Ghosts of Empire (18 page)

The Maharaja was becoming a nuisance, but there was little the British government could do about it. The Resident complained of Hari Singh's delusions of grandeur, his taste for independence, his growing ‘tendency towards extravagance', especially the pomp and ceremony he indulged in at court.
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Hari Singh's pettiness knew no bounds. At a formal dinner held on the night of 15 May 1931 at the Shalimar Bagh in Srinagar in honour of the Maharaja, he was greeted on arrival by a group of notables at the entrance to the garden. The Raja of Poonch, a minor chief in the Maharaja's kingdom, remained in the pavilion and did not form part of the welcoming party. Hari Singh was infuriated by this and ordered that the Raja leave the garden ‘at once'; the unfortunate Raja was now to be banned from the Palace and all functions ‘until further orders'. The typewritten programme of ceremonials had laid down that, ‘on alighting from his motor at the door of the garden, His Highness would be met by the Raja of Poonch'. Technically, Hari Singh was right, but his overreaction was characteristic. The next day the Raja wrote a grovelling letter of apology, but the Maharaja
remained implacable. British officials were talking of the possibility of the Raja's ‘internment'. On 6 June, nearly four weeks after the dinner, the Maharaja passed an order that the Raja's salute of thirteen guns should be reduced to nine. British officials looked on in bewilderment. Of course they would have ‘nothing to do with' the quarrel, which continued throughout 1931. In late November the Raja was complaining to the Resident of the ‘consistent series of acts' of ‘aggression' on the part of Hari Singh.
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The petty feuds and the endless disputes about precedence and protocol reveal the highly fraught, almost surreal conditions in which some of the Indian princes operated. This eccentric, even crazy atmosphere was a feature of the British Empire in India which has often been overlooked. The continual references to precedence and formality would astonish a world that has grown tired of such things. There was a precedent or tradition to regulate absolutely everything. In 1940, an issue at stake was whether ‘the Ruling Princes calling on His Excellency the Viceroy should write their names in the Viceroy's Visitor's Book or leave their cards only'. This question was referred to the Committee on Ceremonies, which had reported on just such matters in 1932, when it was decided that ‘writing names in the Viceroy's Book is a universally accepted form of courtesy and no exception or modification seems desirable'. This dispute had been stirred by Hari Singh, who had simply left his card while visiting the Viceroy in Bombay and had complained of not having been invited to the garden party which was taking place during the visit.
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In 1939 there had been a similar controversy about the issue of gifts being presented to the King and Queen in London by the various Indian princes. Again there was a clear protocol which had been established as early as 1861, but was still being referred to in 1939. Back in early 1860s, Queen Victoria had declared her appreciation of ‘every mark of the loyalty and affection of the Princes and Chiefs of India', but it was not her desire ‘that they should give expression to these feelings by the presentation of costly gifts'. The Queen would be ‘most gratified by the receipt of a simple letter of friendship'. Of course, there had been certain exceptions in the eighty or so years which had intervened. In 1925 and again in 1937, the
Maharaja of Rewa had been allowed to send gifts of albino tiger skins, ‘mainly because of their rarity'. Messages from the Indian ‘chiefs and princes' to the King Emperor in London were also regulated, according to the status of the prince: ‘messages of a purely personal and private nature can be addressed to the Palace direct by Rulers having salutes of 11 guns and over'. Since the lowest-ranked prince was entitled to nine guns and the highest to twenty-one, most of the chiefs and princes could, if they wanted, send Christmas cards, addressed to King George and Queen Elizabeth, directly to Buckingham Palace.
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It was inevitable that this kind of formal environment would produce proud and difficult maharajas, who stood on ceremony and were punctilious about their dignity and honours. It was less inevitable that these people ultimately had the power to decide the destiny of millions. It is a tragedy that the fate of Kashmir was in the hands of Hari Singh at such a crucial time as the partition of India and Pakistan. His interests were largely sporting. He was bored by politics and had no desire to engage constructively in affairs of state. Any account of his pursuits is rapidly reduced to never-ending stories from the field of sports and gaming: shooting, fishing, hunting, polo, horse racing and, when he took time off in Cannes or Monte Carlo, a little gambling. His own son, Karan Singh, recalled that his father's shooting parties were ‘meticulously planned, each guest provided with cartridges and a packed lunch complete with wine'.

Duck shoots would begin early in the morning, at which time the Maharaja's guests would ‘all drive out in a great procession, assemble on the banks of the lake' and then row to the location of the shoot, where the ‘whole day would be spent massacring duck of various species'. The Maharaja himself was a superb shot. Black bears, wild boar and even the panthers which roamed the lush jungles of the Maharaja's domain were all shot indiscriminately. His generosity as a host was not matched by even the pretence of sportsmanship. ‘Any small setback in shooting or fishing, polo or racing, would throw him into a dark mood which lasted for days,' remembered his son. When this happened, it was best to stay out of the way. His Highness's peevishness would lead inevitably ‘to what came to be known as “muquaddama”, a long inquiry into the alleged inefficiency or
misbehaviour of some young member of the staff'.
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The Maharaja was known as the ‘King of the Indian Turf', an ‘uncanny judge of horse flesh' and an ‘outstanding horse-breeder'.
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His scarlet and gold colours were familiar to every ‘Bombay race goer', and he was always much happier racing than governing his state.
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His own riding days were curtailed by his increasing obesity in middle age, but he had excelled at polo, a sport in which he was so anxious for his son to develop equal proficiency that he forced the boy to ride every day from the age of three. This regime didn't work. Today, Karan Singh is a noted writer and academic whose skills at polo are limited.

In the midst of all this outdoor activity, the country over which the Maharaja presided was one of the most economically deprived areas of British India. Levels of literacy, especially among the Muslim population, were very low. Although ancient Kashmir had been renowned as a seat of Sanskrit learning, the capital city, Srinagar, which had more than 60,000 inhabitants, registered only 140 women as literate in the 1901 census. The entire literate population of the city was only 2 per cent. This figure had risen to 25 per cent in 1941.
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The Maharaja's fabulous lifestyle was funded by heavy taxation of the Kashmiri people, who were described by the Indian civil servant Sir Albion Banerjee as ‘dumb, driven cattle'.
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Generally, the peasants and lower classes of Kashmir were Muslim and their superiors Hindu. There was a simple reason for this. Under the Mughals of Kashmir who ruled for four centuries till 1752, the vast majority of the population had converted to Islam, and these Muslim converts had been low-caste Hindus who had been consigned to that status by their ancestral religion. Understandably, the Hindus who had refused to convert were, in most cases, the high-class Hindus, the Brahmins, who enjoyed the most prestige in the old religion and would have had nothing to gain from abandoning Hinduism for Islam.

In general, the average British imperial civil servant did have a sense of cultural superiority, but often stopped short of commenting overtly on the racial characteristics of the people over whom he presided. There seems to have been an exception in the case of Kashmir. Memoirs continually refer to the ‘excellent physique' of the Kashmiri men and the ‘exceptional
beauty' of their ‘womenfolk'. A Kashmiri would ‘handle a load on his back for many hours of the day such as would defeat any of his brothers'.
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Although the Kashmiris were strong, the British writers were convinced that they lacked physical courage. ‘A Kashmiri soldier is almost a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing,' asserted Francis Younghusband, in his otherwise admirable account of Kashmir. Another observer, the missionary Dr Ernest F. Neve, believed that the Kashmiris could ‘bear pain much better than Europeans, but owing to want of self-control they make more fuss'. He agreed with Younghusband in praising the physique, while deprecating the courage and temper, of the Kashmiri man: ‘in spite of great physical strength and powers of endurance, the Kashmiri is highly strung and neurotic and he will often weep on slight provocation'.
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Younghusband also commented on two seemingly well-known facts: ‘Kashmir is very generally renowned for the beauty of its women and the deftness and taste of its shawl-weavers.'
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The charms of Kashmir's women were appreciated not only by British men. Dorothy Hargreaves Burton, the wife of Geoffrey Burton, an ICS man, observed in 1914 that the women in Kashmir were ‘decidedly pretty and although Mohammedan do not lead a restricted life'. She was, however, unimpressed by the general character of the Kashmiris and thought that their beauty, both male and female, was merely a veneer: ‘Kashmiris are a very good looking race but their beauty . . . is only skin deep.' For her, the Kashmiris always appeared anxious to please the sahib (master), but the majority were ‘quite unable to keep promises'. Mrs Burton, in her tour of Kashmir in the summer of 1914, was astute enough to identify the kingdom's fundamental problem: ‘It is curious that a Mohammedan people should be ruled over by a Hindu prince.' Yet overall she was deeply moved by the lush vegetation and physical splendour of the Kashmiri landscape; it was ‘an emerald set in pearls'.
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The anomaly of a Hindu ruler set over a predominantly Muslim population created the inevitable tensions we have come to associate with minority rule. The Hindus dominated the state. The British, who had sold Kashmir to the Dogra dynasty, were mere spectators in the unfolding drama, which cast Hindu against Muslim. Jack Morton, a district policeman who was later stationed in Lahore, recalled that the majority of
Kashmiris were ‘lowly Muslim peasants' while the Kashmiri Brahmins ‘were the crème de la crème in the Hindu caste system, and ruthlessly maintained their dominance in government and the economy'.
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The Kashmiri Brahmins, or Pandits as they were known, dominated the administration of the state, and it was only Hindus who were allowed to possess firearms in the Vale of Kashmir itself; Muslims were rigorously excluded from service in the state's armed forces.
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Visitors acknowledged the refinement and sophistication of the Brahmins and felt that Hindu dominance was part of the natural order. The Christian missionary Dr Neve accepted that the Brahmins' ‘intellectual superiority over the rest of the population must be admitted. They are quick of apprehension and have good memories,' though one of their ‘besetting faults' was arrogance. By contrast, ‘the Mohammedans' were ‘grossly illiterate'. The Pandits, as well as being civil servants, could be merchants and shopkeepers but were not allowed to take up handicrafts such as ‘carpentry, masonry, shoemaking and pottery', since practising these professions would defile their status.
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Kashmir's Muslim population began to organize itself politically, the Hindu Maharaja being increasingly regarded as a tyrant. As early as 1924, there had been labour unrest at the state silk factory in Srinagar, where 5,000 people worked, of whom an overwhelming majority were Muslim. When the Viceroy, Lord Reading, visited Srinagar in October 1924 he was presented with a memorandum signed by many prominent members of the Kashmiri Muslim community calling for an increase in the number of Muslims employed in the state service, for improvements in Muslim education and for land reform.
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The Hindu basis of the state was reflected in its laws. Gulab Singh, the founder of the Hindu state of Jammu and Kashmir, had been a devout Hindu who, as his biographer observed, reserved ‘very brutal punishments' for those accused of ‘cow killing', who would have their noses and ears cut off.
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Cow killing even in the 1930s and 1940s was illegal in Kashmir. People who committed this act of sacrilege against the Hindu religion could face a seven-year prison sentence. In addition to the prohibition against killing cows, there was a ‘special tax on the slaughter of goats and sheep'. Muslims sacrificed these animals once a year as part of a religious ritual.
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By 1931,
the situation was particularly tense. The Maharaja had earlier in the year celebrated the birth of his son Karan, who turned out to be his only child. The succession in Kashmir had been problematic, as the Maharaja had already married three times, without producing an heir. In each case, the wives had died mysteriously, his first wife with her child still in the womb. The Maharaja himself was an only child. The fourth Maharani, the beautiful Tara Devi, a commoner from Kangra, produced a healthy baby boy, the Yuvraj or heir apparent, whose birth triggered a ‘delirious wave of enthusiasm' among the Hindu community. The slaughter of animals, including fishing and shooting, was prohibited for three days. There were feasts and free cinema shows; sweets were given to children; there was a procession in Jammu (the predominantly Hindu southern region of the state of Jammu and Kashmir), while Srinagar also witnessed a huge procession.
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This episode marked the high point of Dogra rule in Kashmir, but it was the events of the summer of that year, 1931, which, in their intensity and suddenness, put the spotlight on the ‘communal' issue, the historic divisions between the Hindu and Muslim communities, which would dominate Kashmir for decades.