Raj to Ruins: the Fall of the Imperial Hero.
Some years ago I visited India. Like generations of Englishmen before me, it was a country that I had always wanted to see. In an age of globalisation, it still seemed exotic and mysterious, even the name ‘India’ possessed a powerful, even magical, resonance. My father had been born and brought up in the garrison town of Simla in the Himalayan foothills during the final years of the Raj [the British rule of India]. He was the last in a line of soldiers, engineers, clergymen and administrators who, as with so many other British families, had helped to conquer, build, serve and rule the subcontinent. I got to know these people through sepia photographs found in dusty, leather-bound albums, a particular favourite being of my great-grandmother in 1920, rifle in hand, kneeling over the body of a tiger that she had just shot. I never met her but formed an acquaintance of sorts with the tiger, whose skin spent its later years on the drawing room floor at my grandfather’s house in Somerset.
My great-grandmother with her tiger.
My childhood imagination was thus fired by stories of pukka sahibs [Hindi for ‘real gentleman’], riding out on the arid plains with their stiff upper lips and sola topees [corrupted Hindi meaning ‘sun hat’ or pith helmet] at the head of squadrons of heavily moustached Bengal cavalrymen, resplendent in their turbans and tunics, spurs jingling and pennants fluttering from their lances; of devious adversaries such as the inscrutable Marathas or the artful Tipu Sultan, the so-called ‘Tiger of Mysore’; of ex-public school adventurers getting to grips with warlike Pathan tribesmen at the Khyber Pass; of polo on the lawns of the Ootacamund Gymkhana Club, and gin and tonics on the verandah with the memsahibs after the final chukka; of steely and far-sighted Viceroys and Governors and peppery, ruddy-faced commissioners of the Indian Civil Service (quite possibly educated at Dulwich College); of the fabulous array of Nizams, Rajas, Maharajas, Nawabs, and other native princes pledging allegiance to the Queen-Empress at the great Imperial Durbars; of an endless assortment of tribes, castes, nations, religions all of whom would benefit from a healthy dose of British colonisation … and so on. In all, it seemed such a pity that spoilsports like Messrs Gandhi and Nehru (both of whom enjoyed the benefit of British education) should want to ruin it all with their unreasonable demands that the British should draw stumps and leave the Indians to get on with it themselves.
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