Humane face of the Empire

Raj Chatterjee on Lord Lytton of Knebworth, the Viceroy of India who issued a Minute criticising the harsh treatment meted out to Indian servants by their British masters.

THE year was 1875, the place Lisbon in Portugal. The man, 44-year-old Robert Lytton, Her Britannie Majesty’s Minister who had earlier inherited a peerage along with a large estate, Knebworth, in Hertfordshire from his novelist-playwright father, Bulwar-Lytton.

The young man was hoping that on his retirement he would continue writing poetry, two volumes of which had already been published under an assumed name, in the peaceful ambience of the English countryside. But this was not to be.

A letter received from the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, offered him the viceroyalty of India, an offer strongly backed by Queen Victoria.

The prospect of leaving England did not please him. He preferred a somewhat Bohemian way of life with his wife, Edith. He made several excuses, one of them on grounds of health, but Disraeli was adamant, so was the Queen. The situation was critical for the British in the NWFP. His immediate task was to win over Amir Sher Ali, whose father, Dost Mohd. had severely defeated a British force in the First Afghan War of 1842. Sher Ali was to be persuaded to accept a British Mission in Kabul. In the background, lurked the Russian bear

Lytton’s second priority was to proclaim at a durbar Queen Victoria as ‘Empress of India’. Robert Lytton was a good-looking man, clever, well-read, witty, fond of good food and wine and pretty women. The Lyttons and their two small daughters, accompanied by a large entourage, sailed on the Orantes on March 16, 1876. Reaching Bombay on April 17, Lytton had to leave straightaway, as protocol demanded, for Calcutta to bid farewell to his predecessor. His family and staff proceeded to Simla.

Peterhoff, a large house rented from the Raja of Sirmaur, was to be the Lytton’s summer residence. It reminded them of an old English rectory with ‘hideous’ furniture. What upset them most was that there were no ‘mod.cons!’

Lytton was quick in assessing the changed outlook in India as the result of the spread of English education and the creation of a middle-class intelligentsia. He was dismayed to find that there was not a single Indian holding a commissioned rank in the army and that the ICS had only seven Indian members who had got in by taking the examination in England. He wished to make it easier for Indians to compete by taking the exam in their own country. In this, he was severely opposed by the members of his own Council.

Personally, he considered the ICS to be ‘overacted’ (shades of Nehru!) and thought that its members looked at everything from ‘a small, local point of view’. The whole administration, he thought, was over-centralised and he once, described his six councillors as a ‘crummy lot, as the Devil said to the Ten Commandments!’

Before leaving India he earned the displeasure of his compatriots by issuing a Minute criticising the harsh treatment meted out to Indian servants by their British masters. This was instigated by the Fuller case in which an Agra barrister had beaten up his servant so badly as to burst his spleen and kill him. He was let off with a fine of Rs 20 to be paid to the widow as ‘compensation’. Her appeal was rejected by the Allahabad High Court.

In 1886, Lytton was sent as the British Ambassador to Paris, a city he loved. He died there on November 26, 1897, and his body was shipped to England to be buried at Knebworth.

HOME