Month: June 2014

Warren Dockter
Junior Research Fellow, Cambridge University
Follow on Twitter @WarrenDockter

Winston Churchill’s tumultuous relationship with India is typically seen in the context of his campaign to deny increased autonomy and independence to India during the 1930s. The standard narrative tends to engage Churchill’s relationship with India by depicting a fiercely imperialist Churchill whose policy ‘rested on the simple concept that British power in India must be preserved without qualifications’ against the meek and well-intentioned Mahatma Gandhi, whose policy of ahimsa (nonviolence) helped make Churchill seem even more fanatically imperialist. Many historians also have linked Churchill’s resistance to Indian Independence to his romantic Victorian conception of the British Empire. That is, that he allowed his belief in the ‘civilizing effects of British rule’ to serve as his primary, if only, motivation for opposing Indian home rule.  While Churchill’s romantic view of the British Empire undoubtedly played a role in his motivation to keep India within the British Empire, taken alone it does not sufficiently explain what motivated him to undertake such a politically ruinous stance.

These combined approaches are problematic because they are predicated on the notion that Churchill only understood British India as a static and monolithic extension of the empire, and that the Victorian-minded Churchill was so convinced of this view that he was willing to politically marginalize himself.  As a result, Churchill is often caricatured as a hater of all Indians, an approach that ignores important considerations regarding Churchill’s view of minorities in India — especially India’s Muslims. Continue reading “‘Men of Martial Nature’: Reconsidering Churchill and Indian Muslims” →