Romantic Representations of British India

Michael J Franklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415378277
• eBook ISBN: 9781134183081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Michael J. Franklin's Romantic Representations of British India is a timely study of the impact of Orientalist knowledge upon British culture during the Romantic period. The subject of the book is not so much India, but the British cultural understanding of India, particularly between 1750 and 1850. Franklin opens up new areas of investigation in Romantic-period culture, as those texts previously located in the ghetto of 'Anglo-Indian writing' are restored to a central place in the wider field of Romanticism. The essays within this collection cover a wide range of topics and are written by an impressive troupe of contributors including P.J. Marshall, Anne Mellor, and Nigel Leask. Students and academics involved with literary studies and history will find this book extremely useful, though musicologists and historians of science and of religion will also make good use of the book, as will those interested in questions of gender, race, and colonialism.

1 General introduction and [meta]historical background [re]presenting ‘The palanquins of state; or, broken leaves in a Mughal garden’

Michael J. Franklin

‘in the details of history, truth and fiction are so blended as to be scarce distinguishable’

(Sir William Jones)

Among the ‘Principal Occurrences’ for 7 June 1790 listed by the New Annual Register, and sandwiched between items of news concerning ‘lieut. Bligh’, new military regulations of parity for ‘king’s and company officers in India’, and a debate in the Court of the King’s Bench, is to be found the following description of the retinue of Mubarak ud-Daula (1757/8–93), Nawab Nazim of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa:

The procession of the nabob from Chitpore to Calcutta, in order to pay his compliments to earl Cornwallis, on his arrival in India, is worthy of description, as it gives an idea of the style of magnificence of eastern princes.

Seven elephants of the first magnitude were led by their keepers, in like manner as our sumpter horses; seated on the back of one of which, on a throne of indescribable splendour, was the nabob, with a man behind him holding a superb fan, in the very act of collecting the breezes in his service.

The throne was composed of gold, pearls, and brilliants; and the nabob’s dress was worthy a sovereign: nor was ever animal more grandly caparisoned than the no less honoured than exulting animal on which he rode.

His state palanquin followed. Four pillars of massy silver supported the top, which was actually encrusted with pearls and diamonds; and, instead of verandas, fine glass plates on every side, as well as the back and front, to shew his mightiness’s person to the greatest advantage.

Arrived at the entrance of the governor’s house, down knelt the half-reasoning animal for his illustrious master to alight, who proceeded with an immense retinue dressed all in new turbans and uniforms, to a breakfast that had been prepared for this princely guest.¹

The mushroom magnificence of returned ‘nabobs’ had been satirized since Clive’s victory at Plassey (1757) over an earlier Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, but here was an attempt to represent the unrepresentable, the ‘indescribable splendour’ of the genuine article: a real nawab enthroned upon a Popean elephant.² Readers of New Annual Register might morally condemn or mentally gawp at this admiring paean to conspicuous consumption and Asiatic luxury. They could even bask in the reflected glory, bright as the reflections from the plate-glass, of British suzerainty emblematized in the state palanquin, empty of its native ruler.

Subscribers and coffee-house perusers of this authoritative publication were accustomed to a high standard of accuracy for, on the recommendation of its founder, Dr Andrew Kippis, William Godwin had been employed since 1784 to write the British and foreign history section.³ India news generally took five or six months to arrive in London, but more attentive readers might have been puzzled at why the Nawab had taken almost four years (until 7 June 1790 according to the New Annual Register) to present his compliments to the new governor-general as Cornwallis had arrived in Calcutta in the September of 1786.

Only those readers with tastes sufficiently catholic to extend to the novel of sensibility would have noticed that the description of the Nawab’s procession was lifted virtually verbatim from Phebe Gibbes’ Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), and would have missed the excised ‘romantic’ elements to be found there, such as the heroine Sophia Goldborne’s enthusiasm for the ‘fine-looking’ black guards; her intertextual thrill at becoming, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Constantinople, the object of an Eastern potentate’s attention; or her overwhelming desire to have an elephant at her command.⁴

In representing India, fiction and news become, it would seem, inextricably mixed into a species of eighteenth-century metahistory.⁵ The author of a brief 1784 resumé of the affairs of the East India Company pointed to ‘The novelty of the subject, the difficulty of obtaining satisfactory information, and the various and contradictory accounts of the situation of the Company’, as elements which had ‘hitherto left India, in a manner, an unknown country to the bulk of Englishmen’.⁶ Despite the parliamentary attention, successive India bills, the recall of Warren Hastings and the compulsive drama of the ongoing impeachment proceedings, it would appear that seven years later in 1791 subcontinental ‘novelty’ and metropolitan ignorance encouraged journalistic recourse for ‘satisfactory information’ to a sentimental epistolary novel. Sophia’s romantic representation of India is a heady dream of ‘state palanquins, thrones, elephants, and seapoys’ which – egocentrically if not Eurocentrically – conflates political conquest of India with emotional conquest of her ‘Nabob of Nabobs’, but the ‘poetical’ plagiarism of the New Annual Register journalist reinforces the fact that representation itself is inevitably misrepresentation.

Naturally there are enormous problems attendant upon the representation of any culture and its very multifariousness necessitated that India was imagined or indeed invented in multifarious ways. Though Edward Said has been taken to task for erecting a somewhat unitary concept of Orientalism which failed to encompass the multiplicity of Orientalisms reflecting changing historical contingencies, his groundbreaking book effectively problematized the politics of identity and representation:

We must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, entwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things beside the ‘truth’, which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to methodologically is to view representations (or misrepresentations – the distinction is at best only a matter of degree) as inhabiting a common field of play defined [. . .] not by some inherent subject matter alone, but by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse.⁷

With the romanticizing discourse of Hartly House, Calcutta, we can contrast another representation of an important meeting between Governor-General Cornwallis and Nawab Nazim Mubarak ud-Daula. The Times of Tuesday, 9 October 1787 carried an ‘Extract of a letter from Calcutta, Jan. 28’ reporting that:

The Nabob of Bengal has been to visit the Governor-General and was much surprized at his Lordship’s refusal of a Nuzzer (present) of eight thousand rupees; as, on the other hand, was Lord Cornwallis, at the Nabob’s requesting he might be permitted to spend his pension of sixteen lacks of rupees a year as he chose, which his Lordship immediately ordered. Mr. Colebrooke was imprudent enough to let his Moonshea (Persian clerk) take a present from the Nabob of ten thousand rupees, for which he lost his appointment of Persian Translator to the Council. All this is such a strange reverse in Bengal, that Nabobs, Rajahs, &c. are making daily application for leave to come to Calcutta, to visit the phoenomenon (p. 3).

This representation of English and Mughal aristocracy is clearly ‘entwined’ with the political stance both of The Times and its ‘Indian correspondent’. Here Asiatic magnificence is reduced to a monetary munificence conscientiously rejected by the noble lord, and this stark conjunction of Oriental and Occidental surprise redounds to Cornwallis’s benefit in a number of ways at a time when the question of Warren Hastings’s acceptance of presents from various nawabs and revenue farmers was being closely examined by a Commons committee.⁸ Such reformist rectitude as would make a nawab’s jaw drop is plainly phenomenal in Calcutta, and the summary dismissal of James Edward Colebrooke (future Resident at Delhi, son of a former East India Company Director and brother of H. T. Colebrooke, who was to become the foremost Orientalist in India) displays authoritarian principle as opposed to despotic whim.⁹ Furthermore, Cornwallis’s surprise at the Nawab’s request for financial autonomy glances at the question of Hastings’s ‘interference’ in the affairs of native rulers.¹⁰

That a much more sympathetic political construction might be placed upon Hastings’s treatment of the young Nawab Mubarak ud-Daula by an Indian historian of aristocratic Iranian origin demonstrates not only the complexity of political representation, but the fact that, pace Said, the Orient certainly could represent itself.¹¹

The reputation (and indeed, the self-representation) of Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai (1727–1806) rests upon his intellectually ambitious history of India from the time of Aurangzeb down to 1781, the Sëir Mutaqharin [View of Modern Times] (1789).¹² Ghulam Husain informs us that Hastings spent ten weeks at Murshidabad, the former Mughal capital of Bengal, in 1772, ‘putting in order the affairs of the country. [. . .] He reduced the Nazem’s, or Nominal Nawab’s allowance, from twenty-four lacs a year to sixteen; and out of regard to Mubarec-ed-döwlah’s tender age, he left the disposal of that sum to Menny-begum’s discretion’.¹³

Ghulam Husain’s account of Mubarak ud-Daula is interesting to read both in the context of Sophia Goldborne’s desire to be a ‘Nabobess’, and against the persistent Orientalist stereotyping of feminized Hindoo and virile Muslim which her own text perpetuates. More importantly, the Sëir can be seen as a political act of self-representation, in which the portrait of the current Nawab constitutes part of a discourse of decline from admirable Mughal and nawabi concepts of governance, based upon personal responsibility, moral principle, and the well-being of their subjects.¹⁴ For, according to Ghulam Husain, honourable Indian rulers have always obeyed the precept of Sa‘dl:

The subject is a tree, if you cherish it; You will eat of its fruit, to your heart’s desire.
(Sëir, 2: 585)

In many ways a Mughal man of feeling, the young Mubarak ud-Daula might seem an Asiatic and suitably sentimental counterpart to Sophia’s sensibility. Ghulam Husain compliments the Nawab for his civility and compassion, but elements of criticism soon predominate in his narrative:

Naturally tender-hearted, he listens with patience to those that are unfortunate or oppressed, and he is always disposed to relieve them. But his time is not well distributed; and he is always dissolved in all kinds of effeminating delices [voluptuous delights], and always immersed in the pleasures of the table, or in the company of dance-women.

(Sëir, 2: 533)¹⁵

He inspires little respect and lacks moral authority; even his liberal generosity is misdirected. Whereas the Mughal nobility was famed for its encouragement of artists and intellectuals, this modern aristocrat is a scholar only of dancing and singing. His patronage of Hindu festivals such as Divali or Holl is not in that tradition, greatly respected by Ghulam Husain, of religious syncretism inspired by Akbar or Dmra Shiknh; instead he uses these ceremonial occasions to draw attention to himself and his own lavish prodigality.

In one of these Hölies I happened to be at Moorshood-abad, when Mubarec-ed-döwlah was circumcising his children: a ceremony in which he spent thirtyseven thousand rupees in clothes and presents to his slave-girls, to his favourite women, to his principal eunuchs, and to those of his mother, Babboo-begum.

(Sëir, 2: 535–6)

Such effete sensuality is seen as both cause and symptom of the inqilab (reversal of fortune, revolution) effected by the East India Company as these former private traders consolidated colonial hegemony in Eastern India.¹⁶ The Persian histories, of which the Sëir Mutaqharin is an outstanding example, constitute an attempt to understand a world changed utterly, involving the displacement of Mughal nobility and customary authority. As the prestigious Mughal poet of Urdu, Mlr Taql ‘Mlr’

(1722–1810) observed:

This age is not like that which went before it.
The times have changed, the earth and the sky have changed.¹⁷

When Ghulam Husain seeks to record a period of just and equitable government in Bengal and Bihar, the nawab that he singles out for unstinting praise is Ali Vardi Khan (1740–56), to whom his mother was related, and in whose co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. General Introduction and [Meta]Historical Background [Re]Presenting ‘the Palanquins of State; or, Broken Leaves In a Mughal Garden’
• 2. British–Indian Connections c.1780 to c.1830: The Empire of the Officials
• 3. Torrents, Flames and the Education of Desire: Battling Hindu Superstition On the London Stage
• 4. Between Mimesis and Alterity: Art Gift and Diplomacy In Colonial India
• 5. Poetic Flowers/Indian Bowers
• 6. ‘Where . . . Success [Is] Certain’?: Southey the literary East Indiaman
• 7. Radically Feminizing India: Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Sydney Owenson’s the Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811)
• 8. The Strains of Empire: Shelley and the Music of India
• 9. From ‘Very Acute and Plausible’ to ‘Curiously Misinterpreted’: Sir William Jones’s ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus’ (1792) and Its Reception In Later Musical Treatises
• 10. ‘Travelling the Other Way’: The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810) and Romantic Orientalism
• 11. Conquest Narratives: Romanticism, Orientalism and Intertextuality In the Indian Writings of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Orme
• 12. Orientalism and Religion In the Romantic Era: Rammohan Ray’s Vedanta(s)