IDEOLOGIES OF COLONIALISM

QUESTIONS:

2005: What were the basic objectives behind the introduction of ‘modern education’ in India? How far were these achieved?

2006: What determined the introduction of the new legal system? How did it help in the consolidation of British rule in India?

2007: Why was the ‘modern education system’ introduced in India? What was its impact on the Indian social structure?

2008: Through what ideologies did the British seek to justify and legitimize their rule over India?

2009: see 2007

2010: In what ways did ideology influence colonial rule in the 19th century?

THEMES:

  1. Modern Education
  2. New Legal System
  3. Ideologies

I: MODERN EDUCATION

From the late 18th century onwards, as the colonial enterprise in India expanded, there always remained the need for Britons – both in the metropolis and in the subcontinent – to reconcile their liberal, political and social ideals with the autocratic principle of Empire. During the trial of Warren Hastings, the parliamentarian Edmund Burke offered a means of resolving this contradiction. He argued that the colonial enterprise could be justified as long as the British kept the interests of their subjects in mind at all times, and let those interests rather than any others guide their policy. While Burke was a conservative whose ideas shaped the pre-Saidian Orientalist discourse, the importance he attributes to the moral high ground of colonial rule pervaded future discourses on colonialism as well.

The reform of the native education system only became a priority for the English East India Company in the 19th century. Prior to this, conservative orientalist company officers argued that the best policy the Company could adopt was to preserve and maintain indigenous institutions. Thus, in the late 18th century, the British merely sought to extend the native education system.

Extensive research was conducted by Company officers like Elphinstone, Muno and William Adams into the nature of the existing education systems in different parts of the subcontinent in the first decade of the 19th century. Their studies demonstrated that the native education system laid primary emphasis on rote learning of scriptures and other ancient texts. Science and philosophy were given little or no attention. Moreover, this education – in madarsssas and gurukuls – was accessible only to the Indian elites. Girls were of course not permitted to attend school.

The Company Charter of 1813 reflected the growing influence of English Utilitarians and Evangelicals on the East India Company; figures like Charles Trevelyan, William Wilberforce and Thomas Macaulay felt that the British had a civilizing mission in India, which entailed the reform, or even the total substitution of indigenous institutions. Influential on this new Anglicist discourse were the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and John Stuart Mill. The latter is particularly relevant, for while his father James Mill placed his faith in the reforming potential of legislation, J.S. Mill was far more in favour of inculcating morality and a scientific bent of mind – both assumed to be lacking in Indians – through education. Thus, the Company charter set aside at least one lakh rupees annually for the establishment of an English-medium system of ‘modern’ education in India. It also considerably loosened the rein upon Christian missionary activities, which effectively led to the setting up of many mission schools in the country in the 19th century.

However, while private mission schools could preach Christianity openly, the British had once more to acknowledge that government schools would have to each secular curriculum to prevent offending the religious sentiments of the Indian people. The outcome of secular, modern education, which taught Romantic literature without also inculcating a sense of morality in students, became abominably clear to the Company in the early 19th century, when the Government College of Calcutta graduated a hedonistic batch of young men, known as the ‘Young Bengal’ movement, who became notorious for their rowdiness, atheism and indulgence of pleasure.

This had not been the intention the Company. As Macaulay said, the new system of education, it was hoped, could create a class of Indians who were fluent in the English language, as well as English in their tastes and their morals, and who would be loyal to the British. To this end, Macaulay thought it necessary to teach English literary texts, which though not overtly Christian, nonetheless, would require the Indian student to consult Christian scriptures for a full understanding. Such texts included John Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as the works of Shakespeare. This literature was believed to contain the ‘diffusive benevolence of Christianity’. Thus, says Gauri Viswanathan, the English education system became one of the ‘masks’ of colonial conquest in India, for it so greatly engrained acceptance of British hegemony in the minds of middle and upper-class Indians, that the colonial state rarely had to deploy military/brute force against their subjects to establish their dominance. The Act of 1835, requiring all Indians to acquire English education, was an attempt by the British to further extend the reach of their hegemony.

However, as Ian Copland had noted, if education was a site for the creation and dissemination of hegemony, it was equally site for its contestation. Thus, while the missionaries established and the state dominated the sphere of modern English education in the first half of the 19th century, by the second half, nationalists and reformers had entered the arena. Thus, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan undertook the establishment of the Aligarh Muslim University as well as of a polytechnical college in the mofussil of Ghazipur. After the death of Dayanand Saraswati, the Arya Samaj set up a network of Dayanand Anglo-Vedic Schools in the Punjab. These schools taught science and philosophy along the lines of state schools, recognizing the possession of an English education as an asset and a necessity for middle-class Punjabis seeking well-paying jobs. At the same time, the Samaj also addressed the cultural anxieties of this class by incorporating Vedic studies in the DAV curriculum. Such schools also became the sites for the dissemination of nationalist rhetoric.

Furthermore, Copland argued that while ‘subversive texts’ (ironically, J.S. Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ was included in this category) were carefully excluded from the curriculum of public schools, any relatively good bookstore in Calcutta, Bombay or Madras would have a copy of liberal English/European texts which any middle-class Indian could easily procure.

It thus appeared that while the British had sought to create a class of loyalists through modern education, that system had produced many ardent critics of colonial rule. Macaulay’s vision came to an end in 1854 with the ‘Wood’s Despatch’, which provided for the establishment of Universities in the Presidency towns, where the emphasis would be on technical rather than theoretical subjects. The Despatch also provided for scholarships to be given to promising Indian students.

Not only did the British education system fail to create a class of uncritical Indian loyalists, it had deliberately catered to elite students hoping that this class would then extend the benefits of the education they had received to the lower castes and classes. Yet, this ‘trickle-down’ effect never manifested, and the education of the lower economic strata was undertaken largely by missionaries. When the latter began giving the education of the poor of Bengal greater importance than that of the middle classes – a shift that Poromesh Acharya attributes to the readier acceptance of Christian morality by the poor than by the middle-classes – the Bengali bhadralok were enraged. English education had became a prerequisite for ‘chakri’, or a well-paying job, and this change in missionary policy directly threatened their economic interests.

In conclusion, while the British introduced an English-medium ‘system of ‘modern’ education in India out of both moralistic and practical considerations, the effects of this system was not quite as they had hoped. Rather than producing a class of Indian loyalists, they found their greatest critics were the beneficiaries of the new education system.

  • Under Hastings, appointments were reserved for Englishmen who demonstrated linguistic proficiency, a deep understanding of India and a sense of benevolent responsibility in regard to the Indian people. (DAVID KOPF)
  • 1781 – Hastings founded the Calcutta Madrasah as a school for Muslim officials of the East India Company. The language of instruction at this school was Persian, the court language of the Mughals, and thus the British attempted to rule through the languages already in use by the government, thereby underestimating the role of the growing vernacular languages
  • 1800 – Fort William College was created to train civil servants, and hired a number of scholars who translated ancient texts, wrote grammars and dictionaries
  • The question of which language should become the instrument of government and education was debated during the first three decades of the 19th century between the Orientalist and the ‘Anglicists’, who maintained that English was preferable to a revival of the classical langauges and to the use of the vernaculars at the higher levels of education and management

II: LAW AND LEGAL REFORM

With the signing of the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765, the English East India Company acquired the right to keep the surplus revenues of the province of Bengal. While it would undertake revenue administration, the company intended to leave civil and judicial administration in the hands of the NaibDewan, Mohammed Reza Khan. However, the company soon found that the system of dual administration was both inefficient and corrupt, and in 1772, Warren Hastings assumed the responsibilities that had hitherto been allocated to the NaibDewan, thus bringing the system of dual governance to an end.

As the company assumed an administrative role in the subcontinent, in Britain there were attempts being made through discussion at resolving the autocratic principle of empire with the egalitarian principle of liberalism that governed English domestic policy. Moreover, there was growing criticism of the British Nabobs who returned to Britain after serving the Company in India, where they had also amassed huge fortunes through unscrupulous means. These critiques reached fever pitch with the trial of Warren Hastings, during which the Conservative parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, argued that British colonial rule in India could only be justified if the best interests of the Indian subjects were consistently preserved and catered to. This, Burke insisted, would also ensure that the colonial enterprise profited Britain. From the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, the theme of serving the Indian subject’s best interest remained a dominant influence on the colonial discourse of governance.

Another important ideological influence upon the colonial administration in its early years was the concept of ‘Oriental Despotism’. This theory stated that India had never experienced private property – in other words, all land was state owned. This was used as an explanation of India’s ‘backwardness’ and ‘stagnation’, for in liberal Britain, private property was considered to be an engine of progress. Thus Alexander Dow declared that while the subcontinent had certainly been the site of great empires, it had also been ‘nurse to the most abject slaves’.

The notion of Oriental Despotism was important in shaping the attitudes of British administrators in two ways: on the one hand it justified the perpetuation of ‘despotic’ rule, for it was argued that to introduce a liberal democratic system in a society that had become so used to authoritarian rule would be to unleash chaos; on the other hand it also explained (or rather, implied) the changelessness of Indian society. The British assumed that without private property, no society could progress.

For the early years of Company rule in Bengal, British administrators known as ‘Orientalists’ were largely in favour of preserving the institutions of law and governance native to the province – a policy that reflected the influence of Burke’s conservatism. Thus, the British went about compiling all the information they could relating to ancient Indian laws and customs, a task in which they sought the help of Brahmanas, Munshis and dubashes (those who spoke two languages), for they themselves were not able to read the Persian and Sanskrit texts. This, however, led to the ‘brahmanization’ of the laws that the British recognized, for they recognized only the oldest texts (and those referred to by the upper caste Indians they employed) as authentic. In compiling Hindu laws, then, the British gave precedence to the shastric tradition. This was a stark contrast with the legal system they followed at home – for the ‘common law of England’ took into account precedent and custom and was thus far more flexible than the legal codes enforced in India.

While Company officials like Nathaniel Halhed (author of A Code of Gentoo Laws) compiled digests of native laws based on the recommendations of the maulvis and pundits in their employ, one officer, William Jones, was distrustful of these Indian servants, knowing they had vested interests in the promotion of certain legal texts over others. Thus, Jones set about learning Sanskrit and Persian in an attempt to compile the most important laws from the most authoritative sources to facilitate the Company’s legal administration of Bengal. Jones’ digest, ‘A Code of Hindoo Laws on Contracts and Succession’, was translated and published by H.T. Colebrooke in 1794. From the early 1780s onwards, the Company had given its officials an additional stipend to follow Jones’ example and learn Indian languages by engaging the services of a Munshi. However, while this scholarly exercise was pursued eagerly by some for its own sake, Bernard Cohn has noted that the ulterior motive of acquiring a command over languages was to use them as the language of command.

While the British were resigned to the necessity of establishing a civil and criminal judicial system in India, they remained certain that their intervention in native religious matters was unwise. Thus, while the Company instituted a network of civil/diwani and criminal/faujdariadalats in the province, they continued to allow the native assembles as institutions to adjudicate matters pertaining to marriage and other such religious affairs.

By the turn of the 19th century, the discourse on colonial governance was changing in Britain. The conservatism of Burke was being superceded in influence by the discourse of Anglicism – a marriage of Liberalism and Evangelicalism, which, though fairly disparate, attained a consensus on matters pertaining to the governance of India. Proponents of this school of thought, including the Utilitarian philosopher James Mill, argues that a country’s past need have no bearing on the present, and that rather than preserving India’s indigenous law codes through respect for tradition, the Company was obligated to develop a legal system that would be beneficial to the largest number of its subjects as possible.

The first step in this direction would be instituting private property in India though legal reform, a project undertaken by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal through the ‘permanent settlement’ revenue system. Through this system, the British hoped to develop a class of ‘improving landlords’ – modelled, as Ranajit Guha has said, on the likes of the English yeomanry – who would extend and improve cultivation through extensive and intensive investment and preside over the commercialization of agriculture in Bengal. To this end, the permanent settlement recognized the absolute proprietary rights of the zamindars over land. Though the system failed, Utilitarian emphasis on legal reform as a means of social improvement, as well as the Ricardian theory of rent as justification of the state’s claims over the agrarian surplus, led to the introduction of two other land settlements in India – the Ryotwari System in Madras Presidency, and the Mahalwari System in the North-West Provinces. Despite their considerable differences, all three systems firmly established the legality of individually owned property in India.

However, despite Lord Cornwallis’ liberal sympathies, Anglicism did not assume the position of the most dominant discourse of colonialism until the 1820s. In the early 19th century, there was a resurgence of the conservatism of the Orientalist school of thought, as the Romantics amongst the Company officers – Montstuart Elphinstone, Thomas Munro and Charles Metcalfe – assumed important positions in Bombay, Madras and Delhi respectively. These officers argued in favour of a ‘personal governance’, in which the district collector had almost unrestrained power, which he would use in an enlightened way to look after his subjects. The latter, says Thomas R. Metcalf, were thought of as akin to children, who looked upon the benevolent despotic collector as their ‘ma-baap’ or parents.

The Romantic discourse was soon subordinated to the Anglicism of the Utilitarian Governor-General William Bentinck. The latter was determined to reform the legal system in India with accordance to the principles of reason and logic. In this task, he was aided by Thomas Macaulay, whose rationalism expressed itself in his motto – ‘uniformity where you can have it, diversity where you must have it, but in all cases certainty.’ Macaulay’s reforms included the standardization of laws across India; hitherto, each Presidency had abided by its own legal codes, as well as the introduction of a uniform Indian Penal Code, submitted in 1837 but enforced only in 1862.

Though the British had sought to improve and standardize the legal system in India, their reforms were not entirely successful. Though, as RadhikaSingha has argued, the Company established a ‘despotism of law’, this system was riddled with contradictions. Thus, while individual culpability was the principle upon which the Indian Penal Code operated, with the passing of the Thuggee Act, 1836, thugs were collectively tried and sentenced. Furthermore, the British were often caught between their own liberal principles and the judicial practices they abided by in India. They vacillated over legislating against sati, for while on the one hand the practice seemed barbaric, but it was also closely bound up with the religious sentiments of their subjects. Similarly, as Tanika Sarkar has noted, though the 1850s witnessed a furore in Bengal over the issue of age of consent, with reformist and orthodox Indians voicing starkly differing opinions, the British were unwilling to legislate on the matter if the age of consent had been clearly and legally specified in Hindu scriptures.