the British of some burden of administration. Curzon’s conception of the future development of the Indian Empire was that Britain would hold India perpetually in trust. He saw his principle tasl^ as maintaining the ’rule of justice, bringing peace and order and good government. He expected those who ruled the States to do likewise, but his experience as a Viceroy had made it evident that the Princely order in India were quite unfitted for the task. He therefore considered that 50 jnless the princes were deprived of their absolute or sovereign status, they ivould be incapable either of commanding the loyalty of their subjects or of issisting in the government of the country in the desired manner, Curzon kvas of the view that it was the princes themselves who were "killing the system and that a time would come, "unless some higher standard is ntroduced, when their subjects will turn around, and implore to be relieved Tom the extravagance and oppression of their rulers."-'* 51 End Notes 1. S.R. Mehrotra: The Emergence of the Indian National Congress. Vikas Publications, 1971. 2. i) Report on Native Press 1905 in the Presidency of Bombay: Internal B, July 1906 Source; National Archives, New Delhi, ii) Annual Report: Bombay on native papers published in 1905: Internal B, Sept. 1906. Source: National Archives, New Delhi. S.R. Mehrotra: Emergence of the Indian National Congress. Vikas Publication, 1971. 3. 3rd Anglo - Maratha War, 1818. 4. Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Rai. B.R. Nanda, Oxford University Press, Delhi & London, 1977, pp. 17. 5. S.H. Sathe: b.iS36, d.I912. lawyer. 6. S.H. Chiplonkar: b.l851, d. 1984, lawyer, journalist. 7. S.R. Mehrotra, Emergence of the Indian National Congress. Vikas Publishers, 1971, p . l k . 8. Ibid. 9. B.R. Nanda: Poone Yethil Sarvaiinik Samitchi Rachna va Niyam. (18 July 1870), pp. 1-5. Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj. B.R. Nanda, Oxford University Press, Delhi & London, 1977. 2. Ibid. 10. Sir Richard Temple, Men and Events of My Times in India. London 1882, pp.470- 71. 11. Tilak, Bal Gangadhar . 12. Agarkar, Gopal Ganesh. 52 13. ' B.R. Nanda: Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj. Delhi, Oxford University Press, London, 1977, Chapters 2&3. 14. S.R. Ashton: British Policy toward the Indian States 1905 - 1939. Curzon Press, London, 1982, pp.23. 15. Ibid. 16. K.L. Gauba, H.H. ’His Highness’. 17. ’Desire of Hyderabad for an outlet to the sea’, GOI, Political Branch, No.241 - Political (Secret), 1945, Nos. 1-15. Source: National Archives, New Delhi. 18. S.R. Ashton, British Policy towards the Indian States 1905-1939. Curzon Press, London, 1982. 19. Summary of Curzon’s Administration, Calcutta, 1908, pp.48-50. 20. S.R. Ashton, British Policv towards the Indian States 1905-1939. Curzon Press, London, 1982. 21. Curzon to Hamilton, 29 August 1900, Curzon Collection, No. 159. India Office Library & Records, London. 22. In 1879, when considering the restitution of Mysore to princely rule, Lytton administration had declared, "It is certain that this freedom from fear of the consequences of tax and injurious administration has been to some perceptible extent detrimental in its effect upon the chiefs, upon their councillors and officials and upon all those who are influential in the government of states. " GOI, FFD, Secret-Letter no. 124 to SS, 22 May 1879, Political Secret Correspondence with India, 1875-1911, Vol.22. 23. Curzon’s speech, 20 July 1904, cited in G. Bennet (ed.). The Concept of the Empire from Burke to Atlee 1774-1947, London, 1953, pp.345-348. 24. Curzon to the Queen, 12 September 1900, Curzon Collection, No. 135. India Office Library & Records, London.