Through what ideologies did the British seek to justify or legitimise their rule over India?


“The strangest of all political anomalies” was how Thomas Macaulay described the British Indian Empire. Indeed, the activities of the British in India constitute a curious period in the history of both the countries involved; a dim, half-fabulous tale of ferocious greed and valour, succeeded by the monotonous rule of a bureaucracy, treated sometimes with awed bewilderment, and sometimes with plain disgust. Between a suspicious, sardonic home country and a colonised people that was in turns passive, defiant and rebellious, the Englishmen in India constantly found themselves struggling to find an ideological position that would aptly justify their actions. This essay attempts to briefly discuss the various ideological stands that the British used, at various stages of their rule in India, to legitimise their imposition of colonial rule over a distant foreign land.

Following the advent of its rule in India, the East India Company, for several years, functioned more or less like any of the various native rulers under the suzerainty of the Mughals; duly recognising the authority of the Mughal emperor, issuing coins in his name, and using Persian as the official language. Under the system of “double government”, recommended by Lord Clive himself, the criminal justice system was left in the hands of nawabi officials, while matters of civil and fiscal administration were brought under the control of the company. This policy of expediency and pragmatism to avoid civil disturbances, was gradually replaced by an increasingly Anglicised structure of administration. This change, however, did not come about in a revolutionary way. In the words of historian Eric Stokes, the British saw themselves “as inheritors rather than innovators, as revivers of a decayed system”. This idea of a “decayed system” followed from a prevalent notion about India in the west; that of a land of past glory and subsequent degeneration. This way of looking at India’s past was accompanied by the zeal to know more about Indian culture and tradition, as manifested in the undertakings of scholars like Sir William Jones, who studied the Indian languages, with what he claimed was an aim to return to the Indians their own forgotten culture and legal system, which had fallen prey to the monopoly of the learned priestly classes (pundits and maulvis). Jones established a linguistic connection between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, as belonging to the same Indo-European family of languages, thereby pushing India’s antiquity to equal that of the classical West. With this began the Orientalist tradition in India, leading to the founding of institutions like the Calcutta Madrassa (1781), the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784) and the Sanskrit College in Banaras (1794), all meant to promote the study of Indian languages and scriptures.

Orientalism, as an ideology, has been subjected to much historical analysis. Edward Said (1978) views Orientalism as knowledge thrust from above and legitimised by the power of the colonial state; a part and parcel of an imperialist programme. This view has been criticised by scholars like Eugene Irschick, who see Orientalism as knowledge produced through a process of dialogue in which colonial officials, Indian commentators and native informants participated in a collaborative intellectual exercise. However, it cannot be denied that the Indian participants in the process seldom played a definitive role in its final outcome. Irschick, too, acknowledges that the most important aspect of the cognitive enterprise of Orientalism was to “produce a knowledge of the past to meet the requirements of the present”, i.e., to service the needs of the colonial state.

Rosane Rocher (1993) also rejects Said’s indictment of Orientalist scholarship on grounds that it collapses the entire history of Orientalism into a single consistent discourse, in space and time and across political, social, and intellectual identities, ignoring the precise relations between the genesis and uses of particular forms of knowledge and their immediate historical environments; thereby, “obscuring the more central issue of the intricate dialectics between the pursuit of knowledge and governmental pursuits”. Rocher’s analysis of a sample of Orientalist projects throw important light on the range of interactions between intellectual and governmental concerns that they represent. She mentions projects like the two treatises on Hindu law, the first commissioned by Hastings in 1773 and published in English translation by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1776) under the title A Code of Gentoo Laws; the second proposed to Cornwallis in 1788 by Sir William Jones and published in English translation by Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1796-98) after Jones’s death under the title A Digest ofHindu Law on Contracts and Successions. Both were government projects from conception to consumption. Knowledge was generated on government premises for government use. Yet, the publication and distribution in Britain of the English translation of the Code was not intended as a tool of law enforcement but as an advertisement for Indian culture. Its targeted audience was neither the rulers nor the ruled in India but the home administration of the East India Company and the British public at large. Orientalist projects such as the translation of the Bhagavadgita did not stem from administrative concerns, yet were used for political purposes. As with the translation of the Code, the targeted audience was not in India, but in Britain. Diffusing a knowledge of the Gita in Britain was a second instalment in the advertising campaign Hastings waged on behalf of Indian culture as the legitimizing foundation for his orientalist form of government. Neither Hastings nor Wilkins could have anticipated that the admiration for Indian culture, as represented in the Gita, that they sought to inspire in the British public would influence the perception Indians had of their own culture. Thus, Rocher highlights the multiplicity of factors that bore on Orientalist projects and the diversity and occasionally unintended nature of the outcomes of this interplay.

Bernard Cohn (1996) talks about how the study of Indian languages by the British Orientalists, largely with the help of indigenous religious authorities, had administrative functions to serve. For instance, the study of Persian was necessitated in the aftermath of the Battle of Plassey to recruit and train an Indian army and to develop a system of alliances and treaties with native independent powers. Sanskrit, seen as the other Indian “classical” language was studied to gain a better understanding of the Hindu codes and laws. Besides, regional (“vulgar”) languages like Bengali were promoted to facilitate communication in administration at the provincial level. Besides these immediate functions, the Orientalist discourse had another political purpose to serve, as argued by Thomas Trautmann. By propagating the idea that the British and the Indians share a relationship rooted deep in the classical past, reflected in the supposed linguistic lies between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, the British sought to morally bind the Indians to colonial rule through a rhetoric of “love” and obligation.

Orientalism in practice is best discernible in the administrative policies of the Company under Warren Hastings. The basic tenet of this ideology was that the conquered people had to be governed by their own laws. This required that the British administrators be well informed about the indigenous customs and laws, which they sought to assimilate into the administrative machinery. This political vision led to the establishment of the Fort William College at Calcutta in 1800, in order to train civil servants in Indian languages and tradition. It is to be noted, however, that although the Orientalist discourse, initially centred on a respect for ancient Indian traditions, produced a body of knowledge about the Indian society that highlighted not only the past glory of the Indian civilisation (owing largely to the Aryans, the distant kin of the Europeans), but also its subsequent degeneration. This served to legitimise authoritarian rule as it appeared that India needed to rescued from its present predicament and elevated to the state of progress achieved by Europe; thereby, leading to the demise of Orientalism as a governmental policy.

The Orientalist policies of Hastings were rejected by Lord Cornwallis around 1793. Cornwallis advocated greater Anglicisation of the Company’s administrative system in India, in keeping with the ideologies of the Whig political system in Britain. These encompassed greater legalisation of the system, leading to the establishment of a more formal new legal system, with well defined duties for officials like the district collector, the magistrates, lawyers, etc. The land revenue system underwent restructuring, with collection rights being increasingly vested with the British. Cornwallis’s efforts were supported by Lord Wellesley, who aimed at limiting government interference in administration and ensuring the separation of the judiciary from the executive. These moves were part and parcel of a collective effort on part of the Company to emancipate the Indian masses from what they termed “Oriental despotism”. However, as Thomas Metcalf has argued, this disdain for despotism actually provided implicit justification for the autocracy of the Raj. In an attempt to curb the influence of the local rajas and zamindars, the Company state took utmost care in surveying and policing the territory, thereby converting itself into the “despot” it sought to protect the Indians from. This paternalistic attitude laid the foundation of the Company’s authoritarian rule in India. This conservatism exhibited by the Company officials is not unrelated to the domestic political situation in England, facing the threat of radical Jacobinism. The process of greater Anglicisation of the administration under Cornwallis and Wellesley is reflective of this conservatism.

Around the early 19th century, two distinct trends were emerging in the administration of the East India Company, as pointed out by Eric Stokes. In Bengal, Cornwallis introduced the system of Permanent Settlement; while Madras saw introduction of the Ryotwari Settlement under Thomas Munro, who was supported in his efforts by the likes of Elphinstone and Metcalfe. Under the Permanent Settlement, revenue was settled with the zamindars, not the peasants, on a long-term basis. The aim was to liberate individual enterprise from the shackles of custom through private property rights, thus paving the way for modernisation of the economy and the society. The Ryotwari Settlement, on the other hand, intended to preserve the village communities of India by settling the revenue directly with the peasants, thereby liberating them from the oppressive revenue extraction they were subjected to by the local landlords. Both these systems were based on the same fundamental principles of centralised sovereignty and sanctity of private property, to be protected by British laws. This marked the phase of Romanticism in the imperial ideology of British India, which saw attempts to consolidate the Company’s state in India through appeal to the sentiments of the conquered people and giving them what was meant to be a chance for bettering their standard of living. However, in the due course of history, both these systems failed not only to satisfy the fiscal demands of the Company, but also aggravated rather than elevating the grievances of both the landlords and he peasants.

There was another trend emerging around this time. So far, there had been a certain amount of restrain and conservatism in administration exhibited by the likes of Cornwallis and Munro, determined by the expediencies of administering a newly conquered territory and at the same time raising sufficient revenue to pay for the Company’s annual investments. The situation began to change with further conquests and pacifications, and consolidation of the Company’s position in India. Besides, by 1800, the Industrial Revolution in Britain necessitated the development of India as a base for supplying raw materials and a market for consuming manufactured goods. Around this time, there also emerged in Britain several new intellectual currents that preached the idea of improvement and pushed forward the issue of reform, both at home and in India. Evangelicalism, Liberalism and Utilitarianism emerged as new ideologies, ultimately changing the very nature of the Company’s rule in India.

According to the doctrine of Evangelicalism, India had been conquered through acts of sin and crime. However, instead of preaching the abolition of this sinful rule, it advocated its reform, so that Indians could avail the benefit of good governance. Evangelicalism preached the permanence of British rule and advocated change and improvement as its mission. It had Charles Grant as its chief exponent. Grant, in 1792, stated that the crucial problem of India was the religious ignorance of the people. This, he argued, could be remedied through dissemination of the Christian light, which should be the principle objective of the British rule in India. Hid idea was furthered in the Parliament by William Wilberforce, leading to the passage of the Charter Act of 1813, which allowed Christian missionaries to enter India without restrictions. According to Stokes, there was an overlap of interest between the Evangelists and the free-trade merchants, who also wanted the Company to shift its attention from its functions as a trader to those of a ruler in order to bring about the improvements and changes that India needed to become a good supplier of raw materials and consumer of finished products. In fact, it was Charles Grant who presided over the passage of the Charter Act of 1833, which took away the Company’s monopoly rights over Indian trade.

This period between 1828-56 saw the coming into play of the doctrine of Liberalism, embodied in Thomas Macaulay’s vision that the British administrator’s task was to civilise rather than conquer, thereby setting a liberal agenda for the emancipation of India through governance. This era is characterised by a fervour for reforms. It was in this period that the Company vehemently promoted English education, and enacted laws for the abolition of sati (1829), the sanction of the remarriage of widows (1856), etc. As suggested by Stokes, it may have been an aberration of the ideology of Liberalism – which sought to bring about social reforms through legislation – that led to the genesis of Utilitarianism, with its distinctive authoritarian tendencies. Utilitarianism, as a philosophy of the government, first became explicit in the policies of James Mill. These were dictated by the twin philosophies of good laws and efficient administration. According to Mill, India’s past economic and cultural riches were nothing but an empty legend perpetuated by the “susceptible imagination” of the Orientalists. What India needed was not a return to some glorious mythical past, but improvement and change to be effected in the present through wise governance, accompanied by good legislation. Mill was an important driving force behind the appointment, under Lord Macaulay, of a Law Commission (1833), which drew up an Indian Penal Code (1835) on the model of a centrally, logically and coherently formulated code. A central difference between the Utilitarians and the Liberals was with regard to the question of Anglicisation. While Liberals like Lord Macaulay advocated the introduction of English education in India, Utilitarians like Mill favoured vernacular education as more suited to the immediate needs of India. Thus, as Metcalf puts it, there was, around this time, a “dilemma” – an overlap – between Liberalism and Utilitarianism in the ideological outlook in British India, epitomised by Lord Bentinck, who abolished sati and female infanticide through legislation. Although an ardent believer in effectiveness of the rule of law as an agent of change, he also had a deep sense of respect for classical Indian traditions. Even the official discourse on the proposed reform of sati was grounded in the logic that this practice was not sanctioned by the scriptures.

This dilemma continued to persist through much of the first half of the 19th century. In the post-1857 period, however, Paternalism emerged as the dominant ideology of the British in India. As Metcalf argues, the experience of the revolt embittered the British towards the Indians and they began to see reform as “pointless and dangerous”. Reforms, nonetheless, did continue to be introduced, as in the Proclamation of the Crown (1858), the patronage for education, the Indian Councils Act (1861) and the Local Self-government Act (1882), etc. What was distinct now was that these reforms were more of the colonising power’s response to articulate political demands of the Indians, rather than attempts to revive a glorious, but decaying, tradition. There was a definite waning of the veneration for Indian traditions, which was now replaced by an assertion of the superiority of the European race. Such ideas were given currency by the rise of racial sciences in Victorian England, which placed physical features over languages as the chief marker of racial identity. Under this theory, the image of India’s glorious past was significantly altered to give primacy to the founding of the Vedic civilisation by the invading white-skinned Aryans through a confrontation with the dark-skinned Indian aborigines. This new Orientalist discourse viewed India as a backward caste-ridden society, totally incapable of self-governance; thereby, legitimising authoritarian colonial rule.

Such racial arrogance was, by no means, unheard of before the mid-19th century. It was quite evident in Cornwallis’s creation of an aloof elite bureaucracy, strictly separated from the ruled. Further, British soldiers were forbidden to have sexual relations with Indian women and were confined to army cantonments, quarantined from infectious diseases and “Oriental vices”. Physical segregation between the rulers and the ruled was, perhaps, most overtly expressed in the arrangement of settlement in the capital city of Calcutta, which was divided, along racial lines into a “White Town” and a “Black Town”, intersected by a “Grey Town”, dominated by the Eurasians (children of mixed marriages). What is worth noting is that during the first half of the 19th century, this sense of racial superiority was mixed with a certain liberal optimism, as expressed in Lord Macaulay’s ambition to cultivate European tastes in the indolent Indian. This optimism received a major setback after the revolt of 1857. The Indians, who were earlier seen as only being childish and effeminate and requiring protection, were now seen as also being primitive, savage and roguish. This served to justify the imposition of strict colonial administration over them. As Bernard Cohn states, the Imperial Assemblage of 1877, which resolved the ambiguity of sovereignty by proclaiming Queen Victoria the Empress of India, completed the consolidation of British authoritarianism in India. It was this strong, structured authoritarian imperial order that the Indian Nationalist Movement found itself struggling against in the early 20th century.

Thus, we see that with the benefit of hindsight, historians have categorised the imperial ideologies prevalent in British India into the doctrines of Orientalism, Whig Politics, Romanticism, Evangelicalism, Liberalism, Utilitarianism and Paternalism. Such categorisation is, however, far from being neat and precise. Essentially, the British imperial ideology for India was a product of intellectual and political crosscurrents at home, with functional adjustments made according to pressures from the ruled, and it varied from one generation to another, with multiple overlaps and cross-ideological borrowing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2004.
  • Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge: The British in India, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.
  • Metcalf, Thomas. Ideologies of the Raj; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  • Rocher, Rosane. ‘British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: the Dialectics of Knowledge and Government’ in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer ed. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
  • Stokes, Eric. The English Utilitarians and India; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.