ABSTRACT
Harold Macmillan, in his autobiography Winds of Change, noted that the imagination of an average Briton was stirred by the vision and glory of ‘the zenith of imperial fabric . . . the hymn of ever-widening empire on whose bounds the sun never set’. A villager from UP, when asked by the lat sahib (a political and administrative dignitary) why the sun never set in the British empire, thought for a while and replied: ‘Perhaps the British could not be trusted in the dark.’ Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, H.V. Hodson and Lord Linlithgow did not wish to disturb the fabric of the empire. But the winds of change were blowing over Great Britain itself, setting in motion forces which transformed social relations beyond recognition during the war years and thereafter. No longer did British children remember the song ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’, and even the archbishop was inclined to observe that communism was after all ‘a Christian heresy’.1 Despite such changes, the duty of every Briton who came to India to rule, from the Viceroy down to the young district officer, a member of the steel-frame, was expected to keep the colonial system going unimpaired. But the tensions generated by the observance of the colonial virtues were there for everyone to see. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative leader, was able to recognize the newly emerging world. In December 1934, he observed: ‘There is a wind of nationalism and freedom blowing round the world and blowing as strongly in Asia as anywhere in the world’. He went on to question Churchill and other party members who were opposed to the policy of reforms in India: ‘What have we taught India for a century? We have preached English institutions and democracy and all the rest of it.’2 Nevertheless, Linlithgow was unmoved in 1940-42 as Churchill had been in the 1930s by the niceties of such arguments. H.V. Hodson, however, did not fail to notice the inherent contradictions of British rule. ‘The flower of Imperialist bureaucracy which blossomed in the central government of Indian Empire, was not an abstract organization nor a concourse of officials, but a veritable system of life’, he wrote. ‘The Viceroy was an integral part of the bureaucratic system. He was therefore
dangerously handicapped in performing his Viceregal functions properly but also his functions as the political head of the Government.’3
