When researching nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Irish subjects for the Dictionary of Irish Biography I came across a number of figures with Indian connections. Most of these, as it happens, were linked to the imperial administration, though they were not necessarily all Protestant/unionist. For example, Sir Antony MacDonnell, (known as ‘the Bengal tiger’) the distinguished Indian administrator who became under-secretary (head of the Dublin Castle civil service) in 1902 under Chief Secretary George Wyndham, came from a small Catholic gentry background and had a brother who was a Home Rule MP. Although MacDonnell’s Indian career involved the implementation of famine relief and land reform measures (which some have speculated were linked to his youthful memories of the Great Famine) and he played a significant role in the passage of the 1903 Wyndham Land Act, his administrator’s distaste for populist politics helped to defeat his plans for limited devolution.  While Ulster unionists denounced him as a crypto-nationalist, most nationalists saw his devolution scheme as suspiciously resembling contemporary measures whereby a few supposedly representative Indians were given advisory positions while real power remained in British hands.

Sir John Anderson, the ‘super-administrator’ appointed as under-secretary in May 1920 to oversee a security crackdown and remodel the Dublin Castle administration as prelude to a peace deal, followed the reverse trajectory—Ireland to India—when he became governor of Bengal 1930-5. His arrival was greeted by nationalist denunciations of this ‘Black and Tan governor’ and a physical-force movement modelling itself on the IRA made several attempts to assassinate him. When debating capital punishment in the House of Lords at the end of his career Anderson cited both his Irish and Indian experiences as proof that only capital punishment could deal with dedicated political terrorists who might otherwise expect amnesty. (In this connection, he recalled having to turn down the dying archbishop William Walsh of Dublin, who had himself carried into Anderson’s Dublin Castle office to plead in person for the life of Kevin Barry.)   

The subject of mine most heavily bound up with India did not, however, appear in the print edition but in an online update which I researched more recently. Charles Chenevix Trench (1914-2003) whose book reviews in the Irish Times and Irish Independent may be remembered by some readers, descended from one of the Galway branches of the Trenches, a Protestant gentry dynasty.  His great-grandfather, Richard Chenevix Trench, was Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin during disestablishment. Although Chevenix Trench and his father, Sir Richard, were both born in India they always regarded themselves as Irish. Sir Richard was a member of the Indian Political Service, an elite group handpicked by the viceroy who handled relations with the supposedly independent princely states that made up large sections of British India and supervised the defence of the North-West Frontier. (After a long-running dispute between advocates of a ‘forward policy’ who argued that permanent occupation of the mountainous areas right up to the Afghan frontier was necessary for the security of British India, and those who argued that the warlike mountain tribesmen could not be held down in this manner but could be kept in line by sporadic punitive expeditions—a policy derided by opponents as ‘butcher and bolt’, the Indian administration decided to leave the tribal areas largely unoccupied but build fortresses at strategic points and man them with ‘frontier scouts’—mercenaries recruited from the local tribes, supervised by British officers.) In this capacity Sir Richard waged minor wars against the Mehsud tribe of Waziristan and acted as finance minister to the Nizam of Hyderabad.

Trench became a junior officer in Hodson’s Horse (an Indian cavalry regiment) and learned Urdu and Pushtu with the intention of following his father into the IPS; he underwent the training regime (including policing Shia Muslim parades past Hindu temples, which he later compared to Orange marches in Catholic districts of Ulster. His induction into the IPS was delayed, however, by the outbreak of World War II. It is easy to forget the extent to which Britain made use of Indian troops in that conflict; Trench’s experiences (which included serving with Hodson’s Horse in Iraq and Syria and winning the Military Cross for leading Pathan troops in a successful night attack near Assisi in the Italian campaign) are a reminder of this. After the war, Trench finally joined the IPS and spent just over a year in an administrative role in the princely state of Indore in Madhya Pradesh; the morning after independence in August 1947 he shot a tiger and left for Kenya to join the colonial administration there.

In retirement in Tipperary, Trench published numerous books; these included a trilogy of oral histories commissioned by associations of retired Indian administrators who wished to leave a record of their views and experiences: The Frontier Scouts (1985); Viceroy’s Agent (1987) about dealings with the princely states, and The Indian Army and the King’s Enemies (1988), about the service of Indian regiments in the two World Wars. These preserve in aspic the colonial administrator’s contempt for educated and urbanised Indian nationalists’ political aspirations, and his view that the princely courts and the ‘martial tribes’ represented the real India. Viceroy’s Agent, which laments the eclipse of the Indian princes after independence, derides Gandhi as a sanctimonious hypocrite whose preaching of non-violence actually stirred up unrest while disclaiming personal responsibility for it. The non-violent pretensions of Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Redshirt movement among the Pathans (allied with the Indian Congress Party) are treated with similar derision in The Frontier Scouts; although Trench admits that Nehru showed considerable physical and moral courage in personally addressing a Pathan gathering just before Independence in the hope that by persuading the Northwest Frontier Province to accede to India he might prevent partition, it is with some glee that Trench records the response of the Pathans to the Congress leader’s declaration ‘I have come to free you from slavery to the British’: ‘We have never been anyone’s slaves. We’re not going to be your slaves—and if you ever come back here again, Hindu, we’ll circumcise you!’ Trench concludes by remarking that the improvements which the government of Pakistan has since brought to the frontier areas build securely on the foundations left by the British.

My oddest experience in doing this research was the realisation that if I had read these books ten or even five years ago I would have seen them simply as a reminder of a world that existed within living memory and has now disappeared forever. Of course this is so insofar as it relates to the British Raj,  but I would have thought the same in relation to the Mehsuds of Waziristan—yet as I did my research the Mehsuds were very much in the news as the mainstay of the Pakistani Taliban, and the American and Pakistani armies (despite their possession of remote-controlled missile-firing drones) were experiencing some of the same difficulties in relation to the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier Province that the British had encountered in the period described by Trench.

The entry on Charles Chenevix Trench was published among the first set of online updates to the Dictionary of Irish Biography (covering subjects who died in 2003) in June 2010.  These updates, appearing at six-month intervals, can be accessed by individual and institutional subscribers; for further information see http://dib.cambridge.org/

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