Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [120]
In the end, Britain's loss of India was once again—as with Ireland—a case of too little tolerance, too late. In the case of India, however, Britain had actively squandered decades of goodwill built up within its subject populations. Led by men such as Naoroji, the Indian National Congress in its early years had been staunchly pro-British. Its founding members had a penchant for quoting Shakespeare and referred to the queen-empress as “Mother,” cheering whenever her name was mentioned. Even the more extreme nationalist leaders, including the “terrorists,” were overwhelmingly members of the British-educated, privileged Indian elite, men who had tried to pursue the career paths the British set out for them, only to find their advancement blocked by British racism.
As late as the eve of the First World War, many of India's leaders remained loyal to the crown. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Gandhi told his followers: “We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire. Fighting as the British are at present in a righteous cause for the good and glory of human dignity and civilisation…our duty is clear: to do our best to support the British, to fight with our life and property.” Hundreds of thousands of Indian troops were dispatched to fight in theaters all over the world, and more than one million Indians in all served the empire abroad in some capacity. In return, Indian leaders, encouraged by ambiguous promises from London, believed that the war's end would bring India self-government similar to that enjoyed by Canada and Britain's other “white” dominions.35
Disillusion awaited. Instead of self-rule, India's post-armistice “reward” was a brutal crackdown and shocking repression.
Postwar India was tumultuous. A growing spirit of national awareness and pride pervaded the country, as did mounting anger at the diversion of India's wealth to Britain's imperial needs. The global economy, too, was changing. Protectionism surged around the world. In India, urbanization and unemployment set in even as new Indian-owned industries began to emerge. British-style education had been a double-edged sword; more and more Indians demanded the freedoms they had studied or seen firsthand overseas. Waves of protests, marches, strikes, and political agitation swept the Indian subcontinent, punctuated by bursts of violence.
For the Anglo-Indian community, all this change was profoundly threatening. Even as Whitehall continued to draft progressive Indian reform measures from afar, the British government in India enacted the repressive Rowlatt Acts, imposing curfews on natives and curtailing rights of protest, essentially extending martial law for three years after the war. In 1919, having banned public gatherings, Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyer ordered his men to open fire on some 10,000 unarmed peasants who had gathered inside a walled field in Amritsar in the Punjab, possibly to celebrate a Hindu festival. With no warning, Dyer's brigade fired 1,650 rounds of live ammunition into the helpless, trapped crowd. Hundreds of Indians were killed, and a thousand more were injured.
Although recalled by London for “an error of judgment,” Dyer was unrepentant. Indeed, he initially received a hero's welcome back in England, where Conservatives gave him a jeweled sword bearing the motto “Saviour of the Punjab.” Over the next few months, British soldiers inflicted ever more brutal punishment on the increasingly restless Punjabis—flogging them, forcing them to crawl on hands and knees—“in defense of the realm.”
The Punjab atrocities were the last straw for India's once loyalist leaders. In 1919, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, Asia's first Nobel laureate in literature, repudiated his knighthood in protest of the slaughter. He explained: “The time has come when badges