Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

This is a broad, catch-all category of works that fit best here and not elsewhere. If you haven't found it someplace else, you might want to look here.

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Mon May 10, 2021 11:33 pm

Part 1 of 2

Chapter V. The Three Bureaus of Information, Excerpt from "Influential Centres of Disaffection": Indian Students in Edwardian London and the Empire that Shaped Them
by William H. Cowell
2015

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Hara Prasad Shastri ... is most known for discovering the Charyapada, the earliest known examples of Bengali literature.

The Charyapada is a collection of mystical poems, songs of realization in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism.

-- Charyapada, by Wikipedia


Shastri studied at the village school initially and then at Sanskrit College and Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata)...

Shastri ... received a BA in 1876 and Honours in Sanskrit in 1877.. he was conferred the title of Shastri when he received a MA degree...He then joined Hare School as a teacher in 1878....

He became a professor at the Sanskrit College in 1883... [and] worked as an Assistant Translator with the Bengal government. Between 1886 and 1894... he was the Librarian of the Bengal Library. In 1895 he headed the Sanskrit department at Presidency College.

During the winter 1898-99 he assisted Dr. Cecil Bendall during research in Nepal...

In 1894–1895 he was in Nepal and Northern India collecting oriental manuscripts for British Museum. During the winter 1898–1899 he returned to Nepal and together with pandit Hara Prasad Shastri and his assistant pandit Binodavihari Bhattacharya from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, the team registered and collected information from palm-leaf manuscripts in the Durbar Library belonging to Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumsher J. B. Rana, and here he found the famous historical document Gopal Raj Vamshavali, describing Nepal's history from around 1000 to 1600.

-- Cecil Bendall, by Wikipedia


The Gopal Raj Vamshavali is a 14th-century hand-written manuscript of Nepal... a genealogical record of Nepalese monarchs...

One of the most important and popular chronicles in Nepalese history... Cecil Bendall found the manuscript "in the cold weather of 1898–99 in Kathmandu's Durbar Library"...

The original copy of Gopal Raj Vamshavali is now stored at National Archives, Kathmandu in an "unsatisfactory" state, in contrast to an "excellent" condition, when Prof. Cecil Bendall found it at the turn of the 19th century.

-- Gopal Raj Vamshavali, by Wikipedia


He became Principal of Sanskrit College in 1900, leaving in 1908 to join the government's Bureau of Information.

Also, from 1921–1924, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Bengali and Sanskrit at Dhaka University.

Shastri held different positions within the Asiatic Society, and was its President for 2 years. He was also President of Vangiya Sahitya Parishad for 12 years ...

Bangiya Sahitya Parishad is a literary society in Maniktala of Kolkata... to promote Bengali literature, both by translating works in other languages to Bengali and promoting the production of original Bengali literature...

Romesh Chunder Dutt was the first president...

Romesh Chunder Dutt CIE was... writer and translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata.

-- Romesh Chunder Dutt, by Wikipedia


and was an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London...

He was first introduced to research by Rajendralal Mitra, a noted Indologist, and translated the Buddhist Puranas... Shastri was also Mitra's assistant at the Asiatic Society, and became Director of Operations in Search of Sanskrit Manuscripts after Mitra's death.

Shastri was instrumental in preparing the Catalogue of the Asiatic Society's approximately 10,000 manuscripts ...

Shastri ... ended up visiting Nepal several times, where, in 1907, he discovered the Charyageeti or Charyapada manuscripts. His painstaking research... led to the establishment of Charyapada as the earliest known evidence of Bengali language. Shastri wrote about this finding in a 1916 paper... "Buddhist songs and verses written in Bengali a thousand years ago"...

He also discovered an old palm-leaf manuscript of Skanda Purana in a Kathmandu library in Nepal, written in Gupta script.

The Skanda Purana is the largest Mahāpurāṇa... The text... is of Kaumara literature... The text has been an important historical record and influence on the Hindu traditions related to the war-god Skanda...

The Skanda Purana that has survived into the modern era exists in many versions. It is considered as a living text, which has been widely edited, over many centuries, creating numerous variants....

This Mahāpurāṇa... is attributed to the sage Vyasa.

-- Skanda Purana, by Wikipedia


-- Hara Prasad Shastri, by Wikipedia


The manuscript of Ramacarita was discovered by MM. Pandit Haraprasad Sastri in 1897. It contained not only the complete text, but also a commentary of the first Canto and 85 verses of the second. The portion of the manuscript containing the commentary of the remaining verses was missing.

MM. Sastri printed the text and the commentary from this single manuscript in the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. Ill, No. 1. The scope of his work may be described in his own words: “The commentary, as may be expected, gives fuller account of the reign of Rampala (sic) than the text. The other portion of the text is difficult to explain, and I have not attempted to make a commentary of my own. But I have tried, in my introduction, to glean all the historical information possible by the help of the commentary and the inscriptions of the Pala dynasty, and other sources of information available to me In the introduction I have attempted to write a connected history of the Palas of Bengal from their election as kings in about 770 A.D. to the end of Madanpala’s (sic) reign” (pp. 1-2).

Ever since its publication the Ramacarita has been regarded as the most important literary document concerning the history of the Pala rule in Bengal. It has formed a subject of critical discussion by notable scholars, and many of its passages have been interpreted in different ways. Scholars have, however, experienced great difficulty in dealing with the text on account of the absence of any translation either of the commented or of the uncommented portion. The difficulty was rendered all the greater by certain readings and interpretations of MM. Sastri which proved to be erroneous on a closer examination of the manuscript. A new and critical edition of the text, with a running commentary and an English translation of the whole of it, was, therefore, a great desideratum.

-- The Ramacaritam of Sandhyakaranandin


-- Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past: 1883-1924, by Vikram Sampath

-- National Indian Association, by Wikipedia

-- Personal Intelligence, from Journal of the National Indian Association in Aid of Social Progress and Female Education in India, by Sir M. Monier-Williams, KCIE

-- Northbrook Society [Northbrook Indian Society] [Northbrook Club] [Northbrook Indian Club], by The Open University: Making Britain

-- Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook, by Wikipedia

-- Curzon Wyllie, by Wikipedia

-- William Lee-Warner, by Wikipedia

-- Victor Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton, by Wikipedia

-- Theodore Morison, by Wikipedia

-- Thomas Walker Arnold, by Wikipedia

-- John Wallinger, by Wikipedia

-- Mansfield Smith-Cumming, by Wikipedia

-- Indian Political Intelligence Office. by Wikipedia

-- India Office, by Wikipedia

-- India House, by Wikipedia

-- Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, by Wikipedia

-- Madan Lal Dhingra, by Wikipedia

-- Royal India Society [India Society] [Royal India and Pakistan Society] [Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society], by Wikipedia


[The final chapter will return to the imperial government, examining what became of the India Office’s final attempt to actively control visiting students. The Bureau of Information for Indian Students remains an understudied institution that reveals a surprising amount about the government’s attitudes towards these students; namely, its shifting functions and relevance are treated as emblematic of the India Office’s changing role within a new global network of intelligence. The Bureau of Information was the empire’s spirit made flesh, the endpoint of an intelligence trajectory that began as amorphous information networks in India’s Northwestern Frontier and concluded as a single concrete building in downtown London. As the India Office incrementally centralized, systematized, and made manifest its information network, it became less useful. It’s a counterintuitive narrative: more active attempts at control and influence corresponded with less real power. Why the India Office’s methods failed is perhaps a testament to John Darwin’s decentralized view of empire, as explaining the department’s ineffectiveness requires an understanding of how it functioned within its place in a larger British society.]

“I cannot help feeling a little worried about Indian Students in this country and Cromwell Road...”1 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1707 file 6900, “Official Correspondence.”]

– E.S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 1920


Millions of historically-minded visitors to London pass by it every year, but the unassuming building at the corner of Cromwell Road and Cromwell Place is hardly a sight that sticks in the minds of the city’s tourists. The Natural History Museum across the street captures most of their attention, and the French flag hung outside the cornerhouse that ripples lazily at the light touch of a cool August afternoon’s breeze registers as little more than a momentary break in the sea of Union Jacks that surrounds it. 21 Cromwell Road is still a bustling government hub these days as the location for France’s consulate in England; situated deep within the affluent borough of Kensington, it stands only about two blocks south of the site where Madan Lal Dhingra and Sir William Curzon Wyllie had their deadly encounter.

Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie KCIE CVO (5 October 1848 – 1 July 1909) was a British Indian army officer, and later an official of the British Indian Government. Over a career spanning three decades, Curzon Wyllie rose to be a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Indian Army and occupied a number of administrative and diplomatic posts. He was the British resident to Nepal and the Princely state of Rajputana, and later, the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton. Curzon Wyllie was assassinated on 1 July 1909 in London by the Indian revolutionary Madan Lal Dhingra, who was a member of India House in London.

-- Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, by Wikipedia


A blue plaque on its eastern exterior wall marks it as the longtime residence of nineteenth-century architect and philanthropist Charles James Freake, but the building has a significance beyond this official designation of historical heritage. The four-story building that blends seamlessly into an imposing row of identical off-white facades that stretches down the street was once the seat of another government agency, a branch of the India Office that for a few short years occupied the premises during its last attempts to establish a measure of active control over Indian students. Within its walls were private offices, a government bureau, and twenty-five beds, forming a thoroughly strange imperial space situated somewhere within the dissolving boundary between metropole and periphery. The significance of this space in the years between 1910 and 1912 has been lost on historians as completely as it is on the few passersby who glance momentarily at the unassuming, unrelated blue marker as they hurry along the sidewalk; this chapter is an attempt to bring some meaning to 21 Cromwell Road and the ghosts of its inhabitants.

With the execution of Madan Lal Dhingra, the imprisonment of Vinayak Savarkar, and the dispersal of the remaining revolutionary students who had vocally supported its extremist cause to varying degrees, the India House had effectively been demolished by 1910.
The British public still regarded Indian students with a distrustful eye, but the absence of any similar groups or high-profile events did a great deal to calm official British anxieties about the students as a whole. This absence was less a conveniently unfilled void than an actively inhospitable England; the tolerant safe haven of years past had been replaced by a decidedly unwelcoming and discouraging environment. This chapter is in part an examination of the forces that ensured another India House never took hold, and it requires backtracking to a point where Sir William Curzon Wyllie – and not just his memory – was still an active figure in Indian student affairs.

As discussed in Chapter III, the latent danger posed by the India House didn’t go unnoticed by bureaucrats in the India Office. In 1907, two years before Wyllie’s assassination, the Secretary of State for India appointed Sir William Lee-Warner to head a commission to investigate the condition of Indian students living across Britain. Tasked with quantifying the student population, identifying their problems as well as the problems they seemed to attract, and to formulate some possible solutions, the three heads of the committee spent three months travelling the island visiting universities and interviewing students, faculty, and people with a special knowledge of the issue. Upon submission of their subsequent report, its inflammatory language and provocative assessments of the problems raised concerns within the India Office about its power to galvanize educated Indians both in Britain and on the subcontinent. The report was left unpublished for over a decade, only appearing as an appendix to the report of a similarly tasked commission headed by Lord Lytton in 1922; the India Office, however, carried out most of its major recommendations. Though the commission itself was conducted in 1907, its most important effects wouldn’t be seen until after Curzon Wyllie’s death and should be considered a singularly important document in the history of India Office policy towards students, with its roots in the begrudging hands-off mentality before July 1909 and its more active effects in the years afterwards.

In particular, one implemented recommendation from the committee’s report especially illuminates both the changing role and strategy of the India Office between 1907 and the outbreak of the First World War: the Bureau of Information for Indian Students. Proposed as a paternalist arm of the India Office that would ensure students received accurate information about British education and were subtly imbued with pro-British sentiments, the Bureau’s function vacillated over the its four years of operation and its subsequent reconstitution in 1912.
Rather than an agency with an unwavering mandate, the history of the Bureau of Information is composed of three discrete chapters that form a narrative arc of their own, as its functionality quickly reached a practical zenith after Wyllie’s assassination and then experienced a prolonged slide into ineffectiveness in the years after, due in part to the benevolent ideology of the man at its head2 [Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 11.] as well as to its increasing irrelevance in both an empire now straddled by an integrated intelligence network and a London no longer favorably inclined toward Indian students. Paul Schaffel argued that the Bureau of Information failed because of a linear shift in ideology from mistrust to benevolence, but this misses the underlying point: at its core, the Bureau was too reactive to succeed in a pre-Dhingra London, too voluntary to gather any meaningful intelligence afterward, and too tangible to contribute effectively as a surveillance agency within the empire’s shadowy new global information order.

It is this last point – the Bureau’s physicality – that signaled the end of the India Office’s own policy arc regarding information and Indian students. What was initially inspired by a nebulous and informal network in the Indian hinterlands had by 1912 become a single agency with a lone man in charge, located in a building in central London that advertised its presence to the very students it was intended to surveil. The India Office had systematized its own intelligence network and informally incorporated a handful of private English intermediaries with similar missions as part of its drive towards centralization. By creating its own constructed information order that was highly visible to all students but voluntary to engage with, it unavoidably exposed its own intentions and rendered itself fundamentally ineffective from the beginning.

The history of the Bureau of Information draws on all of the major themes established earlier in this thesis: the restrictiveness of liberalism, manipulations of the information order, and the role of privately-held soft power in allocating social citizenship to colonial subjects in the metropole. Its story is the story of both Indian students and imperial attitudes toward them, told in miniature; the building that it occupied in South Kensington, simultaneously home to the Bureau’s offices and private English groups as well as a temporary hostel for students, was a microcosm of the imperial dynamics at play between the three parties throughout their stormy decade-long interaction and a fitting conclusion to the India Office’s active attempts to control students.

The Lee-Warner Committee and its Imagined Bureau

Alongside Lee-Warner on the 1907 committee were William Curzon Wyllie and Theodore Morison, the latter of whom would go on to chair his own commission in 1913 regarding Indian students seeking industrial education and employment in Britain. Beginning in May 1907, the committee heard testimony in London before moving across the country to hold meetings at the universities in Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, interviewing ninety-nine people across the span of their inquest.3 [India Office, “Report of the Committee on Indian Students” (London: 1922), 73; hereafter cited as “Lee-Warner Report.”] The committee was well-staffed –- Lee-Warner and Curzon Wyllie shared a history of administrative service in India; Morison had spent nineteen years as a professor at a college in India and was regarded as an expert on Indian education reform4 [Batho, G. R.. “Morison, Sir Theodore (1863–1936).” G. R. Batho in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman.] –- well-funded, and enjoyed a large pool of interviewees and documents with which to guide their work, and yet “the findings of the Lee-Warner Committee … were so embarrassing and likely to offend Indians that the publication of the report was prevented. In 1908, the Viceroy of India Lord Minto thought the publication ‘would no doubt put fat into the fire again.’”5 [Thomas Weber, Our Friend, The Enemy: Elite Education in Britain and Germany Before World War I (Stanford: Palo Alto, 2008), 218.] “Much bitter feeling would be aroused, resulting in angry discussion and agitation, which would discredit any arrangements which Government might make for protecting and helping Indian students in England, to such an extent that no student would take advantage of them … it would be nothing short of disastrous to publish the report”6 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 “Minto to Morley” March 13, 1908] wrote in a telegram, fearing pushback against both the imperial government as a whole but also against the committee’s specific recommendations that, despite the inflammatory report, were generally considered sensible and fit for implementation.

The majority of the report is fairly inoffensive and dull reading. The committee presented the first official estimate of the Indian student population’s size –- approximately seven hundred, with over half residing in London -– and the bulk of the report’s first few chapters doesn’t amount to much beyond hazy depictions of the student experience in Britain. An early chapter reiterates public anxieties about Indian immorality and natural inclination toward vice, relaying a handful of vivid examples of young Indians who became

absolute wrecks, the short story of whose life in England consists of running with unabated energy one uniform course of the coarsest and most vicious pleasures, procured by means that would disgrace the cruellest savage, by bullying and frightening an ignorant and indulgent parent out of his last penny on earth and then rewarding his kindness by breaking his heart and ultimately sending him to his untimely grave.7 [Lee-Warner Report, 76]


Such passages stand in stark contrast to the committee’s official verdict on these types of stories: “…although the number of wrecks is not unimportant they constitute the exception … the majority of Indian students get through their time in London without disastrous results,”8 [ibid] setting the tone for a report chock full of backhanded compliments aimed at students. The imperial capital was home to the most worrying subset of the population. With its abundance of experiences unavailable in India and its myriad temptations, London could suck in any visiting student, whether an Indian from Bombay or a young Englishman from Birmingham. While students at Cambridge and Oxford fell under a great deal of university supervision, most students in London were studying for the Bar, a fairly self-motivated course of work that necessitated little in the way of frequent contact with educators who felt little need to intervene in students’ affairs unless they affected their academic standing.9 [ibid, 74]

They by and large lived freely and away from official eyes, a troubling prospect for a government now keen on monitoring them closely. Among the report’s stated consequences of the government’s inability to exercise an ideal amount of control over these semi-disappeared students was their increasing political radicalization, and it was the contents of the report’s fifth chapter – “Indian Students and Politics” – that drew most of the Viceroy, Lord Minto’s, justification for the report’s nonpublication. “We feel justified in asserting that a considerable proportion, probably a majority, of the Indian students who come to this country are imbued before leaving India with the political opinions of the advanced section of the Indian Opposition, and are animated by a feeling of discontent with British rule; and that these political opinions and this discontent are usually strengthened by their residence in England”10 [ibid 101] the committee asserted, describing a “’blood and thunder’ type of Indian” dead set in his deep-seated and long-fermented hatred of everything British. For this, the committee assigned only a modicum of blame to the British government; rather than students’ experiences with imperialism in India or mistreatment during their stay in Britain, it was allegedly the prominence of party politics in Britain and the ‘discord within harmony’ model that confused students who -– unable to distinguish party rhetoric from concrete promise –- were swept up in a tide of what appeared to them as political conflict.11 [ibid] Even then the committee placed hardly any blame upon Britain itself and rather determined that it was the -– possibly unavoidable -– naiveté born of an unfamiliarity of the workings of a democratic society that was causing the polarization among these foreigners, a paternalist pronouncement for the ages.

Aside from the cursory pseudo-blame that the report allocated to British society, the majority of the problem resided with the “representatives of Extremists of Indian politics [who] spare no pains to win adherents to their cause among the Indian students as soon as the latter arrive in this country.”12 [ibid, 102] Clearly aware in 1907 of the existence and prominence of the India House and the widespread reach of the Indian Sociologist, the committee wrote with a pained tone that “while there is an active organization to create hostility against the British Government, there is no agency in existence in London which takes so much pains to get hold of Indian students or to counteract the effect of this political propaganda.”13 [ibid] Torn between the British liberalism described in chapter III and the desire to quash the spread of extremism, the committee flirted in several places throughout the report with recommending a ban on any Indian students at all coming to Britain before settling back into a familiar impotence: “Grave, however, as we recognise the situation to be, we have no specific remedy to propose,” instead issuing a minor recommendation about raising the age required for Government scholarships on the basis that older students would find less of a tendency toward political volatility. Ultimately, the committee had tacitly admitted defeat in the face of Indian extremism at home by admitting the scope of the problem –- “the men educated in England constitute an important section of the educated classes of Indian society, and their permanent alienation from the British Government would be a disaster” -– while dithering powerlessly around a series of solutions it was too scared to officially recommend and ultimately concluding that the best course of action was essentially to hope that student hotheads would mellow out with the passage of time.14 [ibid] Signed, Sir William Curzon Wyllie.

While the committee’s final report was quickly and unsurprisingly suppressed from public view, it did have some significant effects on India Office policy moving forward. Not all of its recommendations were of the ‘ban all Indian students’ variety, and most of what the report proposed was put into action within a couple years. Its three major proposals were all branches of the same general idea: subtly counteract anti-British influence by projecting goodwill in an official capacity. To achieve this, the report recommended the creation of both an Advisory Committee in London made up of Indians and Englishmen alike that students could contact with any needs or questions as well as the Bureau of Information for Indian Student that would serve as a liaison between British universities and students to ensure that prospective students were adequately equipped to apply for admission and well-prepared to adjust after enrolling. Additionally, it recommended that a pair of prominent private English clubs -– the Northbrook Society and the National Indian Association –- work together to focus their efforts and avoid redundant overlap. To further concentrate the coordination between all involved parties, the report proposed the purchase of a building that would house the Bureau of Information, provide an office space for the three private groups –- though they would receive a significant government stipend -– and serve additionally as a short-stay hostel for newly arrived Indian students in need of temporary lodgings and information about further adjusting.

This plan eventually took form in the shape of 21 Cromwell Road, a standalone building in South Kensington across the street from the Natural History Museum and within minutes of the Imperial Institute. T.W. [Thomas Walker] Arnold-– the man appointed Educational Adviser to head the Bureau -– had used the space as early as June 1909 as a venue for public receptions in the ‘at home’ style for students.15 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/945, File 2294 “Proposed Reception of Indian Students by the Chairman of the Advisory Committee to be held at 21 Cromwell Road.”] The India Office and the private societies settled on the building as their shared permanent space not long after. In part the location was reportedly chosen for its proximity to established Indian student neighborhoods; a Times article announcing the building’s leasing to the government claimed that “Many young Indians live in the Western suburbs, and the house is nearer their homes than Westminster, or than the eastern end of Piccadilly, where the Northbrook rooms have hitherto been situated.”16 ["Indian Students In England." The Times (2 June 1910): 6.] In a strange quirk of London geography, the new location bore an eerie similarity to that of none other than the India House, the radical hostel at 65 Cromwell Avenue in Highgate; the two were separated by roughly seven miles and occupied entirely different streets that happened to share a name. Within its confines was the coexistence of Indian students, British government, and private English life; 21 Cromwell Road served as a unique physical space wherein three distinct spheres collided in an often uneasy balance of influence and independence. The three stages of the Bureau of Information’s history alluded to at the beginning of this chapter can each be characterized by the general conception of the Bureau in official circles at the time; this first stage was that of the ‘Imagined Bureau’ in which the new agency was a reactive body, a remedy for growing student unrest that functioned as a replication of existing hostile information structures. After Wyllie’s death, the Bureau would take on a more aggressive tone before finally lapsing into irrelevance after 1910.

Though bureaucrats would have been loathe to admit it, 21 Cromwell Street was conceived of as a government-sanctioned India House. While the India Office’s efforts had previously hinged on simply collecting information about students, India House had demonstrated that putting information in their hands was a more effective tactic. Even though Savarkar’s demands for active militancy eventually drove nationalist students away, they retained the leftist political views that the Free India Society had drilled into them, and that was perhaps more important than the few tangible actions that the group was able to carry out. The imperial government, clearly attuned to the value of information, had long recognized the importance that these England-returned students had on Indians upon their return, but had previously avoided official involvement for fear of stoking suspicion and instead left such responsibilities to private English clubs. In this light, perhaps the street address of the India Office’s 1908 physically-grounded attempt to establish a constructed information order wasn’t coincidental after all: a pro-British information hub on Cromwell Road to match the anti-British one on Cromwell Avenue.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Mon May 10, 2021 11:33 pm

Part 2 of 2

That the Bureau would dictate an artificial, constructed information order in reaction to India House was its imagined goal. In the subcontinental setting from which the India Office had drawn its inspiration for its intelligence strategy, the information order was an organic force; the ICS officers who used it to rule passively listened in on streams within the larger structure, rarely influencing it themselves. In contrast, the India Office’s newest efforts required them to create a new system of information flow –- a constructed information order -– that they not only had the ability to manipulate but that they had total control over. The shape of their constructed information order was expressly pro-British and flowed in two directions, both towards and away from students. Just as Savarkar could influence what information entered into, spread throughout, and left India House, so too was the India Office attempting to create a manipulable space where bureaucrats could ensure that anti-British ideas travelled in only one direction: from nationalist students to the surreptitiously surveillant government officials who could mark them for additional monitoring.

Information within the Bureau’s constructed order was designed to travel outward to students through several media. Most literally, it came published in a handbook. The National Indian Association had been putting out a series of handbooks for incoming students since 1893, offering information about Britain’s different universities and courses of study, as well as the processes of applying to them; they also emphasized seeking out the NIA’s help upon arrival in London for help in acclimating to English life.17 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 file 233 “Bureau of Information.”] These guidebooks were widely read and had to be reprinted almost a dozen times by 1908, at which point the Bureau of Information co-opted the idea and published jointly-authored handbooks in the years after.18 [ibid. After the Bureau’s dissolution in 1912, the India Office continued to sponsor the handbooks through the Indian Students’ Department.
] While the handbooks explicitly offered to imbue students with a positive idea of English society, the Bureau’s other primary avenue of outward information flow -– guardianship -– was a subtler approach to the same destination.

The idea of guardianship as a mode of controlling Indian students had long percolated throughout India Office thought. Groups like the NIA had previously offered to place students in surrogate English homes to keep them out of nationalist circles and expose them to a sunnier side of British life. The Bureau of Information offered the India Office an institution to systematically direct students towards private guardianship rather than simply hoping that students would voluntarily submit to private supervision; 21 Cromwell’s third and fourth floors would be dedicated to the Indian Students’ Hostel. Run directly under the Bureau’s auspices, the hostel’s twenty-five beds were temporary lodgings for freshly-arrived students where they could stay until they made long-term arrangements.19 [“Indian Students’ New Hostel,” The Daily Mail (20 Oct 1910): 3.] T.W. Arnold kept a list of government-approved private homes on file at the Bureau,20 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/845 file 233 “Bureau of Information.”] and the obvious hope was that students would transition from the government hostel to an English home that could act as a government proxy. In effect, they would remain under surveillance -– or at least the possibility of it –- for the entire duration of their stay.

Constrained by the familiar contours of liberalism, however, the converse inward information flow was largely impossible. Morley had forbidden the use of officially-sanctioned spies within seditious circles and insisted that “the whole scheme is of a purely voluntary character.”21 [Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 127-30; OIOC IOR/L/PJ/845 “Morley to Minto.”] Although several India Office bureaucrats made efforts to gather information about the group, their constructed information order fell short of its goal because of the glaring gaps in its knowledge about its radical opponents. Lee-Warner was acutely aware of this shortcoming and wrote that “[the Educational Adviser] cannot do this if, for fear of being called a ‘spy’, he keeps himself ignorant of...the black sheep. Notorious sedition-agents he should certainly know.”22 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1020, “Minute by W. Lee-Warner,” quoted in Katherine Watt’s “T.W. Arnold and the Re-Evaluation of Islam,” Modern Asian Studies 36 (Feb. 2002), 76.] This was easier said than done; despite attempts to unofficially infiltrate India House, the India Office’s picture of the group remained incomplete and its constructed information order only succeeded in a distributory function.23 [“Succeeded” is lofty praise for a Bureau that is universally panned as ineffective, but it really did have some success in making contact with students, even if it was unable to glean much information about them for its surveillance aims. Schaffel estimates that nearly two-thirds of all Indian students between 1909 and 1911 visited the Bureau, and the India Office admitted that the agency’s ceiling was probably at around ninety per cent of students. Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 71; OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1120.]

Aside from its surveillance aims, a student hostel was hardly a new idea; it was only made possible in 1908 as public patience wore thin with India House. In 1903, the India Office had hosted a series of public gatherings at the Imperial Institute about the possibility of opening a government-run hostel for Indian students.24 [Visram, Asians in Britain, 89] This was before Krishnavarma had established India House and was born more out of the type of amorphous public anxieties that had precipitated the certificate of identity scheme a few years prior. Still, opinion was divided on both official and unofficial fronts. A London correspondent for The Times of India reported a general distaste for the idea in July 1903:

…[T]here was a consensus of opinion against the provision of a hostel, and some division in reference to Sir William Lee-Warner’s suggestion for the establishment of a club. The dominant note of hostility to the plan of gathering Indian sojourners here under a single roof ran through the earlier speeches of [the previous meeting] and it was not until [today] that we heard a single word in favour of a hostel.25 [“Indian Students in England: The Proposed Hostel,” The Times of India (11 Aug 1903): 4.]


Lest he slip out of view for too long, Wyllie was an important voice in this early discussion. “The hostel was said to be Wyllie’s idea” claims Rozina Visram, citing his paranoia about students’ growing disloyalty; she argues that he proposed it out of a “need for an Indian hostel to ‘make them loyal’, in other words, under control and compliant.”26 [Visram, Asians in Britain, 159] Though history perhaps vindicates Wyllie’s worry, the 1903 public rejected the idea out of fear that it would stoke suspicion among Indians. This was a predictable outcome within the established framework of British liberalism: a public ill at ease with the presence of indefinably troubling foreigners yet iller at ease with the idea of limiting their freedoms. Since unofficial anxieties at this point were founded primarily on rumors and unrepresentative samples, Indian students were allowed to hold on to their social citizenship and avoid potentially restrictive oversight.

Calls for a hostel reemerged several years later as India House was gaining notoriety, this time with more effect. A rash of newspaper editorials in British India supported expanding the cooperation between the India Office and private societies in response to Highgate’s influence. “The proper means of counteracting the pernicious teaching... is to provide more wholesome centres for these students” wrote one op-ed, insisting that “it is time that the proposal for a hostel for Indian students was reconsidered in earnest.”27 [“An Indiscreet Question,” The Times of India (1 Aug 1907): 6.] Another complained that “A systematic campaign is waged with the view of poisoning these students the moment they arrive in Europe” and advocated government subsidies for private societies.28 [“Indian Students in England,” The Times of India (3 Sept 1908): 6.] A third questioned the useful[ness] of an expanded government presence in solving the larger issue of nationalist discontent: “A ‘Glorified Northbrook’ cannot, and will not, remove the cause of disaffection among the Indian students in England... none of [the private societies] offers any real facilities for the study of Anglo-Indian problems of the day. Is there any wonder that the poor Indian youth... falls back upon questionable sources of information for his political guidance?”29 [S.M. Mitra, “Indian Students: What is to be Done?” Pall Mall Gazette reprinted in The Times of India (1 Dec 1908): 7.] As the shadow of Highgate stretched further across London, the British public was more willing to listen to ideas about restricting student freedoms, even at the cost of offending liberal sensitivities. Wyllie’s death opened the floodgates for more aggressive measures, and the Bureau of Information was one institution that benefitted from increased public acceptance after 1909.

The Aggressive Bureau

The Bureau’s first evolution, shifting from an ‘Imagined Bureau’ to an ‘Aggressive Bureau,’ came on the heels of Dhingra’s shooting and lasted until the end of 1910. Situated within the increasingly cohesive global intelligence network, the Bureau seemingly had the potential to play a critical role and more aggressively expand its influence.30 [Kaminsky, The India Office, 177-8.] Without the liberal benefit of the doubt protecting students, the attempt to enact a constructed information order within the confines of the Bureau that would feed into the larger network seemed a real possibility. That had been the goal for a while but was hampered by liberalism; without the public protecting students, the Bureau could both gather information more aggressively and put its files to use.

The 1909-10 crackdown against India House was the first step in establishing a new global imperial intelligence network in which the Bureau of Information played a key role. Wyllie’s death was the impetus for increased communication and cooperation between the European agencies and the Criminal Intelligence Department in India; what began with John Wallinger’s transfer from Simla to London blossomed into the Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), a secretive new agency that integrated information inputs from India and Britain and coordinated with police agencies that could take action on it. The IPI has been mislabelled as the Indian Secret Service in earlier works; before its files were made public in 1998, even its name was a mystery.31 [Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence and Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination” both refer to the “Indian Secret Service”; as far as I can infer, they both refer to the IPI.] A short history of the organization authored upon its closure in 1946 reveals that it worked in conjunction with Scotland Yard, MI6 and the India, Colonial, and Foreign Offices. It was created in direct response to Wyllie’s death:

The wave of violent crime connected with the intensification of the Indian Nationalist Movement during Lord Minto’s Viceroyalty included the murder of [Wyllie]. This led to the deputation from the Central Intelligence Department of the Government of India in the Home Department of an Indian Police Officer for attachment to the India Office. He was charged to co-operate with the Home Security organizations in detecting subversive activities among Indians here.32 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/12/662 file 1681/44 “Origin and Development of the IPI,” 127.]


The IPI’s mandate included gathering intelligence about security threats to British India across the empire as well as in Britain, including compiling dossiers about notable nationalist personalities and their activities. The Bureau of Information had plenty to offer within this cooperative new system: during a 1911 review of the agency’s work, Educational Adviser T.W. Arnold reported that he kept a file on every student who visited, including correspondences between students and universities, a copy of his certificate of information, and his reported expenses.33 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1120 file 4173 “Indian Students in England.”] Arnold may have sold his own intelligence files short; a student who visited the Bureau found that the official he met with already had a thick file on him despite having never been to 21 Cromwell Road before. “Apparently my every movement had been recorded” he later wrote.34 [Lahiri, Indians in Britain, 171.] Arnold acknowledged that in addition to the aforementioned official records he kept on each student, “I receive information about [radical] students from the Secretary of State’s department as well as from [presumably CID] officers in India; notes are also sometimes attached to certificates of identity.” These red flags were used to designate specific students for additional surveillance. Arnold continued: “In the case of such students...it has been found advantageous to place them in lodgings in a district not usually frequented by Indians, under conditions favourable to the formation of friendships with English persons.”35 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1120 file 4173 “Indian Students in England.”] This can easily be read as an attempt to transpose the structured colonial encounters in India into Britain; by isolating potential troublemakers from like-minded dissidents and putting them into exclusive contact with “good English life,”36 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/808 file 1296, “Memorandum by East India Association, 1907.”] the Bureau intended to reinforce ideas of British cultural superiority while controlling the range of Indian interaction.

Arnold was not always met with as much warmth by Britain’s universities as the India Office would have hoped. Though he was able to set up contacts at every major university he needed for the Bureau to function effectively, Oxford perpetually proved unsupportive, if not entirely uncooperative. The university’s vice-chancellor saw the establishment of the Bureau of Information as an implicit encouragement for Indians wishing to study in Britain and rarely missed an opportunity to voice his disagreement with the idea. “How far it is good general policy, or for their advantage to encourage them to come to this country and to reside and study at Universities here rather than to provide them, if it can be done, with all they need in their country, is a wider question which I think ought to be seriously considered,” adding that Oxford University was, at least by his estimation, home to a disproportionately high number of Indian students already and that the last thing he needed was to sift through the unqualified applications of hundreds more each year.37 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 “Oxford to India Office.”]

Despite the university’s bluster, the India Office intended for the arrangement to work in favor of both parties and hinted at the Bureau’s primary objective immediately following Wyllie’s death. “By means of this agency it is hoped that the Education Adviser will be able to obtain all information regarding individual students which may be desired by the University and other authorities regarding individual students, and thus to meet what is understood to be a need which has made itself felt for detailed and trustworthy information as to the position, means, and character of Indian applicants”38 [ibid, “Campbell to Pargiter and Candy.”] wrote one bureaucrat in July 1909 to the contacts at Oxford and Cambridge in a particularly telling message about the disguised function of the Bureau of Information. While the new office publicly projected an image of benevolence and an outward flow of information to help students, the intelligence continued to run the same direction it always had: from colonial periphery to imperial core, but this time within the confines of Britain itself. The information about these students was useful for the developing global surveillance network and also for university admissions; by effectively weeding out applicants deemed unsuitable by Bureau findings, it simplified the decision process for universities supposedly inundated by unqualified Indian applications.

The Bureau’s function had thus already been altered in the short time since its opening: while it had been conceived of during a period in which students were afforded the liberal benefit of the doubt, Madan Lal Dhingra had opened up the possibility of the Bureau as an acceptable surveillance agency that could add consequence to its information. Spies and informants were increasingly in use by the time the Bureau moved from Whitehall to Cromwell Road, and the new Bureau opened a new avenue to intelligence gathering by providing a presumably safe space for new students that in turn capitalized on their resulting openness by surreptitiously gauging their compatibility with British society and identifying any potential troublemakers. This new approach was worked out during the weeks that followed the Curzon Wyllie assassination and doubtless reflected the newly validated paranoia that had until recently been little more than unsubstantiated anxiety.39 [Lee-Warner had at least a pair of informants within the India House that reported directly to him for some time before the Curzon Wyllie murder, and India Office records detail the expenses related to several other Indians employed to infiltrate potentially hostile student groups. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 127; OIOC IOR/L/PS/8/67 “Employment and Expenses of Indian Informant Sajani Ranjan Banerjea, alias Sukasagar Dutt, to Watch Indian Students in London.” This British Library file is an extremely interesting one as it details the employment of a student spy named Suksagar Dutt from 1909 until 1913; suspiciously, an active member of India House before 1909 was named Sukh Sagar Dutt. Paul Schaffel also noticed this eerie similarity and concluded that the two were different people. Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 107.]

There are a few documented instances of how spies were implanted at India House. For instance, there was an informant named Sukhsagar Dutt (which was the nom de plume of Sajani Ranjan Banerjea) who also stayed here. The DCI had engaged him as an informant from October 1909 until June 1913. His passage and outfit (£100), fees for admission to the bar (£90), final fee when called to the bar (£40), purchase of law books (£10), purchase of other books and instruments (£10), cost of a course of study at the Imperial College of Science (£124–10) and passage back to India on completing the course (£42–2–8) were fully borne by the intelligence department and paid through Thomas Cook & Sons. In addition, he was paid a monthly allowance as retainer fee for £20 for forty-five months during this period. Close to £1316 was spent on merely one informant at India House.

Dutt claims to have turned informant to pay off his family debts. He reported to the superintendent of the Special Branch, P. Quinn, and gave him regular updates. His letter dated 20 November 1912 to Quinn mentions how it was settled even before his departure to London that he should stay there till July 1913 and supply information. The approval of his science course was to ensure he came in touch with several Indian students as science was what ‘appeals to Indians with extremist tendencies’. But his studies at the Royal College of Science were discontinued after a short while when the money sanctioned for that purpose was not paid to him. Now that he was being called by the bar after finishing with the Inns of Court, he wanted to encash the money owed to him, in order to stay on for longer, so that ‘my friends here may get suspicious of my stay till June next, but if I join a barrister’s chamber for practical work for the period of six months there will be no cause for my friends to question about my stay here till June 1913’. 52 If his services were needed for a longer period, he was ‘glad to continue it for another three to six months’. His case was recommended thereafter to Sir Thomas W. Holderness, the undersecretary of state, mentioning that Dutt had ‘been of great use’ and had ‘a good knowledge of Indian seditionists’. He was assessed as having ‘the great merit of reporting, truthfully, and not making sensational statements in order to magnify his usefulness’. Dutt was ‘also eager to know if he is to put himself in touch with any official of the Criminal Intelligence Department on arrival in India. He will probably on the way back call and see Madam Cama and Virendranath Chattopadhyay in Paris and if thought advisable would go to Pondicherry to see V.V.S. Aiyar.’ 53 Dutt managed his work so adroitly that neither Vinayak nor his associates ever found out about the mole in their midst...

The British were conscious that with the closure of India House and in view of heightened police surveillance, a flight of the revolutionaries abroad was imminent. Most revolutionaries would now find safer havens in other European cities, especially Paris. In October 1909, Sajani Ranjan Banerjee, or Sukhsagar Dutt, was employed specifically for the purpose of a twenty-four-hour surveillance on Indian students who seemed suspicious. He was to act as a conduit between the DCI in India and Scotland Yard in London. It was decided to create an Indian secret service to facilitate easy communication and sharing of information between these two organizations spread across continents.


-- Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past: 1883-1924, by Vikram Sampath


While the CID and Scotland Yard were taking direct action against India House itself, India Office bureaucrats did their part to prevent any future recurrences in the way that they were most familiar with: harnessing the information order. This slightly more sinister function of the Bureau of Information, obviously never publicly acknowledged in any official releases about the new India Office branch, secretly defined the office’s role for the few years of its existence and is a lens through which the Bureau needs to be viewed. It was a unique arm of the growing global intelligence network, feeding information about potential troublemakers to the IPI. While attempts to construct an artificial information order before July 1909 had been thoroughly underwhelming, its shifting role within the new network lent it a tone of aggression; its connection with the IPI gave it teeth to back up the information it gathered and the means to collect even more valuable intelligence. It was an important and useful element of imperial surveillance for a little over a year following Wyllie’s death, but that role shrunk rapidly after 1910; it had been instrumental in helping the IPI get off the ground but had less of a part to play once it had become an established organization.

The Irrelevant Bureau

By 1911, 21 Cromwell Road was home to an Irrelevant Bureau; by the end of 1912, the Bureau had quietly been scrapped altogether. Part of the office’s rapid fall from grace was the divergent ideology of its head, and part of it was due to a shrinking niche within the empire’s global intelligence network. During the immediate aftermath of Wyllie’s death and the coordinated official crackdown on India House, T.W. Arnold had acted as a facilitator of information from student to government, passing along intelligence to authorities who could carry out actions on its recommendation. Arnold complied with government directives to make this kind of surveillance work possible, but he may not have been entirely comfortable with it; by 1911, less was being asked of him on that front and he used the lull to steer the Bureau back toward liberal shores.

With the CID and Scotland Yard coordinating efforts within the newly established IPI, the Bureau of Information wasn’t especially useful by the end of 1910. Savarkar had been arrested and extradited to India, the Highgate mansion had been resold, and the few remaining outspoken radicals had left England for either the United States or the European continent. The vitriol and pushback -– both official and unofficial -– following Dhingra’s shooting had temporarily scared potentially dissenting Indian students straight, and no new nationalist organizations were springing up in London. The explanation for this was twofold: global intelligence communication allowed the imperial government to more closely monitor the movements of troublemakers and apprehend them before they could do damage, and public opinion in Britain no longer extended the liberal benefit of the doubt for students. Though not entirely unwelcome in Britain, students no longer enjoyed the uneasy tolerance that had allowed India House to take root. As such, there simply wasn’t much intelligence to be gained from students in London; those who knew anything about revolutionaries kept quiet, but most of them actively tried to distance themselves from those anti-imperialists.

No longer pressured to spy on trusting students, Arnold had free reign to remodel The Bureau in his own image and settled on one of well-intentioned paternalism.40 [Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,”72.] “His efforts as Educational Adviser to promote students’ interests were genuine” wrote historian Katherine Watt, and Arnold gradually renounced his role as an intelligence agent and returned to the style he was most familiar and comfortable with: the teacher.41 [Watt, “Thomas Walker Arnold and the Re-Evaluation of Islam,” 78.] The Lee-Warner Report had recommended the Bureau be governed jointly by an Educational Adviser and an advisory committee; while Arnold took his position seriously, the same could hardly be said of the committee members. They met only a few times in the Bureau’s history and by 1910 Arnold was effectively running the Bureau by himself.42 [Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 67, 74-5] He used this new power to work for students rather than against them, advocating on their behalf to officials at Oxford and Cambridge and in doing so uprooting the Bureau’s earlier efforts to gain the universities’ favor with information. Watt writes that “His attitude towards students, whom he saw as ‘his babes’, was sincerely sympathetic to their ambitions and the prejudice they faced,” arguing that Arnold had been against student surveillance all along and had complied with India Office orders to do so only as long as he was asked.43 [Watt, “T.W. Arnold and the Re-Evaluation of Islam,” 79.] He had occasionally complained about what was required of him, but still passed along information that was used to monitor suspicious students. Thus, the Bureau didn’t become irrelevant because Arnold decided to operate in opposition to India Office directives as Schaffel argues, but rather changed course after it had already been rendered obsolete by the more effective methods of the IPI. Arnold’s actions were a response to a decreasing role in the global intelligence network rather than its cause.

A subtle yet notable feature of the ‘Irrelevant Bureau’ was its harmful co-optation of the two private societies. The Lee-Warner Committee’s recommendation had included the National Indian Association and the Northbrook Club (rebranded afterward as the Northbrook Society) adopting office spaces within the confines of the new building, a prospect that not everyone in the groups found ideal. In particular, a representative of the Northbrook Society wrote in 1908 to the India Office that the club was concerned about a loss of autonomy but that its members on the whole “are not averse from a scheme by which the overlapping and duplication of work would be avoided, while each society retained a separate and distinct existence.”44 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 file 233 “Bureau of Information.”] The societies’ reservations aren’t difficult to imagine: much as the India Office was moving to focus and streamline its process for dealing with Indian students in an effort to better keep them under supervision, so too might the office be making an attempt to exercise some influence over the groups doing similar work and ensure a uniform approach to the problem. Per the committee’s recommendations, the India Office would pay half of the organizations’ rents for their spaces in 21 Cromwell Road and provide additional subsidies as necessary; coupled with the centralized office spaces, it would have been reasonable for the pair of private societies to stay fairly wary of the potential for the government to extend its influence over their own missions.

By subsidizing the private groups and housing them under the same roof as the Bureau of Information, the India Office had however unwittingly cost them their legitimacy as private intermediaries in the minds of students. Having been lumped in with the increasingly repressive imperial government, they ceased to function as the well-meaning alternatives to official agencies they had been prior to 1910 and became one and the same with the India Office. Indians looking for friendly Englishmen to advocate on their behalf in a London where private support for students was dwindling no longer considered the Northbrook Society and the National Indian Association viable options; their legitimacy had been compromised by the government’s tainting touch and no longer wielded the same power to confer social citizenship upon visiting students. “[A representative] of the National Indian Association was aware that students she befriended were regarded as spies. Two representatives at Cromwell Road believed it was the government connection that was at the root of the problem”45 [Lahiri, Indians in Britain, 171.] wrote Shompa Lahiri, providing evidence that the organizations’ leadership was aware of the government’s harmful influence. The new location also had practical drawbacks for the organizations; even with India Office subsidies, rent in Kensington was astronomical, and an inability to keep up with the required payments -– due in part, no doubt, to a decreasing membership within student circles because of their new suspicion –- was one of the factors in the NIA’s decline by 1920.46 [“21 Cromwell Road,” Making Britain Database, http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/ ... mwell-road (accessed 17 March 2015).]

Conclusion

In looking at the history of Indian students after 1909, public opinion was a force perhaps even more powerful than the government in dictating the status of Indian students. After 1909, Indian students were increasingly subject to racial prejudice and their presence in universities was increasingly met with British resentment, largely on the grounds that they were stealing seats from better-qualified English students. This is at least partially explained by the collective partial revocation of their social citizenship -– India House had cost them the liberal benefit of the doubt. During a 1911 India Office investigation into the Bureau’s effectiveness, a student spoke on the recent uptick in unofficial prejudice. He claimed that ten years earlier, racism had been nearly nonexistent in the student experience, but in 1911 “The financial difficulties of some, the extreme political views of others, the commencement of anarchic crime in India and England, the hostility towards students of a certain section of the Press in both countries have contributed to the same result,”47 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1120, “Note by K.M. Singh, 1911”] namely, a growing alienation among Indians in Britain. His testimony touched on the newfound hostility of several private British intermediaries: the press, his university classmates, and even his teachers had all been defenders of Indian students’ social citizenship before the Wyllie shooting, but afterwards had become decidedly less welcoming.

This wholly moderate climate that emerged in 1909 doesn’t mean that English education didn’t produce nationalists as it had earlier; rather, it produced more nationalists of the Jagmanderlal Jaini variety and fewer like Acharya. The Jainis of the student body followed in the moderate nationalism that Naoroji had pioneered while its Acharyas had run out of liberal goodwill in England. This is an explanation that works in harmony with the role of global intelligence in ensuring that no future India Houses ever took hold in England: both the public and the government held power over students in London, and neither party was willing to afford them as much tolerance as India House had received.

21 Cromwell Road in itself was the physical manifestation that signalled the tail end of the transformative arc of the India Office’s use of the information order. What had begun in India as a nebulous network of native informants and tenuous chains had become a single building with a single man at its center; incorporating the private groups effectively signalled their end as alternative avenues and centralized the controlling influence over students in a single location. Common sense would support the India Office’s approach: an increasingly systematized and structured network intuitively lends itself to more effectiveness. The mistake was in believing that information could flow both directions through a single hub; in the minds of students, the information that the Bureau was meant to spread hardly justified interacting with what was obviously an institution designed to keep a close watch on them, especially when things like the handbooks made visiting the Bureau unnecessary. The Bureau may have had an element of well-intentioned paternalism that T.W. Arnold brought out during his tenure, but it was fundamentally an attempt to collect intelligence that pretended unconvincingly not to be.

The Bureau of Information for Indian Students was the India Office’s final attempt to actively intervene in the lives of India’s cosmopolitan intellectuals. When the Lee-Warner Committee’s Report was finally published, it was as an appendix to a similar report conducted in 1921 under the chairmanship of Lord Lytton, the son of the former Viceroy Lytton. That the investigation was conducted by the son of a past Governor-General seems apropos, as the tone of its report was a marked change from that of Lee-Warner’s in 1907 befitting a generational shift in approach. Rather than recommending thinly-veiled surveillance measures, Lytton’s report keyed on the importance of developing India’s own education system. A thoroughly liberal solution that cast an eye towards preparing India for its increasingly inevitable independence, the committee’s report represented the end of the imperial government’s efforts to control students in Britain. The India Office maintained a presence in 21 Cromwell Road’s successor -– a hostel sponsored by the Y.M.C.A. that opened in 1920 and still operates today -– but never made any pretense to running its operation.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue May 11, 2021 1:27 am

Curzon Wyllie
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/10/21

Image

Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie KCIE CVO (5 October 1848 – 1 July 1909) was a British Indian army officer, and later an official of the British Indian Government. Over a career spanning three decades, Curzon Wyllie rose to be a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Indian Army and occupied a number of administrative and diplomatic posts. He was the British resident to Nepal and the Princely state of Rajputana, and later, the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton. Curzon Wyllie was assassinated on 1 July 1909 in London by the Indian revolutionary Madan Lal Dhingra, who was a member of India House in London.

Early life

Curzon Wyllie was born at Cheltenham on 5 October 1848 to General William Wyllie (13 August 1802 – 26 May 1891) and his wife, Amelia (13 October 1806 – 14 January 1891). Third and youngest son of five children, Wyllie was educated at Marlborough College (1863–4) and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst (1865–6) before joining the army in October 1866 as ensign 106th foot (Durham Light Infantry), subsequently arriving in India in 1867. Both his elder brothers, John William Shaw Wyllie (1835–1870) and Francis Robert Shaw Wyllie (4 June 1837 – 1907) served in India. The latter Francis Shaw Wyllie joined the Bombay civil service, became under-secretary to the Bombay government, and died in London in February 1907.

Indian service

Arriving in India in February 1867, Wyllie was promoted to lieutenant in October 1868 and joined the Indian staff corps in 1869. He was posted to the 2nd Gurkha regiment [1] for a year. In 1870, Wyllie was selected for civil and political employment and appointed to the Oudh commission, serving under General Barrow[clarification needed] and Sir George Couper.

Image
Grave of Curzon Wyllie, Richmond Cemetery

Wyllie was promoted to captain in October 1878 and transferred to the foreign department in January 1879, serving as cantonment magistrate of Nasirabad, assistant commissioner in Ajmer-Merwara, and subsequently as the assistant to Sir Robert Groves Sandeman, the governor-general's agent in Baluchistan. He was part of Major-General Sir Robert Phayre's contingent in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, when his actions earned him mentions in the Viceroy's dispatches. After the war, Wyllie was appointed the military secretary to the governor of Madras, William Patrick Adam (later also his brother-in-law) from December 1880 until Adam's death in the following May. On 29 December 1881, Wyllie married Katharine Georgiana Carmichael (15 July 1858 — 9 September 1931), second daughter of David Fremantle Carmichael of the Indian Civil Service. Made CIE in 1881, he was promoted to major in October 1886 and to lieutenant-colonel in 1892.

Wyllie served as the private secretary to acting governor William Huddleston till November 1881, subsequently overseeing the affairs of Malhar Rao Gaekwar of Baroda before taking the post of the assistant resident at Hyderabad from December 1881 to November 1882. Through the next 14 years, Wyllie served in political and government posts in a number of different places, mostly in Rajputana . During this time he oversaw relief for the famine of 1899-1900. In between 1893 and 1899, Wyllie was the officiating resident in Nepal when in February 1898 he was selected as the agent to the governor-general in central India. In May 1900 he was transferred in the same capacity to Rajputana, where he remained for the rest of his service in India.

Return to England

In March 1901 Wyllie returned to Britain on being appointed the political aide-de-camp to Lord George Hamilton, the Conservative Secretary of State for India (1895–1903).[2] Wyllie's acquaintance and understanding of the Indian princes and his service in India meant he was assigned important and often delicate matters relating to the princely states and their relations to the British crown. He oversaw the arrangements for the Indian princes visiting for the coronation of King Edward VII in August 1902, and for his service was invested as a Member (fourth class) of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) two days after the ceremony, on 11 August 1902.[3][4] He was further knighted and invested as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (KCIE) by King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace on 24 October 1902.[5][6] Promotion to a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) followed in June 1907. At this time, he was also involved in affairs relating to Indian students in Britain, including being involved in associations and charities for the Indians, as well as overseeing the Indian nationalist opinion that was finding voice in Britain at the time.

Assassination

Image
Grave of Dr Cawas Lalcaca in Brookwood Cemetery

Popplewell quotes The Indian Sociologist as describing Wyllie and Lee Warner "as early as October 1907" as "old unrepentant foes of India who have fattened on the misery of the Indian peasant every (sic) since they began their career".[7] He was assassinated in London on the evening of 1 July 1909 by Madan Lal Dhingra at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington, where he and his wife were attending an event organised by the National Indian Association.[8] Dhingra was an Indian student at the University of London who had close ties with the nationalist India House and The Indian Sociologist. Dhingra fired at Curzon Wyllie with a revolver, killing him instantly, and mortally wounding Dr Cawas Lalcaca, a Parsi physician from Shanghai, who attempted to come to Wyllie's aid and stop Dhingra. Wyllie was buried at Richmond Cemetery, Surrey, on 6 July. Dhingra was sentenced to death in July 1909 and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 17 August 1909.

References

1. (the Sirmoor Rifles, later the 2nd King Edward's Own Gurkhas)
2. "Appointment". The Times (36403). London. 15 March 1901. p. 7.
3. "Court Circular". The Times (36844). London. 12 August 1902. p. 8.
4. "No. 27467". The London Gazette. 22 August 1902. pp. 5461–5462.
5. "Court Circular". The Times (36908). London. 25 October 1902. p. 8.
6. "No. 27476". The London Gazette. 23 September 1902. p. 6075.
7. Richard James Popplewell (1995). Intelligence and imperial defence: British intelligence and the defence of the Indian Empire, 1904-1924. Frank Cass. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-7146-4580-3. Retrieved 25 March 2012.
8. EJ Beck, Open University, Retrieved 27 July 2015

Sources

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Gokhale: the Indian moderates and the British raj (1977) by B. R. Nanda.
• Raj: the making and unmaking of British India (1997) by Lawrence James.
• The Oxford history of modern India, 1740–1947 (1965) by Percival Spear.
• The British conquest and dominion of India (1989). by Penderel Moon.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue May 11, 2021 1:41 am

William Lee-Warner
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/10/21

Image
Sir William Lee-Warner

Sir William Lee-Warner GCSI (18 April 1846 – 18 January 1914) was a British author and colonial administrator in the Indian Civil Service. He was Chief Commissioner of Coorg in 1895.[1][2][3] In 1907 he headed the eponymous Lee Warner Committee that examined Indians receiving education in Britain.

Early life and education

Lee-Warner was born in Little Walsingham[4] into a prominent Norfolk family. He was the fourth son of the Rev. Canon Henry James Lee-Warner of Thorpland Hall (whose father had changed the family name from Woodward) and Anne Astley, daughter of Henry Nicholas Astley.[5] His maternal great-grandfather was Sir Edward Astley, 4th Baronet. His brother John Lee-Warner also joined the Indian Civil Service and another brother, Henry Lee-Warner, was the Liberal Party candidate for South-West Norfolk in Parliament in 1892. His brother Edward Lee-Warner wrote articles for the Dictionary of National Biography. He was educated at Rugby School and matriculated in 1865 at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he excelled in athletics. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1869, taking honours in the moral sciences tripos, and graduated M.A. in 1872.[2][6]

Career

Lee-Warner joined the Bombay Civil Service in 1869, and his lengthy career included district, secretariat, educational, and political experience. He served as Director of Public Instruction in Berar, private secretary to the Governor of Bombay Sir Philip Wodehouse, Director of Public Instruction in Bombay, and Under-Secretary to the Government of India in the Foreign Department. He spent six years as Chief Secretary to the Bombay Government, and he represented the province of Bombay for two terms on the Supreme Legislature. He also founded the first "up-country" nursing association for Europeans and a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Bombay and in Sind.[2]

A fellow of the University of Bombay, he occasionally gave lectures at Indian colleges. In 1894, he published Protected Princes of India, which was revised and retitled The Native States of India in 1910, when it was published by Macmillan.[7][2] In 1909, he contributed a chapter on India and Afghanistan to The Cambridge Modern History and the Grolier Society Book of History.[8] In 1904, he authored a biography of 1st Marquess of Dalhousie.[9]

In 1907, Lee Warner was chosen to head a committee that looked at the situation of Indian students in British Universities.
This was established due to a general feeling that Indian students did not make the best of the education system and that they were becoming radical nationalists at the places where they lived, notably Shyamji Krishna Varma's India House at Highgate.[10] The report was based on interviews with 35 Indian students and 65 Europeans. The report was not published, presumably because it could offend Indians. It was published only in 1922 as an appendix to the Lytton report.[11]

He published another small book entitled The Citizen of India, which according to The Times in 1914, "met with hearty approval among thoughtful Indians as setting a high and just ideal of civic duty and British and Indian cooperation."
He received an honorary LL.D. from Cambridge.[2]

In 1895, Lord George Hamilton requested Lee-Warner return to England to serve as Secretary of the Political and Secret Department at the India Office. He was appointed to the Secretary of State's Council of India in October 1902,[12] serving until 1910.[2]

Honours

Lee-Warner was appointed a Companion Order of the Star of India (CSI) in the 1892 New Year Honours. He was knighted in the same order (KCSI) in the 1898 Birthday Honours and promoted, upon the recommendation of Viscount Morley, to Knight Grand Commander (GCSI) in the 1911 New Year Honours, an honour typically reserved for Viceroys, Governors, and Secretaries of State in British India.[2]

Personal life

In 1876, Lee-Warner married Ellen Paulina, eldest daughter of Major-General Henry William Holland, CB, in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland. They had four sons: Cecil John Lee-Warner (1879–1907), who drowned aged 28, while bathing at Nanaimo, Vancouver Island;[13] William Hamilton Lee-Warner, OBE (1880–1943);who served in the Colonial Civil Service,[14] Philip Henry Lee-Warner (1886–1925), who married an American from Boston; and Roland Paul Lee-Warner (1892–1960).

In 1914, Sir William died of heart failure following a case of accidental blood poisoning.[2]

References

1. "Warner, Sir William Lee". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34472. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
2. "Death Of Sir William Lee-Warner". The Times. 19 January 1914. p. 11.
3. "The 'Peccavi' Story", The Observer; 2 September 1917
4. 1851 England Census
5. Walford, Edward (1871). The County Families of the United Kingdom: Or, Royal Manual of the Titled and Untitled Aristocracy of Great Britain and Ireland. Robert Hardwicke. p. 595. Retrieved 2 July 2018. Henry James Lee Warner.
6. "Lee Warner, William (LY865W)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
7. Lee-Warner, Sir William (1910). The Native States of India (2nd ed.). Macmillan.
8. W.M. Flinders Petrie; Hans F. Helmolt; Stanley Lane-Poole; Robert Nisbet Bain; Hugo Winckler; Archibald H. Sayce; Alfred Russel Wallace; William Lee-Warner; Holland Thompson; W. Stewart Wallace (1915). The Book of History, a History of All Nations From the Earliest Times to the Present. Viscount Bryce (Introduction). The Grolier Society.
9. Lee-Warner, Sir William (1904). The Life of the Marquess of Dalhousie. London.
10. Ahmed, Rehana; Mukherjee, Sumita (2012). South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858 - 1947. A&C Black.
11. Lahiri, Shompa (2000). Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880-1930. Taylor & Francis. pp. 14–15.
12. "The Council of India". The Times (36904). London. 21 October 1902. p. 6.
13. Lefroy, W. (21 September 1907). "Births, Marriages, and Deaths". Canada: An Illustrated Weekly Journal for All Interested in the Dominion: 325.
14. "Obituary". The Meteor (Rugby School): 74. April 1943 to December 1944. Check date values in: |date= (help)
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue May 11, 2021 1:59 am

James Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie
by Wikipedia
Accessed" 5/10/21

Image
The Most Honourable, The Marquess of Dalhousie, KT PC
Governor-General of India
In office: 12 January 1848 – 28 February 1856
Monarch: Victoria
Prime Minister: Lord John Russell; The Earl of Derby; The Earl of Aberdeen; The Viscount Palmerston
Preceded by: The Viscount Hardinge
Succeeded by: The Viscount Canning
President of the Board of Trade
In office: 5 February 1845 – 27 June 1846
Monarch: Victoria
Prime Minister: Sir Robert Peel
Preceded by: William Ewart Gladstone
Succeeded by: The Earl of Clarendon
Personal details
Born: 22 April 1812, Dalhousie Castle, Midlothian, Scotland
Image
Died: 19 December 1860 (aged 48), Dalhousie Castle, Midlothian
Citizenship: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Spouse(s): Lady Susan Hay (d. 1853)
Alma mater: Christ Church, Oxford
Known for: Doctrine of Lapse

James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie KT PC (22 April 1812 – 19 December 1860), also known as Lord Dalhousie, styled Lord Ramsay until 1838 and known as The Earl of Dalhousie between 1838 and 1849, was a Scottish statesman and colonial administrator in British India. He served as Governor-General of India from 1848 to 1856.

He established the foundations of the modern educational system in India by adding mass education in addition to elite higher education. He introduced passenger trains in railways, the electric telegraph and uniform postage, which he described as the "three great engines of social improvement". He also founded the Public Works Department in India.[1] To his supporters he stands out as the far-sighted Governor-General who consolidated East India Company rule in India, laid the foundations of its later administration, and by his sound policy enabled his successors to stem the tide of rebellion.[2]

His period of rule in India directly preceded the transformation into the Victorian Raj period of Indian administration. He was denounced by many in Britain on the eve of his death as having failed to notice the signs of the brewing Indian Rebellion of 1857, having aggravated the crisis by his overbearing self-confidence, centralizing activity and expansive annexations.

Early life

James Andrew Broun-Ramsay was the third and youngest son of George Ramsay, 9th Earl of Dalhousie (1770–1838), one of Wellington's generals, who, after being Governor General of Canada, became Commander-in-Chief in India, and of his wife, Christian (née Broun) of Coalstoun, Haddingtonshire (East Lothian).[2]

The 9th Earl was in 1815 created Baron Dalhousie of Dalhousie Castle in the Peerage of the United Kingdom,[3] and had three sons,[2] of whom the two elder died young. James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, his youngest son, was described as small in stature, with a firm chiseled mouth and high forehead.

Several years of his early boyhood were spent with his father and mother in Canada. Returning to Scotland he was prepared for Harrow School, where he entered in 1825. Two years later he and another student, Robert Adair, were expelled after bullying and nearfly causing the death of George Rushout, nephew of John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick.[4] Until he entered university, Dalhousie's entire education being entrusted to the Rev. Mr Temple, incumbent of a quiet parish in Staffordshire.[2]

In October 1829, he passed on to Christ Church, Oxford, where he worked fairly hard, won some distinction, and made many lifelong friends. His studies, however, were so greatly interrupted by the protracted illness and death in 1832 of his only surviving brother, that Lord Ramsay, as he then became, had to content himself with entering for a pass degree, though he was placed in fourth class of honours for Michaelmas 1833. He then travelled in Italy and Switzerland, enriching with copious entries the diary which he religiously kept up through life, and storing his mind with valuable observations.[2]

Early political career

Image
Susan, Marchioness of Dalhousie

An unsuccessful but courageous contest at the general election in 1835 for one of the seats in parliament for Edinburgh, fought against such veterans as the future speaker, James Abercrombie, afterwards Lord Dunfermline, and John Campbell, future lord chancellor, was followed in 1837 by Ramsay's return to the House of Commons as member for Haddingtonshire. In the previous year he had married Lady Susan Hay, daughter of the Marquess of Tweeddale, whose companionship was his chief support in India, and whose death in 1853 left him a heartbroken man. In 1838 his father had died after a long illness, while less than a year later he lost his mother.[2]

Succeeding to the peerage, the new earl soon made his mark in a speech delivered on 16 June 1840 in support of Lord Aberdeen's Church of Scotland Benefices Bill, a controversy arising out of the Auchterarder case, in which he had already taken part in the General Assembly in opposition to Dr Chalmers. In May 1843 he became Vice-President of the Board of Trade, Gladstone being President, and was sworn in as a privy counsellor.[2] He was also given the honorary post of Captain of Deal Castle the same year.[5]

Succeeding Gladstone as President of the Board of Trade in 1845, he threw himself into the work during the crisis of the Railway Mania with such energy that his health partially broke down under the strain. In the struggle over the Corn Laws he ranged himself on the side of Sir Robert Peel, and, after the failure of Lord John Russell to form a ministry he resumed his post at the board of trade, entering the cabinet on the retirement of Lord Stanley. When Peel resigned office in June 1846, Lord John offered Dalhousie a seat in the cabinet, an offer which he declined from a fear that acceptance might involve the loss of public character.[2] Another attempt to secure his politics.[clarification needed]

India

As Governor-General of India and Governor of Bengal on 12 January 1848, and shortly afterwards he was honoured with the green ribbon of the Order of the Thistle.[2] During this period, he was an extremely hard worker, often working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. The shortest workday Dalhousie would take began at half-past eight and would continue until half-past five, remaining at his desk even during lunch.[6] During this period, he sought to expand the reach of the empire and rode long distances on horseback, in spite of having a bad back.[7]

In contrast to many of the past leaders of the British Empire in India, he saw himself as an Orientalist monarch and believed his rule was that of a modernizer, attempting to bring the British intellectual revolution to India. A staunch utilitarian, he sought to improve Indian society under the prevalent Benthamite ideals of the period. However, in his attempt to do so he ruled with authoritarianism, believing these means were the most likely to increase the material development and progress of India. His policies, especially the doctrine of lapse, contributed to a growing sense of discontent among sectors of Indian society and therefore greatly contributed to the Great Indian Uprising of 1857, which directly followed his departure from India.[8]

In 1849, under Dalhousie's command, the British captured the princely state of Punjab. He also commanded the Second Burmese War in 1852, resulting in the capture of parts of Burma. Under his reign, the British implemented the policy of 'lapse and annexation' which ensured that if a king did not have any sons for a natural heir, the kingdom would be annexed to the British Empire. Using this policy, the British annexed some of the princely states. The annexation of Awadh made Dalhousie very unpopular in the region. This and other callous actions of the governor-general created bitter feelings among the Indian soldiers in the British Army, which finally led to the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Dalhousie and the British called this uprising the 'Sepoy mutiny' - Sepoy being the common term for native Indian soldiers in British service. Dalhousie was an able administrator, though forceful and tough. His contribution in the development of communication — railways, roads, postal and telegraph services — contributed to the modernization and unity of India. His notable achievement was the creation of modern, centralized states

Shortly after assuming his duties, in writing to the president of the Board of Control, Sir John Hobhouse, he was able to assure him that everything was quiet. This statement, however, was to be falsified by events almost before it could reach Britain.[2]

Second Anglo-Sikh War

On 19 April 1848 Vans Agnew of the civil service and Lieutenant Anderson of the Bombay European regiment, having been sent to take charge of Multan from Diwan Mulraj, were murdered there, and within a short time the troops and sardars joined in open rebellion. Dalhousie agreed with Sir Hugh Gough, the commander-in-chief, that the British East India Company's military forces were neither adequately equipped with transport and supplies, nor otherwise prepared to take the field immediately. He afterward decided that the proper response was not merely for the capture of Multan, but also the entire subjugation of the Punjab.[2] He therefore resolutely delayed to strike, organized a strong army for operations in November, and himself proceeded to the Punjab. With evidence that the revolt was spreading outwards, Dalhousie declared, "Unwarned by precedent, uninfluenced by example, the Sikh nation has called for war; and on my words, sirs, war they shall have and with a vengeance."[9]

Despite the successes gained by Herbert Edwardes in the Second Anglo-Sikh War with Mulraj, and Gough's indecisive victories at Ramnagar in November, at Sadulpur in December, and at Chillianwala in the following month, the stubborn resistance at Multan showed that the task required the utmost resources of the government. At length, on 22 January 1849, the Multan fortress was taken by General Whish, who was thus set at liberty to join Gough at Gujarat. Here a complete victory was won on 21 February at the Battle of Gujrat, the Sikh army surrendered at Rawalpindi, and their Afghan allies were chased out of India. In spite of substantial attempts by Sikh and Muslim forces to polarize opposition through religious and anti-British sentiment, Dalhousie's military commanders were able to maintain the loyalty of troops, with the exception of a small number of Gurkah deserters.[10] For his services the Earl of Dalhousie received the thanks of the Parliament and a step in the peerage, as Marquess.

The war being now over, Dalhousie, without specific instructions from his superiors, annexed the Punjab. Believing in inherent superiority of British rule over the "archaic" Indian system of rule, Dalhousie attempted to dismantle local rule, fulfilling the imperial goals of the Anglicizer Lord Bentinck. However, the province quickly became ruled by a group of "audacious, eccentric, and often Evangelical pioneers".[11] In an attempt to minimize further conflict, he removed a number of these officials, establishing what he believed to be a more logical and rational system in which the Punjab was systematically divided into districts and divisions, governed by District officers and Commissioners respectively. This lasting system of rule established governance through a young maharaja under a triumvirate of the Governor General.[2]

Governance under the established "Punjab School" of Henry and John Lawrence was initially successful, partially due to the system of local cultural respect, while still maintaining British values against acts of widow burning, female infanticide, and burning of lepers alive by small segments of the Indian populace.[12] However, Punjabi rule eventually came to be seen as despotic, largely because of the expansion of judicial system. Although often unpredictable or despotic, many Indians in "rationalized" provinces preferred their previous native rule.

Second Burmese War

One further addition to the empire was made by conquest. The Burmese court at Ava was bound by the Treaty of Yandaboo, 1826, to protect British ships in Burmese waters.[2] But there arose a dispute between the Governor of Rangoon and certain British shipping interests (the Monarch and the Champion).

The facts of the event were obscured by conflicts between colonial administrators reporting to the admirals of the navy, rather than the company or civil authorities. The nature of the dispute was mis-represented to Parliament, and Parliament played a role in further "suppressing" the facts released to the public, but most of the facts were established by comparative reading of these conflicting accounts in what was originally an anonymous pamphlet, How Wars are Got Up in India; this account by Richard Cobden remains almost the sole contemporaneous account of who actually made the decision to invade and annex Burma.[13]

In defending the pretext for invasion after the fact, Dalhousie quoted the maxim of Lord Wellesley that any insult offered to the British flag at the mouth of the Ganges should be resented as promptly and fully as an insult offered at the mouth of the Thames.[2] Attempts were made to solve the dispute by diplomacy. The Burmese eventually removed the Governor of Rangoon but this not considered sufficient. Commodore Lambert, despatched personally by Dalhousie, deliberately provoked an incident and then announced a war.

The Burmese Kingdom offered little in the way of resistance. Martaban was taken on 5 April 1852, and Rangoon and Bassein shortly afterwards. Since, however, the court of Ava was unwilling to surrender half the country in the name of "peace", the second campaign opened in October, and after the capture of Prome and Pegu the annexation of the province of Pegu was declared by a proclamation dated 20 December 1853.[2] To any further invasion of the Burmese empire Dalhousie was firmly opposed, being content to cut off Burma's commercial and political access to the outside world by the annexation. Some strangely spoke of the war as "uniting" territory, but in practice Arakan, Tenasserim and the new territories were still only linked in practical terms by sea.

By what his supporters considered wise policy he attempted to pacify the new province, placing Colonel Arthur Phayre in sole charge of it, personally visiting it, and establishing a system of telegraphs and communications.[2] In practice, the new province was in language and culture very different from India. It could never successfully integrate into the Indian system. The end result of the war was to add an expensive new military and political dependency which did not generate sufficient taxes to pay for itself.[2] British Indian rule of Arakan and Tenasserim had been a financial disaster for the Indian Administration. Multiple times in the 1830s questions were raised about getting rid of these territories altogether. Why Dalhousie was so obsessed with increasing the size of a territory that did not generate sufficient revenue to pay for its own administration has never been explained.

One consequential factor of this war was Dalhousie's continuation of the requirement that Sepoys be forced to serve abroad. This created great discontent among Indian sepoys, because it violated the Hindu religious prohibition against travel. In fact, this resulted in the mutiny of several regiments in the Punjab.[14] When this belief that the British were intentionally forcing caste breaking was combined with the widespread belief that the British were intentionally violating Hindu and Muslim purity laws with their new greased cartridges, the consequences (culminating in 1857), would prove to be extremely destructive.[15]

Policies of reforms

Doctrine of Lapse


Image
Portrait of Lord Dalhousie by John Watson-Gordon, 1847.

Main article: Doctrine of Lapse

The most controversial and tainted 'reform' developed and implemented under Dalhousie was the policy of taking all legal (often illegal too) means possible to assume control over "lapsed" states. Dalhousie, driven by the conviction that all India needed to be brought under British administration, began to apply what was called the doctrine of lapse. Under the doctrine, the British annexed any non-British state where there was a lack of a proper male lineal heir. Under the policy he recommended the annexation of Satara in January 1849, of Jaitpur and Sambalpur in the same year, and of Jhansi and Nagpur in 1853. In these cases his action was approved by the home authorities, but his proposal to annex Karauli in 1849 was disallowed, while Baghat and the petty estate of Udaipur, which he had annexed in 1851 and 1852 respectively, were afterwards restored to native rule. These annexations are considered by critics to generally represent an uneconomic drain on the financial resources of the company in India.

Educational reforms

Dalhousie had a strong personal commitment to the establishment of a national system of education in India. He ensured the successful administration of the provisions contained in the 1854 dispatch.[16]

Dalhousie declared that no single change was likely to produce more important and beneficial consequences than female education. The Educational dispatch of 1854 favored Women's education. There was shift in government policy under him from higher education for elite towards mass education for both .[17] He along with Bethune are credited with changing policy in favour of Women's education. Dalhousie even personally supported the Bethune Women school from his own money set up by Bethune after his death.[18] Before he left for England he took personal interest and introduced the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856, permitting widow remarriage which became an act after being approved by his successor, Lord Canning .[19][20][21][22]

Development of infrastructure

Other measures with the same object were carried out in the Company's own territories. Bengal, long ruled by the Governor-General or his delegate, was placed under its own Lieutenant-Governor in May 1854. The military boards were swept away; selection took the place of seniority in the higher commands; an army clothing and a stud department were created, and the medical service underwent complete reorganization. A department of public works was established in each presidency, and engineering colleges were provided. An imperial system of telegraphs followed. The first link of railway communication was completed in 1855, and well-considered plans mapped out the course of other lines and their method of administration. Dalhousie encouraged private enterprise to develop railways in India for the good of the people and also to reduce absolute dependence on the government. However, as an authoritarian, utilitarian ruler, Dalhousie brought the railways under state control-attempting to bring the greatest benefit to India from the expanding network.[citation needed]

In addition, the Ganges Canal was completed; and despite the cost of wars in the Punjab and Burma, liberal provision was made for metalled roads and bridges.[23] The construction of massive irrigation works such as the 350-mile Ganges Canal, which contains thousands of miles of distributaries was a substantial project that was particularly beneficial for the largely agricultural India. In spite of damaging certain areas of farmland by increasing soil salinity, overall the individuals living along the canal were noticeably better fed and clothed than those who were not.[24] Increasing irrigated area resulted in increase in population. Reforms to improve the condition of the increased population such as immunization and establishment of educational institutions were never implemented. This kept the population poor and bonded to agricultural activities promoting bonded labour. Europeanization and consolidation of authority were the keynote of his policy. In nine minutes he suggested means for strengthening the Company's European forces, calling attention to the dangers that threatened the British community, a handful of scattered strangers; but beyond the additional powers of recruitment which at his entreaty were granted in the last charter act of 1853, his proposals were shelved by the home authorities as they represented yet more expense added to the cost of India. In his administration Dalhousie vigorously asserted his control over even minor military affairs, and when Sir Charles Napier ordered certain allowances, given as compensation for the dearness of provisions, to be granted to the sepoys on a system which had not been sanctioned from headquarters, and threatened to repeat the offence, the Governor-General rebuked him to such a degree that Napier resigned his command.

Dalhousie's reforms were not confined to the departments of public works and military affairs. He created an imperial system of post-offices, reducing the rates of carrying letters and introducing postage stamps. He created the department of public instruction; he improved the system of inspection of goals, abolishing the practice of branding convicts; freed converts to other religions from the loss of their civil rights; inaugurated the system of administrative reports; and enlarged the Legislative Council of India. His wide interest in everything that concerned the welfare of British economic interests in the country was shown in the encouragement he gave to the culture of tea, in his protection of forests, in the preservation of ancient and historic monuments. With the object of making the civil administration more European, he closed what he considered to be the useless college in Calcutta for the education of young civilians, establishing in its place a European system of training them in mufasal stations, and subjecting them to departmental examinations. He was equally careful of the well-being of the European soldier, providing him with healthy recreations and public gardens.

Civil Service reform

To the civil service he gave improved leave and pension rules, while he purified its moral by forbidding all share in trading concerns, by vigorously punishing insolvents, and by his personal example of careful selection in the matter of patronage. No Governor-General ever penned a larger number of weighty papers dealing with public affairs in India. Even after laying down office and while on his way home, he forced himself, ill as he was, to review his own administration in a document of such importance that the House of Commons gave orders for its being printed (Blue Book 245 of 1856). Another consequential set of reforms, were those aimed at modernizing the land tenure and revenue system. Throughout his time in office, Dalhousie disposed large landowners from portions of their estates. He also implemented policies attempting to end the rule of the zamindar tax farmers, as he viewed them as destructive "drones of the soil".[25] However, thousands of smaller landlords had their holdings completely removed as did the relatively poor who leased small parcels of their land while farming the rest. This was particularly significant as the sepoys were often recruited from these economic groups.[26] He introduced a system of open competition as the basis of recruitment for civil servants of the company and thus deprived the Directors of their patronage system under Government of India Act 1853.[27]

Foreign policy

His foreign policy was guided by a desire to reduce the nominal independence of the larger native states, and to avoid extending the political relations of his government with foreign powers outside India. Pressed to intervene in Hyderabad, he refused to do so, claiming on this occasion that interference was only justified if the administration of native princes tends unquestionably to the injury of the subjects or of the allies of the British government. He negotiated in 1853 a treaty with the nizam, which provided funds for the maintenance of the contingent kept up by the British in support of that princes' authority, by the assignment of the Berars in lieu of annual payments of the cost and large outstanding arrears. The Berar treaty, he told Sir Charles Wood, is more likely to keep the nizam on his throne than anything that has happened for 50 years to him, while at the same time the control thus acquired over a strip of territory intervening between Bombay and Nagpur promoted his policy of consolidation and his schemes of railway extension. The same spirit induced him to tolerate a war of succession in Bahawalpur, so long as the contending candidates did not violate British territory.

He refrained from punishing Dost Mohammad for the part he had taken in the Sikh War, and resolutely to refuse to enter upon any negotiations until the amir himself came forward. Then he steered a middle course between the proposals of his own agent, Herbert Edwardes, who advocated an offensive alliance, and those of John Lawrence, who would have avoided any sort of engagement. He himself drafted the short treaty of peace and friendship which Lawrence signed in 1855, that officer receiving in 1856 the Order of the Bath as a Knight Commander in acknowledgement of his services in the matter. While, however, Dalhousie was content with a mutual engagement with the Afghan chief, binding each party to respect the territories of the other, he saw that a larger measure of interference was needed in Baluchistan, and with the Khan of Kalat he authorized Major Jacob to negotiate a treaty of subordinate co-operation on 14 May 1854.

The khan was guaranteed an annual subsidy of Rs. 50,000, in return for the treaty which bound him to the British wholly and exclusively. To this the home authorities demurred, but the engagement was duly ratified, and the subsidy was largely increased by Dalhousies successors. On the other hand, he insisted on leaving all matters concerning Persia and Central Asia to the decision of the queen's advisers. After the conquest of the Punjab, he began the expensive process of attempting to police and control the Northwest Frontier region. The hillmen, he wrote, regard the plains as their food and prey, and the Afridis, Mohmands, Black Mountain tribes, Waziris and others had to be taught that their new neighbours would not tolerate outrages. But he proclaimed to one and all his desire for peace, and urged upon them the duty of tribal responsibility. Nevertheless, the military engagement on the northwest frontier of India he began grew yearly in cost and continued without pause until the British left Pakistan.

The annexation of Oudh was reserved to the last. The home authorities had asked Dalhousie to prolong his tenure of office during the Crimean War, but the difficulties of the problem no less than complications elsewhere had induced him to delay operations. In 1854 he appointed Outram as resident at the court of Lucknow, directing him to submit a report on the condition of the province. This was furnished in March 1855. The report provided the British an excuse for action based on "disorder and misrule". Dalhousie, looking at the treaty of 1801, decided that he could do as he wished with Oudh as long as he had the king's consent. He then demanded a transfer to the Company of the entire administration of Oudh, the king merely retaining his royal rank, certain privileges in the courts, and a liberal allowance. If he should refuse this arrangement, a general rising would be arranged, and then the British government would intervene on its own terms.

On 21 November 1855, the court of directors instructed Dalhousie to assume the control of Oudh, and to give the king no option unless he was sure that his majesty would surrender the administration rather than risk a revolution. Dalhousie was in bad health and on the eve of retirement when the belated orders reached him; but he at once laid down instructions for Outram in every detail, moved up troops, and elaborated a scheme of government with particular orders as to conciliating local opinion. The king refused to sign the ultimatum (in the form of a "treaty") put before him, and a proclamation annexing the province was therefore issued on 13 February 1856.

In his mind, only one important matter now remained to him before quitting office. The insurrection of the Kolarian Santals of Bengal against the extortions of landlords and moneylenders had been severely repressed, but the causes of the insurrection had still to be reviewed and a remedy provided. By removing the tract of country from local rule, enforcing the residence of British officers there, and employing the Santal headmen in a local police, he created a system of administration which proved successful in maintaining order.

Return to Britain

A length, after seven years of strenuous labour, Dalhousie, on the 6th of March 1856, set sail for England on board the Company's " Firoze," an object of general sympathy and not less general respect. At Alexandria he was carried by H.M.S. " Caradoc " to Malta, and thence by the " Tribune " to Spithead, which he reached on the 13th of May. His return had been eagerly looked for by statesmen who hoped that he would resume his public career, by the Company which voted him an annual pension of £5,000 (£1.5 million in 2009), and by the queen who earnestly prayed for the blessing of restored health and strength; conversely, the outbreak of the "Sepoy Mutiny" led to bitter attacks on the record of his policy, and to widespread criticisms (both fair and unfair) of his political interests and career. His health deteriorated in Malta and at Malvern, Edinburgh, where he sought medical treatment. In his correspondence and public statements, he was careful not to assign blame or cause embarrassment to colleagues in government. During this period, John Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence invoked his counsel and influence. By his last wish, his private journal and papers of personal interest were sealed against publication or inquiry for fully 50 years after his death.

Established in 1854 by the British Empire in India as a summer retreat for its troops and bureaucrats, the hill station of Dalhousie was named after Lord Dalhousie who was Governor-General of India at that time.

References

1. Ghosh, Suresh Chandra (1978). "The Utilitarianism of Dalhousie and the Material Improvement of India". Modern Asian Studies. 12 (1): 97–110. doi:10.1017/S0026749X00008167. JSTOR 311824.
2. Lee-Warner, William (1911). "Dalhousie, James Andrew Broun Ramsay, 1st Marquess of" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
3. Lee-Warner, Sir William, The Life of the Marquess of Dalhousie, London, 1904, vol.1: 3
4. Tyerman, Christopher (2000). "A History of Harrow School, 1324-1991". Oxford University Press. p. 202. ISBN 9780198227960. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
5. "Captains of Deal Castle". East Kent freeuk. Retrieved 10 January 2017.
6. Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (New York, NY: The Viking Press, 1978), p. 25
7. D. R. SarDesai, India: The Definitive History (Los Angeles: Westview Press, 2008), p. 238.
8. Suresh Chandra Ghosh, "The Utilitarianism of Dalhousie and the Material Improvement of India." Modern Asian Studies; Vol. 12 no. 1 (1978), 97-110. online
9. James, Lawrence. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 115
10. James, Lawrence. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 116
11. Gilmour, David. The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, 161
12. Gilmour, 163.
13. This text went through several "editions" rapidly, with the third edition already in print in 1853 (this was subsequently reprinted in The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, vol. 2). The full text is now available as a book digitized by Google: Richard Cobden (1853). How Wars are Got Up in India: The Origin of the Burmese War. W. & F. G. Cash.
14. Vohra, Ranbir. The Making of India: A Historical Survey. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997, 79.
15. Hibbert, 61.
16. Suresh Chandra Ghosh, "Dalhousie, Charles Wood and the Education Despatch of 1854." History of Education 4.2 (1975): 37-47.
17. Geraldine Hancock Forbes (1999). Women in Modern India. The New Cambridge History of India. IV.2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 39–40. ISBN 978-0-521-65377-0.
18. Gouri Srivastava (2000). Women's Higher Education in the 19th Century. Concept Publishing Company. pp. 65–67. ISBN 978-81-7022-823-3.
19. B. R. Sunthankar (1988). Nineteenth Century History of Maharashtra: 1818-1857. Shubhada-Saraswat Prakashan. p. 184. ISBN 978-81-85239-50-7.
20. Suresh Chandra Ghosh (1975). Dalhousie in India, 1848-56: A Study of His Social Policy as Governor-General. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers. pp. 54–55. OCLC 2122938.
21. John F. Riddick (2006). The History of British India: A Chronology. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-313-32280-8.
22. Chandrakala Anandrao Hate (1948). Hindu Woman and Her Future. New Book Company. p. 176. OCLC 27453034.
23. Digital South Asia Library. Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 2. University of Chicago. http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gaze ... 02_539.gif (accessed 14 April 2009).
24. Gilmour, 9.
25. Brendon, Piers. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781–1997. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
26. Hibbert, 49.
27. M. Lakshmikanth, Public Administration, TMH, Tenth Reprint, 2013
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Dalhousie, James Andrew Broun Ramsay, 1st Marquess of". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Further reading

• "Ramsay, James Andrew Broun". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23088. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Arnold, Sir Edwin (1865). The Marquis of Dalhousie's Administration of British India: Annexation of Pegu, Nagpor, and Oudh, and a General Review of Lord Dalhousie's Rule. Saunders, Otley, and Company.
• Campbell, George Douglas (Duke of Argyll ) (1865). India under Dalhousie and Canning. Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green.
• Ghosh, Suresh Chandra. (2013) The History of Education in Modern India, 1757-2012 (4th ed.) pp 65–84.
• Ghosh, Suresh Chandra. (1978) "The utilitarianism of Dalhousie and the material improvement of India." Modern Asian Studies[ 12.1 (1978): 97-110 online.
• Ghosh, Suresh Chandra. Dalhousie in India, 1848-56: A Study of His Social Policy as Governor-General (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1975).
• Gorman, Mel. (1971) "Sir William O'Shaughnessy, Lord Dalhousie, and the establishment of the telegraph system in India." Technology and Culture 12.4 (1971): 581-601 online.
• Hunter, Sir William Wilson (1894). The Marquess of Dalhousie and the Final Development of the Company's Rule. Rulers of India series. Clarendon Press.
• Lee-Warner, Sir William (1904). The life of the Marquis of Dalhousie, K. T. Macmillan and Co.
• Trotter, Lionel James (1889). Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie. Hard Press. ISBN 978-1-4077-4948-8.

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by the Marquess of Dalhousie
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue May 11, 2021 2:09 am

Theodore Morison
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/10/21

Image
Sir Theodore Morison, KCSI KCIE
Born: 9 May 1863, Malta
Died: 14 February 1936 (aged 72), Paris, France
Alma mater: Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1885)
Occupation: Educationalist

Sir Theodore Morison KCSI KCIE (9 May 1863 – 14 February 1936) was a British educationalist who served as a Member of the Council of India and Director of the University of London Institute in Paris. He is best known as an interpreter of Muslim life in India.[1]

Early life and education

Sir Theodore Morison was born in Malta[2] to James Augustus Cotter Morison and Frances Virtue (d. 1878), the daughter of publisher George Virtue. He had two sisters, Helen Cotter, and Margaret.[1]

Morison was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1885.

Career

After completing his education at the University of Cambridge, he joined the Department of Education. He was appointed as educational advisor to young rulers of Chattarpur (Bundel-Khand) and Charkhari (Hamirpur) and subsequently moved to India.[1]

He was the principal of Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College from 1899-1905 and member of the Council of India from 1906. He was the principal of College of Sciences at Durham University from 1919-1929.[3] He was also the principal of Armstrong College. He was also the Vice Chancellor of Durham University from 1924-1926.[1]

Association with Aligarh Movement

The Aligarh Movement was the push to establish a modern system of education for the Muslim population of British India, during the later decades of the 19th century.[1] The movement's name derives from the fact that its core and origins lay in the city of Aligarh in Northern India and, in particular, with the foundation of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875.[2] The founder of the oriental college, and the other educational institutions that developed from it, was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. He became the leading light of the wider Aligarh Movement.

The education reform established a base, and an impetus, for the wider Movement: an Indian Muslim renaissance that had profound implications for the religion, the politics, the culture and society of the Indian sub-continent.

-- Aligarh Movement, by Wikipedia


In the year of 1899, he was appointed as a Professor of English at M.A.O. College. He served as a Professor of English at the college until 1905. In 1899, he went to England for vacation and resigned from his teaching job of M.A.O. College. On 2 September 1899 Principal Theodore Beck died in Shimla and M.A.O. College offered the job of Principal to Prof. Theodore Morison which he accepted and joined on 29 October 1899.[4] The 5-year tenure of Prof. Morison as Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College Principal was a distinctive period for Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College. He paid much attention to the educational upliftment of Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College. He paid special attention to the discipline of MAO College and established Proctorial System at Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College. Hostel life of MAO College became disciplined and peaceful. He took keen interests in discipline and hygiene of student’s community. The college discipline was in good shape during his tenure as Principal. He established Proctorial system in the college and appointed Mir Wilayat Hussain as Proctor. He enforced student’s 24-hour time table. He equally enforced discipline among his staff and never tolerated indiscipline in their teachings and schedules. His disciplined approach paid and the college results were improved and student strength started growing. In 1899 when he joined as principal, student strength were 465 but in 1903 it became 713. At the same time the performance of the students were also on the rise. From 1900 to 1904, the rate of success in B.A. examinations was between 71% and 79%. Morison paid attention to other activities of students and promoted The Siddons’ Club. To improve Arabic conversation and communication, he established "Lahjatul-Adab". He also established "Anjuman Urdu-e-Moalla" to promote writing and oratory skills among college students.

Morison also paid attention to the religious studies. He created a position of Dean of Theology. He promoted the Darse-Quran program which used to be given by Allama Shibli in the Strachey Hall and asked Nazim-e-Diniyat, Maulana Abdullah Ansari to continue. Principal Morison also paid attention towards sports. He had a keen interest in riding so paid key role to establish The MAO College Riding Club in 1893. Due to his interest in riding, he was also known as "Sipaahi Morison".

He also started an Employment Bureau to help the students to get a job. He used to keep student records with his personal remarks so that upon the request of the government he can furnish the record to help the students.

Principal Morison was also appointed as Finance Secretary of Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College. He helped a lot to improve the financial condition of the college.

He was also elected as President of Muhammadan Educational Conference in December, 1904 at Aligarh. In 1905 he took early retirement from MAO College and moved back to England. Even then he was a part of Aligarh Movement and always took keen interest in helping MAO College and Aligarh Movement. He made several visit to MAO College from England and proved his belief of teacher taught relationship. For his contributions and key role and active participation in Aligarh Movement, MAO College board of Trustees elected him as a Visitor MAO College.

After 1920, when Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College became Aligarh Muslim University, Morison was honored by naming one of the hostel of Aftab Hall as Morison Court hostel and a road Morison Road was named after him in the campus respectively.

Aligarh Muslim University (abbreviated as AMU) is a public central university in Aligarh, India, which was originally established by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875. Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920, following the Aligarh Muslim University Act...

The university was established as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875 by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, starting functioning on 24 May 1875. The movement associated with Syed Ahmad Khan and the college came to be known as the Aligarh Movement, which pushed to realise the need for establishing a modern education system for the Indian Muslim populace. He considered competence in English and Western sciences necessary skills for maintaining Muslims' political influence. Khan's vision for the college was based on his visit to Oxford University and Cambridge University, and he wanted to establish an education system similar to the British model.

A committee was formed by the name of foundation of Muslim College and asked people to fund generously. Then Viceroy and Governor General of India, Thomas Baring gave a donation of ₹10,000 while the Lt. Governor of the North Western Provinces contributed ₹1,000, and by March 1874 funds for the college stood at ₹1,53,920 and 8 ana. Maharao Raja Mahamdar Singh Mahamder Bahadur of Patiala contributed ₹58,000 while Raja Shambhu Narayan of Benaras donated ₹60,000. Donations also came in from the Maharaja of Vizianagaram as well. The college was initially affiliated to the University of Calcutta for the matriculate examination but became an affiliate of Allahabad University in 1885. The 7th Nizam of Hyderabad, HEH Mir Osman Ali Khan made a remarkable donation of Rupees 5 Lakh to this institution in the year 1918...

Before 1939, faculty members and students supported an all-India nationalist movement but after 1939, political sentiment shifted towards support for a Muslim separatist movement. Students and faculty members supported Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the university came to be a center of the Pakistan Movement.

Dr. Sheikh Abdullah ("Papa Mian") is the founder of the women's college of Aligarh Muslim University and had pressed for women's education, writing articles while also publishing a monthly women's magazine, Khatoon. To start the college for women, he had led a delegation to the Lt. Governor of the United Provinces while also writing a proposal to Sultan Jahan, Begum of Bhopal. Begum Jahan had allocated a grant of ₹ 100 per month for the education of women. On 19 October 1906, he successfully started a school for girls with five students and one teacher at a rented property in Aligarh. The foundation stone for the girls' hostel was laid by him and his wife, Waheed Jahan Begum ("Ala Bi") after struggles on 7 November 1911. Later, a high school was established in 1921, gaining the status of an intermediate college in 1922, finally becoming a constituent of the Aligarh Muslim University as an undergraduate college in 1937. Later, Dr. Abdullah's daughters also served as principals of the women's college. One of his daughters was Mumtaz Jahan Haider, during whose tenure as principal, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad had visited the university and offered a grant of ₹9,00,000. She was involved in the establishment of the Women's College, organised various extracurricular events, and reasserted the importance of education for Muslim women.

-- Aligarh Muslim University, by Wikipedia


The Morison medal was given to the student of MA History, standing first. It was endowed by the staff of MAO College in honour of its Principal Morison. It was Silver Medal, Gold Bordered.[5]

Later life and death

In 1933, Morison moved to Paris to become director of the University of London Institute in Paris. He died at his flat in Paris in 1936. In 1895, he married Margaret, daughter of barrister and politician Arthur Cohen.[1][6]

Works

• "Indian Education" . The Empire and the century. London: John Murray. 1905. pp. 696–706.
References[edit]
1. "Sir Theodore Morison". The Times. 15 February 1936. p. 14.
2. "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/35108. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
3. "Sir Theodore Morison (1863–1936), KCSI, KCIE, BA, DLitt, Principal, Armstrong College (1919–1929)". ArtUK.org. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
4. http://amu.ac.in/pdf/halls/aftab/aftab.pdf
5. "Theodore Morison". Retrieved 14 March 2016.
6. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 3, ed. Charles Mosley, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 2003, p. 4036

External links

• Works by James Cotter Morison at Project Gutenberg
o Gibbon
• Works by or about Theodore Morison at Internet Archive
• Works by or about James Cotter Morison at Internet Archive
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue May 11, 2021 4:35 am

National Indian Association
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/10/21

This was possibly the lowest ebb in Vinayak’s life, with both his personal and professional lives in the doldrums. But being committed to the revolutionary cause, he was prepared to face such seemingly insurmountable challenges. He shifted out of India House temporarily to deflect the attention the place was gathering in the press. On 3 April, he moved to Bipin Chandra Pal’s residence at 140, Sinclair Road.

One of the key influencers of the Gray’s Inn decision with regard to Vinayak’s admission was Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie (1848–1909). He was a British Indian Army officer who rose to the position of a lieutenant colonel. He had served as the British resident to Nepal and one of the princely states of Rajputana. On his return to Britain, he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton. One of his main tasks was the control of high-ranking Indian visitors to Britain and the continent who were suspected of seditious activities. This included native Indian princes such as Gaekwad, the Maharaja of Baroda. 79 He kept a close watch on their movements, the contacts they made while in Europe and the level of official recognition that they were awarded by continental governments. 80 Wyllie also made personal contacts with several Indian students, on occasion inviting them home for a drink or dinner and craftily extracting information from them, all the while behaving as their well-wisher. If any of this information merited attention, he passed it on to his superiors.81

In late April 1909, Curzon Wyllie had personally written to the benchers of Gray’s Inn dissuading them from calling both Vinayak and Harnam Singh to the Bar. Through May 1909, he wrote several letters and supplied a plethora of information to Gray’s Inn about Vinayak’s ‘undesirable’ activities, terming him a particularly dangerous and seditious force. While Harnam Singh was called to the Bar, it charged Vinayak with ‘condoning assassination, inciting revolution and advocating against the nation’. 82 It is said that Curzon Wyllie even travelled to France to gather information about Vinayak and his associates at India House. He spearheaded a few unsuccessful attempts to establish a boarding house for Indian students sponsored by the India Office. He believed that this master stroke of his would help strip away the uniqueness of India House, wean away new recruits for Vinayak and also help foster loyalty towards the British government in the minds of young students.

The anger and resentment among several Indian students in London had reached its zenith and was all set to explode. It was merely a matter of time. On the evening of 1 July 1909, at about 8 p.m., a young, handsome Indian student left his room on the first floor of a lodging house on 106 Ledbury Road in the Bayswater neighbourhood of London. The National Indian Association (NIA) was holding one of its routine parties to encourage interaction between the British and Indians in London. It was being held at Jehangir Hall in the Imperial Institute at South Kensington. Miss Beck, the honorary secretary of the NIA, greeted him at around half past nine. She had met him a few months back and inquired how his studies were progressing. To this he replied that he had finished his course at the University College and would take up the examination for qualifying as an Associate Member of the Institute of Civil Engineers (AMICE) later in October before heading back home to India. Since he knew quite a few people at the party he told Miss Beck that he would keep himself busy socializing with them. 83 The young man walked around confidently, waiting for the opportune moment. At around 11 p.m. William Curzon Wyllie, the honorary treasurer of the NIA, made his entry into Jehangir Hall. He exchanged pleasantries with a few Indian students and stopped by to have a longer conversation with the young man. Suddenly, the young man fished out a small Colt pistol and fired four shots at pointblank range, right into Curzon Wyllie’s eyes. 84 Wyllie collapsed to the ground and died instantly. Cawas Lalcaca, a forty-six-year-old Parsi doctor from Shanghai, who rushed to Curzon Wyllie’s aid upon hearing the first shot was also inadvertently hit and lay writhing in pain on the ground. He eventually succumbed to his injuries.

Douglas William Thorburn, a journalist of the National Liberal Club, and several others rushed towards the young man, leapt on him and grabbed him tightly, pinning him to chair, to prevent further harm. In the process, his large gold-rimmed glasses fell. The young man placed the revolver to his own temple and was going to kill himself, but he had used all the bullets. People jostled and struggled to get the pistol off him. In the scuffle, one of the guests, Sir Leslie Probyn, fell and injured his nose and ribs. Thorburn asked him why he had committed such a ghastly act. The young man looked at him sternly and stoically responded, ‘Wait, let me just put my spectacles on!’ 85 He seemed unruffled and calm.

The Evening Telegraph described this trait of his in its report of him: ‘. . . not only being an expert revolver shot, but was the calmest man in the room after the tragedy, coolly inquiring if he might have his glasses’. 86 A fellow Indian, Madan Mohan Sinha, who was at the party, questioned him in Hindustani but the young man remained silent. The former wondered if the young man was under the influence of intoxicants as he appeared in a half-dazed and dreamy condition. Captain Charles Rolleston who held the young man tightly asked him repeatedly what his name was. Finally, he shouted: ‘Madan Lal Dhingra.’

-- Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past: 1883-1924, by Vikram Sampath


Image
Journal of the National Indian Association in 1879

Should not be confused with the Indian National Association

The National Indian Association was formed in Bristol by Mary Carpenter.

Image

Mary Carpenter (3 April 1807 – 14 June 1877) was an English educational and social reformer. The daughter of a Unitarian minister, she founded a ragged school and reformatories, bringing previously unavailable educational opportunities to poor children and young offenders in Bristol.

She published articles and books on her work and her lobbying was instrumental in the passage of several educational acts in the mid-nineteenth century. She was the first woman to have a paper published by the Statistical Society of London. She addressed many conferences and meetings and became known as one of the foremost public speakers of her time. Carpenter was active in the anti-slavery movement; she also visited India, visiting schools and prisons and working to improve female education, establish reformatory schools and improve prison conditions. In later years she visited Europe and America, carrying on her campaigns of penal and educational reform.

Carpenter publicly supported women's suffrage in her later years and also campaigned for female access to higher education. She is buried in Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol and has a memorial in the North transept of Bristol Cathedral...

In 1833 she met Ram Mohan Roy, a founder of the Brahmo Samaj movement which reformed social Hinduism, and was influenced by his philosophy during his short stay with Miss Castle and Miss Kiddel at Beech House in Stapleton before Roy died of meningitis in September of that year. Later that year she also met Joseph Tuckerman, an American Unitarian who had founded the Ministry-at-Large to the Poor in Boston, Massachusetts. He is said to have directly inspired her start on the path of social reform, partly by a chance remark made when walking with Carpenter through a slum district of Bristol. A small boy in rags ran across their path and Tuckerman remarked, "That child should be followed to his home and seen after." He had established a Farm School in Massachusetts, which became the model for later reformatories. Carpenter's later writings are based upon ideas she developed from her correspondence with Tuckerman...

In 1866 Carpenter visited India, which had been an ambition of hers since her meeting with Raja Ram Mohan Roy in 1833. She visited Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, finding that for the most part girls were not educated past the age of twelve years, mainly due to a lack of educated female teachers. During her visit Carpenter met Keshab Chandra Sen, the leader of Brahmo Samaj. Sen asked her to form an organisation in Britain to improve communication between British and Indian reformers, which she did in 1870, establishing the National Indian Association. She visited many schools, hospitals and gaols and encouraged both Indian and British colonial administrators to improve and fund these. She was particularly concerned that the lack of good female education led to a shortage of women teachers, nurses and prison attendants. The Mary Carpenter Hall at the Brahmo Girls school in Calcutta was erected as a memorial to this work.

She also participated in the inauguration of the Bengal Social Science Association, and addressed a paper to the governor-general on proposals for female education, reformatory schools and improving the conditions of gaols. She returned to India in 1868 and achieved funding to set up a Normal School to educate female Indian teachers. In 1875 she made a final visit and was able to see many of her schemes in operation. She also presented proposals for Indian prison reform to the Secretary of the Indian Government.

-- Mary Carpenter, by Wikipedia


The London branch was formed the following year. After the death of Mary Carpenter, Elizabeth Adelaide Manning (E. A. Manning) became secretary and the organisation moved to London where its activities became synonymous with Manning.

Image

Elizabeth Adelaide Manning (1828 – 10 August 1905) was a British writer and editor. She championed kindergartens. She was one of the first students to attend Girton College. Manning was active for the National Indian Association which championed education and the needs of women in India....

In February 1871, Manning and her stepmother [Charlotte Manning (nee Solly)] started the London branch of the National Indian Association. Her stepmother died the following month and Manning increasingly became the society's main proponent. She edited its magazine, whose title shifted from The Journal of the National Indian Association to The Indian Magazine in 1886, and then in 1891 The Indian Magazine and Review, still under Manning's leadership.


In 1882, the NIA launched Medical Women for India, an initiative to train women doctors so that they could work in part on caring for women in India. (See Zenana missions.) The NIA also took an interest in students from India who were studying in Britain. Manning created a book of guidance called Handbook of information relating to university and professional studies etc. for Indian students in the United Kingdom. Manning had an open house policy and she cared particularly for students from India...

In July 1904, Manning was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal, first class, by the King for services to the British Raj.


The Kaisar-i-Hind Medal for Public Service in India was a medal awarded by the Emperor/Empress of India between 1900 and 1947, to "any person without distinction of race, occupation, position, or sex ... who shall have distinguished himself (or herself) by important and useful service in the advancement of the public interest in India."...

The name "Kaisar-i-Hind" literally means "Emperor of India" in the Hindustani language. The word kaisar, meaning "emperor" is a derivative of the Roman imperial title Caesar, via Persian (see Qaysar-i Rum) from Greek Καίσαρ Kaísar, and is cognate with the German title Kaiser, which was borrowed from Latin at an earlier date. Based upon this, the title Kaisar-i-Hind was coined in 1876 by the orientalist G.W. Leitner as the official imperial title for the British monarch in India. The last ruler to bear it was George VI.[4]

Kaisar-i-Hind was also inscribed on the obverse side of the India General Service Medal (1909), as well as on the Indian Meritorious Service Medal.

-- Kaisar-i-Hind Medal, by Wikipedia


Manning left bequests to the NIA, The Froebel Society, the Royal Free Hospital and Charles Voysey's unorthodox church in Piccadilly.

-- Adelaide Manning, by Wikipedia


History

The National Indian Association in Aid of Social Progress in India was formed by Mary Carpenter in 1870 in Bristol.[1] Its first objective was to improve education for Indian women.[1] Carpenter had visited India in 1866 and she had written about her six months there. She was particularly concerned by the lack of female teachers to educate Hindu girls.[2] The London branch of the association was formed the following year by Charlotte Manning and her step daughter Elizabeth Adelaide Manning.[3] Cities in both the UK and India had local branches of the society.[1]

From 1874 to her death in 1878 Princess Alice was President of the association, she was also the first to subscribe to the Indian Girls' Scholarship Fund, a fund set up by the Association to grant annual scholarships for Indian girls in government inspected schools.[4]

Image

Princess Alice Maud Mary of the United Kingdom VA CI (25 April 1843 – 14 December 1878) was the Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine from 1877 to 1878. She was the third child and second daughter of Queen Victoria and Albert, Prince Consort. Alice was the first of Queen Victoria's nine children to die, and one of three to be outlived by their mother, who died in 1901. Her life had been enwrapped in tragedy since her father's death in 1861.

Alice spent her early childhood in the company of her parents and siblings, travelling between the British royal residences. Her education was devised by Albert's close friend and adviser, Baron Stockmar, and included practical activities such as needlework and woodwork and languages such as French and German. When her father, Prince Albert, became fatally ill in December 1861, Alice nursed him until his death. Following his death, Queen Victoria entered a period of intense mourning and Alice spent the next six months acting as her mother's unofficial secretary. On 1 July 1862, while the court was still at the height of mourning, Alice married the minor German Prince Louis of Hesse, heir to the Grand Duchy of Hesse. The ceremony—conducted privately and with unrelieved gloom at Osborne House—was described by the Queen as "more of a funeral than a wedding". The Princess's life in Darmstadt was unhappy as a result of impoverishment, family tragedy and worsening relations with her husband and mother.

Alice showed an interest in nursing, especially the work of Florence Nightingale. When Hesse became involved in the Austro-Prussian War, Darmstadt filled with the injured; the heavily pregnant Alice devoted a lot of her time to the management of field hospitals.
One of her organisations, the Princess Alice Women's Guild, took over much of the day-to-day running of the state's military hospitals. As a result of this activity, Queen Victoria became concerned about Alice's directness about medical and, in particular, gynaecological, matters. In 1871, she wrote to Alice's younger sister, Princess Louise, who had recently married: "Don't let Alice pump you. Be very silent and cautious about your 'interior'". In 1877, Alice became Grand Duchess upon the accession of her husband, her increased duties putting further strains on her health. In late 1878, diphtheria infected the Hessian court. Alice nursed her family for over a month before falling ill herself, dying later that year.

Princess Alice was the sister of Edward VII of the United Kingdom and Empress Victoria of Germany (wife of Frederick III), mother of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia (wife of Nicholas II), maternal grandmother of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (the last Viceroy of India), and maternal great-grandmother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (consort of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom). Another daughter, Elisabeth, who married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, was, like Alexandra and her family, killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

-- Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, by Wikipedia


In 1881 the society spawned an offshoot named the Northbrook Indian Society (NIA) after the Earl of Northbrook, ex-viceroy of India, who was the new society's Honorary President. The Northbrook society had been conceived two years before and in 1880 the new society was running a reading room stocked with both English and Indian newspapers. This society grew to also supply lodgings for visiting Indian students.[5] In 1882 the NIA launched Medical Women for India which was an initiative to train female doctors so that they could work on assisting women in India. The NIA also took an interest in students from India who were studying in Britain. E. A. Manning created a book of guidance called Handbook of information relating to university and professional studies etc. for Indian students in the United Kingdom. Manning's help was not just theoretical,[6] in 1888 Cornelia Sorabji wrote to the National Indian Association from India for assistance in completing her education. This was championed by Mary Hobhouse, and Manning contributed funds together with Florence Nightingale, Sir William Wedderburn and others. Sorabji arrived in England in 1889 and stayed with Manning and Hobhouse. Sorabji became the first woman to complete a law degree at Oxford and kept in contact with the NIA during her later career.[7]

In 1904 E. A. Manning was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal by the King for services to the British Raj.[8] She died the following year and Emma Josephine Beck was appointed as the new secretary. Beck was at an NIA event in 1909 where William Hutt Curzon Wyllie was assassinated by Madan Lal Dhingra.[9]

In 1910 the society was at 21 Cromwell Street in South Kensington where it shared premises with the Northbrook Society and the Bureau for Information for Indian Students.[5]

The association went into a decline in the 1920s but it did not formally end operations until 1966. The organisation had merged with the East India Association after India left the British Empire and it eventually became part of the Royal Society for India, Pakistan and Ceylon.[1]

References

1. National Indian Association, Open University, Retrieved 27 July 2015
2. Carpenter, Mary. Six Months in India. London, Longmans, Green and Co, 1868, 141-148
3. Elizabeth Adelaide Manning, Open University, Retrieved 25 July 2015
4. E. A. MANNING. "Women In India." Times [London, England] 21 Dec. 1878: 6. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 26 July 2015.
5. Northbrook Society, Open University, Retrieved 27 July 2015
6. Gillian Sutherland, ‘Manning, (Elizabeth) Adelaide (1828–1905)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007 accessed 26 July 2015
7. Mary Hobhouse, Open University, Retrieved 26 July 2015
8. Great Britain. India Office (1819). The India List and India Office List for ... Harrison and Sons. p. 172.
9. EJ Beck, Open University, Retrieved 27 July 2015
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue May 11, 2021 5:31 am

Royal India Society [India Society] [Royal India and Pakistan Society] [Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/10/21

The Royal India Society was a 20th-century British learned society concerned with India.

The Society has had several names: the India Society (founded 1910); the Royal India Society (from 1944); the Royal India and Pakistan Society; the Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society; and finally merged with the East India Association in 1966.[1][2][3]

Not to be confused with the London Indian Society, or the British India Society.

The India Society

The India Society was founded in 1910. The earliest members were T.W. Rolleston (Honorary Secretary), T.W. Arnold, Mrs Leighton Cleather, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Walter Crane, E.B. Havell, Christina Herringham, Paira Mall, and William Rothenstein.[4][5]

"In 1910 he [Coomaraswamy] became involved in a very public controversy, played out in the correspondence columns of The Times and elsewhere, on the status of Indian art. This had started when Sir George Birdwood, while chairing the Indian Section of the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Arts, had announced that there was no “fine art” in India and had somewhat unwisely responded to the suggestion that a particular statue of the Buddha was an example of fine art: “This senseless similitude, in its immemorial fixed pose, is nothing more than an uninspired brazen image. . . . A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionless purity and serenity of soul. This controversy culminated in the, foundation of the India Society, later the Royal India Society, to combat the views of the Birdwoods of this world." (Mark Sedgwick 2004)[6]

The Society's aims and plans were described in The Times, 11 June 1910 as follows:
"The society desires to promote the study and appreciations of Indian culture in its aesthetic aspects, believing that in Indian sculpture, architecture, and painting, as well as in Indian literature and music, there is a vast unexplored field, the investigation of which will bring about a better understanding of Indian India. Everything will be done to promote the acquisition by the authorities of our national and provincial museums of works representing the best Indian art. The society proposes to publish works showing the best examples of Indian architecture, sculpture, and painting, and hopes to co-operate with all those who have it as their aim to keep alive the traditional arts and handicrafts still existing in India, and to assist in the development of Indian art education on native and traditional lines, and not in imitation of European ideals."

The India Society organised a conference on Indian Art at the British Empire Exhibition, at Wembley, on 2 June 1924.[7]

Publications of the India Society

The Society's publications included:[8]

• Indian Art and Letters - twice-yearly journal, issued from 1925
• Indian drawings, ed. A.K. Coomaraswamy (1910)
• Examples of Indian sculpture at the British Museum: twelve collotype plates (1910)
• Indian drawings II, ed. A.K. Coomaraswamy (1911-12)
• Eleven Plates. Representing Works of Indian Sculptures Chiefly in English Collections, ed. E.B. Havell (1911)
• Kapilar and a Tamil Saint, by A.K. Coomaraswamy (1911)
• Gitanjali (‘Song-offering’), by Rabindranath Tagore (1912)
• Chitra, by Rabindranath Tagore (1913)
• One hundred poems of Kabir, tr. by Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn Underhill (1914)
• The Music of Hindostan, by A.H. Fox-Strangways (1914)
• Ajanta Frescoes: being reproductions in colour and monochrome of frescoes in some of the caves at Ajanta, after copies taken ... 1909-1911, by Christiana Herringham and her assistants (1915)
• The Mirror of Gesture (1916)
• Handbook of Indian Art, by E.B. Havell (1920)
• Indian Art at the British Empire Exhibition, with introduction by Lionel Heath (1924)
• The Architectural Antiquities of Western India, by Henry Cousens (ASI) (1926)
• The Bagh Caves in the Gwalior State (1927)
• The Brothers, by Taraknath Ganguli, tr. by Edward Thompson (1928)
• Ancient Monuments of Kashmir, by Ram Chandra Kak (1933)
• The Red Tortoise and Other Tales of Rural India, by N. Gangulee (1941)
• A Garland of Indian Poetry, ed. by H.G. Rawlinson (1946)
• The Tulip of Sinai, by Muhammad Iqbal, tr. A.J. Arberry (1947)
• Indian Art and Letters (1947)
• a book on Mughal Painting, edited by Sir T.W. Arnold and Laurence Binyon

The Royal India Society

In 1944 the Society was granted permission to become The Royal India Society under the patronage of the Dowager Queen Mary of Teck.

Subsequent names

After partition, its name was again changed to the Royal India and Pakistan Society, and then again to the Royal India, Pakistan, and Ceylon Society. In 1966 it merged with the East India Association.

External Links

• The Society's archives (held at the British Library)

References

1. Review, by K.R. Norman, of Coomaraswamy by Roger Lipsey, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1981), pp. 339-341.
2. South Asian Review, The Royal Society for India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, 1969, page 374.
3. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov. ... aae64896ef
4. The Times, 11 June 1919
5. S.V. Turner, "Crafting Connections: The India Society and the Formation of an Imperial Artistic Network in Early Twentieth-Century Britain", in S. Nasta (eds) India in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392724_7
6. Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2004, page 52. ISBN 978-0-19-515297-5.
7. The India Society Conference on Indian Art https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli ... t_djvu.txt. Retrieve 22 March 2021.
8. http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/ ... ia-society
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue May 11, 2021 5:46 am

Northbrook Society [Northbrook Indian Society] [Northbrook Club] [Northbrook Indian Club]
by The Open University: Making Britain
Accessed: 5/10/21

Date began: 01 Feb 1880

About: From an idea that was formed in 1879, founded in February 1880, as a sub-committee of the National Indian Association, the Northbrook Society was originally designed as a reading room and club providing Indian and other newspapers for Indian visitors to London and British members. Named after Lord Northbrook, former Viceroy of India, who was their president, the Society became a separate entity to the NIA in September 1881. In 1910, the Northbrook Society was housed along with the NIA and Bureau for Information for Indian Students at 21 Cromwell Road, South Kensington. The Society was then able to provide a small number of rooms as temporary lodgings for Indian visitors and students.

Key Individuals' Details: Gerald Fitzgerald (Secretary), Lord Northbrook (President).

Connections: M. M. Bhownaggree, Mehdi Hasan Khan, E. A. [Elizabeth Adelaide] Manning, Dadabhai Naoroji, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, Sukumar Ray.

Related organization: 21 Cromwell Road, National Indian Association

Involved in events details: Prince of Wales opened new house of Northbrook Indian Society at 3 Whitehall Gardens, 21 May 1883.

Secondary works:

Khalidi, Omar (ed.), An Indian Passage to Europe: The Travels of Fath Nawaj Jang (Karachi: OUP, 2006)

Burton, Antoinette, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

Robinson, Andrew, ‘Selected Letters of Sukumar Ray’, South Asia Research, 7 (1987), pp. 169-236 [Sukumar Ray's account of lodging with the Northbrook Society, 1911-12]

Example: Mary Hobhouse, ‘London sketched by an Indian Pen’, The Indian Magazine, 230 (February 1890), pp. 61-73 at p. 66.

Content: Extracts from a diary written by Mehdi Hasan Khan of his time in London in 1889. This includes mention of a lunch visit to the Northbrook Club.

Extract: In India I had heard disparaging things said about this club. Among other things, that the club being full of Anglo-Indians, Natives were treated badly there, deriving no benefit from, and having no voice in, the club. I am extremely glad to say that I found every one of these remarks contrary to the fact. Natives are treated there on perfectly equal terms with Europeans. It is a most useful institution for Indians. Our students in London assemble there regularly every afternoon, meet Englishmen, see club life, and enjoy one another’s society.

Archive source:

The Times, 6 August 1881, 15 May 1883, 22 May 1883, 10 August 1883, 7 August 1884, 5 November 1886, 1 September 1908, 11 January 1910, 2 May 1926

NIA Minutes, Mss Eur F147/3-4, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue May 11, 2021 6:00 am

Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/10/21

Image
The Right Honourable, The Earl of Northbrook, GCSI PC FRS
Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire
In office: 7 November 1890 – 15 November 1904
Monarch: Victoria
Preceded by: The Lord Carnarvon
Succeeded by: The Lord Winchester
Viceroy of India
In office: 3 May 1872 – 12 April 1876
Monarch: Victoria
Preceded by: The Lord Napier
Succeeded by: The Lord Lytton
Member of Parliament for Penryn and Falmouth
In office: 24 April 1857 – 15 October 1866
Preceded by: Howel Gwyn
Succeeded by: Jervoise Smith
Personal details
Born: Thomas George Baring, 22 January 1826
Died: 15 November 1904 (aged 78), Stratton Park, Hampshire
Nationality: British
Political party: Liberal
Spouse(s): Elizabeth Sturt ​(m. 1848; died 1867)​
Alma mater: Christ Church, Oxford

Thomas George Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook, GCSI, PC, FRS (22 January 1826 – 15 November 1904) was a British Liberal statesman. Gladstone appointed him Viceroy of India 1872–1876. His major accomplishments came as an energetic reformer who was dedicated to upgrading the quality of government in the British Raj. He began large scale famine relief, reduced taxes, and overcame bureaucratic obstacles in an effort to reduce both starvation and widespread social unrest.[1] He served as First Lord of the Admiralty between 1880 and 1885.

Background and education

Northbrook was the eldest son of Francis Baring, 1st Baron Northbrook, by his first wife Jane, daughter of the Sir George Grey, 1st Baronet. He was educated at Twyford School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated with honours in 1846.

Political career

Northbrook entered upon a political career, and was successively private secretary to Henry Labouchere (Board of Trade), Sir George Grey (Home Office), and Sir Charles Wood (India Office and then Admiralty to 1857). In 1847 he served on the committee of the British Relief Association. In 1857, he was returned to the House of Commons for Penryn and Falmouth, which he represented until becoming a peer on the death of his father in 1866. He served under Lord Palmerston as Civil Lord of the Admiralty between 1857 and 1858, as Under-Secretary of State for War in 1861, as Under-Secretary of State for India between 1861 and 1864, under Palmerston and Lord Russell as Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department between 1864 and 1866 and under Russell as Secretary to the Admiralty in 1866.

When William Ewart Gladstone acceded to power in 1868, Baring was again appointed Under-Secretary of State for War, and this office he held until February 1872, when he was appointed Viceroy of India. In January 1876, however, he resigned. He had recommended the conclusion of arrangements with Sher Ali Khan which, as has since been admitted, would have prevented the Second Afghan War; but his policy was overruled by the Duke of Argyll, then Secretary of State for India.
In 1876 he was created Viscount Baring, of Lee in the County of Kent, and Earl of Northbrook, in the County of Southampton.

Image
Caricature of The Lords Northbrook, Granville, Selborne and Salisbury. Caption read "Purse, Pussy, Piety and Prevarication". Published in Vanity Fair, 5 July 1882.

From 1880 to 1885 Northbrook held the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in Gladstone's second government. During his tenure of office the state of the navy aroused much public anxiety and led to a strong agitation in favor of an extended shipbuilding programme. The agitation called forth Tennyson's poem The Fleet. In September 1884, Northbrook was sent to Egypt as special commissioner to inquire into its finances and condition. The inquiry was largely unnecessary, all the essential facts being well known, but the mission was a device of Gladstone's to avoid an immediate decision on a perplexing question. Northbrook, after six weeks of inquiry in Egypt, sent in two reports, one general, advising against the withdrawal of the British garrison, and one financial. His financial proposals, if accepted, would have substituted the financial control of Britain for the international control proposed at the London Conference of June–August of the same year, but this was not carried out. When Gladstone formed his third ministry in 1886 Baring held aloof, being opposed to the Home Rule policy of the prime minister; and he then ceased to take a prominent part in political life.

Other work

Baring had served in the Hampshire Yeomanry, reaching the rank of major, and was appointed the regiment's Honorary Colonel on 26 January 1889.[2]

In 1890 he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire.

In the 1880s he was president of an offshoot of the National Indian Association, which was named the Northbrook Indian Society after its president.[3] From 1890 to 1893 he was president of the Royal Asiatic Society.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Botanic Society in November 1902.[4]

Family

Image
Elizabeth Baring, wife of Thomas Baring (Richard Buckner)

Lord Northbrook married Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Charles Sturt and sister of Lord Alington, in 1848. They had two sons and one daughter. She died in June 1867, aged 40. Lord Northbrook remained a widower until his death at Stratton Park, Hampshire, in November 1904, aged 78. There is a memorial to him at All Saints, East Stratton.[5] He was succeeded in the earldom by his eldest son, Francis.

Legacy in India

The Ghanta Ghar Multan, or Clock Tower of Multan, was named 'Northbrook Tower'. It is located in the center of Multan in Punjab province, Pakistan.

See also

• Northbrook Hall
• Manor House Gardens

References

1. James S. Olson and Robert S. Shadle, Historical Dictionary of the British Empire (1996), p. 116.
2. Army List.
3. Northbrook Society, Open University, Retrieved 27 July 2015.
4. "Royal Botanic Society". The Times (36921). London. 10 November 1902. p. 12.
5. "Geograph". Geograph. 30 May 2012. Retrieved 29 June 2013.

Further reading

• Mersey, Viscount Charles Clive Bigham. The viceroys and governors-general of India, 1757-1947 (1949)
• Gosto Behary Mullick (1873). Lord Northbrook and his mission in India: a lecture., includes his speeches

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Thomas Baring
• "Archival material relating to Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook". UK National Archives.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

PreviousNext

Return to Articles & Essays

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 15 guests