Churchill and India

Winston Churchill remains a figure of near unalloyed admiration among vast swaths of the public as well as academics, both in the United Kingdom and the United States. Both communities, quite predictably, dwell on his lofty rhetoric during the height of the Blitz over London, his unwavering resolve against Nazi Germany, and his erudition. Few scholars or popular authors have dwelled at any length on his rank and causal racism, his early interest in eugenics, and his unyielding commitment to British imperialism.A handful of popular historians, most notably Arthur Herman in Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, do allude to some of Churchill's less savory personal beliefs and characteristics. However, the vast majority of Churchill biographies, such as Andrew Roberts's Churchill: Walking with Destiny, mostly airbrush his reprehensible views about race and empire.One of the few scathing critiques of Churchill's role in India during the long nationalist struggle and especially during the Bengal famine of 1942 can be found in the work of an amateur historian, Madhushree Mukherjee's Churchill's Secret War. Her unsparing account documents his ignominious role during the famine that consumed the lives of close to four million Indian subjects of the British Empire.Kishan S. Rana's recent, slender book, Churchill and India: Manipulation or Betrayal?, despite its provocative title, is no jeremiad directed at its subject. The work of a distinguished former Indian diplomat, it is a remarkably fair-minded and judicious, if limited, account of Churchill's long relationship with India. It harks back to the time when he was a subaltern officer stationed in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) and concludes with his role as Britain's prime minister and thereafter.It is to Rana's credit that he has made extensive use of the Churchill Archives and has drawn on much of the existing secondary literature on Churchill and his times, and even on Churchill's own copious writings. Given the voluminous work that already exists on Churchill as well as the Indian nationalist movement, some of the ground that he covers is necessarily familiar to those with an interest in twentieth-century Indian political history.Nevertheless, Rana's work makes a useful contribution to both subjects, illuminating some odd corners. Among other matters, Rana carefully traces the evolution of Churchill's views toward the British Indian Empire from mostly indifference toward the country and its inhabitants, to a limited degree of sympathy for Her Majesty's subjects, to outright, unreasoning hostility toward the vast majority of Indians but particularly the Hindu nationalist elite.In his initial days in India, Churchill mostly busied himself with reading vast swaths of history and literature, most of which his doting mother sent to him. However, his writings on the period, Rana underscores, betray a remarkable lack of curiosity about either his milieu or about Indian interlocutors. Instead, like any colonial officer of the time, he seemed content to play polo and enjoy the comforts of well-appointed, mostly racially segregated clubs, and he enjoyed being waited on, hand and foot, by a retinue of servants.Later, when back in Britain and having entered public life, he did evince a small amount of sympathy for India's poor and dispossessed. Nevertheless, this expression of concern for their well-being, to no particular surprise, was shot through with blatant paternalism. Far from being a statement of intrinsic interest in their plight, it stemmed mostly from his interest in perpetuating and justifying the British imperial enterprise.Perhaps the turning point in his views toward India, Rana surmises, came about in 1922 when the Prince of Wales visited the colony. Against a backdrop of colonial pageantry and pomp, violence erupted in Bombay (now Mumbai) as nationalist demonstrators thronged the streets expressing their discontent with British rule. Churchill, shortly thereafter in parliament, staunchly defended British rule in India and pushed back against any meaningful effort toward a devolution of political power to Indians. Instead, he envisaged the eventual creation of a system that would privilege the native Indian princes. This view is hardly surprising given that he, along with countless other Britishers of the period, deemed Indians as “backward races” congenitally incapable of self-governance.These reprehensible sentiments on Churchill apart, Rana highlights two of his most pernicious legacies in India. The first involved his attempts to widen the rift between the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress. To that end, he promoted the dubious notion that Mohammed Ali Jinnah alone genuinely represented the interests of all Indian Muslims. Worse still, he characterized Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru as political charlatans who had little or no interest in the welfare of the vast majority of Indians, let alone the Muslim minority.The second, of course, was his callousness toward the dire circumstances of millions during the Bengal famine of 1942. Rana shows that Churchill even proved impervious to the pleas of a handful of British officials who had sought to alleviate the condition of those on the brink of starvation.Despite its brevity, this book goes some distance toward challenging the hagiographic accounts that have long enveloped Churchill's life and career

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