0:00:04 > 0:00:07BUGLE CALL
0:00:11 > 0:00:17January 1901 - the dawn of the British Empire's fourth century.
0:00:17 > 0:00:22Few of its servants or rulers imagined it would be its last.
0:00:25 > 0:00:30Queen Victoria was barely cold in her coffin
0:00:30 > 0:00:36when her Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, envisioned a fitting memorial in Calcutta
0:00:36 > 0:00:41to the Queen Empress who reigned over a fifth of the globe.
0:00:41 > 0:00:45A learned enthusiast of Indian architecture,
0:00:45 > 0:00:52Curzon's mind naturally turned to the most beautiful memorial in the world - the Taj Mahal.
0:00:54 > 0:01:00Not least because HE had been responsible for making it beautiful again -
0:01:00 > 0:01:05cleared out the bazaar in front of it, restored its water gardens.
0:01:06 > 0:01:14Now he would build the British Taj, faced with the same white marble hewn from the Makrana quarries.
0:01:16 > 0:01:20But the Victoria memorial would not be a poem in stone
0:01:20 > 0:01:25so much as a proclamation in domes and columns
0:01:25 > 0:01:29that the British Raj was the Rome of the modern age.
0:01:30 > 0:01:38But was this a time to be spending a royal fortune when millions of peasants were starving?
0:01:38 > 0:01:41When the foundation stone was laid,
0:01:41 > 0:01:46a year after Curzon left India amidst violence and chaos,
0:01:46 > 0:01:51at least 16 million Indians had perished
0:01:51 > 0:01:57in the most terrible succession of famines Asia had known for centuries.
0:01:57 > 0:01:59What had happened?
0:01:59 > 0:02:06The men and women who'd sat at their desks, played out their chukkas and danced in the club
0:02:06 > 0:02:14were not monsters of hard-hearted indifference. They had, many of them, only the very best of intentions.
0:02:14 > 0:02:22They had a vision that their Empire was the best the world had ever seen because it was built on virtue.
0:02:22 > 0:02:26Its power was to be measured, not in Gatling guns,
0:02:26 > 0:02:32but in an unselfish dedication to eradicating poverty, ignorance and disease.
0:02:32 > 0:02:37We would take cultures crippled by those maladies and stand them on their own two feet.
0:02:37 > 0:02:41In the fullness of time, so the theory went,
0:02:41 > 0:02:46the millions would become civilised enough to govern themselves
0:02:46 > 0:02:52and we would leave them, the children of our liberal dream, grateful, devoted, peaceful
0:02:52 > 0:02:57and - this was the bonus for the modern world - free.
0:02:59 > 0:03:03It didn't exactly work out like that, did it?
0:03:03 > 0:03:06So what went wrong?
0:03:49 > 0:03:57On February 4th 1834, the young MP for Leeds made a farewell speech to his electors.
0:03:57 > 0:04:02Thomas Babington Macaulay, Clever Tom, boy wonder at Cambridge,
0:04:02 > 0:04:09juvenile lead of the Whigs in the Commons, ace reviewer and historian in the making,
0:04:09 > 0:04:14had decided that, as nice as all this was, he needed a fortune.
0:04:14 > 0:04:18India, he'd been told, was where you got it, fast.
0:04:18 > 0:04:25And just to show he wasn't a greedy Tom, while he was at it, he'd do good to the natives.
0:04:25 > 0:04:28He might be leaving industrial Britain,
0:04:28 > 0:04:36but he was confident he'd find its products as well as its benevolent spirit alive and well in Calcutta.
0:04:36 > 0:04:43May your manufactures flourish, may your trade be extended, may your riches increase.
0:04:43 > 0:04:51May the works of your skill and the signs of your prosperity meet me in the furthest regions of the East,
0:04:51 > 0:04:58give me fresh cause to be proud of the intelligence, the industry and the spirit of my constituency.
0:04:58 > 0:05:01Macaulay's breezy optimism
0:05:01 > 0:05:07that cotton cloth and constitutionalism were what Britain had to offer the world
0:05:07 > 0:05:11was the authentic voice of the liberal Empire,
0:05:11 > 0:05:17equally sure of itself whether it was preaching and teaching at India, Ireland or darkest England,
0:05:17 > 0:05:22where the natives also toiled in filth, ignorance and disease,
0:05:22 > 0:05:27and equally in need of a hefty dose of Victorian vim and vigour.
0:05:27 > 0:05:31Asia, they thought, was especially inert,
0:05:31 > 0:05:36and the great principle of liberalism, according to its founders, was, above all, movement.
0:05:41 > 0:05:47Macaulay had been brought up a strict Christian, but his real church was the church of progress -
0:05:47 > 0:05:52steam engines, free newspapers, and parliamentary government.
0:05:53 > 0:05:58The historian in him looked at the rise and fall of civilisations
0:05:58 > 0:06:04and was jubilant that this was Britain's time for imperial greatness.
0:06:04 > 0:06:08We would share our blessings, moral and material.
0:06:08 > 0:06:16We would take ancient societies, miserable with poverty and tyranny, and teach them self-reliance.
0:06:16 > 0:06:20And when we'd done the job, we'd pack up and go home.
0:06:22 > 0:06:27The great principle of the British Empire would be self-liquidation.
0:06:27 > 0:06:34It would be like a parent, full of bittersweet emotion as its children were sent off into the world,
0:06:34 > 0:06:39tied to the home no longer by power but by grateful affection.
0:06:39 > 0:06:44Never had Britain had such an abundance of clever, zealous young men
0:06:44 > 0:06:49itching to liberate Asia from the grip of superstition and disease.
0:06:49 > 0:06:56And in the Governor General of India, Lord William Bentinck, they'd found an ardent patron.
0:07:00 > 0:07:05Even the most dedicated pilgrims in search of the relics of the Raj
0:07:05 > 0:07:09are not going to make a beeline for this statue.
0:07:09 > 0:07:14In fact, I don't suppose anybody in this park knows who Lord William Bentinck really was.
0:07:14 > 0:07:20You have to look at the figures in the frieze here to see why he rates a commemoration.
0:07:20 > 0:07:25Bentinck was the first of the authentic do-gooder Governors General,
0:07:25 > 0:07:31and the kind of person he wanted to do good to was this woman in distress in the middle of the sculpture group.
0:07:31 > 0:07:39She's a young widow about to join her husband in a joint cremation, the traditional Hindu practice of suttee.
0:07:42 > 0:07:47Unlike an older generation of British in India,
0:07:47 > 0:07:52the likes of Macaulay and Bentinck knew next to nothing of this kind of tradition,
0:07:52 > 0:07:59nor would it have made any difference if they had. What they knew was an abomination when they saw it.
0:08:01 > 0:08:05Never mind that there were only 500 cremations a year -
0:08:05 > 0:08:12the campaign to abolish suttee was the campaign of their dreams, and they went about it with a will.
0:08:12 > 0:08:18Volumes were written by missionaries, committees deliberated in Parliament, a law was passed,
0:08:18 > 0:08:24and inspectors were dispatched to intercept widows en route to the funeral pyre.
0:08:27 > 0:08:32The 1830s were a crossroads in the young life of the liberal Empire.
0:08:32 > 0:08:40Did the welfare of our native subjects oblige us to impose the values of the West on the East?
0:08:40 > 0:08:46Or should we be rebuilding and reinvigorating Asian culture and society?
0:08:46 > 0:08:53Charles Trevelyan, another high-minded young reformer, who was courting Macaulay's sister,
0:08:53 > 0:09:00was in no doubt at all which road to take. The more British India could become, the better.
0:09:00 > 0:09:06For Macaulay and Trevelyan, the country would be turned into one vast school room.
0:09:06 > 0:09:12Teaching, for them, was not just a job. Western education was the instrument
0:09:12 > 0:09:18by which India was going to be transformed from a world of bullock carts and beggars
0:09:18 > 0:09:21into the progressive Victorian dynamic world of the telegraph and the locomotive.
0:09:24 > 0:09:30English would be a way to bring Indians, divided by so many faiths and languages, together,
0:09:30 > 0:09:36and it would help bridge the culture gap between Europe and the subcontinent.
0:09:36 > 0:09:41To those who said, "You're destroying their own culture,"
0:09:41 > 0:09:44Trevelyan replied that Hinduism was:
0:09:44 > 0:09:49Identified with so many gross immoralities and physical absurdities
0:09:49 > 0:09:54that it gives way at once to the light of European science.
0:09:59 > 0:10:05Well, here we are, on the veranda. Late afternoon, the perfect Imperial time of day.
0:10:05 > 0:10:11This is the time when words like veranda and bungalow enter the British vocabulary,
0:10:11 > 0:10:17and they would make you think that the world that the sahibs built for themselves
0:10:17 > 0:10:21was a marriage between an Indian and a British lifestyle.
0:10:21 > 0:10:27A bungalow, after all, was a one-storey Indian dwelling. But it wasn't really like that at all.
0:10:27 > 0:10:33What the British had done with the bungalow was make a life for themselves
0:10:33 > 0:10:40that was as much as possible like the life of a country gentleman in Buckinghamshire or Lancashire.
0:10:40 > 0:10:47So instead of the bustle of an Indian courtyard, with animals inside it, washing and cooking going on,
0:10:47 > 0:10:51we have the rose garden, the well-kept hedges,
0:10:51 > 0:10:54the strictly disciplined gardeners.
0:10:58 > 0:11:03Tucked safely away behind the walls of bungalows and barracks,
0:11:03 > 0:11:08and flattered by a new class of English-speaking merchants,
0:11:08 > 0:11:13the sahibs imagined they knew everything about this new Westernised India,
0:11:13 > 0:11:18which would be, as Macaulay liked to put it, "An ally, not a subject."
0:11:20 > 0:11:28So when Macaulay and Trevelyan went home at the end of the 1830s to government jobs in London,
0:11:28 > 0:11:34they were confident that they had sown the seeds of a modern, liberal India.
0:11:36 > 0:11:38Everything was now in place
0:11:38 > 0:11:46to ensure as much of the world as possible would be governed by the one mechanism capable of doing so -
0:11:46 > 0:11:53the British Empire of free trade. And educated, anglicised India would be a key player.
0:12:01 > 0:12:06There was just one iron law - let the market do its job.
0:12:06 > 0:12:14If people clinging to backward ways went under in the name of the new economic order, well, so be it.
0:12:14 > 0:12:20But while the modernisers were all looking East to see the payoff of their great experiment,
0:12:20 > 0:12:26the first great shock to the complacency of their views came from the opposite direction - the West.
0:12:28 > 0:12:32Somewhere alarmingly closer to home - from Ireland.
0:12:32 > 0:12:39Many of those who looked back on the disaster thought they should have seen it coming all along,
0:12:39 > 0:12:43seen that Ireland was India with rain.
0:12:43 > 0:12:48A population explosion from over two to over eight million in a century.
0:12:48 > 0:12:53Too many bodies clinging to unworkable little plots,
0:12:53 > 0:12:57too small to make a profit in the Imperial marketplace.
0:12:57 > 0:13:05Of course, just like India, there were islands of modernity in the great ocean of poverty.
0:13:05 > 0:13:10Rich Ireland was the East and the North, around Dublin and Belfast,
0:13:10 > 0:13:17facing the immense engine of industrial Britain and supplying it with butter, meat, linen and oatmeal.
0:13:18 > 0:13:23But the West was where Ireland's agony was felt.
0:13:23 > 0:13:27Tiny scraps of land with a cabin and a pig
0:13:27 > 0:13:32and only potatoes to grow to make the difference between survival and starvation.
0:13:34 > 0:13:40By the 1840s, Irish men and women, especially in the poorer counties of the West,
0:13:40 > 0:13:48were eating between 10lbs and 15lbs of potatoes a day, sometimes washed down with a little buttermilk.
0:13:52 > 0:14:00Then in 1845 the angel of death struck, in the shape of the fungus phytophthora infestans.
0:14:00 > 0:14:04Spores grew on the underside of leaves.
0:14:04 > 0:14:11The Irish wind blew them to their neighbours, and the Irish rain made sure the crop rotted.
0:14:11 > 0:14:15The infestation was so sudden and so unprecedented,
0:14:15 > 0:14:20it was impossible at first to take in the magnitude of the disaster.
0:14:21 > 0:14:27In August 1846, Father Theobald Matthew saw the damage for himself.
0:14:27 > 0:14:33On the 27th of last month, I passed from Cork to Dublin.
0:14:33 > 0:14:38This doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest.
0:14:38 > 0:14:42Returning on the 3rd of the following month,
0:14:42 > 0:14:47I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.
0:14:47 > 0:14:52In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens,
0:14:52 > 0:14:58wringing their hands and wailing bitterly at the destruction that had left them foodless.
0:14:58 > 0:15:05And while this was happening, oats, one of rich Ireland's prime exports, were being shipped out.
0:15:05 > 0:15:11The man executing Government policy at the Treasury was Charles Trevelyan.
0:15:11 > 0:15:16Someone who could see a catastrophe around the corner
0:15:16 > 0:15:20wrote to Trevelyan, begging him to stop the export of oats.
0:15:20 > 0:15:28I know there is a great and serious objection to any interference with these exports,
0:15:28 > 0:15:30yet it is a most serious evil.
0:15:30 > 0:15:33Trevelyan wrote back:
0:15:33 > 0:15:41We beg of you not to countenance in any way the idea of prohibiting exportation.
0:15:41 > 0:15:45The discouragement and feeling of insecurity to the trade
0:15:45 > 0:15:51would prevent its doing even any immediate good.
0:15:51 > 0:15:56If the peasants of Western Ireland weren't able to grow potatoes,
0:15:56 > 0:16:01perhaps by labouring on public works they could earn money to buy food.
0:16:01 > 0:16:08This is one of those relief projects, a road in the Burren in County Clare which goes absolutely nowhere.
0:16:09 > 0:16:14But it didn't matter. Even these futile jobs got closed down.
0:16:14 > 0:16:20So too did the soup kitchens which the Government briefly provided,
0:16:20 > 0:16:24following the example of the Quakers and others.
0:16:24 > 0:16:31Now there was only one place to go - the workhouse - even if you had typhus or dysenteric fever.
0:16:35 > 0:16:40Workhouses like this one at Portumna in Galway were filled to overflowing.
0:16:40 > 0:16:46Workhouses had always been deliberately designed to be as much like prisons as possible
0:16:46 > 0:16:50to deter anyone who had the slightest chance of a job.
0:16:50 > 0:16:55But as the famine developed, the situation here got much, much worse,
0:16:55 > 0:17:01the sick and the healthy placed side by side. You'd had to be off your head to want to cross the threshold.
0:17:01 > 0:17:08But when the alternative was starvation, multitudes were banging at the doors begging to be let in.
0:17:08 > 0:17:16After June 1847, to get any sort of relief you had to prove you were at the very bottom of the heap,
0:17:16 > 0:17:20with no more than a quarter of an acre to call your own.
0:17:20 > 0:17:26Of course, renting, say, one acre of bog or heath didn't exactly make you middle class.
0:17:26 > 0:17:31Hundreds of thousands of peasants, of course, were clinging to their cabins and patches of land
0:17:31 > 0:17:39on which they hoped to be able one day to grow potatoes again. Now they were faced with a terrible choice -
0:17:39 > 0:17:45either turn in that extra land to the landlords to get poor relief, or stay put and starve.
0:17:45 > 0:17:48It was no choice at all.
0:17:48 > 0:17:55The hungry converted themselves into the officially landless just to get something to eat,
0:17:55 > 0:18:00travelling miles to the widely dispersed workhouses, leaving their plots behind.
0:18:00 > 0:18:06It was just the opportunity Irish landlords had been waiting for.
0:18:06 > 0:18:12Tenants who tried to stay were forcibly evicted, their roofs smashed in to make sure they didn't return.
0:18:12 > 0:18:17Now the landlords could stock their acres with sheep and cattle.
0:18:17 > 0:18:22So much more profitable than peasants and pigs.
0:18:22 > 0:18:29At the height of the famine, there were too many babies dying either at birth or in early infancy
0:18:29 > 0:18:34for the priests to be able to baptise them all.
0:18:34 > 0:18:41Denied consecrated ground, their fathers carried them to a little piece of no-man's-land,
0:18:41 > 0:18:46like this, on the very rim of the island, on the Atlantic shore,
0:18:46 > 0:18:52and put up a rough stone marker to mark their short, sad life.
0:18:56 > 0:18:58For two million Irish men and women
0:18:58 > 0:19:04for whom it was just too exhausting to go on fighting the uphill battle against hunger,
0:19:04 > 0:19:10opportunist landlords and the stony heartlessness of the Government,
0:19:10 > 0:19:14there was one more place to trudge to - the ports,
0:19:14 > 0:19:20which would carry them away to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand
0:19:20 > 0:19:24and - they hoped to God - a better chance, a better life.
0:19:27 > 0:19:30It would be many generations
0:19:30 > 0:19:36before Ireland's population would recover to the numbers before the potato blight struck.
0:19:36 > 0:19:42And in the memory bank of the Irish diaspora, in Boston, New York or Sydney,
0:19:42 > 0:19:49the great emptying of Western Ireland was above all a British - make that an English - plot,
0:19:49 > 0:19:52little short of genocide.
0:19:52 > 0:19:59It certainly wasn't that. Many of the cruelties were acts Irishmen inflicted on each other,
0:19:59 > 0:20:05just as the Highland clearances had been horrors committed by Scots against other Scots.
0:20:06 > 0:20:13But Trevelyan and men like him DID subscribe to the blessing-in-disguise theory,
0:20:13 > 0:20:20in which, as in India, the road to modernity in overcrowded, unproductive rural economies
0:20:20 > 0:20:24would always be paved with the ruin of villages.
0:20:28 > 0:20:30This is how a contemporary English newspaper summarised it:
0:20:30 > 0:20:37The truth is that these evictions are not merely a legal, but a natural process.
0:20:37 > 0:20:42And however much we may deplore the misery from which they spring,
0:20:42 > 0:20:47we cannot compel the Irish proprietors to continue in their miserable holdings
0:20:47 > 0:20:52the wretched swarms of people who pay no rent
0:20:52 > 0:20:57and who prevent improvement of property as long as they remain on it.
0:20:58 > 0:21:03For many Irish on both sides of the Atlantic, Trevelyan was to blame.
0:21:03 > 0:21:09John Mitchell, a journalist and the most eloquently bitter of the Anglophobes wrote:
0:21:09 > 0:21:13I saw Trevelyan's claw in the vitals of those children -
0:21:13 > 0:21:17his red tape would draw them to death.
0:21:19 > 0:21:26The price of this religious devotion to the Victorian bible of free trade was a million dead,
0:21:26 > 0:21:33another two million uprooted as emigrants, more than a third of the total population of Ireland.
0:21:33 > 0:21:40It was perhaps the greatest peacetime calamity in all of 19th-century European history,
0:21:40 > 0:21:47and it happened not just on the doorstep of the richest country in the world, but inside our own house.
0:21:47 > 0:21:52Ireland, after all, had been part of the kingdom since 1801,
0:21:52 > 0:22:00and this, nationalists would say for generations afterwards, was the bitter fruit of the union.
0:22:00 > 0:22:05Knighted in 1848 for his sterling work on Irish relief,
0:22:05 > 0:22:09Sir Charles Trevelyan was oblivious to all this hatred.
0:22:09 > 0:22:12No blots on HIS conscience.
0:22:12 > 0:22:17"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course,"
0:22:17 > 0:22:24his memorial window would proclaim in the church near his family's estate in Northumberland.
0:22:28 > 0:22:31By the spring of 1857,
0:22:31 > 0:22:38Trevelyan was in no doubt that Victorian Britain was, in the best sense imaginable, the new Rome,
0:22:38 > 0:22:44the Rome before corruption and despotism set in. A light to the nations.
0:22:44 > 0:22:52And thanks to Trevelyan's reforms, run by a new kind of civil service - entry by exam, not by connections.
0:22:52 > 0:22:57Now government, the dream machine of Trevelyan and Macaulay,
0:22:57 > 0:23:03needed a space that would properly proclaim its moral and political grandeur.
0:23:03 > 0:23:09Not a rabbit warren of inky-fingered scribes, but a palace of the high-minded and the hard-working.
0:23:09 > 0:23:16And here it is. The new Foreign Office, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott.
0:23:17 > 0:23:23Swaggering enough to take its place alongside the Topkapi in Istanbul,
0:23:23 > 0:23:29Versailles or the Doge's Palace in Venice as an indisputable house of power.
0:23:33 > 0:23:40And it was a machine whose every part interlocked with majestic economy and precision.
0:23:40 > 0:23:45Our great banks told native money men what Britain needed,
0:23:45 > 0:23:50THEY told their cultivators, and lo, raw cotton and indigo dye arrived.
0:23:50 > 0:23:57We shipped back to them the manufactures produced in the workshop of the world,
0:23:57 > 0:24:05locomotives taking our textiles and heavy metal to the towns of India and China and Latin America.
0:24:07 > 0:24:14The globe was shrinking. And through the modern marvel of the electric telegraph,
0:24:14 > 0:24:19this was the first empire that could boast it was run on high-speed information,
0:24:19 > 0:24:25a worldwide web of intelligence - commercial, political, military.
0:24:25 > 0:24:27So how was it, then, with all this,
0:24:27 > 0:24:34we managed NOT to hear the ominous rumble of an earthquake in the making right in the heart of India?
0:24:41 > 0:24:46Perhaps because we were so besotted with our shiny new toys
0:24:46 > 0:24:51we weren't looking or listening in the right place,
0:24:51 > 0:24:58weren't eavesdropping in the bazaar and the mosque, listening to the imams and the soothsayers.
0:25:00 > 0:25:02If we had been listening,
0:25:02 > 0:25:09we'd have heard in the towns angry complaints about missionaries pushing Bibles in native languages,
0:25:09 > 0:25:16and in the countryside protests about who controlled the land and the taxes you had to pay for it.
0:25:20 > 0:25:26Mutiny, the word by which WE know the terrible slaughters of 1857,
0:25:26 > 0:25:32seems to speak of rank ingratitude for all the good Britain was supposed to have brought India.
0:25:32 > 0:25:37But if you look at it from the Indian point of view, the picture changes.
0:25:37 > 0:25:42Both British and Indians got very worked up about loyalty and honour.
0:25:42 > 0:25:49But what they meant by those very highly-charged words were two completely different sets of values,
0:25:49 > 0:25:55values which were at war with each other in 1857, before a single shot had been fired.
0:25:55 > 0:26:00The Indians, whether Hindus or Muslims, peasants or townsmen,
0:26:00 > 0:26:07lived in a world governed by ceremony, shame, respect and passion.
0:26:07 > 0:26:15The Victorians prized moral and material self-improvement, and above all, tight emotional discipline.
0:26:18 > 0:26:20Typical, then,
0:26:20 > 0:26:28that in their eagerness to issue their Indian recruits, or sepoys, the new, improved Enfield rifle,
0:26:28 > 0:26:35the Army neglected to ensure that the cartridge grease was made of neither pig nor cow fat -
0:26:35 > 0:26:40an oversight bound to offend both Muslims and Hindus.
0:26:41 > 0:26:48In fact, it was not the issue of the offending cartridges which was the problem.
0:26:48 > 0:26:53Vegetable grease was quickly substituted. What was most offensive
0:26:53 > 0:27:00was the increasingly arrogant response of the British to matters which they regarded as trivial.
0:27:00 > 0:27:07They were about to find out just what was trivial to an Indian and what wasn't.
0:27:17 > 0:27:24For generations, the province of Awadh in N India had supplied the British Army with its best sepoys,
0:27:24 > 0:27:28in return for which they got to go back home
0:27:28 > 0:27:33and swagger about in the gardens of Lucknow, its principal city.
0:27:33 > 0:27:38Then in 1856, their special status disappeared when Awadh was annexed.
0:27:38 > 0:27:45And why? Because the new Trevelyanite civil service decided that the province was badly administered.
0:27:45 > 0:27:51The sepoys joined a long queue of people - tax collectors, local judges, palace courtesans -
0:27:51 > 0:27:59all bitter that a perfectly workable regime had been demolished by the British in the name of officiousness.
0:27:59 > 0:28:05Lucknow, once one of the most easy-going places for Europeans and Indians to mix -
0:28:05 > 0:28:10at cockfights, for instance - had become a segregated city.
0:28:10 > 0:28:15The tight-laced British huddled together in their military cantonment
0:28:15 > 0:28:21and in buildings scattered through the 37 acres of the Residency,
0:28:21 > 0:28:25complete with churches, clubs and banquet hall.
0:28:25 > 0:28:32They were about to pay the price for this distance. Their over-reliance on the new information technology
0:28:32 > 0:28:37had fatally separated them from the word on the street.
0:28:37 > 0:28:42The sahibs, of course, said they'd built this cordon sanitaire for the memsahibs,
0:28:42 > 0:28:45who'd come out to India in record numbers.
0:28:45 > 0:28:53Have to keep the ladies away from the dirt, disease and frightful morals of the natives, don't you know?
0:28:53 > 0:28:59But the memsahibs at Lucknow were about to get a taste of the real India with a vengeance.
0:28:59 > 0:29:07Take Katherine Bartram, for example. 23 years old, just married to an Army surgeon,
0:29:07 > 0:29:11living in a hill station 80 miles away from Lucknow.
0:29:11 > 0:29:18There with her new baby, Kate lived the usual bungalow life, waited on hand and foot by servants.
0:29:20 > 0:29:27In early June 1857, Kate and her husband Robert would have heard the incredible news
0:29:27 > 0:29:33that sepoys had marched to Delhi and persuaded the old king, the last of the Mughals, Bahadur Shah,
0:29:33 > 0:29:41to issue proclamations calling on the faithful to rise against the Feringhis, the detestable foreigners.
0:29:41 > 0:29:44European Delhi burned,
0:29:44 > 0:29:50its desperate survivors retreating up this hill to the ridge at the northeast end of the city.
0:29:50 > 0:29:53What started as a mutiny of soldiers
0:29:53 > 0:30:00built like wildfire into an immense rebellion of peasants and townspeople,
0:30:00 > 0:30:06right through the mid-Ganges Valley, the prosperous heart of India.
0:30:06 > 0:30:08Lucknow would not escape the flames.
0:30:08 > 0:30:13Rumour fed disobedience, even up at the Bartram bungalow.
0:30:13 > 0:30:18With brutal speed, the world that Kate must have thought would never change,
0:30:18 > 0:30:23that daily routine of sweepers, punka wallahs, grooms, cooks, gardeners,
0:30:23 > 0:30:28now began to crumble under her slippered feet.
0:30:28 > 0:30:33All our servants have deserted us, and now our trials have begun in earnest,
0:30:33 > 0:30:40for from morning till night we can get no food cooked and we have not the means of doing it for ourselves.
0:30:40 > 0:30:43How we are to manage, I cannot tell.
0:30:44 > 0:30:48For many nights we have not dared to close our eyes.
0:30:48 > 0:30:56I keep a sword under the pillow, and dear R has his pistol ready to start up at the slightest sound.
0:30:56 > 0:31:00Their isolation marked them as sitting ducks.
0:31:00 > 0:31:05Their only chance lay in somehow getting through to the stronghold at Lucknow.
0:31:05 > 0:31:09When Robert was called to his regiment,
0:31:09 > 0:31:17Kate made her way by elephant through hostile country to the domes and minarets of Awadh's golden city.
0:31:17 > 0:31:228,000 sepoys were preparing to encircle the Residency.
0:31:22 > 0:31:29Within the grounds were barely 800 British soldiers, just 700 loyal Indian troops
0:31:29 > 0:31:35and 50 pupils from La Martiniere, Lucknow's model Western school,
0:31:35 > 0:31:38who were also ready to do their bit.
0:31:43 > 0:31:47Soon after Kate arrived, the siege began.
0:31:47 > 0:31:54When a breakout failed, it was obvious that the British wives would be needed to nurse and cook.
0:31:54 > 0:31:59The torrid heat was broken only by torrential rain.
0:31:59 > 0:32:03Above them, bullocks and horses wandered about, mad with thirst.
0:32:03 > 0:32:08Details had to be sent out to bury the rotting carcasses.
0:32:08 > 0:32:14As it got hotter, the Residency turned into a stagnant pool of sickness.
0:32:14 > 0:32:19Kate Bartram gagged at the overflowing latrines.
0:32:25 > 0:32:29Food became dire, covered with thick swarms of flies.
0:32:29 > 0:32:36There was still champagne, but now it was an anaesthetic used only for the badly wounded -
0:32:36 > 0:32:41one bottle drunk at a gulp before an amputation.
0:32:42 > 0:32:49Kate Bartram watched babies and mothers die, as cholera and dysentery took their toll.
0:32:50 > 0:32:56She saw people go mad. The Victorian mask was slipping.
0:33:00 > 0:33:08After nearly five months, a relief force managed to break through and evacuated the women and children.
0:33:10 > 0:33:13But still the siege wore on.
0:33:13 > 0:33:18It wouldn't be lifted until 1858, the following spring.
0:33:20 > 0:33:24By then, the great Indian rebellion had been crushed.
0:33:24 > 0:33:30Calcutta had remained intact at one side of the country and the Punjab at the other.
0:33:30 > 0:33:35Troops from both converged on the centre, and then it was only a matter of time.
0:33:39 > 0:33:44But then came retribution, swift and terrible.
0:33:44 > 0:33:49Sepoys blown apart by cannon, flogged to death, mutilated.
0:33:51 > 0:33:59Prints illustrating what British men and women had suffered fed the calls for revenge.
0:33:59 > 0:34:06Since the public expected to see a charnel house, photographers who came to Lucknow obliged them,
0:34:06 > 0:34:11dressing their photos with the disinterred bones of mutineers.
0:34:15 > 0:34:20Things would never be the same. As a sop to Indian pride,
0:34:20 > 0:34:28the East India Company had pretended to govern alongside a symbolic Mughal presence, the King of Delhi.
0:34:29 > 0:34:35For a brief moment during the rebellion, he had become an emperor again.
0:34:35 > 0:34:38But now he was a wanted fugitive.
0:34:38 > 0:34:44The British caught up with the pathetic, blind old man at Humayun's tomb in Delhi.
0:34:44 > 0:34:48As a captive, he became a figure of ridicule.
0:34:50 > 0:34:56The East India Company and the rule of the Mughals were put to rest at the same time.
0:34:57 > 0:35:05The catastrophe of the mutiny threw into crisis all the old ideas about how the Empire should be run.
0:35:05 > 0:35:09What shape it would take in the future divided opinion,
0:35:09 > 0:35:14and those divisions were personified by the Punch and Judy of politics
0:35:14 > 0:35:18in the second half of Victoria's century - Disraeli and Gladstone.
0:35:18 > 0:35:22They'd slug it out for decades,
0:35:22 > 0:35:28their views on Imperial power as conflicting as their personal and political styles.
0:35:28 > 0:35:35The man who gave the British a real appetite for empire was, of course, Benjamin Disraeli.
0:35:35 > 0:35:43His whole career, from taking on and tearing down the venerated leader of the Tory Party, Sir Robert Peel,
0:35:43 > 0:35:45to taking the reins of that party,
0:35:45 > 0:35:50was one long virtuoso exercise in improbability.
0:35:50 > 0:35:56And the most improbable feat of all was to make the exotic, starting with himself -
0:35:56 > 0:35:59domestic, national, patriotic.
0:35:59 > 0:36:06When Macaulay had made his maiden speech, arguing for the admission of Jews to parliament,
0:36:06 > 0:36:12it's unlikely he could ever have imagined that one would lead the Tories in the next generation.
0:36:12 > 0:36:19Dizzy was in fact a baptised Jew, a romantic novelist who compensated for his lack of aristocratic pedigree
0:36:19 > 0:36:27or commercial fortune, by being the attack dog of a party not famous for verbal brilliance in the House.
0:36:27 > 0:36:34He took one look at how politics was conducted in mid-Victorian Britain and saw that something was missing.
0:36:34 > 0:36:38That something was what he called imagination.
0:36:38 > 0:36:45Now, what does a politician do with imagination? Well, in the hands of a mere showman, not a lot.
0:36:45 > 0:36:52But behind the parliamentary performer, the wag in the cherry-red waistcoats and the glossy curls,
0:36:52 > 0:36:55was a political tactician of pure genius,
0:36:55 > 0:37:01someone who could take imagination and turn it into power.
0:37:02 > 0:37:10Disraeli's appeal was being NOT Gladstone, not being the high-minded, morally driven do-gooder.
0:37:10 > 0:37:16When Queen Victoria complained she hated being addressed like a public meeting by Gladstone,
0:37:16 > 0:37:20she voiced the irritation of millions of her subjects.
0:37:24 > 0:37:29How the two of them spent their hours tells you everything.
0:37:29 > 0:37:33Gladstone, when he allowed himself time off from the dispatch boxes,
0:37:33 > 0:37:39unbuttoning his cuffs and chopping down trees at Hawarden, his estate in Flintshire.
0:37:39 > 0:37:44Disraeli, on working days at Hewenden, his house near High Wycombe,
0:37:44 > 0:37:48strolled the terrace amidst his peacocks,
0:37:48 > 0:37:54and then perused the odd document or two between daydreams in the study, where,
0:37:54 > 0:37:59"I like to watch the sunbeams on the bindings of the books."
0:38:00 > 0:38:03Like the master psychologist he was,
0:38:03 > 0:38:10Disraeli had cottoned on to the insight, so obvious to us, but rather shocking to the Victorians,
0:38:10 > 0:38:16that in the dawning age of mass politics, not everyone wanted to be political.
0:38:16 > 0:38:20That rather than struggle relentlessly to BE good,
0:38:20 > 0:38:24many people would be happier to have good done for them.
0:38:24 > 0:38:29The new voter might actually prefer physical betterment
0:38:29 > 0:38:33over the moral regeneration the Liberals were always going on about,
0:38:33 > 0:38:40might want the kind of things that Disraeli's Government would give them - better food, cleaner water,
0:38:40 > 0:38:47and the gaudy oompah of empire over the pious cant of liberty.
0:38:47 > 0:38:54In Disraeli's vision for post-mutiny India, the Queen would rule as Empress,
0:38:54 > 0:38:59and Britain would swerve sharply away from Macaulay's wishful thinking
0:38:59 > 0:39:05that the best thing for Indians would be to turn them into brown Englishmen.
0:39:06 > 0:39:13Let them instead be Indians, and be delivered to the tender care of fathers -
0:39:13 > 0:39:19the viceroys and their teams of prefects, the district commissioners, magistrates and collectors,
0:39:19 > 0:39:24who in return for their children being good boys and girls would promise to deliver peace,
0:39:24 > 0:39:27good health and a bowl of rice.
0:39:29 > 0:39:35For Disraeli and the Tories, the goal was more empire, not less.
0:39:38 > 0:39:45Now what India needed was an extravaganza to celebrate her new dominion.
0:39:45 > 0:39:52And who better to organise one than the noble, though irredeemably bad, poet, the Earl of Lytton?
0:39:54 > 0:39:58Lytton's India would be a new-old India,
0:39:58 > 0:40:06a combination of tigers and peddlers, holy men and native princes, bejewelled, feudal and loyal.
0:40:07 > 0:40:14The Queen Empress promising to protect "the ancient usages and customs of India."
0:40:17 > 0:40:20The bond would be sealed at a Durbah, a great assembly,
0:40:20 > 0:40:25camped on the most sacred site of the Raj - Delhi Ridge,
0:40:25 > 0:40:29where the British had precariously held out during the mutiny,
0:40:29 > 0:40:35and which, along with Lucknow, had become a place of pilgrimage in the 20 years since.
0:40:35 > 0:40:39Spectacle would wipe out the memory of slaughter.
0:40:42 > 0:40:47On New Year's Day 1877, thousands watched Lytton step onto a dais,
0:40:47 > 0:40:52its banners designed by Rudyard Kipling's father,
0:40:52 > 0:40:57and receive on behalf of the Empress the homage of 300 Indian noblemen,
0:40:57 > 0:41:01the Nizams and the Gaikwas and the Maharajahs.
0:41:01 > 0:41:08The show had to be sufficiently over the top if it was to impress them with the invincibility of the Raj.
0:41:08 > 0:41:10As Lytton put it:
0:41:10 > 0:41:15The further East you go, the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting.
0:41:17 > 0:41:23The banquet, the most expensive in British history, went on for a week.
0:41:23 > 0:41:29During that week, thousands of the Queen Empress's subjects in Madras and Mysore starved to death.
0:41:29 > 0:41:34No reason, Lytton thought, to let it spoil the party.
0:41:37 > 0:41:40The monsoon had failed in south India.
0:41:40 > 0:41:44Lytton's council knew the situation might get desperate.
0:41:44 > 0:41:52But though they were supposed to be the new kind of benevolent ruler, they stuck to the old rules.
0:41:52 > 0:41:56Once again, there would be no interference in the grain markets.
0:41:56 > 0:42:00One again, famine relief works were overwhelmed,
0:42:00 > 0:42:06prompting Lytton's enforcer, Sir Richard Temple, playing the part Trevelyan had played in Ireland,
0:42:06 > 0:42:09to introduce the distance test,
0:42:09 > 0:42:15which insisted that starving applicants travel at least ten miles to dormitory camps
0:42:15 > 0:42:18in order to sign on for hard labour.
0:42:18 > 0:42:27The task of saving life, irrespective of cost, is one which it is beyond our power to undertake.
0:42:27 > 0:42:34The embarrassment of debt and weight of taxation would soon be more fatal than the famine itself.
0:42:39 > 0:42:42What made the scale of suffering so obscene
0:42:42 > 0:42:48was that it happened during a time of grain surplus in other parts of India.
0:42:48 > 0:42:52But so devoted to the market was the Government,
0:42:52 > 0:42:58that it refused to liberate those supplies for fear it would artificially bring down prices.
0:42:58 > 0:43:01So common sense, not to mention common humanity,
0:43:01 > 0:43:08were sacrificed to the fetish of the market, and millions were abandoned to perish.
0:43:08 > 0:43:14Five million died in 1877, of starvation and cholera.
0:43:14 > 0:43:18Horrified missionaries would use relatively portable cameras
0:43:18 > 0:43:23to record sights that otherwise no-one in Britain might believe.
0:43:23 > 0:43:30They saw peasants drop dead in front of troops guarding stockpiles of rice and grain.
0:43:30 > 0:43:36Florence Nightingale, moved to indignation by reports of the famine, called it,
0:43:36 > 0:43:43"a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before."
0:43:43 > 0:43:49For William Gladstone, the lessons of India and Ireland were very clear.
0:43:49 > 0:43:53Disraeli's glitzy paternalism was not the answer.
0:43:53 > 0:43:57For Gladstone, it was morally inexcusable.
0:43:57 > 0:44:04But liberalism needed to be something more than the old mantra of liberty, free trade and righteousness.
0:44:04 > 0:44:09It needed to nail its colours to the mast of political justice.
0:44:09 > 0:44:16For surely it was the sense of being robbed of that justice which drove men to fury and violence.
0:44:16 > 0:44:22So Gladstone's new testament would be the idea that government,
0:44:22 > 0:44:28even self-government within the Empire, or Home Rule, should be the instrument of justice.
0:44:30 > 0:44:37William Ewart Gladstone was a politician whose career had always been shaped by religious revelation
0:44:37 > 0:44:42and for whom the Bible was not just a sacred text, but a guide to politics.
0:44:42 > 0:44:49Once the truth had been revealed to Gladstone, he felt obliged, like the carriers of the first gospels,
0:44:49 > 0:44:54to preach to the unbelievers, to bring others to the light.
0:44:56 > 0:44:59And did he preach it!
0:44:59 > 0:45:03The great railway campaign in the North, Lancashire, Scotland,
0:45:03 > 0:45:07where, with the wind in his hair and fire in his belly,
0:45:07 > 0:45:13the locomotive-driven prophet, appearing before the immense flock, rained down hellfire
0:45:13 > 0:45:18on the immorality and indifference of Disraeli's Government to human suffering.
0:45:22 > 0:45:29Gladstone swept to victory in 1880, but he knew he had no time to celebrate.
0:45:29 > 0:45:31He had to grasp the nettle.
0:45:31 > 0:45:37Ireland is at your doors. Providence has placed it there.
0:45:37 > 0:45:44Law and legislature have made a compact between you, and you must face these obligations.
0:45:45 > 0:45:52Even if he'd wanted to look the other way, political reality would have made it impossible.
0:45:52 > 0:45:55Ireland now boasted a block of 59 MPs,
0:45:55 > 0:46:00who had no intention of allowing London to neglect Irish affairs.
0:46:05 > 0:46:10And at their vanguard was Charles Stuart Parnell,
0:46:10 > 0:46:17whose fate would be tied to Gladstone's as he inched towards Home Rule.
0:46:17 > 0:46:21A Protestant landowner from County Wicklow and an MP,
0:46:21 > 0:46:27Parnell was the most unlikely incarnation of Irish anger, hopes and dreams.
0:46:27 > 0:46:34At this distance, without the sound of his voice or the feeling of his presence,
0:46:34 > 0:46:40it's hard to recapture what made this patrician so charismatic a leader.
0:46:40 > 0:46:44Perhaps it was just because he went so much against the grain,
0:46:44 > 0:46:47did things a gentleman was not supposed to do.
0:46:47 > 0:46:52A landlord who burned for the sufferings of the landless,
0:46:52 > 0:46:56and who could play the parliamentary game like a Friday-night fiddler.
0:46:56 > 0:47:00But Parnell was such a god in the pub and at the race track,
0:47:00 > 0:47:04and a god who all too obviously was made of flesh and blood.
0:47:04 > 0:47:11Parnell's power to sway the Liberals and Gladstone came because he was riding two political horses -
0:47:11 > 0:47:16the well-behaved mare of the ballot box,
0:47:16 > 0:47:20and the fiery stallion of countryside violence.
0:47:20 > 0:47:26This had been triggered by a collapse in demand for Irish cattle and butter.
0:47:26 > 0:47:32Small farmers found themselves struggling to pay their rents. Large numbers faced eviction.
0:47:32 > 0:47:36They fought back with ferocity - cattle-maiming, arson, murder.
0:47:38 > 0:47:42Parnell, as President of the National Land League,
0:47:42 > 0:47:46was the mouthpiece for airing the grievances of the rural population.
0:47:46 > 0:47:53In 1881, in an effort to pre-empt more violence, Gladstone pushed through a Land Act
0:47:53 > 0:48:00which theoretically gave the Government the right to intervene in landlord-tenant relations.
0:48:05 > 0:48:10Suspicions, though, had a way of overcoming trust.
0:48:10 > 0:48:17On the Irish side, it was thought that without the threat of violence, boycotts, strikes, hits on landlords,
0:48:17 > 0:48:21the British would never get really serious about land reform.
0:48:21 > 0:48:28And on the British side, Gladstone was told by the hard-liners in his Government to get tough on militants.
0:48:28 > 0:48:35As the apparent figurehead of the militants, Parnell was thrown into Kilmainam Jail.
0:48:36 > 0:48:42But Gladstone soon realised it was a futile gesture and that dialogue was the only way forward.
0:48:44 > 0:48:50Then, just when it seemed as if progress might be possible,
0:48:50 > 0:48:55on May 6th 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and his under-secretary Thomas Burke,
0:48:55 > 0:49:02were attacked and stabbed repeatedly while walking in Dublin's Phoenix Park.
0:49:05 > 0:49:07Gladstone took it personally.
0:49:07 > 0:49:13Frederick Cavendish was not just the chief secretary for Ireland, he was also, for Gladstone, family -
0:49:13 > 0:49:16his wife Catherine's nephew.
0:49:18 > 0:49:24Parnell was horrified, offered Gladstone his resignation,
0:49:24 > 0:49:30and assumed that the Phoenix Park murders had all but killed off any serious chance of collaboration.
0:49:30 > 0:49:36But Gladstone did exactly what the hard men of both sides did not expect him to do.
0:49:36 > 0:49:44He rejected the resignation and began a correspondence with Parnell which made their relationship much closer.
0:49:44 > 0:49:51Parnell's importance to Gladstone was that he alone could translate the fury of Irish grievances
0:49:51 > 0:49:55into something politically constructive.
0:49:55 > 0:49:57Gladstone's importance to Parnell
0:49:57 > 0:50:03was that he was the first British politician to take seriously the nationalist dream of Home Rule.
0:50:03 > 0:50:10By the mid-1880s, Gladstone became more adamant that by embracing the cause of Home Rule
0:50:10 > 0:50:13he was doing God's work in Ireland.
0:50:13 > 0:50:21He was indeed in another world, combing his library at Hawarden for Irish history.
0:50:21 > 0:50:24Yet for all the prayers and the penance,
0:50:24 > 0:50:28he was only being realistic when he told the House of Commons this was:
0:50:28 > 0:50:33One of the golden moments of our history.
0:50:33 > 0:50:40One of those opportunities which may come and may go, but which rarely return.
0:50:40 > 0:50:43The speech lasted three-and-a-half hours -
0:50:43 > 0:50:50as if Gladstone could overcome the adverse arithmetic of the lobby by sheer force of oratory.
0:50:50 > 0:50:55Now, with all the tragic hindsight we have of the miseries that would ensue on his failure,
0:50:55 > 0:51:01nothing rings more powerfully true than his moving appeal to ditch history and memory
0:51:01 > 0:51:06for the sake of the future. Ireland was asking, he said:
0:51:06 > 0:51:11For what I call a blessed oblivion of the past.
0:51:11 > 0:51:13She asks also a boon for the future,
0:51:13 > 0:51:18and that boon will be born to us in respect of honour,
0:51:18 > 0:51:25no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity and peace.
0:51:25 > 0:51:28Such, sir, is her prayer.
0:51:28 > 0:51:33Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely,
0:51:33 > 0:51:40think not for the moment, but for the years to come before you reject this bill.
0:51:44 > 0:51:50The prayer was not answered. In 1886, the bill went down to defeat.
0:51:50 > 0:51:52So too did Gladstone and his party.
0:51:52 > 0:51:57It would be six years before he'd be back in power for the last time,
0:51:57 > 0:52:01with the chances of success even slimmer.
0:52:04 > 0:52:09By that time, Parnell's reputation had been destroyed.
0:52:09 > 0:52:14In 1890, the husband of Catherine O'Shea, his mistress,
0:52:14 > 0:52:19had brought a divorce action based on Parnell's adultery with her.
0:52:19 > 0:52:26A year later, deserted by his followers, disowned by the Catholic clergy, he died in her arms.
0:52:28 > 0:52:33New liberalism was now high on the octane of Imperial conquest
0:52:33 > 0:52:36or concern with social conditions at home.
0:52:38 > 0:52:46Its politicians were just humouring Gladstone with another doomed reading in 1893 of the Home Rule Bill.
0:52:46 > 0:52:51The Grand Old Man died five years later.
0:52:51 > 0:52:54But he'd been right.
0:52:54 > 0:53:00The chance of satisfying Irish self-government inside the United Kingdom would never be realised.
0:53:00 > 0:53:05We're still living with the consequences of that defeat.
0:53:07 > 0:53:14The failure of Home Rule was more than just the death rattle of Gladstone's project for Ireland.
0:53:14 > 0:53:20It spelled the end of the whole Liberal dream of an English-speaking empire,
0:53:20 > 0:53:26grounded on English justice and buoyed up by the great miracle of the Victorian industrial economy.
0:53:26 > 0:53:34An empire whose pupil colonies would be educated and legislated into free self-government -
0:53:34 > 0:53:38Macaulay's vision of half a century earlier.
0:53:40 > 0:53:46The Empire, rolling from war to war, painting Africa as well as Asia red,
0:53:46 > 0:53:51seemed to be in the hands of men like Lord Salisbury and Cecil Rhodes,
0:53:51 > 0:53:57who made no bones about ruling by the sword, making it clear to Westernised natives
0:53:57 > 0:54:04that if they thought they were going to have an equal share in law and legislation, they could think again.
0:54:04 > 0:54:06It was no wonder, then,
0:54:06 > 0:54:12that those who in an earlier generation would still have hoped to see the Liberal dream realised,
0:54:12 > 0:54:16now turned their backs on it as a bankrupt fraud.
0:54:16 > 0:54:23The Tories wouldn't give them prosperity, and the Liberals couldn't give justice and self-government.
0:54:23 > 0:54:26It was time to fend for themselves.
0:54:26 > 0:54:31In Britain, the working class finally had had enough of hand-me-downs
0:54:31 > 0:54:34from the conscience-stricken middle-class liberals.
0:54:34 > 0:54:37They created their own Labour Party.
0:54:44 > 0:54:47In India, the writing was on the wall
0:54:47 > 0:54:55when militant Hindu nationalists adopted a campaign and a word that had emerged in Ireland - the boycott.
0:54:57 > 0:55:01For the entire premise of the Macaulay vision
0:55:01 > 0:55:07had been that subject peoples would yearn to join the world of the British consumer,
0:55:07 > 0:55:13and here they were saying no thanks to the travelling salesmen of the workshop of the world.
0:55:13 > 0:55:16Self-sufficient handcrafts would challenge Imperial commerce.
0:55:16 > 0:55:23That's why Gandhi put the spinning wheel at the centre of the Indian flag.
0:55:23 > 0:55:30You wouldn't know this perhaps if you got a good seat at the last of the great Durbahs in 1911,
0:55:30 > 0:55:34actually featuring a King Emperor, George V, present and in person,
0:55:34 > 0:55:40held yet again on the dusty Delhi Ridge where the martyrs of the mutiny had held out.
0:55:46 > 0:55:53Three years later, the Empire would ask its loyal subjects to line up for king and country.
0:55:53 > 0:55:57Millions did - from Ireland and from India.
0:55:59 > 0:56:04Out of the carnage of world war came a reborn Islamic militancy,
0:56:04 > 0:56:10and a revolutionary Irish republicanism, eager to escape the clutches of Empire.
0:56:21 > 0:56:24This is the Ozymandias of the Raj.
0:56:24 > 0:56:29In 1947, when India became independent,
0:56:29 > 0:56:35all New Delhi's statues of the King Emperors and viceroys and generals,
0:56:35 > 0:56:42the great and the good and the not so good, were rounded up and taken here to the Empire's theme park -
0:56:42 > 0:56:49the Durbah field, where they were interned like so many forlorn hostages to that old joker - history.
0:56:51 > 0:56:53Was that it, then?
0:56:53 > 0:56:59Were Macaulay and Gladstone and all the other high priests of the great Victorian mission
0:56:59 > 0:57:03kidding not just the natives, but themselves?
0:57:03 > 0:57:09In the end, were they just window dressers of a regime that was really all about money and power,
0:57:09 > 0:57:14and when both gave out, just cut their losses and slunk home?
0:57:14 > 0:57:18Maybe. But before we write their ideals off completely,
0:57:18 > 0:57:22we should take note of what rose from their defeat -
0:57:22 > 0:57:29cycles of religious hatred, sectarian wars and massacres, epidemics and destitution -
0:57:29 > 0:57:34not all of them, I think, exclusively our fault.
0:57:34 > 0:57:40But perhaps the last word on the British Empire hasn't been written after all -
0:57:40 > 0:57:46at least if that empire is thought of, not in terms of scarlet tunics and flashing sabres,
0:57:46 > 0:57:50but language, law and liberal democracy.
0:57:50 > 0:57:58So perhaps the marriage of East and West does have a future if we're prepared to fight for it,
0:57:58 > 0:58:05not just in Calcutta and Karachi, but also in Leicester, Oldham, Bradford and Burnley.
0:58:28 > 0:58:33Subtitles by Audrey Flynn and Graeme Dibble BBC Broadcast - 2002
0:58:33 > 0:58:38E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk