George Washington's Ghost

India had been stumbling towards dominion status for over fifty years; the last thing anybody in London wanted to do was to start, de facto, selectively calving off bits of the Empire when most of Canada, Australasia, and all bar the Cape Colony in Southern Africa had been successfully hived off into, to all intents, other than in matters of continental defence and foreign policy, self-governing polities. If the Raj could be induced to, more or less peacefully, go down the same route then perhaps the Empire might not actually implode under the weight of its accumulated burdens for another fifty years.

But of course, there was no such thing as ‘India’, there had not been since the time of the Mughals. The Raj was a collection of religious and ethnic states and principalities – over a hundred of them, although Bengal and the Punjab comprised some thirty percent of the land mass and about one hundred million of the four hundred and eight millions of the population – which, for reasons nobody had ever explained to the King, or anybody else’s satisfaction, the ‘natives’ allowed about twelve thousand Europeans and the eight hundred and twenty-one thousand men of the Indian Army, to pretend that they still governed.

It was one thing for Sir George Walpole, possibly the most learned historian ever to occupy the post of Foreign and Colonial Secretary, to aver that ‘India does not care who rules it and its peoples will never agree which among them ought to be primus inter pares, first among equals,’ arguing that ‘ in a funny way for us to sit in all the big cities and for the Viceroy, whoever he is at the time, poor fellow, to take the blame for everything that goes wrong, suits both the Indian aristocracy, the educated technocracy and the rapidly expanding educated middle classes perfectly. I know there is an apparent ground swell of something ill-informed people in the popular press describe as ‘Indian Nationalism’ but actually, the present arrangements generally support the aspirations, not to mention, offer a degree of security, to the people who have never really stopped ‘running’ India. And I don’t mean us!”

Of the five main Hindu castes in India – each of which sub-divided into tens, hundreds and possibly thousands of smaller divisions virtually incomprehensible to Europeans – the Brahmins, the priests and teachers, and the Kshatriyas, the rulers and warriors, formed only a tiny proportion of the population but so long as the Raj kept them ‘onside’, whatever the hundreds of millions of Vaishyas, what in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the Empire would be regarded, generically, as the middle classes, and the working or lower class, Shudras, effectively the labouring poor, and the Dalits, the ‘outcasts’, more commonly known as ‘untouchables’, who did all the most menial work in the society, thought of the British, or the way their great, sprawling country was being run, really did not matter a fig.

While the King was no advocate for this paradigm, which he found deplorable, as more than one of his ministers had said to him down the years: ‘We are where we are, sir.’

More to the point, doing the right thing was not, and never had been top of the list of any minister at the Colonial Office where the unofficial motto had always been was: ‘Non situ peius!’

Which was colloquially translatable to the majority of the King’s subjects without the benefit of a classical education as: ‘Don’t make the situation worse!”

Thus, the Guyanese situation had been allowed to fester, its root causes unaddressed and frankly, ignored and even if one accepted that there was never a right time to lance a boil; it was far too late now.

Unfortunately, in the prevailing circumstances risking setting sensible but in terms of imperial realpolitik, positively Quixotic territorial adjustments to the political geography of the broader Empire – like, for example, sorting out the long-standing ‘Guyanese Question’, an FCO headache for well over half-a-century – always ran into the sand.

Quick sand, that was, meaning that in the circumstances of the present war the Empire was left holding a huge, indefensible acreage of land far from home which nobody, literally nobody in the British Isles except a few Colonial Office stalwarts, knew anything about, or cared a damn!

War, as any historian will tell one, has a nasty habit of pressing the fast forward button of human affairs, invariably with the predictability of a chess board kicked over in the middle of a long game. While it might be possible to remember where the pieces had been before the great upset, predicting where they actually landed was another matter entirely!

And now it was far too late to mitigate the consequences of decades of Imperial inertia.

The unthinkable had happened.