Flipping through the dark pages

The constitutional arrangements in the metropole, by which the empire was administered by the East India Company, were drastically revised as the final campaigns against the rebels reached their conclusion. The crown directly took over the governance of India. The British monarch was now formally the sovereign ruler of the Indian empire. In practice this meant that Britain's Indian possessions were to be administered directly by the British cabinet. The Company, rather its court of directors, no longer had any role in this. The Company survived as a legal entity till 1874. The guaranteed 10.5 per cent dividend continued to be paid even after the crown directly took over the Government of India in 1858. As has been mentioned earlier, the Charter Act of 1833 had a provision whereby the British government could dissolve the Company after a period of forty years, prolonging its existence as a corporate entity till at least 1874. The government was to pay double the nominal price of each share if it took this step. Thus, the shareholders were assured that they would not suffer losses due to the takeover.

The 1858 Act abolished the board of control. The responsibility for administering India was given to a cabinet minister, designated as secretary of state for India. Policy relating to India was to be formulated by the secretary of state in consultation with a newly formed 'council of India' consisting of fifteen members (this council is not to be confused with the governor general's council). The council of India gradually became merely an advisory body, and had lost much of its relevance by the end of the century, though it remained in existence till 1935. The bureaucratic establishment attached to the secretary of state for India, the India Office, emerged over a period of time as the main instrument through which the Indian empire was controlled from London. This was a vast establishment, staffed by a large body of civil service officials and clerks. All these organs were, of course, ultimately subject to the authority of the British Parliament.

Decision-making in London, needless to say, involved consultations with the governor general. This process, which earlier took several months, was sped up by the completion of the project to connect India and Britain by telegraph. This was done by linking Bombay and London through cables located under the sea; in 1870, Bombay and London were connected by telegraph. This made possible almost instant communication between the metropolis and the colony, thereby making it easier for the secretary of state to monitor the functioning of the governor general and his council. At the same time, it has been pointed out, this technological advance exposed the colonial state to greater public scrutiny in England which, on occasion, actually slowed down the formulation of policy.

Following the enactment of legislation whereby the British government took over direct control over the Indian empire, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation in November 1858 in which all inhabitants of the empire, including princely rulers, were declared to be subjects of the crown (see Appendix, p. 290). This declaration was partly an attempt to resolve the tricky issue of sovereignty. The question of sovereignty had been a complicated one due to the ambiguous status of the East India Company. Although the Company owed its existence to royal charters granted by the British crown, in India it was constitutionally subservient to the Mughal emperor. By the beginning of the nineteenth century this was only a matter of symbolic importance since the Mughal emperors no longer had any real power, yet right down to the middle of the century the Company had formally acknowledged the emperor as its overlord through various ceremonial gestures. The sham trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar in early 1858, in which the main charge against him was that he had committed high treason against the Company's state by agreeing to accept the leadership of the sipahis, was intended to publicly assert the Company's sovereignty and delegitimize the authority of the emperor. In an important essay published in 1922, F. W. Buckler had examined the various constitutional issues involved in the so-called trial and argued that 'the source of the Company's authority in India lay, not in the Charters of the King of England, nor in the Acts of the British Parliament, nor in the sword, but in the farmans of the Mughal Emperor'. He concluded that it was the Company that was the rebel, and that the sipahis were duty-bound to support the emperor: 'if in 1857 there were any mutineer, it was the East India Company'.

From the point of view of the Mughals, the Company had been governing the empire on behalf of the emperor. As for the East India Company, it would appear that it preferred ambiguity on the question of sovereignty. Categorically disowning the sovereign status of the Mughal emperor would have implied acknowledgement in unequivocal terms of the sovereignty of the British crown over the Indian empire. In effect, this would have meant greater parliamentary intervention. The question was decisively resolved only in 1858 when the crown directly assumed charge of the Indian territories hitherto governed by the East India Company, reducing simultaneously rulers of all princely states to the status of subjects of the British crown. Even at this stage the Company did not give up without a fight. Its position was forcefully articulated by John Stuart Mill who was particularly critical of Palmerston for the abolition of company rule. Mill was strongly opposed to the interference of parliament in Indian affairs, carrying forward some of the arguments advanced by prominent Company administrators of the early nineteenth century such as Thomas Munro and John Malcolm. Specialized knowledge of the Indian empire was supposedly essential for governing the empire well, and this was knowledge that parliament did not possess. Such knowledge could only be acquired through 'prolonged and intimate contact with the difficulties of ruling an area different in many respects from Britain'.

Another objective of Victoria's proclamation was to assure rulers of princely states that their territories would remain intact and that there would be no interference in matters relating to adoption or succession. This was in keeping with the British policy of enlisting the support of feudal elites and the landed aristocracy to strengthen the colonial state in the post-revolt period. Princely rulers and feudal elites were supposed to constitute the main audience to which the proclamation was addressed since they were regarded as the 'natural leaders' of Indian society.

(Excerpted with permission from Amar Farooqui's 'The Colonial Subjugation of India'; published by Aleph Book Company)