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meant the main roads were blocked. In the years before the railway
was built, these were the only connections between trouble spots.
By December, the British had successfully reclaimed their forts
and garrisons, and several thousand British-born soldiers, women,
and children, and an uncertain number of rebel soldiers and civilians,
had died. The four-month siege of Lucknow and the massacre of
two hundred British women and children at Kawnpor rank as the
greatest and most publicised tragedies, which reverberated all the
way back to London and Queen Victoria.
By 1900, the British had fully regained control and had entrenched
their rule more firmly than ever. They also reinforced the mystic
rigidities of the British class system throughout the subcontinent.
While the colonisers distinguished between themselves on the basis
of birth and blood, they crudely lumped their Indian subjects
together solely on the basis of colour. The consequences indicated
significant differences in the degree of sophistication the two cultures
exhibited. The rigorously enforced 'No Indians' policy merely
strengthened the segregation of the two races wherever the two could
possibly meet. An uneducated Liverpudlian army private was as
unwelcome in the precincts of an officers' club as an Indian beggar,
yet India's own caste system segregated people according to much
finer nuances of birth and station.
In the princely states, the system followed somewhat different
rules. The British exploited old rivalries between the states in order
to divide and rule them. There the British, to amuse themselves,
encouraged nawabs and maharajahs to flaunt their wealth and
excesses lavishly. Raj officials attended such spectacles as the marriage
of the dogs of a rat-brained maharajah at a cost that exceeded one
million pounds sterling. In seeming to defer to local royalty, Britain's
political agents could maintain their own higher goals of economic
and political control.
For all their wealth, most Indian princes posed no threat to
Britain's 'modern' empire. They existed in a feudal world of their
own, where such concepts as economics and social reform meant
nothing. They were the products of centuries-old dynasties; they
ruled their territories by divine right, many hopelessly drunk or
wallowing in opiated mind-baths by breakfast. Even when faced with
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