Masks of Conquest

Literary Study and British Rule in India

Gauri Viswanathan

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231539579
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A classic work in postcolonial studies, Masks of Conquest describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and illuminates the discipline's transcontinental movements and derivations, showing that the origins of English studies are as diverse and diffuse as its future shape. In her new preface, Gauri Viswanathan argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated its mission.

1

The Beginnings of English Literary Study

As soon as [the Indians] become first-rate European scholars, they must cease to be Hindoos.

—Edward Thornton. Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53. 32:36.

ENGLISH LITERATURE made its appearance in India, albeit indirectly, with a crucial act in Indian educational history: the passing of the Charter Act in 1813. This act, renewing the East India Company’s charter for a twenty-year period, produced two major changes in Britain’s relationship with her colony: one was the assumption of a new responsibility toward native education, and the other was a relaxation of controls over missionary activity in India.

Without minimizing the historical importance of the renewal of the Company’s charter, it would be safe to say that the more far-reaching significance of the Charter Act lay in the commitment enjoined upon England to undertake the education of the native subjects, a responsibility which it did not officially bear even toward its own people. Hitherto, measures to educate the Indians were entirely at the discretion of the governor-general at Calcutta and the Company was in no way obligated to attend to their instruction. Indeed, reluctant as it was to spend any more money on the natives than necessary, the East India Company was all too willing to abide by the practice in England, where education was not a state responsibility. The Charter Act, however, radically altered the prevailing state of laissez-faire in Indian educational matters. The 13th Resolution categorically stated that England was obligated to promote the “interests and happiness” of the natives and that measures ought to be adopted “as may tend to the introduction among them of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement.”¹

The pressure to assume a more direct responsibility for the welfare of the subjects came from several sources. The earlier and perhaps more significant one, decisively affecting the future course of British administrative rule in India, was the English Parliament. Significantly, the goal of “civilizing the natives” was far from being the central motivation in these first official efforts at educational activity. Parliamentary involvement with Indian education had a rather uncommon origin in that it began with the excesses of their own countrymen in India. The extravagant and demoralized life-styles of the East India Company servants, combined with their ruthless exploitation of native material resources, had began to raise serious and alarming questions in England about the morality of the British presence in India. Henry Montgomery, a speaker in the House debate, relentlessly exposed the hypocrisy of the English people in daring to reform Indians when their own behavior was not beyond reproach: “If we wished to convert the natives of India, we ought first to reform our own people there, who at present only gave them an example of lying, swearing, drunkenness, and other vices.”² Montgomery’s disenchantment with British behavior led him to see the customary British association of Hindu practice with Hindu religion as a device to forestall introspection and self-scrutiny. The practice of “women burning themselves on the death of their husbands,” he pointed out, “[was not] any more a religious rite than suicide was a part of Christianity.”³ British greed was a reality of the Company’s presence in India that was too embarrassing for Parliament to ignore without appearing to endorse Company excesses. But unable to check the activities of these highly placed “Nabobs,” or wealthy Europeans whose huge fortunes were amassed in India, it sought instead to remedy the wrongs committed against the Indians by attending to their welfare and improvement.⁴

The English interest in Indian improvement was informed from the earliest period with the need to come to terms with its own depredations in India. Even when religious sentiment later overtook the educational enterprise, no British administrator ever lost sight of the original, compensatory reasons for intervention in Indian education. Charles Grant, who made perhaps one of the most impassioned pleas for missionary activity, was amazingly candid in spelling out the two most important motives. The first was abuse of power by the Nabobs, who not only acquired illicit fortunes but showed a shameful dereliction of responsibility by delegating authority loosely to sycophantic local leaders. Challenging the complacency of those who believed that “British genius and principles” simply radiated from the center, Grant urged British penetration into all sectors of Indian society, provinces and towns alike, to diffuse central authority. In this way he hoped to correct the self-centeredness of a pampered Company that had become insulated from the rest of Indian society, causing it to place power in the wrong hands.

The other factor Grant cited for necessitating British action in the education of Indians was the damage done to India following early British conquests.

Certainly a great deal was due from us to the people in compensation of the evils which the establishment of our power had introduced among them; and in return for the vast advantages which we reaped from the change, it was but fit that what the country had suffered, or was subjected unavoidably to lose by being dependent upon us, should be repaid by all the benefits which good government, in consistency at least with that dependence, could bestow.⁵

In a brashly manipulative explanation that was basically a thinly disguised appeal for increased territorial control, Grant attributed the irresponsible behavior of early English administrators to British uncertainty about the durability of colonial rule. Britain’s anxiety about the permanence of its rule was so intense, he suggested, that India had meaning only as an object of appropriation. The land had not yet acquired a value that develops through an activity akin to aesthetic contemplation of the colonial experience: “Those provinces which we professedly held in perpetuity cease to be regarded here as permanently our own. A secret idea of their insecurity prevailed, and our conduct towards them was perhaps influenced by this apprehension. We were eager to acquire, but slow to cherish.”⁶ In the same way that aesthetic appreciation involves the valuing of experience embodied in a work of art, through which that work becomes one’s own, so the act of conquest too involves valuing as a result of which the ambiguity of the colonial situation begins to find resolution. It is the moment at which self-interest fuses with and becomes indistinguishable from a sense of discharging one’s duty toward the other. Grant’s intense disenchantment with British avarice left room for a commingling of altruism and paternalism, as in the following passage:

The primary object of Great Britain, let it be acknowledged, was rather to discover what could be obtained from her Asiatic subjects, than how they could be benefited. In process of time it was found expedient to examine how they might be benefited in order that we might continue to hold the advantages which we at first derived from them…. [Their] happiness is committed to our care.⁷

But at the same time valuing is a process that selects what is useful or meaningful and rejects everything else. As a selective process it detaches the portion that is valued from the totality of which it is a part. By valuing the happiness of the people, Grant performs a similar operation of disengagement from the whole, objectifying a subjective state that is exclusive to and inseparable from the individual into a separate, autonomous entity also to be appropriated and made one’s own.

Thus in the course of the argument the question of how England can serve the people of India blends indistinguishably with the question of how power can best be consolidated. The shift has far-reaching consequences. Duty toward the people is seen less as a motive for involving the government than as the end point of a process of consolidation of territorial control. To the question, “What are the best means of perpetuating our empire there?” Grant provides two answers. One is “by securing to the people their religion and laws.”⁸ But Grant rejects this solution, speculating: “What if the religion should be less favourable to our dominion than another system, and the people were induced voluntarily to make that other religion their own; would not the change be for our interest?”⁹ There is no suggestion in this statement that Christianity is intrinsically more meritorious than the native religions; the issue is simply one of taking action favorable to British rule.

However much parliamentary discussions of the British presence in India may have been couched in moral terms, there was no obscuring the real issue, which remained political, not moral. The English Parliament’s conflict with the East India Company was a long-standing one, going back to the early years of trading activity in the East Indies, when rival companies clashed repeatedly in a bid to gain exclusive rights to trade in the region. The East India Company, formed from two rival companies, eventually became the only group of English merchants entitled to carry on English trade. But the clamor for a broadening of commercial privileges in India never died down, and Parliament found itself besieged by Free Trade groups, lobbying to break the Company’s hold. In 1813 it had no choice but to concede them greater trading privileges.

Moreover, the English Parliament itself was becoming alarmed by the danger of having a commercial company constituting an independent political power in India. By 1757 the East India Company had already become virtual master of Bengal and its territorial influence was growing steadily despite numerous financial problems besetting it. But in the absence of any cause for interference in the activities of the Company, the British Crown could conceivably do little to reorganize the Company’s system of administration and win control of its affairs. Pitt’s India Bill of 1784 had earlier rejected an outright subordination of the political conduct of the Company to the Crown. Not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when reports of immorality and depravity among Company servants started pouring in, did Parliament find an excuse to intervene, at which point, in the name of undertaking responsibility for the improvement of the natives, it began to take a serious and active interest in Indian political affairs. It was a move that was to result in a gradual erosion of the unchallenged supremacy of the Company in India.

It is impossible not to be struck by the peculiar irony of a history in which England’s initial involvement with the education of the natives derived less from a conviction of native immorality, as the later discourse might lead one to believe, than from the depravity of their own administrators and merchants. In Edmund Burke’s words, steps had to be taken to “form a strong and solid security for the natives against the wrongs and oppressions of British subjects resident in Bengal.”^l0 While the protectiveness contained in this remark may seem dangerously close to an attitude of paternalism, its immediate effect was beneficial, as it led to a strengthening of existing native institutions and traditions to act as a bulwark against the forces of violent change unleashed by the British presence.

This mission to revitalize Indian culture and learning and protect it from the oblivion to which foreign rule might doom it merged with the then current literary vogue of “Orientalism” and formed the mainstay of that phase of British rule known as the “Orientalist” phase. Orientalism was adopted as an official policy partly out of expediency and caution and partly out of an emergent political sense that an efficient Indian administration rested on an understanding of “Indian culture.” It grew out of the concern of Warren Hastings, governor-general from 1774 to 1785, that British administrators and merchants in India were not sufficiently responsive to Indian languages and Indian traditions. The distance between ruler and ruled was perceived to be so vast as to evoke the sentiment that “we rule over them and traffic with them, but they do not understand our character, and we do not penetrate theirs. The consequence is that we have no hold on their sympathies, no seat in their affections.”¹¹ Hastings’ own administration was distinguished by a tolerance for the native customs and by a cultural empathy unusual for its time. Underlying Orientalism was a tacit policy of what one may call reverse acculturation, whose goal was to train British administrators and civil servants to fit into the culture of the ruled and to assimilate them thoroughly into the native way of life. The great scholars produced by eighteenth-century Orientalism—William Jones, Henry T. Colebrooke, Nathaniel Halhed, and Charles Wilkins—entirely owed their reputations to a happy coincidence of pioneering achievement and official patronage. Their exhaustive research had ambitious goals, ranging from the initiation of the West to the vast literary treasures of the East to the reintroduction of the natives to their own cultural heritage, represented by the Orientalists as being buried under the debris of foreign conquests and depredations.

Yet no matter how benign and productive its general influence might appear, as David Kopf among other historians has insisted to the point of urging it as fact, there is no denying that behind Orientalism’s exhaustive inquiries, its immense scholarly achievements and discoveries, lay interests that were far from scholarly. Whether later Orientalists were willing to acknowledge it or not, Warren Hastings clearly understood the driving force of Orientalism to be the doctrine that “every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state: it is the gain of humanity.”¹² Hastings’ argument of course is an overt and unabashed rationalization of “the dialectic of information and control” that Edward Said has characterized as the basis of academic Orientalism, though even Said’s by now well-known argument does not quite prepare one for the programmatic assurance with which Hastings promotes his cultural ideology. Aside from his obviously questionable assumptions about the “right of conquest,” what is most striking about this statement is the intellectual leap it makes from knowledge that is useful to the state to knowledge that becomes the gain of humanity. The relationship of power existing between England and India is certainly one condition allowing for such a leap, but more to the point is the role of the state in mediating between the worlds of scholarship and politics. For Hastings, it was not merely that the state had a vital interest in the production of knowledge about those whom it ruled; more important, it also had a role in actively processing and then selectively delivering that knowledge up to mankind in the guise of “objective knowledge.”

A peculiar logic runs through the argument, and it has to be monitored closely if one is to appreciate Hastings’ keen understanding of the powerful reinforcing effect of Orientalist scholarship upon state authority. The acquisition of knowledge about those whom it governs is clearly perceived to be of vital importance to the state for purposes of domination and control. But the fact that this knowledge eventually passes into the realm of “humanistic” scholarship (again through the agency of the state) confers a certain legitimacy upon the quest and, by extension, upon the state that promotes it. In other words, even though “social communication” may have its roots in the impulse to enforce dominion over the natives, as Hastings had no hesitation in acknowledging, its political motivation is nullified by virtue of the fixed body of knowledge it produces and makes available to the rest of mankind. The disinterestedess and objectivity that this now shared and therefore “true” knowledge purports to represent help to confirm the state’s “right of conquest,” which duly acquires the status of the sine qua non of knowledge production. What therefore appears on the surface as a rhetorical leap is in fact the carefully controlled effect of a self-fortifying dialectic.

As a candid acknowledgment of the implicit political goals of Orientalism, Hastings’ argument belies some of the arbitraty distinctions that are at times made between Orientalism and Anglicism, the countermovement that gained ascendancy in the 1830s. Briefly, Anglicism grew as an expression of discontent with the policy of promoting the Oriental languages and literatures in native education. In its vigorous advocacy of Western instead of Eastern learning it came into sharp conflict with the proponents of Orientalism, who vehemently insisted that such a move would have disastrous consequences, the most serious being the alienation of the natives from British rule. However, while it is true that the two movements appear to represent diametrically opposed positions, what is not adequately stressed in the educational literature is the degree to which Anglicism was dependent upon Orientalism for its ideological program. Through its government-supported research and scholarly investigations Orientalism had produced a vast body of knowledge about the native subjects that the Anglicists subsequently drew upon to mount their attack on the culture as a whole. In short, Orientalist scholarship undertaken in the name of “gains for humanity” gave the Anglicists precisely the material evidence they needed for drawing up a system of comparative evaluations in which one culture could be set off and measured against the other. For a variety of reasons that will be outlined shortly, it would be more accurate to describe Orientalism and Anglicism not as polar opposites but as points along a continuum of attitudes toward the manner and form of native governance, the necessity and justification for which remained by and large an issue of remarkably little disagreement.

WARREN HASTINGS was succeeded in the governor-generalship by Lord Cornwallis (1786–1793), who found himself at the helm of a government seriously compromised by financial scandals and deteriorating standards. For this state of affairs the new governor-general squarely laid the blame on the earlier policy of accommodation to the native culture. In his view the official indulgence toward Oriental forms of social organization, especially government, was directly responsible for the lax morals of the Company servants. If the Company had sorely abused its power, what better explanation was there than the fact that the model of Oriental despotism was constantly before its eyes? To Cornwallis, the abuse of power was the most serious of evils afflicting the East India Company, not only jeopardizing the British hold over India but, worse still, dividing the English nation on the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise.

The most pressing task therefore was to ensure that no further abuse would occur. In the process of working toward this end Cornwallis evolved a political philosophy that he believed would be consistent with British commercial aims. His theoretical position was that a good government was held together not by men but by political principles and laws, and in these alone rested absolute power. The Oriental system lacking a strong political tradition (and in this belief Cornwallis was doing no more than echoing a view that was common currency), he turned to English principles of government and jurisprudenc...