Topic 1. the Imperial Mission

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Gobbets

The following are various Gobbets that will be used in seminars. You may also make use of them in writing essays, giving full references in a footnote. In most cases, these are original source material, dating back to the period in question. A few are later commentaries that will be used as a basis for discussion.

Topic 1. The Imperial Mission

Gobbet 1

The following quotation is by the British reformer William Wilberforce, Substance of the Speeches of William Wilberforce Esq., on the Clauses in the East-India Bill for Promoting the Religious Instruction and Moral Improvement of the Natives of British Dominions in India, on the 22nd June and the 1st & 12th of July 1813, pp. 92-3. Quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1959, p35.

…let us endeavour to strike our roots into the soil by the gradual introduction and establishment of our own principles and opinions; of our laws, institutions, and manners; above all, as the source of every other improvement, of our religion, and consequently of our morals. … Are we so little aware of the vast superiority even of European laws and institutions, and far more of British institutions, over those of Asia, as not to be prepared to predict with confidence, that the Indian community which should have exchanged its dark and bloody superstitions for the genial influence of Christian light and truth, would have experienced such an increase of civil order and security, of social pleasures and domestic comforts, as to be desirous of preserving the blessings it should have acquired; and can we doubt that it would be bound even by the ties of gratitude to those who have been the honoured instruments of communicating them.

Gobbet 2

Speech by Thomas Macaulay of 10 July 1833, in Macaulay, Complete Works, Vol.xi, pp.585-6. Quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1959, p.45.

It may be that the public mind in India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having been instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own. The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconstant to our arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.

Gobbet 3

K.L Datta, Official report on the Enquiry into the Rise of Prices in India, Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta 1914, pp.135-6.

The standard of living among all classes of the population, especially among land-holders, traders and ryots [peasants], has increased very considerably in recent years, and extravagance on occasions of marriage and other social ceremonies has seriously increased. The average villager lives in a better house and eats better food than did his father; brass and other metal vessels have taken the place of coarse earthenware and the clothing of his family in quality and quantity has improved. We may also say that the increase in passenger miles travelled predicates the existence of spare money to pay for railway fares.

Gobbet 4

Romesh Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. Ltd., London 1903, pp. 603-04.

The income of the people of India, per head, was estimated by Lord Cromer and Sir David Barbour in 1882 to be 27 rupees. Their present income is estimated by Lord Curzon at 30 rupees. Exception has been taken to both these estimates as being too high; but we shall accept them for our present calculation. 30 rupees are equivalent to 40 shillings; and the economic condition of the country can be judged from the fact that the average income of the people of all classes, including the richest, is 40 shillings a year against £42 a year in the United Kingdom. A tax of 4s. 8d. on 40 shillings is tax of 2s. 4d. on the pound. This is a crushing burden on a nation which earns very little more than its food. In the United Kingdom, with its heavy taxation of £144,000,000 (excluding the cost of the late war), the incidence of the tax per head of a population of 42 millions is less than £3 10s. The proportion of this tax on the earnings of each individual inhabitant (£42) is only 8d. in the pound. The Indian taxpayer, who earns little more than his food, is taxed 40 per cent more than the taxpayer of Great Britain and Ireland.

Topic 2. Imperial culture

Gobbet 1

Thomas Macaulay, ‘Minute of 2 February 1835 on Education,’ in Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G. M. Young, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1957, pp-721-24.

All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter it will not be possible to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.

What then shall that language be? One-half of the Committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.-But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.

It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same... Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.

Gobbet 2

The following Gobbet is from a book called Prayer (1932) by a theologian called Heiler, quoted in Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford 1990), p.97. Heiler is contrasting Indian and western religion.

Mysticism is the religion of feminine nature. Enthusiasts surrender, a delicate capacity for feeling, soft passiveness are its characteristics. Prophetic religion, on the contrary, has an unmistakably masculine character, ethical severity, bold resoluteness, and disregard of consequence, energetic activity.

Gobbet 3

Gobbet from Philip Woodruffe, The Guardians (London 1954), p.180.

The game of games, easily first in the estimation of all who practised it, was pig-sticking. It was generally encouraged and, though it would not be true that a main had to hunt pig to be thought well of, there is no doubt he had a better chance if he did. To be good after a pig a man must be a horseman, which was in any case a great asset to a district officer. And he must also have just the same qualities - the power of quick but cool judgement, a stout heart, a controlled but fiery ardour and a determination not to be beaten - that are needed at the crisis of a riot, or for that matter of a battle. The kind of man who has those qualities needs to exercise them; it was an old saying in India that pigsticking had saved many a man's liver but it had saved much more than that. The danger and excitement, the ferocity thus harmlessly given an outlet, sweetened men who might otherwise have been soured by files and hot weather and disappointment, as lime sweetens grass soured by poultry. Ugly lusts for power and revenge melted away and even the lust for women assumed - so it was said - reasonable proportions after a day in pursuit of pig.

Gobbet 4

Gobbet from Sir Walter Lawrence, The India we Served (1928) quoted in Ian Copland, India 1885-1947, Longman, Harlow 2001, pp.91-92. Lawrence was senior Indian civil servant of the early 20th century.

Our life in India, our very work more or less, rests on illusion. I had the illusion, wherever I was, that I was infallible and invulnerable in my dealing with Indians. How else could I have dealt with angry mobs, with cholera-stricken masses, and with processions of religious fanatics? It was not conceit, Heaven knows: it was not the prestige of the British Raj, but it was the illusion which is the very air of India. They expressed something of the idea when they called us the ‘Heaven born’, and the idea is really make believe – mutual make believe. They, the millions made us believe we had a divine mission. We made them believe they were right. Unconsciously perhaps, I may have had at the back of my mind that there was a British Battalion and a Battery of Artillery at the Cantonment near Ajmere; but I never thought of this, and I do not think that many of the primitive and simple Mers [community of the area] had ever heard of or seen English soldiers. But they saw the head of the Queen-Empress on the rupee, and worshipped it. They had a vague conception of the Raj, which they looked on as a power, omnipotent, all-pervading, benevolent for the most part but capricious, a deity of many shapes and many moods.

Topic 3. Early Nationalism

Gobbet 1

Memorandum by Rivers Thompson (Lieutenant Governor of Bengal), 14 July 1885, enclosed in a letter from Thompson to Lord Dufferin (Viceroy of India), 15 July 1885, on the ‘advanced party’ of Indian nationalists. Quoted in Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968, p.224.

They have caught very rapidly the idea of the uses of political platforms in England; and meetings on any question of public notoriety, in which they wish to promote their own opinions, are organised by half-a-dozen wire-pullers in Calcutta, and are represented by sensational posters and large-types telegrams in the newspapers as the unanimous views of the public-spirited and enthusiastic community. They do not even limit the publicity of their operations to Calcutta and India, but carry the game further by extending the publicity to England.

Gobbet 2

Alan Octavian Hume, ‘Why India needs the Congress’ (1885) in C.H. Philips (ed.) The Evolution of India and Pakistan: Select Documents, Oxford University Press 1962, pp.141-3.

Do you not realise that by getting hold of the great lower middle classes before the development of the reckless demagogues, to which the next quarter of a century must otherwise give birth, and carefully inoculating them with a mild and harmless form of the political fever, we are adopting the only certain precautionary method against the otherwise inevitable ravages of a violent and epidemic burst of the disorder? I know that both in these provinces and the Punjab there are many officials – good men and true though not far-seeing – who are publicly and privately doing their utmost to impede the progress and hinder the happy development of this great and beneficent movement; but. Gentlemen, as they are good men, acting, though ignorantly, in all good faith, they will be very sorry later for this, and they will regret that before opposing they did not first take the trouble of thoroughly understanding the movement...

Gobbet 3

C. Sankaran Nair ( President of the Indian National Congress in 1897) in his memoirs, as quoted in K.P.S. Menon, C. Sankaran Nair, Delhi 1967, p.35. Nair, who was from South India and not a Brahman, stated that the position of those in the Congress who were not Brahmans:

…was not very agreeable. On the journey to the north to attend the Congress meetings our Brahman friends would often ostentatiously avoid our company when taking meals. This is done by Brahmans in the north only in the case of low castes. They would tell us we were Sudras, which in North India meant a low caste. to us, who belonged to the old ruling race in this Province, this was repellent; and as we did not want to create a scene, we stayed away from the Congress.