Review: The British In India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience by David Gilmour

Allen Lane/Penguin, £30

Review by Brian Morton

As I read the closing pages of David Gilmour’s extraordinary new book, with the tv news silently in the background, a group of Manchester students was solemnly whitewashing the text of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and replacing it with a poem by Maya Angelou. There have been a number of similar protests, the most prominent, perhaps, against a statue of the “imperialist” Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford. If one of the Manchester students had, in Kipling’s words, kept her head while those around her were ignoring the ambiguity of whitewashing any text, let alone this one, they might have recognised that there was more complexity to the issue than they were acknowledging. If they’d had, as I did, an advance reading copy of The British In India, they would have known this.

Gilmour is, of course, widely admired as the biographer of Rudyard Kipling, and of George Curzon. These have at times been somewhat toxic figures in academic circles. In 1990, an American friend was warned off proposing a PhD on Kipling at a rather right-on English university on the grounds that no one read him any more (that also seems to miss the point) and that he was regarded as an “apologist for empire”. Gilmour is no apologist for anyone. One of his great attributes, as a biographer and historian, is an open-minded humanity. His basic premise isn’t exactly a version of Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families”, but it comes quite close. He seems to propose here that, once you set aside a certain rhetoric and a bundle of assumptions, there is no such thing as “Empire” and “imperialism”, but just – just! – a swathe of humanity muddling through with the usual mixture of principle, greed, lust, stupidity, lack of alternatives, kindness and hope; there because of tea and trade, soldiering and the railways, timber and the Gospels. The whole point of Gilmour’s book is that it is not about “the Raj” or “the jewel in the crown”. It is about the British in India. Needless to say, many of them, perhaps a disproportionate number, were Scots, Irish and Welsh.

A full seventy years after the imperial jewel was either lost – as one lobby would have it – or returned to its rightful owners, we tend to forget just how dominant India once was in British life and lives. An astonishing number of prominent Britons were either born in India or lived there in childhood. William Makepeace Thackeray was born in what then Calcutta, Kipling in Bombay, Hector Hugh Munro (the peerless “Saki”) in Akyab, British Burma, Eric Blair (or George Orwell) in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (Sonia was born in Calcutta, too). It goes on into popular culture, too. Film director Lindsay Anderson was born in Bangalore. Norman Wisdom and Spike Milligan learned their craft in India. Joanna Lumley’s familial loyalty to the Gurkhas is well known. Felicity Kendal’s part in the rather forgotten Merchant-Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah was based on her own childhood as part of father Geoffrey Kendal’s repertory theatre group, criss-crossing the subcontinent, bringing the Bard to the Empire. Two of Britain’s most beautiful screen actresses, Merle Oberon and Vivien Leigh were not only born there (as Estelle Thompson, Bombay, and Vivian Hartley. Darjeeling respectively), but were also part-Indian, or “Eurasian”, or “Anglo-Indian”, a detail Oberon did much to obscure. Gilmour seems to have overlooked Cliff Richard (born Harry Webb in Lucknow), but perhaps because Cliff was so much in the papers, rather than despite it; but he does point out that the greatest surprise of Billy Connolly’s Who Do You Think You Are? was the discovery that his great-grandmother Florence wasn’t born in Co Wicklow or Glasgow, but in Bangalore.

It’s worth labouring this slightly because it underlines how much India penetrated British life even into the later 20th century and is only perhaps fading now into the imperial sunset. Gilmour has assembled a vast array of human stories, and of lives lived between two strikingly distant and unlike countries. Which, for many of these people, was home?: the heat and dust of India, or the damp and chill of a boarding house or school, a separated wife’s English retreat, a Westminster office. One of the strangest aspects of Gilmour’s story is how many of the imperial government’s experts on India, men charged with liaison and management, never set foot there and showed remarkably little curiosity about the details of life on the ground. The Indian Civil Service and police force (of which Orwell became a member) were run with a good deal of autonomy, but even as Gilmour’s narrative seems to move away from the point and into lives totally defined by the Indian reality, it’s worth bearing in mind how abstract and mysterious, possibly even mystical, a concept “India” remained in the British establishment psyche.

And this is, of course, the problem. Our common understanding of India is so conditioned by fiction and poetry that we often neglect to understand that the reality was far more extraordinary, in the sense both of exoticism and ordinariness. We still see India through the prism of E. M. Forster and Paul Scott, when we really also need to see it through Kipling’s eyes as well. He wrote about the dirt and the diarrhoea and the pox as well as the men who would be king, the adventurers and heroes who would be forced to come back and die at Passchendaele, or retire to a cottage in Margate.

It is rather pointless to pick specimen lives from Gilmour’s account. They don’t work other than in juxtaposition and in number. He has processed a vast amount of documentary evidence which is why, when he explores one of the guiltiest running themes of empire, he doesn’t resort to the the lazy broad-brush of Jeremy Paxman’s Empire: What Ruling The World Did To The British, in which a man famed for asking “difficult” questions fails to ask the important ones. To Paxman, the Empire served as a field of sexual opportunity for younger sons, the unsettled, cads and bounders, men with pasts. Even on this obviously racy topic, Gilmour makes us think and does ask key questions. Relations between British men and their wives and bibis, relations between and among the races, the exact nature of what “Eurasian” is, or “Anglo-Indian” (and both of these changed significantly over time).

Gilmour takes the story from the 16th century when a passage to India might take years, to the twentieth century, when BOAC could take your there within a day, and maintain some measure of “home” comfort until the doors opened on the tarmac and the heat and smell came flooding in. Everyone who has gone to the subcontinent remembers that moment. Opening the pages of Gilmour’s book has very much that impact. Having a reading copy that still lacks an index or illustrations is actually something of an advantage. The pictures formed by his words are far more vivid than any stock prints, and there is no chance of using its 600 pages as a reference book. It simply has to be read, over and over again.