Book review: Fighting Retreat – Churchill and India, by Walter Reid

In this fair and sympathetic book, alert to both its subject’s faults and his virtues, Walter Reid considers Churchill’s problematic relationship with India. Review by Allan Massie

It is almost 60 years since Churchill died. He was given a moving and magnificent state funeral. There has been nothing like it since and it is likely there never will be. We all had reason to be grateful for his wartime leadership, not only us but all Western Europeans. Yet some ten years earlier, Robert Rhodes James published a biography covering his career up to 1939 with the sub-title “A Study in Failure.” If he had died that year the judgement would have been fair. He had been out of office since 1929, and he had spent the middle years of the Thirties trying to wreck the India Bill which was intended to pave the way for Indian independence. His Victorian imperialism was already out of date.

He had little direct knowledge of India: a few years as a cavalry subaltern and journalist on the north-west frontiers. Like Kipling, he had more time for Islam that for Hinduism, which he thought a beastly religion. He was disgusted by the treatment of the Dalits, the low caste “untouchables”, surely with reason. He described Mahatma Gandhi as “the half-naked fakir” and he distrusted the congress leader, Nehru, though he got on well with him after independence when they both attended Commonwealth Conferences. They were, after all, both Harrovians.

In the last 20 years Churchill has often been condemned as a racist, his statues and portraits defaced. In this book Walter Reid, an admirer of Churchill, but not blind to his faults, considers the justice of this view. One should say first that the case against Churchill is characterised by an indifference to historical realities, a smug assumption of 21st century virtue. Certainly, Churchill believed in the superiority of the white nations. So did almost everyone else in Europe and North America. This may have been shameful, but it was, in the circumstances of the time, understandable. One might remark that though Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves he did not believe in the equality of the races. And, while President Roosevelt was eager to see the dissolution of the British Empire, he was no believer in racial equality in the USA.

Churchill may have disliked Indians; I think he mostly did so. His consistent opposition to Indian Independence was rooted in his conviction that, without India, Britain could no longer be considered a Great Power. In this he was of course quite right. India was the jewel in the crown, and, when India went, the rest of the Empire followed in the next 20 years. This doesn’t mean Churchill was right to oppose Indian independence. It does mean it was natural that he should do so.

Walter Reid, in this fair and sympathetic examination of Churchill and India, in which he largely acquits Churchill of responsibility for the Bengal Famine, spends some time describing the brutality and ruthlessness of the of the East India Company’s acquisition of so much of India. He says something, but less perhaps than he should, on the remarkable achievement of British India. Following on the historian Lord Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education, which determined that an Indian elite should be educated in the English language and European culture, independence left India as a functioning democracy with an independent judiciary, an efficient and incorruptible civil service and a largely free press. Compare India with China and you would have to be blind not to see the enduring merits of the British Empire.

Reading about Churchill over what is now a long lifetime, there have been many times when I have found myself disliking him and disapproving of him. I think Walter Reid has had the same experience, but the richness of Churchill’s character and intellect compels admiration and, indeed, affection. He was a man of many faults but they were exceeded by his virtues. Reid quotes Clement Attlee, Churchill’s “opponent, colleague and friend”, who spoke of Churchill’s “wide sympathy for ordinary people all over the world” and said he “saw himself as an instrument for freedom, for human life against tyranny”. I think this is true, and it renders some of his follies and occasional wild language unimportant.

Fighting Retreat: Churchill and India, by Walter Reid, Hurst, £25