Define and Rule

Mahmood Mamdani

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674071278
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference.A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice.Maine's theories were later translated into "native administration" in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law's legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania's first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism's political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

CHAPTER ONE

Nativism: The Theory

Sir Henry Maine and the Post-1857 Crisis of Empire

A new form of colonial governmentality was born in the aftermath of the mid-nineteenth-century crisis of colonialism. Of the theorists who articulated the response to the crisis, the most important was Sir Henry Maine. Maine sought to recognize the historicity and the agency of the colonized as part of an endeavor to rethink and reconstitute the colonial project on a more durable basis. Through a theory of history and a theory of law, he distinguished the West from the non-West and a universal civilization from local custom. In the process, he distinguished the settler from the native, providing elements of a theory of nativism: if the settler was modern, the native was not; if history defined the settler, geography defined the native; if legislation and sanction defined modern political society, habitual observance defined that of the native. If continuous progress was the mark of settler civilization, culture was best thought of as part of nature, fixed and unchanging. The native was the creation of theorists of an empire-in-crisis.

Sir Henry Maine became a legal member of the viceroy’s cabinet in postmutiny India. His books became compulsory reading for those being groomed for the India Service and, indeed, for the Colonial Service. From Alfred Lyall in India to Frank Swettenham in Malaya, Theophilus Shepstone in Natal, Lord Cromer in Egypt, Frederick Lugard in Nigeria and Uganda, Harold MacMichael in Sudan, and Donald Cameron in Tanganyika, colonial administrators throughout the empire translated the assumptions around which Maine had marshaled his arguments—particularly in his well-known text, Ancient Law—into policies. The result was a mode of rule undergirded by a set of institutions—a racialized and tribalized historiography, a bifurcation between civil and customary law, and an accompanying census that classified and enumerated the native population into so many “natural” groups. Transplanted to African colonies in the early twentieth century, the “customary” administrative authority classified the population in each unit (“tribal homeland”) into natives and migrants, except this time both were ethnicized rather than racialized, with customary law privileging the ethnic native while discriminating against the ethnic migrant. Excluded from the racialized domain of rights, a theory of history framed the agency of the native, set into motion by the colonial legal system, and targeted by its administrative practice. Cradled by colonial power and scholarship, this agency was said to be tribal. Tribalism is reified ethnicity. It is culture pinned to a homeland, culture in fixity, politicized, so that it does not move.

Its architects claimed this mode of rule was no more than a pragmatic response to a dearth of resources, making for a weak state with a superficial impact, and thus called it “indirect rule.” My assessment is the opposite. True, the language of rule was benign: it evolved from a language of “noninterference” in post-1857 India to one of “protection” by the end of the nineteenth century, not only in India, but also in the Malay states and Dutch Indonesia. By the time it was transported to twentieth-century Africa, this mode of rule claimed to preserve custom and tradition through indirect rule. But the indirect rule state was not a weak state. Unlike the preceding era of direct rule, its ambitions were vast: to shape the subjectivities of the colonized population and not simply of their elites.

THE TRANSITION FROM DIRECT TO INDIRECT RULE

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a crisis of empire at both its ends, India and Jamaica, starting with the 1857 uprising in India, known as the Sepoy Mutiny, and closing with Morant Bay in Jamaica in 1865. Together, these developments made for a crisis of mission and a crisis of justification. In the reflection that followed the crisis, the colonial mission was redefined—from civilization to conservation and from progress to order.

Between 1757 and 1857, two-thirds of the landmass of South Asia had been brought under Company rule, either directly as subjects or, indirectly, as princes under protective custody. The main outlines of the Utilitarian and evangelical agenda were clear by 1850: to abolish the Moghul court and to impose British laws and technology—along with Christianity—on India. Then in 1857, all but 7,796 of the 139,000 sepoys of the Bengal Army turned against their British masters.¹ The civilizing mission, spearheaded by liberal Utilitarians and Christian evangelists, had faltered. Why? It was, in Maine’s words, the result of a failure of analysis; a failure to understand the nature of “native Indian religious and social belief.” Maine argued that this “vast” subject had been “so superficially examined” that “I insist on the necessity of having some accurate ideas about it, and on the fact that a mistake about [it] caused the Sepoy Mutiny.”²

What was this “defect of knowledge?” It was twofold. The first was an over-reliance on Sanskrit texts while underplaying the importance of everyday practice: “nothing can give a falser impression of the actual Brahminical religion than the sacred Brahminical literature. It represents itself as an organized religious system, whereas its true peculiarity, and (I may add) its chief interest, arises from its having no organization whatever.”³ Maine called for a shift of focus, away from the Orientalist preoccupation with texts, to observing daily life. The logic of native institutions, Maine argued, was to be found in local customs and traditions. The problem was that even when Orientalists tried to understand daily life, they made the mistake of focusing on the more urbanized and cosmopolitan coast as opposed to the more rural and traditional hinterland, simply because the former was more accessible and the latter more isolated. He cited as examples the highly influential Histoire Philosophique des deux Indes by Abbe Raynal and Diderot, the eighteenth-century French philosophical account of India, as well as less influential English writings, such as Mr. Buckle’s History of Civilisation. They had failed to understand “the extreme isolation of the country until it was opened up by maritime adventure,” the reason why “all things Aryan, the chief part of the heritage of the greatest of races, are older in India than elsewhere.”⁴

For India’s historic isolation, Maine gave two reasons. The first was geography: “Approached not by sea but by land, there is no portion of the earth into which it is harder to penetrate.” The second “powerful preservative has been the influence of Religion and Caste.” Whereas geographical isolation accounted for the paucity of external influence, Maine argued that caste and religion accounted for the lack of change internally: “Brahminism is in fact essentially a religion of compromise. . . . Thus Brahminism does not destroy but preserves old beliefs and cults, and with them the institutions which many of them consecrate and hold together. It cannot be doubted that Central India thus reproduces the old heathen world which Christianity destroyed. . . . Thus, ancient practices and customs, little protected by law, have always been protected by religion.”⁵ Indeed, argued Maine, “the primitive Aryan groups, the primitive Aryan institutions, the primitive Aryan ideas have really been arrested in India at an early stage of development,” so much so that, “a large part of ancient Europe survives in India.”⁶

Maine went on to paint the contrast between the coast and the hinterland in the sharpest possible colors, portraying the two as disconnected realities. He argued strenuously that it was wrong to generalize from the coast to India as a whole: “For it is in the cities of the coast and their neighborhood that there has sprung up, under English influence, a thirst for knowledge, a body of opinions, and a standard of taste, which are wholly new in India. There you may see universities thronged like the European schools of the later middle age. There you may observe an eagerness in the study of Western literature and science not very unlike the enthusiasm of European scholars at the revival of letters. From this part of India come those most interesting samples of the native race who from time to time visit this country; but they are a growth of the coast, and there could be no greater mistake than to generalize from them as to the millions upon millions of men who fill the vast interior of India.”⁷

Maine urged the reader to pass “beyond the fringe of British civilization which is found at certain points of the Indian coast” and “enter this great interior block,” declaring: “No doubt the social state there to be observed can only be called Barbarism, if we only get rid of unfavorable associations with the word.” Ignored by the European literati, this India “has been most carefully observed and described by English functionaries from the administrative point of view . . . in hundreds of reports.” And so concluded Maine: “There is no doubt that this is the real India, its barbarism (if I must use the word) imperceptibly giving way in the British territories until it ends at the coast in a dissolution amid which something like a likeness of our own civilization may be discerned.”⁸ Woe be it to the Utilitarians who, in ignorance of this “real India,” had concluded “that Indians require nothing but School Boards and Normal Schools to turn them into Englishmen.”⁹

Maine cast the contrast between the cosmopolitan coast and the isolated hinterland as one between an impure coast, open to foreign influences, and the pure hinterland whose isolation had protected it from contamination by these same influences. The same observer who would habitually recount the history of the English coast, open to foreign influences from the time of the Romans, as a story of progress, took a dim view of outside influences buffeting the Indian coast.

Maine did more than just lay the conceptual foundation and intellectual justification of indirect rule. He laid claim to founding a new comparative science, one that he referred to as comparative jurisprudence. This is how he put it in his 1875 Rede lecture before the University of Cambridge: “India has given to the world Comparative Philology and Comparative Mythology; it may yet give us a new science not less valuable than the sciences of language and of folk-lore. I hesitate to call it Comparative jurisprudence because, if it ever exists, its area will be so much wider than the field of law.”¹⁰

Maine argued for a more intimate and local understanding of native society, in particular, of institutions that he identified as religion and caste. In doing so, he contrasted “real India” with the India of “Brahminical theory” embraced by Orientalists. Claiming that natives were attached to local custom, not universal ideas or ideals, Maine argued for understanding caste as lived at the local level, as jati, and not in universal terms as varna, as did the Orientalists. He told his Oxford audience: “I am aware that the popular impression here is that Indian society is divided, so to speak, into a number of horizontal strata, each representing a caste. This is an entire mistake. It is extremely doubtful whether the Brahminical theory of caste upon caste was ever true except of the two highest castes; and it is even likely that more importance has been attached to it in modern than ever was in ancient times. The real India contains one priestly caste, which in a certain, though a very limited, sense is the highest of all, and there are, besides, some princely houses and a certain number of tribes, village communities and guilds, which still in our day advance a claim, considered by many good authorities extremely doubtful, to belong to the second or the third of the castes recognized by the Brahminical writers. But otherwise, caste is merely a name for trade or occupation, and the sole tangible effect of the Brahminical theory is that it creates a religious sanction for what is really a primitive and natural distribution of classes.”¹¹

The more he theorized the local, the more Maine went on to closet the native in a separate conceptual world, shut off from the world of the settler by a binary: progressive and stationary societies. Maine was of course not the only one to think of the modern as a sharp break from the traditional. The nineteenth century saw the explosion of historical and anthropological research on the non-European world, leading to the development of social theory (classical sociology) and evolutionary anthropology.¹² From this intellectual ferment was born the social theory of Ferdinand de Tonnies, turning on a contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and that of Emile Durkheim, its focus on the difference between mechanical and organical solidarity. Maine, however, highlighted a different binary, one that distinguished the West from the non-West, which he sometimes called the East.

If the social became the privileged theoretical arena for understanding the nature and dynamics of society in the West, that privilege was given to the domain of culture in the non-West. Thus was born a bifurcated notion of culture, said to be a walled, isolated, and unchanging affair in the non-West, as opposed to a transformative one in the West.¹³ The native was said to represent a triumph of geography over time. India, from this point of view, resembled a house of custom, so complacent that geography could be said to signify history: “There is no country, probably, in which custom is so stable as it is in India.”¹⁴

Maine underpinned this binary with a theory of legal evolution. He claimed that law in its first stage had evolved from an unwritten customary affair to written codes¹⁵ and that this had been the work of aristocracies. The difference was that “in the East aristocracies became religious, in the West civil or political.”¹⁶ This is why the code in the West was an account of rules actually observed, but that in the East was idealized: the idealization being religious in India and nonreligious in China.¹⁷ The difference arose from one ...