One of the first things Richard Holmes tells us in this impressive account of the British occupation is how, by the Victorian era, half-caste Indians had declined radically in status— from being the often cherished offspring of white sahibs and their mistresses or, on occasion, even wives, to second-class citizens debarred from army service.

Such racism was one of the more unpleasant features of an empire which, as Nehru conceded at independence, had been in various key respects a force for good. Nor are Nehru’s words, striking as they are, the only reason why the modern-day British need not feel quite so guilty about, or be so critical of, the Raj as they are wont.

Quite apart from the old litany, oft recited in the pavilion at Lord’s after lunch, of the institutional and infrastructural improvements it brought on the cultural and emotional level, the Indians were already well used to foreign domination by the time the East India Company set up its stall. In the words of an old chief quoted by Holmes: ‘Many conquerors, like the storm, have swept over us and they have passed away leaving only a name, and so it will be with you.’

As Holmes puts it: ‘When the British arrived, they found that the culture of empire was well understood.’ This is a timely reminder in these politically correct days. Moreover, the idea of a nation having been subjugated is a fallacy. ‘The men who fought in India’s armies did not fight for Bengal, Oudh, the Carnatic ... still less for the Moghul empire or Hindustan. They fought for the rulers or commanders who paid them to do so', (be they Moslem, Hindu, British or French) ‘and such loyalty as they felt was to their employers, particularly to those who, like the British, paid promptly.’

Not that there weren’t horrors. Some of these Holmes doesn’t touch on, some he does: the brutal reprisals that followed the Indian mutiny; the disgraceful treatment of Indian servants by British other ranks. Higher up the social scale, there were some lovely counter-examples, such as one viceroy, the Earl of Willingdon, who founded a mixed-race club ‘in protest against the racist attitude of his own club’.

British tricks

But the trick the British quickly learned, and which set their empire in a class apart from its rivals, was a willingness to incorporate and exploit many of the institutions and customs they found in India. Rather than seek to reorganise from scratch, much of the existing administrative infrastructure was adopted and harnessed to British aims and interests. Equally, they were carried on with greatly increased efficiency and fairness.

One example of the latter is the story of two Indians rejected by the Indian Civil Service on the grounds of age. They ‘duly sued the Secretary of State for India’, Holmes tells us, ‘and were reinstated’.

Likewise, Lord Curzon, as viceroy, censured a regiment for failing to punish two soldiers for ‘beating a cook so badly that he died’. But there again, the cook was beaten, and the censure itself was seen as controversial. On the other hand, my father, himself Indian army, tells how while he was in Assam, villagers would ask for a ‘red hat man’— a British officer— to settle some local dispute or other. You pay your money and take your choice, and that ambivalence comes across clearly here.

Codes of honour and rituals were likewise respected, continued and made use of, sometimes with comical results. One official, Holmes quotes, visiting the now dispossessed Moghul emperor in 1831, observed: ‘The mummery of the ceremony was absurd, and I could not suppress a smile as the officers mouthed, with sonorous solemnity, the title king of the world and ruler of the universe to a monarch now realmless and a prince without power.’

If Holmes makes this point in a military context, it applies equally to the nature of the empire as a whole and is another example of an observation he makes on the specifically military level serving to shed light on the whole nature of the Raj.

The Observer

There are some spectacular anecdotes and a colourful cast of characters. I am still trying to make up my mind about a certain Maharajah of Kashmir who, when a man in prison for murdering a little girl begged him for mercy, saying it was only 'a little matter', sent for pen and ink. He drew a line down the centre of the man's back and another across it. He then sent for a sawyer who was commanded to saw the man into four pieces. ‘One piece shall be sent north, one south, one east and one west,’ said the maharajah, ‘for I want my people to know that I do not regard the murder of a little girl for her ornaments as a little matter.’

There is mad, marvellous Napier, with his giant helmet and knee-length moustache and whiskers, a description that made me long to swap Latin puns with him.

And Robert Clive failing to commit suicide and going on to become the archetypal nabob, surely the most lucrative misfiring of any pistol in history. And tales of staggering, nay, lunatic courage such as even the most dyed-in-wool anti-imperialist cannot but admire: Sir Henry Lawrence at the siege of Lucknow, Nicholson at the storming of Delhi.

The book is exhaustively researched, remarkably, if not at times remorselessly, informative. But therein, arguably, lies its weakness as well as its strength. It struck this reader as being an account merely and content with that.

Where a Schama or a Starkey would have imposed a pattern, given us an overarching ‘take’, all Holmes seems to want to do is set down the facts. But there is nothing wrong with that and for anyone seriously interested in the Raj, this book is a must.

Sahib,

by Richard Holmes

Harper Collins

£20, pp 608