India's Prisoner: A Biography of Edward John Thompson, 1886-1946 (Volume 1)

397 Pages·2001·46.468 MB·English

by  Mary Lago

''IN01As PRISONER''
A
BIOGRAPHY OF
1886-1946
EDWARD JOHN THOMPSON,
Mary Lago
University of Missouri Press
COLUMBIA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2001 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 05 04 03 02 01
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lago, Mary.
"India's prisoner" : a biography of Edward John Thompson,
1886-1946 / Mary Lago.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8262-1299-9 (alk. paper)
1. Thompson, Edward John, 1886-1946. 2. Indologists-Great
Britain-Biography. 3. Authors, English-20th century-Biography.
I. Thompson, Edward John, 1886-1946.
DS435.7.T54 L34 2000
941.08'092-dc21
[B] 00-04668 5
@) This paper meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, 239.48, 1984.
Text design: Elizabeth K. Young
Jacket design: Stephanie Foley
Typesetter: BOOKCOMP, Inc.
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Typefaces: Sanvito, Garamond
Frontispiece: Edward John Thompson. Courtesy of Dorothy Thompson.
To the memory of
EOWARO PALMER THOMPSON, 1922-1993
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1X
INTRODUCTION 1
1. INTRODUCING THE THOMPSONS 7
2. DECISIONS 17
3. APPRENTICESHIP 30
4-. 43
BANKURA
5. ·54
DISCORDS
6. FORGING A CHAIN 68
7.
REQUIEM 79
8. 85
EPIPHANY
9. INTERII\t1 94
10. "CHAPLAINING" 105
11. COMBAT 115
12. REVISIONS 132
13. 144
AMRITSAR
14-.
BREAKING WITH BANKURA 176
15. OXFORD AND !SLIP 188
16. THE OTHER SIDE OF TifE MEDAL 200
17. A SUBJECT CONCLUDED 213
18. WRITING ABOUT INDIA 223
19. INFORMATION CAMPAIGN 235
20. FAREWELL AND HAIL 247
21. FOLLOWING LORD METCALFE 260
,,
\Ill
viii CONTENTS
22. OBSERVING A CRISIS 273
23. "CI-IAPLAINING" AGAIN 289
24. LETTERS TO THE FRONT 302
NOTES 317
355
BIBLIOGRAPHY
371
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My 6.rst thanks and great gratitude go to the
late E. P. Thompson and Dorothy Thon1pson, for their kindness, hospitality,
and allowing me access to E. J. Thompson's papers while they were still in
their possession, and for permission to use them after they were placed in
the Bodleian Library. There I had the most patient and expert help of Colin
Harris and all his staff in the Western Manuscripts Department. For Wes
leyan Methodist materials (Methodist Church-Wesleyan Missionary Society
Archives), so essential to E. J. Thompson's story, and for permission to quote
from them, I am most grateful to the Methodist Board of Missions and Joy Fox,
archivist, and to Rosemary Seton, custodian of Wesleyan records at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The Rhodes Foun
dation Trustees allowed me to quote from Thompson's hitherto restricted
reports from his three trips to India under their auspices in the 1930s, to
investigate intellectual and political cooperation there. Other libraries that
have been signally helpful are those of Oriel College, Oxford University; the
University Library, Cambridge; the Imperial War Museum, London; the India
Office Library Papers in the British Library; the Mudd Manuscript Library,
Yale University; the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester; and the
Watch Project, University of Reading Library. I am grateful, as always, to
Martha Alexander, the director of the University of Missouri Libraries, and to
her staff for their unfailing consideration and assistance.
Many persons have supplied information from personal experience and
contacts: Barbara Sloman, E. J. Thompson's niece, on family background;
Clifford Culshaw, on his own experience at Bankura College; Simon Kusseff,
from his research on E. J. Thompson's elder brother Frank, lost during
World War II; and Dr. J. M. K. Spalding, on his father's friendship with
E. J. Thompson. E. P. Thompson's daughter Kate made the first sorting
and invaluable card file of her grandfather's correspondence. Richard and
Ann Symonds gave me much kindness and helpful instruction about Oxford
history, and Maud Rosenthal provided tea and information on the history
of Boars Hill. Michael Bishop, Kingswood School archivist, was unfailingly
generous with school records and photographs. Clinton Seely and Andrew
Robinson were always helpful with suggestions on sources. I am grateful
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
to all of then1 and to the many others who have answered my letters and
telephone calls.
I wish to thank the following for permission to quote from papers for
which they control copyright: the Right Honorable Lord Bridges, for per
mission to quote from his father's and his grandfather's correspondence;
Nicholas Smith, for letters of Sir Harcourt Butler; Jane Carrington, for ex
cerpts from her father's memoir of his Indian career; the Right Honorable
Lord Crewe, for excerpts from his father's letters; Mary, Duchess of Rox
burghe, for letters of Lord Crewe; Teresa Smith and Janet Gnosspelius, for
letters of W G. Collingwood; Curtis Brown Ltd., for a letter from Alfred
Curtis Brown; the late Leonard Elmhirst and the Dartington Foundation, for
quotations from his letters and his interviews with me; the Right Honorable
Lord Elton, for a letter from his father; King's College, Cambridge, for letters
of E. M. Forster; William Graves, for quotations from his father's letters; Victor
Gollancz, Publishers, for access to their correspondence with E. J. Thompson
and for permission to quote from it; the Right Honorable Lord Hardinge of
Penshurst, for letters of the first Lord Hardinge of Penshurst; Barbara Lyon for
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letters of Percy Lyon; Lady Rothenstein, for letters of Sir William Rothenstein;
St. Olave's and St. Saviour's Grammar School Foundation for letters of William
George Rushbrooke; Dr. J. C. Spalding, for his father's letters; Lady Spender,
for letters of Sir Stephen Spender; Sheila Munro, for a letter from Dr. George
Workman of Kingswood School; and University of Sussex Library, for letters
of Leonard Woolf.
There are regrettable and sometimes inexplicable blanks among these
acknowledgments. Efforts to find executors have led to frustrating dead ends
for some of E. J. Thompson's closest friends whose letters were especially
influential and revealing. For instance, probate records reveal almost nothing
about George Lowther; I found only a distant relation by marriage, who had
no information about him. William Canton's publication copyrights were
ceded to J. M. Dent and Company, who have no information about an execu
tor. Inquiries to sources mentioned in letters or to the press yielded nothing.
Requests to recorded executors for S. K. Ratcliffe brought no response.
Search for executors of Frederick Joshua Fielden led from Agra University
through three British solicitors' offices to the Cambridge house that was
his last home-all without result. I hope that my use of those letters will
cause no offense, for the friendships of their writers were indispensable to
Thompson. I hope, at least, that this use may bring new information to light.
For financial assistance during this work, I am indebted to the American
Council of Learned Societies, whose Travel-to-Collections grant in 1988 was,
in effect, seed money for this project. For additional financial assistance I
thank the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester; the University of
Missouri's Weldon Spring Humanities Seminar and its Research Council for
,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xl
summer research grants. Nor do I forget that Selwyn College, Cambridge
University, gave me a Visiting Bye-Fellowship in 1991-1992, as well as
subsequent summer accommodations; and Mrs. Mary Bennett, Oxford, has
repeatedly given me a home while I worked in England.
The University of Missouri Press has been most encouraging and helpful
throughout the project, and I thank particularly Julianna Schroeder, whose
meticulous editing tidied up lapses and repetitions. I also wish to thank both
Tim Fox and Kim Mccaffrey for assistance in proofreading, and I am grateful
to Linda Webster for her fine index.
INTRODUCTION
"lndias prisoner" is Gandhi's phrase. It refers
to Edward John Thompson's 1925 novel, A Farewell to India. Gandhi was
quite right. Although Thompson said repeatedly that he longed to be quit
of India, he could not say a final farewell because he was entangled in the
network of derivations, aversions, and enthusiasms attached to India's two
centuries of involuntary affiliation with Britain. He was not one of those
entangled in India's mysticisms, so many of which were (are) constructs
of Western wishful thinking. He had a saving, if sometimes extravagantly
expressed, skepticism about the British-Indian relationship, but as a child of
late-Victorian England, born in 1886, he could never bring himself whole
heartedly to a view of England detached from India. He wanted only the best
for India: he came to the conclusion that that best was India as a dominion
within the Commonwealth.
India as he knew it between 1910 and 1946 still bore indelible marks
of the upheaval that the British call the Mutiny of 1857 but many Indians
regard as their first great freedom uprising. In 1858 it had resulted in Par
liament's taking control of India away from the traders of the East India
Company. Henceforth British India, theoretically exclusive of the one-fourth
of the subcontinent under the rule of hereditary princes, was administered
through two bureaucracies: the India Office in London under a Secretary
of State for India, and, on the spot, the Government of India under an
appointed Governor-General whose title metamorphosed to that of Viceroy
after Disraeli proclaimed Victoria Empress of India in 1876. Every ten years,
Parliament considered an India Bill, ostensibly a review of the state of affairs
there but all too often a revelation of the shallowness of many Members'
information about their Indian Raj. Meanwhile the India Office and the Gov
ernment of India, even after the advent of the telegraph and the typewriter,
conducted much of their business amid floods of painstakingly handwritten
memoranda and reminders, formal statements of various officials, minutes
of meetings, recommendations and refutations, proposals and counterpro
posals, trivia and strategies of vast consequence. Anyone who reads through
even one year's record of these exchanges must marvel at official patience
and persistence.
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