Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History, 1453-Present

Jon Davidann, Marc Jason Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429759246
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

One of the hallmarks of world history is the ever-increasing ability of humans to cross cultural boundaries. Taking an encounters approach that opens up history to different perspectives and experiences, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History examines cultural contact between people from across the globe between 1453 and the present.

The book examines the historical record of these contacts, distilling from those processes patterns of interaction, different peoples' perspectives, and the ways these encounters tended to subvert the commonly accepted assumptions about differences between peoples in terms of race, ethnicity, nationhood, or empire. This new edition has been updated to employ current scholarship and address recent developments, as well as increasing the treatment of indigenous agency, including the major role played by Polynesians in the spread of Christianity in Oceania. The final chapter has been updated to reflect the refugee crisis and the evolving political situation in Europe concerning its immigrant population.

Supported by engaging discussion questions and enlivened with the voices and views of those who were and remain directly engaged in the process of cross-cultural exchange, this highly accessible volume remains a valuable resource for all students of world history.

PART D

Imperialism and nationalism in the modern world

CHAPTER 7

Altered states

British imperialism and the rise of Indian nationalism

Colonialism is often viewed solely in terms of political conquest and exploitation. However, the assertion of power by one people over others who lie beyond one’s own frontiers involves much more than the clash of arms or the extraction of resources. It is a struggle over ideas and identities, about the changing cultural attitudes of empire-builders toward their conquered subjects and the multifaceted responses of their “subject-peoples” to subjugation, in cultural as well as political terms. Long after the battles for and against empire have passed into history, the cultural legacies of former imperial societies linger on, shaping the lives, thoughts, arts, and literatures of both the former colonizer and the colonized. This is particularly true of the nature and legacy of the 400-year long “and counting” encounter between colonial and postcolonial Britain and India.

BRITAIN DISCOVERS INDIA

In 1600, Queen Elizabeth of England granted a royal charter to the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies (later known as the East India Company) giving it a monopoly on English trade with India, China, and the then little known lands of Southeast Asia between them. Not long after, she dispatched an Ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, to the court of India’s Mughal Empire, then arguably the greatest Empire of the day, to formally negotiate conditions of trade between England and India. From this vantage point, Roe learned firsthand how the Mughals, relatively recent invaders from central Asia, had pursued the pattern of all previous intruders dating back at least to the ancient Persians and Greeks. Like their predecessors, the Mughals sought to “indigenize” their rule by engaging in cultural fusion. The Mughal’s religious policy was then the world’s most tolerant: some of the highest officers of this Muslim-ruled state were held by Hindus. Mughal art, architecture, music, and even food were a blend of central Asia and South Asian elements. The Mughals hoped to solidify popular support by astute administrative policies, which ranged from a form of checks and balances and separation of powers then unknown in Europe to a progressive taxation system that helped India to achieve the highest gross national product (GNP) in the late medieval and early modern world. Roe was so impressed with the diversity and grandeur of the Mughal Court that he advised his countrymen that if they wished to prosper in India they should respect Mughal authority and seek their profits “at sea and in quiet trade.”

The merchants of the East India Company (EIC) initially complied with Roe’s admonition, even though it forced them to show subservience to both Muslim officials and Hindu merchants, who regarded them as denizens of an inferior civilization. Muslim distaste for all Europeans was rooted in the long history of cultural as well as military rivalry between Christianity and Islam, especially in the Indian Ocean, which the pioneering Portuguese had entered killing Muslims on sight. Hindus regarded all foreigners as mlecchas, so low in the hierarchy of their traditional “caste” system as to be outside of it. Hindus joined with Muslims in finding Europeans literally, as well as morally, unclean. The English rarely bathed as they thought it would induce influenza, and, lacking toilet paper, they thought nothing of wiping their rears with their hands and cleaning their hands off on their clothes. In keeping with Shakespeare’s contemporary portrayal of his nation’s merchants, the early agents of the EIC were both proud and greedy. They endured their inferior social position in India rather than jeopardize their commerce, which often earned over a 100 percent return on their investment in each ship returning from Asia.

Two factors altered the relative position of the English and their Indian hosts. The first was the slow decline of the central authority of the Mughal Empire. With each passing generation, Mughal emperors slowly abandoned their policy of religious toleration in favor of a more fundamentalist Islamic agenda. They also exhausted the Empire’s revenues by profligate monumentbuilding (including the beautiful but budget-busting Taj Mahal) and engaged in many ill-advised wars, including a futile attempt to conquer Afghanistan. Fed up with Mughal maladministration, many Mughal provincial governors and the empire’s long-serving Hindu allies sought autonomy within the empire or broke away to establish their own states, which then began to fight among themselves. The collapse of Mughal central authority left the subcontinent vulnerable to foreign invasion and provided a motive, or at least a rationale, for foreign conquest.

The second factor that altered relations between Indians and the English was the increasing aggressiveness of the EIC associated with a more bellicose English posture in world affairs. In the mid-1600s, the largely Protestant English experienced an internationally as well as religiously colored civil war at home and initiated the brutal subjugation of their Catholic neighbor, Ireland. These events sharpened deep-rooted prejudices against non-Protestant and non-Anglo-Saxon peoples and encouraged the recourse to military force wherever it might enrich the English nation. At the same time, England engaged in war with the EIC’s chief trade rivals in Asia, including the Dutch, who had largely succeeded in driving English merchants out of Southeast Asia’s enormously profitable Spice Islands. Turmoil at home and abroad jeopardized the EIC’s royally licensed monopoly of trade in India, as England’s hard-pressed rulers sought to generate more wealth by allowing other British trading companies to compete in the EIC’s Asian markets. Within India, the decline of the Mughal authority exposed EIC merchants to attacks associated with anti-Mughal rebellions and to what the Company deemed harassment by newly emergent Mughal successor states who quite naturally sought to impose their own taxes on European traders.

FIGURE 7.1 Sir Thomas Roe was just one of many supplicants for the favor of Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1615. The appearance of European-style angels adoring the Emperor indicates that the Moghuls sought to appropriate western images of grace and power to exalt their own authority.

Source: Heritage Images/Contributor/Getty Images

The combination of Mughal decline, rising British imperial ambitions (the English formally became British with the union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland 1707), rising prejudice against the inhabitants of the world beyond Britain, and unprecedented commercial competition influenced the EIC directors to take an increasingly bolder stance in the EIC’s relations with Indian rulers. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth had written to the Mughal Court conveying her admiration of its humanity as well as power. By 1754, the EIC’s agents had come to view the remnants of that Empire as ripe for the taking. The decisive opportunity as well as a powerful stimulus to do just that was provided by a fresh round of British wars with its European rivals, this time with France. These conflicts spilled into India (as well as America, where they were known as the French and Indian Wars). The French pursued a strategy in India of playing rival Indian states and their competing internal elites against each other to both gain control over them and use them against the British. Fortunately for British interests, the agents of the EIC were able to turn this strategy against the French, and later used it to seize much of southern India. In 1757, the richest province in India, Bengal, fell victim to the EIC’s intrigues. Over the next 100 years, Bengal’s resources and its European-trained and armed Indian army were used to gain control over much of South Asia. In the process, two fifths of the Indian subcontinent, deemed lacking in commercial value, was left in the hands of politically subordinated Indian princes.

THE ORIENTALISTS

As the EIC’s power and influence spread across the subcontinent, so too did its contact with its inhabitants. Warren Hastings (1732–1818), perhaps the EIC official most responsible for setting the tone and pace of the expansion of British authority after the EIC’s conquest of Bengal, had spent much of his life in India and was impressed by the richness of Indian culture. His interest was shared by a few other EIC key officials in Bengal. Through their collective study of Sanskrit, the ancient Indian sacred language, they helped establish the existence of what thereafter became known as the Indo-European family of languages which included Greek, Latin, Persian, the Germanic, and Romance languages (French, Italian, and Spanish), and English.

MAP 7.1 Map of British Empire in India

Such work also led to the study of the sacred Upanishads, an ancient Indian philosophical treatise dating from the time before the rise of Buddhism. The Upanishads suggested that Hinduism possessed an underlying rationalism and a concept of a single divine spiritual consciousness. This idea appealed to westerners, who had been inclined to reject the ritual sacrifices and polytheism of contemporary Hindu society as morally debased. It now appeared to them that the two civilizations shared a past in which Indians may have once been on a par with the West. These discoveries won the financial backing of wealthy British aristocrats, such as the 3rd Marquis of Lansdowne, who saw themselves as patrons of the rationalist, scientific, and progressive ideas associated with the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, like the European Renaissance before it, had been inspired by Greek and Roman philosophy, which offered tantalizing references to India, with whom the Greeks and Romans had significant cultural as well as commercial contact. British scholars of the Enlightenment were eager to study the culture that was certainly connected to and possibly influenced the Greco-Roman world. Those who pursued this course of study were called Orientalists (a word derived from the Latin word for “east”), which meant students of eastern knowledge.

Given the decline of centralized Mughal authority and the subsequent political disunity that had permitted the EIC to gain dominion over the subcontinent, most Orientalists regarded their own culture as superior to that of India in its current state. But some Orientalists went further, holding that even if Europeans were presently superior to India materially, Indians were not then, nor were they ever, inferior to Europe spiritually and philosophically. One such thinker was Charles Stuart, a Major-General in the EIC’s employ. His living among Hindus and his close study of the devotional centerpiece of Indian religion and philosophy led him to see what he regarded as parallels between God’s taking of human form in the story of Jesus Christ and the life of the popular Hindu avatar of God, Lord Krishna, whose teachings were focus of the most popular piece of sacred Indian literature, the Bhagavad Gita. Stuart also drew attention to the great similarities in the divine instructions given by Jesus and Krishna; both stressed love of God as the vehicle of salvation. These discoveries led Stuart to publish a book (Vindication of the Hindoos, 1808), which sought to refute the prevailing criticism of Indians as a debased people. He concluded that “Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its [believers] a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilized society.”¹

Most of Stuart’s colleagues were not prepared to so deeply enter into Indian culture, but had, of necessity, to adapt to Indian conditions. They were dependent on Indians as bankers and brokers who served as middlemen between the British and the Indian producers of high-value commercial products, such as fine cotton textiles and, later, tea and opium. This acculturation took many forms. Europeans in India smoked tobacco in a water pipe (hookah) and lived in cottages adapted to the Indian climate called bungalows, which, along with other loan words, such as pajama and khaki (dust colored) passed into the English language. A few European officials, soldiers, and traders rose above prevailing social prejudices against Hindus and Muslims to develop friendships with Indians. A small number married into the Indian population. Many more took Indian mistresses (bibis), whom they provided with homes of their own. These bibigarhs (literally mistresses’ houses), along with “nautch” parties featuring Indian dance and musical performances, served as bridges between English and Indian cultures.

Yet another bridge was formed by English tourists who had come to see the Company’s achievement. Visiting Britons were deeply moved by the varieties of historical artifacts found in the Indian landscape and its ancient history, a sentiment encouraged by the Romantic Movement then sweeping European salons. Tourists spending an afternoon visiting vine-covered Roman ruins in Italy to experience sentiments of lost glories found that these scenes paled in comparison to nights spent among the palaces of India’s many past empires crumbling in tropical heat. This was the view taken by the English painter, William Hodges, who came to India with the idea to make a living selling such exotic scenes to the British public. However, like most Orientalists, Hodges tempered his own sense of wonder at the glories of India’s past with a sense of respect for Indians living in the present. Hodges was a frequent visitor to mixed parties of English and Indians in Calcutta, the new capital of British Indian enterprise. There European traders were too busy making money alongside Hindu bankers and merchants to observe the Black Town–White Town division that characterized older Company cities such as Madras and Bombay. Hodges remarked that it was “highly entertaining to an inquisitive mind, to associate with a people whose manners are more than 3,000 years old; and to observe in them that attention and polished behavior which usually marks the most highly civilized state of society.”²

THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE

Indians with inquisitive minds found the British just as interesting. Understandably, most Muslim and Hindu leaders rightly saw the coming of the British as a threat to their traditional political and social dominance. However, elite businessmen, including landlords and merchants, rapidly adjusted to the expanding EIC presence in their society, as they had in the past embraced Greek, Roman, Arab, and Turk as well as Mughal culture and trade. After all, Indian long-distance traders had been among the first to embrace both Buddhism and later Islam and were largely responsible for spreading these faiths through much of the rest of Asia. Some of those Indians benefiting from the wealth generated by commercial relations with the ECI became an Indian version of the British Orientalists, in terms of both the depth of their curiosity in foreign ideas and the variety of their responses to them. Ishwar Chandra Vidyāsāgar (1790–1891), a learned Brahmin from western Bengal, first introduced the ideas of Francis Bacon and other British philosophers into the curricula of Calcutta’s Sanskrit College (founded in 1824) solely on the basis of what he perceived to be the high quality of their thoughts. Bengali intellectuals, such as Ram Mohan ...