over succession kept his practice busy. To these large landlords the British
had promised security of status and landholding after the Revolt to ensure
that they did not side with future revolts. It was the Conservative prime
minister, Benjamin Disraeli’s, idea that British rule should side with,
and not against, the ‘natural leaders’ of Indian society, the landed aristoc-
racy and the princes, to ensure stability of British rule in India. As far
as his government was concerned, the causes of the great Revolt of 1857
lay in the British attempt to raise new classes to power at the expense of
the old. Although these new classes had remained loyal to the British at a
time when most of the country had risen in revolt, the new classes were
a minority who by virtue of their newness could not provide the British
with a necessary base of indigenous collaborators. The British link with
‘natural leaders’ was considered the key to the longevity, and assumed
permanence, of British rule in India. This was a link that the Communist
International, in one of its more felicitous phrases, was later to characterise
as the ‘feudal–imperial alliance’ – where an old feudal aristocracy was kept
alive by virtue of its support from the imperialists, instead of being
destroyed by the new forces of capitalism unleashed on a colony by the
metropolis.
Perhaps, however, the line between the old and the new India can
be too sharply drawn as far as the ‘new middle classes’ are concerned.
Motilal Nehru is an interesting, and perhaps not atypical, transitional
figure among the professional classes in India. Both Motilal and his
forefathers were service gentry: the latter had served the bureaucracy of the
Mughal state, unfortunately in its time of decline; and Motilal served
the legal system of the new British rulers. The clerical professions of the
old regime sought employment in the clerical professions of the new.
It was a logical shift for Motilal from a highly Persianised literary,
bureaucratic and cultural world in which he grew up, and in which he
continued to be comfortable, to the Anglicised world of the new political
power. He wholeheartedly took to the task of mastering the conventions
of the new milieu, wielding an elegant and acid pen in the English
language, adopting European dress and European table manners. This was
for him perfectly reasonable: adopting the cultural norms of the dominant
political power was the means of upward social mobility and the marker
of social status. But it was not that this was a purely instrumentalist
choice. Having learnt Persian (but not Sanskrit, considered by the British
to be the classical language of the ‘Hindus’) during his early schooling, he12 THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL