“Every Effort Must Be Made”
A favourite trope of postcolonial academics and their left-liberal public has been the alleged infamy of Britain’s most cherished hero, Winston Churchill, charged with everything from mere racism to actual genocide. The worst accusation has been that of deliberately starving Bengalis to death in the famous famine of 1943.
Churchill’s first encounter with India dates as far back as the 1890s, when he was a young subaltern in the British Army. His early impressions were not encouraging. He wrote home about “this tedious land of India” and about the “great work” Britain was doing with “her high mission to rule these primitive but agreeable races for their welfare and our own.” He travelled extensively across the subcontinent, from the Swat Valley of the North West Frontier, through the central United Provinces, down to the Deccan and Bangalore. “You could lift the heat with your hands,” he complained. “It sat on your shoulders like a knapsack, it rested on your head like a night”1 mare.
Political Battles
How did this early aversion evolve into Chuchill’s deep-seated later conviction of India’s central role as the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown? His first major political encounter with India came in the immediate aftermath of the infamous Jallianwala massacre in the Punjab in April 1919, when a British-led firing squad had shot dead 367 unarmed protesters and wounded thousands more. The massacre had divided British public opinion down the centre, with the Liberals, then leading a coalition government, condemning General Dyer, the British officer responsible, while most Conservatives and diehard imperialists rallied to Dyer’s defence. Surprisingly, given his later views, Churchill, then
