Jahangir was fond of the Englishmen who were adept sailors and mannerly in his courts as opposed to the hot-blooded Portuguese envoys who with their gesticulations and genuflections made a show of allegiance even as their pirates sank Jahangir’s vessels and their priests tortured his people.
Jahangir reasoned that the English, whose power on the ocean was indisputable, could be useful as his naval auxiliaries, a strategy which could enable him to control India’s waters as well as her plains. He never imagined that his guests would one day cause the decimation of the Mughal empire and become the rulers of Hindustan.
After the British crushed the Indian mutiny of 1857, they realised the perils of having an army which consisted
entirely of natives and thousands of British troops were brought to India to augment the strength of Britons in the sepoy army.
The East India Company was abolished and India was placed under the rule of the British crown.
Socially, the British restricted personal contact with Indians and became a civilisation within a civilisation. By 1860 the situation was such that any European who fraternised with the ‘wogs’ or ‘westernised oriental gentlemen’ was frowned upon and considered an eccentric.
However, this disdain for Indian culture was not always the rule as the early British traders wholeheartedly embraced the Hindustani culture and way of life. Their families lived in native-built houses, cooked in mud ovens and slept on dirt floors.
They indulged themselves in Indian wine and food to such as extent that at times overeating in the tropical sun became one of the many causes of premature death. They learnt to drink tea and use the hookah which was later replaced by the less cumbersome cheroot.
In the beginning, the British were respectful of all religions and many even wore Hindu amulets to ward off the
evil eye. As late as 1802, the British soldiers of Calcutta gave thanks for the signing of the treaty of Amiens by marching in front of a shrine built to honour goddess Kali.
Friendship between the Indians and the British were common. Since European women in India were a rarity in those days, even intermarriage was accepted. For young British men who relished their bachelorhood, the good life consisted of the harem, a retinue of servants, dancing girls and slaves swishing peacock-tail fans around them.
Indian clothes, simple and cool, became popular as did Persian wine and arrack. The early European settlers had little to entertain themselves with other than gambling, conversation, hunting and food and wiled away their days in intoxicated slumber.
Thus, the earlier settlers were free of contempt for the Indian life and they exploited this to its most pleasurable advantage and there was no attempt to impose their western values on their oriental hosts.
However, by the middle of the 18th century, when the British were no longer Mughal servants, they began to slowly indulge in their criticism of Indian life, which they had so long repressed. Now, a new attitude of condescension emerged, which slowly evolved into the doctrine of ‘The White Man’s Burden’.
This attitude was strongly engendered by the thousands of Victorians who migrated to India in the first half of the 19th century.
This was a new breed of British, staunch Victorians who fiercely opposed the harems and the hookahs and were vociferous in their declamations of Christian duty. They castigated the degenerate natives for their ‘idolatrous processions’ and ‘unmentionable rites’ and being in need of social reform and Christian regeneration.
These attitudes were further fostered by the governor generals who followed the India-loving Warren Hastings. Lord Cornwallis halted the employment of Indians in the company’s offices and replaced them with Englishmen, declaring that he believed every native of Hindustan was corrupt. He was seconded by Richard Wellesley, a strong advocate of English supremacy. According to him, all natives were unquestionably inferior, vulgar, ignorant, rude and stupid. He stopped paying respects to local leaders and discouraged fraternisation between Indians and British.
This attitude persisted even after Wellesley and the mutiny of 1857 seemed to reinforce western belief that the natives were ‘uncouth’, ‘untrustworthy’, ‘nasty heathen wretches’, ‘filthy creatures’ and ‘vermin’.
The Englishmen now made every effort to make life in India a duplicate of their life in Great Britain.