The Ruler's Gaze: A Study of British Rule over India from a Saidian Perspective

THE RULER’S GAZE

THE RULER’S GAZE

A Study of British Rule over India

from a Saidian Perspective

ARVIND SHARMA

The most effective way to destroy a people

is to deny and obliterate their own understanding

of their history.

– GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950)

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

1. British Rule over India: A Discursive History

2. The Anomalous Nature of British Rule over India

3. The British Depiction of Indian Society

4. ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: The Status of the Śūdras and the Aryan Invasion

5. Ancient Greek and Modern European Accounts of India

6. British and Muslim Accounts of India

Conclusion: Some Limitations and Extensions of Saidian Orientalism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Book

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

I

This book is fortuitous in its origin. A few years ago I was asked to review, for Religious Studies Review, the scholarship including and growing out of Edward Said’s Orientalism. This was an invitation whose acceptance entailed my reading Said’s masterwork (and a lot of other books, judiciously chosen). I had of course heard and read much about the book, but I had not, until then, read it in its entirety. Upon doing so I realized that its breathtaking thesis was worth testing against Indian material; the book itself was primarily concerned with the Middle East. This conviction lies behind this book.

Said’s work wrought a semantic cleavage in the meaning of the word ‘Orientalism’. It had, until his work, been used to mean what it apparently seems to, namely, the study of the Orient, in either a neutral or positive sense. Edward Said himself acknowledged that one of the meanings of the word was simply an academic one. ‘Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient’¹ was an Orientalist. And one could assume this was a good thing, or at least that there was nothing wrong with being one. After the appearance and phenomenal success of Said’s book, however, the word ‘Orientalism’ has acquired a negative connotation, for it is his central thesis that such knowledge of the Orient was vitiated by the stance from which it was produced.

Hence the same word could now connote both pre-Saidian ‘good’ orientalism and post-Saidian ‘bad’ Orientalism, if one allows value judgments to inform the discourse. From a value-neutral perspective, one could² then distinguish between two kinds of Orientalisms.³ The word has been used in this book in both senses, though primarily the latter.

Several scholars who reviewed Said’s work noted that his arguments apply a fortiori to India. According to Thomas R. Trautmann, for instance, India ‘at first blush exemplifies the Saidian thesis even better than does the Middle East’.⁴ According to Said’s arch-critic, Bernard Lewis, ‘The western study of India came at a relatively late stage when Europe was powerful and expanding,’ a fact which sits better with Said’s thesis, while ‘the study of Islam in Europe, in contrast, began in the High Middle Ages and was concerned not with a conquered but a conquering world.’⁵ Thus India, rather than the Middle East, might exemplify Said’s thesis par excellence. This may once again justify the writing of this book.

II

The purpose of this book, then, is to test Said’s thesis against Indian material. However, in order for this exercise to be successfully accomplished, one needs to begin with a clear appreciation of his thesis, or theses.

As I see it, the epistemological core of the Saidian thesis consists of the claim that the production of knowledge cannot be viewed independently of the power equations inherent in the production of such knowledge.⁶ This proposition could also be stated more resonantly using the famous Baconian maxim ‘Knowledge is power’; Saidian Orientalism almost inverts this maxim into ‘Power is knowledge’ or, at least, ‘Power defines knowledge’. The thesis is capable of further extension in the context of the age of colonialism from which the world has, at least formally, recently emerged, although some might argue that we still live in its shadow. Roger Bacon (1214–1294) comes a little before the beginning of this age of imperialism, and Edward Said soon after its formal end. One could then say that the age began with the celebration of the maxim in its original form, that knowledge is power. The West acquired such knowledge about the rest of the world, which gave the West power over it. Once it had this power, the West used it to produce a certain kind of knowledge about the rest of the world, which both reflected and perpetuated its political control. This dual dynamic is also captured, in its own way, in the case of British rule over India, which is said to have followed the hallowed imperial strategy of ‘divide and rule’ (Divide et Impera). However, once India was firmly in British control, the British also followed a policy of ‘rule and divide’. This imperial inversion may be compared to the previous Baconian inversion.

More modestly, the thesis could be expressed in the realization that the claim to objectivity, often made on behalf of Western academic scholarship about the rest of the world, is rendered suspect by the idea that the conditions under which this knowledge was produced cannot be divorced from the nature of the knowledge which was produced. This thesis can be stated in both a strong and a moderate form. The strong version of the thesis is stated famously by Edward Said as follows:

I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the late nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that an academic knowledge about India and Europe is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, that gross political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.⁷

The italics here belong to the original text. In a way, then, if Said applied ‘Orientalism’ to ‘Egypt’, I wish to apply it to ‘India’. In such an Indian context, the thesis has been stated in its moderate version by Trautmann as follows: ‘Since the appearance of Said’s book, we cannot discuss current knowledge of Asia without a far more acute sense of the relevance of the colonial conditions under which such knowledge came into being than that which we have held.’⁸

Attempts have been made to extend Said’s thesis to India by such scholars as Ronald Inden,⁹ Trautmann,¹⁰ Richard King,¹¹ and by several scholars in a volume edited by C. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer,¹² to name a few. The variety of these applications has been read as an indication of ‘how vague the Saidian thesis is, and how various and underdetermined its various applications to India are bound to be’.¹³ One might wish to argue that Said’s thesis is general rather than vague, but given its varied applications to India, it may not be inappropriate to be more specific about the nature of the present enterprise.

III

If one provisionally accepts Said’s contention that the relationship between knowledge and power is central to the way the West depicts the non-West, then it could lead to certain formulations, in the case of India, as representing instantiations of this general principle. The British period of Indian history could be taken as an illustration of the interaction between the West (read Britain) and the non-West (read India). This interaction could also be compared with the interaction of India with the West in the past, as represented by Greece. Thus Said’s thesis could be tested both specifically for British India, and also comparatively by taking evidence from ancient India into account.

Even when Said’s thesis is tested specifically for the period of British rule over India, it could be tested both diachronically and synchronically, and reduced to the following testable hypotheses.

By taking a diachronic view one could propose that if Said’s thesis is sound, then:

1. The perception of India and Indians by the British would vary according to the various phases of British power in India, as when it was dormant, incipient, ascendant, paramount, or declining.

2. As the rule by one country over another is inherently anomalous, for countries are typically ruled by their own, the continued presence of the British in India would disclose a continuous attempt to justify British rule over it, in some form or another, on account of its inherently anomalous nature.

By taking a synchronic view one could propose that if Said’s thesis is sound, then:

1. If the British focused on specific features of Indian society for imperial attention, then the examination of their treatment of these items would also disclose the connection between the power of the British and their depiction of these items.

2. Saidian Orientalist discourse rests on the positing of a difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the discourse generated by the colonial rulers. Such being the case, the British discourse around India would tend to highlight such difference demonstrably, if the Saidian thesis is sound.

On taking a comparative view (as distinguished from a specific view) of just British rule over India, one could similarly formulate the following two hypotheses:

1. How others depict India would be demonstrably affected by the nature of their power equation with India. To be concrete: the depiction of India by the Greeks, who never ruled over India the way the British did, would be different from the British depiction of India.

2. Different groups of outsiders, who shared the same power equation with India, that is to say, ruled over it, would tend to depict India in similar ways, if knowledge is as power-driven as Said seems to suggest. Thus the Muslims and the British, both of whom ruled over India, would tend to depict India in similar ways, notwithstanding the different nature of their rule.

The examination of these six hypotheses will naturally constitute the six chapters of the book.

Prologue

I

It is said that there were three things that every schoolboy in England knew about India: the Black Hole, Plassey and the Mutiny.¹ The Mutiny was the attempt to dislodge the British by rebellious troops which began in 1857 and was finally suppressed only in 1858, otherwise known as the Great Rebellion and, in India, as the First War of Independence. It was to be remembered by the British for the atrocities the Indian mutineers committed on British men and women; it was also destined to be remembered by the Indians for a similar reason, for the atrocities committed by the victorious British on the vanquished Indians. Plassey, perhaps less well known than the Mutiny, was to be remembered because the British military victory on this site in 1757 has been canonized as marking the commencement of the British Raj in India.

But what was the Black Hole?

‘Black Hole’ was the then current term ‘for the local lock-up or temporary gaol’.² The Black Hole of Calcutta refers to such a lock-up in Calcutta which became infamous in the following way.

After the death of the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, in 1707, the Mughal empire declined rapidly and Bengal virtually became an independent province, although nominally still a part of the Mughal empire. Its rule passed into the hands of Nawab Alivardi Khan, who died at the age of eighty in April 1756 after a long illness. He was succeeded by his grandson, Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula. At this time, in Bengal, the British East India Company was based in Calcutta, which was founded by Job Charnock in 1690, and had now grown into a flourishing outpost.³

In view of the recent depredations into Bengal caused by outside forces, the English and French had begun to fortify their factories. Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula thought that by doing so they were overstepping the privileges granted to them, and demanded an explanation. The Nawab had also heard rumours that ill-gotten treasure had been hidden by the British in Calcutta.⁴ The French reply was conciliatory but the British, who had recently intervened with success in Indian local affairs in the south, suggested tactlessly in their reply that the business might be repeated here, also implying that Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula was powerless when it came to protecting the province.⁵

The infuriated Nawab thereupon invested Calcutta on 16 June 1756. As its fall became imminent, the governor, along with the commandment, most of the council members, and with women and children, escaped on board a ship on the river, leaving the garrison to its fate under Jonathan Z. Holwell, a junior member of the council.⁶ On Sunday, 25 June 1756, the Nawab’s forces finally broke through and the garrison surrendered. In the afternoon, according to Holwell, 146 ‘prisoners were shut up for the night in the military prison generally known as the Black Hole. This was a room 18 feet long by 14 feet 10 inches wide from which only twenty-three survivors emerged next morning.’⁷

When the news of the loss of Calcutta reached Madras, Robert Clive arrived with reinforcements from Madras, and Calcutta was retaken on 2 January 1757. An alliance was also concluded with the Nawab, according to which ‘Calcutta was restored and the company’s privileges renewed with the addition of permission to fortify the town and coin money’.⁸

The British thereafter set out to replace the Nawab with their own protégé, which led to open conflict between the Nawab and the British. Their forces met on 23 June 1757 at Plassey, an encounter which ended in a complete British ‘victory at the loss of sixty-five casualties. Even the defeated lost only about 500 men. As a battle, Plassey was ridiculous.’⁹ And yet, as the Oxford History of India states: ‘A new era had begun,’¹⁰ even if its inauguration was not immediately evident.¹¹

II

One can understand why Plassey was important, but why did every schoolboy have to know about the Black Hole? It seems to be a regrettable but relatively minor incident in the whole story. Nicholas Dirks answers the question as follows when he writes:

[T]he Black Hole became a legend of and for the atrocities committed by the natives of India against the heroic traders of the East India Company … Although [it] was little reported at the time—only coming to the attention of the English authorities in London a year later when Holwell himself arrived by ship—it was seen in retrospect as the necessary occasion for the defeat of the nawab (provincial governor) in late June 1757. Holwell himself, then the governor of Bengal, made sure to erect a monument of the Black Hole in a central square in Calcutta in 1760.¹²

Now that the British Empire is no more, it can be noted that ‘[f]or fifty years, little notice was taken of the incident, but it then became convenient material for the compilers of an imperialist hagiology’.¹³

We realize, when we take note of the incident, how it could be grist to an imperial mill, because it portrays the British as victims, and such heroic victimology was an integral part of an ‘imperialist hagiology.’ Holwell wrote up the account while travelling from Calcutta to London in the winter of 1757 aboard the (rather appropriately named) ship called the Syren. This is how he described his plight in the Black Hole:

Figure to yourself, my friend, if possible, the situation of a hundred and forty six wretches, exhausted by continual fatigue and action, thus crammed together in a cube of about eighteen feet, in a close sultry night, in Bengal…I traveled over the dead, and repaired to the further end of it, just opposite the other window, and seated myself on the platform between Mr. Dumbleton and captain Stevenson; the former just then expiring…Here my poor friend Mr. Edward Eyre came staggering over the dead to me, and with his usual coolness and good nature, asked me how I did? But fell and expired before I had time to make him a reply.¹⁴

Holwell felt that his own life was also in danger, and while he does not blame the Nawab, he does not spare his minions:

Can it gain belief that this scene of misery proved entertainment to the brutal wretches without? But so it was; and they took care to keep us supplied with water, that they might have the satisfaction of seeing us fight for it, as they phrased it, and held up lights to the bars, that they might lose no part of the inhuman diversion.¹⁵

The credibility of Holwell’s account, however, has been called into question. One Mr J.H. Little argued as early as 1915 and 1916 that ‘Holwell, Cooke, and other persons who vouch for the event concocted the story, and that those who are supposed to have perished in the Black Hole really were killed in the storm of the place’.¹⁶ This account questions the veracity of the event itself; other accounts question Holwell’s credibility. Nicholas Dirks notes that ‘all but one of the fourteen standard accounts of the Black Hole have been traced back to Holwell’s general narrative, and the fourteenth was narrated sixteen years later’.¹⁷ He even notes that ‘part of the mystery surrounding why Holwell himself did not quit the fort revolved around another possibility, namely, that he was arranging for the transfer of some of the treasure’s contents for his own use’.¹⁸ He also notes: ‘Serious historians doubt that the story of the Black Hole itself is true. At the very least, it seems likely that most of the deaths of the Englishmen in the fort were the result of combat rather than imprisonment.’¹⁹

III

What could demonstrate the relation of power to knowledge better than the fact that when the British Raj was a power in India, the Black Hole of Calcutta was on every schoolboy’s lips as an axiomatic truth, but now that the Empire is no more, even its mention has receded in the history books into endnotes? The way the retreat occurs seems to confirm the Saidian thesis further. When Vincent A. Smith, the imperial historian, deals with the issue while living during the British Raj, he is prepared to concede factual lapses but imperial victimology is not compromised:

The ‘Black Hole’ tragedy. It is unnecessary to repeat in detail the oft-told story of the horrors of the Black Hole. But it is indispensable to observe that recent attempts to discredit the story as an invention are not well founded. The incident certainly occurred, although some uncertainty may exist concerning one or other detail. The Nawab was not personally and directly responsible for the atrocity. He left the disposal of the prisoners to a subordinate who forced them all into a stifling guard-room, barely twenty feet square, and not large enough to hold a quarter of the crowd. Although the Nawab did not personally order the barbarous treatment of his prisoners, he did not either reprove his officers for their cruelty or express any regret at the tragic result. It is generally stated that 146 were put in for the night, of who only 28, including one lady, came out alive in the morning; but the exact number of the sufferers is not certain, and there is good reason for believing that the prisoners confined included several women of whom only one survived.²⁰

Percival Spear, however, writing after the sunset of the British Raj, relegates the incident to an endnote:

NOTE ON THE BLACK HOLE

The incident of the Black Hole has been given only a passing mention in the text in order to place it in proper proportion to the whole story.

We owe the traditional story of the Black Hole to the descriptive powers of J.Z. Holwell, the defender of Calcutta and a plausible and none too reliable man. For fifty years little notice was taken of the incident, but it then became convenient material for the compilers of an imperialist hagiology. The transition in progress can be seen in H.H. Wilson’s note to Mill’s notes on his account in pp.117–18 of vol. iii of his History of India (ed. 1858). The emphasis upon the incident grew so great that the Black Hole became, along with Plassey and the Mutiny, one of the three things which ‘every schoolboy knew’ about India.²¹

How the Black Hole connects with the Mutiny in the British imagination emerges clearly in the following account of its suppression by Cooper, Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar:

Ten by ten the sepoys were called forth. Their names having been taken down in succession, they were pinioned, linked together, and marched to execution, a firing-party being in readiness. Every phase of deportment was manifested by the doomed men after the sullen firing of volleys of distant musketry forced the conviction of inevitable death; astonishment, rage, frantic despair, the most stoic calmness…

The number executed had arrived at two hundred and thirty-seven when the remainder refused to come out of the bastion where they had been imprisoned. It was supposed that they were planning a rush, but

behold! They were nearly all dead. Unconsciously, the tragedy of Holwell’s Black Hole had been reenacted. No cries had been heard during the night in consequence of the hubbub, tumult and shouting of the crowds of horsemen, police, tahsil guards and excited villagers. Forty-five bodies, dead from fright, exhaustion, fatigue, and partial suffocation, were dragged into light…²²

In the post-independence era, a publishing project titled The History and Culture of the Indian People was undertaken under the general editorship of the historian R.C. Majumdar. The books in this series are unique in the sense that they are a history of the Indians, for the Indians, and (written) by the Indians. This multivolume work contains just a one-line reference to the incident, which runs as follows: ‘But Holwell’s story of the Black Hole has been proved by modern researchers to be untrue.’²³

IV

The Black Hole, despite its name, thus becomes a shining example of Orientalism in India, as an incident which was projected to justify the acquisition of power early in the day, and then projected even more forcefully during the high noon of the empire, and then began to disappear in the shadows as the sun of the empire set, whose core may have consisted of the fact ‘that the actual number of Europeans who might actually have died at the Black Hole was as low as eighteen, out of a group of thirty-nine who were taken prisoner (a group which could not have been more than sixty-four persons, given the number of unaccounted-for Europeans in Calcutta at the time of capture)’.²⁴

1

British Rule over India:

A Discursive History

I

It might be useful to present the broad contours of the political fortunes of the British in India, as a prelude to the discussion of the relationship between the vicissitudes of British political fortunes in India and the nature of the knowledge generated about India. This knowledge can be referred to as Indology.

Legend has it that King Arthur sent an envoy to the tomb of St Thomas in India to fulfil a vow in 884 CE.¹ But sober history must begin with the founding of the East India Company on the last day of the year 1600, when Queen Elizabeth ‘granted a charter of rights and exclusive trading to The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies,’ following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.² At that time, the Mughal Empire was at its height, its great ruler Akbar dying in 1605. The Mughal Empire remained the major political force in India until 1707, the year in which the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, passed away.

At that time ‘British territory in India was of negligible area, comprising only a few square miles in the island of Bombay, Madras city, and three or four other localities. But even then the prowess of their sea captains had made their nation a power in Indian politics.’³ It was this superiority at sea which enabled the British finally to overcome Portuguese, Dutch and French competition. The British benefited from the decline of the Mughal Empire after 1707 and used this opportunity to garrison their trading godowns, thus establishing the nucleus of what would evolve into an army.

The march of the East India Company towards the sovereignty of India began in full earnest in 1757, when the British defeated the local ruler in Bengal at the famous Battle of Plassey and were appointed representatives of the Mughal Empire to administer the region. This appointment was a formality; they had the real power. The end of British rule would involve a similar fiction—a formal transfer of power to the Indians when the British may have been powerless to hold on to India. There was always a phantasmagorical character to Western imperialism in India. Thus the Company ruled India on behalf of the Crown, and it also ruled Indian principalities on behalf of the rulers, thereby setting the scene for an elaborate charade, as it were.

British rule over India was gradually established during the period extending from 1757 to 1858. There were four important chronological markers during this period: the first was the year 1813, when Christian missionaries were allowed to function in the Company’s territories, from which they had been previously excluded. In fact, prior to 1813, the Company publicly participated in the religious festivals of the Indians. The second was 1818, when the British became the ascendant power by defeating the Marathas—their chief rivals. The third was 1835, when English was introduced as the language of public instruction. The fourth was the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58, during which a determined but chaotic effort to dislodge the British by force failed, and ended with the replacement of the Company by the Crown.

Then followed the halcyon period up until 1905, when British Raj seemed set to perdure permanently. The defeat of Russia by Japan in that year, however, marked a turning point, and the first stirrings of national resistance to British rule began to be felt in India, with the British government pursuing policies such as the proposed (and then implemented but later rescinded) partition of Bengal from 1905 onwards, which aroused opposition. This movement against the British gradually gained force, especially after the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, which was followed by the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi on the national scene in 1920. The non-cooperation movement directed against the British by Gandhi made a major advance in 1930 through the Salt March, whose success led to a major devolution of power by the British in the form of the Government of India Act of 1935. The Second World War soon set the stage for Indian independence, whose prospect led the Muslim minority in India to demand their own homeland in the form of Pakistan. These trends culminated in the liquidation of British rule over India and the emergence of the dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947.

II

It seems fair to say that if the contours of major developments in Indology were to match these political changes in a recognizable way, then such coincidence of events would lend credence to the Saidian thesis.

The acquisition of political power by the British meant that these territories had to be administered, generating the need to become informed about the ‘natives’, as it were. This phase marks the beginning of serious Indology, whose commencement may be dated from 1784, for:

On the first day of 1784 the Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded, on [William] Jones’ initiative, and with himself as president. In the journal of this society, Asiatic Researches, the first real steps in revealing India’s past were taken. In November 1784 the first direct translation of a Sanskrit work into English, Wilkins’s Bhagavad Gītā, was completed. This Wilkins followed in 1787 with a translation of the Hitopadeśa. In 1789, Jones translated Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā, which went into five English editions in less than twenty years; this he followed by translations of the Gīta Govinda (1792), and the lawbook of Manu (published posthumously in 1794 under the title Institutes of Hindoo Law). Several less important translations appeared in successive issues of Asiatic Researches.⁴

Some of these contributions reflected political needs, like the translation of the Manusmṛti for gaining familiarity with Hindu law, but many other works belonged to the realm of culture and belles lettres. Another need to know more about India was generated by the evangelical ardour that the exploration of India, as a predominantly non-Christian country, had aroused. If India was to be converted to Christianity successfully, one needed to know more about Indian culture and society to successfully accomplish this mission. While the first kind of knowledge, for broadly administrative purposes, had to be essentially descriptive, the latter had to be evaluative, in the sense that it was to be undertaken from a Christian perspective. The two epistemes, represented respectively by the Company and the Church, could not and did not operate in complete isolation, but it is nevertheless important to distinguish between these two orientations. The impact of the Church’s missionary orientation on the course of events was destined to vary during the course of British rule over India.

The acquisition of the first kind of knowledge related to administration and to the people to be administered. This phase of British rule resulted in what has been called the Oriental Renaissance,⁵ to annex the title of a book. At this stage of British rule, the British were aware of the foreign, and thereby potentially transient, nature of their rule over a part of India. Therefore the knowledge acquired at this stage was based on curiosity about the people who had just passed under their rule on the one hand, and on utility, in relation to the need to govern them, on the other. Such knowledge was not yet vitiated by the need to keep the Indians under the imperial thrall for an indefinite period of time, as was to prove to be the case later. Warren Hastings, who was Governor-General between 1774 and 1785, wrote in the preface to the first translation of the Bhagavad-Gītā into English by Charles Wilkins, when it appeared in 1785:

Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state: it is the gain of humanity: in the specific instance which I have stated, it attracts and conciliates distant affections; it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection; and it imprints on the hearts of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence. Even in England, this effect of it is greatly wanting. It is not very long since the inhabitants of India were considered, by many, as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life nor, I fear, is that prejudice yet wholly eradicated, though surely abated. Every instance which brings their real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained in their writings: and these will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.⁶

Warren Hastings possessed ‘deep sympathy with both Muslim and Hindu culture’,⁷ and in fact gave evidence, although to no avail, against the propagation of Christianity in India when the issue was discussed in 1813.⁸

The missionary and anti-missionary parties in relation to the British involvement in India came to a head in the British Parliament in 1813, when the Company’s charter came up for renewal. Charles Grant (1746–1823), the former Governor-General of Fort William in Bengal, had urged the missionary position on the Company already in 1793. As Nicholas Dirks narrates:

Grant had made his case for missionization in his pamphlet ‘Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals, and on the Means of Improving It. Written Chiefly in the Year 1792’ … In his pamphlet, Grant argued that Britain had an obligation to attend to the happiness, general welfare, and moral improvement of the people under its rule in India, and that the only way to do this was to accept that empire must legitimate itself through Christian principles, and by seeking to promote those principles through education and conversion. Bengal had seriously deteriorated under British rule, but the causes for this were not, Grant suggested, merely political and economic. Rather, even as the Company would take on a moral character by accepting its Christian obligations and duties, the people of India would find genuine improvement only through Christianization.⁹

It is easy to miss the full significance of this development. Whenever things went wrong during the British Raj, such as the deterioration of the situation in Bengal in this case, two options would usually present themselves in the form of the following question: who was to be held responsible for it, namely, the British or the Indians? It is perhaps one of the comforts of having power over a people that catastrophes can be blamed on the ruled, in this case the Indians. It was Charles Grant who set this trajectory in motion, which arced across the entire period of British rule over India, when he wrote:

We cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Hindostan, a race of men lamentably degenerate and base, retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation, yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by great and general corruption of manners, and sunk in misery by their vices.¹⁰

The point cuts deeper. As Nicholas Dirks notes:

Despite the language of racial condemnation, Grant sought to suggest that the problem was not in fact endemic to the people of Hindostan, but rather to their religion. In an extraordinary statement of displacement given the political context, he wrote that this religion was ‘a despotism, the most remarkable for its power and duration that the world had ever seen’. He quoted from William Jones’s recent translation of the Manu Dharma Shastras for proof that Hindu law enjoined fraud, lying, abuse, and oppression, and he provided graphic images of the popular worship of cruel and licentious gods, most especially Kali. Most troubling of all, however, was the institution of caste, itself the product of the fraud and imposture of the Brahman priests who used religion to enslave and oppress the rest of society.¹¹

In their more intellectual incarnations, these opposite tendencies of placing the blame either on the British or on the Indians would take the refined form of holding either Imperialism or Hinduism culpable for the ills that would befall India during the course of British rule over India. That debate continues to unfold to this day.

III

In order to understand these developments, one needs to draw a distinction between Christian and more secular accounts of Indians, for, from the Christian point of view, as hinted earlier, the Hindu and the Muslim, but especially the Hindu, possessed the unvarying characteristic of not being a Christian and therefore being in need of being saved, a situation which persists to this day. Thus the Christian position was and is a fixed one, although the degree of severity with which it is held may vary. This degree of severity was in fact affected by the political fortunes of the British Raj in India, and in this sense the Christian position is also amenable to the general Saidian thesis that the nature of Christian knowledge about India would also be susceptible to political forces. There is also the further consideration that many of the ‘secular’ scholars/administrators were at times committed Christians, whose Christian background played a role in their scholarship on the one hand,¹² and, on the other, the evangelical Christians were also not free from secular associations, as represented by the setting up of schools and hospitals. Thus the situation is not free from complexity, but as will become apparent in due course, the recognition of these elements makes an important contribution towards testing the thesis regarding the complicity of politics in the production of Western knowledge about India.

While the British were a trading company in India and restricted themselves to commercial interests, the divergent orientations of the Christian and secular wings were quite marked. When Percival Spear wrote, ‘The British came to trade and went into politics to preserve their trade. They eschewed religion,’¹³ his statement held true, in an innocent way, only until 1813. Until then, ‘the policy of the East India Company was not to interfere in the religious beliefs of its subjects’.¹⁴ However, the Charter Act of 1813 not only explicitly asserted the sovereignty of the Crown over the dominions of the Company in India¹⁵ but also:

secured the admission of Christian missionaries, a church establishment of a bishop and three archdeacons, and a resolution ‘that it is the duty of this country to promote the interest and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India and that such measures ought to be adopted as may tend to the introduction amongst them of useful knowledge and religious and moral improvement’.¹⁶

The freedom given to the missionaries was connected, by Raja Rammohun Roy (1772/74–1833), directly with the consolidation of political power in India by the British. He is worth quoting at length on this point.

For a period of upwards of fifty years, this country [Bengal] has been in exclusive possession of the English nation, during the first thirty years of which from their word and deed it was universally believed that they would not interfere with the religion of their subjects, and that they truly wished every man to act in such matters according to the dictates of his own conscience. Their possessions in Hindoostan and their political strength have, through the grace of God, gradually increased. But during the last twenty years, a body of English Gentlemen who are called missionaries have been publicly endeavoring, in several ways, to convert Hindoos and Mussulmans of this country into Christianity. The first way is that of publishing and distributing among the natives various books, large and small, reviling both religions, and abusing and ridiculing the gods and saints of the former; the second way is that of standing in front of the doors of the natives or in the public roads to preach the excellency of that of others; the third way is that if any natives of low origin become Christians from the desire of gain or from any other motives, these Gentlemen employ and maintain them as a necessary encouragement to others to follow their example.

It is true that the apostles of Jesus Christ used to preach the superiority of the Christian religion to the natives of different countries. But we must recollect that they were not the rulers of those countries where they preached. Were the missionaries likewise to preach the Gospel and distribute books in countries not conquered by the English, such as Turkey, Persia, &c. which are much nearer England, they would be esteemed a body of men truly zealous in propagating religion and in following the example of the founders of Christianity. In Bengal, where the English are the sole rulers, and where the mere name of Englishman is sufficient to frighten people, an encroachment upon the rights of her poor timid and humble inhabitants and upon their religion cannot be viewed in the eyes of God or the public as a justifiable act. For wise and good men always feel disinclined to hurt those that are of much less strength than themselves, and if such weak creatures be dependent on them and subject to their authority, they can never attempt, even in thought, to mortify their feelings.¹⁷

IV

In the course of their march towards the mastery of India, the British had to overcome two sets of rivals, one European and the other Indian. The European rivals in the main were the Portuguese and the French; the Indian rivals, in the main, were the Marathas and the Sikhs, the two Indian powers that would probably have taken the place of the British had the British not succeeded.

The British finally defeated the Maratha confederacy in 1818, which left the field open to the establishment of British hegemony over India. It was a pivotal year and Percival Spear recognizes it as such when he writes: ‘The reunited India of 1818 could be compared in many ways with the Northern India of Akbar’s later years.’¹⁸ Thus British rule was firmly established in India by 1818.

It is a remarkable coincidence, from the point of view of Orientalism, that James Mill’s The History of British India also appeared around 1818, the same year in which the British ascendancy over India was established—a book which ‘was adopted as the official textbook in the company’s colleges’ and thus ‘influenced a whole generation of British administrators in India’.¹⁹

This book has been described as a philippic against Hinduism.²⁰ But one of its most significant and influential conclusions, apart from linking Hinduism with backwardness and even primitiveness,²¹ was the following:

As the manners, institutions, and attainments of the Hindus have been stationary for many ages, in beholding the Hindus of the present day we are beholding the Hindus of many ages past, and are carried back, as it were, into the deepest recesses of antiquity. Nor is this all…By conversing with the Hindus of the present day, we, in some measure, converse with the Chaldeans and Babylonians of the time of Cyrus; with the Persians and Egyptians of the time of Alexander.²²

It is thus clear that while British power was finding its feet in India, Indology tended to take a generally positive view of its subjects and their culture (with evangelical exceptions), but once it became dominant around 1818, it developed an anti-Hindu position, absorbing the earlier evangelical critique. While James Mill ‘did not share the aims’²³ of the Christian evangelicals, ‘he borrowed their arguments’²⁴ for supporting British rule over India. As William Thomas notes: ‘There had been a great change in the Englishmen’s attitude towards India between 1750 and 1818.’²⁵ This change was reflected in attaching a minus sign to Hinduism instead of a plus, and it was brought about by a plus sign being attached to British power more and