The British Raj: Keywords

Pramod K. Nayar

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351972413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

For two hundred years India was the jewel in the British imperial crown. During the course of governing India – the Raj – a number of words came to have particular meanings in the imperial lexicon. This book documents the words and terms that the British used to describe, define, understand and judge the subcontinent. It offers insight into the cultures of the Raj through a sampling of its various terms, concepts and nomenclature, and utilizes critical commentaries on specific domains to illuminate not only the linguistic meaning of a word but its cultural and political nuances.

This fascinating book also provides literary and cultural texts from the colonial canon where these Anglo-Indian colloquialisms, terms and official jargon occurred. It enables us to glean a sense of the Empire's linguistic and cultural tensions, negotiations and adaptations. The work will interest students and researchers of history, language and literature, colonialism, cultural studies, imperialism and the British Raj, and South Asian studies.

Keywords

Anglo-Indian

The term was used to describe Englishmen and women who came out and stayed in India for years. In the twentieth century, the term came to mean Eurasians: children of liaisons and marriages between the English and Indians. This latter is also the sense in which it is used in the Constitution of India.

Anglo-Indians include both nabobs and sahibs, with many of the latter coming from families whose several generations had been in Company or government service in India. Many established homes, social and sexual relations with Indians.

The Eurasians were also pejoratively called chee-chees.

Since Independence, the term Anglo-Indians has been used. They find representation in the Indian Parliament, by nomination to the Lok Sabha.

Ayah

For Anglo-Indians, the ayah was the centrepiece of domesticity in the colony, but is not to be mixed up with the ‘ammah’, the native servant employed as a wet nurse for the British children in Anglo-Indian households. The ‘ayah’ was used to describe the lady’s maid but more frequently was the children’s nurse and governess. She was effectively in charge of the children as a surrogate mother. Visual representations such as Joshua Reynolds’s The Children of Edward Holden Cruttenden (1759) and George Clive, Family and Ayah (1765–66), Johann Zoffany’s Sir Elijah and Lady Impey and Their Three Children (1783–84) and Colonel Blair with His Family and an Indian Ayah (1786), showed them as part of English family life in the colonies. Ayahs, in British stories and memoirs about life in India, were deeply attached to their British wards, and fiercely loyal to them and their families.

Charles Doyley (1813) claims that the ayahs are attached to the children because ‘the attachment is a principal source of amusement’. He writes:

A total deficiency of education, the absence of every kind of rational recreation, except the game of patcheess, which is highly interesting, and possesses all the intricacy of back-gammon, without its noise, compels the Ayahs into that habit of endearment and attention, which renders them far better calculated for the care of children, than our juvenile race of nurses, whose time is commonly divided between the novel and the window seat!

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The ayah enjoyed a fairly stable relationship with the memsahib: a relationship that gave the ayah considerable power over the other servants in the household. The English children often found it very difficult to part from their ayahs, especially when the ayah had to go on leave or the children were themselves sent away to England. Through the nineteenth century the ayah becomes a symbol of native loyalty in numerous fictional texts. She is portrayed as the conduit of information from the outside world, through the servants, to the Anglo-Indian family in numerous memoirs and fictional texts. The ayah saves the English children during the tumultuous days of the ‘Mutiny’, for instance, in James Grant’s First Love Last Love (1868), Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896), J.F. Fanthome’s Mariam (1896) and others. In Alice Perrin’s Old Ayah, the unnamed native woman cannot bear to go away from her wards even when her own (biological) son is very ill.

Ayahs also accompanied the English families to England, being deemed indispensable on the long voyage back. But, as commentators have noted, they were superfluous attachments once the family arrived in England and often treated badly (Visram 1986). They were often left to fend for themselves and find the money to return to India. In 1897 a home for ayahs was founded in London where they could stay until the passage home. Numerous advertisements with reliable ayahs offering their services for voyages to India appear in English newspapers during the 1880–1920 period, mostly inserted by English families testifying to the character of the ayah (Bressey 2013).

English children picked up Indian languages through their close relationship with the ayahs, and this became the source of considerable anxiety for the British in India who saw their children as ‘going native’. Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner’s best-selling The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1888) was sceptical of the ayah – seeing her as too adoring of the English children and enabling a cultural hybridization of the ruling class. In The English-woman in India (1864), the author ‘A Lady Resident’, cautions: ‘as far as possible children should be prevented from acquiring native dialects’ (106).

The ayah can therefore be read as a professional, mobile colonized subject who possessed limited but potent agency in the English household, and whose presence within the domestic, intimate family space altered interracial relationships, especially of the memsahibs.

Baba

The term was commonly used to describe children, with ‘baba-log’ (child-folk) as a variant.

Baboo

From the late eighteenth century, it was a term to refer to the clerks attached to the East India Company and the government. Marked by their ability to read and write English, they were indispensable to the running of the imperial offices in India. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defined the Baboo this way:

an Indian man (especially a Bengali) who has had a (superficial) English education and is somewhat anglicized; an Indian clerk or minor official who is able to write English; (in later use more generally) an Indian office worker or bureaucrat… Frequently depreciative and in later use often offensive.

Over time the term was affixed to the Western-educated Indian, with a clear pejorative connotation. This stemmed from the Baboo’s indeterminate identity, as a cultural hybrid. Augustus Prinsep’s The Baboo (1834) was one of the first novels to deal with this figure, represented in the novel by Brijmohun Bomijee. Bomijee anticipates many of the later Baboo characters of colonial discourse: apparently servile but secretly treacherous, loyal by day and conspiring to overthrow the white man by night. Through the nineteenth century the Baboo would be caricatured, reviled and rarely respected.

The Baboo would not ever be fully white, yet had already loosened his connections with his roots due to Westernization. He was seen by the British as an icon of the ‘monstrous hybridism of West and East’ as Rudyard Kipling would famously call him. This cultural hybrid was imitative, snivelling, constantly seeking to impress the social circles he moved in, and aspiring to more Englishness than the English. Hurree Chunder Mookherji in Kipling’s Kim is perhaps the best-known caricature of a Baboo. The Baboo flaunts his English, and his everyday speech is full of pedantic quotations, bombastic and hyperbolic usages and forced idiomatic expressions (documented in an 1890 volume, Baboo English).

The Baboo mediated between the white echelons and the native subjects and was often influential in imperial offices, courts and trading houses. He was thus the colonized native whose education and employment positioned him between a colonized servant subject and a Westernized native with a limited agency and cultural capital. While civilizing the native was part of the great civilizational mission of Empire, the Baboo comes to represent a figure who, despite his learning and Westernized outlook, cannot be fully accepted into the category of ‘civilized’ (‘white but not quite white’, as the critic Homi Bhabha described it). The Empire was therefore ambivalent in its perception of its own creation. The caricaturing of the Baboo emanated, critics have proposed, from this very ambivalence (Anindyo Roy).

The cultured, English-speaking native was a threat to the imperial social order and bureaucracy because English education had equipped him with ideals of law and order, autonomy and, more dangerously, nationalism. Hence, we see the Baboo represented as at once a necessary cog in the machinery and a threat. His nationalism was a direct threat to the Empire. The Baboo was figuratively contained within trope of ‘effeminism’ (Sinha 1995, Krishnaswamy 1998), where, by representing the Baboo as emasculated, in contrast to the manly Englishman, the Empire sought to demonstrate that he was unfit to rule despite his obvious Westernization. A well-known literary example of this trope is Girish Chunder De in Kipling’s ‘The Head of the District’, where, appointed to the post of District Commissioner, De is unable to quell the civil unrest in the area. De is described as ‘a gentleman… who had… a university degree to boot … cultured, of the world’ (Kipling: n.p.). Kipling also describes him as a ‘beautiful man’, indicating his ‘softness’ and at the speech he gives to his subordinates, De is mocked by the latter, an omen for his later days in the administration. At the end of the story, the district is calmed with the following statement: ‘rest assured that the Government will send you a man’.

Bafta

A kind of calico cloth from the Baroch area, its early description is to be found in the Dutch traveller, Linschoten in his Itinerario (1598). It had been a valuable component of export from India from the Mughal period. Bafta cloth was used as currency to purchase slaves in Africa in the nineteenth century (Sundström 1974). In the eighteenth century, bafta, along with calico, became a marker of status and class in English homes. The complaint that once-expensive calicos and baftas that were associated with aristocratic and upper-class homes, thanks to increased imports, now adorned the house of the common folk as well. Edward Terry who came as chaplain with Thomas Roe’s 1615 voyage is contemptuous of this laissez faire of fashion around calico in his A Voyage to East India (1655).

Bahadur

From the Mughal ‘bahadur’ meaning a ‘brave warrior’, the term was initially used by Indians to describe Europeans as an honorific signifying gallantry. The East India Company was called ‘Company Bahadur’ by the Indians.

From the 1830s it was a rank and title conferred upon native military officers by the British government in India, Bahadur, Sirdar Bahadur, under the order of the British Empire. There was an entire ranking system of ‘Bahadurs’: the Bahadur, Bahadur Jung, Bahadur-ul-mulk, and others. There was also the Rae/Rao Bahadur (where ‘Rao’ signified ‘prince’) for Hindu bureaucrats and non-military officers, Singh Bahadur for Sikhs and Khan Bahadur for Muslim equivalents.

‘Bahadur’ came to signify authority for both natives and English officers, but in the case of natives, especially, it came to be construed as recognition of their loyalty.

Conferring titles and orders, including the famous gun salutes, were part of a colonial mechanism to bring together British aristocrats and indigenous elites in order to unify British rulers and ruling princes (Cannadine 2002). Indians of rank often competed with each other to ensure that such orders were bestowed upon them (CIE, KCSI, GCSI). It was an attempt to create a ‘transracial hierarchy’ and an ‘honorific equality’ (Cannadine 90). This hierarchy was made available in a compendium, Roper Lethbridge’s A Genealogical and Biographical Dictionary of the Ruling Princes, Chiefs, Nobles, and Other Personages, Titled or Decorated of the Indian Empire (1893) for reference, India’s own Debrett’s Peerage.

Such titles did not simply create an honorific equality: they were manifestations of the imperial politics of recognition. The indigenous elites, by accepting the title, conceded the right and power to the British to bestow the title, just as the conferring of titles reinforced British imperial and cultural authority, with the consent of the indigenous elites. Whereas in earlier eras and as late as the early nineteenth century the Mughals and indigenous rulers bestowed favours and titles upon the British, the British now assumed this role for themselves.

It was also a mode of separating and organizing indigenous elites through the tables of precedence where each native ruler was ranked according to the history of his family and the importance of his state. The tables also indicated where he would be seated, and when he would be introduced to the Viceroy. Further, the order or distinction could be enhanced or decreased at the will of the government. Families and kingdoms who had been traditional rivals now had one more domain to compete in: titles, honours and gun salutes assigned by the British. In short, honours and orders were useful as instruments of organizing social order and obtaining loyalty and favours from indigenous elites.

Bania

The British encountered the Hindu trader in the Gujarat area in the form of the bania. John Ovington records his views about them from his 1689 voyage. Later commentators such as John Malcolm (1823) noted the various caste compositions among the trading community in specific parts of the subcontinent.

The bania was favoured by British policies especially in terms of the legal security granted to debts and property. The British, especially when rebellion seemed on the cards in the mid-1850s believed the mercantile classes, the banias, would support the imperial powers. Later with the Mutiny behind them, trading and banking linkages were established between European banks and the indigenous banias. Scholars have noted how the network stretched from European, Bombay and Sindhi trading houses and banks to village banias, who were both merchants and moneylenders (Cheesman 2013).

Banias have also been stereotyped in colonial discourses as a greedy, unscrupulous trader who is forever seeking to ingratiate himself with the British officers. Banias as wicked moneylenders were commonplace in colonial writings of the nineteenth century. Since the bania was a banker, cash-keeper and accountant (as C.A. Bayly, 1986, shows), his role in food-grain acquisition and distribution was central to rural economies. Often, colonial texts portrayed the bania as profiteering at the expense of the village and the government (Bayly).

The bania enabled the colonials to stereotype usury as a component of Indian trade and mercantile attitudes, with the servile-yet-smart, greedy, predatory and monopolizing bania being the Indian equivalent of the Jewish Shylock (Subramanian 2012, Cheesman 2013). However, the banias also contributed to the building of canals and invested in agriculture for the local eco...