ABSTRACT
Risley’s last published article, ‘The Indian Councils at Work’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, was a livelier version of the India Office minute written in 1910 that I cited in the two previous chapters. 1 Quoting an unnamed French commentator, Risley suggested that ‘Lord Morley has given India a Constitution built perhaps more durably than the world suspects’. ‘Continental thinkers’, he continued, have turned their attention from India’s past to its future and ‘foreign critics’, because they are familiar with administrative methods like those prevailing in India, ‘approach Indian questions with a more open mind than English politicians’, who are prejudiced against ‘bureaucracy’. These thinkers, moreover, ‘with their vivid perception of leading principles and inherent tendencies’, have seen the Morley-Minto reforms as inaugurating a new ‘British-Indian Constitution, having its foundations firmly laid in the bed-rock of history’, which a ‘historian of their own school of thought’ – an allusion to Morley – ‘has called into being’. Thus the constitution was a ‘compromise between two conflicting principles – the absolutism of the Mogul emperors and the democratic ideal of the House of Commons’, which were the ‘two sources of British sovereignty in India’. Furthermore, the British had to retain ultimate control over executive and legislative decisions while also allowing the Indians’ wishes to be expressed, but not through a parliamentary system, because ‘no representative assembly can claim to speak’ for all the people as long as the ‘uneducated masses’ lacked any understanding of democratic government; their interests could therefore be represented only by unbiased British officials. In sum, the only practical solution to the problem of Indian government was not self-government, but a ‘fusion of the Mogul and English principles’, which the new constitution created by the legislative councils reform had achieved. Risley’s opinion on these questions was a conventional one among British imperialists at the time and consistent, for example, with Morley’s in his essay on ‘British democracy and Indian government’. 2
