ABSTRACT
So highly valued was India, the ‘brightest jewel’ in Queen Victoria’s imperial crown, that few eminent Victorians seriously questioned the efficiency or propriety of British rule on that subcontinent. Of the few that did criticize the Raj, most championed the cause of moderate reform, not revolutionary change, and were often motivated by personal or party interest rather than by a genuine concern for the welfare of the Queen’s Indian subjects. One of the rare exceptions to this rule was Major-General Sir Charles George Gordon (1833-85), a man twice immortalized in the literature of empire as ‘Chinese’ Gordon for his contribution between September 1860 and May 1864 to the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion in China, and later as Gordon of Khartoum, the city where he gave his life for what he regarded as an effort to preserve its inhabitants from enslavement or death. Though Gordon’s Indian career can be measured in weeks rather than years, it enabled him to register one of the most precise and damning analyses of late-nineteenth-century British Indian administration. His critique tore through the protective curtain of British paternalism to expose the racism, venality, and vainglory of the men who ruled India, and the severity of Britain’s abuse of that country’s human and economic resources. His conclusion was that the cause of the people of India could be advanced only by revolutionary change, such as the rapid devolution of power to Indians. Unfortunately, while Gordon’s reputation as a soldier-statesman insured that his voice would be heard in Whitehall, the brevity of his Indian service, the peripatetic
nature of his career and his reputation for eccentric behaviour played into the hands of ‘insider’ imperial officials, who were adept at dismissing criticism of the British Raj as the ravings of the illinformed, the professionally disgruntled, or the mentally unbalanced. While Gordon himself expected that the airing of his Indian views would transform his status from that of a lionized Victorian hero into that of an unemployable political and social outcast, he felt compelled to circulate them as widely as possible out of a sense of duty and, it will be argued here, a desire for martyrdom that was tied to his Indian service, but which was ultimately to be fulfilled not in India but in Sudan.
