Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation: Empire, Identity, and India 9780195681598, 0195681592

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Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation

EM P IR E ,

ID E N T IT Y ,

AND

INDIA

Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation

P e t e r R o bb

o xfo rd U N IV E R S I T Y PR ESS

OXFORD U N IV E R S IT Y PRESS

YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

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Contents

vii

Preface

x

Acknowledgements Introduction

1

PART I E m p ir e , L ib e r a l ism , a n d P o l it ic a l O r g a n iz a t io n

1 From Clive to Kipling c h a p te r

ch apter

13

2

Towards the Nation

43

CHAPTER 3

Borders and Allegiances pa rt

58

n

S o m e B o u n d a r ie s a n d I d e n t it ie s CHAPTER 4

Completing ‘Our Stock of Geography’, or an Object ‘Still More Sublime’: Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of Mysore, 1799-1810

93

CHAPTER 5

The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s 127 CHAPTER 6

The Impact of British Rule on a Religious Community: Reflections on the Trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah of Patna in 1865 CHAPTER 7

Muslim Identity and Separatism in India: The Significance of M.A. Ansari 197 Index

111

Preface

Exposing one’s past to a new audience, or once again to an older one, seem: to imply a lack of tact. One half forgets what one has written, and suspect: that others, if they ever read it, may have forgotten it too. But scruples can b< suppressed, and so, though I had not considered anything of the kind, I readily agreed when asked by Oxford University Press to republish some of my essay: with extensive new introductions. The introduction forms Part I and th< illustrative essays are in Part II. The invitation encouraged me to look bacl at some of my themes and interests, re-reading those half-forgotten paper: and writing new chapters. The work will appear in two volumes; the seconc is titled Peasants, Political Economy, and Law. In some ways the two volumes offer a further reflection on questions raisec in my earlier books. There have been four main phases or elements in m] work. The first concerned British constitutional and political policy. The seconc (not yet abandoned) concentrated on the agrarian history of Bihar, but als< recalled my first subject by relating colonial policy to the expansion of th< state and to theories of governance and development. The third phase was £ kind of academic sponsorship, in which I edited and wrote introductions tc books on diverse topics, particularly concerned with ‘South Asian meanings’ if such exist. The fourth is an ongoing study of the British Library’s Blechynder diaries, and hence European domestic life, urban development, and pett} administration in Calcutta from the 1790s to the 1820s. This also raise: questions about the impact of empire on both Britain and India. In much o this, there was a tendency—perhaps it is a temptation or an indulgence—tc try to trace deeper connections across apparent subject boundaries. Partly foi that reason, at least one other theme has coexisted with the others, and provide: the focus for these books. It is colonialism and identity in a broad sense. After I had decided on the theme, a crucial question was whether or not t( revise the chosen essays in order to bring them up to date and, more difficult remove any overlap and weave them into a single, unified argument. The term: on which I was asked to produce the book implied that (if I wished) I coulc let the essays stand as they had first been published. I decided that on the whol or Islamic community. It supposed that rule had a particular purpose and that, in some circumstances, a ruler could be opposed because his duties were not performed. What, then, was different after the European conquest of India? The conquerers claimed that they acted in the name of universalism (in fact one they had invented); but they also adopted specific elements of the systems they overthrew, systems that encouraged the state to act in the general interest within certain spheres, some of which the British did not otherwise consider important. There had always been some compact between rider and ruled, and so colonial government was sometimes old in essence but new in form. In the case of Islam, this applied to Islamic law (which the Company did in part adopt and develop), and to education, charity, and so on. In the Hindu system, it was closely interrelated social and religious obligations at all levels of society, duties for which the ruler was the ultimate inspiration and regulator The British had to take account of the need to recruit servants, to woo supporters, and to meet expectations among Indians. There was always a need for the British to sell their rule and institutions to the Indians. I argued at length in Chapter 1 that, although one school of thought attributed empire to conquest, a more important school and an influential constituency of opinion in Britain (and later, internationally) wanted it to be empire by consent, on ‘trust’, in the phrase later invented by the League of Nations. Certainly it needed as much or more consensus than force. It is easy, therefore, to find occasions when this large, avowedly modernizing government drew back from confronting Indian norms and beliefs, over caste, for example: or when a British civil servant of the new educated breed, busily engaged in what he regarded as scientific government (or for that matter technological innovation), expressed either his inability to change India or his amazement at how well India coped without him. The character of the state in India was determined partly by the fact that it was ‘colonial’—importing solutions, but also having

Borders and Allegiances

61

to make special adjustments—and partly by its anyway being largely Indian in personnel and audience. Colonial operations were even more mixed than they appear because Indians habitually chose whether or not to make use of the British system and when to use alternatives: for example, whether to solve a dispute through the Western law system or through traditional authority, village councils, and so on. When they did use the British institutions, they often did so for purposes quite different from the ones intended. I have called this an Indian ‘colonizing’ of the Raj. Moreover the British in India dissociated themselves from many of the responsibilities expected of them, but gradually they were forced back towards these duties. They espoused universalism when Macaulay introduced new legal codes on English principles adapted remarkably little for India. But from the first, they also created special laws for India. They elevated individual rights, but supported groups and communities. They denounced India’s decadent chaos and created unitary states, but stressed India’s diversity and plurality as a principle of administration. The trajectory was not unambiguous. The British were replaced by rulers who took socio­ religious, ‘national’ duties far more seriously, albeit in a new situation and through different means from those in pre-colonial times, and sometimes for electoral reasons. It is no accident that the cow was a potent political symbol in India. These rather facile comparisons between pre-colonial, colonial, and even independent regimes suggest again that one reason for the character of colonial government in India was In dia. Aspects of the revolution in colonial government were brought about by the need to confront problems of alienation, adaptation, and incorporation, and indeed to construct a new role and justification for rule in the midst of a range of conflicting interests, and to invent for Indians a reason why they should accept, or even welcome, colonial rule (as some of them did). This is not to say, however that a revolution in government did not occur.3 The ‘Indian’ elements did not exclude changes but rather were often transformed themselves, as we saw with revenue administration and land law. Chapters 1 and 2 noticed the impact of quasi­ liberal goals that expanded government, and Peasants will say more about laws and categorizations that helped develop a discourse of rights. There were important differences in ideology and aims; and the governmental changes were in methods as well. The methods were at some level imported. The tale of their origins is familiar. In England, the sixteenth century (the era of Henry VIII, Thomas 3 Versions of the following arguments were first presented to a seminar in Osaka City University, Japan. I am grateful for comments and questions on that occasion.

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Cromwell, Cranmer, Elizabeth I, and Shakespeare) had been a watershed as to how government was conceived and carried out. Later this change was reinforced through the influence of the Enlightenment and the rivalry of the evolving nation states of the Atlantic seaboard in Europe. New forms of bureaucracy reshaped government. There was not only physical and ecclesiastical, but also administrative coercion (surveillance, policing, regulation). Consensus was sought through ceremony and education which were partly of clerkly devising. Even the external rivalries of culture, economy, and war were gradually bureaucratized in departments of state. This was the model that was exported. In India, it was already apparent in the eighteenth century that the English conquerors thought in terms of bordered states governed by a sovereign administration, and that they were confused when they encountered other models of statehood. Completing the circle, the administrative revolution in the West was influenced by colonial experience— it was financed by empire and generated by an imperial agenda. (The empire’s contribution and the role of colonial people in spreading the revolution globally are important questions that await full study.) Within India, indigenous elements and Indian participation also became significant for transmitting a new mix of practices to India. The undoubted transformations of the system of administration may be measured in many ways. I have emphasized the growing range of state interventions. If we ignore the early anomaly of the East India Company’s involvement in trade, and legacies in the form of the opium trade, the salt monopoly and so on, then we can see a gradual expansion in the tasks of government in India. Economic responsibility was the key: the move was from building infrastructure (public works intended to pay their way) to social responsibility (famine relief and public works of a protective kind); there was also a shift of emphasis from external to internal economic management. More broadly, there was a move away from purely military goals alongside an acquiescence in the status quo of the society and economy, towards social management and improvement—protective laws, social reform, education, health, economic development. Money mattered in giving policy an impact. Peasants will outline how a modem fiscal structure emerged with regard to land revenue policy—in effect, the objectification and bureaucratization of tax and spending policies, leading to the expectation of representative government. Such changes drove the development of the administration, which was also their instrument. Some aspects of the change are familiar. In India, one sees the acquisition and ordering of knowledge and the framing of rules gradually coalescing into a set of bureaucratic principles and structures. Print publishing was vital, and more extensive use of the English language assisted in easing supervision. But

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63

as I have discussed elsewhere,4 the key was a system in which tasks and responsibilities were precisely allocated, and checking was simplified. This was developed by the East India Company between the 1770s and the 1840s, in advance of the full establishment of the Indian Civil Service. Cydostyled and standardized returns were introduced in local administration from the 1830s. Definite spheres of delegated authority were established, and career hierarchies provided—promotion rather than punishment being the goad to efficiency. Legal codes and procedures were standardized from the 1860s, despite some opposition from the alternative tradition of personal rule by district officers. Separate codes persisted for particular categories of people, including personal law on the basis of religion; yet they too were codified, clarified, recorded, and made subject to precedent, in just the same way (in principle, at least) as were administrative decisions. Hence both the Indian bureaucracy and the legal system rested on paper at all levels—in bulk in the upper reaches, and by duplication at the base.5Information flowed into offices according to established routines, with actions logged at every stage. Each function was allocated to a specific official. A sense of duty was inculcated deliberately in the services that carried out these tasks. A consequence of this system was the separation of different government functions and the professionalization of those responsible for them. This brings in another of the elements I have proposed, the revolution in attitudes to knowledge and to its wielders. More than in the past, or in different ways, government was regarded as a science with many separate disciplines. Departments grew, with particular tasks and know-how being added. Training came to be important for recruitment, for advancement, and also for carrying out the increasingly complex functions of the state. Inter-departmental feuds erupted; bureaucratic fiefdoms came to be defended. Change was inevitable because (as we saw in Chapter 1) generalist government officers were unable to cope with the weight and complexity of the business and information. There could no longer be the one fount of all state power and actions. Notwithstanding, something of the generalist tradition persists in India even to this day in the district officers of the Indian Administrative Service, inheritors of the role of the Indian Civil Service. However, from the mid-nineteenth century, the district officer’s actual tasks were increasingly hemmed in by the jobs performed by other agencies—the police, the courts, the engineers, the medical officers, and so on—and they came to reflect the residual priorities 4 Peter Robb, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act o f 1885, and British Rule in India, Richmond, Surrey, 1997, chapter 2. 5 Peter Robb, Evolution o f British Policy towards Indian Politics, 1880-1920: Essays on Colonial Attitudes, Imperial Strategies and Bihar, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 34-5.

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of the government of the day. In the twentieth century, they became strongly political in character. The jobs mattered, but I shall not be making any further effort directly to assess the influence of the new kinds of employment under an officials’ Raj. I do not underestimate their importance for writers, soldiers, peons, judges, doctors, everyone from teachers to ticket-collectors. The work experiences of the large numbers of ‘modern’ employees certainly contributed to the construction of ‘modern’ identities. Building on indigenous association, including what Bayly called the north Indian ‘ecumene’,6 the colonial government offered models for the conduct of affairs. It helped provide skills and methods to groups that sought to organize and represent themselves. Those in closest propinquity were most affected—they took leading parts in developing institutions of civil society and politics. Here was a clear practical and intellectual impact of colonial government, despite the repeated objections to government interference, in social policy especially, even from liberal politicians. (The same people, and their more ‘religious-minded’ colleagues, also called for government intervention when it suited them.) It would be another interesting project to note the number and range of employment, to identify the players, and to trace the adaptations and imitations of method; but it is too large to attempt here. Instead, partly as a surrogate for that fuller analysis, I take the choosing of boundaries to stand for the overall order imposed by bureaucracy. This reflects what government employees were being encouraged to do in daily operations as well as in more summative work. It singles out a central feature of the new methods of administration. The delineation of borders and categories showed the emergence of a pervasive, impersonal, sovereign territorial state. The bureaucratic choices involved definitions that were to an extent variable and arbitrary, and as much a matter of ideology as of method. The choices implied new answers to two questions: What is a state? What should governments do? They were related to two further questions: How far was the state ‘colonial’? How far was it ‘Indian’? We know that the state became a sovereign manager and that, rhetorically, it acted to express its responsibilities. In India, those roles both reflected and tempered its colonialism. They reflected it because the British were importing and imposing something different, or developing what existed in different ways. They tempered it, if only at the margins, because the expressed public goals of the government were more positive than the underlying reality of despotism and exploitation. 6 C.A. Bayly, Empire and Inform ation: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communications in India 1780-1870, Cambridge, 1996; and Origins o f Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making o f Modem India, Delhi, 1998.

Borders and Allegiances 65

It was a project for both colonial ruler and subject alike. The Muslims of British India are an obvious illustration. They were divided by faith into Sunni and Shia, and by many heterodoxies of local or sectional practice or belief. They were divided by region, class, culture, and language. But the British as well as many Muslim political leaders came to express the view that they constituted a nation; that their religion made for common interests in all spheres; that it was original and distinctive and internally unifying. Separatists then drew the conclusion that the defined identity needed its own government. Subsequent events—the divide of huge numbers of Muslims between India and Pakistan, and then the division of Pakistan and Bangladesh—may be taken to indicate how arbitrary these claims to nationality were. On the other hand, there were limits or tendencies that permitted or encouraged the identities that were chosen at this time. The Indian Muslims were, in my view, predisposed to choose religion as a basis for identity, as were colonial officials to accept this, because of a legacy of earlier choices and conditions. (See Chapters 6 and 7.) More generally, there were, as already suggested in the Introduction, distinctive features of material culture that made one people or place different from others. Longstanding histories, economic conditions, and prevalent concepts prepared people to accept certain identities. Choices were then made under intellectual, social, and institutional influences. Many of the most important of such choices in colonial India, I would argue, were generated by the state and were expressed in the state’s rules and practices. We have noted that the state changed partly because Indians expected and wanted to do things differently, and because the British needed collaborators and Indians made use of colonial institutions. The alternative goals required the state to become at the same time more ‘Indian’ in its perspectives and in form more like Britain’s government. This paradox, I have been arguing, is one of the keys to the impact of the new ‘state’ on India’s politics and society. It was also expressed in definitions of place, rule, and subject. Two elements of the story will be discussed further in the following sections: the influence of administrative boundaries (foreshadowing Chapter 5), and the impact of categorization through the example of languages. Another element, to be taken up in Peasants, is the politicization of economic and social responsibility (the case of famine). Here ‘borders’ are the central issue, in different ways. To consider them is to think about the significance of the well-known idea that colonial rule reinforced the concept of a bounded state in India, or even in some senses introduced it. A caveat should be added once again. In identifying the state as a context shaping protest and the ideologies of identity, I am not implying a necessary or direct formative link between leaders and followers, or even between conditions and responses. As stated at the outset, my stance has always been

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that questions have many aspects, and that elites and underlings and contexts all need to be examined together. But it is because they all interact that the proper study of the colonial Indian state is a necessary part of an overall picture.

The Frontier Once we link the new role of the state to new categorizations and enumerations of society, we can see how processes of definition would have affected the ways in which Indians saw themselves (as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5). One obvious aspect, and a model for yet others, was the establishment of administrative borders. It is an aspect to which relatively little attention has been paid, except in the case of the partitions of Bengal in 1905 and of India in 1947. Colonial units were always codified, whether or not they reflected existing divisions of land and culture. Imperialism, it seems, was always expanding to the limit (by definition, perhaps, power is never really held in reserve), the initial stage in India having been a consolidation of political units directly through ruling over them, and the second having occurred when suzerains were ground into monarchs and regions into states between the mills of rival empires.7 The places or regions named in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquests changed their nature, their very meaning as territories, once they were measured and demarcated. The boundaries were reinforced by their representations in laws, policies, gazetteers, and maps. These modem units of ‘nations’ were significantly different from other cultural or geographical divisions. A small but interesting example of the process of acquiring bounded territory is the state of Bhutan. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British rulers of Bengal were confused by this country in which spiritual and secular authority (neither aspect clearly supreme) was exercised over people rather than territory. They were infuriated when its people made seasonal migrations into what they considered Bengali lands. Yet this same Bhutan, apparently so isolated, is today concerned about the integrity of its people in their own national land and quarrelling on these grounds with Nepali settlers, ‘Nepali’ of course being another modem construction.8 Nineteenth-century writers and rulers were quite explicit about the frontier, and the different stages of the evolution of states they saw reflected in it. In 7 For details but not analysis in those terms, see B. Prasad, Foundations o f India’s Foreign Policy: Imperial Era 1882-1914, Calcutta, 1979. 8 See Leo E. Rose, The Politics o f Bhutan, London, 1977; Shantiswarup Gupta, British Relations with Bhutan, Jaipur, 1974; Arabinda Deb, Bhutan and India, Calcutta, 1976; and Michael Hutt, Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight o f Refugees from Bhutan, Delhi, 2003, and Michael Hutt ed., Bhutan: Perspectives on Conflict and Dissent, Gartmore, Stirlingshire, 1994.

Borders and Allegiances 67

the most primitive cases there might be personal allegiances, but there was no impersonal citizenship within a particular territory. More recently, social scientists have made similar distinctions. For example, Ainslie Embree wrote an influential article on India’s transition from frontiers to boundaries.9 The modem state has exact, known, and permanent external borders, and within them there is an undivided sovereignty and there are laws to which even the state itself is subject. (Here we come back again in effect to the notion of a nation embodying all the people—the responsible state.) As already suggested, it is not easy to conceptualize pre-colonial concepts of territory, because they evidently were not devoid of measurement or certainty or ‘ownership’ except on superficial examination, and modem ideas and practices have inherited aspects of these. But broadly speaking, it does seem that for pre-modem states (as for estates or villages) frontiers were more likely to be zones of overlapping or intermixing sovereignty. Jurisdiction was stronger at the centre or in some matters than at the periphery (geographically or in terms of function). There were segmentary states in which jurisdiction and functions were divided, though often replicated, in ever-smaller arenas; military states dependent on booty and personal allegiance to a strong leader; ‘feudal’ states; and so on. By contrast, the British attempted to apply the ‘modern’ principles of boundaries to India. They mapped and surveyed endlessly. Maps, like the census, are now seen as defining the modern world and as being, in the hands of states, expres­ sions of power, even invitations to conquest. The modern map has a single form in its exact measurements and conventions of representation, though it may have different meanings and functions. Like landscape painting it links time and space, particularly through measures of human significance. But because the map gives a primacy to place—to soil and location, mixed with and created by people—in the end, once its subjects are able to read it, it empowers nations and communities rather than conquerors and colonialists. In this way the concept of a single national land, and therefore a continuous national history and culture, is derived from Western modes of understand­ ing boundaries. By itself, the map could not achieve such a transformation. But as we have seen, the British also established laws and responsibilities that were universal within the realm as defined territorially. That is to say just as in the nation states of western Europe in the nineteenth century, so in British India, the boundaries were drawn externally, mapping out the land, as well as internally, mapping categories, functions, and rights. As a consequence, the British tried to insist upon setded populations (or at least regulated movement) within 9 This is discussed in Chapter 6, n. 6.

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Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation

these limits, and on equally definite rights and responsibilities for all. These transformations were turned into one of the major excuses for imperial expansion. Change was not suddenly achieved, of course, and I do not mean to exaggerate either the novelty or the completeness of the transformation, in this or in any other regard. The British themselves applied older definitions of the frontier when it suited them—for example in the so-called buffer state of Awadh, where the British resident exercised extraterritorial jurisdiction from 1801 to 1856, especially for and over the Awadhi employees of the Company’s army.10At the edges there were, and long remained, frontier zones rather than boundaries. In 1891 Sir Alfred Lyall, writing in N ineteenth Century,11 talked of the need to keep ‘adjoining’ ‘foreign territory’ free from the ‘occupation’ of ‘powerful neighbours’. The implication was that outside India proper, there was another zone which was ‘foreign’ but also transitional, a kind of buffer over which a protectorate might be established, to adopt Curzon’s terminology from his essay on Frontiers (1907). Out of this ambiguity arose most of British frontier policy. It tended to draw an inner line (not always formally demarcated, even at the end of the colonial period) and then to suppose a range of other lines, marking kinds of influence or claim, progressing outwards until they met and overlapped with similar lines extending from the next supposedly fixed border, which might be of China, Russia, Burma, Iran, or Afghanistan. The result was of course that those main borders were not really fixed at all. Interestingly, this was not dissimilar to ‘traditional’ Indian views of territory. As so often, pragmatism and circumstance tempered doctrine and prescription. Though the British regarded indeterminate zones as survivals from less civilized days and attempted to do away with them, they were never wholly successful in doing so. The inhabitants of the frontier regions, especially the Pathan tribes in the northwest, had other ideas. Periodic military expeditions had to be mounted to ensure that such peoples stayed away from so-called British territory or accepted British terms and influence. Several Afghan wars probed this border as the Younghusband expedition to Tibet did elsewhere early last 10 For a convenient summary, see M.H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764-1858 , Delhi, 1991, pp. 376-86 and 425 (the references cited), and also A Clash o f Cultures: Awadh, the British and the Mughals, New Delhi, 1987, and Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City o f Lucknow, Delhi, 1985; J. Pemble, The Raj, the Indian Mutiny and the Kingdom o f Oudh, 1801-57, Delhi, 1979; P. Reeves (ed.), Sleeman in Oudb , Cambridge, 1971, especially the introduction; and D.P. Sinha, British Relations with Oudh, 1801-1856, Calcutta, 1983. 11 Nineteenth Century 30, p. 313.

Borders and Allegiances 69

century and the so-called trade agents in the following decades.12 This was the same gradual process, in many senses, which had led to the expansion of British territories across the Subcontinent in the first place—though in these cases further extensions of British territory were only slight. In his Romanes lecture already referred to,13 Lord Curzon identified three borders on the exterior, to the northwest of British India: the border of direct administration, the frontier of ‘active protection’ (the Durand Line), and the outer or strategic frontier, meaning the far northern and western borders of Afghanistan—which therefore was not a ‘buffer state’ but a region within British influence, representing an outer frontier zone. (Curzon’s analysis may or may not have been wholly true in practice—if true, then Britain never intended to create a strong and viable Afghanistan, and bears responsibility for the recent state of that country.) Hence frontiers were not entirely turned into boundaries after all. Colonial rule went a long way to establishing fixed frontiers, but did not complete the project. Pakistan’s difficulties on its borders and the short Indo-Chinese war are markers of this failure. There were still dotted lines on the map in 1947, and boundary commissions had yet to do their work. What was even more serious was that there were zones of influence that still lay outside any formal state. Pakistan is a symbol of this imperfection. Careful drawing of borders to form a state for Muslims inevitably left huge numbers of Muslims in India, with terrible consequences during the Partition and subsequently continued ambiguities over their status. The same might be said for most of the internal borders. Colonial government was by no means wholly successful in imposing its own categories, laws, and institutions on Indian practice. There were many zones in Indian society that were more or less beyond state regulation. Undoubtedly there were also withdrawals by the British rulers from certain previously expected functions, especially with regard to religion. External markers, however firm, did not wholly remove the internal frontiers that indicated areas of life with which the state did not directly interfere. Within India proper there were varieties and degrees of sovereignty and control. These exclusions too have had their legacy. The princely states offer a different lesson from this perspective, in that they limited central jurisdiction. Many other confusions and exclusions also existed within the 12 Alex McKay, Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre 1904-1947 , Richmond, Surrey, 1997; see also A.C. McKay, ‘The Establishment of the British Trade Agencies in Tibet: A Survey’, Journal o f the Royal Asiatic Society, 2(3), 1992.1 suspect that the subsequent fate of Tibet resulted in part from its reluctance, until the 1930s, to present itself as a nation state in relation to its powerful neighbours. 13 Lord Curzon of Kedlestone, Frontiers: The Romanes Lecture 1907, Oxford, 1907.

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heart of British India. There was great intrusion by the state, but British reservations about security and about Indian culture and propensities meant that colonial rule did not simply repeat what Habermas called, with regard to Europe, the infiltration of the private by the public sphere.14 Nonetheless, the frontiers were fixed and when ‘frontier tribes’, for instance, resisted intrusions, they inevitably ended up fighting over territory recognized according to the definitions applied by the British or something similar to them. Colonial policy helped export a European understanding of states and juris­ dictions, even though it did not create only what were termed ‘scientific’ fron­ tiers. Pragmatism and R ealpolitik were added to readily defensible points to define the borders. The lines were always fiercely defended by protocol or force of arms; but as already implied, they were often mapped only after the event, so as to outline some more or less vague and unknown territory hith­ erto merely named in a treaty or annexed after the conquest of a central point. The Mughals and the Marathas had done much the same. Though geographi­ cal features were adduced, even at the early stages these boundaries were not all ‘inevitable’ or ‘natural’ barriers waiting to be discovered by a rational analysis of existing strategic considerations, let alone existing language, cul­ ture, history, or institutions. Such strategic or unitary characteristics often had to be created or invented. Curzon recognized this distinction too. Particularly for these reasons, we should not underestimate the impact, to this day, on South Asian peoples of the outer limits, the larger units, and the claims for control established during the colonial period. Most of all, it mattered that effective central authority was consistently extended within territories. British colonial notions of the state contained within them impulses for evolution. Thus, by small steps in a continual process, even provincial British-Indian governments edged towards the independent sovereignty which they were to be partially granted in 1919. For example, they had long bought and sold land for various purposes (subject to sanction), using such powers very extensively in the interest of railway construction and other public works. We come back to ‘altruism’. Governments, including the supposedly feeble one in Bengal, were ready, and indeed often felt constrained, to use their ‘property’ (powers, land, and income) as an instrument for broader changes. That is, not merely to follow rules and consult the legal niceties, but to construct a view of the ultimate public good. This meant that just as land and classes were arranged in rank, so too were priorities and benefits, and it was the job of the state to decide there. There were rules and responsibilities, though there could be trade-offs. For example, in 1910 the Bengal government wanted 14 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation o f the Public Sphere, 1962; translated by Thomas Burge^ Cambridge, 1992; see pp. 141-59.

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to sell to the Port Commissioners in Calcutta a valuable site occupied by the Sibpur Engineering College, intending to use the money to re-establish the college in Ranchi; but it thought the two interests were about equal, so that the transfer would be on easy terms. The central government disagreed and invoked different principles of governance. Though the transaction was approved, a ‘market’ price had to be paid.15 Such technicalities expressed a special need to bend India to the colonial will, by regulation even of the minutiae; but also (and by the same means) a general need to adhere to ‘proper’ forms and goals of ‘civilized’ government under the rule of law. By the 1930s, such exercise of local sovereignty was very largely in local hands (Indian or British colonial), and imperial authority was reserved only in such areas as monetary and constitutional policy or military security. Thus at each level (as argued in Chapter 1) a united, hegemonic, and potentially benevolent state was represented. Partly for this reason, the colonial administrative units often took on popular significance. Borders were significant and contested. Especially among educated contemporaries, they generated loyalties.16It was the new roles and expectations of the state that consolidated popular and rhetorical identifications with defined lands and jurisdictions. Of course it helped that, in colonial India, deliberate efforts were made to urge most estates and districts to stick with ‘natural’ and ‘historical’ borders, on principle and for convenience. Even during British rule, boundaries tended increasingly to be legitimized according to cultural rather than administrative traditions—a discourse more appropriate for nationalistic than for colonial ideology. (In the same way, the British favoured what they took to be legitimate indigenous taboos and norms.) On the other hand, many divisions, provinces, and presidencies were too coloured by accident and political expediency for their boundaries to be altogether consistently drawn. (By the same token, the British imposed their own ideas of social categories.) Here the actions of the state assumed greater importance, but still generated identifications. By the late nineteenth century, even the limits of Commissioners’ Divisions (intermediate groupings of districts introduced in 1829 as part of important bureaucratic reforms) were recognized to be sensitive. On a proposal to change divisional boundaries, splitting Patna Division, H.H. Risley wrote in 1906: ‘The question is not merely one of administrative efficiency and convenience. We have also, especially at the present time [during the anti-Partition agitation 15 Government of India, Revenue and Agriculture Department, Land Revenue Branch proceedings (hereafter R&A Rev), National Archives of India, A 39-40, September 1909. On the transfer of Sibpur College to Ranchi, see ibid.; for rules regarding the transfer of land, see R&A Rev A 25, April 1910, File 88 of 1910. The question was also discussed by the Decentralization Commission of 1907-9. 16 I have discussed this in Robb, Evolution, pp. 72-4 and 90-5.

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in Bengal], to reckon with popular feeling. . . 917 Patna Division was certainly over-large: its population was thought to be 15,514,987, whereas that of Bombay Presidency, excluding Sind, was 15,304,677. In itself, Patna Division reflected no particular regional or cultural identity of long standing. The suggestion that it might be cut in two at the Ganges was sensible in physical and cultural terms. Then, a little less plausibly, it was thought that districts might also be reallocated westwards (Monghyr to Patna Division, and Birbhum or Murshidabad to Bhagalpur Division), thus relieving pressure on the neighbouring Divisions. The Government of India supported the change only on the assurance of the Bengal government that there would be no local opposition—this was the ‘only argument’ that appealed. Later, the Secretary of State for India refused extensive boundary changes because of the political climate.18 Why should administrative divisions have had such significance? They still present major problems in India, as elsewhere in the world.19Risley underestimated the ‘reality’ of sentiment (as with the 1905 partition of Bengal), but he was right when he went on to notice that it was bolstered by self-interest, in this case that of those likely to be affected by consequential changes in the jurisdictions of the courts.20 An Indian or national perspective of boundaries and jurisdictions was being forced upon the British. It was inherent in the current concept of the state. People valued administrative units because of the rhetoric and institutions which grew up within them; because they were presented as cultural and historical units; because they became familiar and could be used as arenas for those seeking reputation and privilege. They were far from being the only such arenas in India, or even the most important to most people; but clearly they did matter to some. Neither wholly primordial nor wholly artificial, such boundaries mattered as labels because of the services and interests they engendered. Chapter 5 shows how people and topology forced the strategy of the thick frontier or the transitional zone upon British officials, who were strongly motivated to rule out such exceptions in the interests of ‘civilization’ and good government. But if we take physical boundaries we can see that, despite some arguments and battles, the colonial rulers were fairly successful in drawing up definite laws dividing different jurisdictions—presidencies, princely states, provinces, divisions, districts, landed estates. Rivers kept shifting their courses 17 See Government of India, Home Department, Establishments Branch Proceed­ ings (hereafter H Est), National Archives of India, A 1-3, May 1907, and 139-42, September 1907. 18 Notes by G. Fell, 20 June, H.A. Stuart, 20 June and 8 August, and E.N. Bakery 11 August 1907, H Est A 139-42, September 1907. 19 Obvious examples are the ‘linguistic’ redrawings of state boundaries in inde­ pendent India, and continuing problems over ‘Sikh’ Punjab or ‘non-Bengali’ Assam. 20 Risley note, 11 March 1906, H Est A 113-17, December 1906.

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inconveniently, but otherwise these borders were not especially problematic, though they meant time-consuming work at the lowest levels. The British also reinforced the idea of India as a ‘natural’ geographical entity with obvious physical frontiers, which they regarded not as sacred topography but merely as defining the sphere in which they and their state were paramount.21 In the 1920s, legal arguments with the state of Hyderabad, effectively sparked off by the possibility of a closer integration of princely states with British India, made it plain that British suzerainty extended throughout the Subcontinent.22 This definition of the state was clearly functional (like those of languages or of landlord and tenant, also considered here). Because it was also ‘public’ and state centred, it set out conditions for the growth of the Indian state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its present predominant position. The British even gave this territory clear international status and recognition well before Independence, reflected for example in India’s founder-membership of the League of Nations.23 In 1947, though culpable in their failure to resolve all ambiguities, and for not caring enough to prevent the terrible and predicted consequences of Partition, they defined external boundaries that have mainly stood the test of war and further partition. These points have not been made only in order to say something about land frontiers. The intention is also to suggest a correspondence between categories in general, and particularly an analogy between political and social or economic typologies. In the latter spheres too, colonial government was by no means wholly successful in imposing its own borders, laws, and institutions on Indian practice. There remained many zones beyond state regulation in Indian society. But on the other hand, as scholars are now extremely, perhaps excessively, aware, there were major consequences from the problematic classifications of Indian society by the colonial rulers.24 Many 21 The firm border—its spread and continuing uncertainty—is the real subject (see chapter 18) of Sir Alfred Lyall’s influential The Rise and Expansion o f the British Dominion in India, London, 1894; 5th edn, 1910; 6th reprint, 1919. 22 See R J. Moore, The Crisis o f Indian Unity 1917-40, Oxford, 1974, pp. 2 5 33; and also Barbara Ramusack, The Princes o f India in the Twilight o f Empire, Columbus, 1978. 23 See Peter Robb, The Government o f India and Reform, Oxford, 1976, pp. 389, and K.J. Schmidt, ‘India’s Role in the League of Nations, 1919-39’, PhD dissertation, Florida State University, 1994. 24 See for example R. Inden, Imagining India, Oxford, 1990; N.G. Barrier (ed.), The Census in British India, New Delhi, 1981; S. Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics and the Raj: Bengal 1872-1937 , Calcutta, 1990; and also Richard Saumarez-Smith, ‘Ruleby-records and Rule-by-reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, new series, XIX(1), 1985. On classification by caste and religion, see also Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept o f Race in South Asia, New Delhi, 1995.

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examples of the broader impact of apparently trivial administrative changes could also be adduced. Ambiguities continued. Even major borders were not really fixed and not that dissimilar to those in traditional Indian views of territory. But perhaps ultimately the consequence was not that frontiers remained vague, but that they could be progressively extended and concretized. The British regarded indeterminate zones as survivals from less-civilized days, and attempted to do away with them. Only occasionally did they confront them with the forces of the army or the law. But a gradual process in many senses had led to the expansion of British territories across the Subcontinent in the first place; and though further extensions of territory in the late nineteenth century were only slight, much of the same process continued to be apparent in the deepening and thickening of once imprecise controls, borders, and categorizations within British India. Moreover, the state was assisted by many other forces in this enterprise of identity- and state-building. Educated Indians, for example, spoke very much in the same terms. Other groups, less directly influenced, also came to value the imposed categories, and to accommodate them to those that had been inherited. Christian missionaries were among those who spread this word, sometimes more effectively than the Word they were proselytizing. For example, in the northeastern regions (the main subject of Chapter 5), the Swedish Baptists from America placed themselves, as they put it, ‘in charge’ of four Naga ‘tribes’, which included ministering to the sick, setting up English middle schools, and—most significantly—translating textbooks and the New Testament into Naga languages. ‘I am hard at work on books,’ wrote Bengt Anderson in 1932. ‘Having taken over the Semas I found they had practically nothing and then found that the Lothas were in the same fix. Last hot season I managed to get the Sema songbook and the Primer off the press and also to mimeograph a textbook in Arithmetic for each tribe.’25 Here there were many conversions, which led to a type of generalized Naga Christian identity, while even those who resisted the missionaries could become beneficiaries of their educational efforts and their linguistic standardizations. Now the Nagas have their own state in the Indian union. Obviously, written 25 Letter from the Anderson family to Dean Arvid Hagstrom, 11 July 1932; see also News & Notes, and Newssheet by Edna and Bengt Anderson, in Bengt V. Anderson Papers, Bethel Seminary Archives, St Paul, Minnesota. See also (loc. cit.) ‘Forty-three years on the frontiers of Assam’, Farewell letters written by friends in Assam, translated by teachers of the Golaghat schools, presented to Dr and Mrs Swanson, 19 April 1936—one Nayia Chundra Das of the Gale Memorial School recalled that Swanson’s Evangelical zeal was so great that he ‘warned, scolded and even whipped some, in love, in order to bring them back to the right’.

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language and education help provide both motivation and means in the search for statehood.26

Languages These examples bring us to another paradigm of borders and categorization, the standardization of language. Knowledge of the English language on the part of Indians from different regions certainly played a part in generating and creating the sense of a nation in India. The use of English was advocated in administration for efficiency and to reduce fraud. A typical example of this impulse is a request by the Collector of Champaran district in 1893 to be permitted to keep the estates ledger account in English, making use of an English-knowing treasury clerk. This would, the Collector argued, ‘check many evils, facilitate inspection and not cause any inconvenience’. The change was approved.27 However the direct influence of English was small on the general popula­ tion.28 Far more important was the role of the state in promoting Indian languages.29 There have been several studies of this, but I will draw some conclusions, mainly from the effects on Bihat 26 They do not guarantee success. In Burma, Ola Hanson ‘clarified’ the Kachin vocabulary, a list of 25,000 words, and translated the Bible into a new written form of the language. Still the Kachins have been largely thwarted in their demands for autonomy. See Virgil A. Olson, ‘Compassion for the World’, Lecture IV, 110th Anniversary Lectures (1871-1981), edited by Marion Anderson, Bethel Theological Seminary, Bethel Seminary Archives, Minneapolis. 27 See Robb, Evolution, chapter 2. See Collector of Champaran to the Patna Com­ missioner 16 May 1893, and reply, 29 May 1893, in the Patna Commissioner’s Records (hereafter PCR) 359, 12/22 (1893/4) Bihar State Archives, Patna. 28 There is no doubt that English has been one of the ‘cosmopolitan’ languages of India (using Sheldon Pollock’s term), bearing culture and knowledge as it spread. But it was not a core language in the way that Sanskrit was. Arguably, it is not even (yet) as influential a language of culture as Persian was—though see R. Snell, ‘The Hidden Hand: English Lexis, Syntax and Idiom as Determinants of Modern Hindi usage’, South Asia Research, 10(1), 1990; or D. Arnold and P. Robb (eds), Institutions and Ideologies. A SOAS South Asia Reader, London, 1993, pp. 74-90. 29 This brief section is intended as a small accompaniment to B.S. Cohn’s important article, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, IV, New Delhi, 1985. As it was beyond the scope of his essay to discuss the ‘results of the first half-century of objectification and reordering’ upon ‘Indian thought and culture’, Cohn was content merely to insist that Indians were not ‘passive’ in their response (p. 329). On the one hand, he suggested, Indians ‘took over' that control of ‘social and material technologies’ which the British had tried to exercise (and thus ousted the British); but, on the other hand, Indian consciousness ‘at all levels in society was transformed as they refused to become specimens in a European-controlled museum of an archaic stage in world history’ (my emphasis). This unresolved ambivalence is central to my discussion here.

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In the early stages, state translations of official documents promoted orthography and influenced vocabulary; state printing presses, when used for non-official purposes, played a major part in developing the public literary culture. Later the government was influential in further defining linguistic boundaries, which, as remarked by G.A. Grierson, the great linguistic expert and earlier a Bihar officei; was ‘not always an easy matter’ because Indian languages tended gradually to ‘merge into each other’. Grierson’s ‘mostly uneducated’ enumerators could not distinguish Bihari and Hindi.30 The contradiction is poignant: the linguist operated with separate, labelled languages, whose speakers could not tell them apart. Definable languages had undoubtedly existed in several senses, yet they had not been made exclusive or standardized, even in formal versions and for ‘higher’ purposes. The British helped decide which were languages and which dialects, as in the case of Oriya and Bengali. There was a dispute in the midand late-nineteenth century about the status of Oriya, and pressure for it to be replaced by the superior and mutually intelligible Sanskritized Bengali; the pressure was resisted, on practical and political grounds, by officials who wanted to recognize an equally standardized and Sanskritized, printed Oriya.31Colonial rule linked each language to a distinct written form, to a region, and in some cases to a ‘race’ or religion. In Bihar, for example, in the 1870s, Hindi written in the Kaithi script had been proposed as the standard. Persian script was also proposed, in the interests of consistency, in 1876.32 According to Grierson, Kaithi was used from Bihar to Gujarat ‘alongside the more complete and elegant Devanagari’. ‘Practically speaking, the former may be looked upon as the current hand of the latter, though epigraphically it is not a corruption of it as some think.’33 Sir Steuart Bayley, then Commissioner in Patna, declared Kaithi to be ‘more suitable to the wants of the people’ (a significant choice of criterion), though he agreed that the Nagri script was sometimes used by zamindars.34 30 Census of India 1901, vol. 1, India, part 1, Report, chapter vii, paras 373,535, and 537 (written by Grierson, then in charge of the linguistic survey; see the intro­ duction, p. xvii). 31 See Pragati Mohapatra, ‘The Making of a Cultural Identity: Language, Literature and Gender in Orissa in [the] Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, PhD dissertation, London University, SOAS, 1997. 32 See Officiating Collector of Gaya to Patna Commissioner, 6 November 1876, PCR 335, 19/2, 1876, wrongly filed with 14/7. On this question more generally, see Christopher King, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth-century North India, Delhi, 1994, and ‘Forging a New Linguistic Identity: The Hindi Movement in Banaras, 1860-1914’, in Sandria Freitag (ed.), Culture and Power in Banaras: Com­ munity, Performance and Environment, 1800-1980, Berkeley, 1989. 33 Census of India 1901, vol. 1, India, part 1, Report, chapter vii, para 543. 34 Unless otherwise stated this and the next paragraph draw on H. Judicial Branch D 1-4, August 1893.

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However in the same year (1872), Sir George Campbell, Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, required that all notifications and processes be in Nagri, and that the amla and police officers learn the script within six months. This practice was followed after 1875 for all printed materials and returns, though handwritten entries were commonly made in Kaithi. The alternative use of the Persian script was abolished in 1880. Hindi written in Kaithi script continued to be used for court proceedings, but in the 1890s Sir Charles Elliott’s government ordered that, though plaints might be presented in any language, all summons, reports, and other official documents should now also be written in Nagri (when not in English). It was further proposed that Nagri should be introduced in all primary schools. Thus standardization proceeded under government sponsorship, though it remained controversial in Bihar: many local officials favoured Kaithi even in the 1890s. In 1892 Antony MacDonnell, temporarily inheriting the issue, proposed to withdraw Elliott’s order (to some extent foreshadowing his own policy later in the North-Western Provinces).35 MacDonnell had been convinced by a quick survey of signatures and documents in the Patna Registration Office and in Muzaffarpur that Kaithi was used overwhelmingly by the few Biharis who could write.36 Again it was indigenous usage that was supposedly to prevail. But in 1896, Grierson advised that Nagri had been 'systematically taught for some years past in all but the lowest classes of the schools’. The Government of India, convinced that MacDonnell was exaggerating, instructed that Elliott’s order should be enforced as far as possible. The local interests of the people had vanished, or had been re­ interpreted by an ‘expert’. The change had all the hallmarks of linguistic imperialism of the kind experienced in Britain and France. Value and political judgements abounded. Elliott thought Kaithi ‘rough and savage’, so that Nagri could be seen as part of a civilizing force. Muslims opposed Kaithi, it was said, in the hope of advancing the cause of the Persian script. Hindus supported Kaithi for the opposite reason. Nagri was presumably ‘superior’ to Kaithi partly by virtue of its association with the Sanskrit past. It was also ‘Hindu’, and widely intelligible as ‘Hindi’. These were pregnant combinations. Unities, once enunciated in one sphere, might be assumed for 35 See Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims, Cambridge, 1974, pp. 43-4, 69-78, 83, and 135. MacDonnell first proposed joint use of Persian and Nagri scripts in the North-Western Provinces, and later, while approving the more general use of the latter did not think it necessary to hurry the change in practice, even after the Nagri Resolution of 1900. 36 In Patna, the figures for documents in the various languages were: Persian 43, Kaithi 82, and Nagri nil; for witness statements, Persian 161, Kaithi 327, English 5, and Nagri nil.

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others.37Stereotypes were not only necessary to definitions and understanding, but also contagious, as when Islam came to be equated with Muslim politics in India between 1917 and 1947, through a range of political issues. Today the recognized languages of Bihar—Maithili, Bhojpuri, and so on— are all regarded, more or less, as variants of Hindi and written in Nagri. Over the last two or three generations, old revenue and other records in Kaithi have become increasingly inaccessible. Such language controversies, which were repeated in every part of British India, reflected the standardization that was inherent in the empire’s ‘civilizing’ mission. The arguments mainly concerned the units that were to be consolidated. The spread of ‘civilization’, economic and political linkages, and administrative convenience all required the units to be large. In this spirit, many officials wanted to remove barriers and imagined hierarchies of languages and dialects, of localities, regions, and overarching national identities, the greater in each case subsuming the lessen One may compare the Punjab of more recent times. In the words of the 1961 Census of India, marking another transition: ‘there was a move to return the two main mother tongues on the basis of religion’ (Hindi in the case of Hindus, and Punjabi for Sikhs), though ‘the population returning Punjabi as mother tongue was more than the population returning themselves as Sikhs’.38 Some of the colonial standardization was beyond doubt shallow or imposed. Accordingly, in Bihar in recent years there have been some attempts by regional or linguistic ‘nationalists’ to replace Nagri by Kaithi or other distinctive scripts.39 The re-emergence of local languages at the expense of Hindi was noticed in the 1961 Census; and, in the 1921 Report for Bihar and Orissa, P.C. Tallents had remarked that ‘the smaller dialects are taking an unconscion­ able time over dying’. On the other hand, more recent and popular linguistic claims depend upon the same criteria of defined historical languages and of associated peoples and cultures assumed by Grierson. In his categorization, the Bhojpuri, Magadhi, and Maithili ‘languages’ were grouped as ‘Bihari’, and regarded—together with Bengali and Oriya—as belonging to an eastern Indo-Aryan group derived from Magadha Apabhramsa.40 Hence ‘Bihari’ was a rather artificial term, influenced by political nomenclature. By itself, it was a language claimed by a very small number of speakers. Though Grierson held that the Bihari languages were originally of the same family as Bengali, he admitted the connection had been severed, since Bihar had been ‘for centuries 37 See King, ‘Forging’, on scripts and on ‘pure’ and (socially) superior Hindi. Shahid Amin has spoken (in SOAS in April 1997) of notions of a ‘Hindu’ agriculture derived from a ‘Hindu’ past as expressed in ‘Hindi’ words. 38 Census of India, 1961, vol. 1, part II-C (ii), p. xii. 39 Information from Subhajyoti Ray, 18 November 1993. 40 See Census of India 1961, vol. 1, part II-C (ii), passim.

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much more closely connected politically with the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh than with Bengal’. One might regard this last point as placing a limit on the influence of colonial rule, given Bihar’s inclusion in British Bengal from 1765 to 1912; on the other hand, Bihar was always considered culturally and administratively distinct. More popularly, the languages of Bihar were affiliated to eastern Hindi and debates continued as to whether, for example, Bhojpuri in particular was not really very close to Awadhi. In the language schedule to the Indian Constitution, the Bihari languages were included under Hindi (or Urdu). The post-colonial state also had a vested interest in large and consistent categories. They were sometimes the same as and sometimes different from those employed under colonial rule; they were not necessarily differently constructed, more ‘legitimate’, or ‘indigenous’. Moreover like administrative structures, the linguistic boundaries plainly generated interests. They did so because they were categories with intent. They existed to allow control and interference, and they also permitted a rhetoric of rights and well-being.

Believing in Progress Now let us go back to the diagnoses of failure that commonly drew the government into extending its role. The alleged decline and degradation of India formed a strong ideological current. Even more potent, however, were direct experiences. Burke proposed a doctrine of state responsibility while condemning Company excesses. Henry Verelst, Governor of Bengal, urged the Company to take a long-term view in the 1760s.41 In the early nineteenth century, when British tariffs and industries and the vagaries of international prices were damaging for Indian producers and entrepreneurs, another great Company man, the Evangelical, Charles Grant sought to expand Indian trade as one justification for British rule, an impulse that led to experiments with cotton or tea. From Lord Auckland’s confrontation with famine in the 1830s came a renewed commitment to public works. Antony MacDonnell also witnessed a famine in Bihar, and went on to draft the 1880s Famine Code. The fervour of a Nicholson for cooperative credit related both to his intellectual conviction as a follower of Raffeism and to his survey of conditions in agrarian Madras. Campaigns against deforestation, because of its impact on rainfall, were inspired by experiences of drought. It was the economic dependence of north Bihar on indigo and opium, a situation directly attributable to British rule, that forced the government to try to assist the region in the early twentieth century—a policy that gave bureaucratic strength to the cause of the state’s agricultural experts, already established as a specialist branch of government 41 See P.J. Marshall (ed.), Problems o f Empire: Britain and India 1757-1813, London, 1968, and H.V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757-1773, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 112-13 and passim.

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from the 1870s, and also led directly to the formation of India’s leading institute of agricultural science and technology.42 It does not matter whether colonial policy directly created the crises of the Indian economy, or whether these were problems exacerbated by the transitions and distortions inadvertently introduced under British rule. The fact that India was changing and that challenges were being thrown up in itself obliged the government to try to do more, either to facilitate ‘progress’ or to mitigate the worst of the problems that arose, and this is true not only of famine and agriculture, but of social change, urbanization, the growth of trade, endemic disease, population growth, religious upheaval, transport, and so on. In turn, this state involvement generated further demands from Indians that the state should intervene, and of course also encouraged, as nationalist thinking developed, strong complaints that India’s difficulties were actually caused by the malfeasance of the state. There were two attitudinal strands, therefore: a belief in progress and an experience of failure. One result was the ‘rational’ and instrumentalist concept of a national government and people, of a national economy and income, and national interests. The ‘altruistic’ public state allowed or required nationalism as its counterpart. Originally in colonial India an intellectual and universalist confidence was inherited from the European Enlightenment. But the state’s interventions had been limited by practical ignorance, fears of corruption or rejection, and doctrines of sectional interests, of minimalism, or of laissez faire. In the earlier phases of Company rule the state rather tended to withdraw from smaller localities and from certain aspects of responsibility. But this generated continual debates between the local officers or enthusiasts, who were close to the problems or opportunities and willing to take responsibility, and the central authorities in Calcutta or, especially, London, who were more influenced by principles of political economy and non-intervention. Two consequences flowed. Firstly, there was commonly a considerable degree of intervention at lower or semi-detached levels of the administration, half concealed from higher authority. Many ‘experts’ pursued their private obsessions. Secondly, major cataclysms provided the occasions to draw the central government into new spheres of activity. Gradually, as we saw, the sense of effective responsibility widened. Before too long, wider socio­ economic interference was contemplated. Expectations were created among Indians. The moral of both colonial and nationalist rhetoric was that the state’s role was to ensure public good, and that private (increasingly Indian) interests should be made public, reconciled, and organized. It followed from this 42 Peter Robb, ‘Bihar, the Colonial State and Agricultural Development in India, 1880-1920’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25(2), 1988.

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reasoning and this experience that the state, within its adopted borders, should eventually be self-governing and even democratic. I have linked the administrative revolution to new roles perceived for the state, and those roles to the rise of nations and in some cases the democratic or contractual arguments that came to justify government. These very devel­ opments were the result of a kind of colonial process and given impetus by the acquisition of empire. France and England contained metropolitan cores that colonized and subjugated their peripheries. This work needed bureau­ cracy and standardization as well as force. Liberty and democracy sought to legitimize the process. Nations, inspired by exploration, science, and indus­ trialization (all part of their own mobilization), then turned their attention to external colonization, building empires and justifying them on grounds of trade, law, good government, improvement, and so on: claims which once again demanded the development of new administrative and political struc­ tures. Similar processes occurred, in different ways, with the unification of Germany or Italy, and the continental imperial expansions of Russia or the United States. Stronger military and economic powers sustained and justified these expansions. The larger systems were paid for by empire, and it was empire that needed them. Technology, professionalization, and cheaper^ faster communications provided the means; ideologies, or indeed public conscience and morality, the rationalizations. The use of strategic groups—the educated, the collaborator—helped the process, as did symbols, ceremonies, and ritu­ als. But empire set the agenda. The argument of this book is that it did so also, and by similar means, in India as well as in Britain. This lead to a rather different strand of thought that would benefit from further investigation. The revolution in government was intended to reduce plurality. It generated neatness in procedures and categories. In Britain, France, and Japan, for example, it seemed to produce centralized governments and homogeneous people. (Britain remains fairly homogeneous even while becom­ ing apparently ‘plural’ because of the unifying force of law, government, edu­ cation, and the media.) Even in the United States, homogeneity was powerfully encouraged, though (or possibly because) state power was relatively local­ ized. The alternative model was centralized government with a plural or multinational state, as in the Soviet Union or (at least until the Maoist revo­ lution) China. In India, as we have seen, the British rulers were imperfect unifiers and centralizers, and hence inadequate state builders. They created a state with ‘modem’ boundaries, goals, and administration, but they also pro* tected and extended pluralities of region, language, religion, and class. By doing so, they made them into larger and firmer units. Their legal and political sys­ tem, like that of India today, was on the whole exceptionally protective of these differences. Even within the state apparatus itself there was (and is) a

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kind of institutionalized respect for difference. We tend to consider this a virtue, just as we regret the loss of Amazonian peoples under the onslaught of the prospector and the axe; but it is a virtue with a price in terms of the effectiveness of the state and the mobilizing of national effort. In this sense, the Indian revolution in government was interrupted by Partition, and it clearly continues its search for unity today. Defining the borders was important because all ‘nations’ (like other categories) have needed to make themselves into islands, by barriers of land, language, or custom, and all have to cope with problems of internal diversity. Here we can see the importance of Fanon’s distinction between the ‘nation’ and the ‘tribe’.43 The nation was essentially democratic, he thought, because it sought to unite. The tribe was essentially autocratic because it controlled difference. Whether or not this is correct, it draws our attention to the claims of the nation to encompass and serve all its people. Ultimately we have had to look at a range of new categorizations in India because the European idea of the state relied on identifying national peoples and national space. As the Indian example shows, it did not depend on democracy^ there could be unity through administrative hegemony, as under colonial rule. A nation state is, then, both a territory and supposedly a shared set of characteristics among people. It implies a national purpose moderated by the state. It requires ruling systems expressing and defined by units of identity. This view of the unitary national state was exported to India—inadvertently in the case of the democratic elements. A special coercive power, a claim to pre-eminent authority, enabled the state to set many of the parameters. Indian nationalism was thus necessarily consistent with and built upon the more limited identities emerging within the people: for example, a national ‘peasant’ type, to take one of the many bespoke sectional identities necessary to the ‘nation in making’. The process was more difficult in India, especially between Hindus and Muslims, because in India the state systems developed ahead of the nation. A state may evolve in parallel with the creation of its people, but often does not, as can be observed in many parts of the world. Unities are still being wrought as self-fulfilling prophecies through active imposition by rulers wishing or believing themselves to be governing nations. As for democracy as a basis of inclusion, no doubt it has survived in India because of a long gestation that overlapped in time with its extension in Western countries, and has produced numerous and influential Indian beneficiaries and participants. Nonetheless, the incongruity between the development of the state and that of civil society surely increased the importance of government servants and institutions. 43 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched o f the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington, Harmondsworth, 1967.

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The problem in India was that encountered in any nation: the need to unite the classes while dividing the nationalities—that is, combining all regions and sections within the putative nation and separating them from others, by means of supposedly common or civilizational experiences and attributes. As the British government was quick to recognize, and as we see almost everywhere today, unitary typologies raise severe problems, whether applied to the nation or to smaller categories such as peasants. The main issue is how to accommodate those who, for some reason, are perceived to be different. This problem was historically encountered by landlords, patnidars (underproprietors), k u lak s, under-raiyats, bargadars (share croppers), Indian Muslims, ‘tribals’, ‘untouchables’, and so on. As in any nation, the distinctiveness of popular culture also had to be set against the solidarities of modern communities.44 True, inclusion was prefer­ able. Spread across social classes, its basis might be found in popular culture and the vernacular—in language, tradition, and mores. Improved communi­ cations—the truly shared experiences—made the inclusion more convincing, though they also made it harder to integrate those perceived to be different. Objective forces—especially those discerned by many students of national­ ism—were helping create the overarching solidarities of modem nations.45 But the general and the local (elite and popular, British and Indian, legal and cus­ tomary, and so on) were not simple, exclusive opposites. Each level influenced and partially interpenetrated the other. In practice it was possible for mixed social criteria and a consciousness of ‘class’ to coexist, just as the hegemonic and plural concepts of the nation did. This is an argument against labelling any one model as ‘Indian’ or ‘colonial’, ‘traditional’ or ‘modem’. At the same time, a great force for change in colonial India was the desire for the modern, often equated with the Western or the technological—and with secularism, rationalism, or class. On the other hand, Indians making such assumptions were faced in any number of fields by an apparent discontinuity, 44 This problem remains. There is a tension, for example, between plural nations and supposedly unitary ethnicities and cultures. Of course all (nations, races, and cultures) are themselves contingent and syncretic in origin, but at the same time they do exist. We may strive to avoid essentialisms (such as ‘Black’ or ‘White’); but the reference ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’, or even ‘English’ (though arguably not ‘British’) has meaning as nation, race, or culture even though none of them is homogeneous or internally consistent, and though none is defined precisely by ideology in the way that, say, ‘Buddhist’, ‘Islamic’, or ‘Christian’ might be. On the distinctiveness of popular culture, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, translated by J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi, London, 1981, pp. xiv-xx, xxii-xxiv, and 129-34. 45 I have in mind such accounts as those by Ernest Gellner, Karl Deutsch, or E. Kedourie. For a convenient discussion focused on India, see Malcolm Yapp, ‘Language, religion and political identity’ in D. Taylor and Yapp (eds), Political Identity in South Asia, London, 1979, pp. 1-33.

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encouraged by colonial denigrations and self-justification. They had to decide between asserting or denying continuities with the past. Many were ambivalent between two extremes: one which claimed a kind of universalism, a chronology of modern features from an ancient (often ‘Hindu’) past as well as or in preference to a Western one; and another which asserted an eternal national distinctiveness and superiority of institutions appropriate for India. Often Indians defining their identities emphasized particular histories and supposedly special virtues of Indian civilization. Of course they also built upon existing local frameworks of region, caste, and religion. (Similarly Europeans took sides on the ‘value’ of things Indian, which helped the West to appeal to some Indians selectively.) These choices are obviously relevant to current discussions of technology transfer and reassessments of the scientific revolution. The arguments of, say, Jack Goody take us in one of the possible directions, towards an original equivalence of Western and Eastern forms.46 Perhaps science and technology developed in India according to local patterns, but basically in ways similar to those elsewhere that is, as an adjunct to practical technology, religious practice, and so on. If so, it is plain that in India this knowledge did not become officially ‘scientific’ (abstracted from practical needs, governed by professional ‘rules’, taught through common syllabi, and so on) in the way that som e knowledge was organized in the West from the seventeenth century. Even in Europe, many discoveries were still made outside that orbit because practical science and technology continued to advance in parallel with ‘official science’. Some now argue that the scientific as opposed to the technological revolution had relatively little to do with the rapid economic and industrial development of the West until the twentieth century, and therefore even if official science did not emerge in India, that fact would not satisfactorily explain the different patterns of economic development in India and in Europe. But why then did India not experience a scientific revolution, especially given the similarity of its knowledge to that of Western science (the way it was organized in categories, its experiential basis, and so on)? An answer may be extrapolated from the one that might be offered with regard to military technology—namely that India developed its own sophisticated forms and technologies, focused on cavalry, but these were ousted in the late eighteenth century by Western models based on disciplined infantry. In other words, India was moving 46 Jack Goody, The East in the West, Cambridge, 1996. See, for example, at p. 226: ‘I am not trying to make all the world the same but simply to state that the major societies of Eurasia were fired in the same crucible and that their differences must be seen as diverging from a common base’—sentiments appropriate enough for publication 250 years after the birth of Sir William Jones. Compare Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making o f the Modem World Economy, Princeton and Oxford, 2000.

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towards its own ‘official science’ but because of colonialism, that science was largely replaced by the version exported from Europe. (I say ‘largely’ because obviously the Indian knowledge has not been completely ousted—witness the persistence of Ayurvedic medicine. It may in some such spheres mount a counterchallenge to Western science, as with the rise of anti-Enlightenment thought in the West. Deep histories can always resurface.) The reason for the ‘lack’ of an Eastern scientific revolution is thereby a circular one: because the dominant revolution was Western, and it obscured or ignored developments of different kind and origin.

A Modern Identity The falsely binary distinction between colonial and pre-colonial legacies is a diversion from the examination of what came to exist. In considering the creation of modem South Asian identities, as in other matters, one needs to treat each element as arising from a mixture of indigenous and extraneous influences, and also as responding in different degrees to pre-existing practices or ideas and to contemporary challenges and experience. Clearly colonial rule provided many of the new mechanisms of identity, such as print, law, and communications, but it was not necessarily as responsible for the content of what they purveyed. Some ideas—for example, individual rights, professional ethics, political self-determination, arguably the sovereign territorial state itself—clearly took Western forms because they had parallels but no exact equivalents in Indian thought or practice, or because they had to be restated in a thoroughly new idiom. But the most successful and popular elements were those which were palatable because they were expected and familiar while also meeting present needs or anxieties. This is perhaps an improved formulation of the proposition that Indian nationalists, in framing identities, inevitably focused less on public spheres of colonial hegemony and more on private spheres of indigenous authority. Thus a discrepancy in dominant notions of the proper development of the Self necessitated Gandhi’s attempt, in the concepts of sw araj and satyagraha, to marry European notions of political freedom (an ability to act) with Indian ideas of self-control and renunciation (a withdrawal from acting). Similarly, if nationalist, conservative, and reformist men regarded women as crucial markers of identity and ‘civilization’, it was because stipulated female roles and behaviour matched ancient exhortations, and high-caste and Mughal socio-religious sanctions, and so-called Victorian values and colonial myths of masculinity, and recent worries about challenges to patriarchy, about legal changes, and about middleclass or family life. No particular codification or definition of the public and private is either necessary or fixed. India developed along its own lines from a mixture of

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influences. Its line of development was distinctive because some influences were always more powerful and entrenched than others, even among the ‘indigenous’ inheritance. For example, recent evidence that the colonial period strengthened aspects of caste hierarchy and religious orthodoxy should be taken to indicate not only the impact of ‘modern’ forces and colonial misunderstandings, but also the existing potency of those ‘indigenous’ elements amidst the more fluid and ambiguous practices of the past. By the same token, India already contained aspects that were ‘rational’ or ‘modem’, and perhaps was more disposed than Europe to encourage state benevolence because of traditions of mutual gifts, duty, and responsibility. There have been recent attacks on special laws for groups such as the Muslims and demands that the Indian public should be defined so as to exclude Islamic identities. These represent a very different approach from that favoured by the colonial administration, though one resting upon assumptions that it introduced about the role and purpose of public law. Perhaps in this case too, despite strong ideas and customs of privacy, India has been able to allow public regulation to intrude into private space (by indigenous tracts and norms if not colonial laws) because of strong traditions whereby matters of food, sex, reproduction, and work, though not in practice standardized exactly as in the texts, certainly had been subject to communal scrutiny and sanction along lines which the texts encouraged. Again an appeal to the past, the authority of precedent, though quite reformulated under colonial influence, may have been less easily avoided in India by those who needed to legitimize status and behaviour given a prevalence of dualist notions and accommodations, and a relative lack of intellectual breaks of the kind associated with the European reformation: with the English, French, scientific, and industrial revolutions; with imperial exploration and conquest; and with the Neoclassical rejection of the ‘Dark’ and ‘Middle’ ages. Such influences would explain distinctive features in India, but not because they were more ‘Indian’ than the reactions to colonial impact as discussed in this introduction. The motive force of national identity or development and the ‘modern’ categories—India or Pakistan; Hindi or Bengali; priest, peasant, or worker; public or private—were neither colonial nor indigenous; or rather they were both. The term ‘India’ implies a historical and geographical entity defined from outside, largely from Europe. The process described here un­ doubtedly depended upon a type of category that was binary, exclusive, and specialized—the type encouraged by the West and indeed by science, colonialism, and capitalism, a type not without precedent in South Asia but certainly different from those in which overlapping and intermixed markers of status and identity—religio-mythical, ritual, economic, political—had all coexisted. But the adoption of this kind of concept in India was only part of

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the story. In constituting themselves as ‘Indians’, the people of the country were not merely accepting a readymade category. Nor were they taking on a shell which they had emptied out and refilled with contents of their own devising. The category itself was always in a state of flux, even as the Europeans were imagining it. It contained many different elements, rearranged in different orders at different times, in reaction with India as perceived by Europeans and with Indian responses. The category ‘Indian’, as adopted and as it exists today, was made from some of these negotiated features, of some features borrowed from Europeans and of others made and rearranged in accordance with indigenous priorities and understandings. Further categories—Bengali, Tamil, or for that matter Pakistani or Bangladeshi—were not in the same sense imposed from outside. But they too were subject to similar processes in determining their meaning. In all cases, the meanings continue to change and to be advocated or contested. Like capitalist production (see Peasants), hegemony, or democratic government, these nationalist forms of identity are everywhere a different thing and nowhere the only thing. The pace of change was not uniform. New boundaries and institutions framed the alternatives in different ways. But they also shifted the balance between three modes of deciding identities as expressed in ideas and behaviour: the legitimacies of origin, of practice, and of rationality or morality. In Europe, to take the first aspect, origins were ‘authentic’ because of the influence of revealed religion; laws of right, precedent, and statute; and a humanist emphasis on authorship. But everywhere their appeal arose out of conflict, why refer to an ancient authority except by way of argument? The outcome implied an inherited social as well as historical hierarchy. This was the way of the text, whereby the word prescribed and tested conduct. Many sacred texts, including Indian ones, contain explicit awareness of the evolution of texts and accord greatest authority to the earliest version and hence to a golden age in the past. Oral texts similarly have their rhetorical and mnemonic devices to provide continuity and consistency. Custom or practice, the second case, gave primacy to action over text, and thus valorized agency and contingency. Here it is noteworthy that many Indian texts, despite often beginning with a sacred invocation and a rhetorical pedigree, revisit and may in several senses transcend their ‘originals’. Conduct depended upon current authority and upon pragmatism, and was more loosely related to memory and to texts. It represented a continually negotiated present. But either of these first two ways allowed for the idea of an eternal, essentialized nation. The third case provided means for the interpretation of both text and praxis: through faith and morality, or through evidence and reason on the basis of either ethical or scientific rationality. This was the tradition of the critical textual commentary, and ultimately the popular mandate. It made texts and conduct multiple and

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conditional, by judging both according to independent principles and thereby relying on the human rather than the divine. It implied civilizational rather than local or national norms. In the West, this method arose alongside notions of progress, as in St Augustine. It assumed an improveable future. The modem era did not result from a movement from one of these modes to another. It came from changes in the means whereby each was expressed and perpetuated. Divine and secular laws exist only because they differ from pragmatic practice. Rationality manifestly has not vanquished imagination— we have evidence ranging from Victorian fairies to tabloid horoscopes to milk-drinking idols. And the ‘corrections’ of print capitalism do not drive out an ever-repetitive but active orality. There is no steady movement from multiple to singular texts, not least because texts remain imperfectly standardized while custom has always had limits to its diversity. As also with the impact of capitalism on the Indian countryside, discussed in Peasants, this lack of absolute change has great importance. In India, for example, part of the success of Western innovations may well have been their fit with Brahmanical views of knowledge. All identities are historical in the sense of being cumulative and of belonging to one period and place. Stories of the past and of identity always contain elements of explanation and empiricism. The mechanisms for an ancient proof of, say, the existence of God and a modern proof in physics are not wholly different, though there are other modes of explanation which may be peculiar to times or languages as conventional expressions bearing little or no evidential or intellectual weight. At all times, some analyses show a preference for human agency and some do not; and all reflect cultural peculiarities. For that reason, the ‘modem’ is partly a matter of scale and certainty. But also it may rest upon specificities of genre, even though all its elements certainly did occur in the past. I mean self-conscious or self-referential forms of cumulative analysis within distinct spheres; comparative assessment of the validity of sources, origins, or forms; distinct and consistent measurements, categories, signs, or representations—at one level the familiar reliance on processes of evidence and observation rather than authority. Two points follow. The first is that a mere change of period or place does not substitute real for artificial perceptions of history or identity. Non-rational or anti-historical explanations are those that ignore analytical rules by suppressing or misreading data. They are not those with a particular intention or agenda, for all understandings are to some degree functional. The second conclusion is that any transition to modern forms cannot be divorced from wider changes such as the advent of centralized states, colonial rule, commodification, or capitalism. Over recent centuries, the ‘modem’ genre has dominated and been imitated even where its rules are broken, because backed up by institutions—

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scholarly disciplines, education, professions, technologies. It is this reinforce­ ment which has meant that modern identities or modern history may be distinguished from earlier forms, despite the pre-existence of many elements of the ‘modem’ and the lack of a complete break with the past. Such arguments reconcile two opposed propositions. One, pre-modern societies do not have ‘modern’ consciousness (and have, say, myth rather than history); or less tautologically, there is a category ‘modern’. Two, pre-modem societies do in fact show many modem features—and more generally, all binary oppositions are artificial. It may be argued that there were new discoveries of self among Indians in the colonial era and that they were new inter alia because they occurred within the frame of broaden supposedly consistent identities. Travel, trade, language, government, political institutions, and law all allowed Indians to encounter similar ‘Others’, and narratives and rationalizations arose to account for these affinities. Though there was nothing new in markers of identity or in notions of bounded, named territories, yet both were now limited and reified by the more precise measurements and more generalized categorizations of the colonial era. The distinction between this latter kind of identity and other possible kinds paralleled that between text and custom, history and myth. In practice the distinctions were blurred, but there was no going back. The ambiguous, customary, mythic, quotidian elements were harnessed to the harder delineations of fixed identities. For Indians who asked ‘Who am I?’, there was a new range of possible answers, and some earlier; contingent, or ambivalent replies were increasingly excluded. On the whole the force of change was such that Indians increasingly acquired their own versions of ‘modem’ identities—‘modem’, that is, in genre. The existence of exceptions or variations does not mean that Indians acquired identities that were ‘hybrid’ or incompletely modem.

So m e B oundaries and I dentities

4. Completing ‘Our Stock of Geography’, or an Object ‘Still More Sublime’* Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of Mysore,

1799-1810

This paper argues that elements o f the colonial categorizations o f space were encouraged by Colin Mackenzie and his survey o f Mysore. It identifies aspects o f the process that were new in India and relevant to state responsibility and management within defined boundaries, a precondition for ‘nationhood’. To facilitate Sc promote all enquiries which may be calculated to enlarge the boundaries of General Science is a Duty imposed on the British Government in India by its present exalted situation 8c the discharge of that Duty is in a more especial manner required from us when any material addition can be made to the Public Stock of useful knowledge without involving considerable expence... [T]his desirable object will never be attained unless it shall be made the Duty of some Public Officer properly qualified for this Service to collect information 8c to digest 8c publish the results of his researches.1

This paper is concerned with an aspect of the colonial contribution to the construction of modem India, namely definitions of place in relation to goals of government.2 It will argue that there was considerable continuity not in * First published in Journal o f the Royal Asiatic Society, series 3, 8(2), 1998, pp. 181— 206. 1 Proceedings of the Governor General, Public Department, 26 July 1804; see below, note 12. The specific reference here was to information on Indian fauna. 2 This essay was originally a talk given at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and later at St Antony’s College, Oxford. I am grateful to participants for their comments. I am pleased to acknowledge that many of my ideas here evolved in discussions with Andrew Grout, and on the basis of materials he had collected on geology in India. Thanks are also due to the staff at the National Archives of India, to the London School of Oriental and African Studies for financial support, to Janet Marks for typing, and for their help during my research in New Delhi to K.N. Malik, and to Olivier Guillaume and his staff at CSH, French Cultural Centre. This paper is based upon letter books and other surveying papers held in the National Archives of India, New Delhi, which describe the evolution of surveying under Colin Mackenzie. The letter books include both fair copies and drafts with emendations in Mackenzie’s

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the execution of policy or in all its objectives, but in some of the available aims and rhetoric relating scientific understanding to public welfare and statesponsored improvement. Such ideas were developing in Europe from at least the seventeenth century, and were familiar to many in the service of the East India Company. They were quite often advocated from on high, as we see in the epigraph to this essay. But they also needed means and exponents for their translation into policy; here we will consider one such conduit. A secondary question (with which others have dealt more fully) is the relation between European and indigenous concepts and objectives in India. The foreign enterprise was not like Bentham’s Panopticon, which Michel Foucault called a machine whereby ‘one sees everything without being seen’.3 Rather; it involved observation and exchange between Indian and Europeans. Participant observers recorded what they were told by Indians at the same time as they imposed Western measurements and classifications. Both sides of the process were equally necessary. On the other hand, it is true that Europeans made significant changes in the perceptions of India—in this instance in the understanding of place. The selection of elements for mapping and their measurement helped establish a new image of the land.4 own hand. In selection and arrangement they appear as a record deliberately framed for posterity by Mackenzie, expressing his concern for records. There are two main letter books and many other related papers in the Survey of India Memoirs collection. The full citation for the first book is M130B ‘Public & Official Letter Book of the Superintendent of the Mysore Survey, 1799 to 1803’, Survey of India Memoirs M 6, 1800-10, cited hereafter as ‘LB1’. The second letter book, commencing 13 April 1803, has the reference M131B, ‘Mysore Survey: Official and Public Letterbook (Colin Mackenzie), 1803-9’, Survey of India Memoirs M l8; it will be cited as ‘LB2’. Other references to the Memoirs (hereafter ‘SI’) will be cited (mostly) with two numbers, the first taken from the manuscript and the second, if different, being the catalogue number at the National Archives of India; initial letters (‘M’ for Memoir; ‘RP’ for Report, and so on) indicate the subsections of the collection’s short-list. Spelling and punctuation have been slightly modernized in the quotations. 3 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 202. Also relevant to the paper is his History o f Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley, Harmondsworth, 1976, pp. 135-45, and The Order o f Things: An Archaeology o f the Human Sciences, translation of Les mots et les choses, London, 1970. See also Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure o f Men: Sciences, Technology and Ideologies o f Western Dominance, Delhi, 1990. 4 Obviously this is related to B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism, London, 1991, especially chapter 10. The implied impact is not only on objective conditions for the idea of the ‘national’ (institutions, language, communications, economic changes), but also on the subjective (ideologies, understandings, common experiences). Thus it does affect the view from below or from the colonized as well as from above or from Europe; see E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge 1972, pp. 9-12.

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The specific story to be told here concerns the success of Colin Mackenzie in establishing the form and the official acceptance of the survey as an instrument of government. This success was important in establishing in India aspects of the much wider development in science and political economy. Mackenzie helped introduce systematic and comprehensive surveys (as were then in vogue elsewhere) to defend against countervailing financial and political imperatives, and to institutionalize the link they provided between scientific knowledge and state responsibility. In brief, he persuaded his masters to support an exercise in collecting information and to set up bureaucratic structures that went well beyond what could have been of practical utility in the ruling of India. He did so partly for reasons of personal advancement. Mackenzie had come to India in 1782-3 and joined the Madras Engineers. He served in the military campaigns of 1790-2 and 1799, but almost all of his career was devoted in one way or another to the survey—in Hyderabad in the 1790s, in Mysore between 1799 and 1810, as Surveyor-General in Madras in 1810 and again in 1814, with the Madras force in Java from 1811 to 1813, and finally as the first Surveyor-General of India from 1815 to 1821.5 There is evidence in his career of that emphasis on the self-made man—in this case based on a mastery of useful knowledge and professional skill—which was to feature in the improving biographies popular in England a generation or so later, from the 1830s to the 1850s. Mackenzie displayed much of the single-mindedness and egotism of the self-made ethos. Yet his motivation was certainly not ambition alone. There was an intellectual excitement in his inquiries, a lively curiosity, and the pursuance of scientific method. Thus such efforts as his helped establish a pattern which was followed in many other aspects of government and investigation in colonial India.6 5 By his own account, he jointed the service in 1783 and was attached to the Nizam of Hyderabad’s subsidiary force in April 1792, chiefly to improve the geography of the Deccan, operations which he carried on ‘without Salary or Establishment for 6 Years till 1798’, interrupted only by expeditions (the siege of Pondicherry, June 1793 to February 1794; expedition against Colombo, October 1795 to September 1796; inspection of Guntur and northern forts, September 1796 to January 1797; ‘expedition designed against Manilla’, June 1797 to May 1798; campaign in Mysore, January 1799); see Mackenzie to Buchan, 10 September 1806, LB2. 6 Contrast this argument with the stress on personal and political advancement and pragmatism (including interesting suggestions on Wellesley’s motives) in Marika Vicziany, ‘Imperialism, Botany and Statistics in Early Nineteenth-century India: The Surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762-1829)’, Modern Asian Studies, XX(4), 1986; this discusses Buchanan’s botanical survey of Mysore, while underestimating Mackenzie’s. The extent to which Mackenzie’s work in Mysore provided a template may be doubted—there are competing claims not only for Buchanan(-Hamilton) but for James Rennell, appointed Surveyor-General of Bengal in 1767, for William

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The main outlines of Mackenzie’s work in Mysore are quite well known. He features prominently in Phillimore’s monumental study, though the hero of its second volume is really William Lambton, Mackenzie’s more technicallyminded contemporary and chief protagonist of the Trigonometrical Survey.7 Mackenzie has been discussed in some detail as part of Matthew Edney’s comprehensive and important thesis on the trigonometrical surveys of India. This paper will endorse Edney’s main conclusion that surveys were undertaken as much (or more) for scientific as for practical reasons.* Nicholas Dirks has given another valuable account of Mackenzie, as historian.9 As a surveyor, he has also been singled out briefly in a general account by Andrew Robinson for having ‘proposed a detailed topographical survey going beyond mere military or geographical information to embrace a statistical account of the entire state of Mysore’. According to Robinson, Mackenzie was the first to

Lambton, and for later innovators in revenue surveys. But the argument seems to be clinched by the (intended?) denouement of Mackenzie’s letter books, his ‘Memoran­ dum on the expediency of applying the remaining Establishment of the Mysore Survey to assist a General Statistical Investigation of the Provinces dependant on the Government of Fort St George’, Madras, 22 February 1809, LB2, and also by his ‘General Report on the State of the Surveying Department’, ‘Official Duties of the Surveyor-General’ and other regulations in SI M3 7. I argue that what changcd after 1809 was not so much the range, methods, and functions of surveying as its general­ ity and institutionalization. Mackenzie for one seems to have had similar goals in mind from the start. 7 R.H. Phillimore, Historical Records o f the Survey o f India, vol. II: 1800 to 1815, Dehra Dun, 1950; see for example p. 9, attributing to Lambton the ‘boon of a great trigonometrical survey’ and stating that before him ‘no scheme [was] ever put into action for a continuous progressive survey of the whole country’; Lambton was indeed a surveyors’ surveyor. For Mysore see chapters VII and VIII, pp. 91-121. See also vols I (1945) and III (1954). 8 Matthew Henry Edney, ‘Mapping and Empire: British Trigonometrical Surveys in India and the European Concept of Systematic Survey, 1 7 9 9 -1 8 4 3 ’, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1990. Edney provides a fine study of the general question of the surveys and their significance, and an account of the legacy of Mackenzie and others, but follows Phillimore in giving prominence to Lambton. While agreeing on the symbolism of surveying and ‘showing the flag’, I seek somewhat to modify the arguments which Edney has made, in regard to the opposition between rational utility (equated with Mackenzie’s topographic surveys) and empirical science (found despite their pragmatic and propaganda value in the geodetic triangulations of Lambton); see pp. 439-41 and passim. See also his Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction o f British India, 1765-1843, Chicago, 1997. 9 N. Dirks, ‘Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive’, in C. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Pre­ dicament: Perspectives on South Asia, Delhi, 1994, pp. 279-313. Dirks has also dis­ cussed Mackenzie in ‘Guiltless Spoilations’ in C.B. Asher and T.R. Metcalf (eds), Perceptions o f South Asia’s Visual Past, New Delhi, 1995.

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use ‘accurate trigonometrical techniques backed up by astronomical observations.’10 In line with Dirks’ account, I would say also that he was the first to regard the survey as a means of providing a historical, economic, and social understanding of India, rather than as a device only to define and measure specific features in order to assist in rule or conquest. It was in this sense that Mackenzie’s work contributed to new definitions of place. Here were geographical points that were located by more or less precise and objective measures, but also situated in history, in administrative structures, and ordered in functional hierarchies according to economy, religion, politics, or government. This, rather than other possible issues, is the subject of this essay.11 Such complete and statistical renderings of place formed an important aspect of a reconstruction of public space in India. Nor was Mackenzie content with this objectification. He hankered after comprehensiveness, the completion of what he called ‘our Stock of Geography’ whereby Indian examples not only were added to a store of knowledge but helped define general laws.12 This was a veritable science of location, and led to a desire to move from empirical 10 Simon Berthon and Andrew Robinson, The Shape o f the World: The Mapping and Discovery o f the Earth, Chicago, 1991, pp. 136-8. 11 See also Edney, ‘Mapping’, pp. 454-92, for a discussion of concepts of space (one, however not fully specifying the distinctive elements and applications of British ideas). Other issues—the use of Indian informants, the nature of indigenous concepts, the role of Mackenzie in discoveries on Indian religion, or the construction of ideas of caste and society—will not be considered here; some have been discussed in the other works cited in these notes. 12 The phrase ‘our Stock of Geography’ comes from Mackenzie to Lt Capt. John Johnstone, Bombay Engineers, 25 August 1800, LB1; but many similar phrases are found in the letter books, notably ‘the Improvement of Indian Geography’ (Mackenzie to George Buchan, Chief Secretary to Government, Fort St George, 18 October 1808, LB2). On ‘completion’ (of history as well as geography)—signifying, I believe, confidence in the unity and comprehensibility of all knowledge, the possibility of describing and measuring everything—see especially Mackenzie to Buchan, 28 February 1804, LB2: ‘Investigations... in the Geographical Line in the different provinces of India may contribute to the General Design.’ Compare the epigraph to this essay (note 1 above) which was copied in the letter books with a circular on fauna from Major Wilkes, Acting Resident, Mysore, 26 July 1804, LB2, and also included the following: ‘The Knowledge hitherto obtained in Europe respecting certain branches of the Natural history of the Continent of India & of the Indian Isles, is defective notwithstanding the progress which has been made within the last twenty years in the prosecution of Scientific enquires connected with the Manners, Produce & Antiquities of this part of Asia... ’ and ‘The Governor General entertains a confident persuasion that with the facilities which we now possess for the Collection of Accurate Information from every part of India, the Natural History of the Quarter of the Globe may be gready improved without involving the necessity of any material charge on the Public Resources... See also note 29 below. Similarly, for a brief account on flora for this early period, see Ray Desmond, The European Discovery o f the Indian Flora, Oxford, 1992, pp. 39-80.

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investigations to theoretical analysis. Mackenzie invested landscape not so much with a picturesque as with a practical and moral significance. He was concerned too with principles of proper inquiry, the collection, creation, and classification of data, and concepts of accuracy and verification. Thus would Indian specifics contribute to universal truth, to supposedly higher forms of knowledge. Mackenzie endorsed, for example, the goals of Lambton, who sought not only the improvement of Indian geography, but ‘a desideratum still more sublime, viz. to determine by actual measurement the magnitude and figure of the earth, an object [he said] of the utmost importance in the higher branches of mechanics and physical astronomy’. 13 In this sense Mackenzie sought to penetrate beyond form —the externals of place—into an interrogation and interpretation of the ‘internals’, an attempt which might be regarded as ‘modem’.14 Mackenzie’s project was related, though logically prior, to that recently described by Eugene Irschick in his D ialogue and History—that is, the estab­ lishment of ‘fixed population and resacralized land’.15 Mackenzie was con­ cerned, similarly, not merely with receiving information but with fashioning it and improving upon reality. He was acutely aware both of the legitimacy of past forms and of the convenience of present needs. But he did not thereby create a ‘colonial discourse’ consisting in the opposition of two imaginary entities, West and East, set up as a result of and for the purposes of European dominion. As said, the agenda of these surveys went far beyond the needs, and indeed the limits, of foreign rule. Moreover the aim was not so much to define the ‘Other’ as to describe and understand a universal whole. More sig­ nificant than ideas of power and possession seem to have been the applica­ tions of the methods of empirical science—in India equally as in Europe, and with the same value judgements. The result was a reification which, as Peter van der Veer has remarked, is a general ‘aspect of some theories in the social sciences’ and not something peculiar to European contemplations of the East. Of course there was often also, as van der Veer adds, a strong tendency in 13 Major W. Lambton, ‘A Memoir containing an account of the principal operations of the Survey carried out in Mysoor in the year 1801, and explaining the general principles on which it has been conducted’, 1802, with Lambton to John Chamiec, Chief Secretary, Government of India, 23 February 1802, SI M14. 14 Mackenzie of course represents that new mode of inquiry and taxonomy, the different range of what it was possible to think, as discussed in Foucault, The Order o f Things. 15 E. Irshick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795-1895, Berkeley, 1994, p. 1. Note, however p. 28; it will be argued here to the contrary that there were limits, imposed by his own close direction and record-keeping, especially in technical rather than historical aspects, to Mackenzie’s dependence on ‘field work and the assumptions of local non-European assistants’.

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South Asia to apply ‘indological constructions’ meaning denigrations of In­ dia.16 However, as in Mackenzie’s work, it is clearly possible to distinguish between such constructions and the process of classification. In other words I agree with David Ludden when he writes of the need to separate knowledge and power. The ‘qualitatively new knowledge’ produced during European expansion in India, he says, was ‘not specific to India’ or in substance ‘dic­ tated by utility’. Even the most instrumental knowledge, intended to sustain colonial rule, was ‘based on methodologies authorized by scientific standards of the day’.17Indeed, in Mackenzie’s case, as in others, the colonial encounter also provided occasions when these standards were devised, extended, or elaborated. The survey was not then in any simple sense an instrument of colonial expansion. It was made more indigenous than might have been supposed, from financial and other exigencies as well as from the value placed upon Indian testimony and cooperation. It was an enterprise of alleged utility introduced in the interests equally of science and practical knowledge, but one which had to be defended by its apparent moderation and thrift, and the mobilization of useful allies. The glamour of science helped ensure that surveys would develop and be institutionalized. But that glamour was related to an idea of government. The Company faced debates over the propriety of having merchants as rulers. It was more concerned than older, more plausible regimes to establish its legitimacy by cautious activity across a range of fronts. It was no doubt more susceptible than some to arguments about what it was appropriate and desirable for a state to do. Once it had succumbed to the blandishment of the survey as being one of the steps it should be taking, it became committed institutionally and by method to the great campaigns of measurement, counting, investigation, and classification that occupied the British rulers in India for much of the nineteenth century.

n My discussion of Mackenzie and the survey of Mysore will fall into two main sections. The first asks how Mackenzie succeeded in securing the work and in defining its character and purpose. The story begins with his surveys of the ceded and conquered districts of Mysore and ends with his establishment as Surveyor-General of India. The second section examines the principles and implications of surveying as defined by Mackenzie. It will not compare his work with that of Rennell, Lambton, Buchanan-Hamilton, or other pioneers; 16 Peter van der Veer, ‘The Foreign Hand: Orientalist Discourse in Sociology and Communalism’ in Breckenridge and van der Veer; Orientalism, p. 25. 17 David Ludden, ‘Orientalist Empiricism: Transformation of Colonial Knowledge’ in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism, p. 252.

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but it will suggest that Mackenzie’s model had a substantial influence upon late efforts—geological, historical, statistical, revenue, or demographic. In this respect I will differ from Dirks’ conclusion that Mackenzie’s effort was idiosyncratic, standing at ‘a bit of an angle’ to many aspects of colonial rule and ending in silence. While it is true that Mackenzie provided no ‘master historical narrative’, he constructed methods and institutions of lasting significance. It is a larger question than can be tackled here, whether or not they contributed, as Dirks says of Mackenzie’s collected source materials, merely to a colonialist discourse untroubled by dissenting or Indian voices.18 My own view, however, is that Mackenzie’s methodology invited, and on occasions achieved, a more complex result, in which Indian contributions and modifications continued to be made. The ostensible justification for the Mysore survey was the need to delineate the territories ceded in the partition that followed the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799.19 Both Mackenzie and his leading assistant, John Mather, another Scot, stressed the usefulness of surveying the new acquisitions, described as a ‘vast conquest’.20 They gave priority to ascertaining its outer limits, especially the border between Mysore and the Maratha lands to the north. Obviously it was also necessary that routes, forts, and principal settlements should be made known to the new government. Thus the survey of Mysore had a significance which was different from that of contemporaneous measurements in England or France, though those examples were also held up in support of the work. The immediate needs of government were only the start, however. From the first, it was agreed by all those closest to the work that, to quote Alexander Read, ‘a Geographical knowledge of the country must be very desirable’.21 Mackenzie proposed including in his purview not only what he called the ‘Great Outlines’, but also the ‘more material features of the country, its Rivers, Roads, Hills, Forts, and Villages, its divisions & boundaries interior and exterior’. The intention, he wrote, was to attain ‘full information as to its extent, form and capacity in a Political and Military light’. Such a survey would provide the ‘Ground Work’ for future, more detailed investigations; and yet, 18 See Dirks, ‘Colonial Histories’. One difficulty is that Dirks’ proposition is itself essendalizing of ‘colonial’ and ‘Indian’, though those categories are diverse and contain many, sometimes parallel strands. 19 Mackenzie to Lt Col Barry Close, Resident, Mysore, 20 March 1800, LB1; compare ibid., to Col Arthur Wellesley, commanding in Mysore, 18 July 1799, referring to ‘Surveys which will now be so desirable, of our new acquisitions in Mysore’ (emphasis added) and to the ‘utility of employing a person’ with ‘experience of the most eligible mode of executing the duty’. 20 Mather to Alexander Read, 6 June 1799, LB1. On Read and the revenue survey in Baramahal, see T.H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development o f Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792-1818, Cambridge, 1966, pp. 12-34. 21 Read to Lt Gen. Harris, 9 July 1799, LB1.

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even at this preliminary stage, it included general details of cultivated lands, irrigation, markets, and production, and, whenever possible, information regarding the history and customs of the region, its rulers, and peoples.22 Mackenzie’s strategy was quite obvious—and indeed he set it out with great frankness. ‘I am convinced’, he wrote to Barry Close, the first Resident in Mysore and his immediate superior, ‘that a complete survey...would be beneficial and satisfactory to Government and reflect credit on him who is fortunate enough to complete it.’23 To Mather he commended a task ‘so usefull to the Public and your own immediate prospects in life’.24 Mackenzie saw, in the practical need to define the boundaries of the partition and the various territories of the region, an opportunity to demonstrate to the government the broader advantages of the survey. He had become personally interested as a result of his surveying work in the Deccan, and he was certain that the value of the experiment would readily become apparent once a connected series of surveys had been conducted using comparable methods—it was ‘work’ which (he told Colonel Close) he had ‘long been ambitious of perfecting’.25 Mackenzie was fortunate in his moment. A generation earlier in 1764, the Company’s territorial involvement was furthest advanced in Bengal and Bihar. Frontiers had to be defended, but otherwise the chief aim was to preserve internal harmony by minimizing interference, for example, by the withdrawal of all European agents to Calcutta.26 By 1766, however, though minimal government was still in vogue, two imperatives had appeared that were to become perennial. First, the Company had resolved to make ‘a thorough survey of the roads in the province of Behar... with all possible dispatch and accuracy’. It was thought ‘of great importance to our security’ to ‘obtain a perfect knowledge’ of those routes. Secondly, the Battle of Buxar, the trial of Nandakumac, and other similar instances of so-called ‘treachery’ had reinforced the importance of first-hand information.27 At this time, John Graham, 22 Mackenzie to Close, 9 November 1799, LB1. See also Mackenzie to Capt. Johnson, 7 July 1800, and to Col Montresoc, 28 July 1800, LB1. On the support to Thomas Munro, then Collector of Kanara, of a survey for revenue purposes, see also Mackenzie to Close, 5 September 1800, LB1. See Beaglehole, Munro, pp. 44-54 and 71-2, for Munro’s revenue surveys in Kanara and the Ceded Districts. 23 Mackenzie to Close, 9 November, and also 6 December 1799, LB1. 24 Mackenzie to John Mather, Assistant Surveyor, 20 February 1800, LB1. 25 Mackenzie to Close, 9 November 1799, and see Mackenzie to [Col. Fitzpatrick?], 5 January 1800, LB1. 26 Foreign and Secret Proceedings, Fort William Consultations, 27 July 1764, p. 214, National Archives of India; compare 2 January and 19 March 1764, and passim. 27 Buxar occasioned the grant by the Mughal Emperor to the East India Company of the diwani (right to collect revenue), and hence effectively territorial control, of eastern India. Nandakumar, long thought an unreliable if rich ally, was hanged for forgery in 1775—‘the last vestige of native statesmanship in Bengal’, according to

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Resident at Midnapore, was writing the diary he had kept while on a tour of the provinces. It was likely to be of value to his successors, he said, because ‘it contains in a summary way every material observation that occurred to me’ and would serve ‘to convey a general idea of the Country’.28 By the time of Mackenzie, then, it was possible to conceive of combining the two impulses— for security and rule—in order to create a new, systematic function of government and to permit new departures in science. At the start of the Mysore survey, the omens were good. A letter in the Military Department in 1798 had used the phrase ‘promoting the progress of Geographical knowledge’—it was probably inspired by Mackenzie himself— and a reply from the Court of Directors in 1800, echoing this, referred favourably to ‘the improvement of Geographical Knowledge’.29 The Mysore survey was established on comparatively generous lines. Though there were the usual H.G. Keene, History o f India, London, 1893, vol. I, p. 234, or perhaps the first in a long series of instances in which British colonizers showed their distrust of their Indian agents and resolved to reduce their reliance upon them. For other views of Indian ‘untrustworthiness’, see Benjamin Heyne, ‘Cursory Remarks on a Tour to Hyderabad in 1798’, SI (M 160) M3, and Lt John Warren, ‘Memoir and Registers of the Pargunnah of Colar, Oosscotta and Jungamcotta in Mysore, 1800-1 and 1802’, SI (M115) M il. Contrast these and Dirks’ ‘Colonial histories’, pp. 309-10, with Mackenzie’s expressed trust in the integrity of C.V. Letchmia, Principal Interpreter to the Mysore Survey, and his welcome of other assistants, in Mackenzie to Letchmia, 13 and also 19 July 1805, LB2. 28 Select Committee paper, Fort William, 14 October 1766 (Graham to Henry Verelst, 30 September 1766), p. 205; and 27 September 1766 (Verelst to Col Richard Smith), pp. 189-90 (see note 26). 29 Sita Ram Kohli (ed.), Fort William-India House Correspondence: Military Series, vol. XXI, 1797-1800, National Archives of India, 1969, pp. 153-4. On 9 May 1797, the Court of Directors in London, ostensibly to supply the indefatigable John Bruce (appointed Company historiographer jointly with Robert Orme until the latter’s death in 1801), was clearly desirous of information about processes of change in India and seeking ammunition with which to defend the Company’s record. The Court had called for data on ‘chronology, geography, government, laws, political revolutions, the progressive stages of the useful arts, manufactures, science, and of the fine arts, and particularly in the former and present state of internal and foreign trade’. In 1798, responding on a specific matter but in a manner which had general implications, the Court recommended the Governor General to investigate ‘the geography and natural production of the hills, the languages, manners, custom, arts, laws, traditions, religions, or mythological tenets, objects of worship, superstitious practices, tempers and disposition of the various communities which occupy the hilly countries’ and the affinity between them and the plains people. See P.C. Gupta, Fort William-India House Correspondence: Public Series, 9 May 1797 and 25 May 1798, vol. XIII, 1796-1800, National Archives of India, 1969. Gupta claims the response to these calls was disappointing, but this overlooks the rapid financial retrenchment on one hand, and on the other the massive contributions of Mackenzie and others and the subsequent history of colonial information gathering.

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confusions and delays in payments,30 Mackenzie had the backing of the civil and military administration and the services of three assistant surveyors; a surgeon who doubled as a botanist and geologist; various Indian assistants, translators, informants, and agents; as well as porters, guards of sepoys, and so on.31Several apprentices were attached to the surveying parties, drawn from the Surveying School which had been established in Madras. Lambton’s Trigonometrical Survey, with its own parties of assistants, was brought into association with the work in Mysore, so that its readings and measurements could assist in providing base-lines and in checking for accuracy.32 In 1801, however the Company’s directors intervened to insist that this provision had been far too lavish and expensive. The pay and allowances of the surveyors were cut severely. Mackenzie’s own pay was cut by half.33 Mackenzie reserved his pleas on his own account, but immediately protested about the effect this would have on the status and morale of the surveyors.34 His representations were unsuccessful and indeed, though he was able to se­ cure one replacement for an assistant during 1801, the number and cost of those involved in the operations suffered a gradual attrition over the ensuing years. In the end, Mackenzie was left to carry out the work, he complained, virtually on his own.35 Yet at the low point in 1803 he had also been ordered 30 See for example Mackenzie to William Jones, Treasurer, Fort St George, 7 August 1800; to H. Gordon, Paymaster, Mysore, 7 August 1800; and to Josiah Webbe, Resident, Mysore, 17 July [1802], LB1. See also Mackenzie to Cecil Smith, Civil Auditor; Fort St George, 1 August 1805; to J. Smith, Military Payments Officer, 31 July 1806; and to Lord William Bentinck, Governor-in-Council, Fort St George, 16 July 1806, LB2. (Beaglehole, Munro, p. 170, claims Webbe, the influential Chief Secretary in Madras in 1800, did not take up his appointment as Resident in Mysore; certainly J.H. Peele was sometimes Acting Resident, and yet Mackenzie frequently wrote to Webbe as Resident, 1801-4.) 31 Mackenzie to Webbe, 5 November 1799, LB1. 32 Mackenzie to Close, 6 December 1799, LB1. See also ‘Letters of Major W. Lambton to the Government of India regarding the Trigonometrical Survey Operations in Mysore [1801-2]’, SI (M489) M14. 33 John Chamier, Chief Secretary, Political Department, Fort St George, to Mackenzie, 10 November 1801 LB1. 34 Mackenzie to Chamier, 27 December 1801, LB1. In his ‘View of the State of the Mysore Survey on 1st October 1803’, SI (M129) RP2, he wrote of the ‘changes that have since proved so detrimental to the Progress’, attributable to ‘The nature of the Design being probably misunderstood at home’, and resulting ‘naturally’ in ‘a momentary damp on the spirits of persons who looked for a different notice of a work of some difficulty’. He made representations on his own account to Buchan, 21 October 1803; see also 13 July 1807 and (to ‘Chief Secretary’) 29 July 1808, LB2. 35 See his attempt to recruit Lt Morrison as a new assistant in place of Warren; to Chamier; 18 June 1802. Morrison (or Morison) was appointed on 6 July. See ‘Present State of the Distribution of the Surveyors on the Establishment of the Mysore Survey, 1 September 1802’, LB1.

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to rejoin his regiment as soon as possible—that is, when the survey was com­ pleted.36 It is a measure of his triumph over these reverses that, in effect, the time never came. Mackenzie’s response had four main elements. First, he remained convinced that the receipt in London of the fruits of his work would vindicate his approach.37He argued that the cut-off in support was based on misunderstand­ ing and inadequate information.38He determined to continue the work, despite great personal sacrifice, so that it conformed as closely as possible to his original, ambitious plan. He made politic and pragmatic adjustments, but he did not, as Dirks has suggested, seriously curtail the scope and indeed to have done so would have defeated his purpose.39 i t is hoped’, Mackenzie would write in 1809, ‘that the Results & Materials... are sufficiently convincing that the Objects sought... might be advantageously prosecuted further, in procuring a more intimate knowledge of the Resources & State of the Country in General.’ He went on: ‘Little more is now wanting but perseverance to extend these Investigations, with a reasonable prospect of success, to the other Provinces— 140 First indications of the success of this strategy were later recorded by Mackenzie in his ‘grateful Sense of the very decided Public Testimony His Excellency [the Governor General] was pleased to give to my efforts on this Service’.41 36 Mackenzie to Webbe, 22 February 1803, to Adjutant General, Madras Army, 9 March 1803 (reorders of 17 February), and to Peele, Acting Resident, Mysore, 4 April 1803, LB1. 37 See for example Mackenzie to Webbe, 21 November 1802, LB1, and to Buchan, 21 October 1803 and 27 November 1805, LB2. 38 Mackenzie to Major Merwick Shawe, Private Secretary, Governor General, 1 May 1804, LB2. 39 Dirks, ‘Colonial Histories’, pp. 285-6. On the original scope, see Mackenzie to Close, 9 November 1799, LB1. There was adjustment (see below), but still many an occasion when Mackenzie pressed himself or his assistants for additional information in a readily usable form. Once, remarkably, seeking data on production, animals, commerce, and history, he wrote that the government ‘from the liberality of the Establishment furnished have a just claim to the exclusive results of the work’; to Mather, 14 November 1805, LB2. 40 ‘Memorandum shewing the reduction of Expence of the Mysore Survey to 1st February 1809’ with Mackenzie to Buchan, 23 February 1809, LB2. 41 Mackenzie to Shawe, 25 June 1805, LB2. Presumably approbation covered pecuniary recompense; Mackenzie expressed appreciation ‘as well as for the recommendation at the same time to Lord Wm. Bentinck [Governor at Madras] in a manner equally grateful to my feelings as justly commanding my sincere acknow­ ledgements’. Later, emboldened, Mackenzie would write to the Madras Chief Secretary (Buchan), 29 July 1808, LB2 on the ‘utility of combining an extensive Investigation with a Geographical Survey, the principle I believe is generally approved of; &c its application to British Indian in general esteemed useful; & what has been already effected may remove any early doubts of its practicality’.

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Secondly, Mackenzie sought assiduously to avoid any possible criticisms of his procedures—there had been difficulties with some of the assistants in their relations with local officials, merchants, and porters. It was no accident that after 1801 Mackenzie redoubled his advice to the assistants to exercise discretion, especially outside the limits of Company territories where people were, he explained, ‘so ignorant, and so jealous...and can scarcely separate the idea of taking possession of a Country from that of surveying it’. In 1799, he still reserved judgement as to ‘whether the time is yet arrived when important considerations should be risqued and popular prejudices hazarded for the improvement of Science’.42 But he insisted repeatedly on the need to secure the cooperation of local officers so as to circumvent the well-known ‘aversion of the Natives to these Enquiries’.43 By 1803, in contrast, he was withdrawing the survey in certain areas and aspects due to such sensitivities,44 and rounding furiously on one of the assistants, Thomas Arthur, whose ‘highhandedness with Indian servants and trades-men’ had caused unfavour­ able comment from the diwan (chief minister) of Mysore.45 Arthur was later relieved of his duties as Assistant Surveyor even though there was then little or no prospect of his being replaced.46 42 The main issue was whether it was possible to survey beyond British territories. Mackenzie to Close, 6 December 1799, LB1. 43 Ibid., 24 October 1800. He urged caution from the start. See also Mackenzie to Mather, 26 June 1801, and 17 August 1804, LB1, and to Resident at Mysore, 16 September 1803, and 30 January 1804, LB2. Note in the last that his concern was partly to avoid ‘irritating the minds of the Natives by multiplied vexatious requisitions’ outside the needs of the survey—his assistants had their own passions too. See also his problems with his military escort (Mackenzie to Close, 11 and 27 March 1801, and to Major Kennett, 11 March 1801, LB1) and his advice against involvement in local disputes (over a boundary in a cornfield, to Close, 21 October 1800, LB1) or revenue questions (to G. Gowan, Collector; Bilghee, 3 February 1806, LB2). On the other hand, note the many reports of ready support from local assistants and officials, such as in [Mackenzie] to Close, 23 May 1800; Mackenzie to Close, 3 December 1800; and to Peele, head Assistant to Resident, Seringapatam, 25 May 1801, LB1. 44 Mackenzie to Lt Thomas Arthur, 30 December 1803, and to Webbe, 30 December 1803, LB2. See the ban, prompted by the Mysore diwan, on inquiries into the number of females in households: Peele to Mackenzie, 9 March 1803; and Mackenzie to Mather and Arthur 16 March 1803, LB1; to Peele, 15 September 1803; to Arthur, 30 December 1803 and 13 April 1804; and Arthur to Mackenzie, 4 February and 3 March 1804, LB2. See also Edney, ‘Mapping’, pp. 448-50, which this paper somewhat qualifies. 45 Mackenzie to Arthur, 30 January, 27 February, 9 and 27 May, and 15 September 1804, LB2. Compare a similar accusation against Mackenzie, which he denied; to Peele, 25 May 1801, LB1. 46 Mackenzie to Arthur, 13 July and 8 August, and Arthur to Mackenzie, 20 July 1805, LB2.

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A third strategy of Mackenzie was to try to regroup allies for his project. He praised Close for his steady support.47 He changed his attitude to the provision of military details. In 1800 he had admitted that it would be useful to insert, in his account of the fort of Chitradurga, information on granaries, works, and capacities of the principal batteries; but these were precisely the details he had omitted.48 In December 1800 he had also written to General Dugald Campbell, greatly regretting that he did not have the time or the staff to send him the information he had requested. Even a cursory survey of all the forts of the ceded territories would take some months, Mackenzie explained, and would be incompatible with what he thought he was supposed to be doing, that is, a ‘Geographical Survey’.49 A little earlier he had reported to Lord Clive in Madras that he had given only a few instances of fortifications in his interim report, so as not to interfere with the proper objects of his work.50 By contrast, in 1802, Mackenzie found he was able to send the Adjutant General of the Army various military charts of roads, passes, and forts;51 and he volunteered to supply Colonel Wellesley, then commanding the forces in Mysore, with a complete map of the northern frontier of the Company’s territories and a plan of the forts in Mysore. This might merely have indicated a more advanced stage of the survey—except that Wellesley was promised improvements and a ‘military chart on a larger scale’ when ‘the further extension of the Survey enables me to give more of the Country in detail’.52 Mackenzie’s final device to secure his survey was to adopt a lasting insistence upon economy. He had always stressed that his plan had limits, noting the risk of ‘undertaking too much at once’ and thus ‘retarding and confusing the whole*. He included, he said, only what was ‘simply useful’ to avoid ‘being accused of fancy or extravagance’.53 Now the chief means he seized upon was to extend the use he made of the boys from the surveying schools.54 47 Mackenzie to Close, 14 October 1801, LB1. Earlier he had expressed his ‘fullest confidence’ that Close would ‘resist any indirect attempt to separate what was designed to be carried on, on so liberal a footing, in concert, I mean the Statistical Enquiry in particular’; to Close, 21 October 1800, LB1. See also Edney, ‘Mapping’, pp. 200-4, for a discussion of Mackenzie’s changing attitudes to Lambton, which may well be relevant here. 48 Ibid., 24 August 1800. Mackenzie had made a plan of the fort while confined there by ‘banditti’, bad weather, and ill health. 49 Mackenzie to Major Gen. Dugald Campbell, 19 December 1800, LB1. 50 Mackenzie to Lord Clive, Governor; Fort St George, 24 October 1800, LB1.

51 Mackenzie to Col Agnew, Adjutant General, 17 October 1802, LB1. 52 Mackenzie to Col Wellesley, 23 October 1802, LB1. 53 Mackenzie to [Fitzpatrick], 5 January 1800, LB1. 54 These boys (who were ‘Native’—that is, India-born—but European or Eurasian; Phillimore calls them ‘country-bred’) had been trained at a school attached to the Madras observatory, founded by the marine surveyor Michael Topping (1747-96);

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As soon as his budget was cut, he wrote pleading for the retention of these apprentices, pointing out how cheaply they could do the work.55 Thereafter he was careful to report regularly on their progress and to have most of them confirmed in their posts as soon as, or before, the terms of their apprenticeship had expired.56 They had come to work for the survey after very basic training in Madras, and in most cases when very young—the youngest was only 13. They started, as John Mather put it, ‘unqualified both by age and education’; but they gradually became more experienced and useful.57 Only one caused a serious upset. James Ross, in 1804, then about 23 years old, was accused of going hunting instead of getting on with his work; of causing various servants, merchants, and bullock drivers to be mistreated; and finally of having seduced one of the dancing girls at the important temple o f Nanjangud near Mysore. In what must have been a remarkable scene, Ross was confronted by Mather and ordered to give up this girl, who was supposedly being held in his house. Ross refused, vowed to protect her with his life, and threatened bloodshed if Mather tried to remove her by force. Mather retreated, but saw to it that Ross was promptly sent back to Madras under guard.58 Undaunted, over the same period Mackenzie was calling for more apprentices to be sent. He described their employment as an experiment, but by the middle of 1805 they were being sent out in detached parties of two to undertake general surveying and the sketching in of the main features of the see Phillimore, Historical Records, pp. 2 and 341ff. From the Company perspective, its purpose no doubt paralleled that of schools at Kidderpore and Alipore, established by the Company’s Fund, set up by Major General Fitzpatrick for the maintenance and education of the orphans of European officers and men of the Bengal Army; see Kohli, Correspondence, vol. XXI, p. 515n. Mackenzie had always envisaged employing boys on his survey for reasons of economy and training; see Mackenzie to Clive, 24 October 1800, LB1. 55 Mackenzie to Chamier, 27 December 1801, LB1. This was approved. See also ibid., 15 and 27 January 1803, and Mackenzie to Warren and to Mather; 6 February 1802, LB1. 56 Mackenzie to William Jones, 25 March 1802, and to Chamier; 12 March 1802, LB1. 57 Mather to Machenzie, 11 June 1805, LB2. See also Mackenzie to Mather; 13 June 1805. 58 Mackenzie to Mather; 14 September 1803, 20 May and 26 August 1804; to Buchan, 9 September 1804; and Mather to Mackenzie, 20 May and 26 August 1804; to Buchan, 9 September 1804; to Mackenzie, 20 May and 26 August 1804 (two copies), LB2. See also Mackenzie to [Warren], 15 June 1808, LB2: ‘altho’ my friends could not think I acted rashly or harshly yet consideration of what was said here then...could but make me hesitate; altho’ in justice to the rest the same causes never occurred with any other [apprentice surveyor]’. Ross was later re-employed in the Tank department in Madras; Phillimore, Historical Records, p. 343.

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country.59 A year later; as sub-assistants in their late teens and early twenties, they were being deputed to the field in charge of substantive parts of the operations.60 Mackenzie had entered an elaborate defence of their employment in a report of 1803,61 and on the same basis he was able, in 1806, to promise the completion of the Mysore survey at reduced cost and with no extra expenditure required.62 Later; when continuing his policy of retrenchment in Madras while he was just beginning work as Surveyor-General of India, he was careful to protect the interests of these young men, several of whom were then very experienced as surveyors. He hoped, he wrote at that time, he might ‘be pardoned for a natural solicitude to do justice to the industry and merits of persons who have been in a manner reared under my eye... some of them deserving approbation for uncommon industry and talent.. .\63 In this praise—in which he included several of the Indian employees and informants (of whom more later)— Mackenzie was stressing the importance of preserving the skills built up over the years at a time when, he believed, profligate expenditure incurred during his absence in Java had endangered the very continuance of his work. His efforts at this late stage were devoted to the centralization of the management of the surveys under the office of the Surveyor-General of India. This was foreshadowed in draft regulations for Madras in 1811, and instituted in all Company territories from 1815 (despite a formal and temporary independence for the Trigonometrical Survey). Ensuring economy while achieving the basic purposes of the surveys was one advantage cited by Mackenzie for the plan of ‘concentrating’ all of them ‘under one general direction’.64 59 Mather to Mackenzie, 11 June; and Mackenzie to Buchan, 18 June 1805, and to Wilkes, 30 August 1806, LB2. 60 Mackenzie to Mysore Resident, 16 September 1803; to Mather; 6 and 19 March; to James Summers and William Lantwar, 8 July; and Mather to Mackenzie, 25 August 1806, LB2. 61 See Mackenzie to Clive, 12 July 1803 (‘Second General Report on the Mysore Survey, 1803’), SI (M129) RP2, and also to Buchan, 18 June 1805, LB2. 62 Mackenzie to Buchan, 10 September 1806, and also 3 March 1807, LB2. 63 Mackenzie to Chief Secretary, 1 August 1816, ‘General Report on the State of the Surveying Department at Fort St George, 30 April 1816’, SI (M561) RP3. See also Mackenzie to [Warren], 15 June (particularly praising Ward and Hamilton, ‘& if errors have occurred in others I am willing to forget it in their subsequent better conduct’), and to Chief Secretary, 29 July 1808, LB2. Edney seems to be slightly mistaken in his assessment here, and on Mackenzie’s attitude to Indians and indigenous knowledge (discussed below); see ‘Mapping’, pp. 458-61. 64 Other purposes were to bring information ‘into one collected view,’ to avoid ‘losing the benefit of the gradual but considerable tho’ slow reform’, and ‘keeping up the Method by which this advantage was obtained’; see ‘General Report on the State of the Surveying Department at Fort St George’, 30 April 1816, SI (MS61) RP3. Also see ibid., passim, but especially Mackenzie to Chief Secretary, 26 September 1816

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Mackenzie’s most distinctive contribution to the acceptance of the survey was first his single-mindedness. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his own long years in the field and the extent to which his determination was merely increased by what he considered the neglect and errors of his superiors. Equally he professed to a concern for the health, future, and well-being of his assistants, and was loyal to most of those who had served him well; but he was ruthless with anyone he thought had let him down. He conducted a longsuffering campaign of obstruction against Benjamin Heyne who, as surgeon to the survey, was supposed to be carrying out tasks for Mackenzie but who devoted himself almost entirely to botanical and chemical experiments and to geological reports, which Mackenzie considered irrelevant or only incidental to the main work in hand. Worse still, Heyne, who had earlier been much helped by Mackenzie, absented himself for long periods on health grounds.65 Even more revealing of his turn of mind was his treatment of John Mather. Mackenzie acknowledged that Mather had devised some of the features of the method which he instituted.66 Mather’s survey of Baramahal had been the first conducted professionally and independently from regular administra­ tion. Mackenzie also praised Mather’s tact and energy.67 He supported a plea for special pecuniary recognition of Mather’s exceptional talents and (second letter of that date); and ‘Draft of Regulations proposed for the surveying operations at Madras by the late Colonel Mackenzie in 1811’, SI M 37. The Trigonometrical Survey was kept distinct for a time—Mackenzie, ever the politician, did not press the point—in deference to the importance of Lambton’s work in establishing the base line for the geography of the peninsula, and possibly (judging from his reports) from respect for his technical knowledge and insistence upon standards, or at least for occasions when he demonstrated his inability to express himself in plain language. In this he may be contrasted interestingly with Mackenzie. See above, note 13. 65 Mackenzie to Heyne, 8 October 1799, 23 December 1800, 13 February, 25 June, and 15 July 1801; to Close, 23 and 24 December 1800, 27 June, 19 and 24 July, and 14 October 1801; to Webbe, 20 May 1800, LB1; to Buchan, 3 March 1807, LB2. See also Heyne, ‘Cursory Remarks’. Heyne, a Dane, was a significant figure in the European botanic exploration of India—see Desmond, Indian Flora, esp. pp. 4 1 3—though he so disappointed Mackenzie, whose problems continued. Asst Surgeon J.G. Leyden was appointed in Heyne’s stead to provide medical aid and to deal with botany and mineralogy; he took sea leave on health grounds in 1805 and then accepted a ‘better appointment’ without informing Mackenzie, who then proposed Dr Evans for the medical work (which he had been undertaking already from February 1802, health being a persistent worry for the surveying teams); see Mackenzie to Leyden, 13 July 1804; to Capt. Morrison, Deputy Secretary, Military Board; to G.G. Keble, 22 December 1807; and Leyden to Mackenzie, 12 April 1805, LB2. 66 Mackenzie to Webbe, 21 November 1802, LB1. 67 See for example Mackenzie to Mather, to March 1801, LB1 and 17 August 1804, LB2. See also ‘Second General Report... 1803’. SI (M129) RP2.

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service.68 By 1806, however Mather’s health was clearly failing after 12 years continually in the field. For the first time Mackenzie had to rebuke him for failing to reply promptly to correspondence, or for not including enclosures, or for not dating his reports, or for not sending in returns.69 Mather struggled on, but his requests to be allowed to resign for reasons of ill health, repeated from earlier years, gradually became more insistent. By June 1806 rheumatism had so invaded his limbs, he wrote, that he was almost deprived of the use of them. In Mangalore, medical opinion was that his condition was incurable and that it would deteriorate rapidly if he was exposed to damp or cold. He thus proposed to leave the remainder of the field work to his now capable assistants (former apprentices), and to spend the rest of his time writing up the results before (he hoped) returning to Europe.70 Mackenzie was furious. It would be ‘inexpedient’, he wrote, for Mather to give up when the work was so nearly at an end. He refused to submit Mather’s request to higher authority until Mather had had a chance to reconsider and then, when he did submit it, he indicated his objections very plainly. He made ungenerous reference to the additional burden which would be placed upon himself. He declined to endorse Mather’s request for a favourable financial settlement.71 Yet at about the same time he was advancing his own claims to an improvement in pay and allowances, and successfully supporting the plea of one of the apprentices, the able if taciturn Benjamin Ward, to be admitted to a military cadetship.72 Mackenzie’s official credit and career advancement, 68 See Mather to Mackenzie, 11 November; Mackenzie to Webbe, 21 November, to Chamiet, 23 November; and to Mather; 25 December; and Webbe’s statement to the Govemor-in-Council with Webbe to Mackenzie, 12 December 1802, LB1. Mackenzie had also proposed Mather as head of a ‘kind of Seminary of Practical Survey’ on the coast for health reasons—he was another casualty of the cut-backs; to Clive, 24 October 1800, LB1. 69 See Mackenzie to Mather; 7 and 25 May and 3 July 1806, LB2. 70 Mather to Mackenzie, 16 (two letters) and 22 June 1806, LB2. Mather succeeded in retiring to England, with his pension secured, but was drowned in 1808 during a sea passage to Aberdeen; see the biographical notes in Phillimore, Historical Records. 71 Mackenzie to Mather; 20 June and 18 September; to Buchan, 26 June; and to Wilkes, 26 June and 30 August 1806, LB2. An element in Mackenzie’s hostility may have been concern that he would be blamed for the deterioration in Mather’s health. He was quick to insist to Buchan that he had always permitted medical leave, and ‘regarding some parts of Mr Mather’s correspondence which do not appear to breathe the most respectful spirit I consider it incumbent on me to observe that to the inattention he alludes to I am a Stranger’. Mather’s ‘disrespect’ has not survived in the record. 72 Mackenzie to Bentinck, 16 July 1806; and to Adjutant General, Fort St George, and to Lt Gen. Sir J. Craddock, Commander-in-Chief, 30 December 1806 (with enclosures), LB2. Ward’s application was successful; see also his ‘Descriptive Memoir (and register of villages and triangles) in Neelgeery Mountains’, Coimbatore, SI M89.

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by his own account, depended on the rapid conclusion of the survey. It is apparent therefore that Mackenzie’s rather uncharacteristic attacks on Mather were a mark of his own ambition, perhaps of resentment at the lack of recognition his work had received by 1806, but also of his dedication to the survey, even of his obsession with it. No word of Mackenzie’s sympathy for Mather survives in the records after March 1806,73 though there are, as said, numerous exhortations to all the assistants in other years to look after their health. At this stage, in 1806 with the field work almost completed, Mackenzie was about to embark on the collation, copying, and analysis that he believed would demonstrate the value of what he had done. He envisaged his work as a model for others and paid particular attention to the conditions in which the materials would be catalogued and preserved. He devoted to these tasks all the fixity of purpose that he had demonstrated in his treatment of John Mather. Indeed the quality and skill of the team he had assembled was one of his strongest arguments for recognition; and his success, by means of the survey reports and other materials, depended above all on his will and persistence.

m Mackenzie’s second major contribution to the projects of investigation in nineteenth century India was the establishment of the methods and goals of the survey. This brings us to the second aspect of the paper Space will not permit a detailed description here, but passing reference has already been made to the developments, and in any case it is to some of the general characteristics that I wish to draw attention. Many of them are commonplaces of scientific method, though they were designed by Mackenzie for assistants who were not ‘scientific men’.741 hope to indicate the importance of the Mysore survey to the adoption of such methods in India. The key elements in Mackenzie’s approach were observation and measurement, comprehensiveness, standardization, reporting, and the record.751 will consider each of them briefly. The first, observation—implying in some part indigenous knowledge—was accorded primacy by Mackenzie over all other kinds and sources of information. His findings he considered ‘defective’ where they were not first-hand.76 It was this which led him to emphasize the need to enlist the help of local officials and their records, and 73 Mackenzie to Mather, 6 March 1806, LB2. 74 Mackenzie to Close, 9 November 1801, LB1. See also Edney, ‘Mapping’, pp. 209-14. 75 Mackenzie to Clive, 24 October 1800, and to close, 24 March 1801, LB1. 76 Mackenzie to Close, 28 February 1800; see also to Clive, 24 October, and to Warren, 4 June 1801, LB1.

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to regret his lack of proficiency in Indian languages.77Indeed, the facility with which the apprentices acquired local dialects was one of the reasons Mackenzie found them especially useful.78 Dirks has thoroughly documented Mackenzie’s employment of a whole team of Indian informants, investigators, translators, and writers for his historical researches and collections—and there is much eloquent testimony to their importance in Mackenzie’s own words. But we should also note that he insisted on local input even for the fundamental aspects of the survey. The ‘most material’ information, he told his assistants, would come from Indian guides. They would point out the boundaries and landmarks which should be recorded. They would provide estimates of, for example, population or the capacity of irrigation tanks.79 Above all was empiricism: ‘remarks made on the spot’, Mackenzie claimed, ‘will be more valuable than speculative opinions formed at a distance.’80 But observation was subject to judgement. The surveyor’s own view remained the final arbiter. It was his duty, explained Mackenzie, to check the informa­ tion received, whenever possible, by his own inspection and calculations.81 The basis of such verification lay in measurement and quantification. The method was, Mackenzie wrote, ‘precisely’ as in the trigonometrical surveys which had started in England and France in the 1790s.82 A basic grid was provided by a series of triangles, working from east to west and from north to south, from a baseline established by precise measurement and astronomi­ cal observations.83 The first duty of each surveyor was to choose the stations 77 See, for example, Mackenzie to Wellesley and to Montresoi; 28 July 1800, LB1, and to Clive, 12 July 1803, SI (M129) RP2. Facility in languages, he reported to Clive, was necessary for ‘Satisfactory Investigation and access to the sentiments of the people as well as to that Knowledge derived from a ready intercourse’, so that ‘to do justice to the work a respectable Establishment of Linguists, or a more than common asso­ ciation of talents in one person joining a competent knowledge of several languages to a fidelity, accuracy & vigour of mind superior to common prejudices, were a nec­ essary aid’—qualities he found in K.V. Letchmia (see below, note 132). 78 See, for example, Mackenzie to Buchan, 18 June 1805, LB2. He identified 10 necessary languages: ‘Tamil, Canara, Tellinga, Maratha, Moori, Toolvei; Coorgee, Sanscrit, Kalla Canara, English.’ 79 Mackenzie to Close, 21 January 1800, LB1, and see above, note 43. 80 Mackenzie to Clive, 24 October 1800, LB1. In addition, of course, ‘the intervals of the rainy Season are as valuable to a Surveyor in laying down his Plans and arranging his materials as that of actual measurement in the field’; to Col Barclay, 22 September 1800, LB1. 81 For example, Mackenzie to Warren, 5 September 1800, LB1. 82 Mackenzie to [Fitzpatrick], 5 January 1800, LB1. 83 A convenient summary of the preparation of the base line may be found in ‘Memoir of the Operations & Method followed in carrying on the Survey of the Boundary & Northern Provinces of the Mysore Dominions... 1800 and 1801’, 25 May 1803, SI (M129) RP2.

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and to plot the triangles, after which the details of the area would be filled in.84 The survey was also to be comprehensive in coverage and in the potential it offered for further research, in particular in the extent to which it enumer­ ated and placed every example under each of a series of stipulated heads. All villages, whether deserted or not, all landmarks, roads, tanks, water courses, woods, hills, and so on, were to be located and listed.85 Nor was the work confined to Company territories. It was to extend over the whole peninsula and, Mackenzie proposed, the whole of India—if not (in other hands) the world—in the same steady process. Mackenzie enunciated concepts of regional identity to explain, in particular, why the ceded districts and the territories of the raja of Mysore, Coorg, the Marathas, the nizam of Hyderabad, and even Portuguese Goa should all be encompassed in the one inspection.86 Most important, this was also to be surveying in depth. Mackenzie sought to sup­ port his measurements and mapping with ‘a body of authentic materials’ on indigenous knowledge—on history, tenures, privileges, customs, government, arts, and sciences, ‘adapted to the peculiar manners of the Natives’. Such in­ formation was necessary because the ‘bare narration of obscure facts can produce litde interest unattended with those lights that render them subser­ vient to the amelioration of the State of the Subject, to the improvement of the administration, or productive of commercial advantages’.87 It followed too that there should be standardization. There would be, ide­ ally, one surveyor and one set of instruments to each area.88 The same points would be used for all measurements, notably in adjacent areas. The same scale would be used for all but the most detailed maps.89 The same list of subjects would be covered. Mackenzie explained that ‘much more may be expected by following one General Plan than by different methods however correct’.90 This was a long way from the ‘general idea of the Country’ which we noted in the Midnapore Resident’s diary. The great advantages of the system were that it allowed results to be compared and rendered them readily intelligible. 84 Mackenzie to Warren, 21 January 1800, LB1. 85 See for example Mackenzie to Warren, 5 September 1800, and Mather, 22 January 1803, LB1. 86 On Goa, see Mackenzie to Close and to Resident at Goa, 23 May; to Johnstone, 25 August and 4 October 1800, LB1; and ‘Memorandum from Major Mackenzie to Col Keith’ (at Goa), 10 February 1806, LB2. Edney, ‘Mapping’, suggests that Mackenzie extended his remit by stealth. 87 Mackenzie to Close, 24 October 1800, LB1. 88 Mackenzie to Close, 15 March 1801, LB1. 89 Mackenzie to Mather 28 April, and to Warren (stipulating one English mile to an inch), 5 September 1800, LB1. 90 Mackenzie to Close, 31 October; see also 24 December 1800, LB1.

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Surveyors were told to keep in touch with one another to exchange stations for their triangulations, to compare readings, and if necessary to correct dis­ crepancies.91 Within each survey, too, different methods were used to provide crosschecking of the data. Surveyors were warned not to rely, for example, on compass readings alone.92When results were produced, therefore, they had a material authenticity derived from comparison and checking. They were ‘composed from various authorities’—that is, cross-checked93—and after the rejection of ‘whatever seemed doubtful’.94 The benefits to be expected from the ‘ready communication’ of the results95—including of course as we have seen Mackenzie’s own advancement and the future of the survey—were greatly facilitated by this standardization, and also by the emphasis placed upon reports. Each surveyor was required to operate from an initial sketch and outline plan, to keep a daily journal and field-book, and to produce elaborate memoirs divided into summary, register, abstracts, and historical and other sketches.96 It was in these details that Mather’s contribution had been greatest. He was responsible, Mackenzie explained in 1802, for the Tables 6c mode of arranging every individual Village by the Primary Stations which in future will authenticate the Survey and the position of each in its proper District; the Classing of the different kinds of Lands with the Stock of Cattle, in the Concluding Abstract, the Tables of Manufactures 8c of the Exports and Imports 8c the useful Table of Vegetable Productions common to these Countries.97

These prescriptions were set out in instructions issued by Mackenzie both initially and in response to periodic reports. Not all the survey memoirs conformed to them exactly, but in general terms they did so to a remarkable degree.98 Together they constituted the significant features which new maps would present and preserve. 91 Mackenzie to Warren, 17 June and 13 November 1800; to Mather, 18 January, 10 March, and 18 September 1801, LB1. 92 Mackenzie to Mathec, 10 March 1801, LB1. 93 Mackenzie to Warren, 21 January 1800; to Mather (on comparisons), 18 January 1801; and to Francis Buchanan (on authenticity), 5 July 1800, LB1. 94 Mackenzie to Clive, 24 October 1800, LB1. 95 Mackenzie to Close, 24 October 1800, LB1. 96 Mackenzie to Webbe; to Clive, 24 October; to Arthur, 14 December 1800; and to Morrison, 7 October 1802, LB1. The initial sketch plan would-be compiled from ‘various authorities’ (to Lambton, 7 December 1800, LB1); see an example with Mackenzie to Superintendent, Surveying School, 2 May 1807, LB2. 97 Mackenzie to Webbe, 21 November 1802, LB1. 98 See for example the memoirs, statistical accounts, registers, and reports of ‘Zillah Madura’, 1800, SI (M67) M9; ‘Nugger or Bidenoor’, (M123) M7; ‘the Province of Adwany and Siringapatam of district Tadamurry, Tandaputree’ etc. (M21) M l7; ‘Colac, Oosscotta and Jungamcotta in Mysore’, 1800-2, (M115) M il; also ‘Canara*, 1806-7, (M142c) M22, and ‘Neelgerry Mountains’, Coimbatore, M89.

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The recording and preservation of the findings, thus standardized and authenticated, exercised Mackenzie greatly from the first." It was clear that he envisaged his work as an essential basis for future investigations in the sense o f something that would not need to be repeated or revised. By the ‘General Plan’ and record, the work could be ‘completed’.100 He lobbied repeatedly, especially in the later stages, for sufficient skilled copyists and draftsmen to prepare and synthesize the materials. In particular he wanted general and special-purpose maps to be drawn and provided to the relevant departments of government. His period as Surveyor-General was devoted to this work—it provided a major component of the regulations he devised to define the post, with its duties and rights, and was an important element in his arguments for retaining the core of the establishment he had created in Madras. Large amounts of materials, he explained, require ‘arrangement’.101 He was also repeatedly alarmed at the lack of provision for the care of records. He sought and obtained proper rooms to avoid their being exposed to danger or damage and to provide for more convenient access.102 As Surveyor-General he was especially concerned to collect and preserve materials under what he had already described as ‘a more regular arrangement’ in a ‘Geographical Depot’.103The other route to the preservation and dissemination of the work summed up the professionalization that it implied. It consisted of the inculcation and perpetuation of skills. Here the apprentices were again important. It was his ‘own professional character’ that had inspired Mackenzie to establish his ‘Regular Plan’,104and in searching for assistants, he had sought out those with the requisite skills and experience. But by including the apprentices in his scheme, he was, as he said, ‘providing a kind of seminar of Practical Survey’.105Many of them continued in the work long after the Mysore survey had ended. 99 Mackenzie’s first suggestions for storing the materials, which he had ‘arranged... under distinct heads for facility of reference’, seem to have been to Webbe, 24 October 1800, LB1. See also to Johnson, 7 July 1800, LB1. 100 Mackenzie to Clive, 24 October 1800 and passim, LB1. See also above, note 64. 101 Mackenzie to Close, 14 October 1801, LB1. See also Mackenzie to Heynes, 23 December 1800; to Wellesley, 23 October 1803; and to Buchan, 13 July 1803, LB2. 102 For example, see Mackenzie to Buchan, 13 July 1803, LB2. 103 Mackenzie to Buchan, 13 July 1803, LB1 and LB2, and to Chief Secretary, 26 September 1816, SI (M561) RP3. 104 Mackenzie to Close, 9 November 1799, LB1; also to Buchan, 10 September 1806, LB2. 105 Mackenzie to Clive, 24 October 1800; also see to Close, 31 October 1800 (envisaging training by practice for older recruits); to Webbe, 22 February 1803, LB1 (his borrowing of two young men from Mather ‘rather with a view to improving their Stile of drawing’); and to [Warren], 15 June 1808, LB2.

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Mackenzie was jealous of his own status as the leading expert on surveying. For example, when asked to report on his former assistant John Warren, appointed Acting Inspector of Surveys and superintendent of the surveying school in Madras, he expressed surprise and asked for instructions on his relation to the inspector. This was a point of importance (he argued) ‘with a view to preserving that respect from the Younger part to their immediate Directors’, given that Warren was his junior in surveying experience by nearly 15 years. He called for regulations to provide a gradation of posts from apprentice through sub-assistant to assistant surveyor, and so on. This was certainly connected with his complaints in the same letter at the limited number of European assistants on the Mysore survey and the fact that he had had to undertake detailed work himself, thus interfering with his duties of superintendence.106 It was also designed to bring pressure for reform. He expressed regret at about the same time, ‘that no more immediate remedy could be applied for my relief than the distant prospect offered in the Appointment of Surveyor General to one who naturally wished now rather [relief] from a laborious course of Service than to engage in the cares that the Arrangement of a new Office must involve’.107 Interpreting this, we should not emphasize his reluctance and weariness but rather the words ‘immediate’ and ‘distant’ and the implication that a Surveyor-General would face a large task of institution building. Mackenzie was already defining the office. His strategy was clearly not only to secure his own position but also to create a professional and career structure for surveyors.

IV The consequences of all this for the institutions and practices of the British government in India are plain enough at one level, though definite connections may not always be possible to prove. On the technical side, Mackenzie himself became one of those models for future conduct which were encouraged in the Indian services. The future survey and settlement reports, district gazetteers, censuses, inquiries, and record offices—all these he could have regarded, with justice, as a continuation and vindication of his work. There were other important consequences that went beyond bureaucratic or even intellectual and scholarly practices. Mackenzie thought his work 106 Mackenzie to Buchan, 18 June 1805, LB2. See also Mackenzie’s sharp and detailed marginal criticisms of a report from Warren to Buchan, 1 December 1806, LB2. Even when Warren referred to Mackenzie’s ‘valuable & important Survey’, Mackenzie retorted ‘it were but an indulgence of justice to allow him [Mackenzie] the common privilege... to present his own work’. Jean-Baptiste, Comte de Warren (17691830) was himself a remarkable figure. An aristocratic refugee from France after 1791, he returned there in the 1820s; see Phillimore, Historical Records, biographical notes. 107 Mackenzie to Close, 14 October 1801, LB1, and to Shawe, 25 June 1805, LB2.

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important partly because of its diagnostic aspects. We have noticed that he contrasted ‘bare narration of obscure facts’ with information conducive to improvements for state or subject and in administration or commerce.108How did he envisage that better information would help? In what is now northern Karnataka, Mackenzie had been understandably impressed by the strangeness of the landscape, but he also believed that in it he could find explanatory patterns. This offers an important clue to the benefits he expected from the survey. ‘Regulating his ideas’, he said, by what he had found elsewhere he anticipated that in one tract, for example, he would find a land with many tanks and reservoirs and, ascending a range of hills for a better view, he was gratified to find his prediction confirmed. He was trying to relate specific features, such as soils and the command of water, to patterns of cultivation or settlement and to possibilities for improvement. He noted that some areas invited pastoral and others agrarian use. He reflected on ‘natural defects’ or advantages.109In short, he was attempting to account, through types or general rules of landscape or topography, for material functions or aspects of society— trying to provide a rational or scientific basis for phenomena, a form of analytical geography on a par with empirical physics. This was the purpose also of his requests for information on weather, climate, and the seasons, which, along with topography, he supposed to have a causative role in the promotion of health or the spread of disease.110 He extended such attempts at rational explanation beyond physical environment across the full range of his enthusiasms.111 It was the basis of his concern with history. Such curiosity was to be expected in the vicinity of the great ruined city of Vijayanagar; but for Mackenzie, it also had a function. As we have already noted, he wanted to understand how the region and people had come to be as they were.112In an eloquent statement of a historicist theory 108 Mackenzie to Close, 24 October 1800, LB1. 109 Mackenzie to Close, 24 November 1800, LB1. On degrees and limits of ecological determinism, see David Ludden, ‘Archaic Formations of Agricultural Knowledge in South India’, in P. Robb (ed.), Meanings o f Agriculture: Essays in South Asian History and Economics, Delhi, 1996, pp. 35-64. 110 See for example Mackenzie to Michael Donigan, ‘Native Sub-Assistant’, 28 April 1807, LB2. 111 See his speculation about similarities between Ceylon and southern India, when asking Francis Buchanan to collect information on Jains and Buddhists; to Buchanan, 25 May 1800, LB1. 112 He would not have had the experience which so impresses modem visitors to Hampi, after much excavation and restoration, but—to give his actual words—he considered that the remains of the ancient capital of an ‘Extensive Empire’ promised ‘the advantages of tracing on the Spot... some notices of those Institutions which still influence] the local Customs & Manners of the various Classes’, ‘Second General Report on the Mysore Survey 1803’, Mackenzie to Clive, 12 July 1803, SI (M129)

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of place and the part played by the past in regulating people’s conduct and institutions in the present, he explained: The elucidation of the History of the several Governments that have rapidly succeeded in this Stage will I conceived be very interesting, as by the Inscriptions, Grants, & other Documents that came into my hands, a regular Progress is traced up to the first Mahomedan invasion in the 13th Century Sc even beyond it to the 8th but more obscurely; & in several instances still further, these consist not merely of a dry Chain of uninteresting facts but are connected by various illustrations of the genious [sic] & manner of the People, their Several Systems of Government & of Religion, & of the predominant causes that influence their Sentiments & opinions to this day; lights are derived on the Tenures of lands, the origin & variety of the several classes, and the genius and Spirit of the Government prevalent generally in the South for centuries from Several Documents illustrating claims & pretension not foreign to modern discussions...confirming the utility of this undertaking to the existing Government from a knowledge of Institutions that influence so considerable a part of the Population of the Empire."3

These were powerful ideas that of course were hardly original to Mackenzie. » But he may, I think, be credited with enshrining them more securely in the perceptions and practice of the British government in India. They had an implication for the avowed purpose of that government, which was expressed, albeit somewhat obscurely, in the continuing readiness to conduct elaborate surveys—it was an implication of responsibility. Of course enumeration, which was central to the process, gave what Arjun Appadorai has called the ‘illusion of control’ in India and Europe.114But it also suggested, in both cases, an admission of purpose-, of goals for government related to the character and needs of the people. Mackenzie stressed the political and moral need for a benign government. Dirks has him complicit in the Company’s RP2. His curiosity and list of points for attention were commonplace (see note 29 above), but his execution and receptiveness were exceptional. 113 Mackenzie to Shawe, 25 June 1805, LB2. Note that this echoes an earlier passage referred to above, note 87. 114 Arjun Appadorai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in Breckenridge and van der Veer (eds), Orientalism, p. 317. His full phrase is ‘illusion of bureaucratic control’, which he contrasts with quantifications of a more direcdy utilitarian pur­ pose. He associates the social, political, and intellectual importance of ‘number’ with modem European knowledge (an issue which might be further explored), and with colonialism the perception and categorization of the whole Indian population (and presumably its ecology, customs, and history) as different, though European under­ standings encountered and interacted with powerful indigenous categories. The case of Mackenzie and surveying supports some of this analysis, but not without qualifi­ cation—for example, as regards the purposes of data-collection, the appreciation of the otherness of India, the interrogation of information sources (human and non­ human), and the shaping of the conclusions and records. This essay addresses mainly these differences rather than the numerous points that reinforce Appadorai’s inter­ pretation.

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conquests and in the self-serving belief that the British were rescuing India from its own decadence. The first of these points is obviously true, but the second may be misleading—not only for Mackenzie but more generally. In one passage, Mackenzie regarded ‘with pleasure’ the evidence that families were returning to cultivate areas they had previously deserted during the dis­ location of the recent wars.1151 read this as a reference to specific and not civilizational failings. Similarly, in his hopes for improvement, Mackenzie seems rather to have been anticipating a general process available to Indians than expecting a particular boon to be provided only by the Company’s government. Mackenzie’s explanations of landscape and his expectations of geography belonged with all those others that studied society and economy as mechanical systems, the Indian examples contributing to the universal whole. The same emphasis on systems and causation encouraged the expecta­ tion that large effects could flow from sectoral improvements in government, law, communications, or education. Later, the same impulse would produce a recognition of the interrelatedness of problems and thus of the need for measures pertinent to the whole of a society, culminating in state planning. In his report to the Governor General in 1804, Mackenzie expressed a hope for a ‘more effectual Scientific Investigation of the Natural productions 8c Manufactures of the Countries which in the present state of British India it is to be presumed will become a more Special Object of attention in a National point of view when general tranquillity is restored’.116 The vocabulary and sentiment are both interesting. Mackenzie's meaning is explained in a fuller and illegible draft that he did not submit, probably (I suspect) because it implied grandiose extensions of his work at a time when he was stressing its modesty, having been ordered to bring it to a prompt and economical conclusion. Mackenzie expected peace to produce a rise of population and a need for a vent for surplus. The ‘national’ (that is, Indian) interest he defined in terms of the resources ‘of these Countries, Manufactures, Cultivation & new objects of Industry’—matters that were, h&said, ‘worthwhile the attention of the Company as a Great Commercial body & the care of the interests of the Natives’. The form any progress must take would be, he added, determined by geographical considerations. The state’s revenues would benefit from an increase in population and in production: ‘A Circulatory Medium, a Vent for the Superabundance of plentiful years, Marts & entrepots of Manufacture and Produce will be proved particularly necessary.’ But ‘in an inland Country possessing few means of transportation but by that of Cattle’, such as the area of the Mysore survey, it would be necessary, Mackenzie went on, ‘that the 115 Mackenzie to Close, 24 November 1800, LB1. 116 Mackenzie to Shawe, 1 May 1804, LB2.

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increase of cultivation be not by means of external Arrangement to provide a due Vent by exportation [but] thru’ erections of Manufacture adapted to the Country & with the regulation of these, having due regard to the interests of the Company’s Countries, & their Commerce’.117 The purpose of the survey, then, was not only to establish a basis for Company trade and rule, but also to determine the requirements of particular Indian regions if their conditions were to be improved. We need not make any exaggerated claims for the benevolence of British rule—there is no shortage of evidence of its extortions and oppression. But we should attend to the extent to which Mackenzie’s project, with its heavy emphasis on empirical observation and Indian informants, represented an attempt to take seriously the Indian realities—and hence, to a point, Indian interests. Even the selfish needs of British rule, in this case represented by the revenue and on other occasions by fears of disorder and resistance, required that India be considered. Such needs offered to justify inquiries as Mackenzie conducted them: At a moment when the attention of the Government in India 8c the Legislature in Europe is turned to the amelioration of the State of the Native Subjects, the means of conciliating their minds, of exciting habits of industry 8c cultivating the arts of peace under the Security 8c milder influence of fixed Rules, it is presumed that such Investigations cannot be viewed with indifference under the management of the India Company whose best interests are involved in what tends to the acquisition of a more intimate Knowledge of the Country & its resources 8c the Suggestions thence arising on the means of improving its revenue Sc Commerce, Sc promoting the prosperity o f... [at the very least] Ten Millions of Native Subjects.118

This was not just a suppressed maverick impulse of Mackenzie’s; it was one among several continuing stands of colonial policy.

V That is not to say, however, that Mackenzie was somehow merely respecting and understanding India. As my final point, I want to return to my comments at the outset about the impact of the survey upon the understanding of place— a change which in any case was a necessary stage in the state’s acceptance of responsibilities. There is an ambiguity in Mackenzie’s position on boundaries, which lies at the heart of the disturbance he was introducing. On one hand, he instructed his assistants to keep in view the ‘ancient divisions’.119He explained 117 Ibid., and copyist’s draft and marginal corrections. 118 ‘View of the State of the Mysore Survey on 1st October 1803’, SI (M129) RP3. 119 Mackenzie to Warren, 23 March 1800 and 24 March 1801, LB1. Nonetheless, changes were to be described by the surveyors in their reports.

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that where other states were involved ‘you cannot with any certainty venture to fix’ the borders.120 The local reports were to be taken as proving ‘real’ boundaries, except where there were disputes.121 Mackenzie implied, in short, that, as in all his investigations, his purpose was merely to read off and record what was. Now that in itself might have brought about a significant change by fixing what had once been vague; but in fact Mackenzie also wrote, contradicting himself, of the possibility of enabling an exchange of districts so as to provide for more convenient administration. He envisaged that the frontier might be ‘liable to alterations’ before it formed a ‘permanent Boundary’.122 In 1803, he set out a series of principles for such adjustment of the borders to make them ‘more regular and compact’. He did not advance what he called the ‘usual consideration... of strong posts, command of Passes & Defiles, Passage of Rivers & c.’; but he did propose an exchange of areas of equivalent rental value in order to reannex detached interior taluks (sub-districts) to their former districts or to consolidate smaller districts or villages with larger in either the Company’s or the raja of Mysore’s dominions.123 Moreover, such rationalization aside, Mackenzie privileged one particular border—that established by the partition of 1799. He ordered that the districts and frontiers recorded in the survey should be those mentioned in the partition, and not those according to any ‘later subdivision... made from time to time by the managers of the country’. This was land to be ruled. He insisted that the records for districts in the raja’s territories should be kept entirely separate from those for the Company’s lands.124Clearly, then, the survey was not merely describing places; it was defining them, or reshaping them, and doing so either for political convenience or on supposedly objective principles. It is noticeable that it was ‘convenient’ borders that were defined even when history and culture were specially examined and harnessed to definitions of place.125 This prepared the way for national states for which history and cultural rationales 120 Mackenzie to Johnstone, 6 January 1801, LB1. 121 Mackenzie to Warren, 23 March and 13 November 1800, and 24 March 1801, LB1. 122 Mackenzie to Close, 5 December 1799, LB1. This helps explain some local sensitivities, as from Koorg; see Mackenzie to Mysore Resident, 30 December 1803, LB2. 123 ‘Memorandum on the Limits & Boundaries of the Mysore Partition’, 14 December 1803, bound with LB2. See also Mackenzie to Close, 24 December 1800, LB1. On ‘detached villages’, see Mackenzie to Warren and to Mather, 10 November 1801, LB1. 124 Mackenzie to Warren, 13 November, 23 March, and to Mather, 27 December 1800, LB1. 125 See Mackenzie to Clive, 24 December 1800, LB1.

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would be subsequently devised, though of course within a context of broad historical and cultural givens. Though the Company was not the first Indian ruler to attempt something of this kind, the change was in fact a profound one. Other reports seeking to record boundaries of India, after as well as before Mackenzie’s efforts, com­ monly stressed the extent to which they were disputed, uncertain, or impos­ sible to ascertain. Often the best that F.V. Raper could do, for example, when trying to plot the borders of Bihar with Chhota Nagpur in 1813-14, was to refer vaguely to a range of hills or a river in the midst of jungle.126The Mysore terrain was kinder and there were some well-defined boundaries; but there were also many examples of what Mackenzie regarded as ‘irregularities’.127 John Warren, one of his assistants, offered an explanation in his memoir o f part of the survey. It was a feature of the ‘feudal form of Government’, he suggested, ‘that Military [and indeed other] services are awarded by a certain distribution of land’. This practice still continued, but now seldom on the best land, but rather on isolated pockets in the hills. This fragmented ownership, as did the partition of land formerly held jointly. And places tended to be named according to the ways land was held. The result was, Warren believed, a proliferation of places with the same name (because although separate, they belonged to the same person) both at village level and in large administrative units. By the same token, what was apparently a single place could be regarded as more than one, with different names, because parts of it had different owners. And in several instances these names or units of territory persisted even when there was no longer any connection with the person or family for whom they were known.128 Whether or not Warren’s explanations are con­ vincing, the fact remains that this evidence implies very complex and ambigu­ ous ways of naming and combining territorial units, or; to put it another way, quite different concepts of place from those employed in the survey. We may also note in passing that village and town names were applied without dis­ tinction to the tracts of country each commanded. None of this ambiguity would do, of course, if one were seeking objective criteria of places as individual objects, based upon latitude and longitude and other exact measurements. Nor was it administratively convenient. Warren noted with some alarm that in the local records resulting from an earlier listing of places, no notice had been taken of the fact that unconnected villages in F.V. Raper; ‘Field Book of the Survey of South Western Frontier of Behar and Bengal, 1813-14’, SI (M240) M61. 127 ‘Second General Report... ’, Mackenzie to Clive, 12 July 1803, SI (M129) RP2; and also to Close, 24 December 1800, LB1. 128 John Warren, ‘Memoir and Registers of the Pargunnah of Colar, Oosscotta and Jungamcotta in Mysore 1800-1 and 1802’, SI (M 115) M il. 126

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separate revenue divisions shared common identity. The sharpness of the change implied is a matter requiring further research.129Clearly previous rulers and peoples had varied notions of geographical location and political space as reflected in political and military structures, land-grants, sacred geography, myths of origin, attachments to villages, and so on. (For that matter there was great and varied significance in number—one may think of the levels of m ansabdars, the measurements of land and revenue, or the role of number in Hindu mythology and in Islam.) However in the fluid political and military conditions of eighteenth-century India, it is safe to assume that the avowedly ‘rational’, ‘objective’ criteria of the survey did mark a significant departure. More broadly, so did the definition of Indian states as subordinated but demarcated and protected territories and ruling systems within the ambit of the policies and assumptions of the East India Company. At the least there are hints that Warren’s concerns were not readily intelligible to the people of the region. He recorded an incident in which a raiyat of one village came to inform him that he would later find a settlement o f huts on high ground away from the village, but that he should not think he had been misled as to the extent of its land as this settlement was not a new village but merely part of the existing one. Warren solved such problems by counting all that he regarded as villages separately, whether inhabited or not. Mather had coped in Baramahal by making two lists, one that he called an agricultural survey (in fact a revenue list taken from government records) and the other a geographical survey (meaning all the actual points of distinct habitation having four or more households). There were, on average, nearly 3 0 per cent more villages by the latter count.130 Judgement as to what constituted a village was thus reduced to a matter of physical location rather than of production or of social or political units. This was really the same process of redefinition and rationalization that Mackenzie was trying to apply to political and geographical districts when he wanted to regularize the scattered fragments that had been treated as one place because of an accident of ownership or history. What characterized these new kinds of place, apart from their precise location and measurement, was a general sense that they were formed according to rational principles. Each was distinct and limited—for political units as for geographical regions— because they partook of a single common measurable character. For that reason, the recorded places were fixed and immutable according to a limited range of objective criteria, usually material and quantifiable—although places 129 For a valuable discussion see Ludden, ‘Archaic Formations’, especially, pp. 501 and 64-5. 130 ‘Records of the Baramahal and Salem Sec. Districts, Section Ilnd, Geography’, SI M98, vol. 1.

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could be renamed or altered or substituted within these same terms. To demonstrate the standard and priority of defining features, surveyors not only drew scale maps, but brought into the record fixed landmarks or artificial boundary stones, suitably inscribed. Such markers had existed before, but not as one element in a unified system for defining each place or area. A boundary marker was supposed to take on the same kind of authority as the force of law, categorization, or circumstance that originally ‘made’ the place. Needless to say, in practice, it did not; yet the many disputes over moved stones and encroachments on land during the nineteenth century do appear to have been old games played according to new rules. Those rules privileged physical over social or subjective location and boundaries. They appeared to create the places, which existed as they were recorded.131 Mackenzie’s method was orderly, and therefore so were its results. What is more, it applied not just to the dimensions and character of places, but to their status and function. A memoir based on information collected by his chief interpreter Kavelli Venkata Boria (a brilliant man discussed in detail by Dirks),132 reveals how the principles of rationality and signification could be applied, through terminology, to rank places as well as locate them. Mackenzie’s and Boria’s memoir on the civil administration of the Ballaghat Carnatic (prepared between 1800 and 1802) discussed allegedly ‘ancient’ distinctions of place based on a mixture of functional, physical, and geographical criteria. There were different terms for enclosed villages, for fortified towns, for places surrounded by hills, for central places according to size and wealth, and so on. There was no one governing principle in these terms and much possible ambiguity. Moreover, in practice, the terms were applied, according to the memoir in a random and inconsistent manner. It ‘frequently happens’—so it was claimed—‘that we find a mean village with a few houses distinguished by... [a] reputable name’. This concept of wrong labels and ‘undeserving’ places was the necessary counterpoint to the virtuous categorizations of Mackenzie’s survey. The memoir concluded that there was indeed a moral to be drawn. The confusion of nomenclature was contrary to 131 See Ludden, ‘Archaic Formations’, pp. 62-4, on indigenous means of measuring and assessing land, different in dry and in rice areas. 132 See Dirks, ‘Colonial Histories’. Boria was a man of ‘ingenious conciliatory talents’ to whom Mackenzie was deeply indebted. One of his brothers, Letchmia (see above, note 27), who remained in Mackenzie’s service after Boria’s death in 1802 (Dirks has 1803), was also, in the words of Wilkes, ‘a man of singular literary zeal and scrupulous research’ and in fact more important to the survey directly; Mackenzie to Buchan, 29 March 1809, LB2. Compare Mackenzie’s accounts of other assistants to Malcolm, Resident of Mysore, 5 May 1807; to Chief Secretary, Fort St George, 29 July 1808; and ‘Memorandum shewing the reduction of the Expence of the Mysore Survey to 1st February 1809’, LB2.

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the custom ‘followed for ages by the Hindoos’, whereby ‘Titles were bestowed, on Places & Men, according to their consequence, estimation or situation’— for locations, then, as for castes or for rajas. The decay had occurred when ‘the Country fell into the hands of a number of Petty Princes of Inferior Race, who presuming on their power; & vain of their newly-acquired consequence, being free of any control, deviated from the ancient customs’ and neglected ‘the original meaning’ of ‘honourable names’.133 This, it should be noted by students of Orientalism, was strikingly different from later concepts of decadence associated with climate, race, or a loss of republican independence and initiative. But the Brahmanical gloss does not conceal the fact that the distinction offered here was between objective and man-made categories. This implies that the change in Mackenzie’s survey was not related to the political so much as to the intellectual order. What was revealed to Boria and Mackenzie as decay was probably just a different view of terms. Interesting in this regard is Mather’s commentary on the divisions of time in Baramahal. He noted that none of the units was fixed or precise—not the year because the astronomical and civil calendar did not match, and different villages followed years of different length; not the day because each was counted from sunrise to sunset; and not the month, whether solar or lunar; because it varied according to the passage of the sun or moon through the heavens.134 This was not variation within strict limits as in a Western calendar; it was a reactive or subjective approach to units of time. The same pragmatism seems to have applied to definitions of place. Thus, in objectifying this, Mackenzie was not just deciding which places and boundaries would be recognized. He was defining the criteria on which they would be said to exist. By insisting on definite signifiers and categories, Mackenzie was of course giving a particular significance to the record he was creating. It was aided by his appeal to the prestige of a universal science by his insistence on system and verification and on objective measures in preference to precedent or moral and social validity. His order was deterministic and permitted relatively little negotiation. When we look back at his instructions (already quoted), we may now invest some of the phrases with a deeper meaning—phrases speaking of ‘fixing a permanent border’, the ‘classing’ of lands, each place in its ‘proper’ 133 ‘Memoir of the Civil Administration, Police, Commerce & Revenue Management of the Balia Ghaat Carnatic from enquiries instituted in 1800 and 1801 and Information Collected for Captain Mackenzie on the Mysore Survey by Cavelly Venkata Boria, Interpreter to the Survey’, 20 March 1802, SI (M129) RP3. The example contrasts with later constructions of Tamil (and Vellala) identity in opposition to the status and claims to legitimacy, in Dravidian lands, of Brahmans. 134 ‘Records of the Baramahal and Salem & c. Districts...’, SI M98.

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district, each and every ‘individual’ head, the ‘great’ features of the country, and so on. Yet we remember Mackenzie also referred to ‘ancient’ divisions, and expected his surveyors to observe first hand and not to theorize at a distance. The survey did not falsify, or invent in Ronald Inden’s sense of the word.135 Rather, it fixed or transformed. It was an example of what Susan Bayly has called ‘complex interactions’ between a colonial state and Indian responses.136 It relocated precise identities in its record, in enumerated categories. It made them definite. And yet it also made them convenient, manageable. Dirks has shown how Indian informants and Indian histories were incorporated and marginalized by colonial scholarship. Here in the survey is the very same set of processes applied to place. Even within the terms of science, the intention was to incorporate and subordinate phenomena (here Indian) to general laws (in origin mainly European). Before we become too indignant at what may have been lost or subverted, however, we should remember that this same change was not sudden or absolute outside colonial practices—that is, in Indian hands—and also that it was in the end a necessary precondition for a continued existence in a world reshaped by European expansion. The new definitions of place were needed for state responsibility and for territorial citizenship, and for what Partha Chatterjee has called the ‘construction’ of the country and Sudipta Kaviraj the nationalism of narrative and enumeration.137 Whatever did not make this transition became indeed non-place, ‘invisible’ to use Dirks’ term—though of course many such phantoms have since been resubstantiated on the new terms and conditions.

135 Ronald Inden, Imagining India, Oxford, 1990. 136 Susan Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, in Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept o f Race in South Asia, New Delhi, 1995, p. 162. 137 P. Chatterjee, ‘Claims of the Past: The Genealogy of Modem Historiography in Bengal’ in D. Arnold and D. Hardiman (eds), Subaltern Studies, vol. VIII: Essays in Honour o f Ranajit Guha, New Delhi, 1994. See also P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, Delhi, 1986; S. Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in P. Chatterjee and G. Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies, vol. VII, New Delhi, 1993.

5. The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity* An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s

This essay states the basic argument on borders and administration that the introduction elaborated. It mainly provides a case study from Assam and Nagaland o f the colonial inputs to the political and bureaucratic framework o f identities.

I This is an essay about the establishment and expanding roles of the colonial state in India and their probable correlation with the developments of Indian identity.1As I have argued elsewhere, identities are always multiple, contingent, and continuously constructed, so that traditions, also continually reinvented, are shared and reiterated practices and beliefs which reflect the collective memories of previous constructions.2 There is no analytical contradiction therefore between long-term civilizational continuities and emerging forms * First published in Modem Asian Studies, 31(2), pp. 245-83. 1 In the later stage of writing this essay, I benefited from discussions with Michael Anderson, Oliver Mendelsohn, Emma Tarlo, and Denis Vidal. I have also been helped by lively questioning led by Bhaskar Chakrabarty at the meeting to which the paper was first presented, in the Department of History, University of Calcutta, in March 1994. I am using the term ‘colonial state’ here in a neutral way, to mean the state during the colonial period. It is a separate question how far its characteristics were colonial in the sense of being produced by or for colonial rule, as opposed to partaking in more general trends also to be found in non-colonized countries. Except briefly at one point, that question will not be considered here—the assumption will be that characteristics were about equally devised particularly for foreign rule in India and that they were borrowed from outside—but this does not mean that I wish to add to the rather tiresome tendency of applying the term ‘colonial’ in an analytical sense, without discussing the issues involved. 2 See Chapter 7 of this volume and Peter Robb (ed.), Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History, Delhi, 1993, especially pp. 2-21, 144-52, and 166-76. For an important (if hardly ‘subaltern’) discussion of the construction and hence radical modernity of Indian national identity, and its location in a specific holistic form of anti-colonialism, see Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies, vol. VII, New Delhi, 1993.

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of constructed identity. This paper is about a particular form of identity that is currently associated with concepts of public space and rights and with the nation state, or at least political and territorial units. For convenience, I refer to it as the ‘modem Indian identity’ because it has been defined and been growing in significance in the modem era; but no inference should be drawn that I consider it to be the only form in India. Secondly, this essay, in proposing to examine the character of one possible contribution to this identity, that made by the colonial state, naturally does so on the premise that the contribution is important and hitherto neglected in the literature; but by the same token, being centred only on a single factor, the discussion does not pretend to ‘explain’ Indian identity as a whole. Many other elements—pre-existing and competing identities, social and economic as well as political forces, and especially indigenous processes—would have to be brought into consideration before any attempt could be made at a thorough analysis. Thirdly, though the essay discusses the actions of the colonial state, it does not imply that the state was an independent actor; rather it assumes that the state was always interrogating and having to accommodate Indian conditions and priorities. On the other hand, because the essay concentrates on one set of possible colonial influences, it more concerned to describe than to account for the colonial state’s changing character. Fully to elucidate the changes would lead the discussion well beyond the hints to be offered here of social and economic anxieties, and ideas of the proper roles of governance; one would include assessments of the importance, among other things, of Indian criticisms and demands. The very fact that there were political Kaviraj regards enumeration and a pardcularist narrative, among other things, as vital in the construction of nationalism, and of course enumeration rested largely upon state activities, while (as he notes) the colonial British histories ‘wrote of an India that was externally defined, a territory contingently unified by political expansion’. However (though what is meant may be acceptable) neither I nor, I think, those involved at the time would agree with what he goes on to suggest: that ‘To define the boundaries of British India was a simple operation’. On the contrary, it was difficult, expensive, specific in character and method, and dependent on keenly contested policy decisions. Almost from the first (say, 1799-1808 in Mysore), it involved, as already discussed in Chapter 4, a new definition o f place , involving precise geographical location, ranking and grouping, history, politics, economy, and culture. Kaviraj also remarks (p. 14), that it is ‘no small irony’ that ‘interestingly, it was European writers writing on India as part of a counter-Enlightenment movement who constructed this India and presented it to Indians looking for identity’—and I would add that such writers and their ‘scientific’ evidence (in fact produced under Enlightenment influence as well) also depended crucially on the somewhat mysterious patronage of the East India Company and the British Raj. Hence, though to be sure we need distinct histories of ‘the discourses of the colonized’ as Kaviraj says (p. 37), there is also room (so runs my argument) for fuller understanding of the reasons and means whereby the colonial state contributed to modem Indian identity.

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calculations involved (in India as well as Britain) implies that the views and interests at least of potential Indian collaborators were being taken into consideration. Modem Indian identity is validated in no small measure by the struggle against colonial rule and by a cataloguing of its evils and the damage it inflicted. This is analogous to the definition of republican Ireland with reference to hundreds of years of ‘English imperialism’ and heroes of the Irish resistance. The preferred assumption is that whatever colonialism touched, it must have distorted and debased. And as in Ireland so for India it is bound to be painful whenever scholarly revisions reveal a more patchy and ambiguous history of colonialism or a less mythologized version of nationalism. Moreover, nowadays history matters all the more in India because any challenge it presents is reinforced by influences and new values from the West’s commodities, images, and lifestyles. The reaction, as ever, may be atavistic. Therefore perhaps it is foolhardy to make what otherwise would seem to be an obvious point—that colonial rule played an important part in building a modern Indian identity. On the other hand, a dispassionate reassessment of ‘Indianness’ is needed and should include discussion of the state before as well as after Independence. No one would suggest that indigenous, cultural, and religious inheritances do not play a powerful and obvious part in defining India; but equally it should not be assumed that by themselves they explain all of what now exists, or that India was ever a closed system. A national identity is created out of myths of place and history, from rationalizations and shared experiences—social, economic, military, and political. To all of these, the colonial past in India contributed alongside alternative traditions and initiatives. Colonialism was important, not just as a stimulus, foil, and opponent for Indians, but in its constructions of the state.3 A broader theoretical issue might be raised about the importance of awareness of the ‘Other’, of rivalry and conflict, and indeed of outside influence in the reconstitution of identities. Sometimes, as in the Indian case, this external role is readily admitted—for example in the importance attributed in accounts of nationalism to the English language, modern communications, Western 3 This is in direct refutation of the suggestion that studies of the colonial state— and hence presumably traditions, institutions, and the ‘order’ inherited from it—are a part (only) of British and not Indian history. Such suggestions are the stuff of Hindutva; but for a popular statement from another quarter on the essential primeval Indianness (effectively Hindu-ness) of Indian culture and the need to keep it ‘religious’ and pristine from external influences, not least the English language and Western values, possibly even at the cost of mediocrity (p. 151), see Mark Tully, No Full Stops in India, New Delhi, 1992, especially pp. 1-13 and 5 7 -1 5 2 .1 have discussed this issue more fully in K.N. Malik and Peter Robb (eds), India and Britain: Recent Past and Present Challenges, New Delhi, 1994, especially pp. 16-30.

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education, and European political ideas and institutions.4 However because they assume that Indians must have defined themselves, many analysts are unwilling to dwell upon these aspects or to trace their significance down to the present day. The heroes of the nationalist struggle are the ‘fighters and rejecters’. One consequence is that the common cause of ‘Indians’ tends to be taken for granted instead of being seen as a development to be studied. Another is that the importance of the state may be underestimated. This too is unfortunate, because arguably the most significant political process between the eighteenth century and at least the 1960s was not imperialism or decolonization, but the growth and evolution of the state. Two questions for this paper, then, are how far the goal of Indian nationalists was unwittingly assisted by colonial rule and how far the colonial rulers were already constructing the nation in parallel with the efforts of Indians. I will be concerned with the theories and practice of administration rather than such obvious contributions as communications, economic change, and education, or more general questions of race, religion, and caste— forms of identity which of course were affected by Western influence, but which are too large to be considered here. At least three elements of colonial administration seem likely to have helped create an Indian identity. The first is the establishment of fixed borders; the second the assertion of undivided jurisdiction or sovereignty within those borders; and the third the assumption of state responsibility for the well-being of the people in a kind of contract between ruler and ruled. Colonial observers, as is well known, tended to regard Indian civilization as disunited politically and culturally. But they also proclaimed India as a single sphere for their own purposes, one with ‘natural’ frontiers and peoples of a shared culture.5 The British idea of the frontier was possibly influenced by their being, like the 4 Notable in this respect are the arguments of Partha Chatterjee, both in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, Delhi, 1986, and more recendy in ‘Claims of the Past: The Genealogy of Modem Historiography in Bengal’ in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds), Subaltern Studies, vol. VIII: Essays in Honour ofRanajit Guha, New Delhi, 1994, where he refers to ‘the historical imagining in the nineteenth century of “India” as a nation’ (p. 2), one in which, as in Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay’s Bharatbarser Itihas (first published in 1858), all history becomes that of ‘this des' whereby ‘The identification in European historiography between the notions of country or people, sovereignty and statehood is... lodged firmly in the mind of the English-educated Bengali’ (pp. 26-7). Chatterjee regards this view of history as preparing for present-day ‘Hindu nationalism’ as an ‘entirely modem, rationalist and historicist idea’ (p. 43), and proposes ‘suppressed’ and ‘confederal’ or plural histories as alternatives. I am not concerned here with this worthy though possibly utopian agenda, but with the kinds of identity which, Chatterjee agrees, actually emerged as a dominant form over the last two centuries. This is also the form discussed by Kaviraj, ‘Imaginary Institution’. 5 For particularly clear and succinct summaries, see Romila Thapai; Interpreting Early India, Delhi, 1992.

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Japanese, an island nation. Certainly in developing their paramountcy in India they took readily to the notion of India as a territory bounded by physical and cultural features. In the late nineteenth century, the idea of a ‘scientific’ frontier was added to this, but really it amounted to the same thing with the addition of strategic and defensive considerations in deciding just where the definite line should be. The British supposed that states ended neatly, preferably at some easily recognizable feature.6Within these boundaries were constituted national peoples, in this case termed as a single category, the ‘natives of India’ or (less frequently) the ‘Indians’.7 Though the existence of some influence and the main outlines of the change introduced by the colonial state are obvious enough, there has been no concerted effort, so far as I am aware, to describe the process involved. One way of considering it is in terms of expansions of sovereignty, from the first outlining of territory and subjects to the reconstruction of state and society. In considering any jurisdiction, one may talk of internal as well as external borders and both broad and narrow frontiers. The narrow external frontier was the one the colonial rulers sought to draw on the map. The broad external border was one in which there were various layers or zones of contestation and influence rather than a definite line of demarcation between one jurisdiction and another. Though the modem era is said to be characterized by firm boundaries—learnt not only from unitary or island kingdoms, but from military conflicts and from systems of law and taxation—yet it still contains many ambiguous edges, and none more so than the land frontiers of India. In the northwest, the patterns are well known, with forward or defensive policies reaching out across an indeterminate space from Quetta or the Khyber Pass towards Iran and Russian Central Asia. In the northeast, similar gradations led, through ‘tribes’ such as the Nagas, towards Burma® and the Chinese or the French. There were layers 6 Ainslie Embree was perhaps the first modern scholar to draw attention to this explicitly as an innovation of Western rule; see his ‘Frontiers into Boundaries: From the Traditional to the Modem State’ in R.G. Fox (ed.), Realm and Region in Traditional India, Duke University, 1977. But contemporaries also understood the point perfecdy well, even before the theoretical expositions of frontier questions by Curzon (Frontiers, 1907). 7 Though it is true that colonial historians and ethnographers found many mythical or extant divisions within India—Aryans and Dravidians, tribes and castes, Hindus and Muslims—yet it should be remembered that this unitary, territorial citizenship was also taken for granted and reinforced by law, rhetoric, and the political system. Perhaps the ‘natives’, originally of very many different ‘countries’ within India (to adopt the early nineteenth-century parlance), were gradually conflated, alongside accretions of British powei^ into the ‘Indians’. 8 Protracted negotiations with Burmese representatives were continuing in the 1880s at the time of other events described in this paper; see Charles Grant to Ripon, 10,14, and 18 July 1882, Add. Mss. 43604, Ripon Papers, British Library, London.

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of uncertainty here not only because of British policy disagreements, but due to political volatilities in regions where there were few proto-states to be conquered and little sense of fixed property. Within India, indeterminate zones of authority still persisted and were even encouraged by the colonial rulers, for all their claims to absolute sovereignty. The narrow frontier implied a single rule of law within a given territory. The British allowed a panoply of exceptions to this rule, excluding many aspects of life, classes of people, and territories (non-regulation and frontier provinces, princely states, and so on). These exceptions constituted the broad internal frontier of British rule, not only a physical line but a demarcation of the various realms of transitional sovereignty. Of course no state is wholly without its internal barriers or limitations, beyond which general procedures or rules are tempered or inoperative. But in modern states the exceptions are much less numerous in practice—partly for technological and bureaucratic reasons— than in earlier autocracies and despotisms. Even in democratic states today, the theoretical and constitutional limits on state power are relatively few and expressed in terms of countervailing principles, for example in bills of rights or conventional respect for freedom of thought and expression. By contrast, many of the colonial exceptions existed alongside doctrines of complete state sovereignty and were derived from special and pragmatic considerations. They were caused by the exigencies of Hindu laws of inheritance, the dangers of interfering in religion, the unreliability of local agents, the special problems of ‘tribal’ zones, and so on. In nineteenth-century India, there were ideological curbs on interference with particular areas, such as laissez faire. Moreover, it was objections to ‘unnecessary’ restrictions or interference that added warmth to most of the private disagreements in the colonial secretariats. But even these ideologies and objections were frequently overruled by appeals to ‘Indian conditions’. There was at best only a weak and declining constitutional principle to limit the state’s role and responsibilities—nothing like what would now be called a doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’—and thus the ten­ dency was for exceptions to be reduced as administrative capacity permitted, as confidence grew in ‘scientific’ government, as professional fiefdoms were carved out, as new supporters had to be wooed and old interests appeased, and as new protests and problems appeared in the economic, social, and political transition. Thus the narrow internal frontier advanced, implying the spread of definite, measured, and recorded categories and their subjection to a single, centralized rule or sovereignty. In the modern era, characteristically, differences and fragmentations of law and authority were greatly reduced by the hegemony of centralized national systems of language, culture, taxation, and government. Arguably the process of unification was concentrated into a far shorter period outside than it had been within western Europe (and East

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Asia). But in all cases the resultant tendency was for forms and institutions to be consoli-dated into a single state system. A further phase concerned the development, through the state, of doctrines o f national interest and state responsibility. Here too colonial rule made some important beginnings, especially in creating an expectation of progress. In his article ‘Dominance without Hegemony’, Ranajit Guha notes that ‘Improve­ ment was a political strategy to persuade the indigenous elite to “attach” themselves to a colonial regime’.9 This is true, but does not go far enough. First, many different elites were appealed to—the intelligentsia through rhetoric, education, and jobs; the supposed landed aristocracy through flattery, advice, and protection; a proprietary peasantry through legal privileges and the alleged benefits of trade; and so on. Elites were targeted because of the past as well as the future, because of theories about society (about hierarchy, tradition, and legitimacy) and about progress (through agency or filtration), theories which applied generally, but in India with particular force and cogency. Second, and more important, the point of British ‘improvement’ was really its claim to generality and equity. It was, therefore, an aspect of the modem creation of India: the construction of a state in terms of its relationship with civil society that (in the definition of Hooker) ‘doth more content the nature of man than any private kind of solitary liuing [living]’10—that is, a representa­ tive state expressive of a public, of public opinion, and of public institutions. Implied were goals for India which, though producing much tension and dissent among nineteenth-century officials, were repeatedly declared, and indeed (because of Indian conditions) were often supposed to require unusual official efforts. They included the achievement of a community of interests, an acceptance of common order and an informed and participating people. In this context, the colonial motives of the British regime may be less significant than its attempt to introduce new forms of interested attachment to government. To restate Guha’s axiom, improvement was a political strategy to persuade first elites and then a citizenry to attach themselves to the state. By this means, they might coalesce into a nation. 9 Ranajit Guha, ‘Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography’ in Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, vol. VI, New Delhi, 1989, p. 242. 10 Richard Hooker, O f the Laws o f Ecclesiatical Policy (1593), 1 & 10; meaning, as also in the term civisme used in the 1789 revolution, creation of citizens and of institutions establishing and promoting citizenship, in contradistinction with feudalism or autocracy. I should explain, however, that in using this term and the concept of the ‘public sphere’ I am applying such straightforward definitions as will be apparent in the course of the paper; this is not an attempt to make a contribution on the terms in the sense of Habermas or Benedict Anderson (an intermediary realm between state and people, scrutinizing the state, dependent on ‘print capitalism’, and so on). For some discussions of that kind see ‘Aspects of the Public in Colonial South Asia’, special issue of South Asia, XIV(l), June 1991.

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I am not concerned here with making a judgement about colonial rule, but with describing those of its characteristics which may be relevant to Indian identity—that is, with the process of state development in two main aspects, namely the creation of structures (the geographical and institutional frame of boundaries, international recognition, state institutions, and so on) and secondly the evolution of new processes—relations and idioms, national consciousness, a sense of community, changing values, and different bases for social discipline and cohesion. These two developments could exist separately or progress at different rates. Thus particular structural forms, which we call modern or nationalist, appeared internationally during the expansion of Europe. But processes and idioms developed differendy during the same period. There was in all societies a basis for articulating identities, which could be harnessed to the modem forms; but it was not necessarily harnessed. Colonial states such as India, like the states of Europe, Japan, or Thailand, attempted to extend the public sphere through the definition of national responsibilities and interests. However, success in these efforts, particularly in colonial states, lagged well behind the establishment of formal structures. Nor did those structures necessarily conform with pre-existing units of social identity. The case of Africa is often cited as one in which political nations had to invent their peoples after the event; but even in India (and from very early times), the political boundaries were often imposed before any corresponding social and ideological identities had been crystallized. In general, the appearance of ex-colonial national identities was less gradual or organic than the equivalent national developments in Europe or Japan. But states were always important instruments for the construction of identity and, though colonial states were to a considerable extent dysfunctional in this respect, even colonial states could be concerned with the creation of a public arena, with citizenship and state responsibility. British rulers in India were always so concerned to some extent, their efforts being an important part of their self-image and justifications for their rule. This view of the state prepared the ground on which arguments for self-determination could build. From this starting point, I wish to relate the expansion of the state under colonial rule to the ‘construction* of modem India. The British provided one of the frames which could be filled by ‘Indian’ identity. But what were the means of that expansion? What provided its impetus? It is not easy to see how to answer these questions, but in the interests of providing both range and context, the optimum strategy would be to mix an extensive sampling of the history of the state in India with efforts to mine deep at a particular point. This paper adopts the latter approach, examining one development against a comprehensive awareness of the contemporaneous concerns of government generally, using materials preserved in the Ripon papers at the British Library.

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Official views may be discerned with remarkable fullness and clarity from such sources, firstly because of their range and depth (allowing insights different from those gained by selective readings on one topic over time), and secondly because of a prevailing tendency among the correspondents and memorialists to argue particular cases at length from general principles—a feature that was perhaps a product of education (it is often summed up in Latin tags), but which also indicated a serious intellectual engagement by the officials with India, where perceived differences from Europe forced debates over fundamentals of policy. If we consider the state in India, we find that at certain periods relevant efforts became concentrated and that important steps were taken to extend its roles. One such conjuncture, as contemporaries clearly recognized, centred on the early 1880s and the viceroyality of Ripon. This was a time when the functions of the state were expanding more rapidly than at others, when lines for future development were being laid down. It has been said that there was little difference in terms of Indian policy between Britain’s Liberals and Conservatives, in that they all became imperialists in the end. But though there was indeed common ground between them, they do seem to have become imperialists of rather different kinds. Partly turning their back on the retrogressive social engineering undertaken in the aftermath of the Mutiny and during Lytton’s administration with its feudal trappings and racial discriminations, Ripon’s proteges began to shift the emphasis towards improvement rather than tradition—one might say towards a linear rather than a cyclical version of history.11A small window was opened for reinforcing the influence in India of the old radical school of Bright, as opposed to the 111 have in mind men whose careers prospered in the twenty years or so after 1880, such as Bayley, Grant, Cotton, Eden, Elliott, Buck, Tuppet, Macdonnell, and Mackenzie, representative of an interventionist and relatively progressive line that had been favoured by Ripon. The point is not that there were absolute differences between this group and others or consensus on all matters within it, but rather that these men generally favoured steps to create in India a modicum of prosperity and a kind of civil society by state intervention. Given the inexorable growth of the state, differences of opinion on its proper role seem an important and persistent divide within the officials—analogous to that between the cult of friendship and authoritarian reform, intellect versus energy, identified by Clive Dewey in Anglo-Indian Attitudes, London, 1994. My approach also seems to come close to answering the question raised by C.A. Bayly in reviewing Dewey’s book (Times Literary Supplement, 11 March 1994), on ‘how particular strains of personal ideology influenced Indian developments in general’. In this paper, assessment of official views is based on the extensive private and official papers preserved in the Ripon Papers of the British Library’s Additional Manuscripts (hereafter Add. Mss.). I have also added some reflections drawn from the Survey of India Memoirs in the National Archives of India.

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‘neo-Radicals’ who (as the Secretary of State, Kimberley remarked) were ‘more often “Jingo” than not’.u The key stimulus to the changes that Liberals introduced under Ripon was the Famine Commission of 1880—in just about every imaginable sphere o f government, its authority was appealed to repeatedly over the next decade and it promoted or at least focused a massive expansion of government intervention and ambitions.13 A multitude of policy measures was designed to reduce vulnerability to famine: the formation of agricultural departments, investigations and statistics, public works, and tentative steps towards taxation and protective investment. Then the Ubert Bill and the Bengal Tenancy Act produced two great legislative controversies whose bitterness owed much to a sense that Ripon’s government was embarking on too many radical new policies. The llbert Bill was one of several moves to remove discrimination against Indians. The Tenancy Act marked a great watershed in its shift of emphasis from rights and their protection towards needs and reform. But in some ways, the touchstone was really the Local Self-Government Act, a change of which Ripon himself was most proud and whose progress he anxiously monitored over the following decades. There was something to be learnt from a perceived interdependence of economic and political reform. It was the lesson of nationalism and selfdetermination. H.J.S. Cotton, for example, wanted to slow down or change some of the liberalizations of policy, but he wrote to Ripon in 1893 that he 12 Kimberley to Ripon, 15 February 1884, Add. Mss. 43524. He referred to those who clamoured for the extension of British prestige (‘as they call it’) by force all over the world—in this instance, in Egypt. 13 Though it did not do to be too radical, one may contrast the general line of the official mainstream with that of, say, George Couper, Lieutenant Governor of the NWP, who, though reported to get ‘so unhappy when the [agricultural] prospects are bad’ and though proclaiming himself to be as experienced in famine matters as any man in India, thought the Famine Commission ‘so unsound and erroneous as to be fraught with danger' and argued that for the state to save people from starvation was merely to prolong and deepen their suffering (their numbers would increase and there was not enough work to support them). Indeed, he wrote, ‘if we are to secure a class of men—so low in intellect, morality, and possessions ... from every cause, such as famine or sickness, which tends to restrain their numbers by an abnormal mortality, they must end by eating up every other class in the community’. Though the government could not be unmoved by their starvation and must help, it should do so only ‘at the very lowest limit consistent with the offer of subsistence’. This monstrous and inconsistent doctrine was set out in a minute of June 1881. In July, Couper’s request for an extension of his term, submitted with the support of a memorial from the taluqdars of Awadh, was turned down by Ripon. See S.R Carmichael to C. Robertson, 24 August 1880; Couper to Ripon, 26 June 1881; Couper, ‘General Questions of Famine’; and Couper to Ripon, 7 and 11 July, 13 and 28 August [1881], and 27 January 1882, Add. Mss. 43615.

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could see no alternative but to ‘break up... and adapt’ the ICS—that expensive system ‘designed ‘by foreigners for foreigners’—and instead, as an experiment, to ‘entrust the administration of...selected tracts [in Bengal] entirely to Bengalis’.14 A number of influential officials close to Ripon in this period toyed with ideas for the spread of official benefits to the whole community (for example, in education), for the development of the electoral principle, and for Indianization of the services. They might be read quite easily for their racial assumptions, paternalism, and arrogance, but to do so would be ahistorical. It would ignore the milieu of ideas within which they operated, and thus the significance of their distinctive attitudes. They consistently preferred civil society over autocracy, and during the 1880s their policies were definitely to the fore, producing inter alia that temporary compact between the officials and national or regional politicians that has been well documented by others. At the same time as these rapid developments on centre stage, one may trace the playing out quietly in the wings, on the northeast frontiers of India and concentrated within a very few years, of a distillation of the whole process that had been developing by fits and starts over the preceding centuries in India—the process of definition, of the assumption of state sovereignty and responsibility, and even of nation-building that had engaged the colonial state and to some extent its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors and rivals. This microcosm was the extension of British authority in Assam and, particularly, Nagaland. It is a story with some resonances today, but in describing it here I shall be concerned only with gleaning from it some of the main features and stages in the process of state-building in modem India, and in particular the connections between frontiers, state responsibility, and public representation. It should be emphasized that, despite appearances, this essay is not particularly about the Nagas. A modern Naga identity was being created—that is, a more general sense of being Naga (as opposed to Angami, Ao, Sema, and so on), and hence of Naga political ambitions, interests, and rights. But the present aim is not to explain that evolution (for to do so would involve and examination of economic change, missionary activities, and the Nagas themselves); it is merely to use the Naga example to illustrate what are argued to be more general processes.

14 Cotton to Ripon, 6 June 1893, Add. Mss. 43618. Cotton probably went too far for his colleagues, but it was noticeable how he returned to favour in 1887-8 not long before expressing such ideas (becoming Commissioner of Police and Chairman of the Corporation, in Calcutta, and later gaining temporary secretariat appointments) after what he called a long period without advancement; see ibid., 28 May 1887 and 9 October 1888.

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II The process of colonial pacification and reorganization in Assam had had a considerable history long before the 1880s, but an important new beginning was marked by the advent of C.S. Elliott as Chief Commissioner, succeeding S.C. Bayley.15 His arrival coincided with minor incidents and apprehensions in the Garo and Naga hills (on the southwest and southeast of Assam) and with a new determination to stake out definite boundaries of British territory, to define British subjects in part by the treatment and entitlements accorded to them by the government, and generally to develop more regular and repre­ sentative administration. This Chief Commissioner wanted to change people— in the case of the Nagas, to change them from ‘a warlike and marauding to a peaceful race’16—but also to match his rule to their character and expectations. He wanted to create a new order, but also to understand and to record the old. Features in the growth of the modem state may be understood from this example, because (I would argue) they were remarkably consistent not just within India but more generally over space and time. The Naga hill district had been constituted in 1867, but its boundaries had not been formally settled. Bayley had had a map prepared of the eastern reaches and since then some slight changes had been made locally.17 Elliot soon realized that he faced a dilemma with regard to the frontier. ‘The more I thought about it,’ he wrote, the ‘less practicable’ it seemed to try to restrain ‘the Nagas with their wanderings and trading habits, within an imaginary line which they have always been accustomed to cross’. The line was imaginary because it was not based on tribal boundaries or natural obstacles. It was also uncertain. For example, several punitive expeditions were undertaken in the early 1880s to avenge attacks by the Sema Nagas on two Lhota Naga villages that turned out to have been left by mistake beyond the frontier.18 Similarly Elliott reported on ‘the curiously scattered character of the Garo houses... their migratory habits...the denseness & difficulty of the jungle, the badness of the District map, 8c the difficulty of finding one’s way in the narrow & diverging paths cut in the ju n g le ...’. Reflecting on the difficulty of an 15 Charles Elliott studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, for two years before succeeding in the ICS competition of 1856. Unusually, he returned to Trinity on his first leave and took his degree in 1866. He remained a firm advocate of the importance of both university education and of district as well as secretariat experience for ICS officers. See Elliott to Ripon, 24 April 1884, Add. Mss. 43605. 16 Ibid. 17 Elliot to Ripon, 28 May 1881; C.J. Lyall to Foreign Department Secretary, demiofficial, 26 May 1881; and Elliott, ‘Memorandum on the administration of the Naga Hills District’ (hereafter MNH), 31 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. The following account is drawn from this memorandum except where indicated otherwise. 18 Elliott to Ripon, 26 June 1881, Add. Mss. 43605.

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‘unscientific’ frontier; he wrote: ‘I began by thinking that we ought to refuse to take any cognisance of what may happen beyond the border: but the more I thought about it & the more I considered the impossibility of restraining the Nagas...the less practicable did that policy seem.’19 The prevailing border strategy was one of holding an ‘inner line’ while allowing a further region to be claimed but not closely administered except when some danger to the settled area was anticipated.20 The inner line was drawn so as to separate ‘tribal’ areas from Assam proper, and the crossing of it was regulated by penal sanctions and a system of passes (which Elliott proposed to abandon). Just such a policy, with variations, was pursued in the north-west of India. However, in 1879, sanction had been given for Assam to push permanent outposts forward to the political frontier at some points, and in one instance Bayley had come to the conclusion that it would be necessary to construct a ‘patrol path and intermediate posts’ along the edge ‘of country which we claim’. He predicted that incidents of aggression or movements of settlement across the frontier would ‘probably end in a large and expensive [military] expedition’ and ‘an advanced chain of posts connected by patrol paths to protect the whole tract of country’.21 For the Naga district, Elliott devised a plan for a series of 45 frontier posts, each with two head constables assisted by a further 20 constables to provide sentries and border patrols. He wanted the posts spaced out along the border, near the settlements to be protected and the tracks likely to be used for attack. At each outpost, the jungle was to be cleared and the land sloped, for 200 yards around so that any attackers could be ‘raked with fire’. The intention was to demarcate British territory more clearly, but also to ‘make our Government more visible’ to people within the borders. The posts would have the same function of controlling the local population as police thanas in more settled districts. There was some discussion, in view of this mixture of roles, as to whether they should be manned by the military or the police. Elliott was 19 Elliott to Ripon, 28 May 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. 20 This policy was discussed at this time in connection with Nizamghat; for a proposal to draw back to an inner line, see Capt. Bereford, ‘Notes on the N.E. frontier of Assam’, Elliott to Ripon, 10 May 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. See also keep-withs (k.w.) to Foreign Department Political Proceedings A423-33, and demi-official from S.C. Bayley, 17 August 1880, with ibid., A127-47, Add. Mss. 43575, pp. 85-7. (Copies of proceedings, especially the crucially important and too often neglected ‘keep-withs’, are not always fully identifiable in the Ripon papers. They may usually be traced, however, in the ‘File’ volumes for this period at the National Archives of India—that is, not in the ‘Proceedings’ volumes, the A-series of which are also available in London. All references to departments and proceedings in this essay are to the Government of India.) 21 Ibid. (Bayley, demi-official). This concern gave rise to similar arrangements to those discussed below for the Naga area.

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in favour of an armed civil police under an enlarged district administration rather than police superintendents.22 He planned to bring his police down to normal levels and have them replace the military for day-to-day frontier duties. Some of his proposals were not immediately accepted by the Government of India, where they were thought premature. What is important, however, is that they assumed that the hill tribesmen were now ‘regular’ subjects of the British (no longer prone to unexpected violence) and that the district would not be policed indirectly, but by regular administration.23 The change would also have a ‘normalizing’ effect upon the military, for it was thought that frontier regiments suffered from being posted only in Assam and hence never being able to compare themselves with the rest of the army.24 I do not wish to be thought to be overemphasizing the instrumentality of the state here. Some of the impetus for the removal of the ‘inner line’—what I would call a movement towards the narrower internal frontier of undivided sovereignty—resulted from incorporations of outlying peoples which had been going on from time immemorial. Thus the Lushais in Assam were accustomed to coming down into the valley to trade pottery and forest products for food. Some got work clearing forests for the tea planters. It could hardly be avoided that they would be made subject to the governments of Assam.25 Conversely, it was also the case that resistance was extremely frequent to such incorpora­ tions and to the new or coopted institutions favoured by the new regime. Thus, in Cachar in 1882, so-called ‘fanatics’, followers of a leader who claimed to be the reincarnation of a god, attacked British forces and collected their own taxes from the people around them.26 Partly for such reasons also, the development and broadening of the state was not a linear progression; there was always a chance that from time to time the rulers would revert to rougher methods. In one instance in Assam, to which we will return shortly, 22 Elliott to Ripon, 22 April 1881, and to Primrose, 23 June 1882; and Elliott, ‘Note on the re-organisation of the police department in Assam’, 20 June 1882, Add. Mss. 43605. He argued that the young police chiefs were led into ‘idle habits’ as there was singularly little criminal work among a simple, contented, and well-to-do people. Though he did not argue with the principle of separating executive and judicial functions, he thought Act V of 1861 had introduced it with undue vehemence, and he considered it to be one general rule that still needed to be modified for the conditions of Assam. The frontier force numbered some 500 men at this time. 23 Charles Grant (Home, Revenue and Agriculture Department) to Ripon, 23 August 1881, Add. Mss. 43604. 24 Elliott to Ripon, 26 June 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. There were three frontier regiments, one of which was universally censured, for example, for running away during the Bhutan war or for ‘shameful behaviour’ at Kohima in Bayley’s time. The Sylhet Light Infantry, however had a good reputation. 25 Elliott to Ripon, 2 February 1882, Add. Mss. 43605. 26 Elliott to Ripon, 28 January, and 2 and 22 February 1882, Add. Mss. 43605.

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Garo villagers were summarily and harshly treated because they had resisted authority. In justification, the officer commanding explained that ‘It was thought that the rule of our Government had been proved to be so beneficial, and at the same time so strong, that though one village might prove contumaceous it would not be assisted by others, but be left to fight its own battles’. However the Garos had not after all altogether lost ‘their old power of combining’.27 This was the reasoning of 1857 and of Jallianwala Bagh, the argument that Indians had failed to come up to the standards expected of them and reflected in the norms of British rule, and that therefore repression was inevitable. Nonetheless there was clearly a deliberate process of ‘normalizing’ and expanding the jurisdiction of the state, one which Elliott was trying to apply in the hill districts of Assam. The move from broad to narrow frontiers of rule occurred in small ways as well as large. When Elliott visited the Abus of Padu, he found that they were paid a tribute for keeping order on the frontier. He ordered them to assemble each year where there was a gathering of British officials that could ‘look imposing’. Such indirect control, employing existing political and social institutions and depending on prestige and occasional force of arms, was typical of the broad frontier. But Elliot was also leaning towards the narrower concept, in which the state would seek a monopoly of force applied through its own structures, and also to effect the well-being of ‘its’ people. In the case of the Abus, he determined to substitute clothes and salt for the rum hitherto distributed to them under the terms of the treaty.28 From a more comprehensive effort some way nearer to normal administration, the result in the Naga district was the creation of a bounded space within which the government constructed a system of administration. It had a capital at Kohima, lines of communications through the telegraph plus a regular tramway and cart road, a house tax, and an attempt to create headmen as part of a structure of local management. It was freely admitted that in several of the Naga tribes this last was an innovation, because no political hierarchy had existed whereby elders could restrain the ‘bolder spirits among the young men’. Both Bayley and Elliott thought the headmen should be elected, perhaps because it would take time to convert the Nagas from their 27 Peet to Chief Commissioner^ 22 April 1881, with Foreign Department Political Proceedings A423-33, Add. Mss. 43575. (For this reference, see the comments above, note 20.) 28 Elliott to Ripon, 1 February 1883, Add. Mss. 43605. Relations with Garo headmen had similarly been cemented by presents of liquor, as certain missionaries complained. Elliott thought this an adjunct to friendly relations, but undesirable when the recipients had not been known to drink. The issue raised another element of the expansion of the state—its openness to scrutiny, here represented by publicity in the Statesman or Friend o f India. Elliott to Ripon, 20 June 1882, Add. Mss. 43605.

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‘democratic and independent habits’ into a state of ‘subordination to a council of elders’. Elliott envisaged introducing what he called a ‘village or tribal system’, with headmen being paid 20 per cent of the revenue collected, in the hope that authority would accrue to them and they would be able to ‘control and guide the villagers’, with the assistance of government when necessary ‘in support against disobedience and disrespect’.29 In the event, Lieutenant Michell, the district’s Deputy Commissioner, appointed headmen in 20 Naga villages. A discussion ensued about the naming of these functionaries. Elliott proposed lam bardars. The whole process was marked by particularly obvious social engineering and standardization in the interests of the state. Intervention went a step further when Elliott proposed that the local taxation should be graduated ‘according to the different conditions and capability of the tax-payer’. Even though he suggested only three rates, so as ‘not to perplex the Nagas by minute differences’, and though he initially proposed to apply these to different tribes and areas as a whole, the policy nonetheless implied a more exact intrusion by the state into Naga lives. When he made the suggestion, he admitted that the government hitherto had had ‘no real information as to the number of houses in any village’ but had had to accept ‘the rough estimates’ of village elders. ‘Records of importance,’ he noted, ‘ought to be more formally prepared and kept.’30 The outcome would have to be proper training in settlement work for government officers, as was deemed necessary generally in Assam.31 Government itself was to be a civilizing influence. Elliott, who was constantly extolling the first-hand experience to be gained from touring the districts, attached ‘the greatest importance to constant and free personal inter­ course’ between officials and people. Elsewhere such influence, he argued, had provided ‘the brightest chapter of the history of our rule in India’.32Conversely, where order and confidence broke down, it could be attributed (to take an actual case) either to the effect of new incursions by the state, such as land settlements or a ban on the bearing of arms—these arguments usually implied 29 Elliott to Ripon, 22 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. 30 Elliott to Michell, 22 May 1882, and MNH, Add. Mss. 43605. The headmen were expected inter alia to supervise the collection of taxes. Bayley had ordered that each house pay one rupee and a maund of rice; this was commuted to two rupees per house in 1881. Settlements had been made by then with 100 villages, which were paying promptly; but the list of villages was still incomplete. 31 Elliott to Ripon, 26 June 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. Serious flaws had appeared in the work, pardy because officers had no experience of how it was done in the rest of India. 32 The quotations are from MNH, but also see Elliott to Ripon, 20 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605, where the authority of a Famine Commission report is adduced in support of systematic visiting by district officers.

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that the measures in question were somehow inappropriate for the time or place—or to the lack of contact between the people and the government: the infrequency of visits by the district officers and the persistence of indigenous institutions, for example, for the resolution of disputes.33 The motive behind the closer definition of the frontier and the administration was not just the need to defend and define British territory; it was also the need to identify the peoples who were to be treated as British subjects. This issue came up most forcefully in some incidents that prompted Elliott’s intervention in the Garo and the Naga hills. Both involved the burning of villages, an action for which there were many precedents. In the first case, the problem had originated in a project of road building sponsored through the district fund and donations from two local zamindars. When the trace for the road was first cut, there were repeated objections to the labour demanded, which was at a rate of 3 to 5 days per village, with pay of 3 annas per man per day. When the engineers returned along the line to begin widening the path, one set of villages stubbornly refused to help. Major Peet, Deputy Commis-sioner of the Garo district, a ‘gentle and kindly man’, sent his office interpreter and a revenue officer to demand compliance. They were faced by a large force of villagers who threatened to kill them. This act of defiance completely stopped all work on the road, as the existing labourers promptly absconded. Peet collected a large force, including friendly Garos, and marched to the area. He found that the inhabitants of the villages had disappeared into the jungle with all their grain and possessions, and so he set up camp. His whole party rapidly began to suffer from fever and dysentry. After some days of this, Peet set fire to two hamlets; the locals capitulated, even though this was an area where the people regularly moved villages, with their cultivation, from one hill to another. They were, Peet remarked, ‘mere children, ignorant, easily frightened, & foolish enough to think they can frighten Govt’. He explained the labour system to them and reported that afterwards they had gathered cheerfully to help carry his baggage. He also detained the ringleaders, who became ‘very sorry for themselves’, and carried them off to his headquarters, where Elliott interviewed them and decided to keep them in detention for a few days. He was not convinced that the village burning had produced the Garos’ change of heart, and would have preferred Peet to set up a police post and prevent the villagers from reoccupying their lands until 33 See above, note 27; these were Peet’s explanations for the incident in the Garo hills discussed below. Other reasons given included an allegation (later denied by Elliott) that census or setdement operations had disturbed people, that a popular officer had left, that too few official visits had been paid, and the affected villages had alleg­ edly not seen a European officer for 10 or 12 years; Elliott to Ripon, 20 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605.

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they had come to terms. He did not altogether condemn Peet, but did not approve either. He thought punishment should consolidate British rule, and not risk alientating people from it.34 The second incident was more serious. A man of Kohima had been murdered while on a trading visit to the village of Chajubama. A very fine settlement of some 200 ‘unusually large and well-built’ houses, Chajubama lay about two miles across the frontier laid down by Bayley, though by an oversight it had been permitted to pay revenue to the British. On hearing of the murder, the first step of the Deputy Commissioner, Michell, was to send messengers and then constables to summon the headmen, who claimed that the murder had not been committed by anyone from the village. He was asked to produce evidence. Several weeks passed and when the headmen failed to respond to further summons, Michell decided that he had to act, lest the men of Kohima make an attack themselves. The accepted response to such incidents was for a military expedition to be launched across the frontier to capture and punish those responsible. This was part of the construction of British subjects as those entitled to the protection of the state. Accordingly, Michell marched to Chajubama, allowing 20 Kohima men to accompany him. Arriving to find the place deserted and that hundreds had followed him from Kohima, he permitted them to plunder the village of an ‘enormous quantity of rice and dhan\ He then had the village burnt and reported the expedition an unqualified success—so much so that neighbouring villages were impressed into trying to tender revenue. (Michell refused it as they lay beyond the frontier) Contrary to the discretion commonly allowed to the ‘man on the spot’—a defence raised on this occasion in the central secretariat—Elliott complained that Michell should have telegraphed for orders. Better communications were an important element in the extension of ‘normal’ forms of government in place of necessarily ad hoc and personalized methods. But most emphatically, Elliott supposed that Michell could not have ‘understood how entirely circumstances have changed now that we have occupied the country and begun to settle it’.35 Earlier he had written that the Naga’s military strength was entirely broken, their strongholds ‘humbled or destroyed’.36Now he explained that, as the hills were a British district, the Nagas had become ‘subjects of the Queen, not outside barbarians; we have decided to take them in hand and civilise them, and to do this we must gradually introduce the reign of law and order instead of that of military expeditions and village burnings’. Similarly 34 Elliott to Ripon, 20 March and 28 April 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. 35 Elliott to Ripon, 24 April 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. 36 Elliott to Ripon, 22 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605.

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Charles Grant, Secretary in the Home Department, argued that ‘villages in British territory should not be burnt’, though burning (albeit still regrettable) might be justified for ‘villages... in a hostile country’.37 (One may remember Edwin Montagu’s repudiation of the extraordinary punishments imposed in the Punjab in 1919 and the doctrine of frightfulness, as he called it, as some­ thing appropriate to Germans in an occupied country rather than to British officers and British subjects.) Also in Nagaland in 1881, Elliott found thoroughly distasteful the ‘spectacle of a British force, led by British officers, accompanied by a horde of savages, marching to the sack and destruction of an unresisting village’.38 Ideas of punishment, he ordered, should not include the destruction of villages; they should be focused on the culpable individual. Though he argued that collective punishment was ‘peculiarly unsuitable to the Naga Country, where it is admitted that no communal feeling exist’,39 Elliott was also reproducing a standard maxim of British jurisprudence. It was one enforced in the civil and penal codes and in the laws of evidence, even though it continued to be overlooked on exceptional occasions thought to be necessitated by Indian conditions—for example, in the quartering of punitive police on refractory villages. At one stage, Elliott, seeking an authoritative statement against village burning on the part of the Government of India, seemed to suggest that a rule should be provided, as if to set out circumstances in which village burning might be justified. Grant retorted that village burning could not be ‘reduced to a system; it must be recognized as a matter lying outside of and beyond ordinary rule’ and Ripon, agreeing that it was quite impossible to have a regulation, took up another of Elliott’s suggestions, to the effect that the burning of a village should be regarded as a ‘grave responsibility’, ‘liable to incur the severe displeasure of Government’, so that anyone seeking to justify having done so should have to ask for the equivalent of an act of indemnity.40 37 Grant to Chief Commissioner, Assam, 13 June 1881; see above, note 27. 38 Elliott to Ripon, 28 May and 26 June 1881, and to Michell, demi-official, 22 May 1881; C.J. Lyall to Political Officer, Naga Hills, 3 May 1881, and reply, 11 May; diary of Political Officer^ 16 April 1881; Lyall to Foreign Department Secretary, 26 May 1881. A.C. Lyall thought Elliott had not really made up his mind on village burning because of the difficulty of finding an alternative that was not even less desirable; Elliott was also unwilling to censure officers publicly—even Michell, whom he did not rate highly. 39 Elliott to Michell, 22 May 1880, Add. Mss. 43605. 40 Elliott was pleased with the Home Department’s official response along these lines and circulated it so that his officers would ‘know the kind of spirit they ought to cultivate’; Elliott to Grant, 21 June 1881, Add. Mss. 43575 (p. 1261, with Revenue and Agriculture Emigration Proceedings). For the other policy statements see Elliott to Ripon, 22 and 28 April, 10 and 28 May, and 26 June 1881, Add. Mss. 43605; and Add. Mss. 43575, pp. 299-301 (see above, note 27).

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These incidents of village burning occurred against the backdrop of changes which Elliott envisaged for the Naga hills, which he set out in memorandum of 1881. Reading this and other schemes, surprised officials in the Government of India thought Elliott had overreached himself—one remarked that he seemed to ‘lay more stress on the rules of civilization than is quite compatible with the present state of the Nagas’.41 The officials were used to regarding such regions (and indeed much of Assam) as special cases, excused from radical reforms. But in fact Elliott’s initiative conformed closely with other; more general developments or goals, and with components that were to be added to the Nagaland scheme when appropriate—measures on labour; education, local self-government, and so on. Normalization was a project with many aspects, but all were related to a pattern of standardization and centralization. First came questions of law, order, and authority. Michell, in putting himself in effect at the head of the Kohima men marching to Chajubama, had been anxious to establish a monopoly of force. Elliott went further. Where Michell had advocated leaving Naga fortifications alone until the people themselves thought them unnecessary, Elliott by contrast believed they had to be removed to promote the pacification of the country. From the first, he had determined on rendering the Nagas ‘defenceless’. He objected particularly to the ‘strong walls... built up round each house, which turn the village paths into enfiladed lanes and make each compound a little fortress’. With their deep ditches and impenetrable thorn hedges, they served ‘no other purpose than that of defence’ and hence were a ‘temptation to resist our troops or our armed police’.42 He cited his experience as an assistant commissioner in Awadh after the Mutiny, when he had been ‘actively employed in levelling and rendering defenceless the forts’ in Faizabad district. Similarly, a general disarming of the people had been gradually enforced in the Angami Naga country, where no one was permitted to carry weapons publicly by the early 1880s. It was recognized that a general disarmament of the Nagas would be very unpalatable to them and that it would have to be carried out with discretion. Ripon suggested that persuasion should first be tried: villages which removed their fortifications should be exempted from house tax for one year; if they refused, the officials should not remove all defences but clear one or two open 41 Note by T.H., 15 June 1881, k.w. to Foreign Department Political Proceedings A423-33, Add. Mss. 43575. 42 Elliott to Ripon, 22 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. Similarly in northeast India, Jats reportedly resisted Mughal impredations by growing thickets of thorns around their villages (according to a comment by Gautam Bhadra, at the Calcutta workshop in March 1994).

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ways through the villages.43 Elliott proposed a durbar to announce the establishment of the Queen’s peace, and that the government would now mediate in quarrels and defend its subjects from attack so that private weapons were no longer necessary. Fortifications too should be removed—if not voluntarily, then by the police. Once this process had been completed, it was proposed (because of a need for defence against wild animals) that arms licences would be issued to ‘any well-conducted cultivator who had paid his revenue’—that is, to anyone who had constituted himself as a settled and respectable subject of the British. Having established order through a centralization of power, the next step was to seek socio-economic conformity. In Assam, a good example is the question of labour, and not always to its disadvantage. An extension of state authority was apparent in the tea plantations, for example, where many rules were imposed in the face of much special pleading, an interesting instance of a state irritating its own supporters by professing to protect their victims.44 Intervention was apparent too in the state’s attitude to forced employment, a persistent feature of colonial as of pre-colonial administration, but also one of which the British officially disapproved and which they sought to remove— often at great expense, as one official ruefully remarked, referring to its abolition for canal clearance work in Sind.45Elliott’s instinct was to avoid it as something contrary to the norms of law and legal rights. He banned officials in the plains districts from ordering mauzadars (managers of government estates or revenue collectors) to compile lists of those liable to be impressed. In the hill districts, swayed by custom and necessity (for administration would have been impossible without using forced labour for transportation, in the absence of carts, bullocks, boats, or roads), he settled for increasing regulation of the system. The exaction of forced labour represented an additional tax. Bayley had set a rate of 15 days per household, but in practice demands had been made as required. There had been extreme dissatisfaction and some resistance— Elliott himself had had to gather his porters and harangue them at the end of every day on one of his marches.46 Moreover, with the building of the capital at Kohima and the roads to it, it was felt that the load had fallen dispropor­ tionately on people in that vicinity. Elliott’s solution was a register of those liable to provide work, a record of demands made, and, whenever possible, 43 Elliott to Ripon, 26 June 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. At just this time, the Arms Act was being discussed in similar terms, though with special reference to the undesirability of racial discriminations. 44 For his changing views on tea ‘coolies’, see Elliott to Ripon, 27 June and 24 September 1881, and 19 February 1883, Add. Mss. 43605. 45 Home Department Political Proceedings, 27 May 1881, Add. Mss. 43575, pp. 299-301. 46 Elliott to Ripon, 22 April 1881, Add. Mss. 43605.

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the employment of people locally and at times compatible with their own agricultural seasons. Part of this process meant that the government had to acquire knowledge and expertise. On the vexed problem of transportation, Elliott set out the aspects of work and planning for which different sections of government were responsible,47 and thought that normally the Transport Department should be able to cope without impressing labour. He insisted too that the civil authorities establish a small permanent staff of bearers on good wages as a reserve for unexpected work. Another aspect of the expand­ ing state was its gradual creation of a professional agency. With Elliott’s intervention in this respect the inner frontier now ended in the hill districts, and even there forced labour was bureaucratically regulated. Where in 1880s Bayley had limited it by rule, now Elliott demanded a register. Of course transitional features were difficult as they tended to contradict the logic of the state’s claims to authority, and this perhaps was the force which helped move the colonial state towards both hegemony and responsibi­ lity. Elliott’s rules may be regarded as halfway towards abolition and the application of general employment laws; and indeed such policy decisions and systems were construed at the time as stages in the construction of a new kind of state. Forced labour, for example, was described in the Home Department as a ‘relic’ of the regime of the former kings of Assam.48 Paternalistic economic intervention was a feature in many policies. For example, in the interests of forest conservation, and especially of ‘valuable forest trees’ (a significant phrase),49 Elliott envisaged investigations of the 47 He found earlier arrangements characterized by want of forethought and system. Difficulties of supply to the Naga hills, specifically to Kohima before the district capital had been constructed, seem to have been due to poor management as well as to the difficult terrain. Eliott criticized the lack of forward planning which had meant that sufficient supplies had not been brought in when steamers were available, and that goods had had to be moved under such conditions that several porters lost their lives. See MNH, and Elliott to Ripon, 22 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. 48 Publicity again played its part in extending the norms, in this case reports in The Englishman. The labour was forced, though ‘liberally’ paid foi; and its eventual abolition was recognized as being necessary to the spread to regular administration. See MNH; Elliott to Primrose, 2 March, and to Ripon, 18 April 1882, Add. Mss. 43605; and k.w. to Home Department Political Proceedings, A423-33 [May 1881?], Add. Mss. 43575, pp. 299-301. For a similar situation in the Central Provinces, compare k.w. to Home Political A24-8 (September 1880), Add. Mss. 43574. For the countervailing reluctance to intervene, typical was Ripon’s warning against unnecessary restrictions on forest rights (referred to in Elliott to Ripon, 3 March 1882, Add. Mss. 43605), which should be set against the very extensive history of forest regulations under British rule. 49 The significance of this value-exploitative or ‘good husbandry’ attitude to the environment will be discussed briefly below. Clearly it also had utility for a revenueseeking state, but its persistence at the start of a transition towards trade and income taxes suggests that it had ideological trappings as well.

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agricultural system of the Nagas and consideration of how far it would be possible to restrict the extent of jhutn, or slash-and-burn cultivation, regarded as a ‘wasteful form’ which destroyed the forest and caused soil erosion. He believed that an increase of population was inevitable, following from the ‘pro­ tection and security afforded by our Government’, and that it would therefore be necessary for the Nagas to take up a ‘more careful and productive system of husbandry’, namely permanent cultivation, while adding potatoes and other vegetables to the range of local crops. Local officers, he suggested, should acquire and distribute seed, demonstrate the possibilities of terracing and irrigation, and possibly place a ban on slash-and-burn rotations in designated areas. Elliott’s thinking also included non-agricultural economic development—he was thrilled at the discovery of major coal reserves in Assam and hoped all difficulties in the way of exploitation might be smoothed away.50In such schemes of agricultural or other improvement, there were very obvious value judgements. They attempted the creation of an ideal subject and a ‘civilized’ economy. In his plan for the Naga hills, Elliott openly enunciated a strategy of providing benefits in order to generate allegiance. Many of his proposed steps thus looked inwards to Naga society. He wanted the use of dispensaries to be encouraged, on the argument that public health measures were an unambiguous good (especially in Nagaland, he thought, in the absence of ‘Hindu superstition’). ‘There may be question[s] about all other improvements we attempt to introduce; every step towards civilization is attended with drawbacks; but if a man is cured of a horrible eating ulcer there can be no doubt that he at least has received some benefit from our Administration.’ Medical treatment would lead to acknowledgment of the ‘benevolence of our motives’. Similarly ‘village schools... would undoubtedly have a civilizing and pacifying influence which can hardly be overrated’. Interestingly, Elliott stressed the value of the children being taught not only in their own languages, but in Assamese or Bengali. He envisaged the creation through education of British subjects, but also of a larger community of citizens. It does not seem to me in the least fanciful to describe all this as an attempt to create civil society or public space in Nagaland. But a quite different way of looking at such ‘positive’ state interventions is to suggest that they both defined and alienated groups by promoting racial and other stereotypes; such a role has been claimed for characteristics ‘discovered’ or reinforced by medical science.51 This would not rule out a further impact upon nationalism 50 Elliott to Ripon, 10 May 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. 51 See David Arnold, ‘Indian Identities and Medical Discourse, 1900-39’, paper read in Calcutta in March 1994, a version of which is ‘The “Discovery” of Malnutrition and Diet in Colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, X X X I(l), 1994.

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attributable to changing expectations of the state; but in any case there seem to be some shortcomings in this alternative. I would prefer to distinguish between those features on one hand that are peculiar to modem science and which occurred everywhere (which include the attempts to oudaw and drive out informal, folk knowledge—attempts that may be regarded as intellectual equivalents of the extensions of sovereignty); and those features on the other hand which were imported into science from other—for example, racist— discourse. This distinction avoids the potentially awkward and often pernicious, fully relativist implication that all knowledge is equivalent and all science subjective, and allows us, rather than lumping together the entire effect on India as ‘colonial’, to discern different kinds and levels of influence, positive and negative, upon identity. Racist stereotypes undoubtedly will stir up feelings and usually help create solidarities among their victims, but it is difficult to see how, for example, medical findings had any effect which differed significantly from those of other quasi-rational theories or quasi-scientific proofs. On the other hand, there is also an impact upon understandings of identity—firstly from particular findings of science (in, say, linguistics or psychology, and these days physics and genetics—one may compare the earlier effect of historical discoveries), and secondly from the very standardizations of science which parallel those to be found in other aspects of thought, economy, administration, and so on. On this basis, one can interpret Elliott’s assessment of the political importance of medicine in terms of the key concept that it contributes, namely public health, implying that which lies in the sphere of common and state concerns. All these points might also be made about education. Particularly interesting was Elliott’s and Ripon’s professed bias towards the primary and vernacular sector. Further and perhaps decisive, evidence of the attempted creation of a public arena is to be found in the beginnings of representation. Elliott faced what he saw as considerable problems in modernizing his local administration. For positions of trust and responsibility in Assam, the British had been wont to import Bengalis; but now, in keeping with current theories on governance, they thought it necessary to seek out ‘Assamese’—that is, people belonging to the adm inistrative territory (for the categories to be represented were only secondarily cultural, ethnic, or interest-related)/2 In Sylhet, part of his jurisdiction, Elliott found two of the three preconditions for recruitment to 52 By the same token, the system of administration was expected to be appropriate. A good example of this is to be found in the protracted discussions at this time of the Sind Commission, and whether there was anything ‘in the special circumstances’ of that country to prevent its being administered on the Punjab system as opposed to being assimilated to the regulation Provinces of Bombay. See C.U. A[itchison], 20 October 1880, and other notes by Collin, Durand, and A.C. Lyall in k.w. to Legislative Department Proceedings, A35-44, September 1880, Add. Mss. 43574.

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local boards: despite poor communications, a limited sense of community and some education, which he thought was the key to progress. In Cachar, however, the people were ‘pioneers on the borders of the wilderness’ and conditions were ‘too primitive for the growth of a cultivated and leisured class’. What Cachar needed, but lacked, was first social differentiation (a middle class, which would be produced over time under conditions of ‘civilization’, through variations in natural abilities and the accretion of wealth), and secondly a sense of community and public life, of human relations governed ‘by transmitted ties and long-transmitted traditions’ rather than by ‘mutual convenience alone’. The agenda was unusual at a time when the British favoured either gentry or peasants, but plain enough—it was to create in Assam a world fit for ‘native gentlemen’, just like Bengal, Bombay, and Madras.53 (In the last two, Elliott noted, a growing middle class contradicted those latter-day advocates of permanent settlement who had regarded the raiyatw ari system as an undesirable leveller—which suggests that he did not think rural and commercial or educated elites to be incompatible, and indeed draws attention to the connection consistently made in British thinking between settled agriculture and ‘civilization’.)54Accordingly, under Elliott’s guidance, Assam’s 53 It is possible that it reflected a moment (which S. Gopal called the ‘liberal experiment’) under Ripon and Dufferin when the Indian educated middle classes were looked upon with more favour than was possible beforehand (given the sneers against babus and post-1857 aristocratic fantasies—which Elliott possibly had shared when serving in Faizabad, but clearly now rejected) or afterwards (when a pro-peasant strategy dominated, until superseded during the World War I by attempts to create ‘moderate’ arid conservative or landowning coalitions of supporters). On the other hand, all these various strategies envisaged the creation of public arenas and political communities. The argument at this point is moreover not that Elliott’s attitude prevailed, though it surely had some influence among Indians; it is that, in stating it, he and others like him set out a new agenda that ultimately the colonial state did have to pursue. For assessments of colonial policy, see S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858-1905, Cambridge, 1965; Briton Martin, New India, 1885: British Official Policy and the Emergence o f the Indian National Congress, Berkeley, 1969; and RG. Robb, The Emergence o f British Policy towards Indian Politics, New Delhi, 1992. Gopal remarked that neither Liberals nor Conservatives had much idea about India, and that the Liberal experiment had little impact on Indian administration, partly through the failure of Dufferin and uninspired leadership in the 1890s; Martin also considered an opportunity to have been lost under Dufferin. These views, which themselves may be due for reassessment, also ignore influence on the role and expectations of the state as discussed in this essay. 54 There are innumerable instances of this. An early one was the characterization of the Pindaris as barbarous and rudimentary in their social and political structures because (it seems) they were highly mobile and dependent upon plunder. See George Sydenham, ‘Memorandum respecting the Pindarries...’, 5 October 1814, Survey of India Memoir no. 208A (vol. 55). This of course is the same point already made here about British interference in Naga agriculture.

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local self-government resolution went ‘as far as possible’, given the condition and attitude of the people. Elliott believed much progress could be made even in Assam, and argued that officials (swallowing their own preferences in the matter) should make appointments everywhere by election, confront the dangers of fraud that had sometimes been evident in the past, and transfer ‘almost complete control over the allotment of finances’ to local representa­ tives, giving them real money to spend so that they would think their efforts worthwhile. Though executive authority could not be made over to them, Elliott argued, they should be able to make decisions that were, for practical purposes, final; and thus to learn from their own mistakes. Similarly, despite the ‘phenomenal’ lack of suitable leaders in almost all districts, Elliott was opposed to having European non-official chairmen of districts boards because this (even more than official chairmen) would discourage the ‘tendencies to self-government among the natives’. In the event, elections to at least some of the boards were found satisfactory, with large polls, sufficient and repre­ sentative candidates, and more general interest than might have been expected, with even a willingness to pay higher taxes to support common purposes. Elliott regarded this as fulfilling, in a way a committee of tea planters would never have done, the goal which Ripon had had in mind, namely ‘the education of the native community’ to enable it ‘to take a share in political power and duties’—the ‘great step of turning boards which were merely consultative and not authoritative, into boards which are both’.55 55 Elliott to Ripon, 7 and 23 June, 12 August and 2 November 1882; and 21 May, 30 June, and 3 July 1883. Also C.J. Lyall, Officiating Secretary, to all Deputy Commissioners, Assam, 5 and 17 June 1882; Extract from the Proceedings of the Chief Commissioner of Assam, General Department, 2 November 1882; Lyall to Chief Commissioner 29 March 1883; W.C. Macpherson, Assistant Secretary, to Deputy Commissioners, Assam Valley districts, 6 April 1883 (all in Add. Mss. 43605). On the primacy of territorial representation, note that for the Kamrup divisional board, the election of 5 tea planters and 11 Indians was welcomed, but it was regretted that there were no Indian planters, foreign (non-Assamese) traders, pleaders, or Muslims. On education and the type of men sought to hold office, note Alexander Mackenzie, who, believing electoral arrangements should vary to take account of local conditions, remarked that ‘the intelligence wanted for direction of public affairs is after all very much the same in quality as that required for the successful management of private business. Some of the shrewdest men in India are native landowners, bankers, merchants, estate managers & the like who never had any English education’ (to Ripon, and to Primrose, n.d. [April-May 1882], Add. Mss. 43615). A qualification of the extension of powers was that the execution of policy had to be done by professionals (engineers, school inspectors, and so on) whose departments tended to oppose the transfer of funds to local control; but this was merely another inevitable facet of the creation of public services. Similarly, Elliott was reluctant to pass over education wholly to the board, lest they favour higher education to the detriment of primary, and thus frustrate his broader aims. For Elliott’s keen interest in education and his regret that

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The Naga hills were only beginning on the journey, and representative institutions were supposed to be reached at an advanced stage. But the hills were regarded by Elliott as his success story: there the external frontier was delineated and the internal frontier narrowed. He had predicted that, given disarmament, a village structure, the ‘opening out of the country by road and by trade, the accumulation of wealth, the establishment of schools, and the benefits of medical treatment’, the Nagas should become as peaceful as other hill tribes had done. (He saw his own influence as being in line with that of Outram and Cleveland.)56 Later he wrote to Ripon: ‘I have seldom been better pleased with anything’. He expected the Naga hills to become a model district. Its features were a permanent capital, improved communications, acceptance by ‘friendly and smiling’ local people who realized the British intended to govern, an effective deputy commissioner backed up by troops, and above all regular administration—even the unprecedented triumph, in 1882, of a double murderer apprehended across the border w ithout any village having been burnt.57

in Part of the delineation of the Naga district occurred in characterizations of its landscape and people. Elliott, depressed by Assam and its incessant rain,58 had at first been even more discouraged by the Naga hills, with their difficulties of transport and lack of permanent buildings or other facilities. Reportedly troops stationed there became extremely dispirited. With a ‘suitable and healthy’, well-supplied headquarters established at Kohima, however; and with the troops being joined by their families, they cheered up enormously—and in contemplation of such a future, Elliott had been moved to write for the Viceroy a picturesque evocation of Kohima’s potential as an ideal hill station, with its romantic landscape, its ‘great buttresses’, ‘precipitous crags and forestAssam was not represented on Ripon’s committee of inquiry, see Elliott to Ripon, 3 March 1882, Add. Mss. 43605. Note, finally, that the point here is about rhetoric and potential, not actual transfers of power. In general, district boards had little practical independence in the nineteenth century. Elliott had remarked to Ripon how ‘effectively a stupid and unwilling District Officer can block the way in introducing any reform’. 56 Elliott to Ripon, 22 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. 57 Elliott to Ripon, 22 March 1882, Add. Mss. 43605. 58 Elliott to Charles Grant, 21 June 1881 (with Revenue and Agriculture Department Emigration Proceedings), Add. Mss. 43575, p. 1261. He was writing from Shillong, the imaginary and romantic image of which was to be eloquendy recalled in a later generation by Nirad Chaudhuri as ‘a place of very much greater and more diversified natural beauty than any place we had seen’ (this when he had not seen it); see The Autobiography o f an Unknown Indian, Berkeley, 1968, pp. 92-3.

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clad slopes’, its views ‘extending over many miles of hilly country’ or over valleys ever ‘wider and hills more gently sloping, till the eye reaches the valley of the Brahmaputra, and beyond it the Bhotan hills and the snow-clad peaks of the Himalayas’.59 Alongside this aesthetic accommodation came the acquisition of knowledge, another form of familiarization and one motive behind the clearing of ways into the secretive villages. We have already noted its importance for revenue and socio-economic management. Before burning villages Peet had found it ‘almost a religion with Garos not to show the way to a stranger village in troublous times, for the village so discovered’ would never forgive the disclosure.60 Indeed, just as lack of knowledge was held to cause or justify arbitrary and irregular administration, so normal government depended upon ready intelligence. To the same effect, Elliott (like Bayley before him) stressed the importance of a facility in Naga languages. He promised on the one hand to reward officials who prepared grammars and vocabularies, and on the other to penalize those who were still ignorant of the local tongue after a year’s posting. More than this, he called for a systematic record of village institutions—their political structure, clans, laws of marriage and inheritance, land or water rights, superstitions, legends, religious beliefs, historical traditions, folklore, and the like. He regarded these as important for practical purposes and for forming a link of sympathy with the people, but also as a sociological record of customs that were likely to die out. He promised that the government would publish such studies free of cost, and that any officer who made one would earn ‘the approbation of the Local Government and a claim to official advancement’. The result, naturally, was a considerable crop of studies on the Nagas, which during the twentieth century merged imperceptibly into those of professional ethnographers.61 59 Elliott to Ripon, 22 March 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. Elliott’s praise of the landscape—an interesting and important aspect of the identification of India not otherwise raised in this paper concerns topography and images—allows one to speculate on the connection of sensibility and sentiment which linked Elliott and Chaudhuri, and on the myths of place that also construct nations. On the troops’ morale, see Elliott to Ripon, 22 March 1882, Add. Mss. 43605. 60 See above, note 27. 61 For example, see R.B. MacCabe, Outline Grammar o f the Angami Naga Language, Calcutta, 1887; M.M. Clark, Ao Naga Grammar, Shillong, 1893; J.F. Needham, Collection o f a Few Moshang Naga Words, Shillong, 1897; D. Prain, The Angami Nagas, Calcutta, 1890; T.C. Hodson (formerly assistant political agent, Manipur), The Meitheis, London, 1908; J.H. Hutton (former Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills), The Angami Nagas, London, n.d., and The Sema Nagas, London, 1921; J.P. Mills (former assistant commissioner), The Lhota Nagas, London, 1922, and The Ao Nagas, London, 1926; and W.C. Smith (superintendent of a missionary school), The Ao Tribe o f Assam, London, 1925.

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Such efforts of course formed no more than a tiny footnote to the grand enterprise whereby India had been described and catalogued over many generations. From the very earliest encounters of the mid-eighteenth century between the East India Company (acting as a government) and Indian society, there had been a positive mania for the collection of information—for measurement, statistics, histories, topographies, sociologies.62 Even survey records dating from the late eighteenth century (and preserved in the National Archives of India) present a bewildering array of information—there are pages and pages setting out measurements in furlongs from one landmark to another, and in relation to astronomical and later trigonometrical calculations; also, especially in the Madras presidency, there are extensive tables counting villages, waterworks, fortifications, religious establishments, public buildings, heads of revenue, population, and land area. The memoir of zillah ‘Nuggur or Bidenoor’, produced in 1799, contains statistics in no less than 57 varieties.63 District descriptions from the early nineteenth century might include, similarly, discussions and enumerations relating to religion, history, castes, and wild animals, in addition to the more obviously practical entries on irrigation, grain production, cattle, minerals, metals, manufactures, weights, and measures.64 The same imperatives were then extended into the great district revenue settlements later in the century. Colin Mackenzie, in many ways the chief protagonist of the survey (in the Deccan and then Mysore, and later as the first Surveyor-General of India; see Chapter 4), had been certain of the utility of the work for demarcating the Company’s acquisitions and assisting their administration. He thought it should be undertaken in stages (for example later producing agricultural information for the revenue department); wondered about ways in which the information could be stored, compared, and disseminated; and worried lest he be accused of ‘fancy and extravagance’.65 62 See C.A. Bayly and other contributors to the special issue of Modern Asian Studies, 1993, for discussions of the importance of information to Indian states. 63 Survey of India Memoirs no. 123, vol. 7, National Archives of India; see also Shickarpur district, 1806, and many others in Mysore. See also zillah Madura in 1800, loc. tit., no. 67, vol. 9, and others in no. 17, vol. 21. 64 In fact, those organized by Mackenzie in Mysore contained a great deal of the latter information even though they were supposed to be primarily for the purpose of delineating district boundaries and recording roads and fortifications, with a detailed agricultural and revenue survey to follow. 65 See Survey of India Memoirs no. 130, vol. 6, official letter book of the Mysore Survey 1799-1803, passim. The quotation is from Mackenzie to [Fitzpatrick?], 5 January 1800. Mackenzie’s justifications included the establishment of permanent boundaries after the partition of Mysore, the supply of political and military information to the government and ‘Publick’, the collection of data on natural history and geography, and generally the development of science. He also proposed setting up a training school for surveying as early as 1800.

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Yet in practice the actual surveys clearly produced vast materials, litde of which can really have been supposed to have had any practical value and much of which was never put to direct administrative or military use. Other governments too had sought information, but what distinguished these efforts seems to have been the extent to which they were seeking ‘knowledge’ for its own sake, professionalizing it as a contribution to emerging disciplines of science. They assumed that it would be possible to measure everything and to achieve a complete possession of reality. Though informants and interpreters were inevitably Indian, yet this positivism challenged Indians by supposedly revealing knowledge that they did not have (and which perhaps they had had no desire to have). Gradually, however, the expectations of completeness waned. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there were signs that bifurcations of disciplines and expertise, and a stronger appreciation of complexity, were preparing the way for the modern expectation that one will be ignorant of the specialisms of others, and for modem doubts that knowledge provides answers or that any objective reality exists. As a conse­ quence, India came to be regarded as ultimately unknowable, while indigenous knowledge—even folklore—was once again respected. Elliott’s unqualified campaign to commandeer knowledge of the Nagas, however shows that in the midst of these doubts and qualifications, some of which he clearly endorsed, the search for ‘useless’ or scientific as well as practical information still formed an important part of the officials’ image of themselves and their rule in India towards the end of the century. The idea of the responsibility of the state was also not new. One strand of thought had long maintained that even a colonial state should seek protection for and of Indians as individuals, rather than merely exploit India and its peoples as a resource. In form the idea derived from European jurisprudence and political philosophy, though it may possibly have been specially evident in India as a colonial imperative and in reaction to Indian demands and expectations of the state—India being arguably more rights- and statuspervaded than most other colonial countries. But whatever its origin, the impulse was evident when the legal system expanded to take into account the interests and protection of both individuals and the wider community (not a straightforward matter in a society given, it seems, to chronic delegation as the basis of social distinctions). There was, for example, the identification as crimes of what were formerly torts, applying to India the concept of the king’s peace as it had developed in medieval Europe. More generally, public interest was evident in the fact that the East India Company’s rule was made so explicitly legalistic in form and that the Company placed itself within and not above the laws it created. The assumption thus apparent about the state and law made it inevitable that the British would progressively seek to

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interfere in areas originally precluded from direct control, and that they would modify the laws and practices they professed to be adopting from Indian traditions. The idea arose that the state not only had a duty to protect established interests but also that it should advance the economic and social well-being of its subjects. This too was discernible from the start of Company rule, not only from critics in Britain but also in policies and pronouncements in India. Certain coercive measures were undertaken against sati or so-called criminal tribes, on the same argument of public interest. Laissez-faire doctrines delayed and distorted, but did not prevent, state interference in trade and production. The state was held to have a duty to im prove India, if not always Indians, apparently according to the parable of the talents. Typical was the argument of J.D. Herbert when he wrote, in his massive ‘Report on the Mineralogical Survey of the Himalaya Mountains’ of 1826’ that ‘many articles of promise present themselves which by careful management might be made sufficiently productive to become worthy of the attention of a Government disposed to improve its resources and to leave no source of revenue neglected’.64This report supposed a need for European colonialization, technology, and investment, and like other investigations and measurements of the time it sought disinterested knowledge as well as information about resources to be exploited. But, in writing as he did, Herbert clearly anticipated that the government w ould be disposed to improvement, not only because of its origins in commerce, but because of a prevailing rhetoric of governance. Visionaries always had schemes, some of which later turned into practical policies. An important element of the definition of territory by the modem state was, as is now much discussed, the assertion that nature was subject to culture, resources could be measured according to monetary worth, and exploitation was more legitimate than ‘waste’. Use was also supposed to produce rights of ownership, and it was perhaps by analogy with that argument that the legitimacy of the state was held to depend upon the advantage it took of its territory and the opportunities it provided to its subjects. Many other deep currents also ran along with these ideas, including the settled cultivators’ fear of the forest and the wild, and of course political and demographic imperatives, so that similar impulses towards nature seem to have existed in all civilizations, though always balanced to some extent by contrary views. Nonetheless, whether for intrinsic reasons or for technological and practical ones, doctrines favouring use (and hence progress) have been particularly associated with the nation state and its assertions of sovereignty. Such an 66 Original MSS Copy, Home Department Miscellaneous Series, no. 437A, National Archives of India.

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attitude to the environment obviously also played a part in the establishment of modem identities.67 Why should there have been any tendency towards progressive legislation and policies? The explanation for a colonial government is no less complicated than it would be for any other ruling elite. It is possible that policies were (and for that matter are still today) largely cosmetic, designed to appease opinion, to reward interest groups (often those who could manipulate programmes to their own advantage), and to improve the rulers’ image of themselves. Certainly we tend to assume that colonial protestations about Indianization and self-rule were more or less disingenuous or fraudulent— like the promise of equality in Queen Victoria’s proclamation—and many scholars have plausibly suggested that reforms of various sorts were merely designed to manufacture supporters for the government. But there is such a great weight of such measures and so many protestations in the officials’ private files and demi-official correspondence, that we should be ready to accept that something more complicated was also going on. Colonial rule was not just a single force and tendency. It contained many aspects or theories. We may leave aside the issue of whether any of its progressive enactments and policies did any good (though I think that at least they were not without influence, if only on the argument presented in the Introduction that whatever is repeatedly proclaimed does ultimately affect behaviour). For the present discussion, what matters is that protective and reforming measures were a logical consequence of the nineteenth-century idea of the state, as well as of burgeoning Indian demands. The result was that at one level the promise of a future Indian raj was strangely consistent with the character of British administration. The officials did not want it, but their concept of the state forced them to conceive of it as a possibility or even a goal. An indication of this was the fact that, despite the obvious alienation and racism in aspects of Western thought on India, there were also liberal tendencies. There are several instances of the infantilizing of Indians in this essay, and vast quantities more which could have been adduced.68 Along with accusations of Indian social fragmentation, irrationality, fatality, passivity, and traditions of despotism, they were of course used to justify special laws and 67 The importance of environment to identity was also raised at the Calcutta meeting by Arun Bandopadhyay. 68 Another example in the present case may be found in a tale told to illustrate the merits of a new, young, resourceful, bright, and persuasive Deputy Commissioner (R.B. MacCabe, in place of Michell). A little Shola Naga boy had attached himself to MacCabe and refused to leave, even when his father came in to pay revenue. The boy did not understand Angami Naga but was learning Assamese, and followed ‘his master about like a dog’. This, said Elliott of MacCabe, ‘is the kind of man we want to impress and civilise savages’; to Ripon, 22 March 1882, Add. Mss. 43605.

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personalized, arbitrary, or autocratic government—the ‘White man’s burden’. But they should not blind us to another central tenet of British rule (or at least rhetoric) in India: namely, the political and legal assumption that Indians were not ‘Other’ at all but ‘British subjects’, entitled to the same laws, privileges, and progress as Britons. As said before, the colonial state remained, in theory, subject to the rule of law, no more and no less than the state in Britain. Repeated declarations of universal rights show the tenacity of these powerful fictions. None of them prevents autocracy and oppression. But it is significant that in India, extreme force mostly occurred outside the professed norms of the British system. Despite Fitzjames Stephen’s picture of a conquest state founded and ultimately held by force, state violence tended almost always to be attributed to a special situation, rationalized in the language of public interest. So it was that Ripon found it impossible to devise a regulation governing the burning of villages. Similarly, it was no accident that the Punjab cadre was the most paternalistic in tone, for it was placed where military or frontier disciplines were thought to be needed. There was a hankering after these simplicities in Bengal, but no real attempt to reproduce them. Similarly, despotic princely states were allowed to fall behind British India in adminstrative standards (though not too far behind); but pressures gradually built up for them to be brought into line. All states have to devise rules for dealing with exceptions and minorities. But we may contrast British rule with the systems from which, in part, it developed. They contained large elements of decentralized authority, so that rights and powers were often negotiated without much reference to codes and institutions, though these did exist and have influence. The British did not abandon all the distinctions, but rather hardened or increased them. Their idea of caste, or of ‘original’ Hindus and ‘foreign’ Muslims, generated a preference for judging people by ‘their own’ rules. Indian personal law was and is a vestige of this, one hostile to the concept of centralized sovereignty. It is striking how often history is thus appealed to as justification or precedent. But it is often also a device to conceal change. We find custom and tradition being cited to support what were surely new departures. Public space was established also through withdrawals by a would-be impersonal state from activities formerly undertaken by rulers in India, including the Company in its early years. As examples of this creation of spaces that were public but potentially independent of officialdom, one might cite the British preference for free trade, the laws of contract and tort, the standardization of measurements, the official eschewal of support for religion and its endowments, the encouragement of private credit and charity, the bureaucratizing of administration and management, and so on. In other senses, however, these apparent abstentions represented another form of intervention,

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for such public spheres were defined and regulated by the state, and often symbiotic with it.

In short, qualifications were legion. They have been called here derogations of sovereignty, areas in which the normal rules did not apply. The whole of India constituted such an exception for some matters. But the norm was always conceived as being expressed in common terms of equity, individual rights, the rule of law, and so on. Because British rule favoured monopolies of power, with one side of its operations the state waged a war of attrition against special cases. The first stage, as we have seen, was to make firm boundaries—these could be geographical, social, or political—the intention being to contain the exceptions and to render them intelligible, manageable, and ultimately digestible. Definitions, as has often been pointed out, whether of land, peoples, or practice, are weapons of selection, reform, control, and assimilation. The further stages in the diffusion of sovereignty then might be: first, the identification of elements which were unacceptable to some higher purpose or moral code (in this way, the British suspended elements of the Islamic code of punishments, for example); second, resolution of inconsistencies and conflicts of jurisdiction; third, interventions justified in terms of individual rights or a broad public interest; and finally, a project for the reformation and improvement of the whole society or nation, from which sections could not be exempted. In this analysis, we can see the great significance of the expansion of the state insofar as it rolled back the exceptions and allowed the spread of a unitary sovereignty. Within India, there were increasing influences of generalization in terms of systems of law, precedents, depictions of society, and custom. The developments did not necessitate goals of democracy or social equality. After all, they had occurred in India as in Europe amongst conditions and doctrines favouring inequalities and exclusions. But some of them—the rule of law, legal equality, just rights, the public duty of care, and finally representation— certainly were signifiers of the modem nation. The same features that we have seen illustrated in the state’s definition of the Naga hill district were necessary to the construction of a modern Indian identity. Colonial interventions of all kinds might of course be contested by Indians who took a different view of their country’s identity. It is possible to see all the objections to state inter­ ference in this light, and also the reassessments of language and religion. But there was also a complementarity between the colonial invention of India and the discovery of India by nationalists. The government in India expanded by employing more and doing more, but also by extending its norms and policies more evenly over its dominion. Full sovereignty was stretched into areas where it had formerly been qualified, and at times even the princely states were brought within the orbit of law and

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‘improvement’ according to the standards of the Raj. To some degree, this was itself the product of refinements of the bureaucratic process, through systemization and specialization, and the greater command and consistency possible with rules of conduct, duplicated forms, the dak, the telegraph, and finally the telephone (introduction of which was being discussed in 1880).69 We may recall that one of Elliott’s complaints against Michell was that he acted without consultation instead of seeking orders by telegraph; there was no longer the excuse of a delay of two or more weeks in communications between Kohima and headquarters.70 However, the process had clear elements of conscious policy. Most important was the expanding idea of the state’s function. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this meant an ever-growing list of responsibilities. The changes depended on a school of thought that Elliott represented, but also on far broader processes of change. That is why the different elements of what was done in the Naga hills were a microcosm of the establishment and growth of the modern state in India. Elliott, it should be noted, was the instrument and not the hero of this story—later Ripon would say of him, on another matter, ‘what a fool... though in many ways able’.71 But in Elliott’s local plans all the main features of a general development were present and indeed concentrated. There was the firming up of administrative centres, boundaries, and structures; the extension of taxation, policing, and record­ keeping; the creation or use of local authorities; the disarming of the local population; the disabling of alternative instruments of power; and the removal of extraordinary procedures in favour of routine and uniform legality. Then came the development of physical, linguistic, and economic communications; a breaking down of secrecy; the extension of public spheres; and the collection and publication of information. Finally, there was an elaboration of benefits, designed to render government palatable and to create interested collaborators. Medicine, education, trade, and so on were all harnessed to this cause. The state increasingly found itself unable either to avoid a duty of care to the people, or to resist the impulse of trying to change them and mould them in its own image. Moreover it was established that India and its government had interests distinct from (albeit still subservient to) those of Britain. It was also established, as missionaries had long recognized, that a greater desire to change Indians— 69 See Add. Mss. 43574, pp. 531-5. This was another issue on which the proper extent of state involvement was debated. Ripon, though reluctant to ‘increase the amount of business of a commercial character undertaken by Government’, thought on the whole that they should intervene so as to meet any public demand for telephones. 70 Elliott to Ripon, and demi-official to Michell, 28 May 1881, Add. Mss. 43605. 71 Ripon to Kimberley, 9 December 1892 (copy), Add. Mss. 43526.

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the missionaries’ wish to alter beliefs and customs; later officials plans to effect fundamental social and economic reform—implied a proportionately greater involvement of Indian forms and coadjutors. The way was open for the argument that Indians would have to take the lead themselves, an idea which implied a society of representations as well as a public interest. In this context, any district or legislative council, for example, was an arena waiting to be filled by Indian leaders. All these were processes indistinguishable from or inevitable for nation building, and thus arose the curious complementarity of colonial rule, nationalist challenge, and Indian identity.

6. The Impact of British Rule on a Religious Community* Reflections on the Trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah of Patna in 1865

Using the example and evidence from a trial o f ‘Muslim conspirators’, this essay exam ines the relationship betw een tradition al and m odern form s o f organization, the range o f reactions to colonial impact, the rapidity o f indigenous adaptations to new institutions, and the means o f forming community identities. It summarizes some additional aspects o f the colonial impact on the Indian countryside and seeks to identify the possible bases and limits o f longstanding, wider senses o f community.

In his study of the advent of Company rule in western India, Kenneth Ballhatchet shows the initial concern of Elphinstone both to respect Indian customs and expectations and to wean the people and certain chiefs from their ‘natural’ allegiance to the Marathas. Similarly, in his study of British attitudes to race, sex, and class, Ballhatchet discusses the conflict which developed when various pressures brought Europeans and Indians into close contact despite British efforts to preserve a paternalistic social distance. Again at issue, amidst a range of stereotypes, was what was ‘natural’ to different peoples and classes.1 Such ambiguities and contradictions are important in assessing the nature and impact of British rule over a range even wider than that suggested in these two diverse examples. As a result, a major uncertainty remains over the as­ sessment of British impact in India. The present paper addresses this problem with particular reference to the position of Muslims (also taken up in Chap­ ter 7) and to the Indian countryside. The context is two current trends in the historiography: to minimize the impact of British rule, and to treat popular * First published in Peter Robb (ed.), Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History presented to Professor K.A. Ballhatchet, New Delhi, 1993. 1 See Kenneth Ballhatchet, Social Policy and Social Change in ’Western India, 181830, Oxford, 1957, and Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and the Critics, 1793-190S, London, 1980.

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movements as autonomous. These ideas obviously offer mutual support; but confusingly they also appear to accommodate theories of modernization, for example when explaining the political separatism of Indian Muslims. By con­ trast, this paper will attempt to fit an overview of religious and political change into an understanding of government policy. It argues that, despite regional and class differences and religious heterodoxy, distinct identities and beliefs were already present early in the century, and that just as ecology or socio­ economic and political structures provided a framework for agricultural de­ cisions and were reinforced by ethical sanctions or consensus, so too religious and other ideas circumscribed the ways in which people could perceive them­ selves. It suggests that the existence of this ‘community’ and the unwitting British infringements against Indian society amounted to a major counterbal­ ance to the British attempts at distance and non-interference, and therefore (partly as a result) British rule had an earlier and more pervasive impact than is sometimes supposed. It is concerned, in short, to define at the same time the nature of British rule and that of the society it confronted. The issue is partly one of perceptions and consciousness. The focus is on eastern India in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.2 One way to recover the beliefs and reactions of the illiterate is to examine the movements to which they responded in significant numbers. The so-called Wahhabi conspiracy, centred around Maulvi Ahmadullah of Patna, provides an interesting case study in this respect, not least for what it suggests about the impact of British rule. We need concern ourselves only briefly with the details of the ‘conspiracy’.3It was inspired indirectly by the teachings of Abdul Wahhab and the success of his followers in Arabia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and more directly by the life and work of Saiyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly, especially his war against Sikh power in the Punjab (182631). From Patna, after his death, his message was spread by disciples, notably Maulvis Wilayat and Inayat Ali. The news of the death being disbelieved encouraged some of his followers to persist in jihad (holy war), but against British rule. This movement led, in the 1840s and 1850s, to sporadic incidents 2 The present paper is for me an unaccustomed foray into this field of social history. Some of its examples, as in this paragraph, reflect the fact that it is a by-product of work on British policy, tenurial structure, and agricultural production in Bihar. Parts of the essay were originally presented at the conference on ‘Peasant Culture and Consciousness’ at Bellagio, Italy, in January 1990, and at the eleventh European Conference of South Asian Studies at Amsterdam in July 1990. My thanks to the participants on those occasions, and also to Avril Powell for more recent comments. 3 See P. Hardy, The Muslims o f British India, Cambridge, 1972, pp. 50-60. Unless otherwise specified, this section is based on the ‘Papers Connected with the Trial of Moulvie Ahmedoollah, of Patna, and Others, for Conspiracy and Treason’, Selections from the Records o f the Government o f Bengal, vol. XLII, Calcutta, 1866.

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of violence among the northwestern ‘tribes’ and a good deal of preaching in many districts across north and eastern India. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, some of the remnants of Saiyid Ahmad’s forces, centred on the village of Sittana (in the Swat valley, northeast of Peshawar) and augmented by recruits drawn largely from among the peasants of Bengal, engaged in several skirmishes with British troops, dignified in the records by the tide of a ‘frontier’ war. The conspiracy was regarded, in subsequent prosecutions, as having been centred upon the families based in an extended house in the neighbourhood (m u halla) of Sadikpur, Patna. They had recruited followers among the villagers, organized their travel, and provided funds for their support and for the prosecution of the ‘war’ on the Punjab frontier. Two trials were held, one in the Punjab and one in Patna. At the latter the Patna shopkeeper and banker Elahi Baksh, already convicted but later pardoned, gave evidence which led ultimately to the conviction and transportation of Ahmadullah as leader of the conspiracy. The first point to be made about these events is that they illustrate not a new but a longstanding range of connections and organization, for and among Muslims, features sometimes supposed to be ‘modem’.4 Of course communi­ cations, like many transactions, did become easier and quicker (and hence more numerous) between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. The ‘Wahhabi’ papers (letters seized and brought in as evidence) may be full of complaints about lost replies, lack of news, and so on, illustrating that com­ munication remained precarious; but they also show advances brought by the British—relative security on the roads, improvements in river and land links, and the post and telegraph service. On the other hand, the linkages did not begin with the British period, and it was existing expectations of travel and 4 The assumption in this paper is that the reports—British ‘constructions’ though they are—do nonetheless reflect a real range of connections; and moreover that those claimed by Muslim activists in other sources also have a basis in reality. Avril Powell has tended to dismiss these as mere rhetorical devices, but notes that a figure such as Wazir Khan could be seen as an intermediary between the ulama, the British in the Thomason Hospital, and the Muslim peasants in the vaccinating clinics; see Avril A Powell, ‘Muslim-Christian Confrontation: Dr Wazir Khan in Nineteenth-century Agra’, in Kenneth W. Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages, Albany, 1992, pp. 77-92. See also, in the same volume, Rafiuddin Ahmed, ‘Muslim-Christian Polemics and Religious Reform in NineteenthCentury Bengal: Munshi Meheru’llah of Jessore’, especially pp. 110-14, on religious debates and meetings treated as a new or developing phenomenon; and Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘Imaging Community: Polemic Debates in Colonial India’, which traces developments to the middle and late nineteenth century, but adds (p. 231): ‘...these may always be shared consciousness, to varying degrees. But the salience of a Muslim identity will vary.. . . ’ It is the mechanisms and consequences of this ‘shared consciousness’ that this essay explores.

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exchange that ensured innovations were readily adopted. Nor were Britishbacked connections alone important. The message of the Indian Wahhabis was spread by travelling preachers (Saiyid Ahmad’s own travels took him to Mecca on the hajj and then repeatedly across India) and consolidated by institutional means, including committees and family ties distributed across the continent. Both itinerants and organizations were old, familiar devices— different, but not absolutely so, from the public men and societies appearing at the same time in India as copies of those of the West. The disciples of holy men such as Saiyid Ahmad were initiated ‘by the ceremony of joining hands’. During his visit to Patna, he also appointed a chief priest and local sea leader or khalifa, governed by sanad, a formal grant of authority, so that this nomi­ nee, Muhammad Hussain, could on his deathbed appoint his son-in-law Yahiya Ali to succeed him, and place Yahiya’s elder brother Ahmadullah in charge of all property. Regular meetings were held in the brothers’ Sadikpur house, both in committee to take decisions and control funds, and among the followers to preach the Wahhabi message. Written records were kept of some of these transactions. In addition to such religious institutions, the main infrastructure that allowed people and money to be moved across hundreds of miles was that of commerce and trade. Bankers and hide merchants in particular occupied key roles in the regional network of the Wahhabis, trade routes and dakgharis (post-chaises) were used, the hundi system of commercial paper was relied upon to transfer funds, and even the rather obvious codes used in correspon­ dence were expressed in terms which related to trade—the mujahidin as beparis or soudagar sahibs (merchants), the Wahhabi party as the ‘firm’, its leader as the head agent, Patna as the ‘little bazaar’, supplies for the ‘rebels’ as ‘Cashmere and Cabul goods, shoes, & c.’, and transfers of money as books, jewellery, or hides. Moreover; in the conspiracy as in trade, family members travelled widely, so that long-distance contacts were reinforced by kinship ties. Nor were the alternative connections provided by administrative and military structures entirely lost. Though British administration replaced or suborned many former political ties, there was far from a complete discontinuity. Many of the ‘conspirators’ held posts of responsibility within the new structures, which no doubt reinforced their status, secured their income, and facilitated a familiarity with technological advances such as the telegraph. Participants included lam bardars (headmen), an opium gom ashta (agent) and one-time daroga (chief of a police circle), a meat contractor to British forces, and other contractors, as well as sepoys, jam adars, and risaladars .5 Indeed (as these military personnel might imply) movements of the British army were 5 The term ‘jamadar’ was used for various subordinate officers, but here probably implied one in charge of infantry men (sepoys); a risaladar was an Indian cavalry officer.

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sometimes used to cover the travel of couriers. Maulvi Ahmadullah himself served on several government bodies, including the Patna Committee of Public Instruction, and was a Deputy Collector and Income Tax Assessor (despite having been arrested on suspicion of disloyalty in 1857). Such linkages spread widely from Patna. Associates were named in 31 districts, including 5 in Bihar and 14 in Bengal. Nor was it a town-centred superstructure: as traders, moneylenders, and landowners, the leaders of the ‘conspiracy’ reached into the countryside and reacted to the rhythms of rural society. Maulvi Ahmadullah’s remittances to the frontier; for example, had to await the autumn harvest; some of his supposed purchases were of ‘good milk cows’; one letter promised a visit once the agricultural work was oven Town and country were intermixed, as property was, as occupations were. The proof of this connection lay above all in the recruits to the cause. The lower classes had allegedly greeted Saiyid Ahmad with greatest enthusiasm, some of them running shoeless beside his travelling palanquin as a sign of respect. His successors, it was said with some hyperbole, ‘under the very nose and protection of Government authorities, openly preached sedition in every village of our most populous districts’. Hence, those who flocked to the Wahhabi cause were ‘thousands of quiet villagers from Lower and Eastern Bengal’ (present-day Bihar, West Bengal, and Bangladesh). Of the Muslims of India, the point has long been made—dating at least from Ibbetson’s studies of the Punjab6—that regional rather than religious categories predominated until the great effort of orthodoxy and political communalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and (given the emergence of Bangladesh) even beyond. Pan-Islamic and other generalizing trends are seen as developing over specific periods; various explanations are given for the changes.7 But it must also be remembered that these developments 6 See Denzil Ibbetson, Report on the Census of the Punjab 1881, as discussed in David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India, Princeton, 1978, pp. 15—16. Lelyveld’s is an illuminating account. Only one point jars with the explanations here, the suggestion that ‘shared genealogical identity’ among Muslims was a ‘historical memory—or fabrication’ rather than a ‘resource’ (p. 43). This paper regards the identity as maintained or invented because of its usefulness: Wahhabis, merchants, landlords, peasants—all used it. 7 See in particular ibid.; Hardy, Muslims; Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Retnval in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900, Princeton, 1982; Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence o f Communalism in North India, Berkeley, 1989; Rafiuddin Ahmed, Bengal Muslims 1871-1906: A Quest for Identity, Delhi, 1981; F.C.R. Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics o f the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860-1923, Cambridge, 1974; Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, Delhi, 1982, pp. 3-4 and passim ; and Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and PanIslamic Trends in Colonial India, Delhi, 2nd edn, 1985. See also note 17 below.

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nonetheless rested on a longstanding sense of community among Muslims (as similarly among Hindus), reinforced by actual movement and contacts, which complemented or transcended the syncretic regional elements. It is significant that Ahmadullah seems to have been consulted, for example, at a distance of almost one thousand miles about British interference with a Muharram procession of the butchers of Ambala (Punjab). The second point to be made from the evidence surrounding the Wahhabi case is thus that in a number of ways the beliefs and connections represented a level of common culture derived from systems of ideas to which peasants as well as princes were susceptible. Given the long tradition of free movement, especially by service elites and religious teachers, across the whole of the Muslim world, some sense of community was bound to exist wherever the religious leaders were not wholly isolated from the mainstream. Information and ideas passed accordingly. Persian texts and manuals circulated on a huge range of subjects. One work seized from the Indian Wahhabis was a history of Abdul Wahhab. The fall of Mecca to the Wahhabis in the early years of the nineteenth century, with its interruption of the hajj and of Arabian caravan trade, was reported in India and caused consternation just as the Sherif of Mecca’s revolt would do more than a century later. (In their sense of loss, Muslim elites were sensible not only of real Islamic reversals and disunity, but of the British view of Indian history that substantialized periods as ‘Muslim’ or ‘British’, despite the fact that social and political power was shared.) One core of the common culture was defined by religion. It is a truism to say that, while Hindus might be united through a sense of social process, Muslim identity rested ultimately upon belief. Thus in Bihar a Hindu might be located in society by, for example, marriage customs: the stages of negotia­ tion and ceremony were well differentiated terminologically, with each functionary, visit, significant meal, gift, jest, or ritual being distinguished by a specific word, and hence expected and standardized across areas. They were tied in too, symbolically, both to domestic functions within families and to agriculture—particularly through the mixing, division, touching, parching, and scattering of rice. To a large extent, such practices defined the Hindus and could be articulated or defended as an orthodoxy by way of extending a sense of Hindu solidarity, as in some Bengali literature, in cow protection movements, or age-of-consent controversies.8Muslims often followed similar 8 On marriage customs, see G.A. Grierson, Bihar Peasant Life, Calcutta, 1885, div. XII. I concede that (for example) emphasis upon the authority of doctrine or text was found only in certain Hindu sects, though increasingly and more in the mainstream during the nineteenth century; but suggest that many features of rural involvement and change among Muslims applied also, by different means, among Hindus.

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forms, but constantly (and not only in recent times) many experienced the contrary attraction of their own orthodoxy, a set of beliefs that eschewed such ceremony. As is well known, a Muslim is virtually identified in orthodox thinking by adherence to the tenets of Islam. Hence the importance of religious education (which in effect created the believer) and of actions which reflected belief. Religious debate mattered. Among the Indian Wahhabis, as always, it concerned rituals, and social and commercial behaviour. Here is a list of essentially doctrinal questions produced among the ‘conspirators’ in the 1860s: should people stand at the mention of Muhammad’s name; was it right, while at prayer to bow, lift up the head and hands, and say ‘amen’ out loud;9 was it proper to fast in remembrance of a saint or to keep the anniversary of a great man; was it permitted to eat food prepared by Hindus; should Muslim merchants stock skins bought from Hindu chamars, and should they sell at a profit what they had bought in the same shop and not removed to their own storehouses; did the Qur’an’s strictures against interest apply to the many traders who paid drafts at a discount? Above all, the influence of the movement, as of the Arabian Wahhabis, derived from a set of puritan precepts, from strict observance of the law of the Prophet, in particular by not attributing the attributes of God to any but God and by observing only those forms and practices observed under the Prophet and his successors. In India, these opinions were most prominent among members of the hanafi sects of Sunni Muslims in Bengal and the North-Western Provinces. Therefore, despite the variety of practice and beliefs reported among nineteenth-century Indian Muslims, all reformers operated in a context of established ideas—a notion of the believer, and then one of the umma or community of believers.10 Embodying these ideas were expectations and practices that assisted recruitment to a religious cause. First, of course, there was the mosque—Sikh interference with the call to prayer was one of Saiyid Ahmad’s main grievances, and a Hindu-Muslim riot over the same issue in Faizabad contributed to the unease that preceded the 1857 revolt.11 The 9 Variations in these practices distinguished Sunni sects; hanafis (see below) avoided the last two. 10 This is not an attempt to discuss the many doctrinal differences among intellectuals, the reaction to Sufi tradition, to Hindu customs, and so on. Information on these differences and their importance is provided in Hardy, Muslims. The point is to list some of the common denominators affecting almost all Muslims. 11 For the latter, see the ‘Narrative of Mainodin’, in C.T. Metcalfe, Two Native Narratives o f the Mutiny in Delhi, 1892; Delhi, 1974, pp. 32-7, which connects the incident to the annexation of Awadh. Avril Powell points out that the Faizabad mosque incident indicated worsening divisions between Shias and Sunnis, as did the factions in Lucknow before and indeed well after 1858. But the argument here is on elitepeasant linkages within factions that were jointly identified as ‘Muslim’, rather than

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authority of the Qur’an also disposed Muslims to accept that of the pir or religious leader; as well as that of the religious teacher and madrasa, the seminary and the fatw a (edict). The actual words of the leader of the faithful bore the weight of command. The central treatise of the Indian Wahhabis (available in Persian and Hindustani) was supposedly written at the dictation of Saiyid Ahmad. It named the individuals, including Maulvi Ahmadullah, to whom the mantle had been passed. It followed that the believers were also liable to be divided into sects by ideas and, for ideas, to proselytize. We have noted the bonding of disciples by a joining of hands; in Saiyid Ahmad’s case, because of the huge numbers involved, the same end was achieved apparently by the touching of his unrolled turban. This implied too that religion should be defended and advanced (looking to the future as well as to the past). Thus could be interpreted the concept of jihad itself, and the expectation of the Arabian Wahhabis of an Imam who would lead true believers to victory—the Bengali followers of Saiyid Ahmad believed he was this Imam, soon to reappear, and indeed the illiterates among them reportedly thought even that he was the Imam Mahdi who would appear before the last judgement. Similar was the z ak at, the tithe or meritorious donation—that is, a payment centrally collected and dispersed in a common religious cause. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim movements in India all showed a capacity to raise funds. The Indian Wahhabis were liberally provided with money, especially from the province of Bengal. Traders allegedly regarded it as a sacred duty to donate a percentage of their profits, while ‘those, who were too poor to give money daily, put aside a handful of grain, the proceeds of which were periodically collected by itinerant Maulvis and transmitted to Patna’. Further donations accompanied marriages, deaths, and other ceremonies. In short, to believe implied efforts to protect and spread belief. The message would change, but the means and the medium persisted. The common culture of religion was not the only experience of any Indian Muslim, but it was part of the experience of most. Nor did Hindus fail to be aware of ground similarly shared and peculiar to them. This much united the high and the low, the elites and the peasants. Of course peoples do not have only one point of reference in defining their identity. Linguistic, social, and economic differences also fragmented these ‘communities’ of religion, which were only partially combinations of interest. It is worth noting therefore that, allied to the religious notions in the Wahhabi movement as in others, were unified under a single Muslim identity. See also Juan Cole, Roots o f North Indian Shi’sm in Iran and Iraq , Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988, New Delhi 1991, to which Powell draws our attention for its dissection of Shi’i networks.

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elements of social criticism. Some support for the jihad was no doubt due to a belief that religion promoted social justice. An application of religious standards to the conduct of trade and moneylending was apparent in the Wahhabi questions already listed. The movement built too upon the Fara’izi outbreaks of the 1830s and 1840s in Bengal proper. Then Titu Mir, eventually killed in battle with the British, had encouraged ‘combinations’ of peasants to resist zamindari demands, while Hajji Shariat-Allah and his son Dudu Mir similarly linked puritan religious doctrines with social protest. Their followers, almost exclusively drawn from among the Muslim peasantry and poorer artisans or traders, claimed complete equality among themselves. In the same tradition, the author of one Wahhabi tract proclaiming the crucial importance of religious education and devotion congratulated himself on having at an early age escaped from relatives who wanted to ‘ensnare’ him ‘in the zemindary net’. What use, he asked, were ‘dirty buildings’, land, money, valuable shawls, and elephants to one ‘of contented mind’ who endeavoured to please God? ‘All the wealth of the world is but a carcase in the eyes of such a person.’ Such attitudes did not of course prevent attacks on those who possessed wealth; not; though they undoubtedly added to the attraction of Wahhabi doctrines among the peasants, did they ever exclude the impact of the broader religious questions that dominated in the preaching. The most significant point here may be the clear equation of ways rejected on religious grounds with the British and their system. This same Wahhabi boasted of his knowledge of British law, his expertise as a writer of court petitions, and the income he thus made, but he also lamented that by this profession he had ‘received great injury’ to his faith: ‘mere contact with the Mussulman employees of the Feeringee’ was not less fatal to him than poison. Zamindars and courts were seen almost equally as British inventions. In the Wahhabi view, Western materialism and self-styled rationality were ranged against Islam (as in comparable protest movements they were set against Hindu beliefs). In part, this reaction was no doubt learnt from the influence of those who experienced a practical threat from the British. The challenge to religious leaders was obvious. Perhaps, too, another grievance lying behind the involvement of commercial interests was the extent to which European enterprise was excluding indigenous traders from some of the lucrative and expanding sectors of the economy—in the growing administrative-cum-export towns such as Calcutta, or in trades such as that in exported indigo or opium, where Europeans dealt directly with village-level rather than regional or commercial intermediaries. Others again certainly felt the pressures that the British imposed on those who possessed property. The case of Ahmadullah himself illustrated (and played a small part in) that pressure. His estates and

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properties were ‘like those of all Mussulman joint families’, that is ‘tied up and intricately divided’. Yet ‘his’—Ahmadullah’s—property was forfeit by law after his trial. His separate interests had to be disentangled from those of his family, a matter requiring ‘considerable time and attention’. His fellow Muslims refused to bid for this property. They expressed, one suspects, not only sympathy with him as a leader suffering in an Islamic cause, but also a sense of affront at the attack upon joint property, indeed upon the nature and meaning of ownership itself. The Sadikpur house, like all such houses, offers a metaphor for the complexity of such possession. It was to be razed to the ground—to provide a marketplace, ironically enough. The house plan reveals the typical mixture of interests it provided for—with quarters for different families and sexes, for business, and for community affairs. Some social and religious institutions suffered a similar violence from a more general process of definition. In many of them—as in the Sadikpur house—private, family, and public property were not obviously distinct, or not as the British would have them. In this broader sense too, the secret codes of the Wahhabis seem to reflect their perceptions of the system and indeed of the struggle they were engaged in. One device was to write of criminal and revenue cases, meaning the military batdes won or lost. The metaphor was carried through not just with a plausible show of context, but in such circumstantial detail, with references to ‘agents and people of business hanging about the Court.. .preparing the missils’, and so on, as to show up (dare one say?) the psychological penetration of the British system and to equate the religious struggle with resistance to the British. The new milieu that was thus described was one with which many of these people were closely involved and upon which they depended, yet which they perceived as a threat. One letter said of a supposed court case, ‘The cost has been great: had money or labour been spared we should have been dispossessed’. This suggests rather more than a convenient means of concealing a discussion of military needs and dangers. Other codes (whose meaning is unclear) also seem to delineate the experience and common parlance of the Muslims. The letter just quoted (apparently written by Ahmadullah) mentioned ‘several marriages’ being completed, and suggested that payment of the four-anna kist (the quarterly land-revenue instalment) had ‘of course’ to be made first, before any money could be sent to distant relatives. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers an implicit contrast between the world of family and religion and that of state and Western law. The challenge of foreign rule was felt not just by the altm, the courtier and the soldier but—or so the jihad implies—among the peasantry as well. The experience of the peasants did not merely comprise received messages from

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the elites. Quite apart from any economic changes experienced in the countryside, the villages felt insecure from the ways in which the change of regime affected religious and social customs and beliefs. These were of course, as the Wahhabis showed, a major area in which any hostility felt at the upper levels could be transmitted through the society. But the perceptions of villagers too were being changed, even when they never saw a European—notably by new concepts of state and law, such as those encapsulated in the case of the Sadikpur house. The interference of the British consisted particularly in efforts to fix rural society according to British perceptions either of an ideal society or of the appropriate society in India. For example, all states dependent upon land revenue and fearing rebellion tried to encourage settled agriculture. But the British colonial state did so while also having little interest in private local trade (by the mid-nineteenth century, devoting its attention to exports in the hands of relatively few Europeans), having litde need of indigenous financial and trading connections to transfer its wealth across the country, having no interest in pilgrimage, and operating under the influence of myths about India’s past disorder and the anarchical character of its society. For all these reasons and others, it placed an even greater emphasis than its predecessors upon stability of settlement (as will be shown below). By contrast, Muslims (like Hindus also) had various strong traditions of mobility—in economic or military pursuits of course, but not least for religious purposes. It was said that Muslims were enjoined to respect those who left their villages to fight for God; campaigns were allegedly started in the hills in fulfilment of a text in the Qur’an. The British attack on these ideas was thus part of a much grander attempt to reorder Indian society. According to the British accounts, the Wahhabis interpreted the Qur’anic texts to mean that they should begin a holy war from beyond the frontier. Yet there was little in Saiyid Ahmad’s career, for example, to show that he appreciated this concept of the ‘frontier’. He began in the service of a celebrated pindari (freebooter), became a disciple of Shah Abdul Aziz (a leading scholar in Delhi), preached among the Pathans of Rampur (the Rohilla state), then across British India concentrating on Bengal (remaining some time in Patna). He launched his religious war against the ‘tribes of Sikhs’ from border regions of non-British Punjab beyond Peshawar, fled at one stage to Surat, and finally occupied Peshawar until the Pathans rebelled against his rule. Clearly physical states did not interest him nor dictate his concept of the ‘foreigner’; he sought an alliance of all Muslims in jihad against the ‘Kaffir Sikhs’. If he claimed territory, it was as an expression of the identity of the people, the religious community located there. By contrast, the British imposed clear definitions (frontiers) upon the land, and hence upon all the people it contained: regardless of identity, they were all ultimately to

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be subject to the one sovereignty. Thus during the trials of Ahmadullah (before the Sessions Judge in Patna, and on appeal to the High Court in Calcutta), there was controversy about whether he could be charged with ‘waging war’ in respect of acts occurring outside British territory, a charge on which he was acquitted on other grounds. It was admitted by the defence counsel that Ahmadullah was *a subject of the British Government’. It followed under British law that he therefore ‘owed an allegiance’ to that government; moreover, for a ‘public servant’ (another British legal concept), a duty to lay information about ‘sedition’ was implied by law independently of any oath of allegiance. Hence Ahmadullah was liable for offences against the Penal Code, such as aiding the ‘rebels’, whether or not the rebellion took place within British India—under a secular definition, rebellion was a breach of the allegiance a ‘subject’ owed. Here we come full circle, for these concepts, which underlay British rule and interference, could be ultimately religious. Already in the mid-nineteenth century they represent competing understandings of the ‘nation’. Hence future involvement in such struggles by religious communities, as of peasant communities, was foreshadowed at this early stage of British rule. The British too were already active in spreading the conflict into the realms of belief or identity, and into the countryside. It may be remembered that they objected because Wahhabis preached in ‘our’—that is, British—villages. Sovereignty was equated with ownership, and this possession extended to the people who occupied the land, and to the codes defining what was from them—these ‘quiet’ villagers—acceptable behaviour. After Ahmadullah’s conviction, T.E. Ravenshaw, the Magistrate of Patna, who was placed on special duty for the investigation and prosecution of the case, called in the witnesses (many of whom were later paid small sums for their trouble) and ‘carefully explained’ to them ‘the error they had committed’. He told them that ‘although the Government had made no possible wish or intention of interfering with the religious opinions of any portion of the community, yet the open preaching of sedition and any overt acts of hostility would not fail to be taken serious notice of, and I warned them to publish in their villages and among their sect the result of the late prosecution.’ He was confident that in future, convinced of their folly, they would not listen to the ‘designing Moulvies’. For all the disclaimers of non-interference, Ravenshaw was really telling his audience that the British did want to have control over their minds and to restrict their beliefs. The message Ravenshaw wanted heard in the villages was that certain religious ideas and actions were ‘seditious’ in a ‘subject’: for example, that the religious act of supporting jihad would render Muslims liable to prosecution, deportation, and possibly execution. The subtext (running like a refrain through the trial proceedings

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and related reports) was that fervent belief in religion was mere fanaticism, and thus a means whereby the simple and worthy villager was duped by a bigot who sought to use him—the same diagnosis which coloured some aspects of the British attitude to Brahmanism, and not very far from the secularist critique advanced in the twentieth century by Indian politicians such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who regarded religious politics as a medieval regression from the proper allegiance to national and class interest. Unremarkably and as a response, while in Patna Ahmadullah was being condemned and deported, Saiyid Ahmad Khan, not far away in Ghazipur, was perfecting his views on the reconciliation of Indian Muslims and British rule. Having published his interpretations of the 1857 uprisings, he was trying to raise funds for an AngloMuslim school and founding his Scientific Society.12 Yet the implicit antagonism between British ruler and Indian ‘subject’ was not so easily overcome. The British, who labelled the Muslims and divided them into ‘castes’, also recognized at this time that they placed a higher value upon their religious allegiance than upon the secular identity and ‘modern’ ideas being foisted upon them. Accordingly, their ‘untrustworthiness’ was established and it was expected that false evidence would be organized or a Muslim daroga ‘bought off* to prevent the early investigation of a ‘Muslim’ conspiracy. Thus challenges to religion paralleled those in political and economic life, and hence various ‘Muslim’ responses were identified and expressed. At the same time, however, British emphasis upon the ‘fanaticism’ of otherwise simple and passive peasants denied in them any rationality, much self-interest, or choice. The same argument denied a privileged status to religion in relation to power (an issue that aroused controversy in Europe as well). This contradiction between labels, choice, and rationality will be explored later, Similar assumptions ensured that what was known of the ad hoc, mixed character of gangs of dacoits (armed robbers) and their economic motivation, and their connections with powerful men—their rationale, in short—would be buried under a blanket of explanations about the ‘irrational’ determinism of caste, heredity, and traditional occupation. The lesson of the Wahhabis is that the existence between elites and peasants, and across the country, of intercommunication and a common culture implies a shared sense of conflict with or distancing from British concepts and politics, even among some of the people most closely associated with the new regime. Indeed, as peasants generally were not so directly involved, their position visa-vis the West may be taken to have been more unequivocal than that of the elites. A common picture of reactions to the West has been of more or less admiring elites—the English-knowing—who accepted, with reservations, large 12 See Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation, pp. 72-81.

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elem ents of imported culture, ethics, and knowledge, and then acted as intrrmcdiane* between the British rulers and the great mass of die population, which was littie affected by this aspect of foreign rule.-' The argument of this paper it that peasant consciousness was not fully insulated in this way. Peasants participated, for example, in the realm of belief and customs, in the changes experienced to greater and lesser degrees in other levels of the society.14 The attempt is to push back in time features that may have seemed to be confined to the last few decades of British rule.

n The point of this discussion is not of course to suggest that there is any peculiar significance in the reactions to British rule among the followers of Saiyid Ahmad Bareilly. On the contrary, it is their ordinariness which is stressed. Nor is it the intention to offer any particular explanations of Muslim unrest, which would have to centre on a wide range of specific changes and responses, including the British annexations, the development of the Indian army, and the 1857 revolt. These subjects are at once familiar and very large, and their implications are difficult to grasp. By contrast, the limited compass of the trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah casts its features into sharp relief. Its message is twofold. First, it may be necessary to revise—or perhaps rather to reintegrate—the chronology of the relationship between British rule and communalism. Secondly, in the history of communalism, attention should be paid to the conflicts between definitions of the nation—between those based on culture and religion, and those centred on the state, the territory, or the race—in more 13 This has been an argument of one school of thinking about Indian politics— ■ee Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National Congress 1880-1915 , Cambridge, 1973; C.A Bayly, The Local Roots o f Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880-1920, Oxford, 1975; and D.A. Washbrook, The Emergence o f Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency 1870-1920, Cambridge, 1976. It is also central to much of the intellectual history of Bengal during the nineteenth century; see for example Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions o f the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal, Delhi, 1988. 14 This extends rather than contradicts the arguments of Hardy, Muslims (pp. 5 8 9): (a) that the contemporary force of reformist movements should not be exaggerated (partly because they were so divided), and (b) that the main support for Saiyid Ahmad came from the ‘lower-middle’ classes—petty landholders, country-town mullahs, teachers, booksellers, small shopkeepers, minor officials, and skilled artisans. These are precisely the people identified as local leaders in the Wahhabi papers studied here, and certainly most of them, though participating in religious controversies, would not have done so at a very sophisticated level. The additional suggestions therefore are, in regard to (a), that religious community nonetheless existed, including the peasantry and, on (b), that partly because of this community, the ‘lowest’ as well as the intermediate levels of society were affected by the impact of British rule.

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concrete ways than those usually suggested in theoretical debates on national­ ism, communalism, and modernization.15 Such questions would take us beyond the confines of this essay, and here we need to concentrate on the second of the premises of such arguments—the opposite side to the nature of Muslim community just discussed, namely the character of British rule. Why should it have been a major influence when it was weak and distant and, to an extent or at times, trying not to interfere with Indian society? The case for impact may be argued on two grounds. The first we have already proposed: the degree of integration in the society it encountered. The second may be made from the busy-ness and shared characteristics of British administration. There is a larger and older literature arguing for British interference than that playing down its influence, and I have argued elsewhere that it was particularly significant that in the nineteenth century the British believed everything could be measured, placed, and then developed or improved.16 Operating as they did during a period of marked changes in European ideas on the function of the state and of nationality, the British in India engaged in a continual effort to push back the geographical, social, and (with reservations) moral frontiers of their rule, and thus to embrace more and more aspects of life as well as more territory. From the first, they surveyed lands, estates, and other sources of revenue (excise, monopolies, and so on); but they also surveyed rivers, minerals, production, customs, and manners. They sought certainties, and exactitude. Within limits of perceived self-interest, they also pursued improvements: rivers could be made to serve trade, minerals could be exploited, production could be increased and redirected, customs and manners could be bettered. This was truly a process of colonization. The protective impulse, which was powerful at times and increased with knowledge, was always subject to other, deeper urges—to use institutions, to project principles, to profit through the application of capital. Things ‘Indian’ were identified, preserved to a point, but annexed where possible to British uses and goals. In their discovery of India, the Europeans provided it with physical and cultural borders and peopled it with races, castes, and communities. Its history too they divided along the same lines, thus reinforcing and fixing the whole model in continuities over time. The effort was a distortion at several levels. It denied the cogency of the locality, the variety, the insider’s view—even today significant in a land of villages—in favour of the outsider’s broad sense of geographical and cultural 15 See Peter van der Veer, ‘Body and Gender in Hindu and Muslim Nationalist Discourse’, paper read at the Eleventh European Conference of Modem South Asian Studies, Amsterdam, July 1990; pp. 2-5 are particularly germane here. 16 Peter Robb, ‘Ideas and Agrarian History: Some Observations on the British and Nineteenth-Century Bihar’, Journal o f the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 1, 1990.

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unity. And conversely, it also ignored the overlap of belief and experience between the categories chosen. As will be seen, this is not to say that the history, the categories, and the unities were wholly imaginary; rather it is to insist that they did not exist in the definite, consistent forms supposed.17 Early examples of this distortion can be found during the eighteenth century in most European writing about India.18 The legal roots lie in the 1770s, at the very moment when the British took up their newly perceived need to understand in order to rule in Bengal. Warren Hastings considered first that there was a discoverable Hindu and Muslim personal law, for example, and then that it contained ‘no thing hurtful to the authority of the government’.19 Thus he implied that the East India Company’s non-interference—avowed since the seventeenth century—was only conditional and also that a ‘sympathetic’ gradualist administration would begin the definition and appropriation of those Indian laws as of Indian society itself. Though Hastings accepted that law had to be suited to the society to which it applied, he also encouraged the Europeans’ encounter with and definition of India on their own terms. (In this respect, the attitudes of his time foreshadowed those of the late nineteenth century.) Beginning under Hastings, attempts were made to codify the personal laws, which were interpreted by courts of record and precedent, subject to regulations and to rules of evidence. Ultimately they would themselves become objects of legislation, at first indirectly in the revenue regulations of the 1790s, and then more directly. Society was defined too, not least because the law required Muslims and Hindus to be distinguished, hence creating a problem in regard to Eurasians and Indian Christians and a pressure to overlook overlaps between communities. There was any number of consequential categorizations. The supposed order and lucidity of all this made 17 The chronology of religious orthodoxy and hence of unity in ‘community’ is discussed in Chapter 7. But see especially Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900, Cambridge, 1989, which makes important points about chronologies of conversion, about the appeal of ‘sacred energy’ (described as an autonomous local belief) rather than ‘Islamic’ egalitarianism, about the lack of dominance by ‘high’ religion, about the preference for orthopraxis over orthodoxy, and about the lack of a ‘dear and unambiguous process’ whereby boundaries between ‘communities’ were being hardened; yet even this agrees that ‘significant difference in identity did exist’. See especially pp. 41, 85-6, 94-6, 123, 459-63, and notably chapter 3 (on a south Indian form of Islam in a Hindu context). 18 See P.J. Marshall, The British Discovery o f Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1970, though oddly it does not remark that the concept of the ‘Hindu’, let alone ‘Hindu-ism’, is itself a prime instance. 19 Hastings to Mansfield, 21 March 1774, quoted in M.P. Jain, Outlines o f Indian Legal History, Bombay, 1966, p. 558; see also the MA dissertation of Martin Lau, Centre of South Asian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1989.

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it a ‘rationalist’ enterprise, and indeed later on it was expected to restore to the Indians the use of their reason: that is, in part, to convert them to a belief in laws framed independently of any mythological or devotional justifications. In its least malevolent version, there was thought to be—as H.T. Colebrooke described it to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1823— a duty upon the British to repay Asia’s early and great contributions to civilization by ‘returning... improved... that which was received in a ruder form’.20 One of its legacies was Indian secularism. If one considers the Selections from the Records o f the Bengal Government published in the 1850s and 1860s, revealing what contemporaries thought worthy of record, one gains the impression chiefly of many parallel endeavours to penetrate and control the Indian countryside. The prevailing British notion of rural India was that it was unruly, that even ‘Asiatic’ oppression evidenced the weakness of law and the lack of a proper order. Hence the general tendency was to seek knowledge and control in the rural areas, as in other aspects of life. Rivers that kept changing their courses and character were to be surveyed and held within bounds; ‘rude and uncivilized’ races of people were to be investigated and subdued. Then, in the face of roads and regular settlements of revenue, the wilderness would be replaced by a ‘rapid increase of cultiva­ tion’, which alone was deemed to have ‘value’. What happened at the social and geographical margins—in ‘uncivilized and jungly countries’, to the armed gangs of robbers called dacoits, or with regard to uncongenial beliefs and customs—represented no more than an exaggerated version of what the British were trying to do to the countryside in general. The Selections record that in the ‘jungle zamindars’ of Cuttack in Orissa— not unlike the ‘tribal’ uplands of Bihar—the first half of the nineteenth century saw a persistent encroachment on land and custom by the British. It might seem a little reluctant: schemes for more direct control were overruled or abandoned in 1814 and 1821, and a common sentiment endorsed even in the 1840s was that the government’s great error had been ‘too much precipitation in attempting to better the condition of the people, with hardly any knowledge of the means by which it is to be accomplished’. But the direction of British policy was inexorable. Even when local disputes were thought incompre­ hensible, being over ‘valueless jungle’, British officers sought to intervene to ensure peace and tranquillity. Knowledge was being gained—it was the ‘duty of every officer to furnish his successor with the fullest information possible’, an impulse already productive of district reports and foreshadowing the surveying and ethnographical work of later decades. Regulation followed, the 20 ‘A Discourse’, 15 March 1823, Transactions o f the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. I, pp. 17-23, Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays, London, 1837. See Chapter 1.

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standards applied according to British agenda—to prevent ‘crimes and outrages’, to restrain ‘gross cruelty’ (a military expedition was mounted to suppress sati), to extract local customs dues, to maintain landed property, if necessary by khas (state) management. Communication helped. Roads were supposedly the ‘greatest auxiliary of civilization and a most efficient instrument in putting down rebellion’. They were an exact physical equivalent of the openings into people’s minds provided by ‘education, the hand maiden of good Government’.21 Information was an instrument of change because it was far from neutral. The approach to dacoity was symptomatic. In the course of their attack on these armed bands, the British redefined not just crime but society. The evidence was overwhelming that the dacoits operated within the existing structures. Supposed histories traced in previous generations the recruitment of various groups by rajas and zamindars to serve as huntsmen or armed retainers. The same people who were known as dacoits or lathials were also employed as village watchmen or to help enforce collections of zamindari dues (and to exclude rivals) at the harvests or in markets. Alternatively, they served in the British-established police and courts. The gangs were no respecters of British innovations and Calcutta itself was said to ‘swarm with dacoits’. Zamindars also frequently participated in actual crimes by taking a large percentage of the plunder and harbouring the offenders. This testimony implies a world in which local power, surrounded by various levels of supporter, client, or dependant, took a purely local perspective on questions of robbery and crime. Agreements were struck between local police or landlords and the dacoits not to commit offences in their area; wealthy villagers would also pay to avoid attack. Then the dacoits would, it was said, travel long distances, sometimes across several districts, before beginning their depredations. Similar notions of appeasing, internalizing, or passing on evil have often been noticed in the literature on Indian villages. The British, by contrast, sought a single, unified rule and a definition of general public good. The society that this definition embraced was necessarily comprised of particular categories. Thus was the dacoit represented as being wholly outside the limits and norms—even in a social sense. Most important for this paper; one group, the Badyas, was described as claiming to be Muslim while worshipping the goddess Kali and joining in Hindu ceremonies. ‘In reality’, it was said, they had ‘no particular religion’—as if that which fell across two 21 See Selections, vol. Ill, Calcutta, 1851, ‘Papers on the Settlement of Cuttack and on the State of the Tributary Mehals’, especially A.J. Moffatt Mills, ‘Minute on the Tributary Mehals’, 1847. See also other Selections, reports on districts, river improvements, and so on.

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categories ceased to exist. The gangs were described too as ‘professional’ criminals, and the members, despite often being of heterogeneous origin, were readily supposed to have a hereditary disposition to crime. Among the Badyas, for example, there was ‘hardly a single man... not ready to commit dacoity’. Whole districts too were characterized as being prone to dacoity—yet its incidence (despite being presented as a victory for British policy) seems to have risen as a response to decisions to thus categorize local crime and violence, until slowly depressed (on the whole) by the prosecutions instituted. In most of Bihar proper for example, dacoity was allegedly rare and not carried out by professionals; but landlords and petty officials certainly presided over systems of coercion, often employing small armies of strongmen renowned for their ‘turbulence’. Later perceptions of zamindari oppression in Bihar may have owed something to this early failure to intervene. The peasants—if they may be so called22—were not immune to such influence. Major parts of the British effort were devoted to the definition and reinforcement of a ‘peasantry’. Land-revenue resumption proceedings and a general ordering of administration in the 1830s and 1840s represented a stage in the settling of the revenue-paying population, as had the Permanent Settlement of 1793, the sales laws, and other regulations. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the major enactments sought to regulate the nature of tenancy, adopting a model of peasant proprietorship under the guise of assisting the actual cultivator. The outcome was both compliance by Indians in new ideas and emphases, and conflicts in reaction against preconceptions that fitted poorly with the experience and expectations of the population. These are issues both of the body and of the mind—and hence the measures taken in the nineteenth century to subdue and annex troublesome or marginal groups and their ideas. If the rulers sought order, subjects, settled agriculture, and trade, these goals implied intellectual as well as economic and political changes. The new regime did not merely skate over the top of rural society. 22 The present paper does not accept the ‘autonomy’ of the peasant, nor many of the common definitions of what a peasant was, but insists nonetheless that he was one of the actors in the drama, and observable through British records. Such study has several possible methodologies and starting points. My own first attempt to overcome the problems was in Peter Robb, ‘Officials and Non-officials as Leaders in Popular Agitation. Shahabad 1917 and other “Conspiracies’”, in B.N. Pandey (ed.), Leadership in South Asia, Delhi, 1977. The work of Eric Stokes, especially The Peasant and the Raj, Cambridge, 1978, was of seminal importance to such studies. More recendy, the ‘subaltern’ school, which uses British sources inter alia while insisting on the ‘autonomy’ of the peasant, devoted several papers to discussing how colonial texts may be interpreted; see Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, vols I-IV, New Delhi, 1982-9, notably essays by Guha (vols II and VI), Gyanendra Pandey (III and VI), and Bernard S. Cohn (IV). See also Guha, Elementary Aspects o f Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Oxford, 1983.

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After British goals and assumptions, the second reason for impact, as said, was the degree of intercommunication within the society. This means, in particular, intermediaries of many kinds, as observed amongst the Indian Wahhabis. Obviously such brokers could filter information and deploy the resistance or indeed subservience they fostered, but neither the pax britannica nor the popular upheavals of the time can be wholly explained in terms of such leadership. Why did these intervening figures not merely provide a barrier to British influence? Part of the explanation may be illustrated by the following incident, even though it will seem at first sight to prove the impotence of the British. A dacoit in Burdwan was suspected of having had the protection of an important zamindar. As a result, the police could not apprehend him. The Commissioner for Dacoity was called in, and approached the zamindar’s servants, who denied knowledge of the dacoit. The Commissioner returned and confronted the zamindar himself with evidence that the wanted man had been in his employ. The zamindar expressed great concern and promised to deliver him to the authorities. He soon did so, but shortly afterwards the man escaped from the guard. The zamindar promised to help again with his recapture. Later, information was received that the dacoit was hiding on the zamindar’s estates, but the police were unable to trace him. Eventually he was discovered by accident in the house of one of the zamindar’s agents, who was himself later charged with harbouring him. This story is not after all one of a resilient local order untouched by the British, but of an order that was being re-formed in ways affecting people at several different social levels. It is of a zamindar having to put on a show of cooperation and having reluctantly to compromise, and as a result proving in the end unable to keep the implicit bargain that when necessary he would protect his employees and the dacoit himself from higher authority. More than this, the terms of such patronage were being re-thought. Powerful men were turning away from some existing controls and towards the manipulation of the new arrangements that the British were introducing, many of which discouraged or reduced the need for alternatives such as armed retainers. Secondly, from this zamindar’s compromise with the Commissioner to the frequent use of approvers’ confessions in the trials of miscreants, the British were coopting the existing structures for their own purposes, even working from the inside. This same zamindar, ironically, was the author of pamphlets decrying the insufficiency of the chaukidari and police systems, especially where they operated under Indian magistrates. Such shifts of ground were to have profound consequences for the life of the Indian peasantry, and such shifts cannot have been without influence in the realm of ideas and belief. Because authority was bound up with codes of behaviour and honour in the compact between ruler and ruled, between instruction and faith, enactment and myth,

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it was not possible to tamper with one side of the equation without disturbing the other.23 Finally, the impact of British rule was cumulative and accelerating. From the 1850s, with a fairly effective imposition of law and order, and the completion in outline of the administrative structures and major settlements of land revenue, the new regime was able to turn to the great enterprise of the middle period of colonial rule, the improvement of communications in the broadest sense. This too provided major points of contact with the people. For example, in the Ferry Fund Committees charged with the care of fords, bridges, and roads, all the usual features of British intrusion were displayed. It must be remembered that there was no question of the British initiating communications and trade through road building and maintenance. The Committee reports on Bihar, a ‘densely populated and highly cultivated’ region 23 The patterns of reported dacoity may have owed something to depressed agricultural conditions and to the disruptions of British rule, but they also reflect the activities of the Commission for the Suppression of Dacoity itself. In the 1840s and 1850s, it concentrated its efforts on the first six districts of the table below. The figures should not be regarded as substitutes for statistics on rural violence or crime generally. Reports o f Dacoity in Selected Districts o f Bengal (1. Burdwan 2. Baraset 3. Nadia 4. Hooghly 5. Howrah 6. 24-Parganas 7. Murshidabad 8. Patna 9. Behar 10. Shahabad 11. Saran 12. Champaran 13. Tirhut 14. Bhagalpur 15. Monghyr 16. Pumea.)

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. LI. L2. L3. L4. 15. L6.

20 4 4 15 0 2 0

19 3 7 27 0 6 0

35 53 16 19 8 29 30 63 15 16 7 8 0 0

73 11 35 97 21 13 0

67 11 31 63 33 13 0

70 7 43 68 23 14 0

o i

1841 - 4 2 - 4 3 -4 4 - 4 5 - 4 6 - 4 7 - 4 8 - 4 9

-5 1 -5 2 -5 3 -5 4 -5 5 -5 6 -5 7 -5 8 -5 9

82 105 109 137 16 38 43 37 86 114 125 67 93 78 114 119 28 26 24 33 20 12 12 14 0 0 0 0

80 48 75 13 40 11 0 5 3 1 1 0 1 10 6 0

67 23 71 95 27 7 0 0 8 0 0 12 0 12 6 4

62 10 41 61 9 2 0 2 10 1 1 0 0 13 4 10

27 3 23 33 5 5 0 4 15 5 0 3 0 6 3 4

12 5 8 41 3 3 65 10 7 4 3 3 1 9 8 9

19 20 5 1 15 15 30 27 3 2 0 2 50 29 0 0 0 50 0 29 4 1 0 2 1 1 0 0 0 0 8 11

13 5 9 5 2 5 25 1 33 22 7 1 9 17 38 18

See Selections, vol. XVTII, Calcutta, 1854, ‘Correspondence relating to the Suppression of Dacoity in Bengal’ Selections, vols XXXI and XXVI, Calcutta, 1857 and 1859, ‘Reports relating to the Suppression of Dacoity in Bengal’, 1855-6, 1856-7, and 1857-8. For an important discussion of these points see Sanjay Nigam, ‘A Social History of a Colonial Stereotype: The Criminal Tribes and Castes of Uttar Pradesh 1871-1930’, PhD dissertation, London University, 1987.

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densely hatched by paths, were filled with descriptions of ‘immense traffic’ (especially exports), roads of ‘special importance’ (including some ‘much frequented by pilgrims from all parts of India’), and long lists of economic products and ‘thriving’ markets. The last, with their emphasis on grain, oil seeds, spices, metal goods, saltpetre, and timber; were not suddenly brought into being by European enterprise. Therefore, the task facing the Ferry Funds was rather, once again, to become informed about and then to manage and try to improve what existed. And they shared the usual suspicion of any organization or movements (as among dacoits) independent of the state’s knowledge and control. The purpose of road building was much as it had been in Cuttack: to open up or divert communications for the military and police, to allow commercial development, and to involve the population at large (hitherto ‘apathetic’) in these enterprises. Despite the fact that in Patna Division in 1856 little hope was held out of cooperation from landholders, indigo planters, and the like ‘in the present state of ignorance, and estrangement and want of sympathy between the governors and the governed’, the districts in this division received most of the highest grants from government in the province, amounts supposedly allocated by ‘circumstances peculiar to each District’. The zamindars were intended to be enlisted not as individuals maintaining travel and trade in their areas of influence, but as participants in public institutions, receiving state funding but also just beginning to consider how to ensure public contributions. The consequences included amalgamation and standardization of different systems. Some committees prided themselves on gradually reducing seasonal and regional variation in the ease of com­ munications. Others expected their functions to extend progressively from main routes to crossroads and eventually zamindari roads, so that where carts, boats, and pack bullocks had once shared in a diverse provision, wheeled transport and no doubt more uniformly ‘professional’ transporters would come to prevail.24 In this work too, it mattered above all that British government needed regulation, certainly, and the incorporation of Indians. It was far from uniformly successful, but was repeatedly, even unconsciously under pressure to make the attempt. Another transport matter offers a lesson on this: Charles Lushington’s report on proceedings in the 1850s to secure land for railway construction. He found ‘huts, houses, bamboos and trees of every description mixed up together, without any boundaries to mark the division of the properties’ or any other clue as to ownership. In this confusing muddle, he 24 Selections, vol. XXIV, Calcutta, 1856, Correspondence relating to the Ferry Funds in the Lower Provinces, 1855.

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attempted of course to recognize ‘legal claims’ (in the absence of ‘legal’ records) and he applied categories as if they had consistent meanings. The term khudkasht raiyat, for example, he took to mean ‘resident cultivator’, though he admitted that for every family exclusively engaged in cultivation, he found others who sublet land or—with ‘a trifling capital’—hired boats, traded in wood, sold fruit, made bricks, and so on. These complexities had to be brushed aside. The railway was needed to open up the interior to the British; like the British, it needed to know who owned what in order to acquire it. Nonetheless, the complexities that Lushington discovered, along with many others before and after him, were real. Arguably, too, marginal people and areas had important functions for the society as a whole.25 What was the chief goal of the British efforts? It was to preserve a hierarchical rural world while creating as model subject, the villager tied to his cultivation. As they had tried to with the dacoits, the British wanted to turn ‘rebels’ into ‘peasants’ according to their notions of peasantry. Indeed the definition of Indians on occasion as rebels—or more broadly, the description of Indian society as unordered or wrongly ordered—was an important instrument for the recreation of the peasant as a settled, isolated, and docile producer. The paradox was that this ‘preservation’ had to be achieved through the penetration of the state and market (as also from the inroads of education). Opinions differed as to what had to be sacrificed in the process. One powerful strand of thought believed in the perfectability of the indigenous ways, while others regarded their continuance merely as a temporary expedient. All agreed that change had to be managed, and that order and control were essential. Again, the Bengal Selections offer examples of this thinking at work in the key area of agricultural expansion. The most celebrated examples are concerned with indigo, the subject of three volumes in 1860; but the very first volume of all (1851) had already set out the main aspects in connection with opium. The result of the hybrid agency of European traders, working through village-level intermediaries and a familiar advancepayments system, that was introduced was supposedly an expansion of trade and the ‘comparative rarity of agrarian crime’.26 The point is not that the British started afresh. But they tried to concentrate authority in themselves, equating changes with ‘civilization’, which was defined as a material and contractual order. Not only European interests were thus interjected into the countryside, but European definitions and expectations of progress. Local fiefs 25 Selections, vol. IV, Calcutta, 1851, ‘Report...on...taking the land and other property... for the railway’. 26 Selections, vol. I, Calcutta, 1851, W.C.B. Eatwell, ‘On the Poppy Cultivation and the Benares Opium Agency’, 1850. Compare Selections, vol. XIII, 1853, ‘Notes on the manufacture of salt... ’.

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of some flexibility, including repositories of indigenous goals and priorities, were being challenged by a bureaucratic reformist state imposing its own standards. Undoubtedly people noticed, even in villages. There were strong continuities, but also significant changes in the two most important aspects of rural life—religion and agriculture—involving the twin elements of locality and culture. A question that used to be asked was why there was not more unrest in the face of nineteenth-century changes? The answer is twofold. First, the continuity of structures (and their adaptation to or coopting by both the colonial state and expanding trade) preserved much of the social control built up in earlier times. Serious disorder usually followed the disaffection of these local elites. Secondly, of course, no informed person nowadays will believe that rural India was without protest and upheaval in this period. Reactions may be more noticeable in the twentieth century because of links with the nationalist movement or political parties, but at earlier times too disorder, protest, and litigation abounded. In the late nineteenth century, there were, for example, countless complaints against landlords for not fulfilling their obligations in regard to irrigation, and increasingly visible disputes over land use and rights or commutation of produce to cash rents. These provide further evidence of the penetration of colonial rule into the countryside. Partly, it allowed dissent in new modes and redirected earlier more violent confrontations into its own channels and arenas. But it did so against a backdrop that in Bihar was probably becoming darker as time went on. In the crime statistics, for example, the bulk of the most serious offences related either to domestic violence, including the deaths of young children, or to factional and agrarian disputes. They are suggestive of frustrations, poverty, and oppression within the experience of ordinary villages, some of it attributable by them to British rule. Not untypical (reported because of European involvement) was an incident in Saran: Some servants of Mr Macdonald, an Indigo Planter, attempted to plough some lands of which Mr Macdonald had taken a lease, but the right to the cultivation of which was contested by the ryots. The villagers attacked and slighdy wounded the Factory servants__

Some of the raiyats were gaoled for up to two years; a ‘recognizance’ was taken from the planter.27 27 The unrest considered here leaves out of account (except for the Indian Wahhabis) major outbreaks such as in 1857-8, which undoubtedly were influenced by the factors discussed here. But continual pressures imply steady responses as well as crises, and hence the more relevant evidence relates to less overt signs of unease, much of which would have reflected long-standing pressures, occurring also under pre-British states and within the existing social order—pressures that British rule continued and enhanced. See the Annual Report of the Police, Patna Division, 1861

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m From the case of Maulvi Ahmadullah and from these aspects of British impact, the conclusion is (as said earlier) of an early colonial influence upon communalism. It is based partly on the character of British rule, and partly on the nature and pre-existence of a Muslim ‘community’. Clearly it is true that British rule was not strong or pervasive in many of its features, that identities did change in form and content during colonial rule, and that separatism, for example, was created and not primordial. But these judgments are not sufficient as an account of what happened in nineteenth-century India. The crucial point is an apposition which existed between features of British government and characteristics of Indian society, particularly the operation of larger communities than have sometimes been recognized as existing in this period. The view is thus in accord with some recent analyses, but qualifies others which tell the story of British rule only in terms of various forms or distortions of modernization, and of changing behaviour, belief, and political identity. The basis for the conclusion is necessarily rather anecdotal, and it will be helpful therefore to conclude by setting out some of the ideas about community that lie behind it and distinguish it from more familiar accounts. Analogies might be made from these examples with other areas of life; they will not be pursued here. With regard to Muslim identity, the main explanations are wholly instrumentalist. A good example is offered by Bipan Chandra: communalism— that is, ‘belief that because a group of people follow a particular religion they have, as a result, common social, political and economic interests’—was (he asserts) ‘not a remnant of the past’ but a ‘modern ideology’ in India. It developed, he claims, from rhetorical misuse of history, from British policy, and from ‘modern politics’ (the displacement of upper by trading classes, and competi-tion among the middle classes): there was ‘hardly any religion in it’. As ‘modern politics’ are assumed to be secular, it follows from this that communalism is yet another of the diversions suffered in India from the smooth course of modernization. More detailed studies come to similar conclusions. (a fairly ‘normal’ year), from which it can be calculated that roughly 15 per cent of reported murders and crimes of violence were domestic, 15 per cent involved babies, 17 per cent resulted from factional feuds, and 33 per cent from agrarian disputes; 65 per cent of all offences were against property, mostly burglary, but also cattle steal­ ing, crop damaging, and attacks on children for their ornaments. Because of institu­ tional and recording differences, such figures cannot be used with confidence to show up trends. Totals were low too: villagers would deal with crimes themselves, fearful of arbitrary and rapacious local officials; lowly police officers too feared the scrutiny that accompanied serious cases, a high proportion of which led to transfers, suspen­ sions, or dismissals.

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Yet in all of these works, whatever their various merits as explanations of change, there is clearly an alternative agenda that is never put to the fore. All these accounts admit a history of identity, what Bipan Chandra calls ‘elements o f... past ideology and institutions and historical background’, a ‘pre-capitalist life’ in which religion played a large, ‘emotionalizing’ part.28 But even Sandria Freitag, who is very much concerned with the continuities of ‘community’ from ‘pre-modem’ to ‘modern’ times and wishes to shift attention from intellectual trends to actions in the popular arena, nonetheless concentrates on elements that evolved towards what she problematically describes as a ‘politicized’ identity.29 In short, the historiography is teleological—perhaps inevitably so, given the need to choose problems for research—but also, more seriously, is apparently unaware of the fact. In the 1970s, by contrast, Peter Hardy carried out pioneering work by re-examining and disaggregating the whole Muslim past in India, and making it an active constituent of the explanations of change. More recently, many writers have concentrated on explaining com-munalism without following this example and without seeing the need to define and account for pre-existing identities as closely as their supposedly separatist successors. The complex intermixture of past and present elements is admitted, but seldom made precise.30Just this point may be made too about the impact of economic changes, such as the commercialization of agriculture. As a result of such inattention, there is far less challenge than there might be to the Eurocentric view of progress, which paradoxically thus becomes, in the supposed distortions of the South Asian experience, a critique of colonialism. It is useful to compare these approaches with one in which the issue of separatism is not so particularly in the frame. In Nita Kumar’s Artisans o f Banaras, ‘popular culture’ is shown to have been inclusive of all the city’s 28 The concluding section in this paper augments the discussion in Chapter 7. See Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modem India, Delhi, 1984, pp. 1, 6, 165, 170, 243, and passim; his view depends upon a conceptual division between the secular and the religious. See also Metcalf, Deoband, which refers to a pre-existing ‘diversity of styles’, to reformations of Muslim belief throughout history that nonetheless have in common scripturalist reassertions of the reality of core beliefs (in God, the Prophet, the Qur’an), and to the error of seeing ‘modernity’ where participants would see ‘Islam’; on the other hand, it refers to reform movements spreading to include people of all classes (pp. 252-60 and passim). This is obviously a problem of how one constitutes the set ‘Muslims’. Contrast the concentration on elites and the role of doctrine (not necessarily only for the elites) in the controversy between Robinson and Brass; for a convenient short summary and references, see Paul R. Brass and Francis Robinson, The Indian National Congress and Indian Society, 1885-1985, Ideology, Social Structure and Political Dominance, Delhi, 1987, p. 55. See also note 17 above. 29 Freitag, Collective Action and Community. 30 See note 7 above.

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people but over time as becoming more differentiated by class and religion— with intercommunal participation declining, for example, as festivals grew. Part of this might possibly be a fallacy of reporting, of the ever-closer perspective. More interesting, the ‘lower’ and ‘backward’ classes are revealed as having a coherent worldview (as we ought to expect) and as displaying overlapping identities, which could sometimes be separated functionally or geographically, for example when occupation took precedence over caste or religion for work-related public activities, residence for cultural, and so on. Indeed, in a city in which Hindus and Muslims were totally interdependent, this externally perceived religious allegiance was often less significant as a basis of identity than other, more immediate elements.31 Such work as this raises significant questions about our understandings of identity, but it permits both localized groupings and their linkage with a wider world. Such a mixture is the key to the position taken in this essay. To materialist and instrumentalist explanations of human attitudes, there are replies that seek (as here and in Ballhatchet’s work) to reinstate religious sentiment and belief to a parity of importance with economic and political interests. There is interesting work too on ‘peasant consciousness’, that implies a different range of wider and continuing identities.32 But it will not do to essentialize the ‘autonomous peasant’ any more than the exclusive ‘Muslim’. All of these categories—the very notion of ‘Indian Muslim’—are challenged by evidence as to the complexity of people’s perceptions and behaviour, so that it is not enough merely to reassert the power of ideas and the persistence of collective identities over time. How then do we describe the wider identities and the linkages through the different levels of the society that maintained them? This is of course a fundamental problem in the study of societies, and can hardly be given adequate discussion in a short paper. The intention here has not been to enter ill-equipped into the anthropolo­ gists’ debates, but merely to suggest that a study exclusively of process is likely 31 Nita Kumar, The Artisans ofBanaras: Popular Culture and Identity 1880-1986 , Princeton, 1988. 32 For example, see Guha, Subaltern Studies, and Elementary Aspects; Mridula Mukherjee, ‘Peasant Resistance and Peasant Consciousness in Colonial India: “Subalterns” and Beyond’, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 and 15 October 1988; Gyan Prakash, ‘Reproducing Inequality: Spirit Cults and Labor Relations in Colonial Eastern India’, Modern Asian Studies, 20(2), 1986; Gyan Pandey, ‘Liberalism and the Study of Indian History: A Review of Writings of “Communalism”’, Economic and Political Weekly, 15 October 1988; and Majid H. Siddiqui, ‘History and Society in a Popular Rebellion: Mewat 1920-3’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28(3), 1986. Gyan Pandey wants to reinstate religion in the form of (peasant) consciousness, which seems rather to move than to solve the problem, while Mridula Mukherjee wants to restore complexity to the treatment of such categories. The present essay attempts to combine the two.

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to be as much in error as one devoted entirely to structures. The structures in part express the inheritance of past identities. In what does this past consist? Elements have already been described in regard to Muslims. More generally, it amounts to an acceptance and expectation of norms of behaviour and rela­ tions. Protests occur when these are overthrown, and in the absence of a new ideology, the protesters tend to call for the restoration of the status quo ante or of some forms deemed legitimate. This is why, as remarked on another occasion, it is as necessary to understand continuities as to examine change.33 The assertion of this paper is that, in such continuities, may be discerned parts of the basis of identity. First, then, there are the arguments for wider community. Of course identities are in a sense imaginary, and hence imagined and indeed con­ structed.34 In establishing communities of any size and duration, for example, the question of language is crucial. In religious as in other spheres, regionwide identities require standard regional languages to bridge the gaps between local dialects or specialist tongues (as for doctrine, law, literature, government, the army, or commerce). Writing and especially printing represent major escalations in the salience and communicability of such standard language forms. This does suggest an evolution in the shape and functions of community as different possibilities and perceptions arise. But this is not to say that, in any interesting sense, everything is merely a construct of the mind. In our interpretations, we do not have to focus on the creation of communities of a certain size or type, thus in effect choosing only between intellectual nihilists or totalitarians—on the one hand, the deconstruction of all in so many pale limitations of Derrida, and on the other the cul de sac of the single instrument, ultimately in the tradition of Marx. Important distinctions that are felt and have consequences are lost in a morass in their reducdonisms. Just as we cannot even use language unless we accept that there are after all categories that prevail over difference, so there are always social groups—perpetual, not 33 This was the central point of Robb, ‘Shahabad 1917’; similar points have often been made since, with the addition of ideas of avoidance as in J.C. Scott’s Weapons o f the Weak, New Haven, 1988, or by Michael Adas, ‘From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and South-east Asia’, Journal o f Peasant Studies, 13(2), 1986. Gyan Pandey’s accusation (see ‘Liberalism’) that my essay treated religion as ‘non-essential and epiphenomenal’ is true enough on the face of it, though it rests on a misunderstanding. The essay attempted to understand the role of leadership and of social and economic factors in a religious riot, where ‘the immediate cause was the cow’ and where religious sentiment was being used for social control and mobility; the intention was to contest certain interpretations of politics and nationalism (see notes 13 above and 41 below), and the religious aspects were taken for granted rather than denied. 34 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism, London, 1983.

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original—defined by shared perceptions and experience subjectively perceived. What makes such a group? In Chapter 7 when describing ‘objective harmonization’ as resting on the persistence of past actions and ideologies, I have in mind the reference made by Bourdieu to Leibniz’s clocks in grappling with this problem, and his question of why any two should chime together—the possible explanations are mutual influence, external agency, and intrinsic or systemic equivalence.35 This idea can be colonized so as to apply to a community such as that of the Muslims in India. (The term ‘community’ is not being used in any technical sense, implying a special or early kind of collective identity.) Certainly if community exists, it was and is in some senses created by agency—that is, from both transactions and leadership or authority. But that is not an end to the matter. Community is also the product of the influence of one member upon another, the effective or notional ties between them, and of what they have in common, in collective memory and shared experience. It is possible to reduce all this to mere instrumentalities, but to do so is to destroy the balance between elements that, though at times barely distinguishable, are nonetheless different in kind and effect. Contrary to this view are various ideas of long standing that, in India at least, there were no large and overarching communities—no ‘nations’—until the modem era. It is suggested, for example, that there was, and indeed is, no such thing as Hinduism. According to Robert Frykenberg, in so far as a ‘discrete complex’ of Brahmanical practice and belief has emerged, it is a ‘modem construction’ resulting from the nineteenth century when the British government first identified, then involved itself with, and finally withdrew from ‘Hinduism’, a process that created a new kind of ‘public consciousness’.36 It will be readily agreed that some such development occurred and also that there is no single ‘Hinduism’ today; that it is arguably less of a unity than Islam or even Christianity (given in both the extensive organization of belief under the authority of hierarchy or text), and the sense in which the boundaries of faith may be presumed to be co-extensive with those of all its constituent sects. Hinduism clearly overflows such constraints. But this is not to say that there were no corporate identities and no bodies of practice and belief that might reasonably have been grouped by an observer under the term ‘Hindu’. There were such identities, of course, including many in which states and 35 Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une theorie de la pratique, Paris, 1972, pp. 180-1 and 242-3, referring to Leibniz, ‘Second edaircissement du systeme de la communi­ cation des substances’, 1696, in Oeuvres Philosphiques, 1866, p. 548. 36 Robert Eric Frykenberg, ‘The Construction of “Hinduism” as a “Public” Reli­ gion: Looking Again at the Role of Company Raj in South India’, paper read at the Eleventh European Conference of Modem South Asian Studies, Amsterdam, July 1990.

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‘public’ sanctions of various kinds also played a part long before British rule. The question indeed is what went before. Before the nineteenth century, was there not (semantics aside) a recognizably Hindu identity—that is, common ground and mutual recognition that divided this one set of religious identities in India qualitatively from other sets? In fact, we need not go so far for the present argument; it is sufficient to establish some extra-local communities and linkages, the existence of which can hardly be disputed, whatever the uncertainties about their character.37 Nonetheless, it is worth considering the more fundamental question because of the extensive debates about ways in which Indian society may be said to be divided. Then, having established the possibilities, we face—as already said—the difficulty of relating larger with specific identities. The difficulty suggests that it is not useful to regard a society only as a structure except for purposes of analysis. Nor are states of being to be objectified as so many boxes with liminal conditions in between. By the token of overlapping identities, any society seems a range of processes, a dialogue with many contingent possibilities bom of environment, context, ideas, and history—possibilities in which the borders are broad and soft. This implies that no one determinant should be given precedence in defining those boundaries. Power, for example, is no more ‘real’ an influence than any other. It need not disaggregate the whole and render it again as discourse, so as to make fantastical any collectivity or sum of individual wills, as claimed by Foucault.38Nor are ethics and organizing principles logically prior to behaviour so that the individual can be seen only as a subdivision of the whole (which is rather the implication of the Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness*). How is the incompatibility of different levels of identity to be resolved? It may be noted that most theories imply a consistent rationality in choice—the 37 Except for this argument about Hinduism and other views on Indian division, it would not need repeating that there were continuities of cosmology, images, iconography, cults, and customs, and a continual influence of texts, laws, manuals, and political and social beliefs in India over millenia. The problems are that content may change without the form (as in understandings of texts), and that shared experiences do not themselves prove categories or a community. In seeking proof of such connections, at least one study has gone so far as to examine genetic information (compare notes 5 and 13 above)—S.H.M. Rizvi and Shibani Roy, Muslims: Biocultural Perspectives, Delhi, 1984; the claim is that the Muslim population in Lucknow was not distinct or homogenous, but Asna-Ashariyas and Sheikh-Surmis were ‘separate biological units’. 38 M. Foucault, Power Knowledge: Selected Writings and Other Writings 19727, edited by C. Gordon, Brighton, 1980, pp. 5 5 ,5 9 ,7 7 , and 122, claiming that power (the relations of which extend well beyond the state and contradict the idea of a ‘social body’) produces knowledge, which thus cannot be analysed in terms of ‘types of consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology’.

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maximization of utility, or at least some explicable limiting (actor such as uncertainty or competitive aims. But people and societies take random, contradictory, and irrational positions also. For societies and general cases, we have to remember the evolving fluidity of practice, and the continual renegotiations between individuals.39Alongside individual actors on the other hand, as in this Chapter we must place contextual and collective considerations. In some matters people do not choose at all, and in all cases their choices are limited by a range of objective or external factors—the limits to what they can conceive and to what they can achieve, that is, the restrictions from ideology and power. (Additional complexities are the role of symbolic rather than ‘market’ interactions, and the subversion of dominant modes of behaviour.)40 On this basis, we can elaborate three points. First, identity exists according to function and context in a variety of guises simultaneously—a person has many identities for different purposes and situations. It is such multiplicity that allows the coexistence of local allegiances, as in Nita Kumar’s Banaras, with the broader concepts of religion or class. Secondly, however, groups differ in kind and function in different societies or moments. What one society values, another may consider unimportant. Inevitably this affects the extent that, for example, religion is thought naturally to determine behaviour or allegiances, and indeed which of the aspects of life belong to the person and which are conducted in a general or public domain. Thirdly, it follows from this that not all kinds of grouping are conceivable in all societies. A case in point is the difficulty of establishing a full range of ‘class’ identities in nineteenth-century India, for all the evidence of self-consciousness among sections of peasants or those of low social status. In short (and when explaining such differences), we need to take into account a mix of current and past instrumentalities, shared and remembered experience, articulated and inchoate, or new and inherited attitudes and ideas. This applies, incidentally, to understanding British rule as much as identities in India. 39 This is contrary to the thrust of the work of Ranajit Guha in singling out the ‘elementary’ aspects of peasant movements (see note 22 above), and probably to that of Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, Delhi, 1986, though it is not dear what one is to make, for example, of tautologies such as i f the consciousness of the peasantry lay in the domain of unreason, it could never be understood in rational terms’ (p. 153). The particular point about renegotiation was reinforced for me by the work of Lloyd I. and Suzanne Hoeber Rudolph on Amar Singh’s diary, notably in a paper read by Suzanne Rudolph in Amsterdam (see note 2 above). 40 See Frederick Barth, Models o f Social Organisation, London, 1966, and generally the attack on structural-functionalist anthropology; this and the limits of the alternative transactional models are discussed in Bruce Kapferer (ed.), Transactions and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology o f Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, Philadelphia, 1976.

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Thus the suggestion of this essay is not at all that we should replace trans­ actions with structures, or instrumentalism with primordialism. It is that we need to rethink and re-establish the role of each. This is a position beyond— or rather before—the absolutism of single theories and the would-be pre­ dictions of social science. It differs from many present historiographical trends, which seem not to have taken this vital step, and as a result to have remained fixed in the patterns of earlier interpretations that they seek to reject. The ‘subaltemist’ view, for example, is in one way similar to that tradition of modernization theories that produced, for example, what many regard as the misreading in Judith Brown’s first book on Gandhi. She saw Gandhi and modern politics as reaching down into arenas where they had previously had no contacts, and hence India as two great layers politically. Just the same notion lay behind even earlier accounts of nationalism, which emphasized the rise of the middle classes, the role of education, and the importance of interpreters between colonial rule and the people. So too for the ‘subaltemists’, society is divided into two large forces (elite and subaltern, or traditional and modem, according to taste). The lower or earlier of these, in all the theories, is found largely in the countryside and is duly ‘penetrated’ by modernity, or in the argument of Ranajit Guha (whose metaphor this is) by nationalism and socialism. In this sense, the ‘autonomous’ subaltern is also, curiously enough, ‘politically latent’ (though active in his autonomy). Indeed, modernization alone seems to unify the contradictions between different versions of this doctrine.41 But both the process (modernization) and the twin, quasi-class structures seem to need further consideration. It is not that the descriptions should be thought wholly wrong. The ‘autonomous’ features at various levels of life, whether in politics, society, or the economy, are precisely what are being 41 See Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915-22 , London, 1972, and note 22 above. Elsewhere, I have remarked on the similarity between the ‘subaltern’ view and the village community myth, and on the odd myopia of the theory’s practitioners in the face of their own evidence of external leadership, linkages, and subaltern differentiation; Peter Robb, ‘Ideas’, and ‘New Directions in South Asian History’, South Asia Research, 7(2), 1987. Equivalent criticisms have also been made in Mukherjee, ‘Peasant Resistance’; note in particular the critique of Partha Chatterjee’s use of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ categories rather than ‘elite’ and ‘subaltern’, and the criticism of Sumit Sarkar for not recognizing the validity of different and possibly contradictory elements of peasant consciousness. Anderson, however, repeats the conventionalities on modernization in Imagined Communities, seeing nationalism as belonging to a period after the decline of religious community, religious modes of thought, and ‘dynastic realms’. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, chapter 5, seems also to accept (though the argument is far from unambiguous or obviously consistent) the equation of reason, progress, modernity, science, the city, industry, and nationalism on the one hand, and of passion, ignorance, tradition, fatalism, incomprehensibility, countryside, localism, and ‘community’ on the other.

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sought and claimed in this essay’s discussion of categories and identity, though they have not been found in discrete horizontal strata. What is misleading is to suggest that such features represent the only angle of vision or the whole of experience in any sphere and a complete explanation of any major event or development, or that they are ranged neatly along a single and inexorable or natural line of change over time. Thus, in the face of some instrumentalist explanations of communalism, it is necessary to reassert the prehistory of broad and overarching religious identities. But in the face of some of the advocates of ‘peasant consciousness', it is necessary to point, conversely, to the multiplicity and divisions that persist until the present. The grey boundaries between each domain, the linkages between them, and the structures that interpret them are at least as important as the elements of separation and autonomy. Properly conducted, history from below employs a whole range of perspectives rather than any kind of crude dichotomy.42 We have to replace totalitarian interpretations not with a feeble but with a strong relativism. Specificity is all. Though there are always many elements, they are never equal and never in the same balance. We have to try to discover what took precedence when and for whom. The endeavour is to identify the elements that persist over time, embodied (as already suggested) in what is usually a strong sense of the norm or the legitimate, and also—in India over a long period, but probably increasingly from the nineteenth century—of what was lawful. Such views will be challenged, as by British rule, and may be transformed by education or leadership, and also by objective, material changes such as in the economy or communications. The story is one of myriad influences bearing upon a multitude of attitudes, in which general characteristics and tendencies can be observed. The equal emphasis here upon process and transactions and upon structures and inheritance (tradition) suggests finally that linkages and intermediaries are of primary significance. This essay has tried to assess and demonstrate the nature of one important influence on community. The European rulers were thin on the ground, weak, and excluded from much of Indian society. They were nonetheless influential, and set up pressures in regard to religion. 42 Mukherjee (in ‘Peasant Resistance’) makes this point, referring to Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 227-8, and yet still adheres to a Marxist interpretation and expectation of revolution, and sees the nature of the state (the space left for protest and the effectiveness of coercive forces) as determining the violence or non-violence of protest movements. The claim is that, under British rule, there was less violence because there was room for non-violent protest and physical repression was effective, whereas in some princely states the reverse was true and violent protest prevailed. This sounds reasonable, but cannot be a complete explanation.

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The pre-existing society provides one key to this paradox. The important instruments for change—communication (education, print, roads), actual movements (pilgrimage, trade, and so on), and brokerage (various agents for the transmission of goods, services, and ideas)—were mostly facilitated by, but not exclusive to, British rule. Hence Indians reacted differently, out of established conditions and attitudes. The intermediary was important equally in transmitting tradition and innovation. The culture broker, for example, was not necessarily Janus­ faced, mediating between distinct cultures. It is misleading to disaggregate the social order mechanically into locality and wider world, with the broker as a link. On the contrary, there was both a continuum, with the broker embedded into the locality, and a fragmentation (discontinuities of polity, belief, and behaviour). We have to keep in mind simultaneously the elements of division and integration.43Within a society, the broker might help integrate, say, the adherents of one religion by passing around (not only up and down in a hierarchy) various messages about norms and rules—and infringements. His pivotal role and wider experience might give him authority in such matters, added to that of the collective but fluid memory of past practice. Quite another case is the connection between the British (or indeed the ‘modem’) and the Indian or the Islamic worlds. Here the intermediary might be not so much Janus-faced as two-headed. He did not necessarily translate from one currency to another but might operate in two simultaneously without trying to relate them at all. A Muslim official, for example, could—like Maulvi Ahmadullah—both serve his secular master (perhaps in the disguise of a ruler sanctioned by religion) and oppose British rule on religious grounds. He might communicate to the broader community no more than a focused but uninformed hostility. Therefore one need not begin by considering British influence on separatism only at the point of the acts of commission—the census categories, the separate electorates, and so on. The advent of British rule provoked reactions unwittingly—out of difference—which communicated itself to people in India, encouraging processes that hardened the outlines of community.

43 See the companion volume, Peasants, Political Economy, and Law, chapter 5.

7. Muslim Identity and Separatism in India* The Significance of M.A. Ansari

This essay also stresses the long-term origins o f differences on which the modem creation o f identities had to depend and which influenced the kinds o f identity that because prominent. It shows the importance o f colonial policy for Muslim separatism, but, with foresight given the date o f publication, also the continuing power o f religious ideas. It tries to understand such continuities with which contradictory colonial influences contested and mixed, and among which the identities o f the twentieth century developed.

I This paper arises out of dissatisfaction with wholly instrumentalist explana­ tions of Muslim separatism in India—views that have their critics, but which generally prevail nowadays, reinforced by no less an influence than that of Michel Foucault.1 The problem is the fundamental one of what constitutes a group, and in particular of whether or not there can be objective harmoniza­ tion—‘orchestration sans chef d’orchestre qui confere regularite’—within any set of people.2At an empirical level with regard to Indian Muslims, the debate has three main elements: what the nature of communalism was; how far Muslim separatism was a process; and whether its development was a sufficient explanation for the Partition of 1947. To the extent that Muslim becam e separatist, they obviously might have been diverted into other attitudes, and to that extent is it important to identify the events that encouraged and the errors that prevented that diversion. * First published in Bulletin o f the School o f Oriental and African Studies, LVI(l), 1991, pp. 104-25. 1 The influence is also that of Derrida, as from Writing and Difference or Positions (translated by A. Bass, London, 1978 and 1981), but is specifically from Foucault’s opposition between power and the ‘great fantasy of a social body constituted of the universality of wills’; Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by C. Gordon, Brighton, 1980, p. 55. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d ’une theorie de la pratique...Paris, 1972, p. 180.

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On this occasion, the discussion will begin as a discussion of A N ationalist Conscience, Mushirul Hasan’s study of M.A. Ansari,3 and then move on to some of the issues suggested by Ansari’s life and Hasan’s treatment of it. In its emphasis and viewpoint the book provides an important corrective to the tendency to attribute the Partition of India to a consistent and inevitable conflict between increasingly irreconcilable forces. The study extends and rounds out earlier works;4 it brings to life the alternative symbolized by Ansari and thus casts into relief the occasions when Hindu-Muslim agreement and a common front against the British seemed possible, as in 1919-22 and 1935. It exhibits the familiarity and maturity of understanding resulting from such an intense and long-term project of research. It is a timely contribution too, as intercommunal tensions once again mount in South Asia, and voices are heard suggesting that the secular constitution of India is inappropriate to the essential character of its people. Hasan’s implicit thesis is that separatism did indeed evolve with clear stages, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century; that its opponents were unable to arrest its advance; and that Ansari is significant for exemplifying these two points. Hasan thus illustrates an alternative to communalism offered during the struggles against British rule. It was an alter­ native that failed. The question is whether or not it could have succeeded. The story begins in a world of Islamic piety, which is contrasted with the ‘political’ world entered by Ansari. So too Indian Islam supposedly moved from religious to constitutional concerns, from worship to agitation. Ansari’s pan-Islamic interests and his tour of Turkey did not contradict his growing Indian nationalism in the period before World War I. Like Muzharul Haq, he claimed to be both an Indian and a Muslim.5 With the ‘Young Party’ of the United Provinces, he was—as James Meston put it in 1913—being drawn into a united nationalist camp. In 1920, Ansari doubted the efficacy of satyagraha but supported Gandhi as an agent of Hindu-Muslim unity. Thereafter, drawing away from many of his fellow Muslims, he sponsored a number of efforts to achieve that objective, culminating in the Nationalist Muslim Party that Hasan 3 A Nationalist Conscience: M.A. Ansari, the Congress and the Raj, New Delhi, 1987, pp. xvii and 277. Detailed references to this book will not be given; note that an appendix on pp. 137-44 reprints the National Pact of 1924 (mentioned below), with one page out of order. 4 On Nationalism and Communal Politics in India 1916-1928, Delhi, 1979, and Mohamed Ali: Ideology and Politics, Delhi, 1982; see also ‘In Search of Integration and Identity: Indian Muslims Since Independence’, Economic and Political Weekly (hereafter EPW), special number, November 1988. 5 See Government of India, Home Department, Political B Proceedings, nos 44-5, March 1913, National Archives of India, New Delhi. The point is discussed briefly in P.G. Robb, The Emergence o f British Policy towards Indian Politics, New Delhi, 1992, chapter iii.

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sees as a last chance for unity. In its most conciliatory and secular stand (in 1931), it described communal safeguards as a negation of a free and united India, and placed social justice before community interests. Ansari gave a great boost to these tendencies, especially as Congress President in 1927-8 and in his repeated service as one of the Congress general secretaries. At various times, his efforts were assisted by Hakim Ajmal Khan, Ali Imam, Deobandis such as Husain Ahmad Madani, and other allies from further afield (especially Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and a few Bengalis). Hasan shows that Ansari threw in his lot with the Congress because he disliked communalism, favoured ‘modernism’, and believed the state could be religiously neutral. His heyday coincided with many other attempts to head off communalism, attempts that ended in general failure despite some instances of success. Coming from various points of view, the efforts were designed to ensure that Indian politics would be secular, even class-based. Muslims of Ansari’s group went so far as to denounce separate electorates for Muslims. In doing so (one might argue), they were not only improving on the work of Motilal Nehru’s All Parties Conference of 1928, but also echoing the sentiments of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report to the effect that separate electorates militated against political progress and the establishment of a modem citizenry in India.6 Most Muslims disagreed with Ansari on this point: the ideological and religious divide among the intelligentsia was especially well illustrated in the late 1920s, in the aftermath of Ansari’s Congress presidency and the fate of the Nehru Report. According to Hasan’s account then, what occurred from the 1920s among Indian Muslims was a retreat from Indian nationalism and a quickening slide from communalism towards separatism. If we are to see Muslim separatism first and foremost as a rival to Indian nationalism, as a religious identity preferred to a secular one, then its success and Ansari’s failure might be attributed to changes in the political environment. Hasan only hints at this argument, but it is explicit in literature with which he is clearly familiar. Some of the changes made a search for followers more and more necessary. No longer were leaders accepted as ‘spokesman’ or ‘inter­ preters’ on the grounds of talent and influence; rather, they had to be leaders of men, backed by fund-raising, organization, votes, or agitation.7 Religious issues were undoubtedly used by politicians to generate support; a Muslim 6 Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, Parliamentary Papers, Cd. 9109 (1918), especially pp. 185-8. The Report’s paragraph headings on communal electorates are instructive, being as follows: ‘They are opposed to the teaching of history’, ‘They perpetuate class divisions’ (that is, reflect the ‘partisan’ and not the ‘citizen’), and ‘They stereotype existing relations’. 7 See for example Francis Robinson, ‘Professional Politicians in Muslim Politics 1911-23’, in B.N. Pandey (ed.), Leadership in South Asia, New Delhi, 1977.

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cause obviously delivered a Muslim constituency. Ansari was a special case in rejecting this path to popularity, but then he was a man cut off from his roots in the United Provinces by secularism and residence in Delhi. He had no following, in the way the Ali brothers had. He stood out not only against communalism, but against changes in the nature of politics and politicians. Generally, as Hasan shows, leaders in the 1920s moved away from espousing elite interests towards appealing to a corporate identity, using increasingly emotive and populist rhetoric to define and discipline their supporters. The government’s role clearly has to be considered too. Over a very long period, the British encouraged communal and persecuted class-based parties. But in Hasan’s book there is a Home Department memorandum from 1920, which made the rather interesting suggestion (traceable to an earlier report by H.C. Beadon, Commissioner of Delhi) that the British imported political agitation into northwest India (and hence among the Muslim elite?) when they transferred their capital to Delhi. Hasan does not take the point further but many such specific political decisions were obviously important to Muslims. Above all, they were affected differentially by the new constitutions being considered. For want of both imagination and nerve, the British introduced the forms that they already knew. They wooed peasants and landlords and princes, but produced lawyers’ reform bills. They sought Muslim support, but introduced ever-wider suffrage. Hasan criticizes Ansari once or twice for failing to grapple with the ‘socio­ economic roots of communalism’. Given that riots occurred between the economically deprived of different communities, it is not clear what this means. It might be argued instead that by concentrating on propaganda and conciliatory organizations in 1920, Ansari showed an awareness of the role of ideas, emotion, and leadership in channelling socio-economic grievances into communal violence. Riots and agitation did occur on ‘class’ issues, and Hasan remarks on how ‘Khilafat’, ‘swaraj’, and ‘Gandhi’ could all be symbols of the better world hoped for by the oppressed. But such concord tended to be quickly followed by communal divisions, sometimes in the course of a single outbreak or movement.8 The displacement of economic solidarity by Islamic sentiment paralleled the equation or replacement of socio-economic with nationalist goals.9 Indeed, the later contributed to the former, by reducing the 8 On such mid-riot changes, see Majid H. Siddiqui, ‘History and Society in a Popular Rebellion: Mewat 1920-33’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28(3), 1986, and Suranjan Das, ‘Towards an Understanding of Communal Violence in Twentieth Century Bengal’, EPW, 27 August 1989. 9 See Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy o f the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 192634: A Study in Imperfect Mobilisation, Delhi, 1978, and Sumit Sarkac, ‘The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, vol. HI, New Delhi, 1984.

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element of class loyalty in politics from a different direction. Moreover; similar changes brought into the ‘public’ arenas (those visible to the British and defined as ‘politics’) people whose interests were more strictly ‘religious’ but who thought they now had to mobilize and take a view on state policy—to build a university at Aligarh, to protect a mosque at Kanpur, or to protest peace terms with regard to Turkey. The ulama thus came into politics. In this case, Ansari was an instrument of change. One can see why religious men came to be involved in the politics of the street and the council as they had been in the politics of court, market, and land. Indeed, the idea that their involvement was new depends on a narrow definition of politics. But in considering the items described by Hasan and the position of Ansari, one must also ask why there had to be Muslim politicians as opposed to Muslims who were in politics. In Hasan’s version of events, as in Ansari’s life, this underlying issue is presented but not resolved. The intercommunal outbreaks of the 1920s emerge from nowhere or are blamed on ‘extremists’. As the latter is a stereotype of Muslims familiar from British records and indeed from the long history of Western observations upon Islam, it is hardly surprising that Hasan prefers the former. And though the usual explanations must also lie behind the account, these two possibilities—either a void or some Muslim identity—do seem to be the main explanations on offer. Hasan would have it, in effect, that Muslim separatism was created anew out of circumstances and propaganda. Writing of the Khilafat campaign, he disputes an alleged suggestion that Hindu-Muslim unity proved ephemeral because Muslims joined in the agitation only on religious grounds. Referring specifically to the alliance and subsequent disaffection between ulama and politicians, he suggests both that Muslims were not united politically ‘in the absence of a religious cause’, and that otherwise the political ‘utility’ of Islam was ‘limited’. This is a teasing paradox, and explains less of the situation in India than it reveals of the secular preferences of the writer. Another way of putting it would be to say that most Muslims were united in being drawn into politics only by a religious cause. The implications are very different—namely, that large numbers of Muslims were first drawn into anti-British agitation on religious (not nationalist or socio-economic) issues, and that this experience (a conflation of Islam with the nation for purposes of mobilization) lay behind separatist politics. There might indeed be ‘utility’ in banishing ‘religion’ altogether from ‘politics’. Ravinder Kumar hopes as much in his thoughtful preface to Hasan’s book. But it is not clear how the banishment can be achieved. Confusingly, Kumar proposes an assault on the virus of communalism and a refusal to be drawn into dialogue along religious lines. Ansari faced exactly the same dilemma. Hence he succumbed at times to arguments of a communal kind. His Indian

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National Pact of 1924, for example, though generally repudiated, still showed up fundamental differences between Hindus and Muslims with regard to the political rights of minorities. For Ansari, at this stage, separate representation continued to imply a principle to be extended; for Lajpat Rai, it was an expedient to be abandoned as soon as possible. Ansari’s ideas move on; but even so it is plain, if we adopt one of Ravinder Kumar’s yardsticks, that he was an agent of the very process he opposed. His career in seeking Muslim and Hindu unity under a Congress umbrella was almost entirely counterproductive because the notion of Islam as a political community, a distinct interest, was inevitably reinforced by any negotiations or compromise that counted on religion to identify a political minority. Ansari’s efforts contained a contradiction at their heart in that he sought a communal grouping of secular nationalists. He represented a Muslim point of view, making religion a badge of identity as surely political as that of the Congress socialists. Even the Muslim Nationalist Party contained this flaw: it was not secular in inspiration and did not merge indistinguishably into the Congress. Ansari thought he reconciled Islamic sentiment with lifelong Indian nationalism, but still he was a Muslim in politics. His groups called themselves ‘Muslim’, and put forward Muslim political interests. The reason was of course that they were addressing Muslims rather than Indians. The most telling point of Hasan’s book may be that even Ansari, the most ‘nationalist’ of men, was still a ‘nationalist Muslim’. It follows that while political and constitutional change accounts for many elements in Ansari’s failure, it is not the whole story. In Hasan’s account, while the ‘political’ Muslim is shown to have been created, the ‘religious’ Muslim is taken for granted, lost in—and only appropriate to—that world of Islamic piety from which Ansari and Muslim politics em erged. This leaves much unresolved.10 At the least, it leaves uncertain how Ansari should be judged, and even whether he was important. He was unable to turn many of the Indian Muslims away from a predominantly religious political identity. Did he make political errors against more skilful opponents, or was his task impossible? Were not religious politics being created among Muslims because religion already defined Ansari’s ‘own community’? One does not need to suggest—this essay does not—that communalism ‘happened’ only to Muslims or that they alone 10 Bipan Chandra similarly, in a valuable but extremely instrumentalist essay, leaves some tantalizing contradictions in his main argument: that communalism was not a popular movement except in riots, and that it had ‘hardly any religion in it’ though ‘communal consciousness’ existed and religion was ‘a large part of the life of a pre­ capitalist people’; Communalism in Modem India, Delhi, 1981. Such an approach was challenged by Gyan Pandey in a review article, ‘Liberalism and the Study of Indian History’, EPW, 15 October 1983, and an alternative was already on offer in Peter Hardy, The Muslims o f British India, Cambridge, 1972.

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were somehow ‘responsible’ for the Partition in order to ask in this way what was crucial in making a Muslim politician. It might have been changes of mind, as with the Ali brothers or Jinnah, or in the nature of politics. But in either case, one could attribute it to a need to consider the audience, and hence to the fact that the elite and the masses (now being wooed) were always interested in questions from an Islamic perspective. But then one has come up squarely against ‘identity’, or even ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ character; After all, religion was intensely political, and on many and various issues—jobs, language, education, the constitution—distinctively ‘Muslim’ views were enunciated in India throughout British rule and before it also. Muslim identity has been much studied, can only be touched upon here, and yet must be confronted in order, as it were, to interpret Ansari’s efforts and thus to answer the larger question of the relative importance of various causes of Muslim separatism. Any monolithic underpinnings of identity that were implicit for Ansari himself potentially contradicted his general political stance, as they do that of Hasan. The difficulty that is raised in this book is thus not its picture of Muslims divided, which fits well with such notions as the ‘imagined’ community;11 the very diversity suggests a potential for Ansari’s efforts, and helps rather than hinders the idea that separatism evolved. Rather, the difficulty is that which faces critics of Orientalism and even bedevils revisionist histories from below,12 that is to say: Are there any objective identities? The difficulty is with what C.A. Bayly has called the ‘pre-history’ of communalism,13 or with ascertaining, in effect, the origin and content of the category ‘Muslim’ in India. The very question may be considered inadmissable, and yet all analysis depends on a degree of ‘licensed essentialism’, that is, on generalization. More difficult still, we must confront in this case specifically some of the discredited British assumptions about India and Islam. These issues, the wider context of Muslim separatism and identity, will be considered in the remainder of this discussion.

II In the usual account, then, of the development of Muslim separatism in India, the reasonable assumption is that Muslims had a choice of political identity and chose in many cases to adopt one based on religion. As a result, a new, 11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism, London, 1983. 12 See not so much Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London, 1978, as Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, M odem Asian Studies, 20(3), 1986. See also Gyanendra Pandey, ‘The Colonial Construction of “Communalism’” , in Guha, Subaltern Studies, vol. VI, New Delhi, 1989. 13 C.A. Bayly, ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”? Religious Conflict in India 1700-1860’, Modem Asian Studies, 19(1), 1985.

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predominantly religious kind of politics was created, for which the rulers, the leaders, the people, or the times were responsible. And though the result was the opposite of that expected from modernization, yet the reaction to modernity was still very much among the causes of the development. Such reasoning assumes that a practical and conceptual divide between politics and religion was achievable in India, but was somehow thwarted during British rule—perhaps, paradoxically, because of the special reactions of ‘Muslims’ to the forces for change. In these terms, points raised by Ansari’s career can be reassessed in more detail. First, the views and strategies of Muslims may be briefly summarized.14 In the late nineteenth century, there was by and large an accommodation to ‘neutral’ British rule, which was deemed able to protect Muslim interests. The decision was marked by well-known fatwas, such as that of various north Indian maulvis in July 1870 to the effect that India was dar al-Islam because of the protection afforded by the British to religious observance. Yet many pressures were experienced during the period, not least from the changing character of the Muslims themselves, in their leadership, their attitudes to religion, their status, wealth, and education, and above all from their having to face the challenge of ‘modem’ knowledge. The reactions paralleled (with less composure) those to infidel rule. The Aligarh Movement represented a decision to make an accommodation, while the Urdu poetry of Altaf Husain Hali similarly coupled pride in the Muslim ‘nation’ with a suggestion that the first principle of Islam was openness to knowledge rather than strict adherence to law. In these uneasy socio-political and intellectual contexts, the Caliphate, Turkey, and the wider Muslim world seemed to offer the security of power and territory, and a satisfying brotherhood based on people and not land or sovereignty. Despite qualms such as those expressed by Saiyid Ahmad Khan, empire loyalty and pan-Islamism were thus complementary rather than incompatible. The strategy depended upon a definition of the nation as a community, and as such would have been intelligible, for example, to Saiyid Ahmad Bareilly. In majority areas, too, identification with co-religionists began 14 There is a large literature on these subjects. Particularly relevant to the present paper are David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India, Princeton, 1978; Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 1860-1900, Princeton, 1982; F.C.R. Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics o f the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860-1923, Cambridge, 1974; Rafiuddin Ahmed, Bengal Muslims, 1871-1906: A Quest for Identity, Delhi, 1981; Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, Delhi, 1982; and Hardy, Muslims. A useful bibliography will be found in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-lslamic Trends in Colonial India, 2nd edn, New Delhi, 1985.

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to give a spurious credibility to various claims put forward by burgeoning but aggrieved Muslim elites.1SElsewhere, better-placed Muslim minorities had to play the numbers game more circumspectly, but generally adopted a ‘grandee’ position, which also defined political interest in terms of religion. Saiyid Ahmad Khan in his attitude to the Indian National Congress, or the 1906 deputation that sought separate electorates from Minto, repudiated ‘democracy’ and claimed that the Muslims’ interests and importance gave a measure of their proper representation. During the early twentieth century, the compact with the British began to wear thin. The 1906 delegation, as much an expression of dissatisfaction as an attempt to reforge an alliance, was followed by two or three decades in which significant groups of Muslims negotiated with Hindus over joint national programmes. This was an elaboration of the search for security within India while enjoying the sway of Islamic power elsewhere. Both separate electorates and pacts with the Congress were designed to preserve the interests of the community. Indeed, elements of this approach continued into the 1940s and in the idea that a Muslim-majority state in one part of India would protect Muslim minorities and culture in other parts. After 1918, the British generally implied that the principle of selfgovernment had been conceded, and that its achievement waited chiefly upon the Indians’ ability to settle their differences. This view (or pretence) was reflected not only in the repeated constitutional discussions at ‘representative’ meetings, but also off stage in the activities among Indian politicians themselves. For Indian as well as British purposes, inter-party negotiations became the very stuff of politics. From 1916 to 1937, they may be said almost to have been more of a preoccupation among nationalists than the struggle against the British. There were brief repudiations of this effort, as during the Congress ministries after 1937 (a factor in Muslim indignation then), but business as usual resumed in the 1940s. Institutions too affect the manner in which power may be exercised:16 the electoral politics introduced after 1919 favoured the intelligentsia, but also ties of caste and community whereby constituencies could be mobilized. Muslim leaders, employing religion to secure credibility and support, demanded all the more fiercely that they be excused the rigours of demography and a wide franchise. The twin, growing prospects of adult suffrage and independence were a chronic political shock. However, the double crisis that initiated a change in Muslim strategies had already occurred with the Turkish 15 In addition to the references cited in the preceding note, see Mohammed Shah, ‘The Emergence of a Muslim “Middle Class” in Bengal: Attitudes and Rhetoric of Communalism’, PhD dissertation, London University, 1990.

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peace terms and the promise of Indian self-government in the MontaguChelmsford Reforms. The British then seemed unreliable and, for all the short­ term alliances and continued attempts at agreement, Congress goals became increasingly incompatible with the Muslim position (as distinct from the positions of Muslims). The confusion among Muslims from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s was a direct reaction to the unravelling of earlier tactics. Indeed, it was as if Muslim politics separated into constituent parts—into loyalist, pro-Congress, panIslamic, socialist, and regional components. The case was worsened by HinduMuslim riots, but also by aspects of the long expansion in definitions or expectations of the state. Jinnah’s ‘14 points’ of April 1929 made clear what was only implicit in Muslim demands for preferential treatment (to restore imbalance in education, employment, and representation), namely that state neutrality was not enough and that state support was demanded. Thus he repudiated the general and secular principles on which Motilal Nehru wanted to focus, and envisaged a state which prom oted religious interests. By contrast, the Nehru report declared: ‘There shall be no state religion... nor shall the state either directly or indirectly endow any religion__ M7 A little later Iqbal’s address to the Muslim League, rather before its time, provided an answer to the strategic dilemma of Muslim politics in his famous argument that a cultural identity required its own territorial and political base. This was hardly original, as it derived from ideas of nationality long familiar in Europe and already expressed in India over the partition and reunification of Bengal in 1905 and 1912, or more recently in the demand to separate Sind from Bombay. But Iqbal reinforced an association between the wish to preserve Islamic culture and language and areas of Muslim-majority population within India, and thus suggested an alternative source of Islamic power to replace the Indian Muslims’ devotion to Turkey.18 By now it was almost axiomatic to identify languages and culture as Islamic, and as shared by or belonging to all Indian Muslims.19 But (with the exception of some earlier remarks about the 16 See Anil Seal, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism in India’ and other essays in Modem Asian Studies, 7(3), 1973 {Locality, Province and Nation). 17 Jinnah’s memorandum of March 1929 referred to ‘adequate safeguards for the protection and promotion of Muslim education, languages, religion, personal law, and Muslim charitable institutions’. See C.H. Philips (ed.), The Evolution o f India and Pakistan 1858 to 1947: Select Documents, London, 1962, pp. 228-37. 18 Iqbal proposed a self-governing Muslim state in the north-west of India, arguing that ‘The life of Islam as a cultural force in this living country very largely depends on its centralization in a specified territory’; the relevant passages are reproduced in The Evolution o f India and Pakistan, p. 239. 19 ‘The Lingua Franca of India’, in Comrade, 22 July 1912, argued that Urdu was not ‘essentially’ Muslim but the ‘vernacular’ of Muslims, containing in its theological borrowings the ‘consolation’ of religion.

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advantages of the province of East Bengal) it was new to emphasize ‘Muslim’ territory within India. The next step, obviously, was the Lahore Resolution of 1940, in effect demanding Pakistan. The process ended with a transfer of political weight to Muslim-majority areas, where this strategy was more realistic. By the end, the strong tendency was to argue that not belief, but the acceptance of the need for a Muslim state actually defined a ‘true’ Muslim. Thus the core of this familiar outline is how Muslims could think of themselves communally as a people and hence adopt pan-Islamism or seek alliances and guarantees within India, or could think in terms of place and thus become separatists. The subtext is the extent to which such ideas were or became general among all Indian Muslims. The outline raises several points relevant to Ansari that can be further considered, in particular the role of secularism and of British attitudes. At one level, the Muslim strategies were by definition a struggle against the way of the future as it was imagined by English schooling, Anglo-Indian legislation, British observers, and Congress luminaries. Secular politics had been achieved in England over several hundreds of years. The ideal was part of a Eurocentric liberalism justifying the legal and administrative structures of the Raj. It was, of course, an error to think that significant ideas or sectors could be kept out of politics. Just as in England, social philosophy or merchants played a part, despite Namier’s findings, even in the eighteenth century,20 so too did religion and holy men in twentieth-century India. But the British tradition—if not always the British in India—envisaged India’s politics as necessarily progressing away from an old corruption (rather like the politics of the gentry and placemen that Namier would portray in England) and towards a new rationality in the framework of law and the expression of ‘legitimate’ socio-economic interest. And the same conceptual divide between religion and politics, that permitted the political philosophies of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in Europe, also engendered Indian socialists and reformers, and their accusations that Muslim separatism was merely a device to maintain the dominance of the elites (and their British allies) against progressive forces. The consequences were far-reaching, including Jawaharlal Nehru’s strictures on communalist politics in the late 1930s, and what he admitted to be a lack of religious imagination in the face of mounting evidence that religion and politics were not distinct in India, that at best they were ‘not yet’ distinct. 20 For a discussion of some of this literature, see J.V. Beckett’s introduction and other essays in Clyve Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age o f Party 1860-1750: Essays Presented to G eoffrey Holmes, London, 1987. See also, on ‘social cohesion’, Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance o f Revolution, Oxford, 1984.

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Would-be socialists and secular nationalists had to rely on the assumption that class politics—materialist identities for a materialist society—would appear rapidly and inexorably, and that future parties would be pluralistic in religion. When coupled with the existence of ‘Congress Muslims’, this belief helped shape Congress strategies, for example after 1937, when the victorious party in the United Provinces offered Khaliquzzaman and his colleagues, and then Muslims generally in the ‘mass-contacts’ campaign, a deal whereby they would merge themselves into the Congress. This may have been politically inept, but it was intellectually consistent from the viewpoint of secular nationalism. The Partition was accepted by secularists, but only because they realized that if Indian independence were to await the exclusion of religion from politics, then the delay would be long indeed. The Congress could hardly hold out alongside diehards who used Indian disunity to justify perpetuating British rule.21 On the other hand, Congress singlemindedness (and Partition) were encouraged by a belief that the end of British rule would itself help solve communal as well as socio-economic problems. Pardy this idea was a political device—so that Indians would bury their differences and unite in the struggle for independence—and partly it arose from a conviction that foreign rule had caused India’s difficulties. Thus Congress sought secularism not only because it was modern, but also because it was nationalist, and this too distracted attention from the autonomous growth of separatist sentiment. Of course a certain unity was achieved by such Congress policies (linking big businesses and peasants, the intelligentsia and the masses, and so on) and there were to be useful continuities in India as a result—in political ethos (such as government within the law), personal liberties, some civil service traditions, and the 21 See, for example, Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, London, 1936; New Delhi, 1962, chapters xix and lvi: ‘The real struggle to-day in India is not between Hindu culture and Muslim culture, but between these two and the conquering scientific culture of modern civilization’ (pp. 136-7). Also see S. Gopal (ed.), Selected Works o f Jawaharlal Nehru, vols 3, 6, 8, and 10, New Delhi, 1972-7: note in Tribune, 27 November 1933, that to ‘lay stress on communal problems rather than national ones... is obviously anti-national’; in the Bombay Chronicle, 11 December 1933, that ‘Today in India there is absolutely no cultural or racial difference between the Muslim and Hindu masses’; and in the Hindustan Times, 12 January 1937, that ‘The realities of today are poverty and hunger and unemployment and the conflict between British imperialism and Indian nationalism. How are these to be considered communally?’; and so on. It will be seen that in seeking a ‘modem’ anti-imperialism, he equated nationalism, social progress, and the Congress, while associating reactionaries, elitist self-interest, and the Muslim League. More importantly, perhaps, he interpreted culture and identity from a material point of view, and nationalism from a geographical one. He was pleased to admit that the was ‘totally unable to think along... communal lines’. Compare Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse}, Delhi, 1986, chapter v.

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exclusion of the military from the government. By contrast, a social revolution might have generated as many allies of the Raj as supporters of the Congress or the socialists.22 But this very success in mobilizing support helped identify the Congress’s professed ideals with the interests of an Indian majority. Secular politics would prove unattainable, for all the undoubted sincerity of a Westerneducated Indian such as Nehru, if they could not be embraced by those who saw themselves as a minority. If that were so, then any ‘nationalist’ Congress appeal was bound, as said, to drive out secular or class solidarities.23 Even Gandhi, though wholly antagonistic to a modernizing, secular Con­ gress ethos, did not undermine it partly because of its nationalist gloss. He had helped mobilize Muslims as Muslims during the Khilafat campaign; but equally in the 1940s, he doggedly insisted, in the interests of non communal politics, that a non-League Muslim must be included among Muslim representatives (or a Muslim among Congress delegates) in the various transitional bodies under discussion. Perhaps impolitic and fatal to chances of agreement, this too rested on a principle of fundamental importance to the kind of India that Congress leaders sought. Secularism as all-India nationalism thus found a hidden place in Gandhi’s thought, just as his religious and social tolerance paradoxically undermined his efforts against communalism. He was in many senses a nineteenth-century figure, more worried about sin than pain, a fact which showed in his attitude towards Islamic sentiment as well as in the support he offered to women in their ‘traditional’ role and character or with regard to the socio-religious rather than the economic disabilities of the Harijans. Meanwhile the political relevance of religion, though reinforced for 22 The nature of Congress support is one of the most active questions of current debates, with contributions ranging from those of Bipan Chandra and his colleagues, as in India’s Struggle for Independence, New Delhi, 1988, to those in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, vols I-VI, Delhi, 1982-9; see Mridula Mukherjee, ‘Peasant Resistance and Peasant Consciousness in Colonial India: “Subalterns” and Beyond’, EPW, 8 and 15 October 1988. On business support, contrast Aditya Mukherjee, ‘The Indian Capitalist Class’, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar (eds), Situating Indian History, Delhi, 1986, with Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931-39: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise o f the Congress Party, Cambridge, 1985. The tendency seems to be to think either that the alliance behind the Congress was wholly predictable (being among nationalists) and beneficial, or that it was self-interested on the part of elites (quite ready to back the British if necessary) and thus responsible for retarding an Indian social and political revolution from below. The truth may lie in between. Issues of continuity are raised (with some exaggeration) by Judith M. Brown, Modem India: The Origins o f an Asian Democracy, Oxford, 1985, and David C. Potter; India’s Political Administrators, 1919-1983, Oxford, 1986. 23 A modification of Herschmann’s concept of choices between ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ may be helpful here. Muslims who ‘voiced’ the collectivity of religion were more likely (but not bound) to ‘exit’ from other possible allegiances.

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Gandhi, was disproved for many Congressmen by his campaigns being at a remove from the nationalist struggle.24 And once again, with regard to secularism the character of British rule mattered too. But perhaps as much as the essentializing aspect of British perceptions so often remarked upon, it was British confusions that increased the likelihood of conflict between distinct groups. Enlightenment thought was expressed in universal terms, but also recognized the power of difference, being tempered both by an inherited sense of rank and by a forthcoming romanticism. All Europeans in India agreed that order comprised civilization and rationality; but the effort at categorization, whether of men, states, or plants, was an expres­ sion at once of unity and of hierarchy. Thus one finds a complex play of rival tendencies to include and exclude. For every Orientalist discovering IndoEuropean prehistories of language, there was an Evangelical bringing light into Indian barbarity. The Brahmanic laws too appeared to set a rule to which there was no alternative, but they may be supposed to have originated in a desire to standardize beliefs in a polyglot society, and not to have operated absolutely, in isolation from non-legal considerations. Meanwhile, the Muslim conquests specifically implied a conflict of jurisdictions, for example with regard to the 24 Gandhi too envisaged improvements—not from ‘modernization’, which he rejected, but from advances in society and human nature, and this led him to mount no more than a partial attack on, and indeed a qualified defence of, such institutions and beliefs as caste, the duty of women to men, and so on. In 1921, he claimed that untouchability made ‘swaraj impossible of attainment’, but also that ‘the spirit of kindness... is slowly but steadily gaining ground in the hearts of the masses’. Effectively, he called for tolerance (or personal ‘truth’) in place of social reform. See The Collected Works o f Mahatma Gandhi, passim ; the quotation is from vol. XIX, Ahmedabad, 1966, pp. 571-2. Thus in the 1920s and 1930s, his emphasis on spinning and the superior or softer moral qualities of women (for example, the view that ‘women are more suitable than men’ for work in khadi or temperance) may be seen to be directed at modifying the conduct of men and rather at perpetuating than at improving conditions for women. His emphasis on the Harijans similarly seemed to be addressed at caste Hindus rather than at the practical suffering of untouchables (which any caste attitudes clearly increased), for all Gandhi’s comments on equality of respect, bread labour and so on. A convenient presentation of these points—and evidence of their advocacy by Gandhians—is in R.K. Prabhu and U.R. Rao (ed.), The Mind o f Mahatma Gandhi, Ahmedabad, 1945; 3rd edn, 1967, pp. 107-11, 198-205, and 398-402. The above quotation on women is from a speech at Dandi, 13 April 1930, in N.R. Phatak, Source Material for a History o f the Freedom Movement in India, vol. Ill, part 3: Mahatma Gandhi, 1929-31, Bombay, 1969, p. 35. Similarly Gandhi’s many speeches and writings about Muslims often seem directed at Hindus rather than at the felt worries among Muslims. He supported their outrage over the Khilafat issue rather than expressing them as his own. Note his Congress Presidential Address at Belgaum in 1924, arguing that communal disturbances were fomented by interested persons, that communities could live together only as friends and not under the coercion of the state, and that swaraj depended on unity and social justice; ibid., vol. II, part 2 : 1922- 9, pp. 485-502.

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property of converts or the taxation of non-believers; any certainties of Islam were diluted, too, by internal heterodoxies and exchange with Indian cultures. In the conflict of codes, then, the British were accelerators rather than initiators. They disturbed India with doctrines of sovereignty, order, and the citizen-state; but at the same time, they generally pursued the expedient of indirect control through existing institutions—from family law to Bengal zamindars. Their system of courts and procedures sought a single, objective authority generalized through all levels of society, and yet admitted rules specific to social categories, albeit monitored by state and statute. They concentrated even more upon the imposition of hermetic concepts, for example of rights, castes, and gender; but helped define Indian reactions by adherence to contradictory interpretations and concepts of nationality which European experience and the encounter with Asia both reinforced. On citizenship (or subjecthood) and race in particular they gave out confused messages. They advocated the former to the extent of insisting upon undivided sovereignty, on citizenship by place of birth, on the notion of the ‘British’, and ultimately on ideas of representative government and liberty. They followed the latter to the extent of insisting upon the separate tribes and religions of India, recognizing this disunity in law and administration and justifying despotism as its political legacy. The same gap was marked by Hindu-Muslim conflict and the secular-religious divide. The ambiguities were compounded by the (still continuing) British preference for subjects over citizens. Perhaps because constitutional tradition (the sovereign parliament) gelled with essentialist notions of race, the rulers repeatedly argued, with communalists and against secular nationalists, that a divided India needed special political institutions. The idea was so often linked with others about slowing down advance or reserving power as to be wholly discredited by the 1920s, but its influence was nonetheless profound. It was apparent when Minto received the famous deputation of 1906, when representative opinion was sought between 1917 and 1919 or at the Round Table conferences, and when the Muslim League was effectively given a constitutional veto in 1940. A different but complementary animus against secular politics appeared too in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, the banning of socialist literature and parties, and the alliance of the state on the whole (as its economic interference increased) with property owners against labour and with businesses against trade unions. Most of all, the British regarded com­ munal organization as ‘natural’ in India, and class—along with nationalism— as artificial,25 and thus they justified the separatist veto. 25 This point is discussed in Robb, Emergence, chapter iii. The one ‘class’ the British might seem to have accepted was that of ‘untouchables’; but they were defined not in

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As far as the British were concerned—though the process neither started nor finished with them—the Muslim case was parallel to but more funda­ mental than many other recreations of interest groups, such as feudal princes, landlords, peasant proprietors, and even the badmash elements (the hooligans) of the bazaar. No doubt such British ideas also reinforced the separation of class and communal elements in riots and other expressions of grievance,26 but the potent mix was of ‘natural’ identities with the nation-as-state. It could not of itself ensure that communal parties flourished, but its influence was felt particularly upon the rhetoric and the organizing principles of political groups. Indeed the British portrayal, repeated obsessively by colonial British writers, constituted much of the provenance of persistent ideas about Muslim identity in India, however much they may nowadays be dismissed as ‘Orientalist’.27 Much of the confusion concerned the concept of race, which is notoriously ambiguous in origin and character. Naturally there is a long history of efforts at determining the relationship between race, religion, and the state. In Islam, one finds from the earliest times the concepts both of citizenship (where the state is defined by its subjects and its material base in territory and taxation) and of ‘race’ or community (commonness of characteristics and behaviour, the umma of believers and their adab, the authority of morality and culture).28 In practice, ‘race’ tends to overlap with or qualify citizenship, and all states face some degree of difficulty with these definitions. If the British were not really on the side of ‘modem’ politics (as Attlee called them),29 this was partly economic but in ‘caste’ or ‘non-caste’ terms as a community. For the foregoing, see also Peter Robb, ideas in Agrarian History: Some Observations on the British and Nineteenth-century Bihar’, Journal o f the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 1, 1990. 26 One need look no further than the various movements described in the early chapters of Hardy, Muslims; but see also Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence o f Communalism in North India, Berkeley, 1989, chapter ii. For insights into the complexity of communal identity, however, see Nita Kumar; The Artisans o f Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity 18801986, Princeton, 1988. 27 See note 12 above; and also Robb, ideas in Agrarian History’. 28 See Barbara Daly Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place o f Adab in South Asian Islam, Berkeley, 1984. See also K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation o f the Indian Ocean Region from the Rise o f Islam to 1750, Cambridge, 1990, chapters ii and iii; ideas from chapters i and viii-x on long-term change are also taken up briefly below—my thanks to the author for letting me read this before publication. On race, see also Claude Levi-Strauss, The View from Afar, translated by J. Neugroschel and P. Hoss, Oxford, 1985, preface and chapter i, and From Honey to Ashes, translated by J. and D. Weightman, New York, 1973, chapter xviii. 29 For example, Attlee’s speech of 4 June 1935, Parliamentary Debates, H.C., vol. 32, col. 1824-8, on the necessary role of the Congress in the creation of ‘modem

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of course as a result of their self-interest in Indian division or their fear of disorder, but also because they were themselves influenced by theories of race and nationality. The Muslim conversion to a nationalism of territory was one of the many consequences of the long pressure from British views on states, subjects, and sovereignty. But the eventually partition of India was also an attempt to reconcile logical opposites: to express the division of ‘race’ in territory—that is, to equate the state-of-citizens with the state-of-community. It is worth returning to the colonialist arguments because they hold the key to the assessment of Ansari’s dilemma. For present purposes, the main point was that history and culture had not produced ‘nations’ in India. Sir Alfred Lyall wrote: ‘In Asia there is no scope for examining the growth of institutions or the development of civil polity or the forming of nations; the famous men are all either able tyrants (in the Greek sense) or successful men of war; the type of civilization is uniform and stationary; the spirit of nationality, where it exists, is in its most elementary stage; the people of the great kingdoms known to history are an immense mixed multitude, broken up into tribal or religious groups, and united under one leadership by force or accident.’ Hence—and because (on the evidence of Bernier) there was also little compact between ruler and ruled and little respect for property or law on the part of the Mughals—British rule was made possible and acceptable in India, its theoretical character refined by a British critique of anciens regim es.30 More broadly, Valentine Chirol, in a book which became almost as indispensable in the 1920s and 1930s as Lyall’s had been before World War I, blamed an Indian ‘failure’ ever to achieve nationhood upon the divisiveness of caste, the personal rather than the territorial basis of law, and the persistence of the village community, now decayed—that is (relying on R.K. Mookerji), on the allegedly remarkable separation between state and society in ancient India. Chirol accepted that Islam offered a more unifying spirit, and that there were racial affinities between the Hindus and the bulk of Indian Muslims; but he explained Mughal decline in terms of the passive resistance offered to Muslim rule by a resilient Hinduism, a religious and social antagonism that was inflamed by the ‘fanaticism’ of Aurangzeb and fuelled by the impoverishment and suffering of the bulk of the people under an insouciant despotism. These differences stood in the way of an Indian nation.31 India and on political division along economic lines, this being ‘in the modem world the natural development’. 30 Sir Alfred Lyall, The Rise and Expansion o f the British Dominion in India, London, 1894, 5th edn, 1910; reprinted 1919, pp. 2 -3 and 41-7. The European dimension of views of India has been reasserted by Javed Majeed, as in his ‘Orientalism, Utilitarianism and British India’, read at SOAS on 7 June 1990. 31 Sir Valentine Chirol, India, London, 1925; 4th impression 1930, pp. 1-55.

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Reinforcing this view was the assertion that the plea for political advance in British India was confined to a small number of educated urban-dwellers. The myth of the Indian village played a special part, depending as it did on the supposed discontinuity between it and the town or the wider world. The ‘indirect influence of towns’ was found to be ‘practically imperceptible some twenty or thirty miles from even a large city’. And in those villages dwelt a uneducated, intelligent, contented population of agriculturists. In such circumstances, it was said, ‘a united India, with its various races, castes, and creeds, is impossible’; there is ‘no such thing as an Indian nation’. Thus British rule served the masses as well as the minorities. These cliches come from yet another commentator, S.J. Thomson, in 1913. The title of his book, The Silent India, was itself emblematic of British assumptions. Also typically, its general thesis was impervious to actual descriptions: the self-sufficient village contained a temple, a trader, and a ‘gentleman’s house’; the villagers went on annual pilgrimages and paid taxes; officials knew them well; and the state sought recruits from amongst them for the police and army, as earlier states had also.32 There was a selective myopia that saw only ‘modem’ connexions and transactions. The continued currency of such interpretations into the twentieth century is important, because there were definite repercussions from just the elements described. The unmistakable message was that India was no nation, was politically divided and weak, because her culture was so strong. Paradoxically, though they believed in a perennial Muslim nation, this was just the argument of the Muslim separatists and even of the Hindu chauvinists. Another publicist for such views was Reginald Craddock, Home Member of the Government of India under Hardinge and Chelmsford. In The Dilemma in India (1929), he raised questions of broad importance for Indian politics, claiming: ‘An Indian Nation, if such be possible, has to be created before it can exist. It never existed in the past, and it does not exist now. Do we flatter ourselves that we have created it? If so, it is sheer flattery. There is no word for “Indian” in an vernacular tongue; there is not even any word for “India”. Nor is there any reason why there should be an Indian Nation. The only bond or union among the races to be found there is that they have for the last century and a half been governed in common by a Foreign Power.’ By this account, ‘Indian’ was the same kind of misnomer applied by the English as the term ‘European’ when applied to the English (as it was in India). According to Craddock, India was merely, like Europe, a subcontinent within the vast single continent of Europe and Asia, whose peoples had ‘roamed over the whole’ in prehistoric times. Down the centuries, nationalities had become localized until Europe and India, 32 S.J. Thomson, The Silent India: Being Tales and Sketches o f the M asses, Edinburgh and London, 1913, pp. v-viii and 1-34.

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for example, each contained well over twenty separate countries, divided by race and language. India looked like one country only if seen from the outside, from ignorance or distance. Craddock went on to assert that ‘the principle which underlies the difficulty of the democratic union of divergent races is surely plain. Race divisions differ from all other class distinctions. When political parties consist of different racial entities, one race will dominate the other in a democratic combination by reason of its numerical superiority.’ By this argument, religious differences should have been more tractable; but ‘in India the differences of religion are accentuated and exacerbated, because they are also in considerable degree differences of race...there is absolutely no parallel elsewhere to the basic antagonism that divides Hindus and Mahommedans’—a feeling then being enhanced (he said) by economic and political jealousies. Both the argument and its extension to religion, it may be noticed, also arise out of the doctrine of the sovereign parliament and its adversarial practices. They would not have followed so obviously from a constitution based on republican citizenship and consensus or compromise. As Craddock would have nothing to do with such generalizations as ‘European’ and also rejected any consideration of skin colour as a basis for analysis, it is plain that by ‘race’ he meant ‘national identity’. Such was the basis of his prejudice in the matter. It is a rhetorical device of great emotional power and practical consequences, as the evolving history of Europe and South Asia shows to this day. Judging from his account, Craddock did not think through the question of how far the Indo-European ‘nations’ had branched off from common forefathers, and how far they were continuing historical entities that had migrated over the regions before becoming settled in one place. His misleading conflation of ‘race’ with ‘nation’ or ‘country’ was intended to duck the issue. The term ‘race’ suggests something that is a given, while avoiding any consideration of the original mechanism for separating out, say, the English from the French, or the Bengalis from the Punjabis. It is interesting in this context that Craddock writes of the nation of England and not Britain. But obviously race for a people as a whole over time is by no means inviolate, unchanging, or unambiguous; even if it were, no ‘nation’ is in reality composed of a single, exclusive race on any objective criteria of ethnicity. Even in England, the identity of the nation and indeed the characterization of the ‘race’ were clearly products of history—some of it recent and all of it continuing—and hence of institutions, ideas, and memories. Like all categories, those of race result, in short, from choices and generalization. Just as we always have the question of what made or makes the ‘English’ a race, we can ask how far such prerequisites or components exist among ‘Indians’.33 33 Sir Reginald Craddock, Tbe Dilemma in India, London, 1929, pp. 1-17 and passim. These ideas were predictable for many reasons: the experience of Italian and

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It is presumably unnecessary to belabour the obvious connection between these conclusions and the ideas of Muslim community that influenced both British policy and Indian attitudes. If a quasi-ethnicity underlay Muslim politics, it thrived partly because the intellectual climate favoured it. Saiyid Ahmad Khan exactly anticipated Craddock when he wrote (in the Pioneer of 22 September 1893) that his study of J.S. Mill convinced him that representative government could only be applied where there was ‘a tangible homogeneity... in ... race, religion, social manners, customs, economic conditions, and political traditions of history’. This attitude is familiar as one explanation for the deepening of separatism among Muslim politicians. It is worth recording the extent to which it was commonplace. And yet the unanimous rejection of such stereotypes by more recent writers leaves us in an anomalous position, the very one already described in Hasan’s treatment of the life of Ansari. If communalism had to be created and Muslim separatism developed, then our assumptions about the original condition of Muslims in India may be startlingly close to the old saws about lack of ‘nationality’ in Asia. With any primordialist theory, on the other hand, we will seem to be endorsing another aspect of the same discredited ‘essentialism’. Either way, we need to face up to what it was that contemporary observers saw. Surely, for all the absurdities of the analysis, Saiyid Ahmad Khan and Craddock were right to diagnose fundamental differences between ‘Muslims’ and ‘Hindus’ as the basis (not the cause) of political discord. Today, we reject the expectation that all individuals in a group will conform, but not (in defiance of common sense) the very existence of norms short of a common humanity. Just as we readily find that diet—what the body takes in—may produce patterns of health and disease in particular populations, so we may agree that ideas and behaviour can be influenced for ‘nations’ as a German unification or Greek, Irish, and Slav nationalism; the claims of social equity by the later nineteenth century, often thought achievable through collective restrictions on self-interest and not through Utilitarian individualism or the beneficent selfishness of the market—that is, through ‘community’, which raised anew the role of state intcrfcrcnce and the relationship between state and people; and hence of course in a range of nineteenth-century thought repeatedly discussed, not least in India. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay noted, for example, that J.S. Mill disagreed with Comte on community and nationalism (see Tapan Raychaudhuri, E urope Reconsidered Perceptions o f the West in Nineteenth-century Bengal, Delhi, 1988, especially pp. 84-5, 132-55, and 168-71). It would be rewarding to know still more of the dialogue between Western and Indian ideas on these and other matters, which produced the kinds of view represented by Craddock. Moreover; the debate continues. For an argument in favour of having a state divorced from ethnicity, by arising out of civil society, not ordering it, see D.L. Sheth, ‘State, Nation and Ethnicity’, EPW , 25 March 1989.

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whole by what the mind consumes. Thus people form distinct subsets through experience, language, and attitudes, and certain characteristics are associated with particular cultures or times. With regard to Indian Muslims, we have from British observers, amidst prejudice, considerable evidence of common identity, and from many recorded acts too clear confirmation that Muslims cared for religion. The portrait should not be dismissed merely because Europeans have tended to describe such fervour as peculiarly Islamic, or as illustrating irrationality and inferiority. Even the assertion that Muslims were ‘fanatical’, once shorn of this derogatory term, is a proper subject of investigation—it is not ‘reductionist’ to say so. Hence, though separatism was a process—the feeling became better organized and more widespread—there is room for a qualified version of the ‘two nations’ theory. One has to ask whether economic and religious interests had an equal chance of political viability among Muslims in India. The choice that had to be made in the twentieth century was about which kinds of category would expand in function and become, as ultimately the idea of community can, an idea of the nation. The British encouraged redefinitions; they encouraged the question: is a nation a place or a people? And if it is a people, how was it determined—by race, by religion, by culture, by residence, by polity? In this case, it was eventually defined at one level as Pakistan; by border commissions, significantly enough. Its supposed basis in race and self-determination inevitably delivered Jinnah a truncated territory. But questions remained: Was Pakistan the nation of the people within its borders or of the South Asian Muslims? Had the quarrels been about power, producing a state for Muslims, or about religion, producing a Muslim state? Similar confusions exist elsewhere, for example over the status of the Republic of Ireland, of Roman Catholicism, and of the peoples of the North. What exactly is the Irish nation? Such questions were not quite answered for Pakistan even by the secession of Bangladesh, which still left unclear whether the definition of a new state either required or prevented demands that the place be Islamic too. Were its laws to cover all it contained, not only the Muslims and not only—if one admitted such a finite category—matters of religion? Again in modern times, there can be many different notions of state, citizenship, and jurisdiction. There is historical precedent for attitudes towards the South Asian diaspora, for example. The issues are as old as the citizenship of Rome or as Islam itself; the manifestations as diverse as Palmerston’s gunboats or Lord Hardinge’s protest over the treatment of Indians in South Africa. They help explain, for example, the extraterritorial claims of India in respect of Indians (or Hindus?) who are nationals of other countries, claims that offer another interesting conflation of national with ethnic identity with

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regard to the meaning of ‘Indian’ today. The identification of the nation with the territorial state is to that extent not yet complete. In emotional terms, it is not complete yet even in Britain; it comes nearer in the United States, with the emphasis in its laws of nationality on the place of birth. What, similarly, is the standing of Pakistan towards Indian Muslims? For India, the question was hardly closed by the incorporation of the Hindu-majority state of Hyderabad, given the existence of India’s huge Muslim population and control over Muslim-majority Kashmir. A taxing confusion over the nature of the Indian state and identity remains in the continued claims for territory on the part of identified communities, whether in the reorganization of the states of the union or in such disputes as those over Sikh-majority Punjab. Like its close relation self-determination, the territoriality of community (distinct from the lands of families or the place of Hindus) is relatively new in South Asia as a predominant idea. Repercussions of the change are still being felt. The founders of modem India did not try to tackle the issue; they accepted the nationality of place and tried to make it blind to religion. This made the union vulnerable when place and religion (or culture) coincided.

in The redefinition of community during the movements for the Partition of India thus represented first a politicization of religious allegiance, and secondly an incomplete association of that group with a territory. But the process in no way disproved the prior existence of a broader religious community. What happened was a widening of that community, though never to the extent of encompassing all South Asian Muslims in a single, uniform category. By ‘community’, we understand a sense of identity based on common belief and practices rather than on affinity or kinship, notional and real; but we recognize that in practice the identity was held to approximate to that of race. The identity ‘Muslim’ became more and more exclusive, making difficult any alliances on the basis of, say, occupation—as among officials, landlords, merchants, or ‘peasants’—and thereby also tending to unite Muslims as an effective political interest. And the unfolding of Muslim separatism did not comprise the mere appearance of polarities, but their acceptance for a time as the overriding political allegiance for a majority among Muslims. It is easy to explain this as a growing orthodoxy and association on the basis of worship, preaching, teaching, and other communication amidst the major changes experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But was the development of Muslim separatism m erely a matter of propaganda and popular mobilization, an extension of the religio-political concerns of elites who remained locked into an Islamic worldview? The argument of this essay is that it was not. Rhetoric and mobilization matter, but they must rest upon

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shared experience.34Any popular appeal succeeds as a dialogue between leader­ ship and the mass. Of course there are elements of education and influence from top to bottom, but they cannot build except from areas of common ground. Thus it is (for all the known divisions of Muslims by language, class, and distance) that importance must be accorded also to social and political linkages, aspects of shared culture, and British impact even in the earlier nineteenth century. Muslim communalism was sometimes thwarted, its demands and hold developed, but it rested on an old sense of identity formed in comparison with Hindus and honed further even in the very early stages of British rule. What are the consequences of this argument? First, it undermines modernization theories. The difficulty with them is not that changes in ideas, political systems, communications, or production did not have their effect, but that linear progress on the model of European history does not necessarily occur. Rather the ideational space that people occupy is defined by physical, cultural, political, and economic boundaries. It is possible to draw in ‘regions’ according to agricultural staples, modes of production, periods of time, parameters of thought, and so on, implying that there may be many modes of change. In the case of India, one might consider developments based on an ancient diversification of agriculture and the experience of market forces alongside subsistence goals, or the interdependence and gradual convergence between settled people and nomads (tribals, pastoralists, dacoits)—in both cases, operating within the constraints of cultures, polities, and economic systems. O f course, as borders change, so do the configuration and content of identities: steamships, printing presses and empires transform the physical and political barriers which determine the units into which it is possible for people to divide. In the same way within the realm of ideas, Tapan Raychaudhuri, writing of Bengali reactions to Western influence, adopted the useful notion of possible or acceptable intellectual positions being affected by the extremes (the limits of what it is possible to conceive), as for example when the middle ground of Hindu sensibility was moved by a Hindu chauvinism that traced all ‘Western’ knowledge and technology to ‘Hindu’ origins— moved, that is, even for those who regarded such claims as ridiculous.35 But (as this example also illustrates) such influences do not ensure that change must occur in a particular direction. The distinctions that have to be made are between inherent, articulated, and imposed categories. The 34 For this reason, Ansari’s case parallels the point made by Hardy that the Muslim League and the Jamiat al-Ulama-i-Hind, though divided over Pakistan, were equally pro-Muslim (Muslims, pp. 239-55). 35 Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, pp. 1-13 and passim.

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British certainly mapped out groups during the nineteenth century and inflicted their understandings upon Indian society. Many were adopted by Indians. Put another way, the widening and generalizing of communities in the present century depended on a shifting distinction between private and public, which was central to British rule in India though the two were not necessarily even dichotomous in Indian eyes. Yet ‘modem’ economic and political developments coexisted with other processes of ancient origin that were also now accelerat­ ing— processes concerned with the evolution of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, geographical, and historical identities. (Many of the problems of this and other regions of the world concern the extent to which the coincidence of these socalled ‘modern’ and ‘ancient’ changes is imperfect, and to which the contradictions remain unresolved.) Thus it is that one can trace at least two parallel processes of change: a more precise and uniform definition of religious identity, and its increasing hegemony among putative communities. A Muslim (or a Hindu) could become more certain in his religion, and also religion could come to influence a wider range of his attitudes and connexions. In this development, it was the category itself which evolved: it was articulated internally as well as imposed from outside. In other words, the process of Muslim separatism was concerned with harnessing and modifying identity, with developing the ‘common culture’ and not with creating it. A reassessment of modernization thus implies, secondly, a new understanding of movements in Muslim society and thought. Heterodoxy and syncretism among Indian Muslims have tended to be seen—though everyone knows the explanation to be false— as a decline from or an elaboration of an original orthodoxy, rather as in the evolutionary tree (branching out from a single primary life form) which was favoured by palaeontologists fifty years ago. The correct model is the one now being adopted in evolutionary theory as well: namely, a large number of primary points of origin, some branching out and others disappearing, with a tendency towards coalescence around a smaller range of successful forms. In different families, communities, and regions, Muslim conversion took a multitude of shapes. Some people held to ‘pure’ beliefs, and generally elites attempted to advance ‘orthodoxy’ as they saw it, religion ever being one of the levers of social control. But most converts accepted Islam in a context of various local (proto-Hindu) beliefs and customs—the equivalent of a large number of points of origin. Parallels between Bhakti and Sufism are obvious examples of this coexistence.36 36 On such links and parallels, see Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 41, 85-6, 94-6,123, and more broadly chapter iii (on a south Indian Islam in a Hindu context). This book raises a number of important general points—for example,

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Then over time in many cases, as political systems and communications permitted, followers of such diverse forms of Islam became increasingly aware of what were regarded in South Asia as the Islamic ‘norms’. Texts, laws, communal worship, and various reformist movements were obviously important forces for coalescence. Conversely, some people who associated with Muslims and accepted elements of Islam reverted over time to stricter Hindu praxis. Such trends were at first tidal, but in recent centuries they became more and more progressive. Despite some ecumenical tendencies, the religious species have generally been ranged more sharply into separate families (or communities), reinforced by education, preaching, organization, and power. In part, there has been a stronger tendency towards (and possibility for) solidarity among all co-believers—something more often overridden in the past by political and cultural disparities, and alliances across religious divides. Any such movement was built, however on an initial choice among groups of being, say, ‘Muslim’, as opposed to ‘non-Muslim’: the content of the identity changed, but a sense of difference was its bedrock. By contrast, the other way of looking at syncretism and segmentation in India has been to suppose that they somehow dissolved differences locally and prevented supra-local cohesion—as suggested by Lyall and Chirol and Craddock and their predecessors, but equally by accounts of Muslim separatism that take as their starting point an alternative community of region or class in which religion was immaterial. ‘Many Muslims and Hindus,’ wrote Francis Robinson, ‘had more in common with each other than with their co­ religionists.’37This is true, but inconclusive with regard to the question of why political alignments based on religion should have developed. Such identifications existed, but did not override the religious identities. about different chronologies of conversion and about the appeal of ‘sacred energy’ rather than egalitarian teaching, both of which link religion with politics. Note, at p. 463, that ‘“high” religion never acquired a dominance over the autonomy of local belief and worship in the south’ even in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite the influence of the colonial state. Moreover orthodoxy was less insisted on than orthopraxis—any increase in the former seems to be attributed to leadership— and (p. 459) ‘At no time in the immediate pre-colonial period was there a clear and unambiguous process at work by which boundaries between different south Indian groups or “communities” were being irrevocably hardened__ All the same, significant differences in identity did exisf (emphasis added). On palaeontology see Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature o f History, London, 1990, in comparison with say John Tyler Bonner; The Evolution o f Complexity by Means o f Natural Selection, Princeton, 1988. This reference does not mean to suggest that Gould’s final conclusion (if I understand it correctly) that the forerunner of modern vertebrates survived by chance can be applied to the evolution of Muslim separatism. 37 Robinson, Separatism, p. 33. Compare note 10 above.

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How then do we interpret ‘community’? As reality is plural—individual, yet defined in relation to others, to what each is not—it follows that the limits of categories must be at some point arbitrary. In practice, ‘community’, like any other category, represents a number of gradations or variations around a core, and not something homogeneous within fixed borders. There is a strong probability that communities will overlap at the margins, or for smaller communities to be subsumed within larger. But there is also a tendency for any community to be equated with the whole and with norms (exemplified, for instance, in the Russian world mir),38 and contrasted with outsiders and deviants, and thus to represent processes of inclusion and exclusion. What was the basis of such identities? Even in a diffuse and ambiguous category such as ‘Hindu’ or ‘caste’, where the terms themselves are most clearly imposed by Europeans, there is a certain sense in which the category must have existed without being named, as a recognizable body of either ideas or practice and through their long transmission over time. We come to the crux of the matter. There was certainly a notion of ‘Hindu’, less embracing than that of ‘Man’, and yet more than a mere amalgam of local identities. It follows that the category ‘Muslim’ too must have contained some common denominators, a degree of self-consciousness, in being always perceived in South Asia (along with outcastes and tribals) as identifiably ‘Other’, not ‘Hindu’, however eclectic its practice and belief. Wherein lies this ‘objective harmonization’? At any moment, it comprises a continuously unfolding legacy of past instrumentalities and environments in the form of shared culture and collective memory. Two further points may be made. First, groups differ in kind and function at different places or times. Thus one may presume an ebb and flow in the refinement of operative distinctions—regional or linguistic, between Brahman and Sudra, and so on—whereby a proto- or ur-category ‘Hindu’, say, would be confined in a particular space and time, while its content remained far from fixed or general; awareness of its social and geographical limits also would have differed greatly from place to place, according to experience and knowledge (for example between a sea-trader of western or southern India and a peasant of the north). More than this, it may be (as so often claimed) that India is a special case in its plurality, and that there ‘Other-ness’ has been notably internalized as caste and community, which are as much incorporating as distinguishing in effect. There were and are regional divisions that correspond to geographical area, but in addition, differences have long had to coexist in the one place and within a single system, or at least in intermixed 38 1 owe to Maureen Perrie and Madhavan Palat this example of a word capable of meaning ‘community’, ‘world’, and ‘peace’.

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contiguity. Hence in each area there may be separate dwelling areas in villages or distinct occupations for different castes and communities. But until the advent of Pakistan, broad differences of this kind had seldom been expressed in a regional divide on a territorial basis. There was little attempt at apartheid, to ensure that the ‘Other* was ‘somewhere else’. This degree of proximity of communities is quite unusual. It was experienced to some extent in early and medieval Britain, but not again until recent times. It may have made Indians inherently aware of difference, an awareness that Hindu and Muslim politicians could not help but exploit. Secondly, and especially important, choices of identity (which are anyway not immutable) also need not be exclusive. But then, if each individual inevit­ ably belongs to more than one group at a time, much of the argument against larger identities in early India falls down. Indians, Craddock concluded, ‘may champion the East against the West, but no true Indian nationhood is involved in this championship’. Why not? The fact that the argument is tautological is betrayed by the need to slip in at the last moment a concept of ‘true’ nationhood, and then (when considering the Muslims) by the awkwardness of having to express the religious divide as being largely rooted in race. But surely it is only this insistence that race is exclusive, and this conflation of race, nation, and community, that obscure the common experiences of Indian Islam (or of Hinduism) and their role in subsequent polarization.

IV The argument then is first that there are always multiple levels or degrees of identity and ‘Other-ness’; but also, on the other hand, that there may be recognitions of larger, competing categories, as in the Crusaders’ Europe against Islam, or Indian Muslims against the Hindus. Secondly, at all levels, other identities help define one’s own, and hence to a varying extent categories tend to be believed to be exclusive and monolithic. This is particularly true of the ‘Other’, but also true of the Self. The balance between the levels of these overlapping identities, and their effectiveness, varies over time. The balance is a measure of the respective weight of relative and absolute values, and it is affected by political realities because identities are matters of choice for societies and sometimes individuals. One might compare Akbar’s India with Aurangzeb’s, or consider the efforts in the United States until very recently to incorporate many identities under one English-using American way. Thus the story of Muslim communalism and of this essay is in the end one of comparing the strength and pervasiveness of religious and other identities.39 39 It is this emphasis on relative pervasiveness that makes the argument of this paper complementary to, rather than contradictory of the very valuable studies

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In contradiction of this relativist approach to ideology and identity, we still face that which Jacob Burckhardt rejected in the nineteenth century: a vulgar confidence—often renewed—in progress and the perfectability of man. The conclusions offered here are not teleological; they are merely reinforced by present-day perspectives on fundamentalist nationalism or religion which are far from encouraging.40 Pessimistic at some parallel tendencies, Burckhardt expressed a preference for insight over facts, and for immaterial subjects (say, the nature of civilizations) for which ‘facts’ cannot be obtained or would be inadequate. He wrote in his London diary, speaking of art, that it ‘never spared itself exertion, but the effort must alternate with inner reflection’. No weight of data could prove the nature of Muslim identity or British impact. But to reflect even on one small example may advance our appreciation of the ideas and possibilities that people faced. The purpose of the reflection, again according to Burckhardt, is to ‘group’ phenomena according to ‘inner relations’. To remember this is not to accept his judgements, for example of Islam—though there may be something to be said, after the present discussion, for his view of the strength of the Prophet as a ‘radical simplifier’ and of the power of Islam as resting on its doctrines. Neither should one ignore Ranke’s or Huizinga’s challenge to this historical approach, and certainly not the severe limitations of generalized concepts and formulae. But some subjects can be approached only by analysis of ‘inner relations’ across a range of contextual factors, a method appropriate for producing small answers rather than grand theories.41 This essay has tried to distinguish the various elements that went into Muslim separatism in India, giving as much weight to continuities as to change, to the past as to the present, and to the people as a whole as to leadership alone. At a fundamental level for Muslims, the means evolved but the end did not. It was endorsed by all Muslims in politics—not by a minority of politicians (notably Communists) who happened to be Muslim; but by all who (though otherwise very different) conceived of a distinct Muslim political interest: appearing on peasant and low-caste consciousness, as by Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ and Gautam Bhadra, ‘The Mentality of Subaltemity’, in Guha, Subaltern Studies, vols in and VI, or Gyan Prakash, ‘Reproducing Inequality: Spirit Cults and Labor Relations in Colonial Eastern India’, Modem Asian Studies, 20(2), 1986. 40 This essay does not take up the appropriateness of secularity for South Asia, which nowadays is questioned—see Subrata Mitra, ‘The Limits of Accommodation: Nehru, Religion and the State in India’, South Asia Research, 9(2), 1989—and if it had, it would have concluded that secularism may be, like democracy, the worst possibility except for all the others. 41 Alexander Dru (ed. and tr.), The Letters o f Jacob Burckhardt, London, 1955, p. 191 and passim; and also Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, translated by Harry Zohn with an introduction by H.R. Trevor-Roper; London, 1959, for example pp. 61-6. Also see Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology (translated by Hayden V. White, London, 1962), chapter v.

Muslim Identity and Separatism in India 225

Indian Wahhabis and Saiyid Ahmad Khan; the Muslim League and the Deobandi ulama in the 1940s. From the later nineteenth century, though many leading Muslims endorsed modernization in a pragmatic response to what they perceived as British power, they paradoxically demonstrated in doing so that they did not believe in it. As seen even with Ansari, they consistently enunciated Muslim political inter­ ests, to which any acquiescence in infidel rule was subject. The social profile of many political organizations was somewhat similar. Fledgling Communists, peasants-and-workers groups, and separatist religious parties often consisted to an equal degree of an intelligentsia in search of mass support. Moreover, both the leaders and the followers of such parties could overlap, in the way for example that supporters of Hindu parties (such as Lajpat Rai or Malaviya) moved in and out of the highest reaches of the Congress. Hence, to explain allegiances and the ascendancy of one party over another, we needed after all to admit that people rallied to religion (or to nationalism) only when they already recognized themselves as belonging together in that camp. More than this, the resistance of one group to another, whether in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, must be taken as indicating a ‘critical mass’ of stable identity. A people so overwhelmed by a challenge as to be assimilated or dispersed will not mount a response in reform or protection of themselves. It follows that there was already a ‘Muslim’ constituency to which separatists and secularists alike had to appeal. Much more research would be needed to explore the origins of this con­ stituency; the purpose here has been to insist upon its existence. It would be necessary to examine the continuing instruments of identity in belief and practice, and in communications (education, print, roads), actual movements (pilgrimage, trade, and so on), and brokerage (various agents for the transmission of ideas)—all of which changed with time, but continually contributed to the shared but fluid memories of the group. It would be necessary, too, to consider the early impact upon such of community of British rule, the advent of which provoked reactions out of difference and helped harden the outlines of community (as suggested in Chapter 6). On the basis of such an understanding, the strength of twentieth-century communalism should then remind us not of missed chances for Indian unity, but of the political importance of ideas, for all the efforts to wish them away in mechanistic, structural, or materialist explanations. Craddock and a majority of more recent writers have been reluctant, it seems, to concede religion as a force in its own right, equal if not superior in strength to that of self-interest. The decline of Christianity and the rise of Western materialism thus infected apologists of the Raj and ‘modem’ scholars alike. No doubt there is, as Foucault and his successors claim, a close relationship between power and perception. But this

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determinism does not provide a complete explanation for any historical process. Ideas are an independent variable. They appear in addition to consumerist aspirations in eastern Europe today and surround us in the renewed confrontation between Islam and the West. They linger in societies after their political backing is lost (or they arrive in advance), so that at any one time they also compete amongst themselves and with political realities. Despite the acceptance of government and institutional influence in politics, this argument aligns with Ranajit Guha in some of his criticism of Anil Seal and David Washbrook. But the two positions seem partly compatible. There is common culture, whatever the vitality of common elements within groups, only in a limited sense. Ideas, as collective memory, form part of an environment in which all identity and behaviour are contingent, and even protest against such norms is often forced into the frame of what it opposes, thus reflecting or even perpetuating them. There is no anti-caste movement without caste, no counter-culture without dominant culture. But tracing an Indian (Hindu?) idiom—authority, subservience, and protest; danda, dharm a, bhakti—should not imply that the forms or their content remained constant over time. They are continually reinterpreted or reinvented, and no single version (dominant, subordinate, Indian, British) should be regarded as particularly ‘real’. Identities too have more than one origin and path of development, and are influenced by institutions as well as ideas. Guha admits that the recognition of belonging to ‘one’s own country’ (a specialized identity) has to be achieved; it follows that anti-colonialism too can be understood in comparison with colonialism, whose forms and structures it may commandeer. Thus, as Guha suggests, Washbrook offers a false choice (opposed in the very concept of this chapter) when he claims that in political history ‘contemporary processes’ are more interesting than ‘ideational antecedents’ (even supposing they can be distinguished, or the former can exclude ideas). But thus Guha also makes a false dichotomy: between the Indian and the British history of India. There are more than two positions or schools. One may argue for characteristic or persistent ‘Indian’ views, but here Guha’s position seems excessively essendalist and ahistorical. British and Indian history are at once distinct and continuous, and the elements of thought each culture has borrowed from the other are too complex merely to be cited as evidence of oppression. Guha rejects the ‘appropriation’ of Indian by British history (ever since James Mill); but at least since Mill, demonstrably a part o f each is a 'portion’ o f the other.*1 42 Ranajit Guha, ‘Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography’, in Subal­ tern Studies, vol. VI; see especially p. 255. The view put forward here is also close to my original response to David Washbrook’s otherwise persuasive book, The Emergence o f Provincial Politics, Cambridge, 1976. See also Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historio­ graphy o f India: A Nineteenth-century Agenda and its Implications, Calcutta, 1988.

Index*

Afghanistan 37, 68-9; and Lord Curzon 69 Ahmad, Saiyid, case of 170; grievances of 169; life and work of 164, 167 Ahmadullah, Maulvi 170-2, 173-4, 187; deportation of 175 Ali, Inayat 164 Aligarh Movement 204 Amritsar massacre (1919) 5 Anderson, Bengt 74 Andre Wink and Maratha polity 59 Anglicanism 25 Anglo-Muslim school, fund raising for 175 Ansari, M.A. 197-203, 213, 219n Appadorai, Arjun 118n Arrah attack on 22-3 Asiatic oppression 179 Asiaticus (Philip Stanhope) 14, 16-17 Assam, colonial reorganization in 138; inner line and tribal areas 139; Lushais in 140 Awadh, buffer state of 68 Baksh, Elahi 165 Bangladesh 55, 65, 167, 217 Battle of Buxar 101 Bayley, Steuart 30 Bengal Tenancy Act (1885) see tenancy Bhutan and British rulers of Bengal 66 Blunt, Edward, lectures on social service 52

Bombay Presidency 72 Borders see government Bourdieu, P. 191, 197n Boyle, 23 Brahmanic laws 210 British rule, policies and impact in India, see colonial(ism), government, liberal(ism), and state Brown, Judith on Gandhi 194 Burkhardt, J. 224 Buxar see Battle of Buxar Calcutta, Port Commissioners in 71 capitalism, print capitalism see modern(ity) Casaubon, Dorothea 13, 15, 27 Caste see government (categories) Catholics and Presbyterians 26 Chamock, Job 14 Chatterjee, Atul 52 Chatterjee, Partha 52, 130n Chelmsford, Lord 51, 214; and see Montagu-Chelmsford Chirol, Valentine 51 Christian(ity) 3, 7, 25-6, 39-40, 74, 178, 191, 225 civilizing mission 18-20 Clive, Robert ix, 16 Colebrooke, H.T. 19-20, 179 colonial(ism) 15, 56, 58, 64, 85-7, 118n, 127n, 129, 226; and see government; rule 8-10, 26, 48,

* South Asian and Muslim names are indexed under the final name not the first.

228

Index

55-6, 58-9, 61, 65, 69-70, 72, 79, 82, 85, 88, 99-100, 127n, 132-4, 158, 162, 183, 186-7, 194 commercialization 9 communications 165-8, 180, 183-5 community 191, 217-18; and see government (categories) Congress see Indian National Congress corporations 4 Cotton, H.J.S. 45-6, 49, 136-7; to Ripon 137n Craddock, Reginald 223, on Indian Nation 214-15; on Muslims and Hindus 216; and Saiyid Ahmad Khan 216 Curzon, Lord 67-70, 131n dacoits or lathials (armed robbers) 175, 179-85, 219 Dalits/oppressed/underprivileged classes 7-9, 49, 209-10 decolonization 49-57; see also liberal Deoband 225 Dufferin and Ava, Marchioness of 33-4 Eden, Ashley 30-1 education 8-9, 45-9, 7 4 -5 ,1 8 0 Elliott, C.S. 138, 144, 161; and Bayley 148; on British force 144-5; depressed by Assam 153; and destruction of villages 144-5; forced labour as additional tax 147; and general employment laws 148; on increase of population 149; investigation of agricultural system 148-9; medical treatment 149; public health 150; racist stereotypes 150; recruitment to local boards 150-1; to Ripon 140, 154n Embree, Ainslie on India’s transition 67 English language 5 5 ,6 2 -3 ,7 5 -9 ,1 2 9 -3 0 Factory Act 6 Famine Commission of 1880 136

famine in 1830 79; code 79 Fara’izi outbreaks, 1830 171 Ferry Fund Committees 183-4 Foucault, Michel 2, 94, 147 French revolution 24; see also revolution frontier see government (borders); precolonial concepts of 67-8, 120-6, 173-4, 210-11 Frontier tribes 70 Frykenberg, Robert 191 Gandhi, M.K. 200; for advances in society and human nature 210n; as agent of Hindu-Muslim unity 198; and modernizing secular Congress 209-10; plurality or coexistence 55 General Committee of Public Instruction 47 globalization 4 Goody, Jack 84 government (British), and borders 1-2, 6, 65-75, 79, 81-2, 87, 89, 93-4, 101, 121-4, 128n, 130-3, 1 3 8 ^ 7 , 153, 157-8, 177-81, 192; and categories, 6-8, 61-5, 69-70, 73, 78, 83, 154-6, 163, 175, 187, 212-18, 222-3; goals and impact 9-10, 73-4, 93-4, 99, 118-20, 133-5, 173-4, 177-86, 195-6, 200, 210-12, 220; legitimacy of 14, 16, 19, 59-61, 64, 67, 79-80; methods of 61-4, 81-2, 93-4, 130-1, 134; records 115, 142, 178; see also Ripon, liberal, state Graham, John 101-2 Grant, Charles 79 Guha, Ranajit 133, 226 Halls, J.J. 21-6 Hamilton, Alexander 14 Haq, Muzharul 198 Hardy, Peter 188 Hasan, Mushirul 198-202, 216

Index Hastings, Warren, and East India Company’s non-interference 178; on Hindu and Muslim personal law 178 Hathwa zamindar 31 Habermas 70 Herbert, J.D. 157 Hindi in Kaithi script 76 Hindu(ism) 18, 60, 168-9, 191-2, 222-3; and see government (categories), identity Hindu(s) 222-3; chamars 169; condemnation of 18; identity 192; system 60 Huizinga, J. 224 hundi system 166 Hussain, Muhammad appointing Yahiya Ali 166 Ibbetson, Denzil 167-8 identity 1-3, 193, 223; politicization of 8-9, 56, 74, 85-7, 204-9; religious 2-3, 39-40, 44, 55, 86, 164-76, 187-9, 193, 197-207, 216-18, 220-3; and see government (categories), India(n) Ilbert Bill 30n, 32; and discrimination against Indians 136; controversy, (1883)5 Imam, Ali 199 Imperialism 13, 34—42, 66 India(n) 3, 15, 18, 50; as politicogeographical entity 2-4, 54-5, 73, 130, 176-8, 191, 208n, 214-15; identity 2-3, 5-10, 54-7, 82-9, 127-31, 129-31, 133-4, 137, 161-2, 188-95, 213-18, 222-3, 226 Indian Civil Service 25, 63 Indian National Congress 6, 31, 199, 202, 205-9 Islam(ic) 29, 59-60, 78, 86, 160, 169-71, 212; and see identity (religious)

229

jihad (holy war) 164-5, 170-1, 173-4 Kaviraj, Sudipta 128n Khan, Abdul Ghaffar 199 Khan, Hakim Ajmal 199 Khan, Saiyid Ahmad 175, 225; on Indian National Congress 204-5; on Muslims and Hindus 216 Khilafat movement 168n, 200-1; Muslims during 209-10 Khilnani, S. 2 Kipling, Rudyard 34-42; and British Punjab 37-8 kisatt sabhas (peasant societies) 6 Kumar, Ravinder 201-2 Lahore, as provincial capital 37-8; Resolution of 1940 207 Landlord associations 6 languages, definition and politics of 75-9, 112, 206 League of Nations, India’s founder membership 73 liberal(ism) definition of 13, 151n; alternatives to 17-19, 25-6, 29-31, 50; and education 46-9, 137, 154; and decolonization 49-54; and imperialism 9-10, 13-14, 20, 25-6, 207; and Kipling 34, 41-2; and public health 149; and representation 43-5, 49, 133, 136-7, 150-2; and Ripon 28-34, 135-53, 158-9; self-interest of 24, 120, 158-9 Linlithgow, Lord 53 Local Self-Government Act 136-7 Lushington, Charles 184-5 Macaulay, Lord 16; and law codes 61 MacDonnell, A.P. 77 Mackenzie, Alexander 29

230

Index

Mackenzie, Colin 95-126, 155; and Alexander Read 100; Barry Close to 101; and Benjamin Heyne 109; and British rule 120; and Dirks’ documentation of 112, 118-19; to Dugald Campbell 106; elements of his approach 111-12; establishment of methods and goals 111; and F.V. Raper 122; first Surveyor-General of India 95; on survey of Mysore 99-111; his interpreter Kavelli Venkata Boria 124; and James Ross 107-11; and John Mather 100, 107, 109-10, 114; and John Warren 122; justification for Mysore survey 100; and K.V. Letchmia 112n; to Lord Clive 106; proposal of 113; Robinson on 96-7; works of 96-9 Madani, Husain Ahmad 199 Madras government and scholarship for poor 48 Marathas 59, 70; state system of 60 Meerut Conspiracy Case 211 Mill, James 17-18, 33, 53, 226 Mill, John Stuart 47, 216-17; on political economy 33; on liberty 42 Mir Dudu 171 missionaries 39-40, 74, 141-2, 162 modem(ity) 4—5, 7, 26-7, 58, 83-5, 165-6, 194, 196, 199, 204, 208n, 209-10, 219-21, 225; government 58, 67, 85-9, 133, 155-7, 187 Montagu, E.S. 145; MontaguChelmsford reforms 31, 199, 206 Mughals 59, 70; and territorial state 60 Munro, Thomas 18, 52 Muslim League 211, 225 Muslim Nationalist Party 202 Muslim(s) 26, 163-96, 197-226; and see government (categories), identity (politicization and religious); in Bengal 8; and the British 159, 201; communalism 219; conquests 210-11; consequences of partition

69; conversion to nationalism of territory 213; Islam equated with Muslim politics 78; and Islamic identity 86, 168-70, 187-8; Mughal discrimination in favour of 60; separatism 164, 199-200, 218, 221 Mutiny, Indian see revolt Mysore survey 96n, 99-126, 102, 155 Naga hills 153, 160-1 Nagas, and S.C. Bayley 138-9, 141-2; Christian identity 74-5; Elliott’s plan for 139-40; tribes 74 Nagri script 76-7; Sir George Campbell 77; replacement by Kaithi and linguistic nationalists 78 Namiei; Lewis 207 Nandakumar, trial of 101 nation 216-17; and popular culture 82-3; state 82 National Pact of 1924 202 ‘national’ economies (c. 1700-2000), era of 4 ,1 3 Nationalism 2, 13n, 43, 80, 149-50, 177, 190n, 211, fundamentalist 224; Hindu 130n; Indian 54-6, 82-3, 129-30, 194, 198-9, 202, 208n, 209; Kaviraj on 126, 128n, lessons of 136; of territory 213 Nationalist Muslim Party 198-9 nationalists 85; and concept of swaraj and satyagraha 85 Nehru, Jawaharlal 54-5, 207-9 Nehru, Motilal 199 Nepal 66 Nevinson, Henry 50 Nicholson 79 O’Donnell, C.J. 30; ‘Irishness’ of 31 Oriya, status of 76 Pakistan 65, 69, 86, 207, 217-18, 223; and Bangladesh, division of 65; and borders 69

Index pan-Islamism 207 Partition, of Bengal (1905) 66; consequences of 69, 73 Peet 143-4, 154 Persian script 77 Pindaris 151n Pope, Alexander 15, 17 Punjabi 78 race 32, 38, 55, 138, 212-18 Rai, Lajpat 202 Ranke, L. von 224 Ravenshaw, T.E. 174-5 Raychaudhuri, Tapan 219 Rees, M.P. Sir John 50-1; on Indian people 50 revolt, Indian (1857-8) 169-70, 175 Revolution 4-5, 10, 58, 62; of 1789 133n; administrative 62, 81; French 24; in government 58, 81-2 of ideas about state 48; Indian 82; Maoist 82; scientific 84—5; social 209; technological 84 Ripon, Lord 27-34, 43-9, 135-7, 146, 152; and see liberal Risley, H.H. on Patna Division 71-2 Robinson, Francis 221 Santhals 29 science, scientific 5, 14-17, 84-8, 97-9, 111-14, 117 secularism 55, 179, 201-2, 206-11 Shariat-Allah, Hajji 171 Singh, Kaur 22-4 Singh, Manmohan 576 slavery 29 space, public 97, 159-60, 201; categorization of 100-1, 102n, 117-18, 120-9, 153

231

St Augustine’s 25 state, development of viii, 4-5, 26-7, 52-3, 56-7, 58-61, 64, 67, 71, 79-80, 85, 95, 116-20, 128-30, 160-2, 204-6, 211-13 surveys, 93-126; see also Mysore taxation 43-4, 59, 62, 142, 146-7, 161 tenancy legislation 17, 30n, 44, 136 Thomson, S.J. 214 Tibet, Younghusband expedition to 68-9 Trevelyan, Charles 48 universalism 49; and liberal thinking 45-6 Utilitarian(s) 17-18, 21, 33, 42, 53 Verelst, Henry 79 Victoria, Queen, proclamation of (1858) 5, 26, 43, 158 Wahhabi(s), Arabian 170; Indian 165-76 war 29, 62, 165, 167, 173; against Sikhs 164-5, 173, Bhutan 140n; in Indo-China 69; of races 32 Wellesley’s 14 Wilson, H.H. 18-19, 48 Wink, Andre 59 Women 6, 85, 209 Wood, Charles 8, 47 World War I 7, 51-2, 15In

zammdars 171; in crime 180; oppression 181; protection of dacoit 182