Many Mark Twain enthusiasts have commented on his life-long dislike of imperialism and the resultant puffed-up vanity of colonialism. The one exception to this rule was the jewel in the crown of imperialism, the British Raj reign of India. Not only did he forgive the British for their incursion but on numerous occasions pointed out how beneficial it was to the natives; how lucky they were to have the British to rule over them. Around then he wrote of Warren Hastings that “he saved to England the Indian Empire, and that was the best service that was ever done to the Indians themselves, those wretched heirs of a hundred centuries of pitiless oppression and abuse.”
His point was—and one easily forgotten these hundred plus years later—that before the Raj the Indians were more oppressed than they were under the Raj. The British had at least, he felt, lifted the stone and let in some light around the edges. The British themselves felt that if they had not made a Raj in India someone else would have done—and they would not have made such a good job of it. Certainly those who know about the cruelties the Dutch inflicted on Indonesia, the piracy the Portuguese dispensed around their seaborne empire, the savagery of French colonialism in Africa or the tribal genocide of the Spanish in their Novus Orbis would agree, if only on a lesser evil basis; and don’t even consider the activities of the Belgians in the “dark continent”. (The American annexation of the Philippines was then still two years hence and his opposition to this move would cause him to be an important figure in the American Anti-Imperialist League.)
The years have put enough space between India’s colonial era and now for an open-minded view of the benefits—or otherwise—of the British period to be seen objectively, and perhaps there is no better place than the Calcutta of Mark Twain’s time and the Kolkata of today to stand back and take stock.
Calcutta was a British creation; Kolkata, as Calcutta has become, is an Indian evolution of that creation. The political classes may not like this but the facts are too self-evident for them to be ignored. There is sensitivity in even proposing this locally: while Indians in general don’t like being reminded they have been ruled for most of the last 500 years by the Afghans and British, with smatterings of French and Portuguese sovereignty around the edges, this is especially so in proud Bengal.
Rudyard Kipling’s famous quip about Job Charnock’s lunchtime halt becoming an empire’s capital only works as a quip because it is so obviously true. What were three tiny hamlets on the east bank of the Hooghly river—one which was called Kalikata46—grew into the great Calcutta through the initiative of British traders and administrators, helped increasingly as time passed by Indian princes and powerbrokers, and by whole swathes from the merchant and warrior castes acting out of self-interest. Twain recognized that not only was Calcutta a British invention but a triumphant and tolerant one—at least it was to him in 1896; no doubt later events would have tempered his enthusiasm. “The handful of English in India govern the Indian myriads with apparent ease, and without noticeable friction, through tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced by just and liberal laws—and by keeping their word to the native whenever they give it.”
He may not have known the care the British took to make sure that this was so. All of India was actually run, executively, by at most 1,300 members of the India Civil Service. Standards of recruitment were exceptionally high, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge and always with a first-class degree, preferably with honors. After graduation they had to study for a further year the root language of Sanskrit and a vernacular language such as Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi or Bengali as well as attend an intensive course on “something of the history of India and the law”.
The next layer of civil servants, although less exalted educationally, were no disgrace to good governance either. Almost exclusively privately educated—and so toughened up by the deprivations of that nineteenth-century penal colony, the British boys boarding school—and often having forbears with Indian government experience, they epitomized what Kipling referred to as the “white man’s burden”. Young men from sheltered backgrounds but classically educated would be sent out to outlying areas, often days’ hard traveling away, to settle disputes, collect taxes, oversee projects or mend diplomatic fences. They may not have had much experience of life but they had learnt all about Pax Romana, the rules of which they now applied to Pax Britannica. This is not so much to defend the colonialism that Twain admired as, like him, to admire it for what is was at the time (and to reflect how very much worse it could have been).
(The Indian Equator pp 100-102)