Fighting Retreat: Churchill and India
By Walter Reid
Hurst, £25

“THE saviour of his country,” “the greatest Englishman of our time,” as he has been variously described, Winston Churchill has also been denounced as a “racist and white supremacist.”

Distrusted by Tory colleagues, he has been described as a mercurial maverick, a charming but irresponsible chancer, a man of irrepressible vitality with only a limited element of focus. 

No surprise that he has been much admired by Boris Johnson, then. 

This biography focuses on Churchill and India more specifically, raising issues about the imperial past with continuing relevance for our times. Walter Reid presents a finely balanced account, recognising Churchill’s achievements and setting some of his most objectional utterances within the context of the norms and values of his time. 

All this serves to underline the force of Reid’s criticisms of Churchill, for sowing divisions between Hindus and Muslims, presiding over the catastrophe of the Bengal famine, and resisting India’s moves towards independence with what has been described as a detestable combination of malice and bad faith. 

Churchill could be progressive in some ways, as Reid goes on to demonstrate. For example, he opposed the 1904 Aliens Act, restricting Jewish refugees from seeking asylum from pogroms in eastern Europe. And he made a powerful speech in support of the proposal to sack General Dyer, who had been responsible for the massacre of unarmed Indian civilians at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919. 

But Churchill could also be extremely reactionary. He was gripped by the fear of Bolshevism. And he was especially virulent in his attitudes towards India, violently opposing anything resembling Indian home rule. He was particularly critical of Hindus, especially Brahmins, whom he regarded as potentially seditious, preferring Sikhs and Gurkhas, less educated but more virile, in his eyes, and so more suitable as recruits for the Indian army under British leadership.

Fighting Retreat devotes an entire chapter to Churchill’s use of language. He could be very rude on occasion, abusive and explicitly racist. He expressed unambiguously white supremacist views. And he suggested that “Keep Britain White” could be a good election slogan, in 1955. While proposing that he should be judged by the standards of his time, Reid does recognise that Churchill said some appalling things, comments which it pains the author to record.

It was not just Churchill’s use of language that was to prove so objectionable, though. 

The Bengal famine of 1942-43 was a disaster in which between one-and-a-half and four-and-a-half million Indians died. While Reid suggests that Churchill was less directly responsible than some of his critics have claimed, the famine occurred on his watch, and he failed to alleviate it. Even more chillingly, Reid reflects, Churchill made almost no mention of this in his memoirs, probably because he didn’t think that the loss of so many Indian lives had been particularly important, in the wider picture. 

Churchill’s resistance to Indian independence included his deployment of divide-and-rule tactics to undermine the independence movement. When it was put to Churchill in Cabinet that there was a risk of a growing cleavage between the Muslim and the Hindu populations, Churchill’s response was: “Oh, but that is all to the good.”

How, then, to explain this degree of cynicism and bad faith towards India? 

When he came to write My Early Life in 1930, Churchill himself explained that “I was a child of the Victorian era, when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the seas was unrivalled, and when the realisation of the greatness of our empire and of our duty to preserve it was ever growing stronger.” These attitudes lingered on well past the Victorian era, continuing to influence Churchill in subsequent years. Britain had done so much for India, in his view, rescuing the country from “barbarism,” and so preparing it for “civilisation,” with independence as no more than a distant possibility in some uncharted future.

Churchill’s associate, the press baron Lord Rothermere, encouraged him to keep repeating this message about the need to resist progress towards Indian independence. “We have a splendid cause,” Churchill argued. “If India is not held, there is nothing for England but bankruptcy and revolution.” This was the crux of the matter, it seemed; without India as the jewel in the imperial crown, Britain would sink into obscurity as a second-rate power.

There are powerful resonances here with contemporary culture wars, fanned by the far right, that refuse to recognise the toxic legacies of Britain’s imperial past, and perpetuate myths about white supremacy and Britain’s civilising mission. The divisive impacts are only too clear, whether in terms of continuing racism within Britain or continuing cleavages within India.  

Morning Star readers will find Fighting Retreat a thought-provoking book, with significant implications for the contemporary context. This is a very readable account, made all the more all the more convincing because Reid tries so hard to avoid simplistic conclusions. 

The book is all the more damning of Churchill as a result.