Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia

Michael S. Dodson, Brian A. Hatcher, Michael S. Dodson, Brian A. Hatcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138653368
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136484452
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Presenting cutting-edge scholarship dedicated to exploring the emergence and articulation of modernity in colonial South Asia, this book builds upon and extends recent insights into the constitutive and multiple projects of colonial modernity. Eschewing the fashionable binaries of resistance and collaboration, the contributors seek to re-conceptualize modernity as a local and transitive practice of cultural conjunction. Whether through a close reading of Anglo-Indian poetry, Urdu rhyming dictionaries, Persian Bible translations, Jain court records, or Bengali polemical literature, the contributors interpret South Asian modernity as emerging from localized, partial and continuously negotiated efforts among a variety of South Asian and European elites.

Surveying a range of individuals, regions, and movements, this book supports reflection on the ways traditional scholars and other colonial agents actively appropriated and re-purposed elements of European knowledge, colonial administration, ruling ideology, and material technologies. The book conjures a trans-colonial and trans-national context in which ideas of history, religion, language, science, and nation are defined across disparate religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. Providing new insights into the negotiation and re-interpretation of Western knowledge and modernity, this book is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, as well as of intellectual and colonial history, comparative literature, and religious studies.

Part I

Local agents, local
modernities

1 The schools of Serfoji II of Tanjore

Education and princely modernity in
early nineteenth-century India

Indira Viswanathan Peterson

This chapter explores the princely patronage of education and the construction of modernity in early nineteenth-century India. It focuses on the educational initiatives of Serfoji II, the Maratha Hindu king (raja) who ruled over the South Indian kingdom of Tanjore from 1798 to 1832. Tanjore (or Thanjavur) had been brought under the supervision of the English East India Company in 1799 by a subsidiary alliance treaty, with the raja's jurisdiction reduced to the fort and city of Tanjore.¹ A European-educated polymath, Serfoji distinguished himself as an ardent modernizer in multiple areas of culture and learning.² Among his major projects of modernization were the promotion of “new learning” (navavidya) and the establishment of free public schools, not only within the fort, but also in the wider Tanjore region. Thanks in part to Serfoji's projects, by the 1820s Tanjore had become a byword for modern education in South India.³ The Tanjore raja's educational initiatives both complemented and differed from contemporary missionary efforts that dominated South Indian education, and anticipated the colonial state's interventions in public education by many years. As early as 1798, Serfoji addressed many of the issues that were to engage diverse groups of British and Indian advocates for native education in the first half of the nineteenth century, in what Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir have called “The Great Indian Education Debate.”⁴ Among other things, Serfoji's enterprise was distinctive in its configuration of Sanskrit, vernacular languages, and English, as well as of traditional and modern learning, key subjects of that debate. The scale and ambition of the project are impressive, especially in the context of Tanjore's marginal status in colonial political hierarchies in the early nineteenth century.

Much has been written about the central role played by education in the shaping of colonial modernity, from the perspectives of native elites as well as of colonial administrators. For diverse reasons, important groups of British policymakers, evangelists, and native elites tended to agree on the tenet that Europe's supremacy rested on its superior rationality and scientific knowledge. They agreed as well that the diffusion of “useful knowledge” through education was the key to moral as well as social improvement.⁵ Recent scholarship has brought to light the important role of multiple forms of Indian agency and engagement in the formation of Indian modernity. However, studies of education as a modernizing strategy have focused largely on the activities of elites in the presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.⁶ By contrast, provincial initiatives have received little attention.⁷ Furthermore, much remains to be done to uncover the contributions of groups and individuals who were arguably marginal or interstitial to the history of education and the forging of multiple Indian modernities. As Manu Bhagavan has argued in his monograph on education in Baroda and Mysore, the princely states—territories brought under indirect rule through subsidiary alliance treaties, and eventually directly under Company and Crown rule—are one such group.⁸ Bhagavan has made a persuasive case for the paradoxically ideal positioning of princely states as modernizing agents in the colonial context.⁹ As quasi-autonomous states, says Bhagavan, the princely states were enabled, even challenged to assert their alterity, both from the mainstream bourgeois native elites and from the colonial state itself. As spheres of activity internal to the princely state, culture and society were areas in which leadership, innovation, creativity, and agency could be fully enacted. Lastly, the mandate (generated by indigenous as well as European ideologies) of princely states to serve as symbols and preserves of “tradition” resulted in a complicated relationship with modernity.

I find Bhagavan's concept of “princely modernity,” a term he uses to designate the distinctive nature of the constructions of modernity in the Indian princely states, useful overall in characterizing Serfoji's engagement with modernity. However, Bhagavan's study focuses on Mysore and Baroda in the twentieth century, and the detail of his theorization of princely modernity does not apply to the case of Tanjore in the early nineteenth century. Bhagavan's argument that the princes of Mysore and Baroda were responding to clearly defined expectations on the part of the colonial state regarding “progressive” princely activity, as well as his observation that their autonomous projects in modernity were a form of nationalist resistance, do not apply in the case of Serfoji's Tanjore. If anything, Serfoji's projects in education demonstrate the existence of factors that stimulated Indian princes to undertake modernizing initiatives before the colonial rhetoric of progressive princely rule had become an entrenched code. Tanjore's relationship with the colonial state was quite different from that of the major princely states with “British India” and the culture of nationalism in the twentieth century. In education, as in other areas, Serfoji's career illuminates the value of close studies of individual interventions in colonial modernity at different points in the development of the rhetoric of colonialism and native response. It also underscores the importance of attending to the multiplicity of the discourses and conversations among diverse agendas embodied in the construction of princely modernity.

Serfoji II of Tanjore: enlightenment, education, modernity

Serfoji's pioneering investment in modern education is explained in part by his unique personality, in part by the unusual circumstances surrounding his early education and his accession to the Tanjore throne, and in part by his ambition to achieve a position of distinction in the emergent colonial public sphere. When the western Indian Marathas seized Tanjore from the Telugu Nayakas in the seventeenth century, they became rulers over a cosmopolitan, polyglot center of South Indian culture.¹⁰ Embroiled in the politics of the Carnatic, by the second half of the nineteenth century Tanjore had become a pawn in the English East India Company's hands. In 1787, on his deathbed, King Tulajaji II adopted the 10-year-old Serfoji and designated him heir-apparent. He entrusted the young Serfoji to the care of C. F. Schwartz, a celebrated German Pietist missionary educator who worked in the Tanjore region for the English Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK).¹¹ Serfoji's legitimacy was contested, but the prince became a protégé of the English East India Company, which arranged for him to be educated in English in Madras by the German missionary educator C. W. Gericke.¹² In 1798 the prince was awarded the Tanjore throne, but the very next year he was forced to transfer power to the Company, in return for a pension and a share in the revenue, with his authority reduced to the city of Tanjore.¹³

Serfoji's engagement with European modernity was shaped by the distinct but convergent influences of the Company state and of the German Pietists.¹⁴ Thanks to his education in Madras, Serfoji acquired a deep and multifaceted knowledge of European languages and the sciences and arts of the European Enlightenment. He also garnered first-hand experience of the military, governmental, and scientific projects of the Company and other European individuals that were underway in Madras at the end of the eighteenth century, just before the consolidation of Company rule in the Carnatic.¹⁵

A scholar by predilection, throughout his life Serfoji actively pursued the study of Enlightenment disciplines, especially medicine and the physical and natural sciences. Along the way he amassed a library of more than 4,000 books and journals in the European languages. His intellectual ambition was nothing less than the mastery of Enlightenment knowledge. He became an active member of amateur European scholarly circles in South India. In time his correspondents and partners in conversation would include the German missionary scientist C. S. John, the eminent philologist F. W. Ellis, and the evangelist-Orientalist-improving administrator Sir Alexander Johnston, founding member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London.¹⁶ Yet Serfoji was also fully invested in cultivating his persona as an illustrious Hindu ruler through the traditional modes of royal practice, which included such things as patronage of indigenous learning and the arts, the renovation of Tanjore's ancient Shiva temple, and a two-year pilgrimage to the holy city of Banaras. Establishing this persona was crucial to his sovereignty in the eyes of the native population as well as the colonial state. To resolve the inherent ambiguity of his position with regard to modernization, Serfoji drew on an enabling aspect of kingship, the power of symbolic capital in the form of local idioms of royal honor, fame, and lordship. Such symbolic power could be harnessed to the tasks of princely innovation and leadership in the public arena.

Serfoji's response to the challenge of princely modernization was to enhance the royal portfolio, not simply by imposing “improving” knowledge on his subjects, but by recasting indigenous forms of knowledge in an active conversation with European forms. Under Serfoji, traditional disciplinary knowledge was rendered in vernacular languages and framed in new forms, the palace library was transformed into a major archive of Sanskrit manuscripts (an archive that resonated with contemporary Orientalist scholarship), and the court physicians not only recorded Indian medical remedies but also studied European medicine. Serfoji forged his own brand of modernity in Tanjore, translating his personal engagement with indigenous and European knowledge systems into innovative public interventions in education, the sciences, and the arts. He asserted his difference from pre-colonial intellectuals by his explicit and relentless insistence on the “newness” and difference of his initiatives.¹⁷ Thus, although the king of Tanjore's intellectual and royal career was shaped by unusual circumstances, he nonetheless became a paradigm for “progressive” princely modernity in colonial India.

Serfoji's educational projects both strengthened his connections with the missionaries who had educated him and asserted the court's “difference.” The king valued his European missionary friends and mentors as friendly mediators with the colonial government. He continued to support missionary education in Tanjore, but in the curriculum of the schools and colleges he established, useful knowledge was disengaged from Christian frames of reference. There were other motivations for engaging in the promotion of modern public education. Such an engagement would enable the Maratha court establishment and his subjects, the people of Tanjore, to be incorporated into and benefit from the evolving colonial social and economic order. At the same time, however, innovation in this field would enable the Tanjore court to play a leadership role among peers, to some extent even to compete with the East India Company state, thus strengthening Tanjore's status in the hierarchies of colonial rule. Equally importantly, public education afforded Serfoji a space in which to address constituencies beyond the court and beyond Tanjore's considerably truncated territories, thus directly participating in and influencing the emergent public sphere. In what follows, I will examine the particular contours of Serfoji's construction of princely modernity through education, and the ways in which this construction engaged with...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Local agents, local modernities
• Part II Strategies of translation
• Part III History and modernity
• Index