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In the decades following the Mutiny, the British enlisted men like Naoroji to serve as lawyers, magistrates, and bureaucrats in the Indian Civil Service; indeed, British rule over India would have been impossible without this cadre of elite pro-British natives. Certainly without the allegiance of Indian sepoys and Indian bureaucrats a thousand British civil servants could never have governed a native population of hundreds of millions.

Most Indian bureaucrats occupied lower or at best midlevel positions. But a handful were permitted to rise to the highest levels, even in the mother country. In 1892, for example, Naoroji was elected to the British parliament by voters from Central Finsbury in London, the same constituency that would later elect Margaret Thatcher.33

British imperial policies during the ninety years of the Raj (1857-1947) were a contradictory, oscillating mixture of Liberalism and Conservatism. Neither camp could achieve dominance for long. First, the two political parties kept toppling each other in London. Moreover, even when Liberals were ascendant, their policies in India were repeatedly undermined by the nonofficial British community living there.

These Anglo-Indians—consisting mainly of hard-driving, often Scottish merchants, traders, railroad men, and tea and indigo planters—were notoriously racist. After the Mutiny, out of genuine fear as well as bigotry, the Anglo-Indians retreated into an essentially apartheid system in which whites lived in insular, militarily protected enclaves separated from the “Blacktowns,” where the Indians lived. Most at home in their comfortable all-white social clubs—with names like “the Unceremonials” and “the Limited Liability Club”—these businessmen were not above beating their Indian workers for laziness or insolence. Between 1880 and 1900, no fewer than eighty-one recorded “accidental” shootings were recorded in which a sahib who had “bagged a coolie” went essentially unpunished.

The Anglo-Indians reacted with fury whenever Liberal administrations sought to dismantle the racial barriers that protected them. In 1883, a Liberal viceroy tried to pass the ill-fated Ilbert Bill, which would have allowed Indian judges to try white defendants. The Anglo-Indian response was a grotesque explosion of racist protests all across the country. “Are our wives,” demanded one Anglo-Indian, “to be torn from our homes on false pretenses [to] be tried by men who do not respect women, and do not understand us, and in many cases hate us?…Fancy, I ask you Britishers, her being taken before a half-clad native, to be tried and perhaps convicted.” “Verily the jackass kicketh at the lion,” bellowed another orator to raucous applause. “Show him as you value your liberties; show him that the lion is not dead; he sleep-eth, and in God's name, let him dread the awakening.” Almost the entire white community in India swung against the government. Not long afterward, the Raj lurched back to Conservatism.34

But when Conservatives were in power, their policies met with the increasing and much more violent resistance of India's growing nationalist movement. When the patrician Lord Curzon became viceroy in 1898, he pitted himself squarely against the corps of anglicized Indian lawyers and civil servants that a previous generation of Liberals had worked so hard to cultivate. With Calcutta as their power base, members of this educated elite had in 1885 founded the Indian National Congress, a party that quickly became the most important voice of Indian political aspirations. Cur-zon spurned these so-called Bengali Babus, with their emergent (and English-taught) ideas of equality and nationhood. Viewing them as a threat to British rule, Curzon pointedly excluded them from the highest posts of the Indian Civil Service and took measure after measure to undermine the Congress Party. Curzon's most draconian step was the 1905 partition of Bengal into two new provinces, gerrymandered to make Bengali-speaking Hindus a minority in both.

Curzon's policies backfired. They fueled the rise