Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in Honour of Peter Robb 9781138237056, 9781315104058

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Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India

This book sheds new light on the dynamics of the colonial encounter between Britain and India. It highlights how various analytical approaches to this encounter can be creatively mobilised to rethink entanglements of memory and identity emerging from British rule in the subcontinent. This volume reevaluates central, long-standing debates about the historical impact of the British Raj by deviating from hegemonic and top-down civilisational perspectives. It focuses on interactions, relations and underlying meanings of the colonial experience. The narratives of memory, identity and the legacy of the colonial encounter are woven together in a diverse range of essays on subjects such as colonial and nationalist memorials; British, Eurasian, Dalit and Adivasi identities; regional political configurations; and state initiatives and patterns of control. By drawing on empirically rich, regional and chronological historical studies, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers of history, political science, colonial studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies. Ezra Rashkow is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Montclair State University, USA. Sanjukta Ghosh is Research Associate at the South Asia Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. Upal Chakrabarti is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

 Memory and Memorials of the Raj: playing cricket in a Mughal-inspired European cemetery, by Ezra Rashkow, Surat, 2015.

Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India

Essays in Honour of Peter Robb Edited by Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The international boundaries, coastlines, denominations, and other information shown in any map in this work do not necessarily imply any judgment concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such information. For current boundaries, readers may refer to the Survey of India maps. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-23705-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10405-8 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC Frontispiece Photo: Ezra Rashkow

Contents

List of illustrationsviii List of contributorsix Foreword by Clive Deweyxiii Acknowledgementsxxv Introduction

1

EZRA RASHKOW, SANJUKTA GHOSH AND UPAL CHAKRABARTI

PART 1

Memory and identity29    I Colonial memory29   1 Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta: transcript of a lecture by Peter Robb

31

  II Colonial identities54   2 On the political history of Britishness in India: Lord Cornwallis and the early demise of Creole India

55

CLAUDE MARKOVITS

  3 Religion and race: Eurasians in colonial India VALERIE ANDERSON

71

vi  Contents

III Textual representations of memory and identity90   4 Texts of liminality: reading identity in Dalit autobiographies from Bengal

91

SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY

  5 Paradoxes of victimhood: Dalit women’s bodies as polluted and suffering in colonial North India

110

CHARU GUPTA

 IV Sites of memory and identity formation132   6 Sites of memory and structures of power in North India: Anandamath and Hanumangarhi

133

WILLIAM R. PINCH

  7 Dispossessing memory: Adivasi oral histories from the margins of Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, Central India

151

EZRA RASHKOW

PART 2

Colonial encounters177   I Encounters with regional governance177   8 Heroinism and its weapons: women power brokers in early modern Bhopal

179

RICHARD B. BARNETT

  9 Changing horses: the administration of Sikkim, 1888–1918

195

ALEX M c KAY

II Encounters with surveillance and resistance213 10 Lost in transit? Railway crimes and the regime of control in colonial India APARAJITA MUKHOPADHYAY

214

Contents vii 11 From London to Calcutta: the ‘Bolshevik’ outsider and imperial surveillance, 1917–1921

232

SUCHETANA CHATTOPADHYAY

III Encounters and ‘improvement’248 12 Competition or collaboration? Importers of salt, the East India Company, and the salt market in Eastern India, c. 1780–1836

249

SAYAKO KANDA

13 Challenging the 3Rs: kindergarten experiments in colonial Madras

276

AVRIL A. POWELL

14 Scientific knowledge and practices of green manuring in Bengal Presidency, 1905–1925

298

SANJUKTA GHOSH

Appendix: Major publications and supervised theses by Peter Robb320 Index327

Illustrations

Figures 7.1 Map of the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve within Madhya Pradesh and India 8.1 The youthful Shah Jahan Begam 12.1 The salt monopoly area of Eastern India 12.2 Foreign salt and Bengal salt at public sales, 1781–1830 12.3 Number of native ships arrived at Calcutta and the salt-grain trade between Bengal and Coromandel 12.4 The major ports on the Coromandel Coast 12.5 Production, consumption and exports of Rajamundry and Nellore districts, 1811–1817

152 188 252 255 258 263 268

Tables 12.1 Exporters of coast salt from Rajamundry, Nellore and Vizagapatnam in 1818 12.2 Exporters of salt from Tanjore in 1818 14.1 Results of Dhaincha experiment

261 265 312

Contributors

Valerie Anderson completed her doctorate on ‘The Eurasian Problem in Nineteenth Century India’ from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK, in 2012. She has been trained in biomedical science, and worked for over 14 years at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, prior to her doctoral research on race. Her book, Race and Power in British India: Anglo-Indians, Class and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 2015. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Asian History and Director, New Zealand India Research Institute, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington. He has co-edited (with X. Huang and A. C. Tan) China, India and The End of Development Models (2012), edited India in New Zealand: Local Identities, Global Relations (2010), Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in Post-independence West Bengal, 1947–52 (2009), among others. Richard Barnett is Associate Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, USA, with research interest in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. He has published articles in several edited volumes and in peer-reviewed journals. His first book concerns state formation and regional culture in North India during the 18th century. Another edited volume assesses scholarship on 18th-century India with interdisciplinary perspectives, and a forthcoming monograph is on Indo-Muslim civilisation in Hyderabad during c. 1750–1803, the era of regional autonomy. Upal Chakrabarti is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He completed his doctoral dissertation at SOAS and is currently working on his book that brings together

x  Contributors histories of political economy, science, property and agrarian governance in British India. Suchetana Chattopadhyay teaches History at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is also Joint Coordinator, Centre for Marxian Studies, Jadavpur University. She is the author of An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913–1929 (2011). She has also undertaken research at Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, as Hermes Postdoctoral Fellow (2009) and Visiting Professor (2014). She has contributed to South Asia Research, History Workshop Journal and Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History. Her current research themes focus on imperial surveillance, urban social history and communist history. Sanjukta Ghosh is Research Associate at the SOAS South Asia Institute, University of London, UK. She completed a Commonwealth Scholarship-funded doctorate in the Department of History at SOAS, where she is a Senior Teaching Fellow. Her recent publication is a chapter in Tanika Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s (eds), Calcutta: The Stormy Decades (2015). She regularly writes for the Times Group and has forthcoming peer-reviewed publications. She is a research network member of the European Social Science History Conference and a Research Fellow of the South Asia Democratic Forum in Brussels. Charu Gupta teaches history at the University of Delhi, India. She completed her doctorate at SOAS, University of London, UK, and has published a number of books and peer-reviewed articles on Hindu nationalism, caste and gender. She is presently a Visiting Professor and ICCR Chair at the University of Vienna. Her publications include Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (2001) and The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (2016). She has also co-authored Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia (2008). Sayako Kanda is Professor, Faculty of Economics, Keio University, Japan, specialising in the socio-economic history of South Asia. Apart from publishing articles in edited volumes, she has published in journals such as the International Journal of South Asian Studies and International Review of Social History. Claude Markovits is Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at the Centre of Indian and South Asian Studies, Paris, France. He has published widely on the history of colonial India. Some of his publications are: Indian Business and Nationalist Politics (1985); The Global World of

Contributors xi Indian Merchants (2000); The Un-Gandhian Gandhi (2003); and Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs (2008). He is currently working on the history of the Indian Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. Alex McKay completed his doctorate in South Asian History at SOAS, University of London, UK. He is a former research fellow at SOAS, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College, London, and the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden. He is the author of more than 30 academic articles and several books on the history and culture of Indo-Tibetan Himalayas, and has edited a number of other volumes in the field. Aparajita Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of History in Salisbury University, Maryland, USA, following completion of her PhD at SOAS. Her recent work is on ‘Colonised Gaze? Guidebooks and Journeying in Colonial India’ in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2014). William R. Pinch is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA, and an Associate Editor of the journal History and Theory. He is the author of Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (2006); Peasants and Monks in British India (1999); and the editor of Speaking of Peasants: Essays in Indian History and Politics in Honour of Walter Hauser (2008). He has written numerous book chapters, essays and reviews as well as articles in History and Theory; Past and Present, Modern Asian Studies; Indian Economic and Social History Review; and CounterPunch. Avril A. Powell is Reader Emerita in the History Department at SOAS, University of London, UK. Her publications include Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire (2010); Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia (2006; co-edited with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley); ‘Old Books in New Bindings: Ethics and Education in Colonial India’ in Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali’s (eds), Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India (2011). She is currently working on the National Indian Association’s contributions to debates on female education. Ezra Rashkow is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Montclair State University, USA. He has been a Research Fellow at Columbia University’s South Asia Institute, a Lecturer at the University of Virginia, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Shanghai University and a

xii  Contributors Teaching Fellow at SOAS. His articles have been published in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Economic and Social History Review, History Compass and South Asian History and Culture. Peter G. Robb is Emeritus Professor, SOAS South Asia Institute, UK. He has held appointments at SOAS since 1971, most significantly as ProDirector of the School for five years until the end of the 2007/2008 session, and before that as Head of the Department of History and Chair of the Centre of South Asian Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Asiatic Society, where he is currently a member of Council. He has been Chair of the Council of the Society for South Asian Studies and of the British Association for South Asian Studies and a member of the British Academy’s South Asia panel. A list of his major works as well as a list of his doctoral students can be found in the appendix to this festschrift.

Foreword

This festschrift – and still more, the conference that produced it – is the best possible tribute to Peter Robb’s lifelong contribution to the history of South Asia. Forty historians, former students and colleagues, came from all over the world to celebrate his scholarship, his teaching and his administration at the reunion which marked his retirement. It is impossible to do justice to all his achievements in the short space of a foreword. Something, inevitably, is lost in the compression: all the beauty of the detail, all the reconnaissances which were never followed up. But a foreword may still be long enough to give a glimpse of the reasons why so many travelled so far to pay homage to a man who came to occupy a unique place in their profession and their affections: because he made a difference: a difference to their lives.

I The research of scholars always takes pride of place in their curriculum vitae, and the first thing that strikes one about Peter’s research is how prolific he has been. Nine books, if one includes the collections of previously published material; 11 volumes edited; 23 chapters; and 19 articles. I gave up trying to count the pages and I never tried to estimate the words. They must come to a million, maybe more. There are only a handful of scholarly Stakhanovites who have published more than this; and most of them have exceeded their quotas by sticking, all their writing lives, to a single narrow theme. As Acton pointed out, a historian ‘achieves mastery through resolute self-limitation’. What makes Peter’s output all the more remarkable is its range. He has never repeated himself; he has always looked for new challenges. There are few historians anywhere, much less historians of South Asia, who have proved as versatile. Agrarian history, economic history, social history, intellectual history, legal history, political history; all six are combined in an effortless synthesis in his oeuvre. At one moment you

xiv  Foreword are with the viceroys, seeing the world from above; at another you are with the Dalits, seeing the world from below; at a third you are with the officials who drafted legislation protecting tenants and the kulaks who exploited them, somewhere in-between. So, how can one impose order, a structure, on this embarras de richesse? As one glances through the five-page list of Peter’s publications, four great themes stand out. The first is agrarian. Using 19th-century Bihar as a rich empirical case study, he explored the structure of agrarian society, the impact of British policies on that structure and the impact of British ideas on those policies. Some of these explorations gave rise to reflections on the changes in agrarian society in the longe duree as a result of the whole complex of factors summed up in the phrase ‘British rule’: reflections which were as thoughtful as Eric Stokes’ earlier insights. Ancient Rights and Future Comforts went to the opposite extreme: it was the definitive word on the ‘causes and consequences’ of the most important piece of tenancy legislation ever enacted in British India: the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885. Peter’s mastery of the sources and his presentation of the issues have rarely been equalled. But connoisseurs of these things may prefer, as cult articles, his incisive interventions in two of the great debates of the 1970s and the 1980s: the debates on peasant stratification and peasant indebtedness. Left-leaning pessimists were convinced that every day, in every way, the peasantry were becoming more unequal and more indebted as a result of the exploitation of the kulaks, the exploitation of the landlords, the exploitation of the trader-moneylenders and the exploitation of the colonial state. Right-leaning optimists were convinced that peasant families were taking turns to rise and fall in a stable social scale, and that – since they borrowed up to the limits of their credit – they could only borrow more if their incomes rose or they had better security to offer. It was a dialogue of the deaf: no one was listening. They were simply digging themselves deeper and deeper into their doctrinaire redoubts. Peter came to these two controversies with a fresh mind. If I had to pick out a single plum from his entire agrarian pie, I would cite the piece on peasant stratification (‘Hierarchy and Resources’), which he wrote shortly after his return from the archives in Patna in 1976, and if I had to pick out the core of that article, I would say it lay in the ingenious diagrams and tables in which he showed how the rents and cultivated areas of the holdings in a village in Muzaffarpur fluctuated in the 1890s. Instead of the three sharply differentiated classes that the classic Leninist model imposes – rich, middle and poor peasants – there was a submerged iceberg of socio-economic mobility, exactly as Chayanov would lead one to expect; only the socio-economic mobility, far from following Chayanov’s inexorable family development cycle, had a curiously arbitrary look.

Foreword xv Peter’s forays into the intellectual and ideological history of AngloIndia – the second great theme – began with the origins of tenancy reform in Bengal. In the 1880s, the British broke with the laissez-faire tradition of the Permanent Settlement and their alliance with the landlords; they conceded tenant rights to millions of cultivators, even if the concessions stopped far short of ‘land to the tiller’; and they initiated the massive administrative effort which was necessary to uphold those rights. Peter traced, in impressive detail, the revolution in ideas which made the revolution in policy possible. After the movers and shakers of the Raj realised that they were propping up a class of parasitic absentees who weakened their control over the countryside, history with a capital H and evolution with a capital E – the customary rights of tenants in India and Maine’s theories of social evolution – legitimated the ‘restoration’ of a species of property which was appropriate in the stage of development India had reached and should never have been confiscated in the first place. Peter’s other contributions to the intellectual history of the Raj – in his symposium on race, the festschrift for Kenneth Ballhatchet, the SOAS Reader on Institutions and Ideology and his article on Mackenzie’s survey of Mysore – were suggestive rather than definitive. But how suggestive they were! After the soft focus of mentalities, there is the hard core of agriculture: the theme that stands at the heart of the economic history of the subcontinent. Peter published a group of papers on the determinants of agricultural growth and stagnation, which ignored the stock stereotypes of the Indian countryside and focused on peasant agency in societies which were far more complicated and far more fluid than the partisan model builders habitually allowed. After a surfeit of sweeping generalisations about ‘the rise of capitalism’ and ‘barriers to development’ which were far too vague to be capable of proof or disproof, the realism of articles like ‘Peasants’ Choices’ – firmly based on research in the archives – came as a frank relief. Peter had many rivals in the field; Eastern India has never been short of accomplished historians. But at the time, only Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri and Jacques Pouchepadass were writing about the agriculture and the peasantry of Bengal and Bihar at the same level of methodological sophistication on a larger scale; and Chaudhuri and Pouchepadass, very sensibly, never really wrote about anything else. The last great theme is the ruling race. One way of seeing Peter’s published work to date – I am sure that there will be new topics to come – is to see it as a Great Circle. He began with the British in India and he is ending with the British in India. In his first monograph, on the Montagu-­ Chelmsford reforms, he breathed new life into a genre which once dominated the field – British policymaking at the highest level – by the simple expedient of doing it so much better than anyone else had ever done it

xvi  Foreword before. Instead of summarising the files in chronological order, the default setting of his predecessors, he made the dynamics of policymaking comprehensible by placing them in a rigorously developed context. At intervals in his career, he has gone back to the British containment of nationalism: to the control of rural areas, to identities, to communities, to ‘the challenge of Gau Mata’. But it is only now that, in the latest phase of his research, he has concentrated full time on the feringhi. In his ‘Calcutta books’ – as Peter Marshall called them – he has done something that must rank among his greatest achievements. His discovery of the 70 volumes of Blechynden’s diary in the British Library made something possible which had only been done once before – a century ago – in Alfred Spencer’s edition of Hickey’s memoirs. He has brought to life the most intimate thoughts, feelings and actions of a very ordinary Englishman in a very extraordinary setting: the most plural of plural societies, the ‘second city of the empire’, the metropolis that the British made. I have no means of knowing – it would require a crystal ball – but I suspect that Peter’s work on the British may stand the test of time better than a great deal of his contemporaries’ writing. This is not a self-evident judgment. The only interest in the British in India comes from outside the groves of academe now. In fashionable academic circles, the ruling race is the least fashionable category of all. How many times, in the last 30 years, has a university given a job to the author of a thesis on white men in South Asia, however good it may have been? The history of ‘British India’, as a result, is the Prince of Denmark with Hamlet left out; it is the history of the Moghul Empire without the Moghuls. The revulsion must come, even if we do not live to see it; and when it comes, the whole historiography of the subcontinent will be subject to a seismic shift. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms will be seen as a turning point in world history, as the point at which the slither to independence and the break-up of the British Empire became inevitable. The diehards realised what was happening – that the first world war had destroyed the confidence of the civilised in the mission civilisatrice – even if the architects of the reforms convinced themselves that dyarchy constituted a subtle ‘holding action’ rather than a dramatic ‘surrender before they were seriously challenged’. The two sides were right to take the 1919 Government of India Act seriously, right to fight out every clause. It not only changed India; it was a time bomb that changed the face of the globe. In this brave new world of Caucasian revisionism, Blechynden’s diary will rank with Hickey’s. Like Pepys, Blechynden seduces his readers by talking to them as if they were his closest confidants. He has no secrets; he holds nothing back; he is a ‘warm’ man; he comes halfway across a room to meet you, even if he never rises from his chair. And once you are admitted to his

Foreword xvii most intimate private life, with such disarming candour, you are lost. You visit his building sites with him and talk to his contractors and workmen, you worry about how he will repay his debts and maintain his ‘credit’, you meet his kind friends and his dubious business associates, you sympathise with his servant problems as he struggles to keep his unwieldy household under control, you share the pleasures and the tribulations of his love life with a string of mistresses, you wonder how his Eurasian children – sometimes his very pretty, much petted children – will cope with discrimination after they grow up, you follow him as he feels his way through the labyrinth of patronage and jobbery in a madly expanding, wild east town, you are intrigued by the way he acts out his ideals of honour and Englishness, paternalism and public service. Blechynden’s humanity, in all these settings, enlists your empathy across the gulf of centuries and the bigotry of the present age. You respond to his trust: it ‘carries home conviction to the hesitating heart’. Even the pedants of North London, sitting round the guillotines they have erected for the politically incorrect, pausing in their knitting to pounce on the latest dastardly revelation of Blechynden’s sexism, racism and colonialism, will turn Peter’s pages – in guilty anticipation – to see what happens next to the hero of this on-going costume drama: a surveyor ‘of the middling sort’, half serious, half comic, always touching, bravely bearing up against the chaos and corruption of a world he never made, with a theodolite in one hand and a bibi in the other. Like all the best diarists, Blechynden turns us into his friends; and I am sure that he will go on making friends as long as there are readers willing to listen to his hope and his despair, his amities and his hostilities, his triumphs and his tragedies – which is to say, as long as there are readers.

II Peter supervised more than 30 PhD theses over the course of more than 30 years. The number of his research students rose until they reached a peak on the eve of his retirement: 10 doctorates between 2010 and 2013 alone. The diversity of the subjects they explored reflected the diversity of Peter’s interests. They ranged from European dress to Hindustani, from trade unions to railways, from political officers to geology, from forests to salt, from propaganda to famine, from Congress to the Mahasabha, from identities to agriculture, from Eurasians to Dalits, with the Indian army and the Punjab somewhere on the way. A third of them have been published as academic monographs; another third have appeared, in part, in academic journals; and the stream of books and articles is still going on. Peter’s decades at SOAS will be seen, in retrospect, as a golden age of postgraduate research on the history of South Asia. Of course there were

xviii  Foreword impersonal reasons for this. There were push factors like the growing number of talented and well-educated students from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh who wanted to get higher degrees in centres of excellence in the West. There were pull factors like the unparalleled resources for the study of Indian history in London and the jobs for South Asian specialists in North American universities. There were other teachers at SOAS, besides Peter: history at the School has never been a one-man band. But as Peter’s reputation as a supervisor grew, it consolidated the History Department’s pulling power. Students came for him as well as SOAS. Then, their doctorates in the bag, the majority went out and got academic posts of their own. As a result, the pupils of his pupils are now completing their degrees in a dozen universities and colleges. So what were the hallmarks of his teaching? What were the secrets of his allure? The megalomaniacs of the academic profession impose their own organising obsessions on their students, whether the organising obsession is a fetish like colonial exploitation or a little methodological gimlet guaranteed to open every dialectical safe in the world. They stamp the members of their patronage-hunting gangs with their own trademark, and send them out to make converts like Jehovahs’ witnesses knocking on the door. Peter, to his eternal credit, never set out to create a school. He never pretended to be a Guru, because he never wanted disciples. The essence of his teaching was helping his students develop their own ideas and their own talents. He really listened to them; he read their drafts with close attention; he was sensitive to their needs as individuals, particularly if they were foreign students facing the problems of settling in London. Then he gave them eminently sensible advice and encouraged them to ‘be themselves’. It was the best kind of pupil-centred learning. The most effective teachers give something of themselves to their pupils, running the risk of rejection; and what they give reflects their instincts and their personalities. Peter’s students spelled out what he gave him in the acknowledgements in their theses and their books. His criticism, one wrote, was always constructive. ‘It managed to be, at the same time, both incisive and encouraging’. Sometimes, a few words broke a writer’s block: ‘His advice to focus on a bit at a time, and not to try to think about the whole thing, was particularly valuable’. Sometimes, a ‘casually astute and thought-provoking’ comment suggested an entirely new line of inquiry. And all the time, he struck a perfect balance – ‘keeping me on track [without ever] seeking to steer me in directions I did not want to go’. Another pupil said how Peter’s patience and good humour ‘clarified [his] muddled ideas, made [him] question many assumptions, and saved [him] from many errors’. A third thanked him for helping him ‘think critically and write better in his characteristically kind and humorous way’. A fourth

Foreword xix described him as ‘caring, tolerant and inspiring’. A fifth testified that his support went beyond the requirements of formal supervision: it relieved the stress of writing a dissertation in an alien metropolis. The contributions of Peter’s students to this festschrift and the conference which was held in his honour are the best possible proof of the value of the Socratic method as he practised it. The method was the man. It was ‘teaching through friendship’.

III One might reasonably surmise that a historian who had published so much and taught so conscientiously would have no time left for administration. Nothing, in Peter’s case, could be further from the truth. He has sat on the committees and councils of all the learned societies in the United Kingdom with a remit to promote the history of South Asia – the British Association for South Asian Studies, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Society for South Asian Studies, the South Asian panel of the British Academy. But his real achievements, as a manager, have been at home. During his half-century at SOAS, he has made three major contributions to the environment in which South Asian specialists work – as chairman of the South Asian Centre, as head of the History Department and as pro-director of the School. As chairman of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Peter did an enormous amount to encourage the interdisciplinary study of South Asia, by drawing area specialists together from all the disciplines in the School. If history at SOAS has been enriched by anthropology, by economics, by geography, by literature, by political science, and if those subjects have in turn developed a historical dimension, then that is due, in part, to his initiative and energy. In an age of ever-increasing academic specialisation, when blinkers were all too often the key to professional success, the Centre broke institutional barriers down. In fact, it institutionalised exchanges. Regular seminars at specific times in specific places replaced chance encounters in corridors and common rooms. Select conferences – one thinks of the conferences Peter organised on Dalits and labour, on the concept of race, on the meanings of agriculture, on local agrarian societies – drew historians from all over the world into the heady mix. Graduate students, in particular, responded to the new perspectives. Their theses in history evolved from superficial studies of elite policies and politics, with very little socio-economic context, to the diversity and profundity of this festschrift. Peter’s two great stints as an administrator at SOAS, as head of department and as pro-director, were tributes to the confidence that his colleagues felt in his judgment and dedication. He inherited a department full

xx  Foreword of world-renowned scholars. If History at SOAS was so highly rated at successive research assessment exercises, it was due to the attainments of talented and committed individuals working as individuals. It owed nothing to team work under a great leader, as so many great leaders would like us to believe. But the dependence of academic standards on the individual raised, in acute form, the problem of succession. Historians at SOAS, like historians everywhere, fade away; at some point, members of the History Department started accepting chairs at other universities, instead of spending their entire working lives commuting to Russell Square. Finding replacements of comparable calibre willing to come to a city where bankers are too poor to buy modest terrace houses was never easy. The shock of the students was much worse. No newly appointed lecturer at a British university could possibly believe how favourable the staffstudent ratios were at SOAS in the 1960s. Some of the staff in the more exotic languages hardly knew what undergraduates were. So the invasion of the teenage vampires – as the men from the ministry put pressure on the School to earn tuition fees instead of relying on their special funding – produced serious strains. Reconciling the members of the History Department to the steadily rising teaching loads – persuading them to put on new courses which were actually designed to attract students and convincing them that the distribution of teaching was equitable – would have taxed the diplomatic skills of a Talleyrand. They needed, as never before, a head of department whose fairness was beyond reproach. The post of pro-director should have been the climax of Peter’s career. It is, after all, one of the glittering prizes of the profession. It was flattering to be chosen. But I strongly suspect that his years at the top were the weariest years of his working life. They coincided with the rise of an ‘us and them’ mentality among the academic staff at SOAS, as they reacted, a little late in the day, to the managerial revolution sweeping over British universities. As long as the management of the School seemed to be ­collegiate – as long as the academic staff, the heart of the School, felt that they had some say in the crucial decisions affecting their research and teaching, even if it was only a veto power over adverse changes – morale remained reasonably high. They felt that they belonged to SOAS and that SOAS belonged to them; so they rolled, as best they could, with the funding blows. As soon as they were reduced to impotence – as soon as they felt that ‘reforms’ were being imposed from above by an authoritarian bureaucracy with a paramilitary chain of command and grossly inflated salaries – they turned nasty. A Pathan chief on the North-West Frontier Province once said that he licked the arse of the political agent above him so he could kick the arses of a thousand tribesmen below him. He would have made an excellent line manager in my old university under a particularly cynical and indolent

Foreword xxi vice chancellor. As the new ‘business model’ reached SOAS, always a decade behind the redbrick universities and two decades behind the promoted poly­technics, the natives grew restless. They saw the glorious independence of the academic profession – one of the main reasons they joined it – ­gradually leaching away. One of the issues that brought this latent conflict out into the open – an issue that particularly upset Peter – was the restructuring of the library. The library, with its magnificent resources, is the School’s greatest material asset. SOAS could never remain a world-class institution without a worldclass library. The key funding body offered a million pounds towards the modernisation of the library, but it made the offer on one condition: the School must reduce the running costs by cutting the number of specialist librarians. The staff involved were offered a choice between redeployment in the School and generous compensation. A small number – perhaps two – refused to make a choice; and the association of university teachers backed them, to defend the principle of security of tenure. At that point, the dispute degenerated. Things were said which showed that many of the academics no longer had much confidence in the high command, and the high command no longer had much confidence in the academics. There were provocateurs on both sides: union representatives spoiling for a fight and managers determined to assert their ‘right to manage’. Only the bravest director, a director willing to walk straight into the lions’ den and rally the lions, could have saved the situation. The director was not brave. The situation was not saved. The opposition fizzled out, but the bitterness lingered on. In this structural crisis, it was doubly important that some of the most senior administrators should preserve their academic faith: that they should go on believing that morale was important, more important than anything else, because high morale is essential to original scholarship and inspiring teaching – the kind of scholarship and teaching that change people’s lives by making them think seriously about serious questions: by changing the way they see the world. At this juncture, when the buzzwords of the managerial class were formulaic ‘product’ (rather than scholarship) and saleable ‘skills’ (rather than enlightenment), SOAS was twice as lucky to have someone with Peter’s values as a pro-director. Whether Peter, caught in the crossfire, was twice as lucky to be pro-director is not so clear.

IV I remember, vividly, the first time I met Peter and Liz – I can never think of them apart – because our first meeting was so characteristic of them both. The time was the end of the hot weather in 1975: more than 40 years ago. The place – where else should Indian historians meet? – was the National

xxii  Foreword Archives of India. At the risk of trying your patience, let me set the scene. The denouement, at least, is worth waiting for. Some of you, who know Peter and Liz, may guess what is coming before it arrives. I had gone out to work on the history of agricultural stagnation in Bihar, only to discover – too late – that Bihar was ‘different’ from anywhere else in India. The staff in the State Record Office in the secretariat in Patna were divided into two bitterly hostile factions, competing for the post of director, which was vacant. The whole self-respect of the members of one faction depended on their stopping the members of the rival faction achieving anything that might redound to their credit. Whether they regarded foreign scholars as assets or liabilities, I never knew; but we were rare birds in Patna in those days, so they shared us out. The first comer was awarded to faction A; the second comer was awarded to faction B and so on. Once a scholar was allocated, it was up to his faction to do everything they could to help him, and it was up to the hostile faction to do everything they could to frustrate him. There was nothing personal about it. We were simply pawns in the game. The opposition, sadly, soon discovered my Achilles’ heel. I had written to the State Record Office, six months in advance, asking them which credentials they would like me to bring with me. No reply. I had written to the High Commission in London, asking what I should take with me. No reply. So, I took all the letters of recommendation I could think of, and added extra letters in Delhi. They worked at the National Archives: I was waved through. They were not enough for Patna. Two days into my research in the Record Office, I was told, politely but firmly, that I must leave. No more records would be shown to me. I must go back to Delhi, a thousand kilometres away, and get the home ministry and the ministry of education to certify that I represented no threat to the security and integrity of the Republic of India or the State of Bihar. There was no guarantee that the ministries would give me what I needed, still less that they would give me what I needed fast enough to save my project. It was the greatest setback I ever experienced in India. The ‘express’ to Delhi started out from Patna, the next day, five hours late. It was supposed to leave at the crack of dawn; it eventually crawled into the station, from Calcutta, around 10 am. I took shelter from the rising sun in the shade of a waiting room, and watched a legless beggar propel himself round the platforms in a tiny wooden cart with four wheels, rattling his begging bowl. After the second or third revolution – he had a regular beat – I stopped giving him anything. All the first class tickets were sold before I arrived, so I settled for a second class berth. When the train finally shuddered to a standstill at the platform, my berth was occupied by six passengers who were good enough to squeeze up and make a space – a narrow space – for me to sit between them. The wind blowing through the

Foreword xxiii open windows was as hot as the blast from a furnace – it dried your eyes and burnt your eyeballs; the smuts from the coal-fired engine turned my white shirt khaki and my white face brown; the wooden seat, pinioned between my neighbours, gave me backache; and after one attack of dysentery, I had no intention of eating any of the ‘refreshments’ sold by pedlars wandering up and down the corridor. The excruciating discomfort went on and on, hour after hour, through the day and into the night. Six hundred miles at an average of 30 miles an hour – you can do the arithmetic for yourself. It finally came to an end in the early hours of the morning. All the train journeys in India seem to start or finish in the early hours of the morning. It is part of ‘the romance of Indian railways’. The next morning I went on a circuit round of the ministries to get my dossier going: the first of many similar circuits. Then, absolutely exhausted and seriously depressed, I went to the National Archives. I walked into the darkness of the great reading room, with its shafts of sunlight slanting through the gloom, its slowly revolving fans, its dust of ages – and there, in one of the intimate alcoves, I saw a vision. Lit up by a shaft of sunlight, there was a devastating blonde with piercing blue eyes and an English rose complexion. Here, after the utter dreariness of Bihar, was civilisation as I knew it. I had never seen an Indian historian who looked anything like that before. I knew, immediately, that she must be doing some really interesting research; so I went up and introduced myself. Of course, it was Liz. Peter was sitting in the shadow on the other side of the table. And yes, they were doing some very interesting research – on the agrarian history of Bihar. They were destined, one might almost say doomed, to follow me to the Patna record office. So here is the moral of the tale. How did they react to this complete stranger, this SDF, this sans domicile fixe, looking so ill and sounding so grim? The answer is simple: they took me in. They asked me whether I had anywhere to stay in Delhi; and when they discovered that I was camping out at the YWCA, which kicked its guests out after a couple of nights, they offered – without hesitation – to let me share their flat in Maharanibagh. I jumped at the chance, and I never regretted it. They did more, far more, than simply let me share their flat. They shared their lives. Each morning, we set out for the National Archives together, we explored the sights and sounds and smells of Delhi, and in the evenings we ‘tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky’. They cooked our meals after we gave our incompetent cook his marching orders, and they introduced me to their circle of fascinating friends. Sometimes it seemed as if every New Zealander knew every other New Zealander, and half of them were living in New Delhi. I can count the number of occasions on which I have encountered such spontaneous generosity, in the course of a long life, on the fingers of one

xxiv  Foreword hand; and I am sure that I am only one of many beneficiaries of Peter and Liz’s largesse. An old-school official of the Darbhanga Raj once said to me, in an abandoned palace in North Bihar, ‘It is your magnanimity, huzoor’. But how many friends, how many pupils, how many relatives have experienced their hospitality, their kindness? An invitation to dinner, a conversation with like-minds, a chat with the twins and a bed for the night: these things made their home in Islington, for an entire generation, a meeting point of cultures. They kept a cosmopolitan salon without any of the stiffness, any of the pretension that term implies – stimulating their guests through their flair for personal relations and their endless intellectual curiosity. At one moment you were discussing a performance of the Trout Quintet at the Wigmore Hall; five minutes later you were wondering whether Jonathan Barnes would ever win the Booker Prize or remain a perpetual also-ran; five minutes after that you were comparing Venice and Istanbul, before twentystorey cruise boats destroyed the view of San Giorgio from the piazetta San Marco and Mr Erdogan’s secret police eviscerated the most cosmopolitan and tolerant city in Turkey; and then, by some seamless elision, you arrived in the Hotel Republic in Patna or Lutyen’s palace on Raisina hill or the basement of the Board of Revenue in Lahore: all the ‘blue remembered hills’ where you went once and shall not go again. The only sadness was the parting. Like a fallen angel expelled from paradise, you stumbled out into the darkness of the lamplit London night.

V One of Peter’s research students went straight to the heart of the matter in the revised version of a particularly impressive thesis. He said in eight well-chosen words what I have been struggling to say in five thousand. He said that Peter was ‘a fine intellect and an even finer man’. There were moments, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, when I wondered whether outstanding human decency and high critical intelligence could co-exist in the same person. All the geniuses I met, bar one, were evil geniuses. After Maharanibagh I never doubted that the two attributes could be combined. You need look no further than Rajit Mazumder’s formula – ‘a fine intellect and an even finer man’ – for the answer to the question with which this foreword began: why ‘so many travelled so far’. It is no accident that memory and relations are the compelling themes of this festschrift. Our work is a collective tribute to our relationship with a signally inspiring and a signally human scholar. Clive Dewey Paris, October 2016

Acknowledgements

Writing a note of acknowledgement for this festschrift complements the purpose of our book that is in itself a tribute to Professor Peter Robb’s distinctive scholarship in South Asian history. We also thank him for giving us his seminal piece to help us formulate our ideas for many of the discussions in the festschrift. We take the opportunity to thank those who have not written for the book but have supported its making in various ways. In that sense, our acknowledgement conforms to an ethical practice of including several others who have wished us well and remained committed to the text in one way or another. We first thank the participants of the conference held at SOAS in 2013 to celebrate the career and works of Peter Robb, who could not eventually write for this volume due to various exigencies. They are Alison Safadi, Anand Yang, Andrew Grout, Aditya Sarkar, Daud Ali, David Arnold, James Chiriyankandath, Nitin Sinha, Peter Marshall, Projit Bihari Mukharji, Ravi Ahuja, Sanjoy Bhattacharya and Mohammad Shah. We are grateful for their ideas and to the several discussants for enriching our thoughts during the conference. Peter’s colleagues at SOAS helped us with advice from time to time. They have supported our initiative with enthusiasm, particularly Amrita Shodhan, Eleanor Newbigin, Shabnum Tejani (for organising the conference as well) and, at a later stage, Ian Brown. Clive Dewey, who was at the conference, wrote the foreword to this volume, reflecting on Peter’s career. Preparing the festschrift has been a long uneven process. The morale was often boosted by words of encouragement from many who wished they could write for it – our deep thanks to J. B. Harrison, who we fondly recognise for his cheerful snippets on colonial history woven deftly in many of his correspondences about the festschrift. We missed the full writings from Walter Hauser, Christopher Hill, Bindeshwar Ram and Sanghamitra Mishra, despite their enthusiasm and initial ideas for a piece. Sunil Kumar joins the list as well after a very inspiring round of sounding out – what it

xxvi  Acknowledgements could be like to write a festschrift in medieval times! Kaoru Sugihara, Rajit Mazumder and Vaswati Ghosh regretted they could not contribute but gave us their moral support. Among our contributors, we would also like to thank in particular Avril Powell, Richard Barnett, Suchetana Chattopadhyay, Aparajita Mukhopadhyay and Sayako Kanda for their kind words from time to time. Valerie Anderson and Charu Gupta for committing their time and contributing directly to our peer review process of selecting the articles. Special thanks go to Vijay Pinch and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay for acting as academic advisers at times when we needed it most. Alex McKay and Claude Markovits also deserve thanks for cooperating graciously as authors in the volume. The editors would also like to add a note of gratitude at a personal level. Ezra Rashkow thanks Sharon Lindenfeld for sharing not only her creative talents and ideas, but also her life with him, as he lived with this project. Sanjukta Ghosh thanks Daniel Brett for his insightful comments on her chapter. Upal Chakrabarti thanks Sukanya Sarbadhikary for regularly reminding him that publishing books do not make or break life, and his student Sandipan Mitra for helping him with some tedious editorial work. Our list could be longer if we added the enormous support and encouragement that we got from all of our families and friends. They all know as much we do how we estimated wrongly our targeted time to complete this project. We would like to thank each of them for having faith in us till we finished. Finally, Aakash Chakrabarty and the team at Routledge believed in the value of this project as strongly as we did, which made matters at the publishing end almost effortless. Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti

Introduction Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti

Memory and identity This volume seeks to reclaim the concept of the colonial encounter from the world of binary thinking. The term ‘encounter’ seems to be obviously relevant for analysing colonialism because it has been thought to imply, in common sense and academic parlance alike, the conquest of a land and its people by another. Colonialism has long been made sense of in a varied gamut of scholarship in such dyadic terms, placing the coloniser and the colonised in mutually exclusive categories and hierarchical relationships, an understanding of the colonial encounter almost as problematic as one transfixed with unidirectional impact of European rule. Yet, the analytical frame of the colonial encounter has also informed a distinctive approach to world history – one that examines the exchanges, networks and institutions that bring communities into contact, co-dependence and conflict. Thus, we argue, the concept of the colonial encounter remains an important index for history writing in India and other formerly colonised nation states. In order to present the complexities of the colonial encounter, the essays in the first section of the volume collectively explore the manifold ways in which the encounter has yielded to memory and identity formation. Moving beyond a simplistic framing of hybridity or loss of authenticity as quintessential aspects of the colonial encounter, we instead examine the complexities of cultural categories long taken as fixed, the arbitrary and tyrannical nature of colonial categories, the problems of identity formation amongst the historically marginalised, the role of historical memory in identity formation, as well as other aspects of the colonial encounter that continue to shape India today. Drawing inspiration from a range of historical narratives that transcend the chauvinistic nationalist narrative of the nation state, the essays deviate from works that assume, in Peter Robb’s words, that ‘nationalism is innate . . . religion is primordial and so on’.1 This kind of analysis

2  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti results from writings that attempted to deconstruct colonial rule as ‘epistemological violence’, focusing on what Bernard Cohn called the various ‘investigative modalities’ of the colonial regime.2 These earlier works also productively explored and contested Edward Said’s position on the application of Orientalist knowledge that was meant to serve European power over non-European societies. The works provided critical reflection on ‘European’ and ‘indigenous’ categories as far more complex, unstable, ambivalent and processual than how they were previously construed in the histories of colonial South Asia. However, a critique of this historiographical tradition initiated by Cohn and followed up by Nicholas Dirks in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India might also be that these authors sometimes swung too far on the pendulum, away from claiming that Indian identities are unchanging and primordial, and instead towards attributing the very invention of Indian identity categories such as ‘caste’ to the British.3 Just as critical engagements with Said’s Orientalism were challenging scholars to think beyond binary colonial constructs that divided the colonial imagination of the world, it was also realised that colonial power had to be elucidated beyond a historiography focused on the elite. Thus, the workings of colonial rule were being reexamined through the lens of the subaltern.4 In these histories, the worlds of the oppressed and marginalised, and the critical question of their relation with enlightenment discourses of the colonial modern, were being debated.5 The problematic of indigeneity/ difference and the nature of modernity in the colonial world were thus becoming some of the chief intellectual occupations of historians. Ideas of ‘difference’ and identity were worked out through a variety of analytical tools to make sense of the coloniser-colonised binary. The field of cultural ‘indigeneity’ was fashioned as a volatile one, marked by ambivalence, displacement, refraction and mimicry, using psychoanalytical tropes and post-foundationalist strategies.6 This was not, however, a one-way street. Along with the ‘indigenous’, the ‘European’ was also reconfigured in more nuanced, fluid and processual terms, through the new historiographical category of the imperial.7 Inaugurated by Stoler and Cooper, these ‘new’ imperial histories argued that ‘Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself’.8 Considering all these advances in thinking about identity formation in the colonial encounter, academic historians are often left to wonder: how can it be that so many people continue to believe that their collective group identities, whether ethnic, linguistic, national, racial or religious, are straightforward and uncomplicated, despite massive evidence to the contrary?9 Let us take the case of Indian identity. As we all know, the word

Introduction 3 ‘Indian’, much like the word ‘Hindu’, is an exonym deriving from a toponym referring to people living in the lands to the east of the Indus River.10 Yet, where really was India and who really was Indian? In the early age of European exploration, ‘India’ could be found just about everywhere, and the label ‘Indian’ was applied to people the world over. The Caribbean was optimistically called the ‘West Indies’ by the conquistadors. Native North Americans were beset with the name ‘red Indians’ and the American frontier was known as ‘Indian country’. In Southeast Asia, Europeans eagerly called that region’s island chain Indonesia, literally meaning ‘India islands’ in the Greek, and that region’s inhabitants Indonesian or ‘India islanders’. Much as Edward Said famously argued that the true location of ‘the Orient’ was in the European imagination, and that the idea of the Orient served as a convenient tool in the hands of colonial administrators for bifurcating the world into categories of self versus other, East versus West, coloniser versus colonised and civilised versus primitive, all identities must be understood in reference to difference, and also as products of the imagination. But, whereas ‘Oriental’ was rarely internalised as an identity formation, ‘Indian’ was. The eventual internalisation of the category ‘Indian’ is somewhat impressive, given the strength and range of forces that historically opposed the very concept of this identity formation. Echoing a prevalent idea at the time, Sir John Strachey, a member of the Bengal Civil Service, concluded in 1903, ‘There is no such country’ as ‘India’, and that ‘this is the first and most essential fact about India that can be learned’. Focusing on the geographical, cultural, religious and linguistic diversity of the Indian subcontinent, Strachey tried to convince his readers that ‘India is a name which we give to a great region including a multitude of different countries. There is no general Indian term that corresponds to it . . . The differences between the countries of Europe are undoubtedly smaller than those between the countries of India. Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab’. And, of course, there was Winston Churchill who once quipped that ‘India’ was as much a country as the equator.11 It was not only colonial administrators who denied the coherence of the idea of India, however. This sort of thinking can clearly be found in Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s eventual support of two-nation theory and the founding of Pakistan. ‘India is not a national state, India is not a country, but a sub-continent composed of nationalities’, Jinnah boomed in 1942. Explaining that ‘the differences in India, between the two major nations, the Hindus and the Muslims are a thousand times greater when compared with the continent of Europe’, Jinnah wrote that Hindu and Muslim ‘culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, name and nomenclature, sense of value and proportion, laws and jurisprudence,

4  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti social and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions, outlook on life and of life are fundamentally different nay in many respects antagonistic’.12 It is altogether too easy in these days of growing Hindu nationalism to dismiss the words just quoted above as the sentiments of ‘anti-national’ elements – colonialists and Muslim separatists, for instance. Yet, consider that there is an interesting and problematic parallel here with contemporary postcolonial intellectuals who self-identify as Indian, and nonetheless uphold that group identities including national identities are in large measure imagined and constructed over time. Can this post-structuralist perspective on the nation be not understood as echoing the same sentiment that Reginald Craddock, Home Member of the Government of India under Hardinge and Chelmsford, expressed in 1929, when he wrote that ‘An Indian Nation, if such be possible, has to be created before it can exist’?13 The history of the construction of the idea of India and an Indian identity through the Indian nationalist movement has been extensively documented.14 In this volume, our goal is not to present a broad general outline of the concept of ‘Indianness’, but rather to turn to several particularly interesting and previously unexplored examples of the colonial encounter’s contribution to how complex identities have been imagined, constructed and represented in the Indian context. In fact, our first essays on identity focus not primarily on ‘Indianness’ at all. Instead, they explore the ways in which ‘the British’ and ‘Eurasians’ have been conceived of in the context of colonial India. Our volume opens with the transcript of a lecture by Peter Robb titled ‘Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta’. Peter read this paper on the occasion of his retirement conference, and thinking with it has since then helped us, the editors, to define the topic of and our approach towards this volume, and so we insisted on including it here. The discussion emerges right at the heart of the recent theoretical shifts in the historical examination of the related concepts of the colonial encounter, memory and identity. It explores the interrelationships between space, memory and imperial rule by analysing the messages and inscriptions on epitaphs in a cemetery in 18th-century Calcutta. Robb argues that these tombstone writings remembered the lives of the dead in terms of ideas of private and public virtue, which in turn reflected the desirability of a certain kind of life and character in British socio-cultural thought. This desirability can be read as suggestive of the principles informing institutions, laws and practices of imperial rule. Towards the end of his talk, he discusses the ways in which indigenous currents of thought used ideas of memory and place to subvert and critique the ideological justification of imperialism. He shows how

Introduction 5 these values were adapted as integral to the formation of an indigenous modernity in these colonised contexts. Robb’s thought-provoking lecture opens up a new line of enquiry by demonstrating how death acted as a powerful marker of imperial life, identity and power, making itself available as an ideological resource, useful for contrary formations and purposes. Robb discusses the ways in which the British represented their own impact and power through inscriptions left in the graveyards of early colonial Calcutta and in memorial sites spread throughout North India. Demonstrating the shifting significance of these colonial memorials over time, we are led through a discussion of evolving and selective historical memories. With these issues in mind, it seems that we might return to ponder the point that Pierre Nora had made in the 1980s about the fundamental tension between ‘history’ and ‘memory’. ‘Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition’, wrote Nora. Memory is life, borne by living societies . . . It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived . . . Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again . . . At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it. At the horizon of historical societies, at the limits of the completely historicized world, there would occur a permanent secularization. . . . It operates primarily by introducing doubt, by running a knife between the tree of memory and the bark of history . . .15 Here, we see ‘memory’s valourisation’ in the face of history, with the claim that secularised academic history appears to ride ‘roughshod over particular memories and identities’.16 But are contentious formulations of the past made through colonial and communal memory really the endangered species in need of protection that Nora projects them to be, and if not, what can be the ethical or political ways of engaging with them?17 Robb’s lecture seems to implore the reader to ask how to make sense of a colonial memory that valourises the coloniser – colonial memory carved in stone, which is certainly as selective and as problematic as any other form of social and collective memory. George Orwell famously wrote in his 1934 novel Burmese Days, ‘All Englishmen are virtuous when they are dead’.18 This was in reference to that story’s main character, Flory, who is something of an outcaste from pukkah Anglo-Indian society and who commits suicide after being publicly shamed for his relations with a Burmese

6  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti woman. Through a brilliant use of symbolism, Flory’s constant source of chagrin, a dark blotch of a birthmark on his face that marks his difference from white Europeans and his resemblance to ‘the natives’, fades away upon his death. And so Flory literally becomes whitened upon death, just as his memory is whitewashed by his faithful friend and colonial collaborator, Dr Veeraswamy, who hides the truth of his suicide from the public. Remembrance is sometimes claimed to be ‘a great British virtue’, and British colonial memorials in India claim to reflect on the commendable values held by European gentlemen in India.19 Yet these are certainly dubious sources of historical evidence by which to gauge the virtue of the colonisers. For, as Verdi’s operatic version of Macbeth reminds us, even the most murderous tyrants worry about what will be written on their tombs.20 Thus, essays reflecting on the conflicting ways in which communities have been constructed and remembered in Indian history occupy a central place in the volume. In the second essay, ‘On the political history of Britishness in India: Lord Cornwallis and the early demise of Creole India’, Claude Markovits breaks down the monolithic category of ‘the British’ that often stands as a sort of shorthand for a wide range of actors in South Asian historiography. The article proposes a critique of the binary framework of British versus Indian that has dominated the political history of British India by focusing on the historical construction of ‘Britishness’ in the context of late 18th-century colonialism.21 Apart from a legal and administrative one, the author makes a bold claim that there is no proper political history of Britishness in India. The article challenges us to think differently about the question of Britishness in India as a political category. In particular, Markovits emphasises the importance of the ‘Cornwallisian’ moment (governor-generalship of Lord Cornwallis [1786–1793] and its immediate aftermath) in the colonial encounter, for the emergence of Britishness as a political cum racial category in India that had significant long-term consequences for the political history of India. As a follow-up to Markovits’ article, Valerie Anderson’s essay, ‘Religion and race: Eurasians in colonial India’ contributes to a much underresearched and complex field of enquiry on Eurasians by showing how the category of Eurasian was underpinned by racial anxieties produced in the colonial encounter. She considers the relationship between racial and religious classification for people of mixed European and Indian ancestry during British rule in India, and shows that the official category of ‘Eurasian’ was no simple hybrid of European and Indian identities. Rather, its margins were never decisively defined and inclusion in it was contingent on context, thus leaving the category to be full of confusion and ambivalence. Not all people born to mixed ancestry were considered Eurasian and not all people referred to as Eurasians came from mixed European and Indian ancestry.

Introduction 7 Furthermore, freedom of belief for Eurasians was often restricted by the colonial government. Religion was a prime vector of ruling anxieties. These anxieties articulated themselves in the form of systematic efforts on the part of the British government, society and religious establishment in India to forge a fit between being Eurasian and being Christian. Anderson’s work tells us anecdotally how some Eurasians managed to escape this coercion by choosing to embrace other faiths, while in certain other contexts it shows how such choice was circumscribed by the possibility of controlling socio-economic capital. In most cases, the most pragmatic move was simply to adopt Christianity. The irony here was that within the Christian ecumenical establishment itself, there were several factors that resisted the entry of Eurasians, like their class location within the colonial hierarchy, interdenominational competition and lack of availability of infrastructure to prepare Eurasian priests. Throughout, the article demonstrates how embracing Christianity was a powerful marker of becoming authentically ‘European’ for these communities. Christianity meant not only the practice of essentially religious rituals, but also a more general socialisation in styles of living and moral behaviour considered ‘European’, and therefore superior.22 The volume proceeds to complicate the conceptualisation of identity by taking into account writings that address the interrelationships between caste, gender, religion and memory of the colonial encounter. Today, scholarly consensus points us towards the conclusion that group identity formations are, in Benedict Anderson’s words, ‘imagined communities’, and if communities are imagined, then communal memory (and forgetting) must play a powerful role in the construction of identity.23 Most people think of memory as a personal, psychological phenomenon. Yet, memory can be social, collective and historical as well as individual and personal. Already in the 1930s, Maurice Halbwachs coined the term ‘collective memory’ and noted that memory was something social, something heavily shaped by concepts that came from society. But Halbwachs also assumed that social identities were essentially stable, determined and that it was fundamentally identity that shaped memory rather than the other way around.24 The following two discussions of caste as group identity and their powerful textual representations invariably raise questions about the acts and processes of remembering for the construction of identity in historical context. In his essay, ‘Texts of liminality: reading identity in Dalit autobiographies from Bengal’, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay returns to the relationship between memory and group identity as he observes that autobiography is not pure memory. Emphasising the point that memory is often selective and that amnesia and opinion together often constitute self-telling, Bandyopadhyay elaborates on themes of self-making, community building and

8  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti personal memory in coming to terms with caste discrimination and social hierarchy. He presents two life stories as historical sources to comprehend the social history of a religious movement called Matua, around which the social identity of the Namasudras, a Dalit agricultural caste in colonial East Bengal, was constructed.25 Glimpses from the village household help the reader to understand the religious dynamics of the Namasudra village of Orakandi that cannot be conveniently explained from the point of a simple Hindu or non-Hindu identity. Namasudras stood at the threshold between many layers of religiosity that prevailed in colonial rural Bengal. These Namasudra life stories exemplify crossing structural boundaries at numerous fronts such as modern/non-modern, Hindu/non-Hindu, nationalist/ anti-nationalist, India/Pakistan and so on. But their self-definition remains stuck at the interstices of the most important structural binary of Indian society between the Dalit and the Sabarna or upper caste Hindus. The essay explores the tensions and ambivalence in Dalit identity. In contrast to Bandyopadhyay’s emphasis on the self-understanding of one’s communal identity, Charu Gupta’s essay ‘Paradoxes of victimhood: Dalit women’s bodies as polluted and suffering in colonial North India’ is about upper caste reformists’ understandings of Dalit women’s identities. The essay explores how and why Dalit women came to be overwhelmingly represented as ‘victims’ in these Hindi writings, whereas previously they were seen as ‘polluting’. It offers an insightful critique of caste-patriarchy in early 20th-century North Indian print public sphere, through an analysis of a shift in the form of representation of Dalit women, encapsulated in the metaphorical move from ‘Surpanakha’ to ‘Sabari’. Gupta demonstrates how upper caste reformists’ rhetoric of sympathy and compassion, which painted Dalit women as ‘victims’ (while moving away from previous representations of Dalit women as polluted and evil), failed to critique the structural basis of inequality and remained rooted within the traditional idioms of domination. Gupta’s arguments here are partly inspired by some seminal works of Peter Robb, as he was one of the first historians to draw linkages between Dalit movements and meanings of labour in colonial India. One of the central contentions of Robb’s piece was that social hierarchies persisted through the late colonial period, regardless of changes in moral emphasis of reformers, as these ideational shifts were seldom accompanied with changes in social and economic structures. Gupta’s essay takes us slightly beyond the public domain of socio-economic relations to mirroring ‘Dalit’ suffering by using the methods of emotional representation in literature. She marks the limits of the caste-patriarchal discourse, and argues that by presenting the critique of upper caste patriarchy in the guise of sentiment, sympathy and compassion, the structures of the social were not politicised as the critique remained a discourse of private moral guilt. Moreover, the

Introduction 9 same discourse then painted the ‘ideal’ untouchable woman as dutiful, deferential, subservient and, therefore, worthy of being incorporated within the Hindu fold. This image grew out of the idea of the essentially hapless, silent and subservient victimhood of the woman, who could be transformed into a dutiful, deferential and an ideal reformist object. What is particularly important for us here is that Gupta’s essay traces a genealogy of how one dominant social group’s understanding of a marginal group’s identity changed over time. The essay uses a critique of the ideology of sympathy and sentimentality from other contexts to analyse this shift, and also shows how this was instrumental for a self-definition of the reformists in terms of an ideology of humanitarianism. Essays in this section exemplify that we do not simply retrieve memory from the past. Instead, there is wide consensus that memory is actively constituted in the present.26 Just as history is constantly restructured by contemporary perspectives, so too is social memory shaped by present interests. In South Asia, as in many other regions in the world, both history and memory are all too often deployed in the service of politics, particularly identity politics. The memory of a pre-Islamic golden age is often invoked in Hindutva discourse just as the memory of a pre colonial golden age might be invoked in popular nationalist discourse. In this context, it is sometimes hard to separate myth-making from memory production, and academic historians have increasingly come under fire from cultural and religious nationalists for offering secular and critical analyses of the past. When Hindu nationalists ‘remember’ the medieval era as a time of mass temple desecration or ‘remember’ the erstwhile Babri Masjid as the birthplace of Ram, these are political acts in the project of majoritarian group identity formation as much as they are supposed acts of remembering. Often, this kind of politicised memory in the Indian context crosses well over the border into myth-making, informing as it were the trajectories of contemporary modern history writing. Such claims often leave historians and other professional academics wondering what to do in the face of what seem to them to be spurious constructs of the past that make entirely unwarranted memory claims that can by no means be justified by the available historical evidence. Yet, we must also wonder if it is prudent to emphasise the distinction between ‘spurious memory’ and ‘historical evidence’; in the light of the critique of the truth claims of history as a discipline (an old example might be Hayden White), there has emerged a range of works which propose different ways of imagining the past as a means to produce narratives alternative to, and critical of, the violence of secular and scientific histories.27 In contrast to this desire to memorialise and remember the colonial encounter, contemporary practices in South Asia seem to raise the question:

10  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti why must colonialism always be so urgently and vividly remembered? It seems that between India and Pakistan, almost the only suitable subject for memory studies for many years was partition.28 Forgetting colonialism is as much a part of the nation-building project as is remembering its contributions and iniquities. Sculpture parks filled with colonial monuments now litter the outskirts of major Indian cities, abandoned and neglected since they were transported there decades ago. European gravesites lie in disrepair, with children from neighbouring bastis (slums) playing cricket in the midst of fallen and forgotten imperialists from times of yore, as this book’s frontispiece illustrates. Road and building names are still being changed at the time of writing, and it is near impossible to keep tabs on the number of Mysores being turned into Mysurus.29 While colonial heritage is variously valued, the meanings and memory of particular incidents such as the Calcutta Black Hole tragedy, Amritsar Massacre, the great Bengal Famine and well-preserved marble busts of famous scientists adorning the aesthetic surroundings of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens continue to be powerful symbols of the colonial past. The significance of preserving select colonial artefacts and analysis of particular events, in retrospect, brings out the complexities within evolving historical memory.30 In his essay, ‘Sites of memory and structures of power in North India: Anandamath and Hanumangarhi’, William Pinch discusses two fortified mathas or ‘monastery-fortresses’ as ‘sites of memory’ in the construction of national identity in the wake of colonialism. His chapter builds on Pierre Nora’s framework of les lieux mémoire to explore two sites, one ‘real’ and the other ‘imagined’, as both existing on an ideological continuum of the sacred and both playing a formative role in building the consciousness of Hindu nationalism in contradistinction to its British and Muslim ‘Others’. Both Hanumangarhi in Ayodhya and Anandamath in northern Bengal play important roles in the memory of the war of 1857. Anandamath as a site of memory contains an unambiguous message of religious ‘purification’ for the nation, and Anandamath (the novel) is usually seen as an early expression of a new Hindu ‘extremism’ that would swell into formal Hindu nationalism during the course of the early 20th century. Hanumangarhi, in contrast, was more of a fort than a monastery and served as a major site of Muslim resistance to the British leading up to the war of 1857. Yet, as Pinch argues, despite the major Muslim influence at the site, in recent years Hanumangarhi has been discursively and ideologically appropriated by Hindu nationalists. The interpretive power of selective memory and selective forgetting in shaping understanding of the contested nature of the colonial encounter is relevant to more contemporary concerns relating to environmental conservation and development agendas, as well. Ezra Rashkow’s article

Introduction 11 ‘Dispossessing memory: Adivasi oral histories from the margins of Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, Central India’ situates oral histories of Gond and Kurku Adivasi (so-called tribal or indigenous peoples) experiences with the state in Central India in dialogue with the colonial archive. Since the 1860s, when Bori was established as the first reserve forest in India, and Pachmarhi was established as the summer capital for the British Central Provinces, this area has been the recurrent site of both conservation and development-induced displacement, leading to the marginalisation of local communities and their removal from forests. Oral histories, of course, are collections of memories, and as such are subject to the same fallibilities, erosion and manipulation as other forms of memory. As Rashkow shows in his article, contemporary Adivasis in Pachmarhi who are the subjects of conservation and development-induced displacement, today tend to see the colonial past through rose-tinted glasses. Despite general agreement amongst historians of Central India and ample evidence in the colonial archive that similar processes were affecting their ancestors since the 1860s, Adivasis in Pachmarhi invoke a romanticised image of the colonial past only to contrast it with the post-1947 period, which they have experienced and remembered as a time of unmitigated decline in their access to forests and forest-based livelihoods. The first section of the volume, therefore, reiterates Peter Robb’s analysis of a creation of identity linked to myths of place and history, as much as it stems from ‘rationalisations and shared experiences’ – political, social, economic and cultural.31 In India, ‘the colonial past contributed alongside alternative traditions and initiatives; and colonialism was important, not just as a stimulus, foil and opponent for Indians, but in its constructions of the state’. This understanding leads to questions over some key aspects of inheritance and legacy of the British rule. These include whether ‘traditions, institutions and the order are solely inherited or are a part of British and not Indian history’.32 In answering these questions, we turn our attention to evaluating external influences and their involvement in the processes of change.

The colonial encounter and governance The second section of the volume seeks to relate British colonial categorisations of India to the evolution of the state. It does so by emphasising the complexity of diverse agencies involved in the colonial encounter. The question of agency is explored through multiple linkages within the dynamics of the colonial encounter and colonial governance. These links highlight the various ways in which Peter Robb’s writings on the colonial state have influenced scholarship on colonial institutions and power relations by

12  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti critiquing old notions of centre and periphery and the spread of Western hegemonic concepts of modernity and development. The colonial encounter is not characterised as a confrontation of two a priori worlds, but as a dynamic interaction with occurrences at several macro and micro levels of governance and society.33 The emphasis is not on the colonial process as it emanated from a colonial state, but on principles and practices that distinguished the various stages of an expansionist programme, underlying the changing categories of intervention. The analytical potential of the ‘indigenous’ category not necessarily premised on concepts of hierarchy in the colonial encounter (such as the division between elite and subaltern) offers alternative perspectives. Colonial knowledge and practices, for example, contributed to an Indian experience that was not only borrowed from post-Enlightenment Europe, but also emerged out of what was distinctive to India out of an experience of encounters.34 The analysis takes into account traditions in history writing since 1950 that do not overemphasise ‘the rise of the West’ as the dominant paradigm for relaying diffusionist approaches in non-Western history writing.35 In historical writings on South Asia, similar shifts in analysis appeared in works that attempted to reshape the field of Indian Ocean studies within a context of colonial modernity and the rise of the nation state.36 Such arguments for South Asia align with similar literatures in world history that pay close attention to ‘bundles of relationships’ shaping the complex interplays between different layers of the local and the global agencies. Within this body of world history scholarship, there appeared questions about Europe’s privileged position in both empirical and theoretical accounts of modernity. C. A. Bayly, for instance, argued that during the 19th century, empires played a central role in reshaping material culture and in the constitution of the modern state by instilling new ideas and visions of nations and ethnicities.37 Our study of the role of external influences takes into account not only the impact of institutions, but also pays attention to the ideas and reforms of colonial officials as intrinsic links to the emergence and characteristics of Indian identities. In particular, it raises the problem whether it is possible to recover any unified ‘Indian’ element in these histories, and so retains the historical category of ‘Indian’ primarily for heuristic purposes. Our examination of elements that select and deselect historical memory, and articulations of the Indian ‘social’ and the ‘political’ in response to colonial governance (including the forces of liberalism and modernisation), yields to this problem of agency.38 Put more concretely, agency was distributed and functioned across various sites and networks of power.39 Robb’s writings emphasise the growth and evolution of the state as perhaps the most significant political process between the 18th and the 20th centuries, raising important questions as to how colonial rulers were

Introduction 13 engaged in constructing the nation in parallel with Indian efforts. The second section, therefore, turns to themes that reevaluate Western impact using the lens of the ‘encounter’ at different levels in society, not in generic terms but ‘with influences of specific character and time’. These account for the specific conditions and the precise form of ideas, expectations and decisions. Other covert forms of interactions generated complex social, economic and cultural relations. British colonial categorisations of India are related to the evolution and further expansion of the Indian state. The nature of interventionist politics changed beyond the realm of social and economic apprehensions as British rulers were rethinking the legitimacy of their rule. Thus, governance might take into account Indian criticisms, demands and other kinds of autonomous responses. The responses constituted important markers for pragmatism in statecraft and processes of negotiations. In British India, ‘indeterminate zones of authority’ existed, such as frontier provinces and princely states punctuated as exceptions to absolute sovereignty.40 Richard Barnett’s article, ‘Heroinism and its weapons: women power brokers in early modern Bhopal’, through a vivid portrayal of five generations of women’s rule in the royal family of Bhopal, reflects the cultural, political and psychological autonomy of Indian elites outside British territories. The begams of Bhopal as women power brokers ‘invaded the spaces of opportunity arising in the period between empires’, often by crossing gender boundaries both during a time of relative independence and the later era of British influence and interference. Here, the discussion of colonial agency becomes important in an essay that highlights the context of various interlocking threads of political power, religious norms, sexuality, memory and economic conditions, which together produced the subjectivities of the begams of Bhopal. The flexibility and pragmatism of conciliatory statecraft shows distinctive responses to challenges arising from regional insurgents and the British Raj. The dynamics of regional power relations during colonial rule were entangled with social relations, political-economic structures, religious forms, ethnicity and rivalries that appear more vivid in the accounts of a less-explored princely state of British India. Alex McKay’s frontier study, ‘Changing horses: the administration of Sikkim, 1888–1918’, accounts for the changing forms of governance in Sikkim over the 19th century, highlighting the difference in strategies of governance between two political officers of the British Raj. The essay discusses how two very different British officials exercised their power to shape the ‘structures and processes’ within Sikkim, and how their ideological perspectives and personalities reshaped the state and its relations with the British colonial government. He examines the British annexation of Sikkim in 1888 and searches for any

14  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti inkling of the building of an Indian identity in the kingdom at that time. Considering that, after independence in 1947, Sikkim became an independent nation and that it was not until 1975 that Sikkim was annexed as a state of India, the questions of Sikkim’s relation to the Indian nation and Indian identity are particularly vexed. The transition process in Sikkim was within certain established British colonial parameters, and was thus broadly similar to that which occurred elsewhere on the frontiers of territory directly ruled by the British Government of India. However, there was a distinct shift in the tone of the process after 1908 that clearly reflects individual agency. The essay shows how governance in Sikkim aimed to devise a framework of diplomatic relations with Tibet by creating it as a buffer zone that, in turn, unsettled the process of the generation of an ‘Indian’ nationalistic identity. McKay’s study parallels a similar examination of these issues in the making of an Indian identity in Northeast India, made by Peter Robb in his seminal article that was published in Modern Asian Studies in 1997. While earlier works on political history reflect on the assumption that colonialism in India could be best understood from the level of the formal domain of state building projects, the two studies on regional administration presented here demonstrate the challenges that stemmed from a wide variety of so-called ‘indigenous’ responses.41 The next two essays discuss a broad spectrum of colonial interests in state management that shaped Indian attitudes towards and perceptions of ‘order’. These administrative issues relate to surveillance and the colonial state’s desire to control the subject population. In their essays, Aparajita Mukhopadhyay and Suchetana Chattopadyay exemplify the variability of colonial institutional power relations, addressing the importance of connections between and among different agencies of colonialism; both argue that distinct spheres of influence, expertise and identity were carved out among those entangled in the counter-strategies or contrary impulses that shaped ‘the political’ Indian over much of the 20th century. Aparajita Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Lost in transit? Railway crimes and the regime of control in colonial India’, reassess our understanding of the imposition of colonial order and control on Indian society through the illustrative example of governing infrastructure, surveillance and an underworld of resistance. Hitherto, it was largely assumed that the colonial administration brought ‘order’ to Indian society by forcefully pacifying it and imposing control from above. In contrast, Mukhopadhyay critically appraises the colonial ‘regime of regulation’ by questioning an important element in existing historiography that order and control were sought primarily by restricting mobility and introducing surveillance mechanisms. By underlining contrary impulses through the prism of railway crimes committed

Introduction 15 against ordinary travelling passengers, the author interrogates the scale, nature and the chronological framework of the ‘Pax Brittanica’ and provides a novel index to gauge the reception of colonial law and order. The colonial state was not self-reliant, having to accommodate Indian conditions and priorities. Robb’s account of liberalism, for example, shows the liberal rhetoric built on Indian expectations was constrained as it outpaced the actual needs of the state to maintain a difference between rulers and ruled. The constraints of the liberal rhetoric are relevant to a discussion on the paradoxes of imperial liberalism. Suchetana Chattopadhyay’s ‘From London to Calcutta: the ‘Bolshevik’ outsider and imperial surveillance, 1917–1921’ studies the organisation of anti-Bolshevik surveillance in urban spaces such as Calcutta that was imposed upon and adapted to a colonial climate with distinct racial, class-orientated and gendered dimensions. During the intensifying crisis of empire in the years after World War I, the Bolshevik challenge was depicted in wholly xenophobic terms. Thus, surveillance, branched out of imperial roots, also embodied the paradoxes of liberal imperialism. The colonial encounter described here involved the circulation of ideas, practices and personnel between India and the West, including outside of Britain’s sphere of political influence. This essay addresses the need to explore the dynamics of colonial governance beyond their immediate borders of control, and leads the reader to look for transnational understandings of colonial encounters and their impacts.

The colonial encounter and ‘improvement’ Robb’s interest in the institutions and practices that formed the basis of ‘liberal imperialism’, its agenda of modernisation and progress for India is not in their instrumentality, but rather in their diverse manifestations. It is as part of this broader concern to delineate the role of colonial knowledge in India’s development that a whole generation of historians spent their intellectual energies in writing histories of the transformation of agrarian economies, bringing out at the same time the unevenness and contrarieties of this process in different regions of British India in the 19th century.42 There emerged, entangled with these histories, some seminal works on the ideational basis of these processes. These works opened up concepts of the new economic arrangements that were inaugurated in the 19th century, showing linkages between metropolitan ideas and colonial practices. For example, in his seminal work on the agrarian history of Bihar, Robb developed a dynamic framework of analysis to make sense of the profound social transformations in Bihar’s countryside unleashed by the tenancy legislations of the colonial state since the middle of the 19th century.43 He examined legislative debates, European political-economic ideas

16  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti about ‘improvement’ and practices of governance that led to changes in the nature of commercialisation of the regional economy. Sayako Kanda’s essay, ‘Competition or collaboration? Importers of salt, the East India Company and the salt market in Eastern India, c. 1780– 1836’, shows how the analytical framework of the colonial encounter can be used to gauge intricate regional power relations by looking at the role of indigenous agencies in brokering trade. It brings into question British revenue collection as the prime mover of the colonial economy. Kanda shows that after the English East India Company established the salt monopoly in Eastern India in 1772, salt became its second largest revenue source. The Company did not directly depend on intermediaries such as revenue farmers in the collection of salt revenues after the 1780s, but its high-price policy itself incorporated the ability of various indigenous merchants and the market that the Company formed to raise revenues. Moreover, the ability of merchants and the market formation were also utilised to suppress illicit actions, which was an integral part of revenue collection. It can be said that such dependency in the collection of salt revenue was ‘to an extent just another quasi-feudal response by a weak state’, as Peter Robb stated on the permanent settlement of the land revenues in Bengal 1793.44 However, as the salt revenues declined from the late 1820s, the Company in 1836 had to abandon the high salt price policy by which it had successfully maintained large revenues. Unlike its predecessors, which have focused on the pressure from Britain to explain this change, this chapter attaches much more importance to diverse internal factors, particularly the role of salt imported from the Coromandel Coast by the Company in the monopoly system. Kanda’s study reiterates the need to broaden the economic discourse of commercialisation through a critical reflection on ‘collaboration’ and its impact on local production. In particular, Robb argued that collaboration was needed because of a weak administrative structure of the Company state, lack of knowledge of the complex social relations on land and resilience of locally dominant social forces.45 But he also indicated the presence of an active will on the part of the Company state in the early 19th century to transform agrarian conditions along the lines of capitalist ‘improvement’. Kanda’s chapter charts the changing relationship between the Company and merchants and the market. The changes reflected the growing administrative capacity of the state that gradually expanded the revenue base and enabled the state to ‘promote the trade of others by general improvements’. Evidently, Robb’s interpretations on collaboration with local forces in the field of agrarian history had a far greater analytical purchase, in relation to prerogatives of state expansion in other areas of improvement involving indigenous knowledge and roles. In addition to political manoeuvres,

Introduction 17 contemporary dialogues for tolerance and mutual understanding have called for a reevaluation of ‘civilisational’ encounters that inform multipolar discourses on modernity. The discussion is relevant to Robb’s historical analyses of state responsibility for progress, extending it not only to structures, but also to language and consciousness and the significance of cultural perspectives for an evaluation of colonial legacy. The state initiatives in the communication of knowledge for the purposes of progress and ‘improvement’ such as in education and scientific agriculture were considerably shaped by endogenous influences and indigenous actors. The essays rounding up this section establish the significance of such changes for understanding aspects of the legacy of British rule in India by specifically focusing on the role of ‘indigenous agency’. The contention between European and indigenous categories was pronounced in the field of education, and is often depicted as simplistic opposition, as in the case with the introduction of Western education after the 1830s. Relations within this domain of state control have typically been understood as ranging from a total negation of one by the other to negotiation and accommodation between the two, to the transformation of both. In 1835, Thomas Macaulay infamously endorsed English education for advancing knowledge and instruction among Indians, calling for the formation a hybrid ‘class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ and ‘who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern’.46 But the impact of Western education was not restricted to the spread of English, or ‘Englishness’, alone. On the contrary, as Sumit Sarkar has argued, the impact was more in the realm of ‘the vastly enhanced importance of formal education’.47 Two chapters complete the section and follow on experiments with ‘improvement’ reflecting on a model of circulation of knowledge and practices that question the imposition of ‘Western knowledge’ on a different epistemic universe. Avril Powell’s essay, ‘Challenging the 3Rs: kindergarten experiments in colonial Madras’, discusses the colonial encounter at the level of childhood development, focusing on early debates over universal education and the state of vernacular instruction. Recent scholarship on Indian education in the colonial period has critiqued the adoption of the British elementary school model with its emphasis on teaching the ‘3Rs’ and attendant cramming from textbooks, constant testing and formal classroom discipline and punishment. This chapter shows that even from within government officialdom, alternative systems were proposed and implemented. The focus is on some experiments initiated by an inspectress of government girls’ schools in Madras who advocated adopting the pedagogy and practice for pre-primary children of the German educationist, Friedrich Froebel.

18  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti Froebel’s ‘child-centred’ philosophy was dismissed by his critics as mere ‘play’, conflicting with ethos and practice in both government and indigenous schools. Inspectress Isabel Brander, nevertheless, elicited government support in the 1880s to introduce her ‘Indianised’ kindergarten methods into some new infant classes, disseminating pedagogical advice through her own teachers’ manuals, journal articles and lectures in English and Tamil. Brander’s initiatives led not only to the introduction of a secular form of ‘Home Education’ for Hindu women, but also to a move away from formal classroom settings for young Indian children and towards a period of Froebel experiments in the alternative pedagogy of kindergartens. Similar to formal interventions in education, institutional governance in other areas such as science takes into account the mechanisms of knowledge production, diffusion and reception in the countryside and linkages and network of patrons steered by new means of communication and spread of knowledge. These concerns arise in Peter Robb’s work on rural linkages and ‘improvement’ of the peasantry.48 His writings on rural history and the ‘meanings of agriculture’ in particular emphasise the relevance of colonial knowledge networks.49 Robb’s work on rural links unravels how the sites and bearers of rural and agricultural knowledge (individuals, groups and institutions) were connected to each other.50 He is also interested to see how these connections spread to the non-rural world, how they influenced each other and how these knowledge bearers shaped agricultural development.51 One key aspect of dissecting the binaries in the colonial encounter is, therefore, to understand causalities and motives of the actors engaged in strategic areas of conflicting interests to govern and ‘improve’. In this context, we may ask: to what extent did the conditions of the natural environment influence opinions of the public, experts/scientists and the government? Sanjukta Ghosh’s chapter reflects on a ‘problematic relationship’ between environment and economy, by looking into the ways in which colonial institutions deployed scientific knowledge and ideas, to make profitable use of natural resources.52 In recent years, a royal visit to India’s organic seed farm Navdanya (also known as Bija Vidyapeeth: school of the Seed/Earth University)53 revealed the on-going differences between Western interests in scientific management of nature and those of the agroecological activists committed to resolving global food insecurities. India’s Navdanya is based on an ideological model of food security research that valourises holistic knowledge in seed conservation and reinforces environmental debates along the binaries of tradition and modernity. A key outcome of such contemporary polarised debates is to fuel misunderstandings over the role and position of indigenous knowledge, often designated as traditional, lacking in empirical strength and scope for innovation. Similar

Introduction 19 concerns surfaced for explaining agricultural change and development in colonial society – a discourse of science replaced a heterogeneous indigenous worldview in agricultural practice. These developments are studied differently in Ghosh’s essay based on two broad interrelated themes on British control over tropical resources – first, with reference to the agrarian institutional history of the Pusa farm in Bihar (1905), which represented progressive state intervention in agricultural experiments during the early decades of 20th-century expansions in the frontiers of scientific knowledge. The second is the impact of state-controlled green manure experiments, delineating the status of indigenous knowledge within the contextual motives of progressive governance.

Memory, identity and the colonial encounter These essays on the colonial encounter, therefore, distinguish themselves from previous studies that dwelled on processes that emanate from the exploits of a colonial state. Essays in this volume also do not reaffirm the conventional view of a state-society divide. Rather, this divide is interrogated by exploring, through multiple linkages, the narrative histories of different agencies operating within the dynamics of the colonial encounter. Our volume also comes at a time of renewed scholarly interest in the legacy of colonial/imperial governance. In recent years, the desire to explore the nature and consequences of India’s modernity has sparked an interest in reevaluating the legacy of British rule, with scholarship asking how colonial heritage, knowledge traditions, ideas, practices and their impact in shaping identity questions have been valued and remembered. There has been a general shift to move away from a broad analysis of state policies and institutions to studying their impact on the lives of individuals or on particular social strata and public responses. Pierre Nora’s monumental, seven-volume work Les Lieux de Mémoire has been a pillar of influence for works that study the interplay between personal memory and collective memory to reinforce national identity.54 Our volume seeks to depart from a shared, overarching and consensual lieux de mémoire to highlighting the experience of empire-building, anti-colonial struggles and decolonisation that capture the complexity of public memory, ambivalence of collective identity and the varied legacy of British rule in India. Memory studies constitute a tool of analysis to help uncover the broad spectrum of different agencies operating in the matrix of power relations, personal realms and informal spaces. Themes relating to memory, identity and the colonial encounter are interconnected by multiple subjectivities, emerging also from a broad and critical public sphere during British rule. Hence, the framework of memory in this volume is not used to valourise

20  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti alternative histories. Using examples such as Cornwallis, Dalit autobiographies, the iconography of Surpanakha, the role of political officers in Sikkim, the begams of Bhopal, the legacies of Isabel Brander and Howard, we explore the significance of individuals enmeshed in wider connections. Histories of communities such as the Eurasians, indigenous groups including traders and Adivasis and distinct political and social strata such as the Bolshevik followers and criminals, all provide a broad interpretative overview of how attitudes, responses and contestations have shaped the social and the political in the process of empire-building. Similarly, recent shifts in the use of literary and material evidence – memorials, autobiographies and conservation of monuments as heritage sites – provide a new entry point for exploring the discursive layers of colonial relations. Drawn together, the essays help us to understand a multitude of actors forming the core of the historical analyses and interpretation of the processes of state and empire-building. These allow room for dismantling of stereotyped images, such as the peasant, Adivasi and Dalit, by factoring in various ingredients of rule and responses. The two sections of the volume serve a common purpose of showcasing the importance of the colonial encounter as a framework for studying historical processes of change and continuity while identifying how the past perpetuates and influences India, even to this day. The colonial encounter impacted political, socioeconomic and cultural relations, influenced actions and created space for critical reflection, thereby showcasing how Indians were both empowered and disempowered. However, when colonial historical relations are reduced to memories and identities, there is invariably some risk of impressionistic understanding of cultural categories.55 The two sections of the volume conjoin instead to incorporate the analytical space for memory, ambiguity, negotiations, contingency and agency – pointers to contradictions and complexities in historical relations. Just as we do not want to treat memory as a stand-alone concept, we do not want to treat identity as an autonomous entity; thus we highlight the importance of integrating individual sensibilities, collective memories, shared experiences and socio-cultural history with a broader perception of colonialism.56 Although knowledge and communication networks are important markers to analyse integrative histories of memory and identity under colonial rule, methodologically the volume seeks a balance by emphasising empirical research to inform theoretical insights in narratives of transformation. Hence, memory and identity are treated as evolving categories, produced by a variety of colonial actors as well as by different mechanisms of communication such as texts and material relics. These indices also show how narratives interpreted, appropriated and translated take the form of actions and attitudes, reiterating the contextual and contingent roles of all colonial

Introduction 21 actors and agencies. The volume shows how knowledge and communication networks could be put to use as pliable resources to mobilise the past to speak for the present. This plasticity, we argue, can be accounted for by introducing a more dynamic understanding of the encounter that retains the necessity for understanding grand structures and their particular reiterations. Our approach, therefore, makes room for analytical mobility without giving up to unbounded ideas about colonial impact. The volume raises questions for future research – as to how memory and identity feed into the production of new narratives or the transformation of existing ones. Some of the essays indicate that in contrast to a desire to memorialise and remember the colonial encounter, contemporary practices in India seem to forget colonialism, which is as much a part of the nationbuilding project as is remembering its legacy. The aim here is to create a space for flexible dialogue on modern Indian identity and categories as contextualised in the colonial encounter and its nuanced memory, a space that recaps the cautionary words of Peter Robb: As 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. There is no analytical contradiction therefore between long-term civilisational continuities and emerging forms of ‘constructed’ identity.57

Notes 1 Peter Robb, Liberalism, Modernity and the Nation, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 2. Here, in one of his later works, Robb begins directly by stating that his intention is to examine ‘India’s encounter with colonial economy and government, insofar as it affected identities’ – an exhortation which appears to resonate perfectly with the concerns of our volume. Interestingly, in thinking about the nature of this encounter, Robb anecdotally compares it to the supervisor-student relationship. The style and substance of this metaphor (of a complex intimacy) indicate and anticipate the direction of his most recent works, where he talks about the formation of emotions, sensibilities and identities in the imperial context. 2 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 3 See, for instance, Bernard Cohn, ‘Census Social Structure and Objectification’, in Bernard Cohn (ed.), An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988; Nick Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 4 See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983 and Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 1, New

22  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982. The irony of the Subaltern Studies project in this context of critiquing dyadic logic, of course, is that in attempting to excavate the consciousness of subordinated classes previously ignored in mainstream colonial and nationalist historiography, the project itself rested on a set of conceptual binaries, dividing all of society into one of two camps: the elite versus the subaltern. 5 Two classic works are Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986, and Dipesh Chakrabarti, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 6 See Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, and Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. 7 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeoisie World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 1. A review of this historiographical development can be found in Stephen Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader, London: Routledge, 2010. The imperial circulations of the concept of ‘culture/indigeneity’, and its entanglements with the formation of global capitalism, is found in Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. This work foregrounds the critical theoretical need to join political economy and culture in studies of empire. 8 C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, London: Blackwell, 2004. 9 The concern with identity in South Asian historiography has been longstanding. Consider for example, Peter Robb (ed.), Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History Presented to Professor K.A. Ballhatchet, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. In this book, several essays raise the conceptual questions of identity and difference. Robb notes that an interdisciplinary approach will be very productive, especially one that takes some lessons from the recent turn towards deconstruction and critical theory. Hence, he talks about bringing together history and sociology or even history and literary analysis. This shows that he takes into consideration the constructivist turn seriously, without abandoning the older concern of historical objectivity. As he notes, ‘The perception that difference is both contingent and empirical, as well as constructed, provides an agenda for this volume’ (p. 5, emphasis added). The volume talks about the creation of identities and their changing forms through encounters: ‘Identities, in which versions of history play such a large part, are constantly unfolding or focusing under the influence of a whole range of agents and commentators’ (p. 9). Traversing an amazing diversity of themes, like conversion, caste in the Sri Lankan society, midwifery, plague, print-culture and others, the book comments on the nature of the colonial encounter: ‘. . . the heterogeneity of Indian responses, the mismatch between some of them and colonial policies, and the extent to which selective aspects were adapted to local purposes’ (p. 12). Peter ends his introduction by emphasising the need to not privilege any one version, perspective or representation in understanding Indian society – a project that our volume stands for in its commitment to breaking binaries and questioning fixities.

Introduction 23 10 Originally called the Sindhu River in Sanskrit, the S-sound was dropped in the ancient Greek and Latin and the people referred the river as Indos; an aspirated H was subsequently added by the Persians and the region later referred to as Hindustan by the Mughals. Whereas previously just about anyone living in the land of Hindustan could be referred to as Hindu, sometime in the late 19th century, the postfix ‘-ism’ was created in English and a newly coined name for a world religion called ‘Hinduism’ arose. 11 Strachey, India: Its Administration & Progress, London: MacMillan, 1903, p. 2; Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness, London: Hambledon Continuum, 2001, p. 129. 12 As quoted in Naveed S. Sheikh, The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 83, and Mahomed Ali Jinnah, Writings of the Quaid-e-Azam, Lahore: Progressive Books, 1976, p. 40. 13 Cited in Peter Robb, ‘Muslim Identity and Separatism in British India: The Significance of M.A. Ansari’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1991, 56(1): 116. 14 Partha Chatterjee (1986) asks if nationalist thought in the colonial world is a derivative discourse. For other more recent works on identity formation through the nationalist movement, see Madhusree Dutta, Flavia Agnes and Neera Adarkar (eds), The Nation, the State, and Indian Identity, New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 1996; Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s: Strategies of Identity-Building, Implantation and Mobilisation (with Special Reference to Central India), New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999; and Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 15 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 1989, 26: 7–24. 16 Alan Megill, ‘History, Memory, Identity’, History of the Human Sciences, 1998, 11(3): 38, 46. 17 For an evaluation of Nora’s framework in colonial history, see the essays in Indra Sengupta (ed.), Memory, History, and Colonialism: Engaging With Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts, London: German Historical Institute, 2009. 18 George Orwell, Burmese Days, London: Harper & Brothers, 1934, p. 295. 19 See, for instance, Patrick French, ‘The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War by Yasmin Khan – Review’, The Guardian, 23 July 2015. 20 Macbeth’s aria: Pietà, rispetto, amore, /Conforto a’dì cadenti, /Ah! non spargeran d’un fiore /La tua canuta età. /Nè sul tuo regio sasso /Sperar soavi accent; /Ah! sol la bestemmia, ahi lasso! /La nenia tua sarà. Libretto: Francesco Maria Piave and Giuseppe Verdi, ‘Pietà, rispetto, amore’, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3 (1847). Thanks to Anne Bogart and Kelley Rourke of Glimmerglass Opera for helping locate this aria. 21 In doing so, Markovits advances beyond many historiographical points about Britishness made over the last several decades. See, for instance, Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, The Journal of

24  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti British Studies, 1992, 31(4): 309–329 and Paul Ward, Britishness Since 1870, London: Routledge, 2004. The narrative of ‘Britishness’ existing in direct binary opposition to the ‘Other’ continues to hold purchase, especially as the focus of academic critiques. See Heather Jane Smith, ‘Britishness as Racist Nativism: A Case of the Unnamed “Other” ’, Journal of Education for Teaching, 2016, 42(3): 298–313. 22 One other recent article focuses on the subject of Anglo-Indians and religion, but takes quite a different course from Anderson, focusing on present issues. See Robyn Andrews, ‘Christianity as an Indian Religion: The AngloIndian Experience’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2010, 25(2): 173– 188. For some recent advances in general historiography on Anglo-Indian and Eurasian communities, see L. Mijares, ‘ “You Are an Anglo-Indian?” Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2003, 38(2): 125–145; A. Blunt, ‘Collective Memory and Productive Nostalgia: AngloIndian Homemaking at McCluskieganj’, Environment and Planning D, 2003, 21(6): 717–738; C.J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833, Richmond, VA: Curzon, 1996; and, of course, Anderson’s own recent book: Valerie Anderson, Race and Power in British India: Anglo-Indians, Class and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. 23 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983. 24 Alan Megill, ‘History, Memory, Identity’, History of the Human Sciences, 1998, 11(3): 44. 25 Self-definition has certainly been part of the historic battle for rights and dignity in the Dalit community since the late colonial period. Formerly described as ‘untouchables’ in English, these communities have collectively chosen to self-identify as Dalit, literally meaning ‘the oppressed’ or ‘the downtrodden’. Rather than being reminded of their stigma and their shame, members of the community who popularised this nomenclature consciously chose to remind the so-called forward caste Sabarna society that they are the oppressors, the people who are keeping them down. 26 Amos Funkenstein, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness’, History and Memory, 1989, 1(1): 9. 27 Hayden White, ‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory’, History and Theory, 1984, 23(1): 1–33. 28 Issues surrounding memory have preoccupied the field of partition studies, but not much else in the historiography of modern South Asia. Since the mid-1990s, partition events figure prominently in works such as Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998. For two of the more famous works in this genre, see Suvir Kaul, The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002; and Gyan Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Beyond partition, one important example of how memories have been studied in the Gandhian non-violent nationalist movement is found in Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Although our work does not particularly deal with

Introduction 25 the memory of events, it is important to observe that, as Amin writes, ‘the master saga of nationalist struggles is built around the retelling of certain well-known and memorable events’ (p. 3). 29 See Paul M. McGarr, ‘ “The Viceroys Are Disappearing From the Roundabouts in Delhi”: British Symbols of Power in Post-Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 2015, 49(3): 787–831. 30 Pandey in Remembering Partition has a somewhat different stance from his previous work on The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1991), by taking into account the role of various South Asian actors in contesting community boundaries and a pluralistic understanding of history and identity in South Asia. Similar shifts can be seen among the Dalits striving to gain political identity during the period in Ramnarayan S. Rawat, ‘Partition Politics and Acchut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled Castes Federation and Dalit Politics in UP, 1946–48’, in Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory; the Afterlife of the Division of India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, pp. 111–139. 31 Romila Thapar argues for a similar interplay of ideas and concepts in the shaping of complex cultures and heritage in a keynote lecture delivered at SOAS South Asia Institute/Presidency University conference on ‘Heritage and History in South Asia’, celebrating the centenary of SOAS University of London. Monday 5 September 2016. www.soas.ac.uk/south-asia-insti tute/events/heritage-and-history-in-south-asia/file116739.pdf. 32 Peter Robb, ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s’, Modern Asian Studies, 1997, 31(2): 245–283, 247n3. 33 C.A. Bayly’s analysis of the spread of western ideas shows that non-western people not only adapted these to their own traditions that served their own purposes, but also produced powerful new hybrids capable of challenging western dominance. Bayly posits this argument to criticise Edward Said’s framework in Orientalism that over-emphasises European construction of knowledge over non-Europeans in his ‘The Second British Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. v: Historiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 15. 34 Such a view comes close to what R. Bin Wong has argued for: that ‘we should exceed the limits of historical explanations derived from European experiences’ by exploring ‘[t]he plurality of historical pasts’ and expanding ‘the capacities of social theory through a more systematic grounding in multiple historical experiences’. See R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. 35 Important diversions from this model can be found in the body of works on the integration of silk routes and religion in the integration of Eurasia. Similarly, Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean are connected into a highly interactive system from the late 15th century through to the early 19th century. 36 K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History From the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Sugata Bose, for example, stressed the endurance of transoceanic connections into the early 20th century and the important role of various non-European elites in creating expansive political and cultural

26  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti networks across the ocean. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 37 We regret that this volume was being prepared at a time when Prof. C.A. Bayly passed away. His works on global dimensions in South Asian history give impetus to our analysis of the ‘colonial encounter’. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, for instance, shows the importance of a network approach in the colonial history of intelligence gathering. 38 The complexities of what Scott calls ‘colonial governmentality’, following Foucault, produces the ‘social’ in modern South Asia. See David Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’, Social Text, 1995, 43: 191–220. 39 One of Peter Robb’s earlier edited volumes, Rural India: Land, Power and Society Under British Rule, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, deals with the conceptual task of breaking binaries by examining the connections that Indian agriculture, peasants and villages had with the dense networks of social and economic life in the wider world. He suggests: ‘. . . we might ask what does the dual economy mean when one and the same cultivator grows millets for consumption, sugar for local trade, and cotton and oilseeds for the international market . . . How complete is the division between urban and rural when few economic or social activities are restricted to one arena or the other, and when the same trading, credit, and social or religious networks pervade both’ (p. 3). His study of the agrarian world presents a contradictory, overlapping and fragmentary form of the ‘social’. 40 Peter Robb, ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s’, Modern Asian Studies, 1997, 31(2): 245–283. 41 For an account of indigenous roles in administrative practices, see Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 42 Some of the pioneering works from this perspective are Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, London: Clarendon Press, 1959; Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, Paris: Mouton, 1963; and William J. Barber, British Economic Thought and India 1600–1858: A Study in the History of Development Economics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Some important recent approaches in Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Martha Mclaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance, Ohio: Aakron Press, 2001; Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010; and Andrew Sartori, Liberalism and Empire: An Alternative History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 43 Peter Robb, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 and British Rule in India, London: Curzon Press, 1997, p. 102. Eugene Irschick’s study of South Indian agrarian society has a similar analytic. Irschick insists that the process of reconstruction of this society in the colonial period involved exchange of ideas and practices that cannot

Introduction 27 be categorised as either ‘western’ or ‘indigenous’. He argues that both were so intimately woven into each other that it is impossible to locate authorship. Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India 1795–1895, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 44 Robb, Ancient Rights, pp. 66–67. 45 Robb reiterated the need to balance colonial relations by critically engaging with David Washbrook. Both argued that collaborationist strategies marked the relationship between law and agrarian society in the first half of the 19th century. Also see David A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 1981, 15(3): 649–721. 46 T.B. Macaulay, ‘Minute on Education 2 February 1835’, IOR V/27/860/1, p. 115. 47 Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India1880s–1950s – Environment, Economy, Culture, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2014, p. 41. 48 Peter Robb, ‘British Rule and Indian “Improvement” ’, The Economic History Review, 1981, 34(4): 509; Also see ‘Bihar, the Colonial State and Agricultural Development in India, 1880–1920’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1988, 25(2): 205–235; Agrarian Structure and Economic Development: Landed Property in Bengal and Theories of Capitalism in Japan, London: SOAS Occasional Papers in Third-World Economic History, 1992, no. 4: 1–23; Ancient Rights and Future Comfort: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, and British Rule in India, London: Curzon, 1997. 49 Peter Robb, Rural South Asia: Linkages, Change and Development, London: Curzon, 1983; (with Kaoru Sugihara and Haruka Yanagisawa), Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India: Japanese Perspectives, Richmond: Curzon, 1996; Meanings of Agriculture: Essays in South Asian History and Economics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. 50 See Peter Robb, ‘Peasants’ Choices? Indian Agriculture and the Limits of Commercialization in Nineteenth-Century Bihar’, The Economic History Review, 1992, 45(1): 97–119. 51 Peter Robb, ‘Town and Country: Economic Linkages and Political Mobilization in Bihar in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries’, in John L. Hill (ed.), The Congress and Indian Nationalism: Historical Perspectives, London: Curzon, 1991, pp. 158–191. 52 Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj, 1857–1905, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995; Roy Macleod and Deepak Kumar (eds), Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, New Delhi: Sage, 1995. 53 Prince Charles visited Navdanya Biodiversity Conservation farm in organic farming in village Ramgarh in Doon Valley, India, on 7 November 2013. See www.navdanya.org/news/395-press-release-hrh-prince-charles-princeof-whales-visits-navdanyas-biodiversity-conservation-farm-a-earth-uni versity (accessed on 21 September 2015). Charles’s visit and support for organic farming symbolises a sidelined scientific tradition. See Gregory A. Barton, ‘Albert Howard and the Decolonisation of Science: From the Raj to Organic Farming’, in Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge (eds), Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800–1970, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 180.

28  Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti 54 Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (3 vols), New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–8. 55 Such a possibility is contrasted with formalised and institutional history emerging from Sanjay Seth, ‘The Code of History and Non-Western Pasts: Does Historiography Travel’, paper presented at the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Post-Colonial Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 12 October 2016. 56 Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History provides a similar slant of interpretation. 57 Peter Robb, ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s’, Modern Asian Studies, 1997, 31(2): 245–246.

Part 1

Memory and identity I  Colonial memory

1 Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta Transcript of a lecture by Peter Robb1

Pierre Nora made a distinction between real memory, ‘borne by living’ communities, and the ceaselessly reinvented traditions of modern societies. In the current ‘acceleration of history’, he argued, memory’s real environments are being destroyed until only certain sites embody a sense of historical continuity. These are lieux instead of milieux, places where memories are consciously rather than unconsciously preserved as a product of modernity. He regarded real memory as the ‘secret’ of those ‘newly awakened . . . by colonial violation’ and of the internally colonised with ‘little or no historical capital’. Fundamental objections might be made to his contrast between memoryladen and dynamic times or communities. Also, it is obvious that there is nothing specifically modern about memorials that carry messages. On one hand, in his voluminous Lieux de Mémoire, Nora was attempting a history of French culture through its artefacts and relics, both concrete and abstract. He has been criticised for painting too favourable a picture of France’s history. On the other, a major interest when linking memory and place is the process of selection that is involved.2 Many studies have shown how memorials both take possession of places and define their nature: lands of heroes or martyrs; lands won by one people or defended by another. In Simon Schama’s phrase, landscape carries ‘the freight of memory’.3 Certainly, Indian places are demarcated by memory and Indian memories by places. Natal villages play a large part in families and life cycles. The caste system, however contingent in practice, represents a remembered scheme of status and controls, strongly connected to time and also to space (whether in land rights or by seclusion, pollution and distance). India’s landscape is overlaid by pilgrimage sites, temples, shrines and mausolea that invest it with memory. Nonetheless, these are no unchanging legacy. Memorials, like places, need interpretation and are shaped by point of view. Take the famous Boitacannah (Baithakhana) tree of Calcutta (Kolkata), at the east end of Bow

32  Peter Robb Bazar. The diarist and surveyor Richard Blechynden had it cut down in 1800 while rebuilding the Circular Road. It had stood in the middle of the street with a brick surround, and it took eight days to remove. Six days after it was gone, Blechynden received a message from Wellesley, the governor-general: ‘He should let the tree alone if it had not already been felled; Indians had complained it was venerated by them’. Charles Wyatt, the architect of Government House and Wellesley’s go-between in such matters, jokingly said that the surveyors would be called to account for this sacrilege. Wellesley was then told that the tree’s particular significance for Bengalis was that Siraj ud-Daulah was supposed to have sat under it while directing the siege of Calcutta in 1756. Wellesley then decided he was glad it was down.4 Presumably, no one mentioned to him the other abiding legend, namely that (as the name suggests) the tree marked an old resting place for traders, a caravanserai perhaps, and that it was there that Job Charnock, with his back to the salt marshes, had picked out the site for the settlement of Calcutta. The tree’s memorial resonance was already ambiguous in 1709, when the Italian priest, Matteo Ripa, claimed it had special significance for Europeans. Having described a visit to a fine church in the town with tombs in the shape of ‘very neat little houses’, he went on in the same breath to describe a ‘Tamarind tree, which grows there . . . so famous among the English that, when they return to London and speak of what they have seen, they make a special mention’ of it. Of course, it is said to have been a banyan, ficus religiosa, such as the one under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, and not tamarindus indica with its aromatic seeds. Subliminally, perhaps, Father Ripa thought it plausible for the English to be impressed by a memento of the lucrative spice trade rather than by one of ancient religion.5 Nowadays, whatever the tree’s significance in the past and its continuing phantom existences in memory, the site where it stood is pretty much subsumed into Sealdah railway station. Meanwhile, the Circular Road later bore the name of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, the celebrated scientist; and Bow Bazar – the street, at least – was renamed after Bipin Behari Ganguly, a less distinguished Congress politician. This evolution represents history playing upon memory, of which an even more familiar example is the politicised, but often random and inconsistent memorialising of the Indian revolt of 1857/1858. In Delhi, Nayanjot Lahiri has argued,6 rebels targeted British symbols and locations; but in reply, the Company’s soldiers looted indiscriminately and the British government, while sometimes focusing their vengeance, mostly generalised the sites and agents of rebellion through their widespread confiscations and demolition. European civilian casualties were memorialised only in the churches, notably in St Stephen’s Memorial Church (1867), and,

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 33 as would be expected for this time, there was no consolidated war cemetery for British soldiers. Some of the most notable graves were provided with only terse epitaphs, though one regiment’s memorial referred to the ‘glorious sacrifice to their country’ and the defence of the honour of ‘their beloved Queen and country in avenging their murdered countrymen and women’ and ‘crushing a mutiny unrivalled for its atrocities’.7 Thereafter, many were the indications over several decades of the continuing British uses of the ‘Mutiny’ and a continual wish to reinforce its message. The army was ‘proactive’ in providing markers of the defensive and offensive actions by Company forces, and a memorial landscape was created, quickly implying tourist trails. Appropriate to the times, copious inscriptions on the Delhi Mutiny Memorial (1863) celebrated victory rather than sacrifice, while privileging officers over men and ‘Englishmen’ over Indians. Later, rather different messages emerged in the attempts to legitimise British rule by linking it to Delhi as a capital in the durbahs of 1877, 1903 and 1911, and then the transfer of the seat of government. The ‘Mutiny’ still played a large part, but alongside gradual normalisations, indicated for example by archaeological restoration and the reopening of mosques.8 After independence, some Indian families demanded recognition of their ‘sacrifice’ and the restoration of lands confiscated after 1857; but (a case of memory overtaken by events) ‘no transfers took place because the lands were legally in the possession of other proprietors’. At the present day in Delhi, several memorials and cemeteries created by the British remain, supported voluntarily as elsewhere, but others have disappeared, though more as a result of the uncontrolled growth of population than of deliberate policy and also from insufficient British government funds. Meanwhile, the ‘Indian government has chosen to memorialize the revolt . . . by appropriating British memorials’, adding new ‘inscriptions’ to ‘counter’ their original narratives.9 Hence, there are national memorials to the ‘freedom struggle’, appropriate to a capital, but (says Lahiri) little by way of local commemoration: ‘the rich history of Delhi’s revolt has been rendered invisible’.10 These ironic contingencies of memory could be endlessly illustrated. For present purposes, one more example will suffice: the Angel of the Redemption at Kanpur, for its mixture of appropriation, invention and contestation. Erected in 1865, it was the work of Carlo Marochetti (1805–1867), a sculptor of choice in Victorian Britain. Born in Italy, he lived in France until the fall of Louis Philippe in 1848, when he moved to London. His credentials were impeccable, responsible as he was for a panel on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and in Britain for diverse statues, as well as the marble effigies of Queen and Consort on the royal mausoleum at Frogmore and (with Edwin Landseer) the bronze lions at the foot of Nelson’s column.

34  Peter Robb The Kanpur memorial was a place of pilgrimage for the British in India, as it was raised over the infamous well where the bodies of murdered European women and children were dumped in 1857. It stood in what later became known as Nana Rao Park, now pointedly embellished by an effigy of the rebel leader, Tantia Topi. As Rosie Llewellyn-Jones explained: On 15 August 1947 there was slight defacement of the [Angel] statue, [and] so a local committee was formed and recommended the statue be moved to the grounds of All Soul’s Church, which it was, accompanied by the pierced stone screen. It’s still there. The actual site of the well, under the statue, was grassed over, and a circular flower bed planted there. That’s still there too, unmarked. But most people think the statue of Tantia Topi erected later, and to the right of the site, marks the actual well, and this impression is strengthened by the fact that the statue sits on a circular surround. Deliberately circular or not? One doesn’t know.11 Rosie Llewellyn-Jones has also written evocatively about the shifting significance of many other memorials of 1857: how General Havelock is remembered in London streets (and, I would add, towns in New Zealand); how admonitory public statues were erected across India to European heroes, but ‘caution was used in the words of public monuments’ likely to be seen by Indians; and how, most remarkably, locals came to treat the Wedderburn memorial, for Europeans killed in Hissar district, as a shrine to a Muslim saint, despite being told firmly that it was for a British officer.12 One lesson seems to be that, however streets are named or renamed and memorials expunged, it is quite hard to erase the past. Another is that the ironies may multiply over time, partly because any memorial is a terse statement with tenuous meaning. In Kanpur, the British constructed a redemptive Angel to contrast with what they imagined to be Indian savagery and ingratitude; the Indian replacement celebrated the supposed heroics of resistance. In neither case was there space for complexities or nuance. The Angel was seen as a vindication of colonial rule and its self-imposed task of improvement, but it was no sophisticated defence of imperialism. Tantia Topi is equally a nationalist symbol, but hardly an unassailable argument that a just goal justifies violent means; we may note independent India’s response to the state’s opponents. Memorials are constructed and continually reconstructed in contemporary terms, and only indirectly reflect whatever is being remembered.13 My examples thus belabour the obvious point that memorials are not only selective in the readings they provide, but also blunt instruments, subject to history, victims of chance. The examples illustrate three main points.

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 35 First, memorials are as much about those who created and paid for them as about their ostensible subjects; for example, about national pride more than victims at Kanpur and in other ‘Mutiny’ memorials. Second, they are competitive as well as complementary. That feature is not confined to conquered lands but is obvious in colonial India, where one question is how far British memories and markers replaced Indian ones. Third, though much is lost or reinterpreted over time, the remnants do not succeed each other; they are selectively overlaid.

II Nonetheless, I am not arguing that memorials are passive or nugatory. On the contrary, my present purpose is to examine their attempt to make history – to construct the future. Specifically, I discuss British tombs and memorials in Calcutta, not so much because they were a way of laying claim to Indian land, but because their praise of the dead helped prescribe the desirable characteristics of a would-be imperial race. Whatever we think of the message, it derived from sites, in Nora’s sense, without further obfuscation. To illustrate this, I turn to Derozario’s Complete Monumental Register from 1815, which records tomb inscriptions from Calcutta.14 Many give merely names and dates or employment and marital status. Others, however, cite traits of character, as if proselytising for particular kinds of conduct. In Derozario’s words: ‘An Epitaph . . . may be denominated as a Biographical Sketch of the deceased’s Life; since it often records their many Virtues and amiable Qualities, and is very justly considered, the last Tribute of Love and Respect, we can pay to a departed Friend’. Derozario added his own notes on some persons he found worthy, with this same intention: so too the improving purpose of biography, already well-established by this time, was to illustrate virtues and pay tribute to merit. We need first to note that these memorials stand in a long line. From the time of the Emperor Constantine (c.285–337), if not before, Christians came to believe it desirable to be buried in churchyards and, later, considered other consecrated sites to be acceptable as well. The latter became a necessity for large British cities from the mid-18th century for sanitary and other reasons, due to overcrowding and pressure of population: St George’s Gardens in London’s Bloomsbury is a very early example (1713). Calcutta’s Park Street and Tiretta cemeteries followed this pattern. Monuments and epitaphs also evolved over time. English parish churchyards tended to reflect their parishes, and separate city burial grounds like national churches inevitably envisaged a wider audience. Tombstones recorded details of families (often grouped together) and occupations rather more than personal

36  Peter Robb characteristics. Obviously, an elaborate memorial was usually a mark of personal wealth and indeed of general prosperity. An early Christian viewpoint may be seen in Bosnia: epitaphs there are said to have followed ‘a set of strongly determined formulas’, for ‘a eulogy must maintain a dignified style and a measured language because of the grief it is required to convey’. As described, however, the inscriptions mainly reflect soberly on the human condition and inexorable fate, as for Ivan Maršic´ from Western Hum: ‘Long I lived on earth/Eighty and eight years/And I hath not taken anything with me’; or for an inhabitant of Lašva near Travnik: ‘And here lies Dragaj/At the end –/Nothing . . .’15 By contrast, later, and certainly in England long before the 18th century, it was thought that memorials ought to reveal the character and standing of the deceased. John Weever (1576–1632), in the first work of its kind, Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), suggested that ‘Sepulchres should be made according to the qualitie and degree of the person deceased, that by the tombe everyone might be discerned of what ranke hee was living’. An epitaph, he said, should consist of ‘the name, the age, the deserts, the dignities, the state, the praises both of body and mind, the good or bad fortunes in the life, and the manner and time of the death, of the person therein interred’. As an explanation, Weever’s friend, the antiquary William Camden (1551–1623), observed that, in an epitaph, ‘Love was shown to the deceased, Memorie was continued to posteritie, Friends were comforted, and the Reader put in mind of human frailtie’. Clearly, Weever’s view prevailed. Here is an inscription from St. Vedart Church, Foster Lane, London, covering aspects of the life and character of a 17th-century family: Here lyeth buried the body of John Davenport, late of Datchet in the County of Buck. Gent who lineally descended from that ancient family of Davenport de Davenport in ye County Palentine of Chester and also Katherine his wife who was the daughter of John Miles of Cuddington in the County Huntington Gent. They lived most vertously together 53 years and had issue 3 sons and 2 daughters John the eldest son Ambrose and Katherine living at his death he departed this life 27 Decemb 1683 age 89 years she died ye 20 August 1679 aged 72 years he was a benefactor to the poor of St. Michael Le Quern where he had formerly lived 44 years.16 As this tradition was transposed to Calcutta, mostly generic characteristics were cited in praise of the dead. In St John’s Church lies Martha (Gumley) Eyres (d.1748), who ‘concluded this life with a becoming Resignation’, was ‘well esteemed & much regretted’ for her ‘engaging Qualifications &

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 37 personal Merit’. Charlotte Becher, dead in 1756 aged 21, had suffered ‘with Patience’ a long illness, ‘Occasioned by Grief at the Death of an only Daughter’. Women were praised also for their virtue and beauty and for being ‘truly amiable in the several Relations of a Child, a Wife, a Parent, and a Friend’.17 These ‘amiable Virtues’ Elizabeth Reed (d.1767) embodied as well, but, going further, hers were those not only ‘of a Dutiful Child, a Sincere loving Wife, a tender Affectionate Parent, a Kind Relation and True Friend’, but also of ‘a Humane Mistress and real well Wisher to all her fellow Creatures’. Implied was a compendium of proper womanly characteristics, what it took to be highly regarded. To these paragons should be added the far from passive Frances Johnson, said to be the oldest British resident in Asia when she died in 1812. Notable for her long eventful life and many husbands, she was ‘universally beloved, respected and revered’. In the Great Burying Ground, Park Street, there are many more along the same lines, too many to list, but starting with young Catherine Sykes (d.1768): ‘The unaffected Simplicity of her Heart, joined to a Life of Virtue, must ever make her Husband and her Children feel, and her Friends lament, her loss’. After Anna Bruce, the daughter of Charles Blunt, brother of the Earl of Elgin, died suddenly aged 23 in 1798, the shock perhaps intensified the emotions on her tombstone – every desirable quality was contained in her person: By a natural Benevolence of mind, and an unaffected and becoming dignity of manner, by a propriety of conduct, and exemplary deportment upon all occasions, by glowing Affections, as a Daughter, a Sister, a Friend, and a Wife, by a singular Humanity and sincere sympathy with the Distressed, Accomplished, Graceful, and Elegant, she attracted Love and esteem so far as her character reached.18 Men were somewhat differently praised. Why was Joseph Law (d.1776), a Company servant interred in Park Street, ‘Sincerely regretted by his Friends’? We are not told. Many others were also ‘much esteemed’ and ‘lamented by all [their] Friends’ or even ‘Sincerely and universally regretted by Europeans and Natives’.19 Very occasionally, there was a remembrance of tenderness, goodness and Christian virtue as husband, father and friend (Thomas Powney, d.1782), at least according to the widow; but mostly men worded their tributes for other men slightly differently. It was because the merchant John Holme (d.1779) was ‘a Sincere Friend and Honest Man’ that his ‘surviving Friends’ were moved to erect a monument ‘as a Testimony of their regard for his virtues’. Edward Morony (d.1780), too, was ‘gifted with an excellence of Heart, an Urbanity of Manners, and a Benevolence of Disposition, which seldom come to the lot of one Man:

38  Peter Robb And his virtues had so truly endeared him to his Friends, that it is only when Memory shall fail to record them, that they can cease to regret his Loss’. Similarly, for the chaplain Thomas Yate (d.1782), it was ‘His amiable and chearful disposition [that] procured him the esteem & Friendship of the Public in general’, while his ‘many private Virtues’ including his honesty would ‘ever be remembered by those of his more intimate acquaintance’. The latter claim contradicts itself. The remembered virtues were not to be hidden and private, but had to be writ large, as they were here, in stone. The epitaph of Sir William Jones (d.1794) is probably the most famous of this genre: he was a man who ‘feared God, but not Death, and maintained independence, but sought not Riches: who thought none below him but the base and unjust; none above him but the wise and virtuous’. Naturally, then, he loved ‘his Parents, Kindred, Friends, Country’, in that order (it seems), ‘with an ardour which was the chief source of all his Pleasure and all his Pains’. And then, ‘having devoted His Life to their Service, and to the improvement of his mind, resigned it Calmly, giving glory to his Creator, wishing Peace on Earth, and with Good will to all creatures’. All this, for such a man as Jones, remains oddly private and personal: a life, close relatives, friends, expressions of grief and loss. But the implicit lessons were general, and some epitaphs did emphasise public affairs. We may pass over Holwell’s monument to the so-called ‘Black Hole’, content as it was to excoriate a ‘Tyrannic’ and ‘Horrid Act of Violence’ and the revenge ‘deservedly’ taken by Watson and Clive. The tedious apposition of despotic Eastern cruelty and rational Western process needs no further commentary from me, even without referring to Partha Chatterjee’s discussion of its afterlife.20 We come closer to the masculine virtues, when the epitaphs reflect on achievements in office. For very many, such as John Clavering (d.1777), the commander-in-chief, a list of their posts was made to suffice. However, St John’s Church has an effusive monument to Job Charnock (d.1692), and there too lie William Livesay (d.1719), ‘an eminent Sup[er] Cargoe to the General Satisfaction of his Employers, and publick good of Trade’; and James Kerr (d.1782), a surgeon, ‘distinguished as well by his Medical knowledge as by his Improving the Arts and enriching Science by his discoveries in India’; and Anthony Hunt (d.1798), a ship’s commander, among society’s ‘most valuable members’, having ‘acquired great Honour in his Profession, and the esteem and regard of all who had the honour of his acquaintance’.21 Reiterations of honour as the standard meant that success was not always necessary to esteem. In Park Street, Richard Becher (d.1782), a member of the Bengal Council in the 1750s, was provided with a lengthy, regretful

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 39 biography describing his fine service deserving of ‘private esteem and public confidence’; his return to England and misfortune; his fall, as a ‘victim of his own benevolence’ and ‘open, liberal, and compassionate’ nature; and his hapless efforts to restore his fortunes in Bengal. Finally, ‘Under the pang of Disappointment, and the pressure of the Climate’, his ‘worn mind and debilitated Body’ had ‘Sunk to Rest’ and ‘an Eternity of Happiness’. Becher’s character and industry were presented as worthy of reward, if not in this world then in the next. The young district judge, Augustus Cleveland (d.1784), had similarly excellent qualities, so valued that after his death at sea his remains were preserved in alcohol until they could be interred in Calcutta. In him, the ‘Public and Private Virtues’ were all on display: ‘In his Public Capacity he accomplished by a System of Conciliation what could never be effected by Military Coercion. He civilized a Savage Race of the Mountaineers who for Ages had existed in a state of Barbarism’. Naturally, also, ‘In his Private Station, by the amiableness of his deportment, the Gentleness of his manners, and the goodness and generosity of his heart, he was universally admired, beloved and respected by all who had the happiness of knowing him’.22 The remains of another Bengal Council member, Edward Wheler (d.1784), were treated to a triumphal arch. The epitaph, which ends oddly with a medical report (John Weever might have approved), claimed mainly that he too was not only a ‘kind and tender Husband, a fond and careful Father, the warm Patron of those he protected, and the friend of all Mankind’, but also ‘in his Political character’, as ‘will be best learned from the Pages of History’, ‘an upright, just, and honest Man’: ‘as his disinterested conduct gained the esteem of all ranks of Men, so in their Memory he is honoured, beloved, lamented’. For the similarly ‘much lamented’ Supreme Court judge, John Hyde (1796), the epitaph quotes as its authority a declaration of government that he was ‘a Magistrate Whose Integrity in the Discharge of his Public Functions was only equalled by the Virtue of his private Character’. Of course, Hyde was ‘an affectionate Husband, a fond Parent, a firm and zealous Friend’, but it was his ‘unquestioned Integrity’ that made him a ‘truly virtuous Man’. Even more important was his ‘carefully concealed’ charity, or so his tomb noisily proclaimed: the ‘Advice, Protection, and Munificence’ he showed towards the unfortunate and the poor, to benefit whom ‘His Life was one continued Study’. A similar conjunction was inscribed in Park Street cemetery after the untimely death in 1815 of Richmond Thackeray, father of the novelist William Makepeace. Richmond’s ‘understanding’, ‘purest principles in public life’, ‘social and tender affections’, ‘moral and intellectual qualities’ and so on, were commemorated by ‘those who had the best means of contemplating’ these public virtues – that is, from the private sphere, where Thackeray

40  Peter Robb had exercised them as ‘a son, a brother, a husband, a father, and a friend’.23 Formulaic virtues seemed to rely on perception, almost brought into existence through the gaze of an equally standardised list of observers. There are dozens more examples that I could cite, given time, but the picture is plain enough from these examples.24 Private and public and duty and charity are consistently linked in the wording of the tributes: an often explicit connection between personal conduct, the public good and national character. So, the ‘Respectability and worth’ of Robert McFarlane (1800), a free merchant, was summed up as ‘integrity’ in his public duty and the spirit of Christianity (‘Acts of Generosity and Benevolence’) in his private life. Was any of it true? Did it matter? Tombstone reputation could be a reflex rather than a reflection of virtue. For example, William Townsend Jones (c.1757–1807), a lawyer of Irish extraction, was – to be frank – unprincipled, vulgar, a philanderer and notorious as the unpunished murderer of at least two of his servants. His grave in Park Street tells us that he was ‘Much respected and lamented by a numerous acquaintance’. But the rhetoric tells its own story. According to a modern pamphlet on Park Street cemetery, ‘the desire to honour the dead led to obvious exaggerations of worth. This may have been due in part, and perhaps unconsciously, to a desire to bring credit to their own small community located in a foreign land’.25 If so, it seems to have been a desire seldom expressed by other foreign communities in Calcutta – the French, Portuguese, Greeks and Armenians, also recorded by Derozario. It was more of a piece with the use of epitaphs and memorials as propaganda in contemporary England, while (as Linda Colley showed, mainly in regard to painting) heroes of war, empire and honour were rising in the annals of fame.26 However, in Calcutta, the elaborate tombs and the more fulsome epitaphs were only loosely correlated with the distinction or even the wealth of the deceased, and devoted not only to the established dignitaries for whom grandiose memorials and pompous testimonials had become the norm, but frequently also to women, children and very young adults. The texts are the voice of an elite of sorts, but one that was unusually open and diverse. The crucial point I want to make about them – to which the social diversity is germane – is the equation of private with public virtue and their joint alignment with the supposed style and justification equally of professional life, official service and colonial rule. Collectively, the purpose of these inscriptions was not so much to honour the dead as to reinforce a set of desirable traits: some intrinsic (virtue), others outward facing (charity, honesty, reputation). The centrality of the self, as established in Britain by the 18th century, augmented by romantic sensibility and evident in these inscriptions, not only had its pathologies (racism, jingoism), but also allowed empathy and a valuation of the individual, and

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 41 hence particular forms of community and social responsibility that were expressed in art, customary behaviour, law and politics. To honour and charity, for example, I link British pretensions to equity and legal rights in their Indian laws and government.

III My argument is not that inscriptions were new in themselves, as in many ways Calcutta’s Britons were merely following the fashions of the homeland. My concern is with the character of the inscriptions and their possible, indirect impact on India. What was going on here was more than the annexation of space for a body or a memorial statue, which might stand (I suppose) as a metaphor for Britain’s claim to sovereignty over India. There was also a definition of the principles that made the British in their own eyes and that they were attempting to impose on India. This mattered because such messages of memory were very far from being confined to inscriptions in stone: they were to be found in many of the mediated experiences of the colonial era. Such experiences have been a perpetual subject of mine. I have been interested in the role of memory in defining places, peoples and principles. The possession of real property, for example, is based on recalling the acquisition and maintenance of rights, which were subsequently recorded formally and protected by regulations – laws defined more by the sum of past practice (precedent and definition) than by abstract principles. In India, hereditary rights had long existed in both cultivated and common land, even in forests. The Mughals’ mansabdari system imposed a superstructure upon such rights and practices, but over time it too morphed into transferable political rights. British colonial laws not only stepped around such remembered land rights, but also reincorporated them in new systems based on their own ideas of individual sovereignty that depended on time and records (proof of the past). Land rights were attributed (as by John Locke) to original cultivation and conquest, but in both cases it was the persistence not the event that counted. In feudal Europe, landed property had assumed a notional subjection, secured as a grant from its prime owner – the sovereign – and ensured by fealty and by inheritance; but even then time mattered. Just as in ancient Rome customary practices led to a refined law of usucapio (acquisition of property by use or possession), so too in England unauthorised land use began to be regularised by the common law dictum that prior possession provided a good title in the absence of any other, and later came under a 20-year rule of occupancy derived from the Statute of Limitations of 1623. In India, revenue settlement, surveys, land records and tenancy acts took up similar tasks, whereby the past engendered the present and the ambiguous gave way to the defined.

42  Peter Robb For another example, my recent book on friendship is partly about how informal conduct helped define formal rules; in other words, how remembered actions led to regulation.27 Indeed, this suggests one means of propagating and perpetuating the messages of funerary inscriptions, for my emphasis on the role of friendship in early Calcutta is amply borne out by references in the epitaphs. In Derozario’s list, friends or friendship are mentioned in well over half of the inscriptions that went beyond the bare particulars of the deceased.28 They show what friendship represented, the conduct that a mode of friendship was supposed to encourage, and what this led to in a foreign land and a colonial situation. Similarly, I have calculated that, between 1762 and 1850, of all the wills of a supposedly transient or rootless European community in India, merely 2–8 per cent appointed executors only in Britain (the larger proportion being in the later periods) rather than in India alone (a large majority) or in both places. Also, only just over half the named beneficiaries between 1762 and 1804 were blood kin, among people accustomed to primogeniture and inheritance within family units.29 The influence of private mores on public norms gained in significance from early modern times, as independent private property became effective. When landholding was supplemented and then outpaced by the personal possession of money and things, elective personal relations also gained in importance: Katharine Maus identified this change to explain the friendship of Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV. It has been called an ‘emotional economy of choice’.30 In this economy, recollected conduct was the basis of personal reputation and obligation; what was remembered were principles and proper behaviour. What is more, as I have claimed about friendship (as also in earlier books on British identity and on women, children and servants in Calcutta), private conduct, reputation and professionalism, all dependent on memory, helped effect a transition from normative practices to regulated institutions. The friendly association of the agency house paved the way for the commercial company under law. The social pressure that favoured fair treatment of orphans, concubines or servants prepared the ground for welfare systems, women’s rights and labour laws.31 I do not mean to suggest causal links or inevitable progress from one stage to another, but that the steps taken were helped by models of behaviour already developed, by a mental and ethical disposition created by the recall of conduct deemed correct or just, despite or because of the many shortfalls of actual behaviour.32 I am concerned, therefore, not with some generic Western impact, but with influences of specific character and time, in this case of individual worth and social relations, aspects of new notions of community, identity, legal rights and political purpose.33

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 43 Let me be more precise about the influences I am identifying. First, I entirely accept that the virtues paraded on the Calcutta tombstones, at a general level, were to be found everywhere for individuals and rulers – certainly in the Hindu and Persianate traditions in India, as well as in Europe, classical, mediaeval and modern. They were forever paraded in public and private eulogies, addresses and memoirs, often in hope of encouraging the kinds of conduct they celebrated. Second, however, specific circumstances define such virtues more precisely. In late 18th-century Bengal, the context was conquest, commercial priorities and political despotism, all needing to be legitimised in Britain and India. The precedents were neoclassical European and Mughal; one role model was Frederick the Great of Prussia. The goal was to produce benefits to reconcile Indians to Company rule. The rejected alternatives were not only French revolutionary ideals and similar radical populism, but also (for India, and initially the Company) the British system of constitutional monarchy and parliament.34 However, third, this consensus was always ambiguous and did not hold far into the 19th century. It was augmented and eventually overtaken by a more confident imperialism, and, even more significantly, by the rule of law, introduced through the Regulating Acts and the Supreme Court. These changes, while modifying rather than revolutionising Company practice, did eventually mark a clear breach in the Company’s role, administration and values, and a break also from the Indian past. Especially, we should note the principle of representation, first accorded in India to urban ratepayers but continuing to this day, with successfully conducted popular elections (whatever one thinks of their results). Above all, we must acknowledge also the theory of equal rights in law, regardless of status, as provided to the horror of many Indian elites and the immediate interest of some ‘lower’ persons emboldened to sue their ‘betters’. Such later constitutional and equitable aspects of British imperial practice and of Britons’ virtuous image of themselves were more important, in the long run, than a sovereign and benevolent autocracy. Epitaphs celebrating individuals for their charity, honour and service fit very well with these later ideals and, I suggest, reflect personal and social experiences that promoted them as the public virtues. Britons were presenting versions of the past interpreted in their own terms. The reality was politics and profit, but the underlying ethos implied the virtues paraded on tombstones and also evoked in apologies for empire. The importance of the epitaphs was that they enacted and preserved specific principles of character and conduct, some of which came to be required by law. On such a rationale, the British created their institutions. Of course, their measures were not only avowedly prospective – attempts to shape the future – but they were also inevitably retrospective – what had worked.

44  Peter Robb So, in cemeteries as also in law old names and rights were supposedly ‘preserved’ but actually formed the basis of expected norms and rules, a very different matter. Cemeteries thus made a claim to place, not in the obvious sense (Rupert Brooke’s ‘some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England’ was a romantic illusion), but by reflecting a set of virtues, achievements and relationships that were being more generally expressed or imposed. My discussion has been concerned so far with British ideas and standards, but these arguments lead us to consider how they came to matter for Indians. The settlement of Calcutta developed markedly from the late 18th to the mid-19th centuries. It was a notionally divided but racially and socially intermixed town, which permitted a paradoxical intimacy and separation. As said, day-to-day circumstances and ideologies changed markedly during the 19th century, but in different ways the paradox continued, even intensified. The key intimacy reflected on by Ashis Nandy, for example, is a closeness in the mind.35 The epitaphs on Calcutta’s tombstones made claims about the character of the British, in unspoken contrast with the ‘unreliable heathen’ who surrounded them. But in conditions of close mutual contact, it was inevitable that these ideas and values would leak out, not least because of the link made with the justification of empire, in itself an analogy with the idea that property meant not only possession but particular incidents or characteristics and uses. Those who wanted to supplant the British, as well as those who sought personal benefit from their rule, had to notice the British claim that empire had resulted from virtue and merit or that property (including that of sovereign lands) was morally justified only by its beneficial use. In some ways, resistance to ideological colonisation was another contest of memory and memorials. It was straightforward for Indians to repudiate the colonial appropriation that was the Kanpur Angel of Redemption. The diverse moral messages hidden in all the other memories of the colonial era were not so easy to escape. My assertion is that India could not and did not escape. Partly, this was because of processes in which Indians were closely involved, notwithstanding numerous devices of mutual exclusion. With what consequences, I wonder? The impact on Britain is increasingly recognised. The effect on India is more contentious. I have played a small part in a very large debate about Western influence on India, which nowadays is firmly in the territory of dialogue and adaptation, but still finding legacies mostly malign by many accounts.36 Dialogue reminds us of Bayly’s accounts of Indian ideas of ‘common homelands’ well before colonial rule and those of ‘right counsel and good government’, as debated in an early 19th-century ‘Anglo-Indian public sphere’.37 The legacies may be thought of as a shifting application of memory to place, and as changes

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 45 in the ranking of places that were important for the values they implied. Thus, in the 19th century, when Europe became central for some Indians, marked by European monuments of intellect, brick and steel planted on Indian soil, these experiences were turned by memory into ideals: the same kinds of ethics and endeavour as were recorded on Calcutta tombs. Influence occurred through selectively appropriated values and technologies. I am not saying that there were exclusively European traits that were thus imported – I entirely accept Jack Goody’s splendid rubbishing of the idea of exclusively European rationalism and his consequential commercial and social comparisons – but I do argue about forms and rules that were developed and accepted in India under British imperial rule.38 Over the same period, India was being painstakingly recentred and reinvented. At that point, we come back to the arguments of Pierre Nora and my questioning of the fixity of cultural indigeneity. I argue that a set of standards and ideas was provided that was challenging to aspects of Indian tradition, but I deny that they were, therefore, irremediably foreign and indigestible. By contrast, Partha Chatterjee, by appearing to accept Tipu Sultan’s or even Siraj ud-Daulah’s absolutism as somehow ‘free’, effectively posits ‘nationality’ rather than law or justice as a criterion of merit and legitimacy. Similarly, having described the evil effects of the colonial myth of Indian barbarity, he then notes, apparently with approval, the indiscriminate popular celebration of Bengali terrorism as an anti-colonial sacrifice: a triumph of nativism over consistency, perhaps.39 Chatterjee also remarks of a celebrated 18th-century history of Bengal that ‘It is in looking after the people that Ghulam Husain found the English to be failing’. It must be understood that I am not implying that the British empire was ever much good at looking after Indians and their interests. I agree that the denigration of Indians marked the arrogance of British civilisation and morality. I accept that what Chatterjee calls ‘disciplinary techniques’, both ‘violence’ and ‘culture’, were underpinned by ideas of Western superiority, and that liberal impulses were often weak or distorted in British Indian policy. I acknowledge too that Indian opposition to foreign rule was inherent and became increasingly overt (e.g. in drama, sporting contests or terrorism). Yet, the empire was nonetheless a vehicle for the transmission and acceptance of liberal ideas. Chatterjee agrees that such ideals were adopted by Indians, as were many of the empire’s cultural goods. He shows that Rammohan Roy, for example, though he did not derive his ideas only from European sources (notably his rationality about religion), was also an awkward talisman for nationalism, because he was so supportive of clearly imported forms and institutions, the ways of expressing equality and legal rights that were then professed if not much practised in European Calcutta. Chatterjee claims tendentiously that such ideas were

46  Peter Robb not ‘gifts of the British Empire in India’ because they were not legitimised by ‘popular nationhood’. But they were internalised by many Indians from the 19th century onwards. More than that, they are not contingent upon the prevailing mode of government: they are directed against despotic power whether of the state or of the popular majority.40 An obvious yardstick is the contrast between equity formally provided in Western law – the charity cited in the epitaphs – and the oppression redolent of Hindu caste. In this regard, it is relevant that the non-Brahmin writer, D. R. Nagaraj, wrote eloquently on the Dalits’ problem of cultural memory. They seek rebirth, he said, in ‘a state of fearful loneliness’. Of the rights that they claim, the most challenging is the right to cultural space. Dalits not only suffered from the colonial transformations of the Indian economy, politics and law, but also benefited from the ethical and technological tools made available. For example, Nagaraj noted the impact of Western liberal, egalitarian and ethical thinking on Ambedkar, but added that Dalits, seduced by aspects of modernisation, did not at first realise that its fruits were being reaped chiefly by the upper castes, recreating their dominance. In Nora’s terms, Dalits were thus both externally and internally colonised. But somehow they had to escape the dominant memory of caste Hinduism. Nagaraj explains that one of their responses ‘to the project of modernization, which was launched by colonials’, was to erase their existing cultural memory and build a new one. How then to avoid ‘deculturation’? Some sought to distinguish between spiritual beliefs and social practices; some sought greater ‘purity’ in lifestyle, reinforcing rather than challenging the Hindu norms; and some tried to ‘bring marginal structures to the centre’ and promote alternative histories, erasing the cultural present, as in Ambedkar’s Buddhism, a response to the ‘tragedy of a memoryless community’.41 In this paper, my own take on that – as also on comments by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gyan Prakash on colonial modernity42 – has been to remark that all memories were and are constantly reconstructed, and then overlaid. I am very ready to consider Ashis Nandy’s account of how what he calls culture contended with different political narratives,43 but I believe that those who argue strongly for an essential indigeneity merely transpose, for example, the racialist myths that India had been eternally unchanging44 or (to quote Subho Basu) that a ‘modern’ nation state, ‘according to the colonial discourse, is the privilege of advanced civilizations . . . from a colder climate zone’.45 I suggest the opposite: that (returning to Nagaraj) there is no reason why Indian or Dalit culture should be diminished by a move towards egalitarian values, or no more than Western cultures were deracinated by the advance of rationalism and liberalism or than the umma of Islam was destroyed by its own early experiments in science and

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 47 toleration. The rise of a Wahhabi alternative in Islam is a social and political choice and so is any maintenance of Hindu inhumanity or indifference towards Dalits. But, in an evolving and interacting world, there are no pristine essences to be despoiled by the import of charity or human rights. Therein lies the importance of selective memory. There could be worse legacies for India – or indeed for Britain, were it so lucky – than the ethical ideals proclaimed by the British tombstones of Calcutta.

Notes 1 Transcript of a lecture presented in abridged form at, Ideologies and Institutions: A Conference to Celebrate the Career and Works of Professor Peter Robb, SOAS, 19–20 September 2013; and read at SOAS again, revised and expanded, on 26 November 2013. I am grateful for comments, especially by Peter Marshall, Katherine Schofield and the editors of this volume. In subjects, range and tone, the paper owes something to its having been written for a valedictory conference. 2 Pierre Nora (trans. Marc Roudebush), ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, Spring 1989, 26: 7–24, drawing on a manifesto for the project dating back to 1978. Chicago University Press published a translation of Les Lieux de Mémoire entitled Rethinking France from 2001 to 2009. Among Nora’s omissions are the Napoleonic wars and French colonialism. He has also been criticised for bias against the PiedsNoirs in his book on Algerian independence. My doubts focus on his distinctions between history defined as the incomplete reconstruction of what no longer is on one hand and ‘social and unviolated’ memory on the other, that is, between a ‘hopelessly forgetful’ modernity with its sharp breaks and rapid change and the ‘ethnological slumbers’ of the ‘so-called primitive or archaic’ until they too are ‘swept into history’ as new independent nations. Think pyramids, Trajan’s column or Taj Mahal. Modernity seems mostly to change the mechanisms rather than the fundamentals of commemoration. 3 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London: Harper Collins, 1995, p. 5. Even at the outset, on the river Thames, this sprawling book quickly establishes the contingency and subjectivity of such memories. 4 Add.Mss.45578–663, British Library: Diary of Richard Blechynden, 8–10, 12–14, 15, 21 May 1800. Wyatt’s remark was made to Edward Tiretta, civil architect and superintendent of roads. 5 The words are from an English translation, published in 1914, of the passages on Bengal in Ripa’s memoir. Its notes identify ‘the Tamarind tree of Golicatan’ (Calcutta) as the tree at Baithakhana. See P. Thankappan Nair, Calcutta in the 18th Century, Calcutta: Firma KLM Private, 1984, pp. 30–1 and 46, being the translation with notes by H. Hosten, Bengal Past & Present, January–June 1914, VIII (15 and 16): 52–63 and 166–180, of the portion relating to a visit to Bengal in Matteo Ripa, Storia della Fondazione della Congregazione e del Collegio de’ Cinesi sotto il titolo della Sagra Famiglia di G.C., 3 vols, Napoli: Tipografia Manfredi, 1832. Ripa’s identification of the tree seems to have been a mistake, not a mistranslation, as the Italian words are pipul (pipal being another name for the banyan or bo

48  Peter Robb tree) and tamarindo. Hosten’s sources on the tree and Hastings are given in H.E.A. Cotton, Calcutta Old and New, Calcutta: Newman, 1907, p. 9, and Raja Binaya Krishna Deb, The Early History and Growth of Calcutta, Calcutta: R.C. Ghose, 1905, p. 65. More curious, in view of Blechynden’s account, is that in 1914 the tree was said to have been ‘removed by the Marquess of Hastings in 1820, in pursuance of his schemes for the improvement of the city’, but not without ‘lament and prophecy of evil from the superstitious’. That error was later corrected in P. Thankappan Nair, A History of Calcutta’s Streets, Calcutta: Firma KLM Private, 1987, pp. 7, 167, which declared the tree a pipal, unlikely to have hosted Job Charnock’s meetings with merchants, and that it was removed during Wellesley’s improvements, citing Kathleen Blechynden, Calcutta Past and Present, London: W. Thacker, 1905, who drew on Richard’s diary with scant acknowledgment. 6 Nayanjot Lahiri, ‘Commemorating and Remembering 1857: The Revolt in Delhi and Its Afterlife’, World Archaeology, 2003, 35(1): 35–60; with thanks to Pragati Mohapatra. 7 Lahiri, ‘Commemorating’, p. 45. Memorial to almost 200 officers and men of the 2nd European Bengal Fusiliers in St James Church, New Delhi. 8 See Archibald B. Spens, A Winter in India: Light Impressions of Its Cities, Peoples, and Customs [first published 1914], and my ‘Introduction’, New Delhi: Routledge, 2014. 9 For example, on the 1863 Mutiny Memorial near Kashmiri Gate, an inscription still reflects on the heroism of the British and their allies against the ‘enemy’, while a more recent plaque (1972) explains that the ‘enemy’ were really freedom fighters and martyrs of India. The monument itself was specially cleaned for the Delhi Commonwealth Games in anticipation of visitors; see Times of India, 12 August 2010. Pragati Mohapatra and Sanjay Sharma provided these details. The continuing juxtaposition of rival texts is intriguing in comparison with the general reclamation of New Delhi, in terms of official street names, statues and popular representations, from a British colonial to an Indian register. 10 Lahiri, ‘Commemorating’, pp. 54–58. 11 Personal communication, 22 May 2013. See also Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, The Great Uprising in India 1857–58: Untold Stories Indian and British, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007; and Stephen J. Heathorn, ‘Angel: Empire: The Cawnpore Memorial Well as a British Site of Imperial Remembrance’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Winter 2007, 8(3): 1–33. Marochetti was also responsible for the tomb of Vincenzo Bellini in Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris, and in London memorials to Richard the Lionheart, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Stephenson (Euston Station) and W. M. Thackeray (Westminster Abbey). 12 Llewellyn-Jones, Great Uprising, pp. 180–206. Similar stories could be told about other ‘mutiny’ memorials; and compare with note 9, above. 13 We hardly need reminding that constructed memories may be dangerous. Contrary to that magnificent elitist Alexander Pope, the main risk is not ‘a little knowledge’ but ignorance and misinformation; ‘shallow drafts’ from the Pierian spring may be better than none at all. Historians try not to be complicit in the fictions. Their reinterpretations may be regarded as attempts to reform memory.

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 49 14 M. Derozario, The Complete Monumental Register: Containing All the Epitaphs, Inscriptions, & c. & c. & c. in the Different Churches and Burial-Grounds, in and About Calcutta . . ., Calcutta: printed by P. Ferris, 1815. Subsequent citations from Calcutta epitaphs are from this source unless otherwise stated. For ease of reading, I have removed capital letters when they were applied only because the word started a new line of the inscription. Future research, including comparison with terse Dutch and more fulsome Scottish epitaphs, will be much helped by two superb databases: dutchcemeterybengal.com and scotscemeteryarchivekolkata.com (my thanks to Souvik Mukherjee). 15 Mak Dizdar, ‘Inscriptions on Bosnian Medieval Tombstones (Stecaks)’ (trans. Snježana Buzov), www.spiritofbosnia.org (21 January 2007). 16 Colin R. Chapman, ‘Tombstones and Pre-1841 Censuses as Sources for British Family History’, World Conference on Records, 1980, citing Weever and Camden. Derozario wrote in the tradition of Weever, but surely influenced also by the long series of biographical works from Anthony Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses (1690–91; 1721) to Alexander Chambers’ General Biographical Dictionary (1812–17). 17 It was sometimes in Latin, such as Anna Moore (d.1730), in whom ‘Pulchritudo et Omnes Virtutes in Illa dilectissime junctae suerunt’ (‘Beauty and every Virtue [were] sweetly joined in one’). It was Jane Douglas (d.1755), remembered for her ‘many virtues’, who was ‘truly amiable’ in relationships. Frances Rumbold (d.1764), too, had ‘Many Good Sensible and Amiable Qualities’. Marg. Dickson (d.1774) had all these qualities too, according to her ‘disconsolate Husband’, even though her merits as a parent (‘had it pleased Providence to spare her’) could only be deduced from her ‘virtuous conduct and tender affection as a Wife’. 18 The conclusion was sombre and hardly resigned: ‘Let an unexpected fall in the vigour of Life, a sudden extension to so much accumulated virtue, the unfeigned tears of Affection, the mournful solemnity of death, and the deep silence of the grave, impress our minds with the fear of God, and his awful dispensations’. 19 Henry Wedderburn, master attendant (d.1777) was ‘much esteemed & lamented’, George Hurst (d.1780) ‘Much lamented by all his Friends’ and Charles Playdell, member of the Board of Trade, Superintendent of Police (d.1779), ‘universally regretted’. 20 Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. This interesting if discursive account deploys the well-known story and imagery to uncover what are said to be buried layers of narrative and doctrine: British claims to superiority and depiction of Indians as naturally duplicitous and servile, exemplified also by Tipu Sultan, vilified like the ‘black hole’ but regarded by Chatterjee as an early modern ruler on the ‘absolutist’ model. Chatterjee paints a vivid and convincing picture of the rapacity of the Company and its servants during their rise to power in India, and claims the long popularity of Macaulay’s ‘Essay on Clive’ marked the black hole’s importance, renewed by Curzon’s memorial at a time of aggressive imperialism. Chatterjee rightly regards denigrations of Indians as an alibi for an imperialism, but I think sees more consistency in British attitudes than existed. The empire may have

50  Peter Robb hidden its violence under the veil of its culture (notably education, literature and political thought), making paradoxical its professions to ‘equality’ and ‘liberty’. But a rhetoric of virtue occurred in Company papers and public commentaries even before Holwell, and the refrain became louder over time, having to be continually reinforced. The mysterious disappearance of Holwell’s monument in 1821 gives the lie to the black hole being a consistently empowering myth of empire, as does the variety of interpretations from Holwell onwards, from exoneration of Siraj personally, to questioning whether the deaths occurred at all or on the scale alleged; Curzon’s monument was erected to a chorus of such questions. As Chatterjee remarks, even Holwell himself sought not so much to accuse Indians of brutality as to ‘establish what may be called elevated principles of moral discipline as self-governance for his own people’ (pp. 25–26) – courage and fortitude, to make Britons worthy of ruling others – being in this respect ‘somewhat ahead of his times’. (I made a similar argument in regard to a narrative of the siege at Arrah in 1857; Robb, Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 20–7.) So, too, the Amritsar massacre was a major turning point, not least because British opinion was divided sharply between a familiar celebration of imperial moral strength (a brave ‘rescue’ of the Punjab from ‘savagery’), and yet another repudiation of what the then secretary of state for India called a ‘doctrine of frightfulness’ in evidence in the actions of General Dyer and others. The paradoxical ambivalence continues: imperial violence is deployed by independent Indian governments. Agreeing, Chatterjee argues their ideology is different. 21 Similar are William Livesay (d.1719), ‘an eminent Sup[er] Cargoe to the General Satisfaction of his Employers, and publick good of Trade’, and William Hamilton (d.1717), surgeon, whose ‘memory ought to be dear to the Nation for the Credit he gain’d the English for curing Ferrukseer, the present king of Industan’. Hunt was ‘greatly beloved and respected’ as one of the navy’s ‘brightest ornaments’. Hamilton’s part in securing the Company’s firman is well known; for a lively account (also of Job Charnock and his mausoleum), see Blechynden, Calcutta, pp. 11–22. 22 Cleveland’s ‘savage race’ had ‘eluded every Exertion that had been practised against them to suppress their depredations, and reduce them to obedience. To his wise and beneficent Conduct, the English E[as]t India Comp[any] were indebted for the subjecting to the Government the numerous Inhabitants of that wild and extensive Country, the Jungleterry’. Likewise, the artillery commander, Thomas Pearse (1789), ‘distinguished himself by his abilities and unwearied attention to the duties of his Station, and to the general Interests of those he commanded’, qualities matched as usual in the private sphere by ‘the benevolence of his disposition and . . . the warmth of his friendship’. 23 Thackeray is discussed in Blechynden, Calcutta, pp. 171–4. 24 My account is limited to Calcutta, but, in a private communication, Ezra Rashkow showed that I could well have extended it to Bombay and Surat. For the recent history of commemoration and preservation, focusing on the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, founded in the 1970s, see Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India’, History and Memory, 2006, 18(1): 5–42.

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 51 25 Harold Holloway, ‘Reflections’, in The South Park Street Cemetery Calcutta, 3rd ed. Calcutta: Association for the Preservation of Historical Cemeteries in India, 1997, p. 26. 26 Linda Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992, esp. pp. 177–93. 27 Peter Robb, Useful Friendship: Europeans and Indians in Early Calcutta, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 28 Analysis of St John’s Church and Great Burying Ground, Park Street; Derozario, Monumental Register, p. 108. Most of those counted as mentioning friendship (99 epitaphs or 55%) do so explicitly; a few with phrases such as ‘all who knew him or her’ have been included. The other list (55 examples) mainly comprises tombstones with conventional verses, Biblical texts or lamentations by relatives alone, but also some that refer to personal and public traits discussed in this paper. 29 Robb, Useful Friendship, ch. 1, n. 37, based on data provided courtesy of Margot Finn. A really intriguing project (not covered by my book, alas) would be a comparison of friendship across times and cultures, as Katherine Schofield proposed in reaction to this paper. 30 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; quotation from John Kerrigan, ‘Fathers Who Live Too Long’, London Review of Books, 30 September 2013, 35(17): 18. 31 Robb, Useful Friendship, and see Peter Robb, Sex and Sensibility and Sentiment and Self (both subtitled Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791–1822), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chatterjee, Black Hole, p. 124, repeats a good example of the moral treatment of concubines (bibis) from William Hickey’s memoir, at least as remembered afterwards (significant in itself): his mourning of his dead bibi, Jamdani, and his treatment of her successor, ‘a very pretty little native girl’, Kiraun, who bore a surprisingly dark-skinned child he treated as his son. When Kiraun was discovered asleep in bed with the baby and a ‘handsome lad’, a khidmatgar (serving man), whom she admitted was probably the father, Hickey dismissed all three. But later, when Kiraun was in distress, Hickey paid her a monthly pension for as long as he remained in Bengal. 32 I am implying a mechanism for political evolution, for example, as traced by the Russian comparativist Dmitri Furman to a conjunction of democratic principles and nationalism (according to Perry Anderson, London Review of Books, 27 August 2015, 37(16): 19–28; see also vol. 37(15)). 33 This is not the time to explore these questions fully, but emphasis on the self is evident in the funerary inscriptions discussed here, unreservedly displaying a humanistic romantic sensibility, which in some other times and cultures would be regarded as indulgence. Similar sentiments can be traced in aspects of British society, politics and culture that were distinctive of the time in Britain and in comparison with India, features that contemporaries either deprecated or found admirable. The individual focus of Christian memorials may be significant in a country where shrines were chiefly erected to gods, kings and saints – they probably had some general influence in Calcutta. My intention, however, is not to claim any direct impact nor do I pretend to consider all of the many imponderable ways in which influence might have been transmitted. My emphasis has been on

52  Peter Robb the tombs as exemplars and summaries of then-professed values and mores, whose significance does concern me. 34 See Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, and also his more recent work on Indian submissions during the trial of Warren Hastings, paper read at SOAS, 3 June 2014. 35 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. My reference is only to his idea of mental colonisation and indirectly to his suggestion that it helped sustain the British Indian empire, and not to what I and others regard as the dangerous implication that some of its products (modernity, secularism etc.) are thereby suspect or antipathetical in India, which I argue against in this paper. See also David Arnold, ‘On Intimacy’, paper read at SOAS, 19 September 2013. 36 We have mostly moved beyond what Anindita Mukhopadhyay called ‘sweeping assumptions about an authoritative disruption of the indigenous traditions and modes of thought by the cultural and political technology of colonial rule’; Behind the Mask: The Cultural Definition of the Legal Subject in Colonial Bengal (1715–1911), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 6. 37 C.A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, esp. chs. 1–3. ‘Public sphere’, the thinking of Habermas, may overstate it, and I accept that intermingled influences, Indian as well as European, contributed to ideas about the state and public morality. But I argue that European principles and practices were decisive in designing the key institutions (e.g. laws, courts, education, the press and administrative systems) and concepts (such as nations, democracy or human rights) that embodied these principles. 38 Jack Goody, The East in the West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. It is well to de-centre Europe, and recognition of common traits greatly complicates explanations about the expansion and industrialisation of Europe (as also in the cases of Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). But in the end, different parts of the world did have different experiences in the modern era. In the case of India, this meant the importation of ideas and institutions from Britain that worked in conjunction with India’s past and present. My concern, rather assisted by this tendency of Goody and others, is to insist that this makes them ‘Indian’ as well as ‘foreign’. 39 Chatterjee, Black Hole. The argument on freedom, in chapters 1–3, is that early modern absolutist states were aware of the issue of sovereignty, stressed the personal qualities of the ruler rather than ‘a conservative dogma of dynastic legitimacy’ (p. 93), and (interpreting Ghulam Husain) potentially able to resist British imperialism. On terrorism, see pp. 273–291. 40 Chatterjee, Black Hole, p. 83 for Ghulam Husain Tabatabai, Sair almua’akkhitin; p. 308 for ‘gifts’. On Rammohan’s indigenous rationalism, compare Bayly, Nationality, pp. 155–156 and passim.

Memory, place and British memorials in early Calcutta 53 41 D.R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays (ed. Prithvi Datta Chandra Sobhai), Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010, pp. 93–181. Sanghamitra Misra kindly drew my attention to this work. 42 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’, Representations, 1992, 37: 1–26; Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, American Historical Review, 1994, 99(5): 1475–1490. Chakrabarty denies the universality of citizenship, equality and individual rights and advocates nativist alternatives. Prakash also defines certain ‘modern’ concepts and practices as ‘foreign’. By contrast, Sumit Sarkar consistently recognised the way political concepts and actions are readily adopted and made indigenous; for example, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History, Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2002, and ‘Post-Modernism and the Writing of History’, Studies in History, 1999, 15(2): 293–322. 43 Ashis Nandy, ‘Contending Stories in the Culture of Indian Politics: Traditions and the Future of Democracy’, in Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion, London: Hurst, 2002. Noting the wish to see Indian history as an unfolding progress, he suggests as an alternative the ‘continuous updating of Indian traditions’ (p. 35), leading to an ‘uneasy, if not inverse, relationship between democracy and modernisation’, partly because the latter came to India ‘piggybacking on an oppressive colonial society to establish lasting bonds with the traditional stratarchies in society’. Precisely so, and as Nandy says (p. 15), his four ‘narratives’ are all attempts ‘to search out an “appropriate” construction of Indian culture’ (for him often seemingly reified and timeless) in response to ‘the changing relationship between society and politics – the global and the local, the personal and the collective’ (p. 15) of which, as I describe it, a major conduit was colonial rule and European ideas. 44 Obviously rejected nowadays, too often this view persists subliminally while alternative dynamic visions remain shadowy. An excellent corrective is Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s, London: Anthem Press, 2012, especially ch.1. With regard to circulation and space, he disputes not ‘the newness of technological change’ (and colonial impact) but a historiography that ‘threatens to flatten the rich and changing [pre-]history’ (p. xxi). 45 Subho Basu, ‘The Dialectics of Resistance: Colonial Geography, Ben gali Literati and the Racial Mapping of Indian Identity’, Modern Asian Studies, January 2010, 44(1): 53–79. The omitted words are ‘claiming heritage to classical antiquity, cultivated Christian masculinity, and the ethno-­ environmental traits of a ruling race’. However, note that it is hard to square the undoubted racial arrogance of ‘colonial discourse’ with some colonial practice: daily accommodations with India and its ways; necessary reliance by an expanding state upon huge numbers of Indians in ever-higher managerial and executive roles; and pragmatic, progressive concession of Indian self-government – factors that also help explain the discord between ideas and actions.

II  Colonial identities

2 On the political history of Britishness in India Lord Cornwallis and the early demise of Creole India Claude Markovits The historiography of the Indo-British colonial encounter has been for a long time characterised by the prevalence of a binary framework, pitting British versus Indian. While the two categories of ‘British’ and ‘Indian’ have been recently subjected to various deconstructionist exercises tending to show that they were far from being homogeneous, there remains a certain asymmetry between the two. It is thus widely accepted that the category ‘Indian’ encompassed a great variety in terms of class, caste, gender, language, religion, etc., and an internal binary framework has even been constructed to try to make sense of it, positing the elites and the subaltern as two opposite poles. No historian worthy of the name, I think, would still hold ‘Indianness’ to be an unproblematic category. The same, however, does not necessarily apply to the category of ‘Britishness’. Of course, it is commonly recognised that sociologically the British in India were far from being a homogeneous group, and a rich body of literature has focused in great detail on the profound differences that existed between the various segments of that altogether small population. Recent research, for instance, has drawn attention to the persistence over time of a significant group of ‘poor whites’ in spite of the relentless hostility they faced from officials.1 The gender angle has been explored anew by feminist scholars with the aim of criticising often-held assumptions about the primary responsibility of British women in the emergence of a polarised racist environment in the second half of the 19th century, following the so-called era of the ‘white Moguls’, so poetically but dubiously, from a historian’s point of view, recreated by William Dalrymple,2 in which sexual relations across the racial barrier are deemed to have been fairly common occurrences. A lot of attention has also been given to the internal ‘ethnic’ diversity of the British population, with a particular focus on the role of the Scots and, to a lesser extent, the Irish. Ian Beaucom, in particular, has shown the complex relationship between the notions of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’.3 But, in spite of all this, the category of ‘British’ is still often held to have operational validity

56  Claude Markovits in political terms to help construct the binary ‘coloniser/colonised’. I refer to Ranajit Guha’s well-known text,4 in which he argues that in India the British were dominant but not hegemonic because their rule was based on physical coercion rather than on a measure of persuasion. Nowhere in the text does Guha question his own de facto equation of ‘British’ with ‘British ruling class’, as if all those who were ‘British’ were necessarily involved in the project of domination of India devised by the ruling class, and that, according to Guha, did not result in the establishment of a real hegemony. Leaving aside the question whether Guha’s view of domination and hegemony as polar opposites is really tenable, I propose to look differently at the question of Britishness in India as a political category by adopting a genealogical rather than a morphological approach. Actually, this leads me to put forward the (perhaps too bold) claim that there is no proper political history of Britishness in India apart from a legal and administrative one. I focus on a period which, I argue, was of crucial importance – that of the governor-generalship of Lord Cornwallis (1786–1793) and of its immediate aftermath. At that time, there took place a redefinition of Britishness that had significant long-term consequences for the political history of British India. These will be considered in the second part of this article.

Defining Britishness: the Cornwallisian closure It is an already well worn-out topos of British-Indian history that Cornwallis (1735–1808), in sharp contrast to his predecessor Warren Hastings, whose political project had been, as shown by Robert Travers in a recent book,5 the ‘restoration of the Mughal Constitution’, was the first British ruler of India who attempted to make India British.6 He is known to have declared that ‘all the natives of India are corrupt’ and it is under his governorship that the Court of Directors of the East India Company, in April 1791, took the momentous decision that no native of India could henceforth fulfil any function in the civil or military apparatus of the Company (although those already in post were not demoted). What has tended to be overlooked, however, is that this exclusion did not apply only to Indians, but also to Eurasians and even to country-born Europeans. It must be recalled that the Regulating Act of 1773 had for the first time introduced a distinction between ‘British subjects’ on the one hand and ‘natives of India’ on the other, mostly for legal purposes. It had not, however, given a clear definition of what a ‘British subject’ was, and although the two categories were obviously held to be mutually exclusive, the lack of a proper definition left open the question of where those who had full or partial British ancestry, but were India born, were situated. In 1773, there were not many of them. Most mixed-race people in India, known then as ‘East Indians’,

On the political history of Britishness in India 57 were of Portuguese ancestry on the paternal side, and although a few like the members of the well-known Derozio family of Calcutta had converted to Protestantism and apparently become British subjects, the vast majority were Catholics and Portuguese subjects.7 At that time, there were still very few Britons in India, whether civilian or military, and only a handful had formed durable unions with mixed-race or Indian women. But in the following two decades, as there was a significant influx of British military personnel into India belonging both to the King’s army and to the Company’s army, the number of these unions increased considerably. We are not talking of idylls ‘à la Dalrymple’ between dashing Britons and beautiful ‘Mughal’ princesses, and there was often nothing romantic in these unions, born of sexual and economic necessity.8 The woman sometimes had been a captive purchased in the course of a military campaign, but in the case of officers, such unions got ‘normalised’ to a certain extent through marriage, although local British society always frowned on them. They resulted in the rapid growth of a group of youth who were British by their fathers and Indian or Portuguese by their mothers. Those whose fathers were private soldiers, by far the most numerous, were largely abandoned to their fate and were often raised in orphanages. Those fathered by officers, a much smaller group altogether, had a more enviable fate. Amongst them, the girls were just supposed to marry, preferably British men, but not much attention was devoted to them by their fathers. On the other hand, most of these British fathers nurtured some social and professional ambitions for their mixed-race sons. Being military men, they understandably thought of a military career for their sons, and cadetships in the Company’s army were particularly coveted by them. There was thus a certain amount of pressure on the Company to open the ranks of its officer corps widely to these mixed-race youngsters, who had generally received a good British education and were also cognizant of India (most of them were fluent in at least one Indian language). The pressure even extended to the King’s army, as royal regiments started arriving in India with more regularity, and some mixed-race ‘Britons’ sought commissions in these regiments. It is doubtful that many were successful at obtaining them, but the sheer possibility of it happening seems to have agitated official minds. At this stage, Cornwallis enters the scene. The new governor-general, who was not a Company man, contrary to Warren Hastings, but owed his nomination to his Tory political connections at home, decisively moved towards a closure on this question. While reviewing in 1789, three years after his arrival in India, the position of officers in the King’s army posted in India, in a correspondence with Sir George Yonge at the War Office he dealt with the problem of those who were of mixed ancestry in the following terms:

58  Claude Markovits ‘Male children’, Cornwallis wrote, ‘of English fathers and “black women who are natives of the country” were often educated, had the character of “gentlemen” and were capable of “acquitting themselves with propriety in a military character” ’. Yet, ‘as on account of their colour and extraction they are considered in the country as inferior to Europeans’, he was still of the opinion that ‘those of them that possess the best abilities could not command that authority and respect which is necessary in the . . . discharge of the duty of an officer’ and added that ‘the greatest part of them would be held in utter contempt by soldiers of His Majesty’s regiments’. Cornwallis, therefore, recommended that ‘the King (would) be pleased to issue such orders and establish such regulations as will in future effectually bar the introduction of any person bar those who can furnish the clearest proof that both their parents are European-born or descended from Europeans without any mixture of the blood of natives of this country as officer or even soldier into any of the British regiments that are now or that may be hereafter employed in India’,9 a proposal that was accepted by Yonge and apparently immediately implemented in the King’s regiments. Christopher Hawes, in his excellent study of the Eurasians in India,10 rightly traces also to the view aired by Cornwallis in 1789 the origins of the 1791 decision by the Court of Directors barring Indians and mixedrace people from its service,11 which was not as he remarks (and this was rather unusual) ‘minuted’. The sequence appears clear between the two, and although it is not possible to document how exactly the Company absorbed the wisdom of Cornwallis’s advice, the inference drawn by Hawes appears logical enough to be convincing. Cornwallis’ language in his letter to Yonge is clearly infused with ideas about race, and we may be tempted to say that he was simply a white racist. He was certainly disingenuous in using the prejudices held by the rank and file as an argument against the employment of Eurasians as officers: when it suited them, commanders in the British Army did not hesitate to castigate the prejudices of the rank and file, whom they held, as is well known, in poor esteem (suffice it to recall here the Duke of Wellington’s famous quip about his soldiers in the Peninsular Wars being ‘the scum of the earth’). There was more, however, to Cornwallis’ argument than an argument about race. At this point, it is appropriate to keep in mind what Roxane Wheeler12 has shown to be the characteristics of 18th-century British views on categories of difference. She has emphasised the prevalence of Christianity, civility and rank over skin colour and other physical attributes in defining difference. The rather crude use of skin colour and ancestry as markers of difference by Cornwallis is, therefore, susceptible of two different interpretations. One could see it as signaling a move in official circles towards a more racialised concept of difference, but this view appears a bit too teleological to me. Or one

On the political history of Britishness in India 59 could see it as instrumentalist and rhetorical: exclusion could be more easily argued if it could be justified on the basis of visible characteristics. The real thrust of the argument was political rather than biological. In support of my argument, it is worth pondering what Cornwallis had written a few months earlier to the Court of Directors of the EIC, when discussing the question of European officers of the Company’s army settling in India after their retirement: I think it is my duty to repeat my opinion that it ought to be part of the political system for the management of India [emphasis mine], to discourage and prevent Europeans as much as possible and particularly European officers from colonizing and settling in this country, for it may be considered a certain Maxim, that when they have reconciled their minds to relinquish all thoughts of returning to their Country, they will soon become indifferent or perhaps, when in opposition to their own view, even hostile to its interests, and many circumstances might in time arise in a country as far removed from Europe in which a number of men of such disposition might have it in their power to create serious embarrassment to Government.13 It is clear that it was not only a question of colour of skin and ancestry. Given his personal history and his role in the American War of Independence, a point to which I shall return, Cornwallis certainly had in mind the British settlers of North America who had revolted against the King. It is also possible that he had come across some evidence of ‘disloyalty’ amongst civilians and military officers who had remained in India at the expiry of their time of service. That this was a common enough occurrence is strongly suggested by a survey of Company servants who had gone to India in the period 1762–1784: of 508 surveyed, apart from 150 who had died in India, only 37 had returned to Britain while 321 had stayed in India.14 And Peter Marshall notes dryly that at least till the 1780s, a widely held view was that ‘it was possible that the Whites might themselves bring down the regime’.15 Similarly, according to Holden Furber, at the time when Dundas sent Cornwallis to India, ‘there were even rumours that the British in India might declare their political independence’.16 So, the danger posed to Company rule by India’s resident British population was not a pure figment of the governor-general’s imagination. As to Cornwallis’ more personal input, we are handicapped by the fact that there exists no good analytical biography of this most important figure of late 18th-century British and imperial history. His passage through three crucial imperial locations – America, India and Ireland – would make him an ideal subject for a good biography with an imperial angle. But it

60  Claude Markovits remains to be written.17 Even Peter Marshall, in his fascinating attempt at writing parallel histories of North America and India in the 1770s and 1780s,18 fails to give Cornwallis the place he deserves. No doubt, the personal dullness of the man, his reputation as a curmudgeon and the lack of sexual scandals linked to him deter biographers from taking an interest in him. So, we can only infer that Cornwallis, who had been defeated at Yorktown by the American insurgents just a few years earlier in 1781 (even if he had attenuating circumstances, his superior Clinton having not provided him with sufficient troops and the French having considerably reinforced the insurgents19), was particularly aware of the potential danger posed to British rule by the emergence of a Creole community in India and that he took measures to prevent such an outcome. We use ‘Creole’ here, a term which was not commonly used in India, to account for people of white or mixed-race ancestry who identified to a certain extent with India, whether or not they were born there. There is no clear evidence that they thought of themselves as a separate community at the time, but the example of North America could not but create fears in Cornwallis’ mind that they would in time harbour separatist ideas. Hence, the need he felt, we can infer, to exclude them from positions in which they could have constituted a menace. The King’s army was Cornwallis’ first target, but then his exclusionary policy was extended to the Company’s Army. In 1794, while he had gone back to England but still followed closely its affairs, he outlined a plan for the reform of the Company’s army20 in which he proposed that no person who had not two European-born parents could be employed in European regiments except as drummer or fifer (of whom there were 22 in a regiment of 1,100, who were particularly exposed to enemy fire), a suggestion that was retained when the reform of the Company’s army was eventually implemented in 1797.21 Thus, Eurasians and to a certain extent countryborn Europeans were excluded from exercising any responsibility in the apparatus of British rule in India.

Creoles in different contexts We can perceive fully the importance of their exclusion from the army only if we cast our net wide and take in a global imperial perspective rather than remaining within a purely British framework. The subsequent history of European colonies in the Americas, both Spanish and French, shows what a potent force mixed-race people could be in military terms: Bolivar and San Martin in South America, who were themselves white Creoles, would not have won their liberation wars against Spain22 without the massive participation of mestizos, the llaneros of Venezuela under General Paez23 or the gauchos of the Plata provinces. In Haiti (French Saint-Domingue), the

On the political history of Britishness in India 61 alliance with Pétion’s mulatto army was crucial to the final victory of Dessalines and his army of black ex-slaves over Napoleon’s armies, as emphasised by C. L. R. James.24 In India, some Eurasians were also formidable military figures. The case of Colonel James Skinner of Skinner’s Horse is the most well known. Born of a Scottish father and a Rajput mother, he was prevented from joining the Company’s Army in which his father served by the reforms of the 1790s. In his semi-fictional account of Skinner’s life, Philip Mason imagines the following dialogue between the young James Skinner and his British father, Hercules Skinner: ‘If you were English’, Hercules tells his son, ‘I could get you a commission in the Company’s service. You might be a country cadet, as I was myself, commissioned out here. But there is a rule against that now: you know it well. Your mother was a native of India and they’ll not commission you. It’s the law. If you were a Rajput, I could take you as a recruit, and you could rise to be a subadar. But you’re not a Rajput either. You’re country-born. There’s no place now in the army for one of your birth’.25 As a result, the young Skinner offered his services to the Marathas and served for several years under the famous Savoyard general Benoît De Boigne, who was in command of the Gwalior ruler Scindia’s armies. He had all the makings of a military adventurer who could have played an important political role in India in the early 19th century, especially since he was culturally quite ‘Indianised’, having a perfect mastery of both Persian and Hindustani. As we know, he eventually proved loyal to the British26 and organised a famous corps of irregular cavalry known as Skinner’s Horse, 3,000 strong, which was of great use to the Company in the period 1815–1820 to maintain order in the Haryana region. Had a Creole community coalesced in India, this military force might have played a different role. Without going into counterfactual history, it has to be recognised that Cornwallis displayed some foresight in discerning the dangers to British despotic rule posed by the emergence of a community of domiciled Europeans and Eurasians in India. By denying them any official role, he succeeded in emasculating durably that group politically. When it reemerged in the late 19th century on the political scene, it set itself largely in opposition to Indian aspirations on an openly racist platform, like at the time of the Ilbert bill agitation.27 But it would be a teleological view of history that would hold this development as inevitable and preordained. My argument here is slightly different from the one put forward recently by Robert Travers about discourses on liberty in British India in the late 18th century.28 Travers points to the fundamental ambiguities in the

62  Claude Markovits discourse that some developed against Company despotism and in defence of British liberties for British subjects in India. He analyses, in particular, a 1779 petition by the ‘British inhabitants of Calcutta’ to Parliament protesting against the extension of British law to the native inhabitants by British judges of the Calcutta Supreme Court. Their arguments revolved around fundamental differences between Britons and natives in political terms, the latter being deemed perfectly happy under a despotic regime (an argument also used by Edmund Burke). I am not so much preoccupied with discourses on liberty as with defining the boundaries of ‘Britishness’. I argue it is there that a closure intervened decisively under the rule of Cornwallis. Once a large group of putative Britons with strong local roots and local connections had been excluded from the British community by a fiat that made use of crude racial and geographical categories, it became much easier for the Company to control the British inhabitants, even if some of them could still mobilise a discourse on liberty against Company despotism. They were too isolated to be a significant threat, and therefore never represented a real challenge. There remains, of course, the question of why Cornwallis appears to have so successfully nipped in the bud any move towards the emergence of a Creole community in India. Actually, he was not successful in one of his pet projects – that of a fusion between the King’s army and the Company’s army. Company officers, who belonged to a different social milieu than the King’s officers being mostly small gentry or even middle class as opposed to aristocrats and upper gentry, managed to thwart his attempt.29 However, the energy they expended in defending their own institution with the economic advantages it conferred on them (their pay was higher than the pay in the King’s army and promotion was entirely through the ranks) probably explains that they did not become more of a political challenge, even if ‘white mutinies’ did occur in the early 19th century30 and created fears amongst the rulers. As to Eurasians, who were really Cornwallis’s main victims, their acceptance of their fate remains more difficult to account for. The political circumstances of a fight to death with the French have, however, to be taken into account. Any attempt at dissent would have been immediately tarred with the brush of ‘Jacobinism’,31 and we know how effective this stigmatisation was in Britain itself to discredit opponents. So, the fact that no Creole political community could emerge in late 18th-century India has at least partly to do with the environment of a global struggle for supremacy between Britain and France. One should also take into account the social heterogeneity of the small Eurasian population, which made it difficult to present a united front against the Company government, especially in the absence of any significant support in London.

On the political history of Britishness in India 63 That there were different historical possibilities in late 18th- and early 19th-century India is, however, suggested by an even cursory look at the political history of Portuguese India. The insularity of Indo-Portuguese history, which is largely of its own making, has had the unfortunate consequence that it is largely ignored by historians of British India. If one overlooks ‘essentialist’ explanations of the difference between British and Portuguese racial attitudes, one is led to conclude that the difference in historical trajectories between British India and Portuguese India was not preordained but resulted from specific contingencies. In Portuguese India, there emerged a group of black ‘Creole’ Portuguese, who, taking advantage of political turbulences in Portugal in the period between 1820 and 1835, became important political actors. Although they met with opposition from both the white Portuguese and the mixed-race ‘descendentes’, they carved a niche for themselves as ‘Portuguese’. The figure of Bernardo Peres da Silva, a Goan Catholic of Brahmin background (who was elected to the Cortes of Lisbon in 1822 in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1821–1822 in Portugal, then spent years of exile in Brazil before returning in 1835 to Goa under a new liberal political regime as ‘Prefect’ of Portuguese India [a newly created position] to be immediately overthrown by a military junta before eventually returning in 1837), is a good example of the historical possibilities of ‘Creolisation’.32 My point is that, if no Peres da Silva emerged in British India, no ‘black Briton’, it has to do not only with differences in the contemporary political situations in Britain and Portugal, but also with the long-term effect of the exclusionary measures taken under Cornwallis and continued by his successors. Of course, the evocation of ‘black Britons’ immediately brings to mind Macaulay’s 1835 minute on education and his project of creating ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’. But, as is well known, Macaulay thought in terms of creating a group of clerks as auxiliaries of British rule and not in terms of helping the emergence of a Creole elite. Britishness had thus been defined in the late 18th century as the privilege of a small minority of metropolitan whites. This redefinition of Britishness in a narrowly exclusionary way was of enormous consequence. The second part of this chapter takes a rapid look at the way in which it influenced durably the field of political discourse and political action in British India.

Indian responses: two forms of cosmopolitanism When a small group of English-educated natives started to emerge in the 1820s, there was no British political community in India to which they could think of aggregating themselves. The 1820s were marked by a

64  Claude Markovits particular display of Company despotism against ‘free-born Englishmen’, with a cause célèbre, the expulsion from India of newspaper editor James Silk Buckingham who had taken up the cause of Irish soldiers in British regiments.33 Since (for reasons into which I shall not go and that have been the subject of many studies) Indian nationalism was not yet on the agenda,34 the members of the nascent native intelligentsia were tempted by different strategies that could be seen as embodying forms of ‘cosmopolitanism’. In the face of the closure of all avenues of legitimate political dissent within the existing regime, for those Indian literati who were seeking forms of political self-expression, it was tempting to look for inspiration elsewhere than in Britain. Recently, C. A. Bayly has drawn attention to the echo that the Iberian constitutional revolutions of the 1820s, both in Spain and Portugal as well as the Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, met with in India.35 This could be seen as part of the ‘liberal international’ recently analysed by Maurizio Isabella.36 In view of the close connections between Goa and Bombay, with a large Goan community present in the capital of the Bombay Presidency, it would be interesting to know more about the impact their presence and the turbulences in Goa had on political developments in Western India.37 As it is, more attention has been devoted in the existing literature to Calcutta, thanks to the prominent role played there by men such as Rammohun Roy and Henry Vivian Derozio. Both sought to carve out for their respective communities, the Indian literati for the former and the ‘East Indians’ for the latter, some political space. Roy, besides forging close links to the Unitarians in Britain, also expressed support for the constitutionalist revolutions in Europe including the French Trois Glorieuses (the Revolution of July 1830), and is known to have been a particular admirer of the French Revolution as well as a supporter of the Spanish constitutionalists. He had republican leanings, and in a famous correspondence with the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand,38 in which he protested over the fact that the French demanded a passport for entering their country, he pleaded for a kind of world government in a manner reminiscent of Kant’s famous project for a perpetual peace. As for Derozio (1809–1831), a talented poet who boasted that he dreamt in English, he was also a social reformer39 and his ‘Young Bengal’ had as an inspiration Mazzini’s ‘Young Italy’: he started a trend of Italophilia that was to play a significant role in the subsequent history of political ideas in India. While in the 1820s and 1830s, at the time when Foreign Secretary George Canning was encouraging constitutionalist movements in Europe as a way of countering Metternich and the Holy Alliance, Britishness and liberal constitutionalism did not appear incompatible, things changed by the mid-century, when Britain became an island of stability and conservatism in an Europe raked by revolutionary risings in 1848–1849.

On the political history of Britishness in India 65 Gradually, a difference appeared in India amongst the English-educated literati between two approaches. Some stuck to the British model and sought forms of imperial citizenship,40 while others emancipated themselves from British liberal ideas and sought inspiration in contemporary stories of national emancipation with Ireland and Italy vying for their attention. I would argue that both these attempts not only had a cosmopolitan dimension, but also that they embodied different forms of cosmopolitanism. Those who remained within the parameters of British political thought, attempted to construct the empire itself as a form of cosmopolis, taking advantage of a certain rhetoric that harked back to the example of the Roman Empire as the model of a cosmopolitan empire, as epitomised by Saint Paul’s famous civis Romanus sum. They could build on certain trends in British official policy that seemed to open a way for Indians to participate in a British imperial political community. They used the Queen’s proclamation of 1 November 1858 as a manifesto for a form of imperial citizenship, although the document itself was riddled with ambiguities and caveats of all sorts. However, its promise of equal treatment of all the subjects of the British Crown seemed to put an end to the insidious distinction established by the Regulating Act between British subjects and natives of India, which had been reified by the reforms of Cornwallis. The 1876 Royal Titles Act and the subsequent Durbar appeared as a further vindication of the idea of a special place for Indians in an empire which became a sort of dual monarchy on the Austro-Hungarian model, a ‘Kakania’ to use Robert Musil’s famous ironical expression in his novel The Man without Qualities.41 The problem is that the rulers of India never took the Queen’s proclamation seriously. For them, the Indian subjects of the queen could never be citizens with political rights equal to those of her British subjects.42 In their view, a Briton could only be a white man. That is why the emergence of a discourse of ‘imperial citizenship’ cannot be equated with the resurgence of a ‘Creole’ India. The world of the second half of the 19th century was not that of the late 18th century: ideas of racial difference had become so deeply entrenched that nobody could think of uniting Eurasians, ‘domiciled’ Europeans and ‘Westernised’ or ‘Anglicised’ Indians into one political community. Those Indian literati who thought of themselves as imperial citizens did not claim Britishness, knowing well that they did not have the right colour of skin. While they sought political support from liberal-minded Britons in India and in Britain, and even accepted the leadership of retired Indian civil servant Allan Octavian Hume over the nascent Indian National Congress, it did not mean an aspiration on their part to become British. Even Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi publicist who got elected to the British Parliament in 1892,43 did not claim to be British. He was a proud Indian patriot, even in some ways a nationalist, but he believed

66  Claude Markovits in the possibility of a partnership between Britain and India, in which the interests of the latter would not be subordinated to those of the former. To us, it looks a pipe dream, but some of India’s best minds were captivated by the idea. In one development, the notion of a particular link between the Crown and its Indian subjects, due to the queen having been made the empress of India, was instrumentalised by some to claim special privileges for Indians in the colonies. It is in the name of such a link that Gandhi fought for the political rights of Indians in South Africa between 1894 and 1914.44 For him, the empire was British in the sense that it embodied British liberal values that he then cherished, but it was also a kind of universal brotherhood in which Indians could be full participants. Gandhi’s take on the empire as a brotherhood, which strikes us retrospectively as delusional, directly clashed with the ideas of the extremist nationalists who saw the future of India in a total break with empire, and viewed the Italian Risorgimento or the Irish Fenians as the alternative political models to emulate. Thus, one of the main ideologues of extremism, Veer Damodar Savarkar, developed his own interpretation of Mazzini, whose work he had translated into Marathi, as a revolutionary nationalist, and in Hind Swaraj Gandhi attempted to claim him on the contrary as a forerunner of satyagraha as contrasted with Garibaldi as the ancestor of terrorism.45 But the fact that the (indirect) debate between these two major actors of Indian politics in the 20th century partly centred around the figure of an Italian 19th-century leader already dead and who had become an icon was testimony to the fact that Indian nationalists saw themselves as participants in a wider debate about the meaning of nationalism. I would then mention briefly other forms of political identification that could be seen as ‘cosmopolitan’ and that played an important role in India in the 20th century: pan-Asiatism, which got its initial boost from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, was epitomised by Rabindranath Tagore’s embrace of Japan as a kind of template46 and would culminate in Subhas Chandra Bose’s alliance with Imperial Japan in the Second World War; pan-Islamism that emerged at the time of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 and climaxed in the Khilafat movement of 1920–1922,47 but could be seen as influencing to a certain extent later Muslim separatism and the movement for Pakistan; and last, international communism, whose influence would rub off on some nationalists like Nehru through the League against Imperialism. By then, imperial citizenship as a political ideal in India was dead as the dodo, but it had not always been the case and one should beware of projecting later tendencies into earlier stories. I want to conclude that rather than remaining centred around a binary opposition between ‘Britishness’ and ‘Indianness’, the history of British

On the political history of Britishness in India 67 India can be made more interesting and more significant by bringing in another dimension – that of cosmopolitanism. What I have tried to show here is that because Britishness had been, so to say, ‘hijacked’ to the exclusive benefit of a small minority of metropolitan whites and Indianness had remained a vague and contested category (this is a point which has been made by many) till at least the 1920s, there was space in India in the 19th and early 20th century for the emergence of political idioms that embedded a cosmopolitan dimension. Such a dimension could be found not only through a construction of the British Empire itself as a cosmopolitan community, but it could also emerge through a search for other non-British political models. Both strategies eventually floundered, and nationalism emerged in the 1920s as the only viable way forward for the Indian elites and a chance of gathering some mass support. However, even that nationalism, I would argue, retained traces of cosmopolitanism, be it in Gandhi’s attempt at linking India’s struggle to the fate of the world at large or in Nehru’s search for anti-imperialist solidarity. That is why an attempt at recovering cosmopolitan moments in the trajectory of Indian political discourse must not be seen as a kind of antiquarian’s pastime, but is of some relevance to an understanding of the political history of British India.

Notes 1 Harald Fischer-Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans: Race Class and ‘White Subalternity’ in Colonial India, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009. 2 William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India, London: Harper-Collins, 2002. 3 Ian Beaucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Location of Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 4 Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 5 Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in 18th Century India: The British in Bengal, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 6 As mentioned in George Robert Gleig, Life of Sir Thomas Munro, London: John Murray, 1849, p. 381, Cornwallis was anxious ‘to make everything as English as possible in a country which resembles England in nothing’. 7 In the Madras of 1773, according to the 19th-century British historian and traveller James Talboys Wheeler, there were 300 ‘English’ in White Town as against 3,000 ‘Portuguese’ in Black Town. Quoted in George Albert Wilson-deRoze, Origins of the Anglo-Indian Community, Kolkata: A Cameo Book, 2001, p. 10. 8 Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 9 Cornwallis to Sir George Yonge, secretary of state for war, 5 November 1789, War Office Records, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, Secretary-at-War, In-letters and Reports, 1782–1792, WO 40/5.

68  Claude Markovits 10 Christopher John Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773–1833, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996, pp. 85–90. 11 A standing order of 19 April 1791 stipulated that ‘No person, the son of a Native Indian, shall henceforward be appointed by this Court to Employment in the Civil, Military or Marine Service of the Company’. Quoted in Hawes, op. cit., p. 90. 12 Roxane Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in 18th Century British Culture, Philadelphia, London: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 13 Cornwallis to Court of Directors, 6 March 1789, India Office Records, Asia Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC) of the British Library, London, East India Company Correspondence, Bengal Letters received 1 November 1788 to 12 March 1789, E/4/47. 14 John Scott Waring, quoted in Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in 18th Century Britain, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 70. 15 Peter John Marshall, ‘The Whites of British India 1780–1830: A Failed Colonial Society’, The International History Review, 1990, XII(1): 26–44. 16 Holden Furber, Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville 1742–1811, Political Manager of Scotland, Statesman, Administrator of British India, Oxford, London: Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford, 1931, p. 48. 17 See Frank and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. This, however, does not deal with the question in a really satisfactory manner. 18 Peter John Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America c. 1750–1783, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 19 Henry Phelps Johnston, The Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis, 1781, New York: Da Capo Press, 1971 (1st ed., New York: Harper Bros, 1881). 20 In a letter to Dundas dated 7 November 1794, reproduced in Om Prakash (ed.), Lord Cornwallis, Administrative Reforms and British Policy, New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 2002, p. 138. 21 Raymond Callahan, ‘The Company’s Army, 1757–1798’, in Patrick Tuck (ed.), The East India Company 1600–1858, Warfare, Expansion and Resistance, vol. V, London, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 21–31. 22 On these wars, see John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions 1808– 1826, New York: Norton, c. 1986, and Robert Hervey, Liberators: South America’s Savage Wars of Freedom 1810–1830, London: John Murray, 2000. 23 Robert Bontine Cunningham Graham, Jose Antonio Paez, s.l.: William Heinemann, 1929. 24 Cyril Lionel Robert James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint l’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London: Secker & Warburg, 1938. 25 Philip Mason, Skinner of Skinner’s Horse, a Fictional Portrait, London: André Deutsch, 1979, p. 15. 26 See Skinner’s letter, dated 6 January 1815, to the adjutant general of the army, enclosed in adjutant general to secretary to Government in the Secret Department dated 10 May 1815, India Office Records, APAC, Military

On the political history of Britishness in India 69 Collections, Collection 31, Skinner’s Horse, L/MIL/5/378. In this letter, Skinner accepted command of the regiment and pledged loyalty. 27 Christine Dobbin, ‘The Ilbert Bill: A Study of Anglo-Indian Opinion in India, 1883’, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand, 1965, 12(1): 87–102. 28 Robert Travers, ‘Contested Despotism: Problems of Liberty in Brit ish India’, in Jack P. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900, New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 191–219. 29 Raymond Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reforms, 1783– 1795, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. 30 Peter Stanley, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India 1825–1875, London: Hurst, c. 1998. 31 In a letter to Dundas dated 21 March 1799, Richard Wellesley (Lord Mornington) boasted of the way he had suppressed all manifestations of ‘Jacobinism’ in the European population of India. Letter enclosed in Edward Ingram (ed.), Two Views of British India:The Private Correspondence of Mr Dundas and Lord Wellesey 1798–1801, Bath: Adam and Dart, 1970, pp. 235–236. 32 For a sketch of Peres da Silva’s career, see Antonio Anastasio Brito da Costa, As Revolucoes Politicas da India Portuguesa do Seculo XIX, Margao: Typographia do “Ultramar”, 1896. 33 Ralph Edmund Turner, James Silk Buckingham, 1786–1855: A Social Biography, London: Williams & Norgate, 1934. 34 For a discussion of this question, see Christopher Allan Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. 35 Christopher Allan Bayly, ‘Rammohun Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–1830’, Modern Intellectual History, 2007, 4(1): 25–41. 36 Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian émigrés and the liberal international in the post-Napoleonic era, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 37 Some indications are to be found in Teotonio R. De Sousa, ‘Capital Input in Goa’s Freedom Struggle: The Bombay Connection’, in Teotonio R. De Sousa (ed.), Indo-Portuguese History: Old Issues, New Questions, New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1985, pp. 102–113. 38 Letter (not dated) to Prince Talleyrand reproduced in Sophia Dobson Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1962, 1st ed., London: Harold Collet, 1900, Appendix IX, pp. 501–504. 39 Elliot Walter Madge, Henry Derozio, the Eurasian Poet and Reformer, Calcutta: Attic Press Book, 1905. 40 For an overall view of this trend, based on an analysis of some important texts, see Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 41 On this point, see Claude Markovits, ‘How British Was British India? Recovering the Cosmopolitan Dimension in the British-Indian Colonial Encounter’, Jahrbuch für Europäische Uberseegeschichte, 10, Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Velag, 2010, p. 78.

70  Claude Markovits 42 David A. Washbrook, ‘After the Mutiny: From Queen to Queen-Empress’, History Today, 1997, 47(9): 10–15. 43 On British reactions to his election, see Sumita Mukherjee, ‘ “Narrow Majority” and “Bow-and-Agree”: Public Attitudes Towards the Elections of the First Asian MPs in Britain, Dadabhai Naoroji and Mancherjee Merwanjeee Bhownagree, 1885–1896’, Journal of the Oxford University Historical Society, 2004, 2: 1–20. 44 On Gandhi in South Africa, see Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1928; Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, Johannesburg: The Ravan Press, 1985; Surendra Bhana and Goolam Vahed, The Making of a Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa, 1893–1914, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005. 45 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (ed. Anthony J. Parel), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 46 On Tagore’s connection to Japan and China, see Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China and India, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. 47 See Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, and Azmi Ozcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain 1877–1924, Leiden: Brill, 1997.

3 Religion and race Eurasians in colonial India Valerie Anderson

Although religion played a major part in the lives of 19th-century Eurasians in India, it is a subject that has received little attention from any academic discipline. There are many questions yet to be explored, but archival data are sparse and diffuse. Nonetheless, there may be many answers to find in the silences that indicate to historians the presence of a subject about which our predecessors were uneasy. Eurasians is and has always been an uncomfortable word, but it was the identifier used by the government of British India from the late 1820s until 1911 to refer officially to any of those who might now be called Anglo-Indians. In that period, they were also known as East-Indian, Indo-British, Indo-Portuguese or Indo-French, and by less savoury terms such as half-castes and country born. It would be anachronistic to use the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ because at the time those British who were in India in government service referred to themselves as AngloIndians. It would also be inaccurate because the two terms (Eurasian and Anglo-Indian) refer to populations that do not completely overlap. AngloIndian is also now a kind of political identity that many people who might be entitled to call themselves Anglo-Indian would be very uneasy with. The colonial British administrations, Company and later crown kept meticulous records and carried out extensive exercises in demographic categorisation; so, it should be easy to find out about the Eurasian category. In fact, defining this category has always been problematic. Neither the category nor the circumstances in which it applied were static. In a 1925 House of Commons debate, the undersecretary of state for India was asked to clarify the status of Eurasians (by then termed Anglo-Indians); he answered thus: For purposes of employment under government and inclusion in schemes of Indianisation members of the Anglo-Indian and DomiciledEuropean community are Statutory Natives of India; for purposes of

72  Valerie Anderson education and internal security, their status, so far as it admits of definition, approximates to that of European British Subjects.1 This statement was made more than a century after the British decided that Eurasians and Europeans were separate communities. The British were institutionally schizophrenic about the national or racial status of Eurasians and, to a lesser extent, about domiciled Europeans who failed to leave India for schooling or retirement in Europe. In 19th-century census reports, there were frequent complaints about the inaccuracy of data concerning Eurasians. British and Eurasian community leaders believed that those Eurasians who looked white were returning themselves as Europeans and that Indians were taking on European names and dress and claiming to be Eurasians so as (in both cases) to improve their employment prospects. There were further difficulties in deciding how those in exogenous relationships were to be categorised when mixed couples of Eurasian and European, Eurasian and Indian, European and Indian were raising Eurasian children. It is not surprising that the margins of this ‘Eurasian’ category were never successfully set. The category was meant to identify those who had mixed European and Indian ancestry and who had been born and bred in India. But it was contingent on a mixture of ancestry and lifestyle. It sometimes included people whose ancestry was wholly European but who had been born and raised in India and had no further connection with Europe, the so-called ‘country-born’, later styled domiciled Europeans. Incidentally, these are now included in India’s constitutional definition of the Anglo-Indian minority community. Employment added another variable. East India Railway and most likely other employers, too, included amongst its Eurasian staff some people whose ancestry was known to be wholly Indian but whose education and lifestyle were considered to be sufficiently European for employment as though Eurasian. The category was also used sometimes for other minorities who the British found it expedient to include such as Armenians, Jews and some Parsis. But the Indo-Portuguese, part Indian and part European so one would think obviously Eurasian, were often excluded. Some may have self-excluded because they returned themselves in census enumerations simply as Portuguese or Goan, others were excluded because the British thought Portuguese Eurasians were just as likely to be Indian converts to Catholicism or the descendants of manumitted Portuguese slaves. In the 1871 census, there was a separate category for the Indo-Portuguese, but by 1881 the category had disappeared. ‘Portuguese’ numbers had not grown and only the most Anglicised were reclassified as Eurasians; most were now classified as native Christians or ‘Goanese’.2

Religion and race 73 Also excluded from Eurasian classification could be any illegitimate Eurasians whose European fathers had failed to acknowledge them together with Eurasians whose European ancestry came from their mothers. All of them were likely to be classified as Indians. The British and even Eurasian community leaders were unwilling to classify these people as Eurasians for a variety of reasons – all involving prestige. Including the illegitimate might have shown that some European men had loose morals and did not take care of their own.3 The same was true of Eurasian children of European women; it was not done to admit publicly that some European women chose Indian husbands. Such children were simply recorded as Indians. In the 19th century, if not carefully protected, European women were imagined to be at risk of rape, mutilation and murder by Indian men – not married to them. Their children were not just vilified for illegitimacy, but their mothers, having chosen an Indian to father their children, would have been considered mad or bad. Victorian sensitivity on this subject meant it was a long wait before even a fictional account of a European woman choosing an Indian man could be published – that was the novel Anna Lombard, published in 1901.4 Real examples are equally hard to find. The 12-year marriage of a European woman to Meer Hassan Ali is known of only because, avoiding the ire of colonial society, she returned to Britain where she published her 1832 ‘Observations on the Mussalmauns of India’.5 The marriage was only recognised by the British because it had taken place in England. Naturally, exceptions could be made for high achievers and anyone who did something impressive. The actions of William Beresford Brendish, a telegraph boy in 1857 Delhi who put his own life at risk to warn the British that the rebels had arrived in the city, were widely reported in the British press. His name and bravery were seen as characteristically European. There was no specific mention of his race but young telegraph operators were usually Eurasians. One article referred to him and the other telegraph staff as Europeans, but they may well have been Eurasians reclassified (for purposes of internal security).6 After 40 years of service in the post and telegraph service, his final rank was telegraph master with a final salary just INR 200. It is, therefore, unlikely that he would have been a European. Even today, his descendants still question whether he was European or Eurasian.7 There have always been those who confound the imposition of racial classifications such as the label Eurasian. Ananda Coomaraswamy was born in 1877 to a Ceylonese father and an English mother. His father died when he was just two years of age, after which he and his mother left for England where he was raised and educated. As an adult, he settled in America where he worked on improving Western understanding of Indian art. He had two English wives, an American and an Argentinian (sequentially), and had spent only a handful of years in South Asia. Nonetheless, he was a Hindu,

74  Valerie Anderson famed as an Indian philosopher and identified strongly with his Indian heritage. Similarly complicated was Noor Inyat Khan. She was born in Russia to an Indian father and an American (honourary European) mother and raised in France. She worked as a British SOE spy during World War II, posing as a French native. But she also rewrote stories of the Buddha for children and is usually represented in the media as an Indian Princess.8 All of this may seem unimportant to us, but that was not the case for people living in a society that was so strongly stratified by the concept of race, a concept for which there was no clear or consistent definition except at its extreme margins.

I In the 19th century, undoubtedly many people of mixed European and Indian ancestry were not Christians but Muslims and even Hindus, if their European connections could be hidden well enough. Tagore even gave us a European orphan character, the fictional Gora, who was raised to believe that he was an Indian Brahmin.9 There were real people, particularly early in the century or remote from the presidency capitals, who considered their religious beliefs to be as mixed as their genetics. But any European or Eurasian who made census returns declaring that they were Muslim, Buddhist or anything other than Christian had their entries corrected demonstrating the central importance of religion in the government’s perception of racial identity. In Baine’s report on the 1891 census, it is clear that non-Christian Eurasians were enumerated as natives. The author of the Madras report listed every caste name entered in the schedules including ‘Eurasian Hindoo’. But because ‘. . . caste terms . . . modified by prefixes or affixes . . . [were not] considered satisfactory’, any Eurasians who thought themselves Hindu had to be returned either as Eurasian or Hindu, but not both.10 The idea that a Eurasian might profess any religion other than Christianity was met with incredulity and removed from the records.11 European or Eurasian meant Christian. So far as the government and British society in India was concerned, Christianity was central to both European and Eurasian identity with only occasional honourary exceptions for employment or business purposes, as already noted. Religion was not just about faith but also about lifestyle: marriage, socialisation, dress and where one lived. It was firmly believed that properly educated Europeans or Eurasians would never choose to follow any faith except Christianity. So, what happened to those who did choose otherwise? Some, like David Dyce Sombre, confused the heck out of the British. He combined Catholicism with Islam. Having been brought up with social values appropriate to a Muslim court, he found the

Religion and race 75 behaviour of some of his European associates towards women abhorrent. When he accused his British wife of adultery because she had been dancing and socialising with men, he found himself confined as a lunatic. To the British, he was either mad or Indian. If he was a European, then his views proved him mad. If he were Indian, then he was perfectly sane. Culturally, he had to be one or other, not a mixture of both. But he was a mixture of both, and even though his liberty was at stake, he would not define himself otherwise.12 Eurasians who had never been formally recognised by their European fathers might be left in peace to follow their mother’s faith, but acknowledged children whose fathers had died, left India or were just poor could be taken from their families and placed in orphanages. If that happened, they would be raised as Christians. Take an example researched by Malcolm Speirs: the case of William Short. Born in Lucknow, he was the son of a great-nephew of Muriam Begam, a Eurasian queen of Awadh. His father died in 1890 when he was about 10 years old, and because he lived with his Indian Muslim mother, a British guardian was appointed who insisted that he be sent to a Catholic boarding school. Whilst there, he was allowed no contact with his family, not even his Catholic Eurasian grandmother who had offered to care for him. His Muslim mother and Eurasian Catholic uncle (with whom she now lived) obtained a court order allowing them to remove him from the boarding school. They sent him to a nearby Catholic mission school. But that school was for Indian children not Eurasians and so the court order was overturned. The boy was allowed no further contact with his family and he was returned to the Catholic boarding school. On the day William reached his majority and with the protection of a family lawyer, he ran away. He reestablished contact with both his Catholic and Muslim relatives, but chose himself to become a Muslim with the name Baqur Hussein. He married a Muslim, but perhaps hedging bets for his own son named him both Haidar Abbas and James Short.13 Baqur Hussein was lucky: he had independent means so there was not much the British could do to him. Most were neither so lucky nor so strong willed. The orphanages were careful to sever Eurasian children’s ties to any Indian culture and relatives, and this included their own parents. Besides what happened to William Short, there are many examples in surviving records, such as those from the Madras Military Orphan asylums of children whose European fathers had died but whose mother’s existence was not even recorded. The mother was frequently ‘unknown’. From the record of a female orphan in that asylum, whose mother was ‘unknown’ but who was later removed to be cared for by her stepfather, it would seem to be possible to have a stepfather but still an unknown mother – though it is hard to imagine how.14

76  Valerie Anderson Orphans were not only to be raised within a British milieu appropriate to the class of their fathers and as good Christians, but they were also to be moulded into useful citizens. Boys might be prepared and their talents identified before they entered into training and employment as bandsmen, writers or clerks, cartographers, apothecaries and later as railwaymen and telegraphers, to name a few common options. Girls were to be safely married off or, failing that, to be trained as seamstresses, teachers and nurses. Even at the turn of the 20th century, it was not unknown for a new official or a missionary, especially an evangelist, to ‘imagine that Hinduism and Mahomedanism . . . [were] evidently absurd’.15 A non-Christian Eurasian was perceived as simply ignorant. But it was not just ignorant Eurasians who professed other faiths as Victorian texts might have us believe. Some parents made pragmatic decisions about their children’s upbringing including the faith in which they were to be schooled. Colonel William Gardner and his wife Mah Munzel Ool Nissa, with strong connections and status in both British and Mughal society, raised their family to be at home in the highest circles of both. Their children and grandchildren married variously a Mughal prince, British officers and wealthy Eurasians. Other families, or at least fathers, chose where they thought individual children would be most likely to flourish. Thus, a fair-skinned son sent to England for a British education might land a reasonable position in Britain or in British India, but his darker brother might do better after education in India, perhaps including Persian or a vernacular language and familiarity with court etiquette, to prepare him for employment in a princely state. Early in the 19th century, many European and Eurasian men sought military employment in the princely states, even though this was often against the wishes of the British authorities and expressly forbidden in many treaties. The nativity of Eurasians and the inexact wording of many treaties complicated the issue. Several durbars, when asked by the British to justify and document their employment of Europeans and Eurasians, were simply dumbfounded; they had never bothered to pass on such details. Samthar durbar said ‘. . . since 1852 or for the past fifty years . . . no applications have ever been submitted from this State, either to the Central India Agency or to the Bundelkhand Political Agency for sanction to the employment of Europeans and East-Indians’.16 Eurasians born and bred in Samthar were unlikely to have considered becoming second-class British subjects when they were valued employees of their home state and its ruler. Circumstances differed from state to state, but a brief look at three (Punjab, Awadh and Hyderabad) is informative. Those working for Ranjit Singh in the Punjab could quite easily disappear into the local population and it would have been simplest, if they intended to stay, to raise their children as Sikhs. Grey cites John Holmes,

Religion and race 77 a Eurasian officer with Ranjit Singh, who like all Europeans and Eurasians serving his durbar had to agree to grow a beard, marry locally, give up beef, neither smoke in public nor offend the Sikh religion and (if required) to fight their erstwhile countrymen.17 Some were better at blending in than others. Alexander Gardner must have stood out in his tartan kurta and turban as he was a little before his time. The first Sikh tartans to gain official recognition in Scotland did not appear until 1999! Before British annexation, Awadh’s Europeans and Eurasians often lived a hybrid lifestyle in Lucknow. Only later did that idea become repugnant to the British. Before that, Christians such as Mary Short and Mariam Aish, whose fathers were British and mothers Armenian and Hindu, respectively, underwent conversion to Islam in order to become wives to the King of Awadh Ghazi-uddin Haidar. Even so, Mary was still allowed to practise her Roman Catholic (RC) faith without interference. In ‘The Wasikadas of Awadh’, we see that the author’s European and Eurasian ancestors who had a pension (a wasika) from the Awadhi royal family were able to choose their own lifestyles, mixing with Indians and Europeans, following Christianity or Islam and wearing kurta or Western dress as they chose. William Short, whose ancestry is explored above, had a pension which allowed him to do just that.18 Only when the family grew and each share of the pension became too small to survive on without the employment opportunities now proffered by the British, were they forced to conform, and there were several cases of conversion to Christianity so that marriages and children’s legitimacy would be recognised under European personal law. In Hyderabad, the sheer scale of the kingdom and its strategic importance to the British meant that if the Nizam wished to employ Europeans and Eurasians regardless of creed, the British had to be diplomatic if they wished to influence him. They had to disguise their concern for British interests as concern for the Nizam – lest he be duped by an unscrupulous cad. The kingdom was powerful enough for the loyalty of Britain’s own officials to be called into question, especially when they appeared to be ‘going native’. The political agent to Hyderabad was advised as late as 1884 to ‘tread carefully’ before he interfered in its employment of 271 Europeans and Eurasians there.19 Not only was Hyderabad powerful, but also the Nizam had the ear of the Viceroy and so could afford to ignore lesser officials.20 It was far easier for the British to exert pressure in British India, where family life could be scrutinised and employment, housing and other opportunities for Eurasians were dependent on conformity. There was another kind of exception that the British had less control over, and that was whether or not Indian society could accept Eurasians as their own. A 2006 paper in ‘Men and Masculinities’, by Janaki Abraham of Delhi University entitled ‘The Stain of White’, identified a Keralan

78  Valerie Anderson matrilineal community which included (and sometimes excluded) Hindu Eurasians. European men and Indian Hindu women formed long-term, though sometimes long-distance, relationships raising their children within a caste group – the Thiyyas. In Cannanore and Tellicherry, the European fathers were British and in Mahe they were French. Some of their children were raised as Christians, but this was not universal. Thiyyas’ property and wealth passed from mother to daughter, so these mothers were in a position to assert themselves. It was not without opposition; some fathers insisted on maintaining open contact with their children and shaping their futures (within the British sphere) through education. Local communities, too, would sometimes ‘excommunicate’ mothers and their Eurasian children, perhaps even their extended family, to preserve caste pride. Others hid their mixed relationships for many decades. Only recently has caste sensitivity relaxed enough so that some of the descendants of these relationships can open up and talk about their ancestry.21 Others are still afraid to do so. It was important to the British that Eurasians should be Christians. But why? In the early days of British India and until the last decade of the 18th century, the East India Company’s personnel in India thought of Eurasians largely as acclimatised Europeans, potential spies, walking dictionaries and a cheaper and more readily available source of labour than imported Europeans. European men were even offered a reward for baptising (as Protestants) any children they had fathered. Those whose fathers could send them to Britain for their education, for example, William Dalrymple’s white Mughal James Kirkpatrick and Peter Robb’s Blechyndens, could anticipate a high degree of acceptance in Britain and British India. Money, class and education could still trump race. But the majority of European men were working class, soldiers and later also railwaymen, who could not afford to send their children home. Their numbers increased rapidly in the 19th century as did the number of poor uneducated and decidedly brown children they fathered. From the turn of the 19th century, Eurasians became far more visible because of their increasing numbers and because exclusion, first through proscriptions and later through social pressures, left them with worse employment prospects and in a state of poverty that the British found embarrassing. There is a constant theme in the literature, fact and fiction, of poor whites and Eurasians living in the bazaars amongst the native population. Not only were they desperately poor, but also they were sending their children to neither school nor church. Before 1805, there had been no barracks for soldiers, which is why (apart from their poverty) the bazaars were a perfectly natural home for so many of them and their Eurasian descendants.22 This became a problem because a fundamental principle developed supposedly legitimising British rule – Europeans in general and the British in

Religion and race 79 particular were possessed of a racial and cultural superiority. Europeans and part-Europeans had to embody this imagined superiority, and Christianity was a major part of it. Chatterton tells us that Bishop Cotton around 1860 said, ‘If there could be one thing fatal to the spread of Christianity, it was the sight of a generation of unchristian, uncared-for Englishmen, springing up in the midst of a heathen population’.23 Towards the end of the 18th century, Parliament enacted Pitt’s India Bill and formed the India office to try to root out nabobbery and corruption and improve the image of the government of British India. Together with the concurrent rise of evangelical Christianity, this made personal morality very much part of the process. In Britain, keeping mistresses and fathering illegitimate children became less socially acceptable than it had been. The British in India had an added pressure to avoid miscegenation, although a lack of women who were both European and Christian made that quite problematic. These attitudes were mirrored in the Eurasian population, too, through education, emulation, social pressure and their own evangelisation.

II Christianity was not introduced to India by Europeans. Syrian Christianity predates all Europeans in India by many centuries and was an orthodox (i.e. very traditional and Eastern) form of Christianity. But the introduction of Western Christianity by the Portuguese, French, Dutch, British, Americans, Germans, Danes and many others meant that it came in many forms or denominations. The 1871 census of India records the following broad denominations or sects: Armenian, Baptist, Episcopalian, Church of England (CofE), Greek, Presbyterian, RC, Wesleyan and Native Christian. By 1891, Christians got to choose between about 50 different labels to describe their religion,24 and between 1706 and 1865 the protestant churches had 41 different missionary societies.25 RC congregations were divided into those with clergymen appointed by the king of Portugal and those with priests appointed by the Pope. The protestant divisions at this time were a nightmare to understand, so to simplify, apart from the Quakers who had no clergy at all, the most important division was between those that had bishops and those that did not. The former did not recognise the legitimacy of the latter. Today, Christianity in India is generally less divided. All RC clergy are appointed ultimately through the Vatican and the Pope. Syrian Christianity not only continues, but is now also in communion with Rome and the Pope. Taken ‘in house’ by Indians, the Protestant denominations have come together to form the overarching ecumenical (non-denominational)

80  Valerie Anderson Churches of North and South India, although Western churches and missions are still to be found. With so many churches to choose from, how did Eurasians decide which to sign up to and did it really matter when the churches were all Christian? In fact, the decision was often taken for them. If a European father was working class, dead or had left India, his Eurasian child was deemed to be in need of spiritual guidance so that he or she might be turned into a useful citizen. They could not be left with Indian or Eurasian Christian mothers (who might have Indian relatives), living amongst Indians or exposed to Indian cultural mores. Official policy was to raise children in the religion of their fathers – and all Eurasians and Europeans were Christians by default. In India, about 50 per cent of Eurasians were RC. This church (and the Portuguese) had been in India since the early 1500s and was firmly established by the time the British arrived. By the 1890s, there were over 100 Catholic orphanages.26 Until 1829, Catholics at home in the United Kingdom were second-class citizens and, though the law changed in that year,27 they remained socially second class for much longer. Prejudice against RCs in India was compounded by its association with the Irish, French and Portuguese, so although Catholicism did not mean total exclusion from positions of responsibility, they would more likely go to Protestants. Early in the 19th century, many of the Protestant churches, newer to India and present in much smaller numbers though not themselves ecumenical, did cooperate with one another. CofE buildings could be loaned to or shared with Scottish Presbyterians, if there happened to be a Scottish regiment nearby.28 To avoid direct competition, a Baptist mission was unlikely to be set up in the same area as a Methodist one. So, the London Missionary Society was active in Bellary and Bangalore, while the Methodists went to Mysore.29 Though unable to prevent foreign churches and missions operating in India, the East India Company was reluctant to allow any British clergy into India other than army chaplains, and in 1813, it sanctioned only 35 clergymen to cater to the spiritual needs of the entire official British community.30 Its hand was forced by the Act of Parliament (also in 1813) and the number of British Protestant missionaries and clergymen increased thereafter. However much many Christians, especially evangelists, believed that converting Indians to Christianity was their duty, it was also argued that it would be inappropriate for government to tax Indians to pay for clergy and church buildings other than those serving congregations of government servants and their families. The Boxwallahs, the unofficial British, the missionary societies, Eurasians and native Christians were, therefore, left to raise the funds needed to provide any other churches and to pay for their clergymen.

Religion and race 81 For many Christians whatever their race, if there was only one church nearby there was no real choice to be made. The Catholic Church in Goa was already very firmly established, a British mission in Danish Serampore was Baptist and the mission in Tanjore was Lutheran. But the Presidency capital cities (Calcutta, Bombay and Madras) had the largest European and Eurasian populations and several churches and denominations were established in each. From the time Richard Wellesley took over as governor-general at the turn of the 19th century, the official British (including the army) were required to demonstrate British piety by attending Church services, preferably in a CofE, which was an Anglican Protestant denomination and the established (or official) church in England and the government church in British India. By the end of the century, each presidency got a CofE bishop, who oversaw a body of clergyman and a number of churches around British India at places with a significant British population. The non-official Europeans and Eurasians were also well advised to attend church or risk government officials labelling them ungentlemanly or lacking in character. Christian missions were the main providers of clergy and churches away from the major European population centres. They catered to the spiritual needs of nearby Europeans and Eurasians, but these were primarily intended for ‘the prosecution of mission work among the heathen abroad’.31 In 1900s’ Calcutta, the Protestants had a Presidency Church (CofE) and an Anglican Mission Church where services were conducted exclusively in English. Despite the growing size of the European population and regardless of any Indian converts, it was a battle to get a third Protestant church. Company policy was to steer clear of interfering with the religion of the people in case it sparked resistance to their presence. Nevertheless, William Carey and his colleagues from the Baptist mission close by in Danish Serampore, although ‘apprehensive of giving umbrage to Government’, had been holding services in an undertaker’s house in Bow Bazaar.32 Despite objections from Hindu residents to opening another Christian church in Calcutta, the government permitted them to build the Bow Bazaar chapel: It was situated in the Bow Bazaar, in the hotbed of vice and immorality, surrounded by liquor shops and brothels, the haunt of sailors who disgraced their European name and Christian character by every excess. The ground was covered at the time with the abodes of prostitution.33 One might suppose that it would have proven unpopular, but it took off with well-attended services in English and Bengali. Obviously, the Bengali services were designed to draw Indian converts. But why did a chapel in such an unpleasant site attract a large European and

82  Valerie Anderson Eurasian population? It is well known that Bow Bazaar was and is home to many poor whites and Eurasians so it was very convenient, but more importantly, William Carey said that he and his brethren: . . . had long wished to establish some place of worship for the benefit of those who, though bearing the Christian name, were too low in the scale of society to intrude into the patrician congregations of the Mission Church and the Presidency Church.34 How much should be read into the significance of the language in which sermons were preached is a moot point. After all, 50 per cent of Eurasians and the largest number of Indian Christians were RCs and RC mass was conducted in Latin almost everywhere until the 1960s. That was no one’s vernacular tongue. What is significant is the Baptists’ awareness that only the elites felt at home in the other two churches. He did not complain of patrician clergy but of a patrician congregation making others u ­ ncomfortable – one example of how Eurasians and poor whites were subjected to social exclusion. Schooling (especially in orphanages), geographical location, numbers of churches, language (not only for Indian Christians, but also for Eurasians whose mother tongue might be any of several European languages), employment prospects and social exclusion all played a part in which denomination of Christianity a Eurasian might adhere to. But personal law was extremely significant, too. Aside from dress and culture, Eurasians’ status was tied up with their official paper trail. Birth or christening and marriage certificates were important proofs of ancestry, legitimacy and respectability that could open doors to education and thereafter employment. As Laura Bear’s work on Indian Railways highlights, such documents were seen as proof of not only lineage, but also communal identity. The importance of documentation cannot be overstated and they are a reason for the cooperation found between different denominations. Lutheran ministers, for example, were ordained into the CofE so that marriages and baptisms conducted by them in their own churches would have legal standing. Jews had their children baptised into the CofE so that they would have recourse to British Indian personal law and would not face doubts as to their legitimacy or inheritance rights.

III Other than attending church, having a Christian education, marking life’s major milestones with the right rites and documentation, what part could Eurasians play in these various churches? Like temples and mosques,

Religion and race 83 churches were forever in need of funds not only for their own infrastructure and clergy, but also to provide schooling and charitable help. In 1823, for example, St. Mary’s Church in Madras was giving money and assistance to 7,500 people, funded locally by the congregation. This included large donations from three prominent Eurasians – one British, one French and one Portuguese.35 There were informal roles for lay persons in all churches: playing the organ, singing, acting as parish clerk, teaching children in Sunday school, the all-female Zenana missions, organising fundraising, translating and distributing religious tracts and even helping clergymen during services. But for Eurasians who wanted to become clergymen race was an issue, probably more so than it was for Indian Christians. It was easier for Indian Christians to gain ordination than it was for Eurasians since the British did not believe the latter could attract converts to Christianity. Many churches were less than keen to ordain Dalits, or pariahs as they termed them, into the priesthood but they were very enthusiastic about converting Brahmins. As a priestly caste, they were thought to be ideal as examples that other Indians might follow. But Christian clergy are not born into a priestly caste, they have to feel an individual calling, a vocation, although in the 19th century it was a British cliché that families produced one son for themselves, one for the army and another for the church. Excluding Goa, there were almost 800 Catholic clergymen in 1860s India and up to half of these were described as natives; this included Eurasians who were not categorised separately.36 The Catholic Church had a chequered record on race and caste, although the Vatican, the final authority for all Catholics, was consistent in saying that all races and castes should worship together and the priesthood was open to all. In reality, many Catholic churches across India had separate entrances and internal walls that separated congregations by caste or race, but still followed the letter if not the spirit of the Vatican’s directive in that everyone worshipped in the same church and at the same time. The effects of race, class and caste on ordination varied, but even at the turn of the 21st century in South India, 70 per cent of Catholics but less than 4 per cent of the Catholic priesthood are of Dalit origin. In the 19th century, both bishops and families were uneasy or hostile to the idea of ignoring caste and race when selecting young men to train as priests. Thus, ordination was in theory open to all in French India, but in practice no bishop took this so far as to ordain a Dalit. A Belgian Catholic bishop of Calcutta (Grosjean) tried a little harder and succeeded in setting up a seminary in Ceylon, where candidates from different castes and communities, away from their local church and family in India, were rapidly drawn to each other by common experience and esprit de corps.37 He did not publicise that Dalits were still not accepted.

84  Valerie Anderson Bishop Grosjean’s objection was that admitting Dalits to the priesthood would lower the status of the church and thus discourage caste Indians from following Catholicism; the same belief underpinned British attitudes to the ordination of Eurasians into the Protestant clergy. The Portuguese were more relaxed about such issues, readily ordaining Portuguese Eurasians who the British rather sniffily described as ignorant and superstitious, just as they described Catholics everywhere.38 In mid-century, the Protestant churches’ largest followings were in the South. In ‘A History of Protestantism in Madras Presidency’, Penny lists 443 ordained clergymen and missionaries, amongst whom there were just 19 Indians and 21 Eurasians. Leaving the low number of Indians aside, why were Eurasians so under-represented when they outnumbered Europeans two to one in India? Even allowing for the fact that half of them were RCs, there still should have been more. A European who did not go to church was still a European but a Eurasian’s identity was at stake, so it is surprising to find so few as 21 entering the Protestant clergy. That patrician attitude spotted in CofE congregations by the Baptists extended to those selecting candidates for training as priests. The first hurdle would have been convincing the priest of an aspiring student that he was a suitable candidate for training, and many of these European clergy believed that Eurasians would not be respected by Indians and would not be acceptable to the European elite. But there were other factors, apart from racism, discouraging Eurasians from becoming clergymen. Finding somewhere to train and a means of subsistence during training are fundamentals and these were certainly not easy. Bishop’s College was established in Calcutta only in 1823. Its remit was to train young men from all over India, be they ‘Europeans Indo-Britons or natives’ as catechists, clergymen and schoolmasters.39 It was claimed that until 1848, all the best Indo-Britons from the South were sent to that college. They had to be well off in order to afford a long stay far from home – training for ordination lasted six years. In Madras, the Vepary Grammar School was set up in 1826: an extension to an existing mission school, its purpose was to train missionaries for the Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPG). Therefore, it is no surprise that there were no CofE ordinations in Southern India, of any race, before the last two or three months of 1830.40 What the Vepary seminary could offer that Calcutta could not was training in local vernaculars and proximity to family which was especially important to married men. Another seminary was established at Sullivan’s Garden for the Church Missionary Society (CMS). Two more Protestant seminaries were established in Tinnevelly and Tanjore in 1844,41 and by the end of the century there were perhaps a dozen throughout India.

Religion and race 85 Once trained and ordained, a Eurasian priest had to be assigned to a church or a mission and someone or something had to be found to pay him a stipend. Support did not come from the government who, with some British missionary societies, recruited exclusively in Britain. Other than a few sons of clergymen who were raised and trained in India, they would only contribute towards the cost of chaplains and other clergy serving the official community. There were a few ordained Eurasians, who had worked as catechists before ordination, working as missionaries and priests; the 21 ordained in Southern India (mentioned above) and perhaps another 10 in the North. Of the 21 for whom biographical data has been found, 19 were trained entirely in India at either Bishop’s College in Calcutta, Vepary Grammar or Sullivan Gardens in Madras. Only two attended seminaries in England, as well.42 In 1838, the first Anglican bishop of Calcutta, Bishop Wilson, endorsed ‘the Additional Clergy Society’ – a fund-raising body to pay the stipends of priests trained at Bishop’s College with (as the bishop put it) ‘the East-Indian population particularly in view’.43 Only four Eurasians can be identified who were trained before that fund was set up – the two who trained partly in England and two others who appear later to have left the clergy. In Madras, ‘the Vepery Church Pastoral Aid Society’ sometimes guaranteed a stipend for a clergyman such as in 1845 when it funded one man for five years, although he was an import from England.44 There was also some funding from various mission societies and congregations outside India. Advertisements appealing for subscribers appeared frequently in the British press as did lists of subscribers. Besides these voluntary donations, at Christ Church, Madras, in 1853, the vestry (a committee who ran the church’s finances) decided to let or rent out the pews (the seats) to raise funds – luckily it included a fair number of wealthy government servants in its congregation.45 The seminaries may have been open to men of all races for training for the priesthood, but the attitudes of individual bishops could have a profound effect. Government-funded employment was not available to Eurasian clergy. Clergy for the official community served the European elite who were believed to be unwilling to tolerate Eurasian clergy. Nor were some missions prepared to recruit India-trained Eurasians. The paucity of Eurasians was also, in part, because they were paid less than Europeans (about a third less) and the congregations they might have served were unlikely to include many wealthy people who might augment their stipends. Episcopal churches (like the CofE) appointed clergymen to specific churches or missions and the congregation did not have a say in who was appointed or from where. The Baptists and other congregationalist denominations (represented by the LMS) allowed congregations the right to elect their

86  Valerie Anderson own clergyman. Since the British elite did not predominate amongst these, a local man (even a Eurasian) stood a good chance. This was another reason Eurasians were attracted to these denominations. Protestant denominations varied widely in their attitudes to caste and race. Lutherans in the South claimed to be strongly against caste and any sort of separation amongst their followers, but felt the need to tread carefully when strong objections were raised and thought that such distinctions were best removed gradually through education. In the 1830s, the Anglicans and Methodists tried to force the issue by banning all caste distinctions sending ‘catechists of pariah origin . . . to enter the homes of caste people and even read the funeral service over the remains of a caste man’.46 As a result, Anglican and Methodist congregations shrank violently and Lutheran and Catholic ones grew. Attitudes also varied individually. Bishops Corrie and Spencer both of Madras faced a shortage of British clergymen willing to work in India and so they actively encouraged Eurasian candidates to enter Bishop’s College in Calcutta.47 It could be that Eurasians were simply invisible in the records. Data for Penny’s multidenominational study of priests and missionaries were garnered from diverse sources with differing views on the ‘race’ to which they would assign Eurasians. In Badley’s ‘Indian Missionary Directory’ of 1881, clergymen were only recorded as European or native. Eurasians (or IndoBritons) were not specified as a target group in this book, which tells us that the Free Church of Scotland’s ‘Western Mission laboured among Jews, Parsees, Mahomedans, Portuguese and Africans, as well as Hindoos’.48 Badley refers to Calcutta’s Bow Bazaar church as a ‘place of worship for Europeans and natives’; although it had a large Eurasian congregation, he does not mention that.49 It may be that he did not mention Eurasians because they were already Christians, yet he talks about education and lists seminaries. So, it is more likely that Eurasians were amongst the seminary students and missionaries listed but lumped in with either Europeans or natives. There is no way of knowing which. To conclude, Eurasians could be non-Christians but not without losing their Eurasian identity and being reclassified as Indians. For those rich enough or far enough away from British sway, in princely states that did not necessarily matter; not being Christian could be an advantage to fit better into Muslim or Hindu society. On the other hand, there were certain advantages that came with the label ‘Eurasian’ in British India and where the British were influential. It gave access to schooling (especially in orphanages) and for the better off in fee-paying schools. Eurasians enjoyed privileged employment prospects in reserved occupations and access to the same personal law as Europeans. But this purportedly racial identity was

Religion and race 87 contingent on being a Christian. Which type of Christian a Eurasian might be was itself contingent on geographical location and numbers of churches, on language (for non-Anglophone Eurasians) and on the social make-up of any given congregation. Besides faith and beliefs, all these elements affected or effected choice. Wealth might determine whether a Eurasian’s philanthropy might be large enough to record, but was not the same as social standing that could dictate where he might feel most at ease. Such factors would also have affected his ability and desire to become an ordained clergyman. What Eurasians could never alter was an underlying trickle of conscious or unconscious European disapproval. Chatterton, writing in 1924, typified this by recording that Milman, Bishop Cotton’s successor in the 1870s, ‘took a deep interest in the Eurasian problem’.50 With very few exceptions, whatever Eurasians did, no matter how European and even pious their lifestyle, they ‘remained . . . a problem because they muddied the racial legitimation of British colonial rule’.

Notes 1 Earl Winterton, ‘House of Commons Debate, 21 December 1925’, Hansard, 1925–6, p. 189. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/ dec/21/anglo-indian-domiciled-community#S5CV0189P0_19251221_ HOC_7 (accessed on 14 January 2015). 2 Letter to the secretary to Government of India, Home Dept., No. 81, Calcutta, 17 July 1880, reprinted in n.a., Annual Report of the Eurasian And Anglo-Indian Association, Calcutta, 1880, pp. 34–40. 3 There was no recognised means, under British-Indian law, for a European to marry a non-Christian. Marriages in accord with lex loci, Muslim and Hindu, were simply disregarded by British society and government in India if they involved a European. For more on this subject, see Valerie Anderson, Race and Power in British India; Anglo-Indians, Class and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, London: I.B. Taurus, 2014. 4 Victoria Cross, Anna Lombard, New York: Kensington Press, 1901. 5 Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali, Observations on the Musselmauns of India, London: Parbury, Allen & Co., 1832. 6 Some historians describe Brendish as Anglo-Indian: Christoper Hibbert, The Great Mutiny – India 1857, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980; Richard Collier, The Sound of Fury: An Account of the Indian Mutiny, London: Collins, 1963. 7 Doug Brendish, personal communication, 23–29 November 2012. 8 Noor’s parents were Hazrat Inayat Khan (a Sufi) and Ora Meena May Baker, an American. Shrabani Basu, Spy Princess, the Life of Noor Inayat Khan, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2006; Noor Inayat Khan, Twenty Jataka Tales, London: Harrup & Co., 1939. 9 Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, London: Macmillan & Co., 1924.

88  Valerie Anderson 10 Jervoise Athelstane Baines, General Report on the Census of India, 1891, London: HMSO, 1893, p. 307. 11 This happened with ‘. . . a few instances, altered on scrutiny, of Buddhists amongst European and Eurasian Christians’. Baines, General Report on the Census of India, p. 170. 12 For more on this fascinating character, see Michael H. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo Indian MP and Chancery ‘Lunatic’, London: Hurst & Co., 2010; David O. Dyce Sombre, Refutation of the Charge of Lunacy, Paris: privately published, 1849; Nicholas Shreeve, Nawab to Nabob; the Diary of David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, West Sussex: Bookwright, 2001. 13 Malcolm Speirs, The Wasikadars of Awadh, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2008, pp. 68–76. 14 Some orphanage records have been digitised and are available at http:// search.fibis.org/frontis/bin/aps_browse_sources.php?mode=list_sour ces&source_class=229 15 John Murdoch, Indian Missionary Manual, Hints to Young Missionaries in India, London: Nisbet, 1889, p. 198. 16 Bundelcund Agency/English files/Part 1, No 8/ Rubakar from the Samthar Durbar, Political Agent’s translation, Return of Europeans and EastIndians in the service of native states, 24 June 1882. National Archive of India, New Delhi. 17 Charles Grey (ed. Herbert L.O. Garrett), European Adventurers of Northern India, 1785–1849, Punjab: Supdt. Government Printing, 1929 (Reprinted, New Delhi: AES, 1993), p. 12. 18 Speirs, The Wasikadars of Awadh, pp. 68–76. 19 Foreign/Political/Notes/Procs., no. 29, Employment, 1885, National Archive of India, New Delhi. 20 Ibid., 1885. 21 Janaki Abraham, ‘The Stain of White: Liaisons, Memories, and White Men as Relatives’, Men and Masculinities, 2006, 9(2): 131–151. My grateful thanks to James Chiriyankandath who very kindly gave me this reference. 22 Chatterton, History of the Church, pp. 186–7. 23 Eyre Chatterton, History of the Church of England in India since the Early Days of the East India Company, London: SPCK, 1924, pp. 236–239. 24 Church of England, with Churches of India, Ireland, America, all Anglican and Episcopalian churches; Church of Scotland, Presbyterian, United Presbyterian, Reformed Presbyterian, American or Irish Presbyterians, Irish Presbyterian Mission; Baptist; Wesleyan, Wesleyan Methodist, Methodist, Primitive Methodist, Episcopalian Methodist, Bible Christian; Congregationalist, London Mission, Independent, Calvinist, Welsh Calvinist; Nonconformist, Dissenter, Puritan; Plymouth Brethren, Open Brethren, Swedenborgian, New Jerusalem, Catholic Apostolic, Quaker, Friend, Salvationist, Anabaptist; Lutheran, German Mission, Swedish Church, Reformed Dutch, Zwinglian, Moravian, German Church, Evangelical, Evangelist Church, Evangelical Union, Reformed Church; Protestant; Church of Rome; Syrian Church; Greek, Abyssinian, and Armenian. Baines, General Report on the Census of India, p. 179. 25 I have identified 29 European and 12 North American Societies from Matthew A. Sherring and Edward Storrow, The History of Protestant Missions in

Religion and race 89 India From Their Commencement in 1706 to 1881, London: Religious Tract Society, 1884. 26 Murdoch, Indian Missionary Manual. 27 Emancipation Act (Catholic Relief Act) of 1829. 28 Chatterton, History of the Church, p. 236. 29 Frank Penny, The Church in Madras, Volume 2, 1805–1835, London: John Murray, 1912, p. 213. 30 Rev. Claudius Buchanan, Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment; Submitted to the Consideration of the Imperial Parliament, 2nd ed., London: Cadelland Davies, 1813, pp. 117–119, and Regulating Act 1813. 31 Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 2, p. 199. 32 John Clark Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward, vol. 1, London: Longman and Roberts, 1859, p. 174. 33 Marshman, Life and Times of Carey, vol. 1, p. 258. 34 Ibid., p. 174. 35 Charles Lushington, The History, Design and Present State of the Religious Benevolent and Charitable Institutions . . . in Calcutta, Calcutta: Hindustanee Press, 1824, Appx.13, Lord Clive’s Fund, p. 334–341. 36 Murdoch, Indian Missionary Manual. 37 Kenneth Ballhattchett, Caste, Class and Catholicism, Surrey: Curzon, 1998, p. 141. 38 George Smith, The Life of William Carey; Shoemaker and Missionary, London: J.M. Dent, 1885, pp. 109–110. 39 Penny, The Church in Madras, vols. 3, 1835–1861, London: John Murray, 1922, p. 430. 40 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 147. 41 These seminaries were in Tinnevelly (at Sawyerpuiam) and in Tanjore (at Vediarpuram). 42 Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 3, p. 366. 43 Chatterton, History of the Church, p. 176. 44 Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 3, p. 162. 45 Ibid., p. 165. 46 Geoffrey A. Oddie, Hindu and Christian in South-East India, London: Curzon, 1991, p. 176. 47 Chatterton, History of the Church, p. 193. 48 B.H. Badley, Indian Missionary Directory, 1881, Lucknow: Methodist Episcopal Church Press, p. 119. 49 Ibid., p. 10. 50 Chatterton, History of the Church, p. 248.

III Textual representations of memory and identity

4 Texts of liminality Reading identity in Dalit autobiographies from Bengal1 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

In 2010, K. Satchidanandan, a leading Indian literary critic, wrote in Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi: There is a new interest in the genre of autobiography or life-writing in India. The reasons are manifold, the chief of them being the emergence of subaltern autobiography as an important subgenre. Dalits, tribals, servants, nuns, women actors, women writers, sex workers, pickpockets: a lot of ordinary people from diverse walks of life have begun to tell their life story.2 This quote indicates the importance of this new genre. Perhaps, it also shows the kind of condescending attitude this new literature is often treated with by the Indian literary elite. These are not what Philippe Lejeune would call ‘The Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write’, that is, life narratives of non-literate people transmitted orally and recorded by others.3 These are narratives by the subalterns writing their own life stories. And these are not just ‘eye-witness accounts of collective suffering in the first person’. So far as Dalit autobiographies are concerned, these texts are reflective of the emergence of their distinctive personhood that tends to rupture the celebratory accounts of modern Indian democracy.4 For historians writing on Dalit or other forms of subaltern history, such autobiographies are of particular interest as they promise to provide an insider’s voice – an entry into the Dalit household – which is otherwise unavailable from conventional archives. Such insights are even more important to non-Dalit historians grappling with the moral-ethical challenge of writing Dalit history without the lived-in experiences of Dalit life.5 But memory is contextual; it is structured and constructed by the author’s present. And as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, ‘Contexts are charged politically. . . . Thus, remembering has a politics’.6 So, while using these texts as historical sources, one should remember that memory,

92  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay amnesia, authorial position, cultural and political contexts together determine the modes of self-telling. But then, all historical documents are constructed and the historian has to learn to read them.7 While we need not read autobiographies as statements of historical ‘truths’, we may still derive important insights from contextual reading of these texts by carefully navigating through their rhetoric, biases and literary tropes. In India in recent years, a number of Dalit autobiographies have been published in Marathi and Hindi, and then translated into English.8 It is only recently that a few have been published in Bangla,9 but there is still no worthwhile discussion of such Bangla subaltern autobiographies, except Jeanne Openshaw’s contextual reading of Baul Guru Raj Krishna’s Jibancarit (autobiography).10 In this essay, I therefore wish to focus on two autobiographies in Bangla, one by Pramatha Ranjan Thakur – popularly known as P. R. Thakur – and the other by Manohar Mouli Biswas.11 I will read these two texts as historical sources to understand the social history of a religious movement called Matua, around which the social identity of the Namasudras – a Dalit agricultural caste in colonial East Bengal – was constructed and their political movement organised in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. I intend to do so because these two autobiographies reveal important details about the social life, economic conditions and political positions of the Namasudras that were not available to me when I wrote the history of this community relying primarily on conventional archives. I explain below how these two autobiographies in a significant way supplemented my findings in my earlier work on this community.12 However, my intention here is not to rewrite the collective biography of the Namasudras, but rather to try to understand how the different presents and diverse politics of the two individuals, both belonging to the Namasudra community, inform their narratives of the past and what that selftelling convey about their quest for identity and citizenship. What I find is that these two divergent lives, despite dissimilarities in life experiences and political positions, ultimately come together in their shared state of liminality. Both these life stories tell of crossing structural boundaries at numerous fronts, such as modern/non-modern, Hindu/non-Hindu, nationalist/ anti-nationalist, India/Pakistan. But in the end, both remain stuck permanently at the interstices of the most important structural binary of Indian society between the Dalit and the Sabarna (or upper caste Hindu). And it is here that the two individuals, despite differences, also become representatives of their social collective.

Two lives P. R. Thakur was the great-grandson of Harichand Thakur and grandson of Guruchand Thakur, founders of the Matua sect around which the modern

Texts of liminality 93 Dalit movement had started in Bengal. Pramatha Ranjan was born in 1902 to Guruchand’s eldest son Sashi Bhushan. Like his father (who was one of the earliest Namasudras to be educated and to get a government job), he too was initially educated in Faridpur, and then sent to Calcutta where he studied at St. Paul’s College and Calcutta University from where he received a law degree and a master’s degree in Philosophy. From the age of seven, when his father used to take him to Eden Gardens in Calcutta and showed him the ships in the river Ganges sailing off to England, Pramatha Ranjan had begun nurturing a dream of going to England, which became his ultimate goal in life, as it was for many other English-educated young men of his time. So, the day after he finished his MA examination, he set off for England, where he was trained as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. His personal life trajectory thus represents a remarkable story of intergenerational mobility from the landless poor peasant background of Harichand to the exalted status of an England-returned barrister. But more importantly, after coming back from England, Pramatha Ranjan got involved in the social movement started by his grandfather and took charge of the Matua Mahasangha – a modern voluntary organisation of the Matua devotees – which had started functioning from 1932 and was supporting Scheduled Caste (SC) candidates in the Legislative Assembly election of 1937. Both Guruchand and the Matua Mahasangha were staunchly anti-Congress. Pramatha Ranjan also won the election to the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1946 as an independent anti-Congress candidate. But then, he moved closer to Congress after an encounter with Gandhi and was elected to the Constituent Assembly with Congress support. Thus, along with intergenerational mobility, we also witness a remarkable political shift away from the staunch anti-Congress position of Guruchand Thakur. After the Partition in 1947, he migrated to India, settled down in West Bengal and remained with the Congress until 1964. He was elected on Congress ticket to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1957 from Haringhata SC-reserved constituency and in 1962 from Hanskhali SC-reserved constituency. In 1962, he briefly became a minister of state for the Department of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the B. C. Roy cabinet, but was removed from office in 1963. One year later, there was another remarkable shift in his political career; he left Congress, frustrated and disgusted with the utter governmental neglect of the Dalit refugees. He was arrested by the P. C. Sen government for allegedly fomenting communal violence in the wake of the Hazarat Bal riots. In 1967, he contested the election as a candidate of the breakaway Bangla Congress in the Lok Sabha constituency of Nabadwip and won by 89,000 votes in a direct contest against his Congress rival.13 But this was the last election he won; in the two subsequent parliamentary elections in 1971 and 1977, he lost to the CPI(M) candidates and left politics. The rest of his life until his death in

94  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay 1990 was devoted to the work of the Matua Mahasangha, which he rebuilt as a non-political socio-religious movement from 1986.14 Thakur’s autobiography, Atmacharit ba purbasmriti (Autobiography or Old memories), records his memories of what happened in the Thakur household as well as of social life in his ancestral village Orakandi in Faridpur in East Bengal and his observations on Indian politics until his departure for England in 1926. The text, thus, not only gives us a rare glimpse of what happened inside the Thakur household, but it also speaks boldly of his own religiosity as well as his political identity vis-à-vis nation and caste. But in order to properly understand the significance of this text, we need to remember that Thakur wrote his autobiography in the late 1950s when he was a Congress MLA, but did not publish it during his lifetime; it was published in 1994 after his death (1990) by his wife and eldest son. As Smith and Watson have reminded us, ‘What is remembered and what is forgotten, and why, change over time’.15 Hence, the historical moments in which this text was written, published and circulated are important for understanding its content and context. We will return to this issue later in the essay. The second autobiography is that of Manohar Mouli Biswas who was born on 3 October 1943 – more than four decades after Thakur – in a Namasudra peasant family in a remote village called Dakshin Matiargati in the Bagerhat subdivision of Khulna district, now in Bangladesh. He describes his family as a ‘lower middle class Namasudra peasant family where both parents were illiterate’.16 Manohar was the first child in the family to go to school. He was a meritorious and motivated student. He stood first in his class. In class five, he got a scholarship taking the first place in the Jessore-Khulna region. He passed his I.Sc examination from Bagerhat College under Rajshahi University. Meanwhile, Partition had taken place, and he migrated to West Bengal in India and went to the Gobardanga Hindu College in Bongaon district near the Indo-Pakistan border, where most of the Namasudra refugees from Pakistan had settled down. As he had moved to India he lost his scholarship, which he had won for being the top student in his intermediate examination from his college. By this time, his homeland had become a foreign land for him. He did his graduation in science and humanities from the Calcutta University and eventually became a senior subdivisional telecommunication engineer. The story of Biswas is, thus, also a story of vertical social mobility from the status of poor peasant in a remote village in Khulna to that of urban middle class government employee. This intergenerational mobility continues through the life trajectories of his sons. Biswas, too, is involved in the Dalit movement, but a movement of a different kind; he is involved in Dalit literary movement. He started publishing from 1967. As he claims: ‘Initially I used to write poems on trees, flowers, birds; now I write Dalit poetry’.17 In his definition, Dalit literature is one

Texts of liminality 95 in which ‘the Dalit people themselves are directly expressing their own sufferings and feelings’.18 Dalit aesthetics in his view can only be understood if born in Dalit conditions.19 He is thus imbued with a reflexive consciousness that is distinctly Dalit. He has published more than a dozen books of poetry, history of Dalit literature, translation of Dalit writings and edited volumes of writings by other Dalit authors. He edits a bimonthly English language journal called Dalit Mirror published since 1997. He is the general secretary of the Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha established in 1992 after the death of Chuni Kotal. His autobiography, Amar Bhubane Ami Benche Thaki (I survive in my own world), came out in June 2013 from Chaturtha Duniya (literally meaning the ‘fourth world’), a very distinctive Dalit literary publishing house. Structurally, the book has two distinct parts: the first part deals with his memory of childhood in his village in Khulna in the 1940s and 1950s, and the second part consists of four interviews with four academics which bring out his life as a Dalit literary activist in contemporary West Bengal. The autobiography thus bridges the temporal gap between the historical and the contemporary in the life of a man and his community. Biswas mentions that like many others in his village, his family, particularly his mother, was attracted to the Matua sect and was inspired by the teachings of Harichand and Guruchand Thakur.20 Thus, as P. R. Thakur’s autobiography gives us a rare entry into the inner world of the household of Harichand and Guruchand, who initiated the Matua movement, and were the pioneers of Dalit awakening in Bengal, Biswas’s autobiography gives us an idea of the lived experiences of one of the numerous Namasudra peasant families of East Bengal who were attracted to their teachings and became part of a remarkable social movement. And then, the differing politics of the two lives and their divergent presents also tell us about the heterogeneity that marks the ontology and ideology of the community and the movement.

Text 1 Unlike other Marathi or Hindi Dalit autobiographies, P. R. Thakur’s Atmacharit is not a narrative of pain and oppression, nor is it a discourse of social assertion of Dalit identity;21 it is rather a story of ambivalence. Unlike other Dalit autobiographies, and more in the fashion of Sabarna autobiographies like that of Mahatma Gandhi,22 it begins with the genealogy of the family. It starts with a statement that the ‘Thakur family of Orakandi belongs to a Brahmin lineage’. It originated from a Brahmin, he claims, who migrated to Radh from Mithila in the 16th century. One Ramdas Misra of this family settled down in a Brahmin village called Lakshmipasha in Jessore district, where he began to attract devotees many of whom were Namasudras from neighbouring villages. Because of this association,

96  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay he could not get a Brahmin bride for his son and had him married to a Namasudra girl, and it was since then that the Sudrahood of this family began.23 One could argue that this statement of genealogy does not only validate the discourse of Sanskritisation a la M. N. Srinivas, but it also represents an implicit faith in the essentials of the ideology of caste, where the Brahmin is regarded as the Supreme Being and the woman an agent of defilement.24 Yet, it may also be read as a denial of a previously ascribed caste identity, a tendency which many upwardly mobile Dalits shared in this period.25 As another celebrated Dalit autobiography from Bengal, Manoranjan Byapari’s Itibritte Chandal Jibon mentions, this knowledge of Brahmin origin had become a common sense among the Namasudra villagers in eastern Bengal in the 1950s.26 When everyone claims to be Brahmins, Brahminhood loses its connotation of power. So, I read this origin myth as a symbolic appropriation of the authority of the Brahmin to subvert the local caste hierarchy. What is also remarkable about Thakur’s autobiography is that it acknowledges on the one hand the predicament of the lower castes in Bengal in the post-Chaitanya period and presents Harichand and Guruchand as saviours of the depressed classes.27 But on the other, it does not appear to be propagating an adversarial Dalit identity that was necessarily anti-Hindu. It was because of Harichand’s endeavours writes Thakur that a large section of the rural population of Bengal belonging to the depressed classes ‘gave up the idea of relinquishing their Hinduism and accept conversion’. Guruchand is described as a Hindu or naishthik Hindu (devout Hindu).28 But despite this assertion, the religious life it describes for the Thakur household – and also for the predominantly Namasudra village of Orakandi – cannot be conveniently pigeonholed into a simple Hindu or non-Hindu box – it stood at the threshold between many layers of religiosity that prevailed in colonial rural Bengal. Let me explain. The Thakur family like the majority of the Namasudras in the village were Vaishnavas. Jasobanta, the father of Harichand, is described as a devout Vaishnava who organised in his household regular nam sankirtan (singing of devotional songs) ceremonies, which were attended by Vaishnava sadhus, who were then given grand feasts. But Harichand did not get attracted to the rituals or to the sadhus, who he thought had degenerated in the post-Chaitanya era. The Vaishnava rituals that the lower caste people followed – and here there is an obvious unstated reference to the popular stereotypes about the exotic sexual practices of the jat vaishnavas (low-caste Vaishnavas) – were in fact degrading these people, and hence he thought of a new religion that would be devoid of rituals, except singing of devotional songs, and that was the reason why his devotees were called Matuas. But while Harichand remained within the ambit of the Vaishnava

Texts of liminality 97 tradition, he did not prescribe, unlike Chaitanya, the life of an ascetic for his devotees. He prescribed instead a family life modelled after chaturashrama (four stages of life) as enjoined by the Aryan sages. According to Atmacharit, he thus remained very much within the broader Hindu tradition, and was a rural counterpart (and also a contemporary) of Rammohun Roy. ‘Sri Sri Thakur did not believe in many gods or goddesses’, observes Atmacharit. ‘He believed in one god. His religious message was the message of Vedanta’.29 In other words, he too was preaching monotheism as was Rammohun Roy, who is often credited as the harbinger of Indian modernity. After Harichand’s death, when his mantle fell on his son Guruchand, the number of devotees began to increase. But as it appears from his grandson’s account, he straddled across even more varied religious fields. At a time when English education had not penetrated the villages of Faridpur, he was educated in Persian and could read and write Bangla. ‘In those days people had to read Puranic texts written in Bangla’, observes Atmacharit, and ‘he (Guruchand) read and acquired knowledge of many shastras’.30 Apart from that, in his household, there was the regular practice of reading aloud the classical epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana and Guruchand listened to them attentively. This was not unusual in Dalit households across India, as B. R. Ambedkar too mentions the practice of reading the epics in his ­household – a practice enforced by his father.31 But while Ambedkar consciously rejected their teachings, Guruchand, according to his grandson, lived a sacred life through the performance of ‘rituals and practices of a devout Hindu’.32 Yet, he was not an orthodox or inflexible Hindu and had no qualms in accepting food from the hands of a Christian. He made money through a small business, which would take him frequently to Calcutta at a time when the winds of liberal reform were brewing in that colonial city. He learnt from the teachings of Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore and told his grandson about their philosophies.33 He also came into close contact with the Christian missionaries, particularly with the Australian Baptist missionary Dr C. S. Mead. At one stage, he even seriously contemplated converting to Christianity and there was possibility that with him the entire Namasudra community of the region would convert as well. In the end, he desisted from that idea and decided to preach the religious ideals of his father.34 However, as his grandson describes the situation, he did not see any apparent conflict between the ideals of Harichand and the Hinduism as it was practised in his household and in the village, the reformism of the urban Brahmo preachers and the wisdom of Christianity that he learnt from the Baptist missionaries. He was indeed developing a rather eclectic philosophical corpus for the Matua sect. As for popular religious life, the majority of the inhabitants of village Orakandi were Namasudras and Vaishnavas, the Atmacharit tells us. Yet,

98  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay they also observed many Sakta religious festivals like Shyama or Kali puja or Siva puja.35 The most important of these religious festivals was, of course, Durga puja, which was performed in many households in the village. The Thakur family started Durga puja in their house in 1901, the year Pramatha Ranjan was born. It was discontinued for a few years when Guruchand was seriously contemplating conversion to Christianity; but it was started again in 1923. However, it was a puja with a difference. On these occasions, people of all castes were invited to the Thakur household and treated to grand feasts. Even Muslims of the area were invited and they too attended the puja. ‘Apart from Durgapuja’, Thakur reminisces, ‘many other festivals were organised in our household. The most important among them were Rathajatra, Rasjatra, Janmastami and Doljatra’. All these religious festivals, unlike Durga puja, had a distinct Vaishnava lineage and all started by Guruchand. In his narrative, however, Thakur brings all these festivals under one descriptive rubric of Hindur puja parbon or the religious festivals of the Hindus,36 indicating a popular spiritual space that encompassed multiple structural compartments of religiosity in rural life of colonial Bengal. And, within that space, gradually Baruni mela celebrating the birth anniversary of Harichand became an equally if not more important religious festival in the Matua devotional calendar.37 In other words, the evidence of Thakur’s Atmacharit confirms that the everyday religious lives of the devotees of the Matua sect were not locked in a Hindu-non-Hindu structural binary, but resided at the interstices between multiple religious belief structures and practices of rural Bengal. It is that religious life which Ashis Nandy describes as ‘the peculiar mix of classical and folk Hinduism and the unselfconscious Hinduism by which most Indians, Hindus as well as non-Hindus, live’.38 This ambivalence is also evident in Thakur’s representation of his family’s attitudes to colonial modernity. Guruchand, as we have already mentioned, accepted selected aspects of this modernity, particularly the necessity of English education, as a possible path to social mobility for his community. As the Atmacharit tells us, during his frequent business trips to Calcutta, he learnt about this modern trend and wanted his children to be educated in English. So, his son Sashi Bhushan was first sent to a nearby English school in Lakshipasha, and then to Calcutta. He became, perhaps, the first English-educated young man in Orakandi and the first among the Namasudras to get a government job. But even more important than that, when Shashi Bhushan was receiving his education, Calcutta was the centre of a new era of reform and regeneration that was removing ‘orthodoxy, unreason and ignorance’. ‘He learned a lot’, writes Thakur, from these new intellectual movements.39 Like his father, Pramatha Ranjan too was initially educated in Faridpur, and then sent to Calcutta and then to England. But his Western education

Texts of liminality 99 had not made him an uncompromising rationalist, nor could this association with modernity detach his family from its religious moorings. While describing the religious appeal of Harichand and Guruchand, Thakur speaks eloquently of their supernatural (aloukik) healing power, which could cure diseases and drew numerous ailing devotees to their doorsteps. Those who had received Western scientific education did not believe in the supernatural, the Atmacharit observes, for they believed everything in this world to be governed by the laws of causation. But there were many things in the nature, pertaining to the relationship between mind and matter, which were only revealed to great spiritual figures like Harichand. Ordinary human beings saw these as mystical, but there were numerous examples of such occurrences, the text argues, which provided ample evidence of such occult power possessed by Harichand and Guruchand as well as by other spiritual figures who came to be associated with them.40 One needs to remember that by the time Pramatha Ranjan was writing this memoir, he too had become the spiritual head of the Matua sect. The Thakur family’s ambivalence on modernity becomes more apparent in Thakur’s references to the colonial public space and in his observations on nationalist politics. He refers first to the elision of any dividing line separating the religious and the secular spaces in the sphere of activities of Guruchand. He patronised the philanthropic works of Christian missionaries like Dr Mead, as with his support he founded the Orakandi High English School in 1908, which was recognised by the Calcutta University in 1911. This was no doubt a significant step towards social-material uplift of the Namasudras. Also for this purpose, he ran a monthly journal Namasudra Suhrid, which was published regularly between 1907 and 1913. It was on Mead’s advice that in 1907, that is, at the height of the Swadeshi movement, Guruchand sent a welcoming letter to Sir Lancelot Hare, the lieutenant governor of East Bengal and Assam, who was hated by the nationalists. At the end of the Swadeshi movement, on 12 December 1911 – after the partition of Bengal was annulled and the capital was shifted to Delhi from Calcutta – Guruchand was awarded a durbar medal by the new Governor Lord Carmichael. Thakur does not see this as a reward for loyalty, but as recognition of his leadership of the Namasudras.41 The Atmacharit does not represent Guruchand as a pro-British loyalist, but as someone who knew how oppressive the British were, with first-hand experience of witnessing humiliation of Indians at the hands of the gora (white) soldiers on the streets of Calcutta. He was also aware of the oppression suffered by the peasants at the hands of European planters and Indian zamindars patronised by the British. But he had also pinned his hopes in Queen Victoria’s Proclamation that promised equal rights to all; it would protect, he expected, the weak against the powerful.42

100  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay It was this optimism about colonial justice that had led Guruchand to oppose Swadeshi movement and reject Gandhian nationalism; but that position also put his grandson in great dilemma, for when he was writing his Atmacharit he was a Congress MLA. He had moved nearer to Congress as colonial rule was drawing to a close. Since the majority of the Namasudras lived in the Muslim majority districts of eastern Bengal, the growing militancy of Muslim politics and the prospect of Bengal becoming a part of Pakistan divided the Namasudra community. Around this time, while a few Namasudra leaders led by Jogendra Nath Mandal joined Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation (started in Bengal in 1944) and entered into an alliance with the Muslim League, the leaders associated with the Matua Mahasangha and the Thakur family at Orakandi aligned with the Congress and supported the Congress-Mahasabha campaign to partition Bengal to create a Hindu majority province in West Bengal. Thakur supported the partition campaign and in June voted in favour of the partition resolution in the Legislative Assembly. Then, after the partition, he migrated to West Bengal and, as mentioned earlier, remained with the Congress until 1964.43 So, when he was writing his memoirs, Thakur was trying to locate himself and the Matua movement somewhere between the two positions – the earlier one of overt rejection of nationalist politics and the latter one of strategic alignment with the Congress. The historical moment of production thus becomes important for understanding the politics of an autobiographical text. When positioned in his politics of the 1950s and looking back at the happenings of the 1920s, Thakur was faced with an obvious ethical dilemma. He notes that as a student in Calcutta he observed with interest the unfolding of the noncooperation movement in the 1920s. He revered Gandhi, but disapproved of his support for the Khilafat movement, which he thought had nothing to do with Indian nationalism and indeed had led to communal riots in the East Bengal countryside. He was full of respect for Gandhi’s nonviolent methods, although he himself did not participate in the agitation. It was not because he disapproved of nationalism, he says, but because he thought it inappropriate for a student to participate in politics. Yet, the reality was he did not stay away from politics altogether. He mentioned that he worked for the Namasudra candidate Bhismadeb Das who stood for the Legislative Council election of 1921, which Congress wanted to boycott as a part of the non-cooperation agenda.44 In other words, while he appeared to be supportive of the nationalist spirit and accepted the legitimacy of the demand for self-rule, he also provided enough indication of his unwillingness to participate in or support the movement. This ambivalence, which was partly resolved in the late 1940s on the eve of the Partition when he joined the Congress, was rekindled again in the 1960s when he was totally

Texts of liminality 101 disgusted with the Congress and was arrested and detained without trial for anti-state activities.45 At this stage, he reinvented Matua Mahasangha as an autonomous social and religious space for the Namasudras. This unresolved dilemma could be a reason why he did not consider publishing his autobiography during his lifetime.

Text 2 By contrast, there is less ambivalence in Manohar Mouli Biswas’s autobiography, which is overtly political in asserting the autonomy of Dalit identity. He was inspired by the writings of Dr B. R. Ambedkar and was influenced by the Marathi and Kannada Dalit writings as well as radical Afro-American literature. But despite his unambiguous political position, his account of childhood days in his village clearly shows elements of ambivalence in everyday experience of his people – the kind of which we come across in Thakur’s narrative as well. In terms of their religious life and social identity, the Namasudra everyday life could not be pigeonholed into the structural divisions of organised or elite religion; am I a Hindu or a non-Hindu was a non-question.46 As Biswas writes, the ‘people of my caste thought of themselves as Hindus. But they did not observe many of the rites and rituals of the Hindus’.47 They ate pork, although they would not openly admit it. They respected commensality restrictions in relation to other castes. But the widows in Namasudra households did take non-vegetarian food. There was no restriction on widow remarriage. The Brahmins who came to perform puja in the Namasudra villages were not treated equally by other Brahmins. Many Namasudras in his village were attracted to Vaishnavism, as it defied the hierarchies of caste system; but they did not like their peripatetic or bohemian – sometimes even promiscuous – lifestyle. They preferred family life and had very strong extended family bonds. And that was very much in keeping with one of the major teachings of Harichand and Guruchand Thakur that had already reached the remotest Namasudra villages in East Bengal. Like many others in their village, his mother too was a devout Matua, a follower of Harichand and Guruchand Thakur. But, at the same time like the Thakur family, the Namasudras in their villages also participated in Hindu festivals like Durga puja. Biswas gives detailed description of public celebration of Durga puja in Namamasudra villages, where the inferior Brahmins or charaler baon performed the pujas.48 Everyone shared the fun and merriment on an occasion where more important was the carnivalesque spirit than the religious ritual. However, like many other peasant communities in India, as Gyanendra Pandey has argued,49 the Namasudras too had always worn their Hinduism lightly. As Biswas writes, in childhood he was never attracted to religion, and nothing happened in the family that

102  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay could attract him to religion. ‘Not religion’, he writes, ‘it was poverty that hung like a sword over the head’.50 Existential problems rather than spiritual salvation thus remained the major preoccupation of a poor peasant Namasudra family. The Biswas family remained in a physically isolated space – the 52 villages around the big marsh or bil constituted their physical world. It was primarily inhabited by Namasudra and other low-caste peasants, agricultural workers and artisans. There were no educational or medical facilities or any other traces of colonial modernity in these villages. The Biswas family had some land,51 but the income from it was never enough for the subsistence of the entire family over the year. Also, when there was flood in the bils and salt water destroyed the crops, the family faced starvation and survived on wild vegetables and fish. This poverty kept the Namasudras insulated from the outside world.52 He first saw a train at the age of seven – his first encounter with the artefacts of modernity. Their engagement with modernity was not without tension or contradictions. The family was divided on the question of education. The head of the family – Manohar’s grandfather – wanted to follow what Guruchand was advising his followers, that is, to educate the children in the family. While Manohar’s father wanted to have his children educated, his uncle – his father’s elder brother, strongly distrustful of the high-caste educated elite – had his doubts. He was against losing family labour in lure of elusive educated middle class career. How would education help them? Who would be generous enough to give them jobs? But his father hoped for social mobility for his children. Even if they could not become a lawyer, they could at least become a lawyer’s clerk! As we know, it was this yearning for vertical mobility which was at the root of the Namasudra social movement initiated by Guruchand Thakur.53 But the contrary reality of obstacles to social mobility, that is, ending up as clerks instead of lawyers, remained as true as ever. The spread of this social movement also indicates that despite their physical isolation they were not totally insulated from the wider world. Manohar’s elder brother’s first son was born on 2 October and hence was called Gandhi. Unfortunately, the child died young, as these villages with no medical facilities had high child mortality.54 His father also died at a comparatively early age because of inadequate medical facility, which was a stark reality of Namasudra existence in the remote areas of eastern Bengal. Biswas does not talk much about nationalist politics. When he was growing up, the main blast of Gandhian mass movements was over; it was the turbulent time of Partition. In a brief reference to nationalism, Biswas describes how the elders in his village picked up information about the wider nationalist movement from the market place. They discussed nationalism and Partition, but followed Guruchnd’s dictum that for people who had nothing to

Texts of liminality 103 eat or had no education, there was no apparent difference between political independence and servitude. He mentions that in childhood, he witnessed the country becoming independent and being partitioned on the basis of religion. Those who divided the country in the name of religion were a small minority, not the poor suffering people of the country, he writes.55 The Namasudras failed to understand why they could not live together with the Muslims as they had done for so long despite occasional conflicts. This was the line taken by Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation in Bengal under the leadership of Jogendra Nath Mandal.56 Thus, being true to his faith in Ambedkarite politics, Biswas, consciously in his reconstruction of childhood memory, does not take P. R. Thakur’s line of aligning with the Congress and mainstream Indian nationalism, but follows the Federation line, which preferred a coalition between the Muslims and the Namasudras and opposed Partition. And following the advice of the Federation leaders, after Partition their family like many other Namasudra peasants preferred not to leave their homeland, which now became Pakistan. Biswas studied in the Bagerhat College until his intermediate examination and then migrated to West Bengal, probably in 1960, when many other Namasudra peasant families also finally decided to migrate to India and settle down in the border districts of West Bengal. Like many of them, he also settled in Bongaon region near the Indo-Pak border and went to Gobardanga Hindu College, very near Thakurnagar, the new centre of a reinvented Matua Mahasangha. Biswas’s politics, which is writ large in his text, emanates from his sense of historic injustice and humiliation meted out to the Dalit by the caste system. He, therefore, consciously positions himself as a Dalit writer and activist. His literary career started in Nagpore, when he came to know about Namdeb Dhassal and Dalit Panther literature and was influenced by them, as well as by the radical Afro-American literature. Although society and culture in Maharashtra and Bengal differ, he argues, the sufferings of the Dalit as a result of the caste system remain the same throughout India.57 In his autobiography, he consciously spells out this social disjuncture between the Dalit and the high-caste Hindus. It is manifest through the language structure of the narrative. The main narrative is written in the elite Bengali literary diction, but the conversation between family members or among Namasudra villagers is rendered in colloquial East Bengali or Khulna dialect as an authentic marker of their subalternity. Biswas consciously posits this linguistic dichotomy as a signifier of social differentiation. When he first went to school, his high-caste teacher told him to unlearn the language that he learned in his mother’s womb, for it was not the language of knowledge, of modernity. He had to learn the elite’s language to enter this new and alien world of modern education. He excelled in it despite his abject

104  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay poverty, the family’s demand on his labour during the agricultural season and other obstacles that naturally arose in a family situation without a learned tradition. And yet, despite all his achievements, he could not reach the same height as his high-caste classmates did. As in Thakur’s Atmacharit, Biswas does not mention any specific incident of caste discrimination in his personal life, except one very covert act of insinuation mentioned at the very end of his narrative.58 But unlike Thakur’s, the oppression of the Dalit is the central theme of his autobiography, where indeed the personal becomes political or ‘I’ tends to become ‘we’. While commenting on his life, Biswas writes: What I have narrated is not the life story of someone who had a normal life. Those who are born in light, who go to school in childhood holding hands of their parents, those who get two full meals a day, wear new clothes during festivals, wear shoes, get medical treatment in illness, show no signs of ill health on their bodies, wear warm clothes in winter, those who grow up in love and care – this story is not their story.59 In his retrospective reconstruction of memory, Biswas thus consciously situates his life in a dichotomised notion of normality, where the realities of Dalit existence constitute the opposite of being normal. But Biswas is also conscious of the complexities of the collective and does not present an unreal picture of homogeneity. He also emphasises that it is the story of his own life. It is a past not shared by his wife or two sons or daughters-in-law or the grandchild, as all of them had comfortable urban middle-class upbringing. In other words, he recognises that his individual life experience represented a particular historical moment in the life trajectory of a family and a community. He thus does not make it an artificially homogenised collective biography of a Dalit community. He recognises his own mobility across temporal, physical and social boundaries – from colonial to postcolonial, from Pakistan to India, from poor peasant life to middle class professional status. He is also conscious of social mobility over generations; as a father he is proud of his sons’ successes. His narrative thus obviously points to many layers and multiple forms of lived experiences of a community over time, space and structures. Yet, they all share a common existence of subalternity, as despite all forms of mobility they fail to break that glass ceiling and remain forever Dalit.

Liminality The two lives and their texts that we discuss here give us few important insights into Dalit life, identity and politics in colonial and postcolonial

Texts of liminality 105 India. First, they tell us that it is hazardous to try to homogenise Dalit identity; we need to recognise the ontological as well as ideological plurality within the community. We need to take into consideration the temporal or intergenerational mobility. There is no single lived experience of the Dalit. Not only were the two life trajectories very dissimilar, although they both belonged to the same Namasudra caste, but their ideological positions were distinctly different as well. Yet, they both come together in their shared sense of marginality as Dalit. But here, marginality does not necessarily mean peripherality, but liminality. And here, we may draw some theoretical insights from Victor Turner who once defined ‘liminality’ as a state of being ‘Betwixt and Between’ structures – it is ‘a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise’.60 The history of the Namasudras and of the Matua Mahasangha, which many of them followed, could be located within that realm of liminality indicating new possibilities of Dalit emancipatory transcendentalism and political empowerment. But in Turner’s thinking, liminality was rite de passage, a transient state from which new structures emerged. I argue that Dalit liminality is not transient; until now it has been a permanent state of being at the edges of structures. In a subsequent study, Turner acknowledged the possibility of ‘a style of life that is permanently contained within liminality. . . . Instead of the liminal being a passage, it seemed to be coming to be regarded as a state . . .’61 Here, he defines marginality not only as a state of being betwixt and between, but also of belonging simultaneously to multiple groups with ‘no cultural assurance of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity’.62 If we take liminality not in a temporal sense but more as ‘a state of being’ in an in-between space, then Dalit identity and history – or more precisely, the history of the Namasudras and Matua movement – should appropriately be located in that marginal sphere on the edges of entrenched structures of religion, society and politics in colonial and postcolonial India. Let me further explain this state of liminality with more concrete examples from the two autobiographies. I think the commonality of the two lives we described lies in their profound, unacknowledged, yet permanent state of ambivalence. Thakur’s ambivalence is relatively more pronounced and apparent, as he is evidently caught between sets of binaries, such as modern/non-modern, Hindu/ non-Hindu, nationalist/non-nationalist and so on. And this ambivalence becomes more apparent if we consider his silences or what is omitted from his autobiography, that is, his subsequent alienation and condemnation of the Congress and his unwillingness to either publish or revise his autobiography that betrayed his past inconsistencies. He had joined the mainstream nationalism, but could not rise to its higher echelons of power because of his Dalithood and ended up as a frustrated man; but still he could not

106  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay totally disown his past. Biswas too suffers from ambivalence. His present, which is defined by the modernity of his government job and middle class status and informed by his post-Ambedkarite reflexive Dalit self-consciousness, is different from his past in colonial East Bengal – a past stricken by poverty, illiteracy and discrimination. But his past does not leave his present; even after moving up the class ladder, he realises that he cannot leave aside his Dalit self, as he discovers that he is not accepted as equal even by the most liberal high-caste bhadralok, despite his caste-neutral achievements. He expects his future to not only be different (his sons and grandson would have a better life), but he also wants that future to be informed by his past – and that is why he writes his autobiography – to tell his progeny the story of his difficult past, lest they forget. Thus, as a Dalit, he resides in a perpetual state of liminality, that is, between and betwixt multiple layers of temporal and structural positions. His literary politics of representation is an attempt to resolve that ambivalence between his middle-classness and Dalithood. While Thakur continued to suffer from his ambivalence, Biswas consciously chooses to be Dalit and denies others the right to speak for him or his community. This ambivalence or liminality was also apparent in the quotidian social and religious lives of the Namasudras in rural East Bengal, as narrated in the two autobiographies, and here they effortlessly project the personal on to the collective. Religion was an integral part of their everyday lives, but this religious life defied structures. The Matua movement was a local religious sect of East Bengal that was initially conceptualised as an alternative spiritual space for a particular Dalit group, the Namasudras. But it eventually attracted various other Dalit groups who found in it a philosophy of emancipation. What these two autobiographies tell us is that the popularity of the Matua sect did not initiate any fundamental structural upheaval in Bengal’s rural religious life, as it represented a spiritual and social space that was located in-between, sometime even overlapping, existing structures of popular religious life in rural Bengal. Those who embraced this religious order for spiritual transcendence or social emancipation did not have to consciously renounce or distance themselves from their erstwhile popular Hindu or Vaishnava religious practices or beliefs. The in-betweenness of the Matua further lay in its association with the social and political movements of the Namasudras – their attempts at political empowerment – and for that reason, in its appropriation of selected aspects of modernity such as modern education and mainstream national political parties. Yet, it tried to retain its autonomy and its essential nonmodern character of a rural religious sect. The Matua Mahasangha was thus a marginal religious sect – marginal not in the sense of being inferior, but because of its in-betweenness. The two texts thus offer rare insights into this

Texts of liminality 107 liminal identity of the Namasudras and the Matua movement in colonial as well as postcolonial Bengal. This liminality is different from the hybridity of the elite Indian modernity that selectively embraced and retained aspects of the modern and the non-modern.63 These autobiographies thus force us to rethink social theory of modernity by pointing to the multiple levels of engagement of a colonised society with the hegemonic modernity of the West, brought to them by a colonising power.

Notes 1 This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the Rabindra Bharati University in its Distinguished Lecture Series in January 2014. 2 K. Satchidanandan, ‘Autobiography Today’, Indian Literature, 2010, 54(2): 6–9. 3 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (ed. P.J. Eakin and trans. Katherine Leary), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 185–215, cited in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed., Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, pp. 227–228. 4 Debjani Ganguly, ‘Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives’, Asian Studies Review, 2009, 33: 431–434. 5 Gopal Guru, a noted Dalit social scientist, wrote in 2002 that social scientists without lived-in experiences of Dalit life could only theorise from outside. See Gopal Guru, ‘How Egalitarian Are the Social Sciences in India?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 14–20 December 2002, 37(50): 5003–5009. 6 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, p. 24. 7 As Smith and Watson suggest: ‘The complexity of autobiographical texts requires reading practices that engage the narrative tropes, sociocultural contexts, rhetorical aims, and narrative shifts within the historical or chronological trajectory of the text. To reduce autobiographical narration to facticity is to strip it of the density of rhetorical, literary, ethical, political, and cultural dimensions’. Reading Autobiography, p. 13. 8 For a discussion and bibliographical details of these autobiographies, see Raj Kumar, Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste, Nation and Identity, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2010. 9 Manoranjan Byapari, Itibritte chandal jiban, Kolkata: Priya Shilpa Prakashan, 2012; Jatin Bala, Shikor chenra jiban, Kolkata: Chaturtha Duniya, 2010; Gopal Heera, Chhinnomul jiban itihaser ruparekha o prasangik anubhuti, Kolkata: Banga Pathak Prakashan, 2012; Adhir Biswas, Allar jamite paa, Kolkata: Gangchil, 2012; Jogendranath Roy, ‘Cooper’s Camp-e chhelebela’, in Madhumoy Pal (ed.), Deshbhag: Binash o binirman, Kolkata: Gangchil, 2011. 10 Jeanne Openshaw, Writing the Self: The Life and Philosophy of a Dissenting Bengali Baul Guru, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010. 11 Pramatha Ranjan Thakur, Atmacharit ba purbasmriti [Autobiography or Old Memories], Thakurnagar: Matua Mahasangha, 1994; Manohar Mouli Biswas, Amar Bhubanae Ami Benche Thaaki [I Survive in My Own World],

108  Sekhar Bandyopadhyay Kolkata: Chaturtha Duniya, 2013. This book has now been translated into English: Surviving In My World: Growing up Dalit in Bengal (trans. and ed. Angana Dutta and Joydeep Sarangi), Kolkata: Stree Samya, 2015. However, excerpts used in this essay are in my translation from original Bengali. 12 For details on the Namasudra movement and the Matua sect, see Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal 1872–1947, 2nd enlarged ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. 13 Election Commission of India, Key Highlights of the General Election of 1957 to the Legislative Assembly of West Bengal, p. 9; Election Commission of India, Key Highlights of the General Election of 1962 to the Legislative Assembly of West Bengal, p. 5; ‘Matua Mahasanghatipati Sri Sri Pramatha Ranjan Thakur-er Sankshipta Jibanpanjee’, Matua Mahasangha Patrika, 2 November 2009, (62): p. 5; IBN Politics.com: http://ibnlive.in. com/politics/electionstats/constituency/1967/ . . . (accessed on 18 April 2010). 14 For details on Matua Mahasangha and the biography of P. R. Thakur, see Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity, pp. 35–45, 53–54, 210–213, 239–240, 155–166, 180–187, 192–193, 204–205. 15 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, p. 24. 16 Biswas, Amar Bhubanae, p. 98. 17 Ibid., p. 97. 18 Ibid, p. 122. 19 Ibid, p. 94. 20 Ibid, p. 24. 21 See, for example, Sarah Beth, ‘Hindi Dalit Autobiography: An Exploration of Identity’, Modern Asian Studies, 2007, 41(3): 545–574; Raj Kumar, Dalit Personal Narratives, pp. 150–151. 22 Raj Kumar, Dalit Personal Narratives, p. 159. This confirms Smith and Watson’s observation that working class autobiographies may sometimes reflect the forms, patterns and ideologies of the ruling class life narratives. See Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, p. 228. 23 Thakur, Atmacharit, pp. 1–2. 24 It is important to note that this origin myth which was initiated in the early 20th century as a part of the Matua movement became a common sense by the 21st century and appeared in Dalit blogs, which describe Harichand as a Brahmin. See http://indiainteracts.in/members/2007/11/03/MoreonDalit-Pa . . . (accessed on 3 April 2010). 25 See Ross Mallick, ‘Affirmative Action and Elite Formation: An Untouchable Family History’, Ethnohistory, Spring 1997, 44(2): 345–374. 26 Byapari, Itibritte Chandal Jibon, pp. 24–25. 27 Thakur, Atmacharit, pp. 100–101. 28 Ibid., pp. 64, 69. 29 Ibid., pp. 83–84, 99–102, 104–105, 117–119; quotation from p. 119. 30 Ibid, p. 82. 31 ‘B.R. Ambedkar’s Preface’, in B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma, a Critical Edition (eds, Akash Singh Rathore and Ajay Verma), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. xxv–xxvi. 32 Thakur, Atmacharit, pp. 30, 43, 64. 33 Ibid., pp. 94–95.

Texts of liminality 109 4 Ibid., pp. 70–71. 3 35 Ibid., pp. 50–52. 36 Ibid., pp. 87–88. 37 Ibid., p. 51. 38 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self-Under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 104. 39 Thakur, Atmacharit, pp. 4–13. 40 Ibid., pp. 105–113. 41 Ibid., pp. 65–67. 42 Ibid., pp. 89–93. 43 For the above details, see Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity, pp. 204–205, 249–250, 264–265. 44 Thakur, Atmacharit, pp. 185–214. 45 Note sheet, dated 22/5/64, Government of Bengal, IB Records, F.No. 2076–50, West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata. Also see Jugantar, 20 April and 1 May 1964. 46 Here one may refer to Kancha Ilaiah’s powerful work, Why I am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy, Calcutta: Stree Samya, 2009. 47 Biswas, Amar Bhubanae, p. 9. 48 Ibid., p. 76. 49 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Partition and Independence in Delhi: 1947–48’, Economic and Political Weekly, 6–12 September 1997, 32(36): 2264. 50 Biswas, Amar Bhubanae, p. 84. 51 Ibid., p. 68. 52 Ibid., p. 49. 53 See Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity, chs. 1 and 2. 54 Biswas, Amar Bhubanae, p. 51. 55 Ibid., p. 84. 56 See Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity, pp. 249–250. 57 Ibid., p. 94. 58 Ibid., p. 88. 59 Ibid., p. 82. Italics added. 60 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 97. 61 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974, p. 261. 62 Turner further elaborates: ‘What is interesting about such marginals is that they often look to their group of origin, the so-called inferior group, for communitas, and to the more prestigious group in which they mainly live and in which they aspire to higher status as their structural reference group’. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, p. 233. 63 See H.K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in H.K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 1–7. See also Gyan Prakash’s discussion of the Nehruvian modernity in his Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 236–237.

5 Paradoxes of victimhood Dalit women’s bodies as polluted and suffering in colonial North India Charu Gupta1 This essay explores how and why Dalit women came to be overwhelmingly represented as ‘victims’ in a section of upper caste reformist writings in Hindi in early 20th-century colonial North India, with a particular emphasis on iconographies of suffering, sentimentality and subservience. My arguments here are partly inspired by some seminal works of Peter Robb. He was one of the first historians to draw linkages between Dalit movements and meanings of labour in colonial India.2 One of the central contentions of Robb was that though there occurred changes in moral emphasis of reformers, nationalists and colonisers with regard to Dalits and labour in the colonial period, which often resulted in ideological and religious ferment, it was seldom accompanied with, or extended to, changes in social and economic structures, leading to a persistence of hierarchies.3 This essay takes this observation forward by arguing that the shift from the polluting to the victimised body of Dalit woman in late colonial North India, symbolised, for example, through a reallocation of focus from Surpanakha to Shabari, in many ways was a historical need of the times, as reformers faced the challenge of transforming stigmatised bodies into suffering Hindus. At the same time, the essay shows that there were various limits to such sentimentality, as Dalit women usually appeared here as mute sufferers and romanticised submissive beings. The essay underscores how such idioms were often invoked to evade questions of structural inequalities. A second set of writings by Robb, through the Calcutta diaries of Richard Blechynden, have again invoked people on the margins – cooks, chaukidars, servants and concubines – to offer accounts of intimate histories of self and household.4 Each story that Robb narrates here begins with a new promise of sentimentality and melodrama. In some accounts, he weaves in Blechynden’s occasional sympathy for servants with increasing regulation of labour and employment. The complex master-servant relationships often carried expectations of shared sentiments, along with conflict. They also revealed, as Robb says, how sentiment was modified by sense and sense

Paradoxes of victimhood 111 reinforced by sentiment.5 These writings of Robb provide a profound peep into quotidian lives, bringing together the personal, private and domestic with the public and the outside. Here, Robb stresses the significance of discovering routine, ordinary and non-consequential histories. He shows how the trivia, or a study of what does not matter matters, reflects the transitory and the quotidian.6 This essay, too, does not attempt any ‘cataclysmic’ or ‘high’ social, political and economic history of caste and gender, but rather explores their regulation at the level of the quotidian and everyday by focusing on the Hindi print culture and its invocation of sentimental melodrama and sympathy for the figure of the Dalit women, which not only was marked through a move from the lascivious to the vulnerable, but also represented various shortcomings of such moves.

Iconographies of sympathy, suffering and sentimentality In May 1927, Chand, the leading Hindi journal of early 20th-century colonial North India, published its Achhut Ank (special issue on ‘untouchables’). Though overwhelmingly male-centric, it had a distinct perspective on Dalit women, encapsulated in the following: It is the story of days and nights of fasting; it is the story of those mothers who leave the dead bodies of their beloved children in their broken huts and go to do begar (forced unpaid labour) in the homes of demonic landlords; it is the story of those wives who leave their essence of being, their god like husbands and their life-wealth on the death bed and in the face of the naked sword of oppression go to do begar with their heads bent; it is the story of those sisters who are subject day and night to the sexual passions of oppressors in front of their parents and brothers; . . . it is the horrifying story of extreme poverty; . . . it is the moving story of desolation of Hindu religion and Hindu society and it is also the story of rise of Islam and Christianity in India; it is the heartrending story of silent tears, soundless weeping and speechless suffering.7 This poignant account about Dalit women was emblematic of a critical shift in their representation in a significant segment of upper caste social reformist Hindi literature in colonial North India. The dominant precolonial image of Dalit woman’s body as the site of evil and pollution gave way to her suffering and victimised body. At the same time, the Achhut Ank strengthened certain stereotypes of Dalit women and carried within it certain inherent contradictions, as it framed its portrayal largely through an upper caste lens, embracing Dalit women within a hierarchised Hindu

112  Charu Gupta fold. Simultaneously, it upheld and idealised images of a silently suffering, compliant Dalit woman. It also revealed deep anxieties around conversions of Dalits, especially women, to Islam and Christianity. The context for this Achhut Ank at this particular time can perhaps be found in a series of interrelated factors – the incipient emergence of the Adi Hindu movement of Dalits in the United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh, henceforth UP), to which however this issue made no reference; the propagation of shuddhi (movement to purify and convert untouchables and others to Hinduism) and sangathan (political movement to organise and unite all Hindus) by Arya Samaj; and increasing fears of conversions by Dalits, linked to an alleged decline in Hindu numbers. Though the print-public sphere was deeply heterogeneous, and there were other representations of Dalit women that jostled with those of suffering, this essay explores the ideological discourses and depictions of Dalit women as victims, largely by upper caste reformers and nationalists. It argues that this move in a section of reformist literature, where images of the permanently polluted, evil and grotesque Dalit woman’s body gave way to her suffering body – epitomised by a shift of focus from Surpanakha to Shabari – allowed for a conceptualisation of an ideal Dalit ‘subservient’ woman, which provided a stamp of historical legitimation to reformers and nationalists. Social scientists have been deeply concerned with the causes and consequences of human suffering. Veena Das and others have argued that there is a degree of emotional healing that takes place for suffering individuals, once they feel that the larger society is making efforts to recognise their pain through sympathetic representations.8 Scholars have gone on to discuss the intricate links between the problem of suffering and the politics of compassion, particularly evident in modern societies.9 This essay, too, examines how the suffering body of the Dalit woman became a significant focus of reformers in early 20th-century India, invoking sympathy for her. At the same time, it interrogates the paradoxes in these upper caste portrayals, as representations of Dalit women’s suffering bodies were inextricably bound by even sympathetic reformers within limited frameworks of charitable benevolence and spectatorial pity. Descriptions of Dalit women within frameworks of suffering and victimhood functioned in tandem with those of sentimentality and subservience. Sentimentality, combined with humanitarian impulses, has been regarded by some as the motive force for social reform in the modern period.10 Feminists have theorised the use of sentimentality, particularly in the representations of African American women and of the marginalised. For example, Rebecca Wanzo shows how sentimental politics shapes the rhetoric around victimisation and suffering, and how it frequently presents itself as progressive about social justice issues while eventually preserving the status quo.11

Paradoxes of victimhood 113 Political theorist Wendy Brown similarly comments that when we substitute emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones, we replace the justice project with a therapeutic or behavioural one.12 Talking of media ethics, philosopher Lilie Chouliaraki chalks out mediated public discourses around suffering and the politics of pity, which produce systematic distribution of ethical sensibilities towards distant others along with hierarchies of place and human life.13 While she makes the argument in the context of television news, it can well apply to written words and visual images, where one ‘uses image and language so as to render the spectacle of suffering not only comprehensible but also ethically acceptable for the spectator’.14 Histories of untouchability in colonial India, too, were constantly touched by depictions of suffering and pity. The logic of sentimental and spectatorial telling was crafted over Dalit women’s bodies through repetitive images. Frames of victimhood helped in drawing attention of upper caste Hindus towards the Dalit woman’s suffering body and in gaining sympathy for her. At the same time, these narratives privileged a language of personal and domestic betterment from within rather than structural and institutional changes. As has been succinctly argued recently by Arundhati Roy, appeals to an inner voice, moral righteousness or a reformed heart were often posited by upper castes to underplay brutal, institutionalised injustices of caste hierarchies.15 Moreover, the language of sympathy and sentimentality was meant to provide a sedative for wounds that were centuries old, and in turn, expected to stimulate feelings of gratitude, thankfulness and obedience among the untouchables. Symbols of deference, embodied in specific Dalit figures, became particularly useful here as they epitomised the ‘ideal’ untouchable. Wanzo has explicated how sentimental texts and practices of storytelling around suffering bodies often make the body of colour iconographic, leading to the ‘crafting of generic heroes for the moment’.16 What I try to show in this essay is how in upper caste reformist renderings of sentimentality and sympathy for the Dalit woman in early 20th-century North India, she often came to be represented through symbols of subservience and reverence. I particularly focus on the figure of Shabari, who became an iconographic and model figure in this regard. Through the iconographies of suffering, sentimentality and subservience crafted over Dalit women’s bodies, this essay also extends existing works on both caste and gender. In the past few years, there have been significant and perceptive regional histories of Dalits in the colonial period, which have provided us with critical redemptive narratives.17 An important body of work has now emerged on Dalits in colonial UP as well. Most of these studies have centred on Chamars/Jatavs, the largest Dalit caste in the region, and their experiences.18 These scholarly works, while extremely rich and insightful, have largely had a Dalit male bias, concentrating on

114  Charu Gupta their print, public, political and economic activities. The assumptions of gender neutrality have rendered Dalit women largely invisible, leading to the depictions of Dalits as a predominantly male category, particularly in colonial UP. Through certain illustrations, this essay tries to gender caste and show how depiction of Dalit women in certain modes helped in further institutionalising patterns of caste domination and subordination. In the recent works of many feminist historians, caste has emerged as a central analytic category.19 Uma Chakravarti, for example, shows the intimate relationship between the consolidation of Brahminical and graded patriarchy and traditional caste hierarchy during the Peshwai in 18thcentury Western India.20 Prem Chowdhry has pointed out how, in colonial Haryana, a more rigid and caste-oriented social pattern was being reinforced, a development particularly disadvantageous for the low-caste women.21 Taken together, these works demonstrate how in this period reforms centred on women took on new forms through engagements with caste. This essay extends these insights by exploring some of the upper caste reformist writings in Hindi that embodied the gender of caste, and exposed the contradictory impulses in representing bodies that were marked and likewise coded. In the reformist print-public sphere, words of sympathy coalesced with images of acquiescence to regulate Dalit women’s bodies. By concentrating on such writings, the essay reflects much more on the everyday and the anecdotal rather than the spectacular and the cataclysmic, drawing insights from Robb’s work.22 The quotidian everyday depictions of Dalit women as victims, in a section of reformist literature, nonetheless concealed deep structures of inequality. Even when cast in a humane language, they helped in maintaining the hegemonic and hierarchical caste order. Finally, the essay foregrounds ‘representation in print’ as its critical tool. To paraphrase Jacques Ranciere, representations are often ‘embodied allegories of inequality’.23 Shahid Amin remarks that representation can pose afresh the relationship between myth and memory, fiction and history, oral and written, rhetoric and everyday reality.24 Tanika Sarkar makes a forceful case for accepting histories of representation as ‘legitimate’ history.25 Representations of Dalit women in upper caste reformist writings not only reflected their hidden fears and desires, but also made public their private feelings and images. From the late 19th century, there emerged a vibrant public culture in urban UP, which took on material form through the circulation and consumption of print; this was facilitated by a rapid growth of public institutions and libraries, publishing houses, presses, newspapers and books. By the early 20th century, Hindi became the dominant print language of a large section of middle class, upper caste Hindu reformers

Paradoxes of victimhood 115 and nationalists in UP.26 A part of this literature was deeply engaged with debates around caste. Images of Dalit women and men came to be circulated in various genres of Hindi literature like novels, stories, reformist magazines, didactic literature, missionary propaganda material in the vernacular, cartoons and Dalit writings, providing significant insights into gendered Dalit formations. As is widely recognised by several scholars, a section of educated Dalits in early 20th-century UP also saw print and publishing as a critical instrument for claiming dignity.27 At the same time, this literature too was largely Dalit male-centric in its orientation. This essay does not engage with Dalit writings, which is a subject of separate study, and instead concentrates on those of upper caste reformers. To understand systems of inequality, it is equally important to study the perceptions of dominant groups.

Polluted to suffering bodies In the early 20th century, with the emergence of pioneering figures of Gandhi and Ambedkar, caste, particularly the figure of the ‘untouchable’, became a ubiquitous subject in Hindu reformist and nationalist writings including booklets, magazines and newspapers. Novels, plays and stories were penned around the achhut (untouchable).28 Writings of orthodox Sanatani Hindus and reformist Arya Samajis, nationalists and missionaries, authors and journalists were saturated with debates around the figure of the untouchable, with discussions around ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’, sympathy and antagonism, wooing and distancing. These narratives mostly embedded untouchables within a male paradigm. However, Dalit women did make an appearance in multifaceted ways. The sharp demarcation between upper caste and Dalit women – exemplified, for example, in some of the didactic manuals published at this time, which often depicted Dalit women as kutnis (vamps)29 – was becoming untenable for many reformers and nationalists, as they had to make serious attempts to reclaim the ‘untouchables’ within a putative Hindu community and nation. These were combined with anxieties and fears around conversions and increasing Dalit protests and assertions, which forced the upper caste reformers to respond with alacrity. The rubric of victimhood and suffering particularly proved convenient for them in this context. Scholars have shown how in ancient texts and epics, be it Manusmriti, Ramayan or Mahabharat, Dalit and Dravidian women were often depicted as vulgar, treacherous, dangerous, polluted and evil ‘Other’. The figure of Surpanakha (literally meaning sharp, long nails) in Ramayan was referred to as that of a ‘savage’, embodying all that was ugly and fearful. Researchers

116  Charu Gupta have read the mutilation of Surpanakha’s body at the hands of Lakshman as punishment by an Aryan male to a Dravidian woman. In Mahabharat, Hidimbi, a low-caste woman, epitomised a lustful being, full of desire. Manusmriti dehumanised the Dalit woman as the ‘fierce, untouchable woman’ and as someone who was permanently and constantly polluted.30 Uma Chakravarti demonstrates how repetitive transmission of negative and false images of Dalit women had their roots firmly fixed in ancient, cultural traditions.31 While in some of the writings of colonial North India (e.g. in didactic literature) such images made a reentry taking on new forms and meanings, in some of the other literature, such images were pushed to the peripheries to be replaced by a new kind of sentimentality. A substantial section of reformers started constructing Dalit women in a benevolent light. They attempted to arouse empathy for them, where Dalit women emerged as victims of caste exploitation, circumscribed employment, poverty, rejection and marginalisation. However, while sympathetic, their language and metaphors often bristled with certain assumptions and contradictions. Dalit women usually appeared here as mute sufferers and romanticised subservient beings. ‘Improvement’ in their condition was couched in a language of reform from above. There were other severe limitations of reformist rhetoric vis-à-vis ground tensions, further reflecting the paradoxes and ambiguities of their positioning. Such mediated representations, where upper caste reformers were speaking for Dalit women, played a primary role in shaping dominant attitudes and beliefs about them, creating an inferential casteism. At the same time, these accounts cannot be dismissed by just branding them as ‘hypocritical’. The late colonial period and its print culture reflected the continuing discussions amongst the nationalists and reformers around caste inequities, as they faced the challenge of transforming representations of Dalits from polluted and stigmatised bodies to suffering Hindus, entailing a redefinition of ‘untouchability’. As has been argued, reformers here were usually responding to Dalit movements and assertions in this period, which forced them to adopt a humane language.32 Reformers were aided in these attempts by a substantial section of Hindi literature, which began writing in their language and, in a limited way, contesting the past and traditional representations of untouchables. It critiqued the cruelty and oppression that had once gone largely unquestioned, stating that such previous practices were now unacceptable.33 Reformers created sympathy for untouchables, depicting them as victims of centuries of exploitation by the elite castes. Sympathy, mingled with sentimentality, became a cornerstone of the consciousness and conscience of reformers in their communication and representation of Dalits.

Paradoxes of victimhood 117

Melodramas of sentimentality For the protection of our untouchable sisters, for the protection of their virtue, their character, their morality and their divine sweetness, we will have to foil the attack from all three directions! We will have to protect our helpless untouchable sisters from the hands of twice-born castes, from the blows of heretics [Muslim scoundrels and Christian missionaries], and from the onslaught of untouchable men themselves. . . . The chastity, the character, the virtue of both untouchable woman and Brahmin devi are equally worthy of protection and respect.34

In contrast to the image of Dalit woman as different, polluted and evil, there emerged in a substantial segment of reformist Hindi literature a discourse of sameness, sympathy and victimhood. At the same time, the ‘burden’ of safeguarding Dalit women was seen as falling on the shoulders of upper caste Hindu women and men with a ‘conscience’. In such readings, the Dalit woman was incorporated into a Hindu reformist-nationalist fold. Memories of oppression were reorganised around this new notion.35 The deployment of such rhetoric responded to the historical need of the times. Speaking of 18th-century England male social behaviour, historian Karen Halttunen remarks that how ‘in the context of the bourgeois “civilizing process,” compassion and a reluctance to inflict pain became identified as distinctly civilized emotions, while cruelty was labelled as savage or barbarous’.36 This, according to her, became an integral aspect of the humanitarian sensibility of the times, where the aim was ‘to teach virtue by softening the heart and eliciting tears of tender sympathy’.37 A similar point has been made by James Carson, who shows how 19th-century social reformers conceived of the power of sympathetic identification as the product of high civilisation and thus characteristic of modernity, and more specifically, as the possession of those social classes above the ‘brutal mob’.38 In early 20th-century colonial North India, upper caste reformers too trenchantly criticised exploitation that had once gone unquestioned, and expressed a sense of historical guilt and moral horror at caste Hindu cruelty. Heralding modernity and nation building, they implored the upper caste Hindus by appealing to their ‘innate’ virtues. This was also a way to challenge colonial notions of ‘barbarism’ and lack of civilisational ethics among the colonised. Through their writings, reformers and nationalists wished to aspire for an emotional response that would arouse a strong sense of sympathy towards the untouchables in the readers and help in building a putative Hindu community and nation. This relatively compassionate view, where Dalits were basically portrayed under the rubric of ‘victimhood’, coincided with nationalist concerns and

118  Charu Gupta with a larger cultural attack on Brahmins and upper caste religious preachers by the reformers, especially the Arya Samaj. The figure of the Brahmin priest, particularly vis-a-vis the ‘untouchable’ woman, emerged as that of a scoundrel.39 Cartoons appeared, depicting the pitiful sufferings of untouchable women in the hands of Brahmins and other upper castes, especially around the public spaces of temples and wells, since it was largely they who were regarded as more frequent visitors to temples and who mainly drew water from the wells. For example, a cartoon depicted the rage of a Brahmin priest towards an ‘untouchable’ woman, who was trying to enter the temple, with the following caption: ‘Enough, I have told you so! You cannot enter the temple!’40 Another showed her trying to draw water from a tap and the priest shouting at her: ‘he achhut dushte tujh ko hai kab nal chune ka adhikar’, bata raha Brahmin budhiya ko kitni hi aisi fatkaar! [‘Oh wicked untouchable, since when do you have the right to touch the tap’, Brahmin is telling the old woman, who is subjected to many such scoldings!]41 Premchand, the master storyteller of colonial India, too captured the pathos of Dalit woman’s victimhood in his stories, often imbibing familiar reformist themes of suffering, sentimentality, sympathy and subservience. In his story Mandir (‘Temple’), written in May 1927, the chamarin widow Sukhiya goes to the temple to pray for her extremely ill son but is denied entry by the Brahmin priest.42 The pain of her unfulfilled wish and the abuse she is subjected to leads to the death of both child and mother. Before her death, Sukhiya painfully voices against the upper caste men and priests: My touch will make the God untouchable! Keep him locked, guard him. You do not have an iota of sympathy. . . . And you claim to be protectors of dharm! You are murderers, undiluted murderers!43 The story seems to be largely inspired by the temple entry agitation, which was at its peak around this time, and mirrors its several ambiguities. Choosing a Dalit woman as his protagonist, Premchand embraces Sukhiya within a Hindu paradigm, painfully portrays her silent suffering and sacrifice, scorns the Brahmin priest and suggests reforms from above and within, cast in a Gandhian mould. Similarly, choosing the other dominant issue of the times – drawing of water from all wells by Dalits – his brief story Thakur ka Kuan (‘Well of Landlord’) again genders the issue and has

Paradoxes of victimhood 119 Gangi, a Dalit woman, in the lead role.44 While attempting to draw water from the well of a thakur for her extremely ill husband Jokhu, Gangi fails to do so, and she reaches home to find Jokhu drinking the dirty water from the pot. She reflects on both the thakur and the moneylender: They indulge in theft, in cheating, in false cases . . . They get work done without paying wages. How are they higher to us then? . . . If I come to the village sometimes, they start looking at me with lustfullecherous eyes.45 Another story Dudh ka Daam is about a bhangan (female sweeper) midwife Bhungi, who is also a surrogate mother to the son of the upper caste landlord.46 She keeps her own child hungry at the cost of her employer’s son, but receives nothing except leftovers. These stories reflected hierarchical caste prohibitions to which Dalit women were subjected to at the hands of priests and landlords, who emerged as extremely negative and evil characters. Repugnance towards them and their prevailing customs, however, was intertwined with the taciturn endurance of the Dalit woman, arousing the reader’s sympathy for her but leaving little room for decisive action or collective protest. While strengthening a sense of outrage against the upper castes, particularly the Brahmins, such appalling images of caste cruelty captured and popularised a new culture of spectatorial pity and pathos. In a different context, Sheila Moeschen has investigated how ‘disabled’ people’s performance was pulled into a net of charitable sentiment in 19th-century America, which marked such benevolence as seemingly legible, compelling and uncomplicated.47 She reflects on how spectatorial sympathy for differently abled often employed visual and rhetorical devices associated with sentimental culture to code the impaired body within a limited range of meaning. In representations of Dalit women too, which accompanied the humanitarian spectacle of suffering, was an image of the unfortunate, innocent, poor, weak, helpless and silent Dalit woman’s body, who endured all the pain without any complaint or protest. A cartoon had an upper caste woman royally sitting on a bed, while the ‘untouchable’ woman passively sat at her feet, receiving her jhutan (leftover food): deti hai tukde sethani baithakar jute ke paas, yahi achhuton ka aadar hai jo hote tan-man se daas! [The prosperous upper caste woman gives small bites, making her sit near the shoes! This is the respect given to untouchables, who are our slaves in body and soul!!]48

120  Charu Gupta These images, while critiquing upper caste women and men for their hierarchical mindsets and indifference, simultaneously constructed passively suffering female untouchable victims, who were using body language and gestures to communicate their emotions and draw attention to their pitiable state. Dalit women appeared here as metaphoric sites of passive endurance. Equally significantly, the larger political, economic and social struggle of Dalits was transformed into something like a ‘domestic tragedy’, a ‘suffering from within’, which could be recuperated by purging Hinduism of some of its evils. Sentimentality and pity in many ways trivialised political engagement with the caste question and the material realities of Dalit lives. The politics of pity is very different and distinct from the politics of justice.49 As Wendy Brown states: When suffering as such is reduced to a problem of personal feeling, then the field of political battle and political transformation is replaced with an agenda of behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional practices.50 Viewing and witnessing the pain of the ‘Other’ could also make upper castes aware of their own good fortune, where a privileged body felt compassion for a less privileged other. Notes Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarian reform was a major cultural vehicle for the growing unacceptability of pain; it was also, inescapably, an expression and even a demonstration of the new obscenity of pain’.51 Representations of Dalit women, while arousing sympathy, also brought forth the limits of such discourses.

Surpanakha to Shabari: grotesque to submissive Such sentimental politics was often accompanied by a degree of romanticisation, with reformers adopting a paternalistic and a patronising attitude towards Dalits. It was reasoned that the Hindu community was powerful precisely because of the outcastes, as it was they who address the upper caste Hindus as seth-sahib, babu-sahib and mai-baap. Representation of Dalit bodies as dutiful and deferential was an important aspect of reformist rendering.52 Even though they were declared as one with the Hindu community, many reformers continued to regard them as ‘the feet’ of the society.53 To serve the upper castes was seen as a ‘natural’ trait of low castes, and this was best captured in the image of the obsequious and compliant Shabari. Moreover, it was construed that Dalits should be thankful to and grateful of the upper castes for showing sympathy towards them and for recognising their suffering. Upper caste ‘kindness’ was expected to arouse humility, submission and seva (to serve) among the untouchables, again encapsulated in the figure of Shabari. In

Paradoxes of victimhood 121 an enchanting reading of Shabari and the gastronomical delights of her jujubes, Philip Lutgendorf remarks: The identity of this woman and the precise nature of the foodstuffs she places before the brothers has been a matter of no small interest to Ramayana tellers and audiences over the last two millennia, and in the popular Hindi parlance of recent times, at least, the expression ‘the tribal woman’s jujubes’ (bhilni ke ber) has become a proverbial designation for a humble but loving offering that pleases God, and the verbal signifier of a highly emotional tableau often represented in popular religious art.54 Lutgendorf goes on to show how in the modern interpretations of the Shabari episode, marked usually by orthodox or reformist Hindu leanings, one can glean a tension ‘between more popular and liberal, and more elite and conservative orientations; between the enthusiastic savoring of the sweet and “juicy” essence of collective devotion, and a more sour perspective that finds such egalitarian impulses unappetizing and indigestible’.55 While agreeing with his analysis, I want to expand it by showing how even the humane portrayals of Shabari were marked by certain incongruities, making the reformist project problematic. In a section of upper caste reformist literature of early 20th century, previous images of Surpanakha as the evil one were marginalised and replaced by the figure of Shabari, who came to symbolise the ‘ideal’ low-caste woman. The image of Shabari was now constantly invoked as a new icon for low-caste and tribal women, who were advised to follow and emulate her selfless devotion and service. Books were published praising Shabari and many poems composed around her figure. A book titled Shabari linked its publication directly to achhutoddhar (upliftment of untouchables) movement, portraying her as the ideal Dalit woman.56 Upholding her model, a reformist poem went: ber shabari ke, bhakti bheel ki bhuli kaise, ram ke bhakton se kya apne vyavhar kiya. [How did you forget the jujubes of Shabari, and the bhakti of the bhil, How did you treat the worshippers of Ram.]57 The image of Shabari was particularly useful for presenting a critique of food taboos and inter-dining, as both Shabari and Ram shared the same food. At the same time, hierarchy remained embedded in this partaking of food. She represented a low-caste woman who serviced and worshipped God, and implicitly all upper castes, quietly, submissively, freely and without

122  Charu Gupta any inhibitions. Her virtuous and reverent character provoked a facile moralising, which declared that loving untouchables like her was like loving God.58 Her offerings epitomised selfless devotion. In such a situation, one could have nothing but affection for her:59 aye hain shabari ke ghar par, kyun? isse karne ko bhent! bhed bhav ko nahin janta, maha janon ka sneh amet!!. . . . jiske charnon se hota hai, kalushit mandir ka sopan! bana usi ka bhavan aaj hai, yogijanon ke hriday saman!!. . . . boli shabari rakh chode hain, chakhke thode meethe ber! tumhen chahti arpan karna, hridya, use yeh kya andher!! [Why have they come to Shabari’s house? To meet her! The affection of great people recognises no inequality!!. . . . Whose feet pollute the stairs of temple! Her home today has become like the heart of the ascetics!! . . . Shabari said that she had left some sweet jujubes after tasting them! I wish to offer you my core, what is wrong in that!!]60 Although outwardly polluted, Shabari was portrayed as inwardly pure, with a child-like simplicity and deep reverence. Admonishing the upper castes, appeals were made through her to treat Dalit women humanely. The treatment of Ram towards Shabari became a point of reference, and the upper castes were asked to be like him.61 A poem went: shabari kar se khaye prabhu ne, van mein jhoote ber. ‘ganga’ kavi kyun pada tumhari, mati mein ab hai pher. [God ate blemished jujubes from the hands of Shabari. Poet ‘Ganga’ asks why this change in your attitude now.]62 This magnanimity of Ram, however, maintained the obsequiousness of the low-caste body. A picture titled ‘Shabari aur Shri Ram’, printed on the back of the first page of the special issue on ‘untouchables’ published by Chand, captured it effectively, with Shabari sitting on the floor and devotionally feeding Ram. The picture carried the following caption: keh de hindu jati kahan veh chhua-chhut ka gaya vichaar! athva srimukh se yeh keh de ram na ishwar ke avatar!! [Say Hindu community, where has the idea of purity-pollution gone now! Or tell Shri Ram that he is not the incarnation of God!!]63 It was important to accept and approve of Shabari, since it was claimed that through her the status of Ram was further enhanced. Thus, for one’s

Paradoxes of victimhood 123 own elevation, Dalits had to be embraced. The Dalit woman was no longer sinful but a devout Hindu woman who could aid upper castes’ trip to heaven: shabari ke kar se le kar yadi, ram nahin phal ko khate. maryada-purushottam phir ve – kaise aaj kahe jaate? [If Ram would not have had fruits from the hands of Shabari, How would then he have been called Maryada-Purushottam today?]64 At the same time, such representations also symbolised a paternal relationship and a patronising attitude, whereby the Dalit woman was both deferential of and dependent on upper castes. She was filled with gratitude and humility, and to reach out to her, one had at times to ‘stoop’ in order to uplift her: prabu kehte jinhen ve – ram patiton ko uthate the . . . bhula kar maan, shabari – bhilni ke ber khate the! [Whom we call God – Ram, he uplifted the downtrodden. Forgetting his own pride, He ate the jujubes offered by Shabari, a Bhil woman.]65 The image of Shabari was a core symbol of reformist literature at this time, since through her sympathy could be capped with subservience. The logic of sentimental spectatorial telling was based on the crafting of Dalit women’s bodies as submissive. Shabari exemplified spiritual integrity, reverence, docility, humility, austerity and heartfelt devotion, while also functioning very much within a Hindu paradigm. She provided an emotional and a personal vocabulary to the Hindu reformers, which could gloss over political and social structures of caste inequalities. The language of suffering and sympathy helped to fashion, regulate and position Dalit bodies as subservient and docile. Dalit women could be rendered passive or subordinate through such imagery. Shabari became, for upper caste reformers, the ‘truly representative’ face, frame and embodiment of a Dalit woman.

Thresholds of sympathy Sympathy, it has been argued, always needs an object of pathos, and it is often a form of sociality that facilitates the elaboration of various forms of power relations.66 A scholar contends that a rigorous examination of the faculty of sympathy ‘reveals that it cannot be wholly divorced from the spectacle and theatre through which an older form of hierarchical power operated’.67 Sympathy for the untouchable woman was garnered by social

124  Charu Gupta reformers through the deployment of literary, visual and rhetorical devices. A sense of historical guilt, combined with the need of the times, helped in the reproduction of such images. In the process, however, terms of upper caste privilege were reworked and reinstated. Examining the historical guilt of the Whites, which leads to a cathartic and redemptive alleviation, Joy Wang remarks that it is often guided by ‘self-indulgent forms’ that ‘merely activate melancholy and morbid stagnation’.68 There were also various dilemmas of sentimental empathy rendered by reformers at this time. Depiction of Dalit women as tragic and submissive figures confined them as objects of charity and in need of the benevolent intervention of upper castes from above for their improvement.69 Within sympathy was framed a condescending language, where Dalits were shown as defiled, dirty and debased. Upper castes were urged to distribute free soaps among the lower castes. Jotted down a reformer: jo saaf aur suthre ho tau hogi kise ghrina. khushboo se mehek jayegi teri disha dason. [If you are clean and neat then who will hate you. The fragrance will light up all your 10 directions.]70 Upper caste and Arya Samaj women were entrusted with leadership roles in introducing reforms from above and inculcating in ‘untouchable’ women certain sanitised troupes, which would ‘make them competent enough to be in the company of upper-castes’: First of all our upper-caste sisters will have to catch their [untouchable women] hand and with the support of their hand uplift them; the dust which has accumulated on their bodies, the dirt and grime that has entered their every pore, will have to be cleansed through sympathy. . . . It is only the upper-caste woman who can make the untouchable woman clean, refined and pure. . . . How can an untouchable woman take bath in front of us men? Will it be possible for us to cleanse the filth of her heart and body? . . . Definitely not! Thus it is our belief that the salvation of the untouchable women . . . rests with the upper-caste ladies. . . . Without our upper-caste educated sisters participating in this sacred rite, there will be no solution to this pathetic situation.71 Stri Darpan, a leading women’s journal, praised the upper caste Hindu women for their efforts to uplift and educate untouchable women.72 A meeting of untouchable women was held on 26 March 1928 at Agra, in which women from Arya Samaj spoke on cleanliness and education.73 Arya Samaj lauded the role of upper caste women like Pushpa Devi, Vishnu

Paradoxes of victimhood 125 Devi and Shakuntala Devi in Meerut, for their work among the untouchable women.74 The construction of ‘we’ (upper caste women reformers) incorporated within it the edifice of ‘them’ (Dalit women) as the ‘Other’, reiterating the terms of upper caste privilege. Even when decked out in a sympathetic rhetoric, the model of womanhood remained couched in upper caste frames, deifying Brahminical patriarchal codes and morals. It was against this that Dalit women were habitually judged.75 There were various other problems in the language and idioms used in reformist writings, often reflecting the stereotypical imagination of the reformers. For example, with the growth of communalism, Dalit women were privileged over Muslims. Stated a reformist publication: ‘It is amazing that we do not mind worshipping tazias and even send our women to the fakir, but we hate the mehtrani who does the work of a midwife in almost every village of UP’.76 Again, while advocating widow remarriage, social reformers expressed that many upper castes were opposed to the practice since it was prevalent among the Dalits. The upper castes believed that if they resorted to it, their caste status would be debased. To combat this logic and in support of widow remarriage, some of the reformers gave a double-edged argument. One contended: Can gold become iron merely due to the touch of untouchables? If no then the widow-remarriage cannot be polluted by the touch of untouchables. We also want to ask as to from where did this custom come amongst the untouchables? Untouchables after all are not capable of inventing any custom themselves. They are actually always aping the upper-castes. So this custom of widow remarriage too must have come from the upper-castes only.77 These examples indicate that the language of sympathy was also a paradoxical and protean mode of power,78 where it often reproduced the very inequalities it decried and sought to bridge. Such rhetoric further fulfilled many other roles – it revealed to the nation the ‘humane’ face of reformers and nationalists; it had a wider appeal for the Hindu middle classes, as reforms could be initiated from above without any radical change; it rallied moral sentiment with a new propriety for Dalit bodies; its deployment simultaneously helped in identification with and differentiation from Dalits; it aided the logic of wider Hindu unity; and deflected deeper links between caste, hierarchy, sexuality and patriarchy.

Conclusion Expressed in the language of sentiment and satire, part of the creative endeavour of reformers in colonial India was aimed at provoking a sense

126  Charu Gupta of outraged morality at the behaviour of upper castes towards Dalits. Earlier representation of Dalit woman’s polluting body gave way to a deep concern for, and an emotional investment in, her suffering body. Images of victimhood became characteristic of the way she was portrayed, appealing to the ‘innate’ and ‘elevated’ feelings of sorrow, sadness, pity and sympathy of the upper castes. While guided by a humane sense, there were various problems in the language and idioms thus propounded. Dalit women often remained powerless and pitiably helpless, silently suffering their pathetic conditions. Sympathy was also capped by a language of subservience and gratitude on the part of Dalits, symbolised in the idealisation of the figure of Shabari. There were further limits to how effective upper caste reformist guilt could be. Accent on upper caste women’s leadership in ‘improving’ the social and cultural habits of Dalit women by mimicking upper caste ways, constantly diluted criticisms of caste. Exclusionary terminologies were built into the reformist lexicons. Vocabularies of suffering and victimhood further became a way of controlling Dalit bodies and, at the same time, depoliticising the social. Feelings of outraged moral sentiment and heightened pathos detached caste from the political economy and eclipsed deeper exploitation, thus reducing structural and systematic oppression to token gestures. Amalgamated iconographies of suffering, sentimentality and subservience, characterising portrayals of Dalit women, often left the larger dominant narratives intact, as public policies were rendered as essentially private matters and the political transformed into the personal. The substitution of pollution by suffering, of paranoia by romanticisation, of vamp by victim, of difference by sameness, of stigma by sympathy, of condemnation by subservience was almost as iniquitous, as these illustrations often worked together in different yet similar ways, and their ascriptions were often analogous.

Notes 1 An early and substantially different version of the article, with a different title ‘Dalit Women as Victims: Iconographies of Suffering, Sympathy and Subservience’, has been published in South Asian History and Culture, January 2016, 7(1): 55–72. 2 Peter Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. 3 Peter Robb, ‘Introduction: Meanings of Labour in Indian Social Context’, in Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour, pp. 1–67. 4 Peter Robb, Sex and Sensibility: Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791–1822, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011; Peter Robb, Sentimentality and Self: Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791–1822, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Paradoxes of victimhood 127 5 Robb, Sentimentality and Self, pp. 50–84. 6 Robb, Sex and Sensibility, pp. 210–211. 7 Chand [Moon], Editorial, “Paap ki Granthiyan” [Records of Sin], May 1927: 5 (my italics). This was the editorial of a special issue of Chand (1922–1941) on untouchables. Chand was a monthly Hindi journal published from Allahabad and proved to be extremely popular in the 1920s, under the editorship of Ramrakh Singh Sahgal. For details: Shobna Nijhawan, Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere: Periodical Literature in Colonial North India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 79–89; Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 267–274. 8 Veena Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele, M. Lock and P. Reynolds (eds), Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, pp. 1–30. 9 Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (trans. Graham Burchell), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Iain Wilkinson, Suffering: A Sociological Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. 10 Wilkinson, Suffering, pp. 111–116. In a different context, Robb too shows how Blechynden created his identity from a selection of sentiments, Robb, Sentiment and Self. 11 Rebecca Wanzo, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, Albany: SUNY Press, 2009, p. 9. 12 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 16. 13 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering, London: Sage, 2006. 14 Ibid., p. 3. 15 Arundhati Roy, ‘Introduction: The Doctor and the Saint’, in B.R. Ambedkar (ed.), Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, New Delhi: Navayana, 2014. Robb too has made a similar point in the context of Dalit and Labour, Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements. 16 Wanzo, Suffering Will Not Be Televised, p. 17. 17 The pioneering work of Robb was one of the first on this subject, Robb, Dalit Movements. Also see, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial Bengal: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947, Surrey: Curzon, 1997; Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity and Power Among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950, Albany: SUNY Press, 1998; Mark Juergensmeyer, Religious Rebels in the Punjab: The Ad Dharm Challenge to Caste. 1982. Reprint, New Delhi: Navayana, 2009; Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. 18 Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth Century India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; R.S. Khare, The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology, Identity and Pragmatism Among the Lucknow Chamars, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; Owen M. Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City of India, New York: Columbia University Press, 1969; Ramnarayan S. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012.

128  Charu Gupta 19 S. Anandhi, ‘Reproductive Bodies and Regulated Sexuality: Birth Control Debates in Early Twentieth Century Tamilnadu’, in Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998, pp. 139–166; Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens, Calcutta: Stree, 2003; Prem Chowdhry, Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007; V. Geetha, ‘Periyar, Women and an Ethic of Citizenship’, in Anupama Rao (ed.), Gender and Caste, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003, pp. 180–203; Anupama Rao (ed.), Gender and Caste, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003; Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009; Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonies, New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006; Sharmila Rege, Against the Madness of Manu: B.R. Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahminical Patriarchy, New Delhi: Navayana, 201. 20 Chakravarti, Gendering Caste, pp. 107–111. 21 Chowdhry, Contentious Marriages. 22 Robb, Sex and Sensibility; Sentiment and Self. 23 Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator (trans. Gregory Elliott), London: Verso, 2009, p. 12. 24 Shahid Amin, ‘Representing the Musalman: Then and Now, Now and Then’, in Shail Mayaram, M.S.S. Pandian and Ajay Skaria (eds), Subaltern Studies XII: Muslims, Dalits and the Fabrications of History, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2005, pp. 1–35. 25 Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban, a Modern Autobiography, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999; Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001. 26 Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; Nijhawan, Women and Girls; Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere; Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007. 27 Amardeep, ‘The Making of the Dalit Print Culture in Uttar Pradesh 1913– 1978’, unpublished PhD diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2012; Kanwal Bharti, Swami Achhutanandji ‘Harihar’ aur Hindi Navjagran [Achhutanand and Hindi Renaissance], New Delhi: Swaraj Prakashan, 2011; Laura R. Brueck, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014; Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics, New Delhi: Sage, 2006; Badri Narayan, The Making of the Dalit Public in North India: Uttar Pradesh, 1950-Present, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011; Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability. 28 Purshottam Das Gaur ‘Komal’, Achhut ke Patra [Letters of an Untouchable], Allahabad: Gaur Pustak Bhandar, 1934; Rameshwari Prasad ‘Ram’, Achhutoddhar Natak [Play on Untouchables’ Upliftment], Banaras: Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 1926; Anandi Prasad Srivastava, Achhut: Ek Samajik Natak [Untouchable: A Social Play], Allahabad: Vishwa Granthavali, 1928; ‘Viyogi’, Nandlal Jaiswar, Achhuton ka Insaf [Justice of Untouchables], Allahabad: Jaiswar Seva Sadan, 1943.

Paradoxes of victimhood 129 29 Charu Gupta, ‘(Mis) Representing the Dalit Woman: Reification of Caste and Gender Stereotypes in the Hindi Didactic Literature of Colonial North India’, The Indian Historical Review, 2008, 35(2): 101–124. 30 Vizia Bharati, ‘Hindu Epics: Portrayal of Dalit Women’, in P.G. Jogdand (ed.), Dalit Women in India: Issues and Perspectives, Pune: Gyan Publishing, 1995, pp. 93–104; Wendy Doniger (trans.), The Laws of Manu, New Delhi: Penguin, 1991; Kathleen M. Erndla, ‘The Mutilation of Surpanakha’, in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Ramayans: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 67–87; Jebaroja Singh, ‘The Spotted Goddess: The Dalit Woman in Classical Brahminic Literature, and in Modern Fiction, Memoirs and Songs From Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh’, unpublished PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2004, pp. 22–71. 31 Uma Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi ? Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 27–87; Uma Chakravarti, ‘Women, Men and Beasts: The Jatakas as Popular Tradition’, in Aloka Parasher-Sen (ed.), Subordinate and Marginal Groups in Early India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 210–242. 32 Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability. 33 Shivkumar Shastri, Varna Vyavastha par Vichaar [Thoughts on Caste System], Aligarh: Vishwavidya Pracharak Mahamandal, 1916. 34 Chand, ‘Achhut Nari ki Durdasha’ [Pathetic Condition of Untouchable Woman], May 1927: 177. 35 Sanal Mohan, ‘Narrativizing the History of Slave Suffering’, in Susie Tharu and K. Satyanarayaya (eds), No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writings from South India, New Delhi: Penguin, 2011, p. 537 [534–55]. 36 Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, The American Historical Review, 1995, 100(2): 303 [303–34]. 37 Ibid., p. 307. 38 James P. Carson, Gender and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, New York: Palgrave, 2010, p. 11. 39 Acharya Chatursen, Dharm ke Naam Par [In the Name of Religion], Allahabad, 1930. 40 Baijnath Kedia, Vyanga Chitravali, Part I [Collection of Cartoons], Kashi: Hindi Pustak Agency, 1933, p. 32. 41 Ibid. 42 Premchand, Mansarover, VIII Vols. [Collection of Premchand’s Stories], Allahabad: Saraswati Press, 1984, V, pp. 5–13. 43 Ibid., V, p. 13. 44 Ibid., I, pp. 141–144. 45 Ibid., I, p. 142. 46 Ibid., II, pp. 204–214. 47 Sheila C. Moeschen, Acts of Conspicuous Compassion: Performance Culture and American Charity Practices, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 48 Chand, May 1927: 40. 49 Boltanski, Distant Suffering, pp. 3–5.

130  Charu Gupta 50 Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 16. 51 Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and Pornography’, p. 330. 52 Charu Gupta, ‘Feminine, Criminal or Manly? Imaging Dalit Masculinities in Colonial North India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2010, XLVII(3): 309–342. 53 Chand, Hazarilal Jain, ‘Sanatan Dharm aur Achhut’ [Sanatan Religion and Untouchables], May 1931: 62–66. 54 Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Dining Out at Lake Pampa: The Shabari Episode in Multiple Ramayanas’, in Paula Richman (ed.), Questioning Ramayans: A South Asian Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, p. 120 [119–36]. 55 Ibid., p. 120. 56 Mishra ‘Vachanesh’, Shabari, Awadh: Hanumat Press, 1936, p. k. 57 Prasad Singh ‘Sant’, Harijan Gaan [Song of Harijan], Azamgarh: Harijan Sevak Sangh, 1933, p. 4. 58 Sudha, ‘Achhutoddhar’ [Upliftment of Untouchables], February 1931: 33–40. 59 We came across some other examples, which were cited in this period to show the affection of Gods towards low-caste women. Krishna was shown to have developed great fondness towards Kubja, a hunchbacked woman from a low caste. See: Chand, Kannomal, ‘Hindu Dharm mein Achhuton ka Sthaan’ [Place of Untouchables in Hindu Religion], May 1927: 55. 60 Chand, Anandi Prasad Srivastava, ‘Uphaar’ [Gift], May 1927: 133. 61 Chand, Chadiprasad, ‘Devi Shabari’ [Goddess Shabari], September 1927: 552–562. Also see Chandrikaprasad, Hinduon ke Sath Vishwasghat [Treachery With the Hindus], Awadh, 1917, p. 5. 62 Sukhnandan Prasad Dube, Chhua-chhut ka Bhoot arthat Hinduon ki Dasha [The Ghost of Pollution Taboos Meaning the State of Hindus], Lucknow: Awasthi Pustakalya, 1933, p. 5. 63 Chand, May 1927, back of 1st pg. 64 Chand, Ramcharit Upadhyay, ‘Parirambh’, May 1927, p. 75 [74–5]. 65 Chand, Shobharam ‘Dhenu-Sevak’, ‘Achhut Avedan’, p. 15. 66 Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power 1750–1850, New York: Palgrave, 2002, pp. xi–xxi. 67 Carson, Populism, Gender and Sympathy, p. 12. 68 Joy Wang, ‘White Postcolonial Guilt in Doris Lessing’s “The Grass Is Singing” ’, Research in African Literatures, 2009, 40(3): 45 [37–47]. 69 For example, Chandravati Lakhanpal, Striyon ki Stithi [Condition of Women], 3rd ed., Lucknow: Ganga Granthagar, 1941; Ramgopal Shukla ‘Prakash’, Achhutoddhar Arthat Kattar Panthiyon ki Chillapon [Upliftment of Untouchable Meaning the Clamour of Conservatives], 2nd ed., Kanpur, 1934; Kumari Satyavati, Stri Darshan [Knowledge About Women], Chapra: Gyanodaya Prakashan, 1932; Chand Karan Sharda, Dalitoddhar [Dalit Upliftment], Ajmer, 1925; Sanyasi Shraddhanand, Jati ke Dinon ko Mat Tyago arthat 7 Karor Dinon Ki Raksha [Do Not Abandon the Powerless in Castes Meaning Protection of 70 Million Powerless], New Delhi: Sadharm Pracharak Press, 1919. 70 ‘Sant’, Harijan Gaan. 71 Chand, ‘Achhut Nari ka Samudhar’ [Reform of Untouchable Woman], May 1927: 178–9 [178–80].

Paradoxes of victimhood 131 72 Stri Darpan, “Neech Jatiyan” [Low Castes], November 1919: 273–274. 73 Secret Police Abstracts of Intelligence, CID Office, Lucknow, 21 April 1928, p. 135. 74 Gangaprasad Upadhyay, The Arya Samaj and Depressed Classes, Allahabad: Arya Samaj, 1930. 75 Chakravarti, Gendering Caste, pp. 109–111. 76 Sharda, Dalitoddhar, p. 30. 77 Badrinath Joshi, Vidhwodvah Mimansa [Treatise on Widow Remarriage], 2nd ed., Prayag, 1928, pp. 193–194 (my italics). 78 Rai, Rule of Sympathy.

IV Sites of memory and identity formation

6 Sites of memory and structures of power in North India Anandamath and Hanumangarhi William R. Pinch This chapter examines two fortified mathas or ‘monasteries’, Hanumangarhi in Ayodhya and Anandamath in northern Bengal. The former is real – which is to say, it possesses a physical existence outside of our imaginations. The latter is a product of late 19th-century literary fiction. It too is real, though it exists only in our minds. But the word ‘only’ in the previous sentence is misleading: Anandamath is so real that it may be understood as what the French historian Henry Rousso, building on the work of Pierre Nora, called a ‘site of memory’. A ‘site of memory’ is . . . a symbolic entity, one that emerges from the imagination. It is the crystallization of a vision of the past onto a specific place, whether real or symbolic, onto a ritual, or even onto a remarkable individual. A site of memory refers back to the past and serves as a marker, a more or less permanent point of reference in the continuum of social and historical time. It also refers to a particular narrative, an interpretation or a vision of history, usually dated. Sites of memory also have a history, as does collective memory itself.1 I argue in this chapter that Anandamath and Hanumangarhi should be understood in relation to each other, that they exist on an ideological continuum about sacred space and the nation. It is also possible that the two sites are related in a more conventional sense – that the conjuring of Anandamath depended on the history of Hanumangarhi in the mid-19th century, including the eruption of the Mutiny-Rebellion of 1857. But even if their histories did not intertwine in the 1880s, they could not help but intersect in the century that followed. Anandamath (the novel) is usually seen as a beginning point in Indian history, as an early expression of a new Hindu ‘extremism’ that would swell into formal Hindu nationalism during the course of the early 20th century.2 While the importance of Anandamath as a source for Hindu nationalist

134  William R. Pinch thinking cannot be overstated, we should also think of Anandamath as an endpoint, as the discursive culmination of thinking about fortified mathas, and charged sacred space generally, in 19th-century North India. I begin with Anandamath and then turn to Hanumangarhi.

Constructing Anandamath The person who implanted Anandamath as a site of memory on the consciousness of the nation was Bankimchandra Chatterji. Bankim’s Anandamath, ‘the Abbey of Bliss’ (as it is usually known in English),3 was a monastery-retreat that functioned as hermitage, headquarters, and hideout for the remembered renouncer-patriots of late 18th-century Bengal. Though Anandamath – the building as well as the novel that took its name – was the product of Bankim’s late 19th-century Bengali imagination, the unprecedented popularity of the novel served to lodge the structure firmly in the Indian national psyche. For many readers (and, as we shall see, viewers), Anandamath was and is real. And for the more sophisticated members of the public who knew Anandamath was not real, it was still true.4 Anandamath conveyed several history lessons for the emerging Indian nation. First, it represented a bygone, almost forgotten past, recently reclaimed. Here is how the matha first appeared in the novel: There was a large monastery in that forest, spread out over a vast area and encircled by a great deal of broken stone. On seeing it archaeologists could tell that what had once been a Buddhist abbey had now become a Hindu monastery. There were two-storeyed rows of buildings with many kinds of shrines in between and a meeting-hall in front. Nearly the whole area was enclosed by a wall and covered in such a way by the thickets of the trees outside that no one could tell even during the day and from a short distance that there were buildings here. The buildings had crumbled in many places, though by daylight one could tell that the whole place had recently been repaired. It was clear that even in this deep, impenetrable forest human beings now lived here.5 The monastery was ancient, so ancient that it had almost become part of the natural landscape that engulfed it. Almost, but not quite. This gesture to the crumbling physical presence of the ancient past was part and parcel with much 19th-century thinking that saw authentic Indianness in archaic forms.6 It practically goes without saying that the forest monastery was not Muslim: for late 19th-century readers this meant that the site represented an unadulterated throwback to a pure, indigenous Hindu essence, untouched by a corrupting foreign influence.

Structures of power in North India 135 Anandamath played with memory and time in another way. The matha contained four shrines. Adjoining the main hall of the abbey was a timeless ‘Vishnu shrine’;7 on Vishnu’s lap sat ‘an enchanting image, more beautiful and glorious than Lakshmi and Sarasvati. Gandharvas kinnaras, gods, yakshas and sprites paid her homage’. This enchanting image was ‘the Mother’ – ‘she whose children we are’. Connected to the Vishnu shrine were three additional chambers containing goddesses symbolising different temporal representations of ‘the Mother’, who symbolised ‘the image of [the] birthland’ in the golden past (‘Mother-as-she-was’), degraded present (‘Mother-as-she-is’), and glorious future (‘Mother-as-she-will-be’). These temporalities were connected by tunnels, the first one in a chamber adjoining the Vishnu shrine, the middle one deep underground, and the final one in a sylvan glade; they could only be glimpsed sequentially.8 Thus not only was the physical structure of Anandamath a crumbling but notquite-effaced remnant of a glorious ancient past, it contained within it the seeds of an even more promising future. The immediate, context-specific history lesson conveyed by Anandamath is told by a mysterious figure that appears at the end of the novel, ‘the Healer’. After the rebel forces have defeated the Company sepoys in a pitched battle, the Healer appears to Satyananda (the sagely sanyasi leader of the rebellion) and tells him that the time has come to stop fighting – ‘Muslim rule has been destroyed’ and ‘[n]ow the English will rule’. Satyananda is heartbroken at this and cannot comprehend why it is that ‘The Mother’ must suffer the continued indignity of domination by ‘unworthy foreigners’. The Healer explains that India needs the English so that it may come into its own and rediscover its ‘Eternal Code’ or ‘sanatana dharma’: To worship three hundred and thirty million gods is not the Eternal Code. That’s a worldly, inferior code. Through its influence the real Eternal Code – what the foreigners call the Hindu rule of life – has been lost. The true Hindu rule of life is based on knowledge, not on action. And this knowledge is of two kinds – outward and inward. The inward knowledge is the chief part of the Eternal Code, but unless the outward knowledge arises first, the inward cannot arise. Unless one knows the gross, one cannot know the subtle. Because the country has lost the outward knowledge and, consequently, the inward knowledge as well, it needs the English. Not only are they expert in the outward knowledge, ‘they’re very good at instructing people. Therefore we’ll make them king’. Thus the whole rebellion is revealed by the Healer to be a contrivance, a foil to force the English to abandon commerce and become true sovereigns.9

136  William R. Pinch Though it remained unstated in Bankim’s narrative, the implication of this history lesson was that the inferior worship of ‘three hundred and thirty million gods’ would melt away. The ‘many shrines’ of Anandamath would be fused into one: only ‘the Mother’ would remain. If there is any doubt about the gendered, shakti-infused nature of divinity in this schema, Bankim clears it up in the penultimate paragraph. Satyananda, still bereft at the notion that he has failed his ‘Mother’, contemplates sacrificing himself in her presence. Instead, the Healer tells him to accompany him to the ‘crest of the Himalayas’ where there is a ‘temple to the Mother’ – and saying this, the ‘Great One’ grasped Satyananda’s hand and ‘a wondrous radiance shone forth’. Amidst this transfiguration, Bankim reveals that Satyanand and ‘the Healer’ were actually mystically identical with two key female protagonists in the novel, Kalyani and Shanti. ‘Kalyani had come and taken hold of Shanti. Satyananda was Shanti, and the Great One was Kalyani. Satyananda was honour, and the Great One was sacrifice’.10 As is well known, Bankim’s novel quickly became inscribed on regional and Indian national consciousness. The rebel anthem, ‘Bande Mataram’, was put to music by Rabindranath Tagore in 1896, and the slogan ‘Bande Mataram’ itself became a rallying cry for the ‘Swadeshi Movement’ after Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905. In 1905, the young Bengali revolutionaries Aurobindo and Barin Ghosh issued a plea for the construction of a real edifice, to be called ‘Bhawani Mandir’ or ‘Temple to the Mother’, modelled on the images in Anandamath. The Ghosh brothers’ temple was conceived as a place far from the corrupting Western influences of the city where young Bengali men could, through a devotion to the shakti or ‘infinite energy’ embodied by the Mother, sharpen their martial skills and hone their religio-nationalist intellect.11 Arguing in the pages of the radical broadsheet, Bande Mataram, that the combination of Vedanta and Shinto understandings had enabled the intellectuals of Japan to deploy the weapons of the West against itself, Aurobindo announced: We will therefore build a temple to the white Bhawani, the Mother of Strength, the Mother of India; and we will build it in a place far from the contamination of modern cities and as yet little trodden by man, in a high and pure air steeped in calm and energy. This temple will be the centre from which Her worship is to flow over the whole country; for there, worshipped among the hills, She will pass like fire into the brains and hearts of Her worshippers. This also is what the Mother has commanded. . . . We will therefore have a Math with a new Order of Karma Yogins attached to the temple, men who have renounced all in order to

Structures of power in North India 137 work for the Mother. Some may, if they choose, be complete Sannyasis, most will be Brahmacharins who will return to the Grihasthashram when their allotted work is finished, but all must accept renunciation. Public consumption of Bankim’s novel continued apace during these decades, both via multiple editions in Bengali as well as translations into other South Asian languages as well as English.12 It was only a matter of time, therefore, before Anandamath would reach audiences in cinema halls. In 1952, Hemen Gupta released ‘Anand Math’, starring Prithviraj Kapoor as Satyanand, Geeta Bali as Shanti, Bharat Bhushan as Mahendra, and Pradeep Kumar as Jivanand. Of particular interest are the ways in which the monastery and shrine had evolved. The cinematic version of the monastery is set deep in the forest, as in the novel, and the interior contains long, dark hallways with massive columns and lit with hanging oil lamps. The great shrine of Vishnu sits in front of a fire pit in a large chamber with more thick columns.13 One interesting difference between the novel and the cinematic version is that the viewer is not escorted through the sequence of underground shrines depicting ‘the Mother’ in the past, present, and future. Rather Satyanand takes Mahendra from the large Vishnu shrine to a single image of Durga.14 These depictions are largely replicated in what may be taken as the final visual cementing of Anandamath in the historical consciousness of the wider Indian public, the Amar Chitra Katha comic book version, first released in 1974.15 A visual departure here, however, is that when depicting ‘the Mother’ the illustrator or editor chose to use an image of Kali grasping weapons and decapitated heads rather than that of Durga. Given the proliferation of Anandamath in various media over the past century, the popular perception that the story and the site16 constitute the stuff of history should not be surprising. What is surprising is the degree to which the substance of Bankim’s tale of monastic patriotic virtue percolated into historical representations of a higher order. Jadunath Sarkar himself, the senior-most historian in the Indian academy, opined that the work should be understood as ‘historical’ in his introduction to the 1957 Bangiya Sahitya Parishad edition of the text.17 And in 1977, Asit Nath Chandra produced a monograph entitled The Sannyasi Rebellion that attempted to depict the insurgency, more or less along the lines of Anandamath, that is, as an exclusively Hindu ascetic uprising with widespread peasant support.18 The work was granted a degree of respectability by the fact that another well-known historian, Jagadish Narayan Sarkar, had authored the foreword to the volume. Not surprisingly, public history was not immune to such representations. In recent years a visitor to the Archaeological Survey of India’s Museum of Indian Independence in the Red Fort in Delhi could

138  William R. Pinch read the following caption beneath an exhibit describing early resistance to Company rule: From the beginning of their rule in India, the East India Company had to face stiff resistance from the common people, tribals and peasant. The disposed rajas, nawabs, their descendents [sic], uprooted zamindars, officials of the subdued Indian states laid a series of revolutionary activities against the foreign rule. In eastern India, displaced peasants and Bengal soldiers joined hands with religious monks and uprooted zamindars rose up [sic] in the Sanyasi revolution (1763–1800). ‘Bande Mataram’ the patriotic song composed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in his novel Anand Math, inspired greatly the Sanyasi Movement.19 Leaving aside the curator’s temporal transposition of Bankim’s ‘Bande Mataram’ anthem into the late 18th century, which raises its own questions, the references to a ‘Sanyasi revolution’ and ‘Sanyasi movement’ are evidence of the degree to which Bankim’s fictional Anandamath is imprinted on the historical consciousness of the Indian nation.

From Anandamath to Hanumangarhi Anandamath as a site of memory thus contains an unambiguous message of religious ‘purification’ for the nation. What the matha did not contain, as has been noted by many observers, was Muslims. The actual 18th-century events that Bankim ostensibly fictionalised involved not simply a Hindu ascetic insurgency against Company rule, but many Muslim ascetic participants as well: hence the name that is most often used to describe those events by historians, ‘the Sanyasi and Fakir Rebellion’. It is not my purpose to rehearse the various reasons for which Bankim sought to strip the event of its multireligious (or even secular) character.20 Suffice it to say that Bankim’s response was that readers should not consider the novel a form of historical fiction: After Anandamath was published many expressed a wish to know whether there was any historical basis to this work or not. The sanyasi rebellion was historical no doubt, but there was no particular need to inform the reader about this. . . . It was not my intention to write a historical novel (aitihasik upanyas), consequently I made no pretence of historicity. . . . If the reader would be so kind as not to consider Anandamath a ‘historical novel’, I would be most obliged.21

Structures of power in North India 139 Nevertheless, to satisfy his history-hungry readership, Bankim did provide in a later edition of the novel extracts from W. W. Hunter and G. R. Gleig on the Bengal Famine and its aftermath. Ironically, as Lipner notes, this only heightened the conviction of readers that the novel was intended as a historical interpretation of those late 18th-century events and even spurred a scavenger hunt among especially ardent Anandamath devotees for possible temple-monastery sites in northern Bengal that might have served as the model for Bankim’s novel.22 There are, of course, other ways to read Anandamath, and other histories in which to situate it. For instance, it is not difficult to read the novel as a general commentary on the rebellion of 1857 and its aftermath. Thus when ‘the Healer’ informs Satyanand that the point of engaging ‘in this cruel war’ was to usher in proper English rule, to turn merchants into sovereigns, he offered a message that would easily have resonated for readers in terms of the Government of India Act of 1858, namely, the official liquidation of the East India Company and the transfer of the administrative functions of the Company to the British Crown: The Great Man replied, ‘At present the English are traders. They’re intent on amassing wealth and do not with [sic] to take on the burden of ruling a kingdom. But because of the Children’s rebellion, they’ll be forced to take on the burden of ruling, for without this they cannot collect wealth. The rebellion came about to usher in English rule’.23 One can push such speculation too far, of course. But it seems likely that Bankim was in many ways writing about 1857, and that the references to the ‘Sanyasi and Fakir Rebellion’ constituted a safe way to trod upon what was still, in the 1880s, extremely dangerous historical ground. (I return to this theme in the conclusion.) In any case, there is no question but that Bankim – in depicting the British in the way he did, in distorting the history in so blatant a fashion (by removing fakirs from the insurgency), and by reflecting on the strategic value of tolerating British rule – was addressing a much larger topic than the late 18th century.24 There is another reason that the 1857 era looms large for Anandamath. A major controversy involving a Hindu fortress-abbey erupted in Ayodhya just prior to the Mutiny-Rebellion. In fact, the way that controversy was handled by the administration of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah played an important role in the decision of the British to annex the province of Awadh in 1857 – which, as is often argued, itself earned the ire of many sepoys in the Bengal Army in the months before the military mutiny at Meerut in April–May 1857. The Ayodhya controversy stemmed from the allegation

140  William R. Pinch that the Hindu fortress-abbey, known as the Hanumangarhi, contained a masjid. This allegation was made by a firebrand maulvi ‘fakeer’ named Shah Ghulam Hussein, usually referred to as ‘the Shahjee’ in the records pertaining to the controversy. The ensuing controversy over the alleged masjid climaxed in a pitched battle at the Hanumangarhi, or ‘Hanuman’s fort’, and quickly spilled over onto the precincts of a neighbouring mosque – a mosque that became famous in the later 20th century as the ‘Babri Masjid’. Here is how the clash was described by Captain Alexander Orr, commanding a force of 150 men, in a letter written to Captain Weston from nearby Faizabad the following day: My dear Weston, The tragedy has been enacted! . . . The conflict, notwithstanding all we could say or do, commenced at about 1 o’clock p.m. It is difficult to say who fired the first shot, for the tumult and confusion was something indescribable. It was soon apparent that it would be useless to attempt to separate the belligerents as both Hindoos and Mahomedans had become desperate and were bent on bloodshed. The Mahomedans at first may have numbered 4 or 500 men, the Byragees with their allies more than 8000. The leaders of Shahjee’s party endeavouring to cheer their men on to Hunnooman Gurrie, were soon laid prostrate. The remainder retired and gained the Musjid25 where they were soon surrounded and cut to pieces. The Byragees yelling and furious, tho’ obstinately resisted, closing on the Musjid, hemmed it on every side and after a few desperate attempts, stormed it and gave no quarter. The Shahjee and a few followers escaped jumping over the walls. About 66 or 70 men of the Shah’s party, were killed, and as many or more perhaps of the Byragees. Hearsey and myself wished much to stop this carnage, but what could our handful of men [sic: do?] against the thousands pouring in against the devoted [sic: devotees in the?] musjid. Had we endeavoured to save the Mahomedans when so closely besieged, we should have been dreadfully cut up without perhaps effecting our object and the mischief would perhaps have spread far and wide. No arrangements could have been made to prevent the ransacking of the city. We were thus obliged to remain passive, still endeavouring by all means in our power to restore peace and tranquillity. At about 4 p.m. all was over, and our men were placed, as many as we could spare of them, in different parts of the town to prevent disturbance at night.26 The 1855 skirmish has received renewed attention in recent decades in the wake of the more recent struggle over the ‘Ramjanambhumi’, or birthplace of Ram, which is said to be on the site of the nearby mosque, the

Structures of power in North India 141 ‘Babri Masjid’, into which the Muslims had taken refuge after failing to storm the Hanumangarhi, and inside which they were subsequently killed. A number of commentators have noted the symmetry (to say nothing of irony) inherent in the fact that whereas in 1855 struggle was over an allegation of a Muslim sacred space inside a quasi-religious Hindu structure (the Hanuman Garhi), the cataclysmic 1992 violence in Ayodhya was over the allegation that the Babri Masjid contained a Hindu sacred space – the birthplace of Ram. An additional point that is sometimes also made is that local Hindus had ample opportunity to gain control of the Babri Masjid in 1855 and chose not to do so, and that this is clear evidence that they did not then consider the site to be religiously significant.27 In the weeks following the conflict, Captain Orr would lead a three-man committee (comprised of himself, Raja Man Singh, and Agaie Ally Khan) charged with investigating the claim that a masjid existed in the Hanuman Garhi. So confident were the bairagis of the lack of any proof for such a claim that they readily agreed to allow the committee to fully examine any alleged sites pointed out. The committee carried out its investigation in the last week of August 1855. On 30 August, Orr wrote to report that the members ‘cannot in conscience come to the conclusion that a musjid ever existed in the Gurree – no traces however slight of such a building now exist . . .’28 He added a revealing coda to this point: ‘In fact it seems of itself improbable that two buildings consecrated to such opposite creeds, could ever have stood in so close proximity’. Outram, in his report to the Governor-General, made a related point: ‘I need scarcely remind His Honour in Council, that the Hunnooman Ghurrie and adjacent Temples in Oudh are regarded as most sacred by Hindoos of every class in every part of India who resort annually in many thousands to these Temples in pilgrimage from the most remote places in Hindoostan’.29 He later elaborated, noting that ‘any endeavour forcibly to erect a mosque in the Hunnooman Ghurrie would be regarded by the Hindoos as a grievous wrong and wanton insult to their religion, the Gurrie and its temple being among the most sacred of their edifices throughout all Hindoostan’. The result would be, he asserted, cataclysmic: it would most certainly drive the Byraghees who occupy the Gurree, into resistance which all the power of the State could not overcome, aided as they will be by the thousands of Warlike Rajpoots who will flock to their aid. Every Hindoo in Oudh will espouse this cause, and a general revolt of that class, computed at four fifths of the population, will most probably be the consequence. Nor will the mischief be confined to Oude alone: our own provinces likewise would in that case be drawn into the quarrel, and war between Hindoo and Moslem would extend far and wide.30

142  William R. Pinch Outram’s sense of dread31 and Orr’s instincts about the extreme improbability of a masjid and mandir existing adjacent to each other reflect, of course, tendentious assumptions about the civilisational divide between Hindus and Muslims in India that had been evolving for some time in official and demi-official circles. Gyanendra Pandey has examined the broad contours of this ‘colonial construction of communalism’ for 19th-century North India, and Sushil Srivastava has similarly detailed the ways in which British writing about Ayodhya shared in this discursive project, so we need not belabour the point here.32 What is remarkable, however, is the fact that both Orr and Outram, in practically the same breath, were able to point to the complex history of the site, a history that reflected its origins in an intertwined Hindu–Muslim social and political space. They did so as part of the evidence for the fact that there was no masjid in the Hanumangarhi. Orr wrote: . . . by the ‘Sunuds’ furnished by the Byragees of Hunooman Guree, it would appear that Munsoor Ally Khan Bahadoor Soobadar of Oudh [usually known as Safdar Jang] and Shoojaood Doulah Nawab Vizier of Oudh, actually authorised their subordinate Hakims at Oudh to give assistance to the Byragees in the construction of certain buildings composing the Hunnooman Guree; in these ‘Sunuds’ no reference whatsoever is made to the existence of a Musjid, neither within or near the precincts of the Gurree. . .33 Similarly, Outram enclosed with his letter to the Governor-General a summary report on the committee’s findings by the Assistant Resident, Fletcher Hayes, stating that The Mahunts produced grants of land, given by the Oudh Govt and dated so far back as 1119 Hegiree AD 1702 and extending to 1196 Hegiree AD 1779 – relative to the Temple and its lands, but nothing is said in them, about the Musjid, or is there any allusion to its existence.34 All this reinforces a point made by numerous scholars in the decades preceding the Ayodhya Ramjanambhumi controversy that led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 that the polity of Awadh in which the Ramanandis seemed to thrive in the 18th century bore a distinctly multireligious character, Hindu as well as Muslim.35 In fact, and as Orr and Outram inadvertently indicate, the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ fail to capture the myriad religious and sectarian fault lines that shaped conflict, asceticism, official piety, and institution-building in

Structures of power in North India 143 Ayodhya in the 18th and 19th centuries. The rise of Ramanandi bairagis (generalised under the heading ‘Hindu’ in today’s parlance) in the 18th century occurred at the expense of Dasnami sanyasis and Nath yogis (also ‘Hindu’) who had earlier dominated the topography of asceticism there.36 Indeed, the Hanumangarhi contains a prominent display of Saiva (trishulas, or tridents) in the fort, weapons that were captured from the Dasnamis when the Ramanandis conquered the site, and some people today claim that the image of Hanuman in the garhi was originally a Siva lingam.37 The rise of Ramanandis was, as noted above, occasioned by the patronage of the Shia Nawabs Safdar Jang, Shuja-ud-Daulah, and Asaf ud-Daulah (often today generalised as ‘Muslims’); key in this process was the agency of Kayastha ministers in the nawabi court, especially the staunch Vaishnavas, Naval Ray and Tikait Ray (‘Hindu’).38 Further, legend recorded in the 1960s held that prior to the construction of the Ramanandi fort-monastery in the 18th century, Muslims devotees used to visit the mound upon which the Hanumangarhi would eventually be built. The site was generally known as ‘Hanumat-tilla’, but many locals venerated it as a shrine to the Sufi saint ‘Hathile Pir’, one of the five or ‘Panch Piriya’ immensely popular across eastern UP and Bihar.39 The historian Hans Bakker added that when he was conducting research in Ayodhya in the early 1980s, he was ‘told that until the riots of 1948 the compound of the Hanumangarhi contained a room in which Muslims used to offer their prayers. The Saivas and a Muslim faqir were driven from the Hanumantila [in the 18th century] by Abhayarama who led a group of about 50 Ramanandi vairagis’.40 The 1855 allegation of the presence of a mosque in the Hanumangarhi had much more to do with the emerging political and religious worldview of the leaders of the Sunnis in the mid-19th century, who had long looked with disapproval on the Shia nawabs of Awadh and sought to use the affair as a wedge in a bid for power.41

Conclusion: fort and monastery in nationalist memory At one level, Hanumangarhi and Anandamath have nothing to do with each other. Certainly Bankim may have been aware of Hanumangarhi – he may have heard glimmers about the violence in 1855 in Ayodhya while a student at Mohsin Hooghly College or Presidency College (whence he graduated in 1857), and he may have come across references to it in the following decades while an official in the revenue administration. In fact, as it was such an important place of pilgrimage by the mid-19th century (as noted by General Outram in his 1855 correspondence), Bankim may have gone on a visit to Ayodhya). Anyway it is hard to imagine that he didn’t know something about

144  William R. Pinch Hanumangarhi in the decades between 1855 and 1880. And no doubt the 1857 rebellion that the Hanumangarhi violence helped to inaugurate had a significant formative influence on Bankim’s writing. Bankim could not but have been aware of the complex roles that warrior ascetics, including those of Hanumangarhi, played in the rebellion.42 The mysterious sadhu, or rather ‘suspicious fakeer’, of Meerut and the banner-waving Lalpuri Gosain on elephant near Kanpur became such central staples of the ‘Mutiny Narrative’ that they cannot have escaped his literary attention.43 But still, at a superficial level, it is possible to say that Hanumangarhi and Anandamath have little or nothing to do with each other. They are certainly completely different in terms of architectural design and topographical habitat: As a glance at Bankim’s prose makes clear (to say nothing of the various iterations in film and comic in the decades since), Anandamath is more monastery than fort, with hints of Buddhist antecedents, and it is set deep in a forest, far from human habitation. By contrast, as any visitor to Ayodhya knows, Hanumangarhi is much more fort than monastery, is possessed of a Saiva/Sufi prehistory (as Hanumat-tilla), and is set in an increasingly congested urban landscape on the banks of a significant tributary to the Ganga. Though Anandamath was led by ascetics of a more conventional religious sort – sanyasis like the commander Satyananda – the rankand-file soldiery mostly consisted of householders, ‘santans’ (‘Children of the Mother’) in Bankim’s formulation, who had temporarily renounced their wives and families to fight the foreigner and save golden Bengal. As such, they were a model for the future patriots in the nationalist movement. Hanumangarhi’s bairagis, by contrast, were anything but householders; indeed, they bore a distinct resemblance to the freewheeling warrior gosains who thrived in the 18th century, the outgrowth of the human flotsam and jetsam of the countryside, vagrants and orphans mostly, swept up by the commanders of the wandering akharas, especially in agriculturally fragile, war-torn frontier regions like Bundelkhand. Even the design of Hanumangarhi bears a strong resemblance to the structures built by the two most prominent gosain warlords of that era, Anupgiri and Umraogiri, in Vrindaban and Banaras respectively. These were large, rectangular fortress-palaces with thick, high walls and corner bastions, strategically located on important (and religiously significant) waterways. ‘Oomraogiri Pooshta’ and ‘Himmat Bahadur Ghat’ each had a footprint of roughly 50,000 square feet.44 Though Hanumangarhi’s footprint is less than half this, at 20,000 square feet, its relative dimensions are similar.45 As the profiles of Hanumangarhi and Anandamath gained prominence during the late 19th and 20th centuries, the structures built by Anupgiri and Umraogiri crumbled, receded, and eventually disappeared. It is likely that the many thousands of gosains who had frequented those crumbling structures gradually melted into the Ramanandi bairagi ranks

Structures of power in North India 145 that filled the halls of Hanumangarhi. (While there were clear rivalries between gosains and bairagis, most famously at the periodic kumbha melas, there are numerous similarities between the armies; in fact, the hostilities between them are often prompted by these very similarities and related questions of ritual precedence during key moments in the festivals. In any case, since the mid-19th century both groups have been increasingly referred to as ‘naga sadhus’.)46 So on the surface, Hanumangarhi and Anandamath seem worlds apart. On a deeper level, however, Anandamath and Hanumangarhi have everything to do with each other. One may be more monastery than fort and the other may be more fort than monastery, but each is still both fort and monastery, and each still represents an increasingly important ‘site of memory’ shaping the DNA of Indian nationalism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Their distinct ideological trajectories do not formally converge until the mid-20th century, when an image of Ram is installed in the Babri Masjid by a Hanumangarhi mahant, inspired by those who sang ‘Vande Mataram’ as a sacred anthem.47 The legacy of that fateful moment, and the Ramjanambhumi movement that it gave rise to, is too well known to bear repeating here. But the ideological trajectories of Anandamath and Hanumangarhi were inching closer together well before 1949: In 1925, Balram Keshav Hedgewar, who many years earlier had been expelled from high school in Nagpur for singing ‘Vande Mataram’, founded a militant organisation of householder ascetics of a different sort, in Nagpur. While modelled in some ways on the British army, Hedgewar’s RSS possessed distinctly matha/akhara-inspired features, including the notion of ‘gurudakshina’. Meanwhile, a few years earlier, in 1918, sadhus at Banaras and Allahabad were regaling the missionary-scholar J. N. Farquhar with tales of how the sanyasi followers of Shankaracharya resolved to form armed battalions during the reign (and with the permission) of the Mughal emperor Akbar, to defend peace-loving Brahmins against Muslim plunder and pillage and persecution. Farquhar would publish this oral tradition, and his speculative theories about it, in multiple venues in 1925. Nearly a century later, in 2014 it would take an act of will to resist the conclusion that these two developments – that is, the founding of the RSS in 1925 and the oral traditions concerning the founding of the naga akharas in 1918 – have nothing, discursively and ideologically, to do with each other, or with the memory worlds of the Hanumangarhi and Anandamath.

Notes 1 Henry Rousso, ‘The Historian, a Site of Memory’, in Sarah Fishman et al. (eds), France at War: Vichy and the Historians (trans. David Lake), Oxford: Berg, 2000, pp. 285–286. See also Pierre Nora, ‘L’Ère de la

146  William R. Pinch commemoration’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. III, Les France, p. 1004. 2 See, for instance, Sources of Indian Tradition, vol. 2, Ainslee Embree et al. (eds), pp. 130–140, where Bankim and the novel are placed at the beginning of chapter four, ‘The Marriage of Politics and Religion: The Extremists’. 3 N.C. Sen-Gupta, The Abbey of Bliss, a Translation of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath, 5th ed., Calcutta: Padmini Mohan Neogi, 1905. In 1941 a new translation by Basanta Koomar Roy, omitting the antiMuslim references, was released under the title Dawn Over India, New York: Devin-Adair Co., 1941. This version was reissued on numerous occasions into the late twentieth century, usually under the title Anandamath (e.g. by Asia Publishing House, London, in 1992). Julius Lipner offers an alternative interpretation of the title ‘Anandamath’, as ‘The Sacred Brotherhood’, in his recent critical edition of the text. See the introduction to Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Anandamath (trans. Julius Lipner), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 44–46. References to the text of Anandamath in the present essay are to Lipner’s translation. 4 For useful reflections on fact, fiction, and the writing of history, see Jill Lepore, ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am: Fake Memoirs, Factual Fictions, and the History of History’, The New Yorker, 24 March 2008, pp. 79–83; and Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, in Hayden White (ed.), Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp. 81–100. 5 Chatterji, Anandamath, p. 137. 6 See Rakesh Pandey, ‘Archaic Knowledge, Tradition and Authenticity in Colonial North India, C. 1780–1930’, unpublished PhD diss., SOAS, 2004. James Mill’s Buddhist/Hindu-Ancient (classical), Muslim-medieval (decline), British-modern (return to classical glory) periodization in his History of British India, also comes to mind. 7 Referred to twice in the text. See Chatterji, Anandamath, pp. 212, 228–229. 8 Chatterji, Anandamath, p. 149. 9 Ibid., pp. 228–230. 10 See Lipner’s introduction to Chatterji, Anandamath, pp. 16–17 for a discussion of the tantric dimension to Kalyani and Shanti’s character development and the centrality of shakti to the unfolding didactics of the narrative. 11 See Aurobindo Ghosh, ‘Bhawani Mandir’, Bande Mataram, 1905. See www.aurobindo.ru/workings/sa/01/0015_e.htm (accessed on 8 September 2013). 12 The Bengali editions of the text are too numerous to mention. Translations into other languages include the Hindi versions by Sriyukt Mohan (Khankhal, Haridwar: Saraswati Pustak Mala Karyalaya, 1922) [BL, London, Hin.B.3389]; Isvari Prasad Sarma (Calcutta: Hindi Book Agency, 1929) [BL, London, Hin.B.3824 and Hin.B.8057]; Suryakant Tripathi (Prayag: Indiana Press Ltd., 1940) [BL, London, Hin.B.11914]. In Sindhi, Dev Duttu Kundaramu (Hyderabad [Sindh]: Mahraj Hoondraj Paruram Sharma], [1923]–1925) [BL, London, Sind.B.92]; and Gujarati, Arupa Sen (trans.), Anandamatha, Ahmedabad: Kum Kum Prakasan, 1985 [BL,

Structures of power in North India 147 London, 14147.ff.341]. See also footnote 15, below for other languages. For the English translations, see footnote 2 above. 13 ‘Anand Math’, Bombay: Filmistan, 1952, directed by Hemen Gupta. For example, after Kalyani and her child are rescued by Satyanand in the forest, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=al7ttYBIgWo (minutes 6:20 to 740; accessed on 28 November 2010, but no longer available online). The YouTube film clip was preceded by images of Uma Bharati and various other Hindu nationalist politicians. 14 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPubTl7FzdM (minutes 8:22 to 10:35; accessed 28 November 2010, but no longer available online). 15 Amar Chitra Katha: Anand Math, script by Pradip Paul, illustrations by Souren Roy, Bombay: India Book House, 1974, reissued 1998. In the 1998 edition, this was listed as volume 655, on sale for Rs. 25. On the inside cover, Amar Chitra Katha advertises itself as ‘the Route to Your Roots, over 80 million copies have been sold so far’ – referring, no doubt, to ACK comics as a whole, not to the Anand Math edition. The foreword on the same page also notes, in reference to the original novel, that ‘Translations appeared in Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, and Urdu’. Amar Chitra Katha was created by Anant Pai in 1967 to teach children about their own heritage. According to Pai, ‘In June 1967, I was in Delhi, watching a TV quiz on Doordarshan. I was saddened by the fact that none of the participants knew what was the name of Lord Ram’s mother. But, they all knew who the Greek god of Mount Olympus was!’ Quoted in Vijay Singh, ‘Now, Amar Chitra Katha Gets Even Younger’, Times of India, 16 October 2009. See also Frances W. Pritchett, ‘The World of Amar Chitra Katha’, in Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley (eds), Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998, pp. 76–106, who opens with a similar quote. 16 See Kishanchand Bhakat, ‘Anandamath – Sthan Kal Patra’ [Anandamath – Places, Times, Characters], Udbodhan, Asvin 1405 (1998), cited in Lipner’s introduction to Anandamath, pp. 37–39 (for detailed discussion). 17 Cited in Suranjan Chatterjee, ‘New Reflections on the Sannyasi, Fakir and Peasants War’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 January 1984, 19: PE9–10n2. 18 A.N. Chandra, The Sannyasi Rebellion, with a foreword by Jagadish Narayan Sarkar, Calcutta: Ratna Prakashan, 1977. Chandra’s communalist interpretation was mostly ignored and easily refuted; see the short review by Barbara Ramusack, ‘Review of The Sannyasi Rebellion, by A. N. Chandra’, American Historical Review, April 1979, 84(2): 525–526; Chatterjee, ‘New Reflections’, p. PE2 (which, tellingly, also treats Bankim’s tale as a work in need of ‘refutation’); and the more studied analysis by Atis K. Das Gupta, The Fakir and Sannyasi Uprisings, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co., 1992. 19 Peter Gottschalk, email communication, 1 October 2005. I visited this exhibit in December 2012; the caption remained unchanged. 20 But for the parameters of the debate on Bankim’s ‘communalism’, see Tanika Sarkar, ‘Imagining Hindurashtra: The Hindu and the Muslim in Bankim Chandra’s Writings’, in David Ludden (ed.), Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, Philadelphia: University

148  William R. Pinch of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, pp. 162–184; and the discussion in Lipner’s introduction to Anandamath, passim. 21 Bankim, in the preface to a subsequent novel set in the past, Debi Chaudhurani, quoted in Lipner’s introduction to Anandamath, p. 43. 22 Lipner, ‘Introduction’, Anandamath, pp. 37–39. See pp. 27–28 on Bankim’s use of W.W. Hunter’s Annals of Rural Bengal, 7th ed., London: Smith Elder, 1897; first ed. 1868. Lipner was not convinced by their arguments. 23 Chatterji, Anandamath, pp. 229–230. 24 Indeed, this is precisely why the book was so successful in the late nineteenth century. Oddly, I have yet to encounter any scholarship on the possibility that Bankim’s Anandamath was actually a coded commentary on 1857. It is a theme I am taking up in current work on the rebellion. 25 The neighboring structure, known in recent decades as the ‘Babri Masjid’. 26 Orr to Weston, dated 29 July 1855, no. 341 of 28 December 1855, Foreign and Secret Proceedings, India Office Records, Asia and Africa Collection, British Library, London (hereafter BL). 27 See, for example, Sarvepalli Gopal’s introduction to S. Gopal (ed.), Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India, New Delhi: Penguin, 1991, esp. pp. 30–36. 28 A. Orr to G.R. Weston, 30 August, no. 365 of 28 December 1855, FSP, IOR, BL. 29 Outram to Cecil Beaon, Secretary to the GoI, Foreign Department, 16 September 1855, no. 370 of 28 December 1855, FSP, IOR, BL. 30 Outram to Beadon, no. 379, 17 September 1855, no. 379 of 28 December 1855, FSP, IOR, BL. 31 Though we should also factor in that Outram may have been exaggerating his fears so as to impress upon the Governor General and Council the severe consequences that might ensue from the alleged imbecility of the nawab. 32 Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; Sushil Srivastava, ‘How the British Saw the Issue’, in S. Gopal (ed.), Anatomy of a Confrontation, pp. 38–57, and his The Disputed Mosque: A Historical Inquiry, New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1991. 33 Orr to Weston, 30 August 1855, no. 365 of 28 December 1855, FSP, IOR, BL. 34 ‘Note on the papers submitted by the Commission appointed by His Majesty the King, to investigate the causes which led to the recent affray at Fyzabad, wherein much loss of life ensued’, 17 September 1855, no. 380 of 28 December 1855, FSP, IOR, BL. The earlier date, 1702, seems suspicious, given that Sa’adat Ali Khan did not become Subadar of Awadh until 1722. 35 See, for example, Peter van der Veer, Gods on Earth:The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Center, London: Athlone Press, 1988; Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720–1801, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; J.R.I. Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi’ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Even a close reading of A.L. Srivastava’s early works, mainly political and military chronicles, make clear that

Structures of power in North India 149 a simple reading of Awadh as a Muslim polity is simplistic and unsatisfactory. A.L. Srivastava, The First Two Nawabs of Oudh, Lucknow: Upper India Publ. House, 1933, and Shuja-ud-Daulah, Calcutta: Midland Press, 1940. 36 Hans Bakker and van der Veer relate that the site was captured by Ramanandi bairagis under the leadership of Abhayarama, whose main opponents were Saiva Sanyasis, in the mid-eighteenth century. See H. Bakker, Ayodhya, Groningen: Groningen Oriental Studies, 1986, part I, pp. 149–152, and part II, p. 126; van der Veer, Gods on Earth, pp. 143–147. A key source cited in support of the ‘internecine’ conflict is an early nineteenth-century hagiographical text, published in 1930, entitled SriMaharajCharitra, which describes (among much else) the persecution of bairagis by sanyasis in the eighteenth century. Bakker, part I, p. 149; van der Veer, Gods on Earth, p. 145; Bhagwati Prasad Sinha, Ram Bhakti mem Rasika Sampraday, Balrampur: Avadh Sahitya Mandir, 1957, pp. 119–120, cited in Vasudha Paramasivan, ‘Between Text and Sect: Early Nineteenth-Century Shifts in the Theology of Ram’, unpublished PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010, pp. 90–91. 37 As reported by Philip Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 83, n52. 38 Srivastava, ‘How the British Saw the Issue’, pp. 39–40; see also Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 100. 39 R.R. Tripathi, Sri Hanumangarhi ka itihas, Ayodhya, 1966, p. 7, cited in Bakker, Ayodhya, part II, p. 126. On the Panch Piriya, see William Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, vol. 1, Westminister: Archibald Constable & Co., 1896, pp. 204–208; and, on the central figure of Salar Masud Ghazi (Mahmud of Ghanzni), Shahid Amin, ‘Un saint guerrier: Sur la conquete de l’Inde du Nord par les Turcs au XIe siecle’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociale, Mars–Avril, 2005, 60(2): 265–292. 40 Bakker, Ayodhya, II, 126. 41 See Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi’ism, pp. 244–249, and Francis Robinson, ‘Review of John Pemble’, The Raj, the Indian Mutiny, and the Kingdom of Oudh, 1810–1859, Harvester Press, 1977, in Modern Asian Studies, 1979, 13(1): 149. 42 As Srivastava notes, the mahants of Hanumangarhi came to the aid of the fleeing British in Ayodhya and Faizabad. 43 Testimony of Mr. Williams, a commissioner in the Meerut division, cited in J.W. Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–1858, 2nd ed., London: W. H. Allen, 1865, p. 566n. And Williams, ‘Narrative of Events at Cawnpore’, p. 856. See my Warrior Ascetics, chapters four and five, passim, for discussion, especially concerning the rebels around Kanpur. 44 The size of the Umraogiri Pushta structure may be estimated based on an 1822 map of Banaras by James Prinsep (City of Bunarus, Surveyed by James Prinsep [1822]), corrected with reference to subsequent photographic evidence. Prinsep’s map suggests that the structure was rectangular in shape, roughly two and a quarter times as long as it was wide. According to the scale given on Prinsep’s map, the width of the structure would have been about 80 feet. However, based on an excellent 1869 photograph of the Umraogiri Pushta (B.G. Bromochary, ‘Meer and Lalita Ghats and the Nepalee’s Temple’, Photo 984/(12), BL), it is clear that the façade of

150  William R. Pinch the structure was substantially longer than this, about 150 feet from octagonal turret to octagonal turret. It should be noted that though Bromochary’s photograph is the best nineteenth-century image of the structure, it is misidentified in the BL caption (last accessed 30 December 2014). Based on comparison with identifications by Prinsep and others, particularly a drawing by Prinsep of an eclipse festival in which the building is shown in the background and clearly labelled (J. Prinsep, ‘Eve Of The Eclipse Of The Moon, 25 November 1825’, Benares Illustrated, Part 2 [Calcutta: 1831], X751/2(7), BL; note ‘Oomraogir Pooshta’, background left), the image in the Bromochary photograph is clearly the Umraogiri Pushta. I thank Phillip Wagoner for his assistance in judging the building’s dimensions from the photograph. The footprint occupied by Anupgiri’s Vrindaban structure, known today as ‘Himmatgir Bahadur Mandir and Nand Kila’ but in the nineteenth century as ‘Himmat Bahadur Ghat’ (according to F.S. Growse, Mathura: A District Memoir, Allahabad: North-western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1882, p. 308; see also p. 270), can be more easily estimated simply by using Google Earth. The site shares a common wall with the Shahji temple, from which line the original Anupgiri structure runs northwest to the Jamuna River. Happily, the original buildings and grounds are largely unchanged, having been only slightly improved by the Shahji family who purchased the property in the 1850s. Because of this, it is possible to locate the site on Google Earth and thereby calculate a fairly accurate footprint measurement, which I did on 14 September 2013. The original lot narrows as it approaches the river, so whereas the measurement of the original southern (shared) wall with octagonal turrets at each corner is 170 feet, the northern façade by the Jamuna is only 100 feet. The length of the original structure, north to south, is 375 feet, resulting in a total area of approximately 50,625 square feet. These measurements confirm the estimates I arrived at when I paced the site in November of 1999. 45 This is based on a Google Earth measurement, captured 12 September 2013. 46 See Pinch, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight Sight: Gosains in Banaras, 1809’, in Michael Dodson (ed.), Benares: Urban History, Architecture, Identity, New Delhi: Routledge India, 2012, which describes the history of the Oomraogiri Pooshta and the tricky question of ascetic identity; also, on the latter point, Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. On Anupgiri’s Vrindaban structure, see Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, introduction. 47 See Dhirendra K. Jha and Krishna Jha, Ayodhya: The Dark Night, New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2012, esp. chaps 1 and 2. According to the Jhas, Abhiram Das, the minor mahant in question, was also a member of the Hindu Mahasabha.

7 Dispossessing memory Adivasi oral histories from the margins of Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, Central India Ezra Rashkow Since at least 1864 when Bori was established as the first reserve forest in India, the Pachmarhi area of the Satpura Mountains in what is today Madhya Pradesh has been the recurrent site of both conservation and development-induced displacement for Gond and Kurku-Mewasi Adivasis (so-called ‘tribal’ or ‘indigenous’ peoples).1 But this history of dispossession is hardly ever remembered, even by the dispossessed. Paradoxically, while archival sources are clear that forest-dwelling residents of the Central Indian highlands were being removed, sedentarised, turned into forest labourers and peasantry already by the mid-19th century, in a large number of oral histories collected in the Pachmarhi area, Adivasis almost universally remembered the pre-1947 period as a time of relatively unrestricted use of the forest in contrast to the independence period, which they describe as a time of increasing restrictions on their forest-based ways of life and livelihoods. The reasons for this seeming lapse in Adivasi historical memory will be explored in this chapter. In 2009, Pachmarhi was declared a Biosphere Reserve under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) Man and Biosphere Programme, a decade after the government of India designated the area as a Biosphere Reserve in 1999.2 According to the UNESCO definition, a Biosphere Reserve is intended to conserve ecological and cultural heritage side by side.3 Biosphere Reserves are defined as ‘special environments for both people and nature . . . living examples of how human beings and nature can co-exist while respecting each others’ needs’. Their mission is ‘to ensure environmental, economic and social (including cultural and spiritual) sustainability’.4 Yet in naming this region a Biosphere Reserve, conservationists also seem to have forgotten Pachmarhi’s past. Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve is the consolidation of three contiguous protected areas: the Bori Wildlife Sanctuary (est. 1977), the Pachmarhi Wildlife Sanctuary and Satpura National Park (established 1981)5 (see the

152  Ezra Rashkow map in Figure 7.1). Since the 1970s, both conservation and developmentinduced displacement have only increased their impact in the region. The Tawa Reservoir defines the northwest border of the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve. In 1974, when the Tawa Dam was built, 44 villages were submerged by the reservoir, and some 3,000 families were displaced. ‘Two

Figure 7.1 Map of the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve within Madhya Pradesh and India. Source: Prepared by Sharon Lindenfeld.

Dispossessing memory 153 years later, 25 villages were displaced by the Army Proof Range Establishment. An ordnance factory in the region displaced nine villages’.6 In terms of conservation-induced displacement, ‘After the declaration of Satpura National Park in 1981, two villages were displaced. Forest department officials harassed five families of [a] village that refused to move out; the officials burned their homes to ashes’.7 Since the designation of biosphere status by the Indian Government in 1999, efforts to resettle villagers outside the park have only intensified. By 2005, approximately 50 of the 60 villages located inside the reserve were being slated for relocation. As of 2013 it was reported that, ‘currently, officials are talking of relocating between 13 and 16 villages’.8 Following Koetzer, Witkowski and Erasmus, this article argues that to a large extent the biosphere designation for Pachmarhi has proven to be a meaningless bureaucratic label.9 Naming Pachmarhi a Biosphere Reserve not only elides the long and bitter history of interventions by the colonial and postcolonial state in the region, it also ignores the continuing hardships faced by resident populations, and their continuing removal from the reserve. To quote UNESCO literature back at itself, since the establishment of Pachmarhi, the Biosphere Reserve has hardly sought to ‘foster the harmonious integration of people and nature for sustainable development’, or to ‘integrate cultural and biological diversity, especially the role of traditional knowledge in ecosystem management’.10 ‘Direct Beneficiaries of the Biosphere Reserves’ are said to be ‘the local people and the ecological resources’, whereas ‘indirect beneficiaries’ are said to be ‘scientists, government decision makers and the world community’.11 Thus, biosphere reserves are intended to ‘explicitly acknowledge humans, and human interests in the conservation landscape’.12 It is entirely unclear how such highminded ideals are today being implemented or achieved in Pachmarhi. In seeking to understand how Adivasis make sense of their own history, and in particular their personal experiences of being removed from the hills and forests of the Satpuras, this article situates the voices of Gond and Kurku residents of Pachmarhi in dialogue with the colonial record and professional historians’ and activists’ accounts of the region’s history. In summer 2011, and in repeated return trips to the Satpuras since then, I video recorded extensive oral history interviews, primarily in local dialects of Hindi, with, among others, about 100 individuals living in villages in various stages of resettlement from the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve. This included interviews in several villages already resettled outside of the reserve, in two villages currently being removed from the reserve and resettled near a market town approximately 50 kilometres away, as well as with a family living in an isolated mango orchard inside of the reserve that was also in the process of being evicted, and with about 10 residents of a

154  Ezra Rashkow village inside the reserve, who all expressed a strong desire for resettlement. Between 2012 and 2014, that village then went through the process of resettlement. In addition to this, I also recorded oral history interviews in several villages displaced by the Tawa Dam, with several activists working in the region, and in three villages inside the reserve where residents were resisting pressure to resettle elsewhere. Although specific village names have appeared in numerous other publications, in order to protect the interviewees, all oral history materials presented here have been anonymised, with both individual and village names redacted.13

Central India enters modern India Historians have often identified three main waves of impact in the modern era on those identified as ‘tribal’ or Adivasi in Central India – a process moving towards the utter destitution of many communities of the region by the late 19th to early 20th century, and culminating in the near eradication of forest-based ways of life and livelihoods by the late 20th century.14 In oral history interviews, residents of Pachmarhi rarely reduced their history to these terms. Still, it will be useful to review this grand narrative in order to contrast it with Adivasis’ own accounts. According to the standard historical narrative, then, the first wave of modern impact in Central India began in the 1600s. Previous to the incursions of Rajputs, Marathas and Mughals, much of the region today known as Madhya Pradesh had long been an ambiguously defined area known as Gondwana. For hundreds of years, from at least the 12th to the 18th centuries, a series of Gond kingdoms reigned over the area. Gond rulers had built architecturally splendid palaces and forts throughout their kingdoms, and even founded several cities (e.g. the founding of the city of Nagpur, for instance, is attributed to the Gond Raja Bakht Buland Shah of Devagad in the year 1702. Nagpur fell to the Marathas in 1742). By the late 1700s, Raj Gond power had been all but supplanted by the Marathas. The anthropologist Stephen Fuchs, for example, describes: ‘In 1781 the last Gond ruler of Mandla, Narhar Shah, was tortured to death by the Maratha general Moraji, and Mandla became a dependency of the Saugor Marathas. In 1799 Mandla fell to the Bhonsla king of Nagpur, till in 1818 the British took over and assumed the rule also over Mandla’.15 It is in this period that many of the Gonds and other independent peoples of Central India began their retreat into the forests and hills as a means of escape and resistance. As A.C. Lyall described in the 1867 Gazetteer of the Central Provinces, ‘the wild original tribes . . . had begun to recede before the more skilful and superior settlers’. Lyall recorded that, ‘In Bukht Boolund’s time (A.D. 1700) the bulk of the population was undoubtedly Gond; but. . . . The Gonds are now as 1 to 18 of the strictly Hindoo population’.16

Dispossessing memory 155 In the second wave of impact, by the late 1800s at the height of the colonial era, the Gonds, past their political prime as rulers of Central India, were now also being dispossessed of their forests. Colonial administrators in the 19th century viewed the Central Indian highlands as a ‘great natural fastness’ for the ‘aboriginal tribes’, who were said to have retreated there to escape the impact of ‘more powerful and highly organised races’.17 In the new political ecology, hills and forests no longer provided safety from intrusion, and these areas became shrinking vacuums of power within a totalising and enveloping colonial state formation. Sedentariation and the conversion of forest communities into agriculturalists was a major thrust of the policy. By the turn of the 20th century Russell and Hira Lal in their Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces could report: The Gonds are mainly engaged in agriculture, and the great bulk of them are farmservants and labourers. In the hilly tracts, however, there is a substantial Gond tenantry, and a small number of proprietors remain, though the majority have been ousted by Hindu moneylenders and liquor-sellers.18 The third and latest wave of displacement affecting the Gonds, Kurkus and other Adivasis of Madhya Pradesh is that induced by conservation and development programmes since the 20th century. This most recent wave is obviously the most tangible to contemporary residents of Pachmarhi, and dominates their narratives as related in the oral history interviews I recorded; this wave of impact is of primary relevance because it is still ongoing.

Oral histories There is nothing factually incorrect when it comes to the chronicle of major events in the narrative outlined above. Yet the very act of interpreting and ordering Adivasi history from the privileged perspective of the archive and the academy without consulting contemporary Adivasis about their own experience, at best, leads to a simplistic interpretation of the past that denies already deeply marginalised people agency in their own history making. Historical constructions of Adivasi pasts, for example, have far too often been reduced to overarching meta-narratives of either ‘cultural endangerment’ or ‘progress’, pigeonholing all changes affecting Adivasis of Central India either as tragic decline on the one hand, or as improvement away from primitivity and towards civilisation on the other. Interviewees, in contrast, rarely, if ever, spoke in such sweeping terms about historical processes, and instead tended to remain firmly focused on their own life histories and struggles.

156  Ezra Rashkow One of the most fascinating contradictions between the oral histories collected from residents of Pachmarhi and the standard historical narrative is the fact that they tend to describe the colonial era in wholly different terms. Older villagers nearly universally remembered their own lives as a period of ecological, cultural and material decline, a time of vanishing forests and forest rights, and spoke of the past as a halcyon time of unrestricted access to the forest. Discussing the pre-independence period, elderly interviewees repeatedly reminisced about a sort of ‘freedom of the forest’ (echoing Verrier Elwin’s phrase) unparalleled in today’s world dominated by, according to them, the forest department. As one elderly gentleman now living in a resettlement colony expressed: ‘We used to like those days, because in the British day we used to get lots of work and they took care of us . . . the British never harassed us the way the forest department did in recent years’. Another elder, still living in a forest village, recounted of his youth in the pre-independence era: ‘Life was much better back then’. Explaining this with reference to his present predicament of being the head of a family of landless labourers, increasingly restricted access to forests and rising prices, he complained ‘aaj kal pura bekhar hai ’ – ‘these days are completely profitless’. An octogenarian woman from one of the original villages pushed out of the national park, who vividly recalled the moment in the 1980s when the forest department burned down several homes in the process of evicting her village, had particularly rosy memories of the British era. ‘Everything was lovely then’ – ‘Sab bat ki sukhi thi! ’ (sic), she exclaimed. ‘We could cut fields in the forest and plant millets (kodon and kutki). And since the park came, nothing’. Finding this somewhat unbelievable, I asked ‘But the British, didn’t they collect taxes?’ Her response was that, ‘They did, from farmers, but they let us hunt everything. If you went hunting with them they would give you everything. They would feed you too’. Asking her to say more about her opinion of Satpura National Park, she replied: ‘What can I say? They’ve put a fence right there. There’s a fence by my field. There’s a boundary, so the meaning of the park is if you go here we’ll catch you, and we’ll take your axe. If not, we’ll file a report. There’s a boy of mine in jail now just for collecting firewood . . . Look, look at our houses. If they’re falling apart we need wood’. In large measure this selective nostalgia about the colonial past must be understood in relation to the current conservation regime. Memories of hunting, of dhaya cultivation and of unrestricted access to the forest were a dominant feature of numerous oral history interviewees’ descriptions of the early 20th century. Interviewees described a history over the last several generations of progressive whittling away of forest rights. Rules against collecting firewood, against harvesting non-timber forest produce

Dispossessing memory 157 and against distillation and sale of mahua liquor particularly bothered residents of Pachmarhi. They also especially bemoaned the village boundaries established by the forest department in 1977. With the exception of one village, which lost only 91.9 per cent of its land in 1977, in all of the villages in the core are a of the reserve for which statistics are available, between 97.7 and 98.9 per cent of all village land was taken away by the government of Madhya Pradesh without any compensation.19 Villages remaining in the Biosphere Reserve have become tiny isolated islands in a sea of forest green. The fact that residents of Pachmarhi almost universally refer to the forest department officials in English as the ‘forest log’ or ‘forest people’ (as in ‘forest log bahut takhleef dete hai ’ – ‘the forest people give us lots of trouble’) also speaks of their alienation from the park, which they view as a foreign intrusion in their jungles. Nearly all interviewees expressed resentment towards the forest department and biosphere reserve (or ‘park’ as they referred to it, using the English term).20 This situation parallels the experience reported in other biosphere reserves in India, such as Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, where multiple studies have found overwhelmingly ‘negative attitude among local people towards [biosphere reserve] management, mainly because of restricted access to the forest resources for their livelihood’.21 In two quantitative studies, whereas around 85 per cent of residents of biosphere reserves supported the concept of conservation of forest resources, 75 per cent of respondents also reported negative attitudes towards the reserves, and 90 per cent experienced a deterioration of the rural economy since the establishment of the reserve.22 The selective memory that paints the colonial era as better than the present must also be understood in terms of the current lack of development, sustainable or otherwise, within the reserve. The forest villages presently have limited or no electricity (some villages began being equipped with solar panels in the late 2000s). Running water in the form of plumbing was universally absent. Interviewees repeatedly complained of schools that existed only on paper. In one case, residents claimed that the government built half a school building, only to abandon the construction project midway (‘two three years earlier they were building a school, but they didn’t finish and the whole thing fell down’). In another village, it was reported that the government teacher came only once every few weeks, and only for a few hours at a time, if at all. None of the villages in the core of the reserve, with the exception of one, had a road. To reach the closest market town, Pachmarhi, villagers from some areas had to hike uphill some 10 kilometres on extremely steep forest paths that could become particularly dangerous in the monsoon season, especially considering the near universal lack of footwear beyond thonged sandals.

158  Ezra Rashkow The experience of conservation or development-induced displacement occupies a central place in the vast majority of personal narratives recorded, and deeply informs people’s views of the past. For many in the older generation, the move from the forest was experienced as trauma. As one evictee from the Tawa Dam submergence zone put it, ‘You can never imagine what it is like to lose your home and your land and never be able to see it again. This is something most people can never dream, but we have experienced’. Still, the vast majority residents of forest villages, young and old alike, expressed willingness to leave the conservation area. Asked if her family was ready to leave their home, one female interviewee in her mid-fifties responded, ‘We are ready. The people from the next village went. Now they live next to the bazaar’. Her husband chimed in, ‘If we leave this land, it will be for our children. If the government gives us money and land to farm, then we are ready to leave’. Many in the younger generation, especially, expressed eagerness to escape the forest. ‘The government is giving everyone 10 lakh rupees and five acres of land. There is nothing for us here’, said one young man living in a village where a resettlement offer was on the table and who seemed particularly keen to take the government’s offer. It is in this situation, then, that Adivasis of the Satpuras remember, imagine and sometimes long for a past where they had more access to forest resources. When it is longing, it is a longing for a lost place and time, but not necessarily a colonial place and time. There is a strong sense among residents of Pachmarhi that they were the original inhabitants of the forests of the Satpuras, and that the national park and biosphere reserve are outside impositions. ‘Ham pahle yaha the’ – ‘we were here first’, was an oft repeated claim. Many interviewees insisted, ‘ye zamin hamara tha, ye hamara jangal hai ’ – ‘this was our land, this is our jungle’, along with other similar slogans. ‘It was taken away from us’. Yet there was often also a sense of confusion expressed as to how and when the forests were lost, and how the people became increasingly marginalised over time. How their communities were first sedentarised into forest villages in the late 19th century is as much a mystery to interviewees as why they are being evicted from those same villages now. Asked why gathering non-timber forest products was now banned, one interviewee answered rhetorically, ‘how should I know why it’s banned?’ Similarly, asked, ‘why is the forest department asking you to leave?’ another elderly respondent answered sardonically, ‘How am I supposed to know why?’ In Donald Ritchie’s words, ‘Interviewees all tell their stories from their own subjective points of view . . . not everyone has a clear view of what happened or a comprehensive understanding of what it meant. Generals in the rear may know the broad sweep of the battle plan, but foot soldiers will have a different view of the action on the battlefield’.23 Yet this position,

Dispossessing memory 159 which relegates people equivalent to mere pawns in the grand scheme of history, seemingly eschews the possibility that local or subaltern historical memory might hold significant analytical value. I would argue emphatically that it is not mere ignorance that leads to the contrast between historians’ accounts and Adivasis’, but rather their positionality. It is certainly not only lack of historical awareness that makes so many residents of Pachmarhi look at the past through rose-tinted glasses. Instead, their descriptions of the past need to be understood as part of a rhetoric of suffering that imagines the past as better than the present as a part of a critique of the present. Working in rural Indonesia, James Scott described this sort of idealisation of the past a ‘weapon of the weak’: They have collectively created a remembered village and a remembered economy that served as an effective ideological backdrop against which to deplore the present . . . Their memory focuses precisely on those beneficial aspects of tenure and labor relations that have been eroded or swept away . . . That they do not dwell upon other, less favorable, features of the old order is hardly surprising, for those features do not contribute to the argument they wish to make today.24 There is of course also the performative aspect of the interviews to consider. Most interviewees were extremely eager to speak with a foreigner who could understand their language and who seemed eager to understand their situation. Many saw this as an opportunity to vent their grievances and express their frustrations with the forest department and the resettlement programme. Thus, it would not be particularly surprising if some were resorting to describing the past as better than the present in order to drive home their grievances about present suffering. Ajay Skaria, in his work on oral histories in Western India, describes a similar situation when he reports that Adivasis in the Dangs tend towards a historical periodisation that divides time between moglai and mandini, with moglai being equivalent to a precolonial golden age where the Bhils of the Dangs were kings of the forest, a period characterised by ‘the aesthetics and politics of wildness’. In contrast, mandini is felt to be a time of subsequent decline in the colonial and independence eras, a sort of kali yug.25 Ann Gold and Bojur Gujar in their fieldwork in Ajmer, Rajasthan, also found that villagers of that region tended to divide time between the azadi or independence period and the ‘time of trees and sorrow’, an era when kings ruled and villagers lived in dire poverty. Thus, the case in Ajmer significantly differs from Pachmarhi, where residents of Ajmer and many other rural farming districts simultaneously describe environmental decline and an improved quality of life in the independence era.26 Both Skaria’s and

160  Ezra Rashkow Gold’s formulations contrast with the oral history footage I recorded in Pachmarhi, which suggests that the residents of Pachmarhi actually remember the British Raj as a kind of colonial moglai.27 Although many interviewees generally agreed that the British had a mixed legacy overall, with more than one saying that they did ‘some good, some bad’ for India as a whole, one interviewee put it particularly eloquently when he said, ‘Ham azadi ke bad bhi koi azadi nahi mili’ – ‘after India’s independence, we still haven’t received our freedom’.

Archival histories of dispossession in Pachmarhi The story most commonly told about the founding of Pachmarhi as the summer capital of the British Central Provinces is that Captain James Forsyth discovered the plateau in 1862. Forsyth’s ‘discovery’ is well established in popular memory among the Indian middle classes, especially since his famous Bison Lodge is now a museum and ticket office for entry into the neighbouring national park. Yet, as in the case of Columbus Day in the United States, even school children now question the notion of celebrating a European’s ‘discovery’ of an inhabited landscape. Delving deeper than the usual tourist histories of the area, the archives tell us not only that this region was inhabited before the British arrival, but also that a whole array of British officers had ascended to Pachmarhi before Forsyth. In 1819, following the Third Anglo-Maratha War, the British sent an expedition to Pachmarhi in pursuit of their enemy Appa Sahib, and in 1832 one Captain Ouseley led a geological and botanical expedition there. This was followed by a good number of official excursions to the hills through the 1850s. The point that it wasn’t Forsyth at all who discovered Pachmarhi is noteworthy here, primarily to show how dearly lacking in understanding the popular narrative can be.28 Most of the accounts of Pachmarhi that lionise Forsyth, for instance, also largely neglect Adivasi history. They tell the commemorative story of establishing a hill station, a sanitarium, an army cantonment, the British summer capital of the Central Provinces, and even the first reserve forest in India, but few bother to remember the inhabitants of these hills. The removal of the Gond and Kurku Adivasis from their forests is a less pleasant, and more often than not forgotten or ignored, aspect of Pachmarhi’s past. The first British foray into the Pachmarhi region was in an attempt to destroy a resistance that had already been driven into the hills from the plains and cities they had previously controlled.29 In 1819, following the British establishment of the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories over the areas the Maratha Chief Appa Sahib Bhonsle had come to control in 1816, Appa Sahib escaped arrest by the British and took to the hills as a staging

Dispossessing memory 161 ground for resistance to the British incursion. One of the first references to Pachmarhi appearing in the colonial record relates this incident: After the expulsion of Appa Saheb . . . he sought refuge among the wild Gond tribes of the Mahadeo hills, which brought on the temporary occupation of the elevated plain of Puchmurry, a commanding and central position, both with regard to the Gond hills and to the British territories on the Nerbudda, in which these tribes were in the habit of making predatory incursions . . . The success of the British troops caused most of the Gond chiefs voluntarily to surrender, and the British government at last managed to suppress the system of plunder and devastation so long habitual to the inhabitants of the Mahadeo hills . . .30 In the war of 1857, as the final Raj Gond kingdoms of Central India fell to the British, Pachmarhi again became a last bastion of resistance.31 During the war, the rebel Tantia Topi fled into the area that is today the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve and formed an alliance with a Korku chief who locals still refer affectionately to as Raja Bhabhut Singh. While Tantia Topi himself was captured and executed in 1859, Bhabhut Singh, ‘with his ragtag tola of matchlockmen’ used the Satpura Mountains to continue the rebellion, launching raids against British positions in the plains below. Singh was not captured and executed until 1860, some three years after the mutiny died down nearly everywhere else. This defeat of the proprietor of large tracts of the Mahadeo Hills section of the Satpuras gave the British perfect excuse they needed to move into possession of these forest tracts. As the 1897 Working Plan of the Bori Forest, located in the Madhya Pradesh State Archives in Bhopal describes: Old Bori . . . belonged originally to Thakur Bhabut Singh, from whom it was confiscated . . . on account of his rebellion, and it was taken up by the Forest Department, only then just organised in 1862. At that time there was a considerable local population of aboriginal tribes who practised dahya. . . . and with the exception of the villagers of Jolli and Harapala, who were kept back to supply labour to the forest work, the population was induced to settle elsewhere . . . The forests were at the same time closed to grazing, except for the few head of cattle remaining in Joli and Harapala until these villages were deserted in 1871.32 Thus, the issue of dispossession of the forests, the same issue that contemporary residents are facing today in the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, is by no means new. The British entry into Central India’s interior begins a clearly documented history of dispossession in the hills of the region.

162  Ezra Rashkow The town of Pachmarhi itself, which was at Forsyth’s time just a small village of about 30 Adivasi Korku huts mixed with those of a few traders from the plains, quickly evolved into a British cantonment and the summer capital of colonial India’s Central Provinces, fondly known as the Queen of the Satpuras. Displacement, induced by both development and conservation, has been a problem for the forest dwellers of the region almost from the very moment of the colonial encounter. In 1862, Forsyth’s orders were to build a forest lodge at Pachmarhi. This unsurprisingly met with local resistance. As Forsyth records: I found I was likely to have a good deal of trouble in getting the wild hill people to help in building our lodge . . . Truth was, I saw the chief himself and his advisers hated our intrusion. With some truth they feared we were come to break up their much-beloved seclusion, and untrammelled barbarism; their rich harvest from the taxation of pilgrims to Mahadeo’s shrine they thought was in danger; and they would have none of us.33 Local fears were realised when the first reserve forest in colonial India was established at Bori in 1864, and the people who lived on this land were removed in the name of scientific conservation.34 Of course the land of Pachmarhi Plateau, where the town would eventually be situated, needed to be sorted out as well. This land was first designated to be an army sanitarium and as one officer exclaimed: ‘It does seem to be remarkable that we cannot locate 200 convalescents on the top of a hill without taking up the whole country round as a cantonment and evicting the country-folk’.35 In documents I unearthed in the National Archives of India in Delhi we find that one Thakur Gharab Singh was to be compensated Rs 23,916 and one anna for the entire plateau, which was said to measure 14,580 acres ‘allowing for contour and little outside pieces’ (less than 1.7 Rupees per acre). The Thakur was clearly unhappy with the measly payment offered, and begged the court instead for an equivalent piece of land.36 One official baulked at the Thakur’s request writing: ‘I am quite satisfied myself that no injustice is done to the Thaqur’, saying that a fair price for the site of London two thousand years ago would be ‘two swords and a shield’.37 As another officer later reflected, ‘I know Pachmarhi very well, having reported on it in 1864, when a little Gond chieftan [sic] actually considered himself proprietor of the plateau; probably his cattle drank the waters. But I suppose he has been staved off, or has been indemnified, though I should like to know whether these jungle wastes were marked off by the Settlement as unoccupied’.38

Dispossessing memory 163 Now with the plateau in the hands of the army for building a sanitarium and cantonment, an early Sanitation Department report outlines how already in 1869 Pachmarhi was also being sanitised of its native residents: About half a mile to the south-west is the native village of Pachmarhi, the only assemblage of human beings on the entire plateau; it is very much the same as all Native villages, a collection of squalid huts of all sizes and shapes, set down without the faintest idea at regularity, inhabited indiscriminately by men, women, children and cattle, and reeking with the vilest odours not only in the interior of the huts but also around the precincts of the village, where collections of filth in every stage of decomposition are far from uncommon. This village is most unfortunately situated with regard to the new sanitarium, being only about quarter mile from the stream which runs through the cantonment, and on a higher level, the ground sloping steadily from the village down to the stream; the filth therefore just referred to can hardly escape being washed into the stream, thus exercising a very deleterious effect on the quality of the water contained in it. It has been recommended that the village should be removed to some more distant site; the removal, it is said, will be comparatively inexpensive from the inferior nature of the huts. This recommendation I consider a most sound one, and one that hardly admits of delay, for in its present position the village is a standing menace to the health of the neighbouring sanitarium . . .39 Gond and Kurku land use and settlement patterns were also severely impacted by colonial rule. Previously, small populations spread over relatively vast forest tracts practised a form of shifting cultivation called dhaya, where forest communities grew kodon, kutki and other local crops in what was most likely a sustainable manner.40 The colonial forest department, which was one of the most powerful departments of government in the Central Provinces, progressively worked to prohibit shifting cultivation because it was seen as a threat to forests generally and timber revenues in particular. As the Central Provinces Administration Report of 1862–1863 put it: [I]t is unfortunate that the best ground for this peculiar cultivation is precisely that where the finest timber trees like to grow. The damage thus done during ages is incalculable; but to stop this cultivation now would be a serious, indeed a lamentable undertaking. It may be hoped

164  Ezra Rashkow that by degrees these Hill people will learn a better mode of cultivation. But to prohibit the Dhuya cultivation altogether would be to drive this widely scattered population to despair.41 And Forsyth explained: The abandoned dhya clearings are speedily covered again . . . In such a thicket no timber tree can ever force its way into daylight; and a second growth of timber on such land can never be expected if left to nature . . . Stand on any hill-top on the Puchmurree or other high range, and look over the valleys below you – the dhya clearings can be easily distinguished from tree jungle – and you will see that for one acre left of the latter, thousands have been levelled by the axe of the Gond and the Korku.42 Along with working to ban dhaya cultivation and to transition the population to sedentary agriculture, the colonial regime also created several official categories of villages, viz. forest villages, revenue villages, etc. where the Adivasis would be sedentarised. The variety of evanescent, heterogeneous community types and livelihood formations that previously existed in the region thus dissolved, and all of the villages currently remaining in the biosphere reserve can be identified on district planning maps dating back to the 1870s.

Flouting the Forest Rights Act In 2003, a new Tiger Taskforce was formed in India with its goal being to strengthen the nation’s wildlife conservation measures. The taskforce broke with the traditional model of human-free national parks to propose ‘a new wildlife management paradigm that shares concerns of conservation with the public at large’.43 In this spirit, a new bill was brought before the Indian Parliament, the Lok Sabha. The Scheduled Tribes (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006 was written with the premise of addressing the ‘historical injustice to these forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes who are integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem’.44 The Forest Rights Act (or FRA), as it was popularly referred to, promised forest dwellers the right to remain in any forest, including protected areas such as national parks and biosphere reserves, if they could show that they had historically occupied that land. It also asserted that the ‘scheduled tribes’ have traditional rights, defined as including ‘responsibilities and authority for sustainable use, conservation of biodiversity and maintenance of ecological balance . . . thereby strengthening the conservation regime of the

Dispossessing memory 165 forests while ensuring livelihood and food security’.45 In one fell swoop, the Forest Rights Act thus appeared to reverse over 30 years of conservation legislation in India, and some hundred years of colonial forest policy before that, which had been aimed at removing people from forests. Unsurprisingly, the Forest Rights Act was met with vociferous objections from dyed-in-the-wool conservationists. Even within the Tiger Taskforce itself there was no unanimity, with Valmik Thapar, one of India’s preeminent tiger experts, issuing a strongly worded note of dissent. Thapar’s main argument, and the argument of many staid conservation biologists, was that ‘tigers have to be saved in undisturbed, inviolate landscapes . . . You can either create landscapes that are undisturbed, or you don’t save tigers. As far as I’m concerned, tigers and human beings – forest dwellers or tribal peoples – cannot co-exist’.46 Given this failure to reach consensus, while the Forest Rights Act was a major milestone for conservation legislation in India, it has also been completely flouted in many cases. One particularly damning study found that ‘all of the key features of this legislation have been undermined by a combination of apathy and sabotage during the process of implementation. In the current situation the rights of the majority of tribals and other traditional forest dwellers are being denied and the purpose of the legislation is being defeated’. Madhya Pradesh has been particularly notorious in its refusal to implement the Forest Rights Act, and as of March 2010, the state rejected 71 per cent of claims filed under the act. In 2010, the state also passed an amendment to the Madhya Pradesh Forest Act ‘which makes activities such as grazing and collection of any forest produce from any reserved forest an offence punishable with a fine of Rs 15,000, or one year’s imprisonment or both, thereby effectively nullifying the recognition of minor forest produce and other forest rights under the FRA’.47 In Pachmarhi, it is clear that important portions of the Forest Rights Act have not been implemented. For example, the Act ‘grants the right of ownership, access to collect, use and dispose of minor forest produce (which includes all non-timber forest produce of plant origin), which has been traditionally collected within or outside village boundaries, even in protected areas’.48 But interviewees universally denied seeing any improvement in forest rights since the passage of the act. In the words of one forest village resident: ‘The forest department gives us lots of trouble. We go to the forest to collect wood, mohua flowers, pickle, different kinds of leaves, jaributi [medicinal herbs], but the forest department has banned all that. They’ve only started giving us this kind of trouble in recent years. The old folks never had this kind of trouble. Now they’ve banned all this, but what can we do without work? In the past, we used to make dhaya (slash and burn) fields in the forest. About 10 years ago we

166  Ezra Rashkow tried doing this and there was a complaint. So we were sent to jail for over a week. My husband, uncle, etc. Everybody was making the field, but 10 old men went to jail’. The number of people being resettled outside the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve has only accelerated since 2006, and as of 2015 the large majority residents I interviewed reported that they were willing to leave their land.49 Overall, what most people want and demand at this point is simply adequate resettlement. In the case of eviction from Satpura National Park, Pachmarhi Wildlife Sanctuary and Bori Wildlife Sanctuary, i.e. Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, people’s willingness to accept resettlement seemed mostly to stem from what they perceive to be nearly 40 years of increasingly vigorous harassment at the hands of the forest department, coupled with the failure of the state to provide even the most basic of services in their forest villages, e.g. electricity, safe drinking water, roads, schools, medical care and job opportunities. The young and middle-aged, in particular, complained bitterly about the lack of development within the reserve, and expressed the desire to live near town where there would be access to these key forms of development. Thus, the pervasive prejudice that indigenous people around the world are universally keen to resist resettlement and desire to stay in their ancestral forests and villages needs to be challenged. This popular myth, largely based on the romantic image of primitive and isolated tribal people living in harmony with nature, crumbles away under any form of closer inspection. More than one interviewee now living in resettlement expressed the sentiment: ‘Ye sab khatam hai. Jangal khatam hai, jangal ke jivan bhi khatam hai’ – ‘That’s all finished. The jungles are finished, life in the jungle is finished too’. Yet calling these people’s choice to leave the forest ‘self-determination’ also obscures the harsh realities that underlie such a decision. Deciding whether to stay in the reserve or to leave is not a simple matter of free will. For residents of Pachmarhi, the choice to resettle outside the reserve is vexed, complicated and often tragic. As one young man, age 20, living in a village about to undergo resettlement in 2011, put it when asked why he wanted to leave: ‘1000 reasons. We only have a little land here, one acre each. There’s a road where cars can get in, but no electricity, just from a few solar panels. The school’s been closed . . . I’ve always lived in this house, since childhood. But we want to leave’. For this young man, as with many others, the decision to leave his birthplace was clearly bound up with the large number of problems that he and his fellow villagers face in their daily lives in the biosphere reserve. It was also, of course, predicated on the tempting offer of a resettlement package, which may not have

Dispossessing memory 167 truly appeared as much of a choice. As another man in the same household described, The forest people (‘forest wale’) came and told us to clear out (‘khali karne ke liye bola’), so we have to clear out. But not until after the rains, it won’t happen in the rains. They’re giving money to everyone, 10 lakh rupees per family [equivalent to about £14,000 in 2011]. We didn’t get the money yet, but they say they will give us five acres of land each, and money for building houses. They’ve promised everything, but nothing is certain. Once we get this land, only then will we leave the village. Until we get that land, and build our houses, we won’t move. Considering all this, I asked him how he feels about this impending move. ‘Of course we are sad, but what other choice do we really have?’ he replied.

Conclusion This essay should be read neither as an argument for the removal of Adivasis from Pachmarhi nor as an argument for their continuation within the biosphere reserve. The right to make an informed decision as to whether to stay in or leave the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve is now legally in the hands of the project-affected people themselves, and not up to academics, conservationists, the forest department or other administrators. According to the Forests Rights Act of 2006, forest dwellers themselves are legally entitled to make their own decisions, and relocations are to proceed only after free, prior, informed consent is given (though of course it is important to recognise that this is simply the de jure rather than the de facto state of affairs). So, rather than making an argument for either removal from or continuation within the reserve, my goal has been to draw attention to the historical complexities and deep-seated problems underlying the contemporary conservation regime in India today. While a good amount of space in this chapter has been devoted to tracing the long history of dispossession faced by Adivasis of Pachmarhi, elsewhere I have published a global overview of the history of the idea, dating back at least to the 1830s, that indigenous peoples should be protected in national parks and other conservation areas.50 Elsewhere, I have also explored the long and problematic history of overlapping discourses of biological and cultural diversity conservation that imagine the Gonds, Kurkus and other Adivasis of Central India in the mould of ‘endangered species’ in need of protection.51 So, now, the residents of Pachmarhi are caught between

168  Ezra Rashkow two problematic ideologies and their attendant structures of power: one of human-free wilderness and the other of human-inhabited wilderness. The problem with the Man and Biosphere model is not only that it is grounded in a long-standing discourse that has perceived indigenous groups as in danger of extinction, and therefore paternalistically projects them as in need of top-down protection. It is also that Adivasis, who have long suffered dehumanising animal analogies, are now envisioned as endangered, like wildlife, and in need of cultural conservation in biosphere reserves. Whereas this essay has largely focused on the concerning parallels between historical and contemporary forms of displacement affecting Adivasi communities, there are also similar parallels between historical and contemporary ideas about protecting Adivasi cultures in parks. In Central India in the 1930s, for example, Verrier Elwin called for the restoration of the ‘freedom of the forest’ to ‘tribal’ peoples in ‘a sort of National Park, in which not only the Baiga, but the thousands of simple Gond in their neighbourhood might take refuge’.52 This park was to be established in a ‘ “wild and largely inaccessible” part of the country, under the direct control of a Tribes Commissioner . . . Inside this area, the administration was to allow the tribesmen to live their lives with the “utmost possible happiness and freedom” ’.53 Contrast this to January 2015, when Survival International, an organisation which bills itself as ‘the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights’, published an article on its website, ‘Tribespeople illegally evicted from “Jungle Book” tiger reserve’. Illustrating the Adivasis of Kanha as a cartoon Disney character, a poster for the Survival’s campaign ‘Parks Need Peoples’ announced: ‘Mowgli’s been kicked out. His jungle is now a tiger reserve. But tourists are welcome’. The article went on with the blanket claims that ‘progress can kill’ and that tribes ‘face a desperate future without their forests’.54 In contrast to this simplistic message, which Survival International (formerly the Primitive Peoples’ Fund) promotes, in fact it is not at all clear in most instances what the best options for these communities are at present – i.e. whether to stay in the forest or accept resettlement. Yet most residents of Pachmarhi interviewed do opt for resettlement, as long as they are adequately compensated monetarily and the resettlement colonies come with enough land and water for farming, along with other basic amenities such as roads, electricity, access to education, healthcare, etc. Does displacement exacerbate the problem of ‘survival’? Despite all the rhetoric that claims that the very question of ‘survival is at stake’ for these peoples, according to the 1991 census, there were some 6.7 million Gonds in Madhya Pradesh alone.55 Thus, the Gonds are by no means in danger of physical, biological, ‘extinction’.56 While some argue that life-expectancy

Dispossessing memory 169 rates are likely to increase when people move out of an area without access to roads, schools, proper sanitation and healthcare, and into an area with all of these amenities, other studies have shown that, especially in earlier waves of displacement where adequate resettlement has not been provided, displacement ‘caused impoverishment, social disarticulation and political disempowerment’.57 Some have argued that displacement has engendered various sorts of existential crises beyond mere physical ‘survival’. There is the ubiquitous viewpoint that links Adivasi identity with forests, and therefore projects not only Adivasi forest-based ways of life and livelihoods as endangered, but also envisions Adivasi communities and cultures themselves as in danger of extinction due to their removal from forests, for instance. This is, by no means, a new perspective, and this assessment can be found expressed repeatedly in English-medium and other European language publications, dating back to the very outset of the colonial encounter. Nirad C. Chaudhuri expressed this attitude well in 1965 when he wrote: In an industrialised India the destruction of the aboriginal’s life is as inevitable as the submergence of the Egyptian temples caused by the dams of the Nile. . . . As things are going there can be no grandeur in the primitive’s end. It will not be even simple extinction, which is not the worst of human destinies. It is to be feared that the aboriginal’s last act will be squalid, instead of being tragic. What will be seen with most regret will be, not his disappearance, but his enslavement and degradation.58 The idea that Adivasi culture is endangered by their removal from forests has recently been carried forward by G.N. Devy, an Adivasi activist and educator, among others. Devy argues that, ‘In the case of the Adivasi, the future is the enemy of the past. The forces of modernisation are rapidly wiping out Adivasi cultural tradition’. Asking repeatedly, ‘is there a relation between depletion of forests and voicelessness? . . . Is there a connection between dwindling of plant species and voicelessness?’, Devy argues that ‘If a community loses its resource base, its ability to voice is also curtailed. Both bhashas [languages] and forest resources are dwindling in our time’.59 Here, Devy makes the interesting link between ecological decline and voicelessness, or what he calls ‘aphasia’, a medical term meaning inability to speak.60 What I would argue is that in the case of Pachmarhi there is neither aphasia nor amnesia. Both speech and memory are not so much ‘threatened’ as Devy argues, as being wilfully shaped by Adivasis ‘for life’.61 We ought not to medicalise Adivasi use of speech and memory. Consider that whereas in the early 20th century even nostalgia was viewed as a medical

170  Ezra Rashkow disease or a psychiatric disorder, recent work in clinical psychology has found that nostalgia can act as a psychological buffer against existential threat.62 In all of the villages both in the biosphere reserve and in resettlements where I conducted interviews, the vast majority of people speak only Hindi, though often with a dialect. While some claimed that ‘we have always spoken Hindi’ and insisted that ‘No, we have never spoken anything else’, others clearly remembered a time not more than a couple of generations ago when Gondi and Kurku languages were widely spoken, and indeed some elderly interviewees still speak these languages. While on the one hand it might be reasonable to mourn this as linguistic endangerment, it might also be useful to look for the pragmatic reasons for this language shift. Much as in the case of the one woman I spoke with who defined the meaning Adivasi as Hindu (‘Adivasi matlab Hindu’, she said), this act of denying or forgetting one’s ancestral language, and embracing the language of the surrounding society, seemed to me to indicate an intentional incorporation of the Adivasi community into the wider public sphere of the (‘Hindu’) nation. In a Hindu-right (BJP-controlled) state such as Madhya Pradesh in 2011–2015, it seems only natural that Adivasis would want to project themselves as Hindi speaking and Hindu. Through these acts of self-definition, Pachmarhi’s residents seem to say that they are integrated into the state and the nation, and have as much right to be recipients of benefits from the state, such as aid, development and adequate resettlement, as their caste Hindu neighbours in the plains.63 Whether academics and other outside observers want Adivasis to maintain their forest-based ecological and cultural traditions or not, in 2011 the majority of Adivasis in Pachmarhi were voting with their feet for a life in resettlement, hopefully somewhere not too far from a decent town; yet some also desperately clung to their old life in the forest. Though it may be easy to paint this choice as a matter of self-determination, or at least free prior informed consent, the decision as to whether or not to vacate one’s home is never a simple one. And there are no guarantees the decision will prove to be the right one, either way. By 2016, feelings were deeply divided about the outcomes of resettlement. This may be the kind of situation known in policy circles as a ‘wicked problem’ – one where there is no clear solution that makes everybody happy, for when it comes to public policy there is no ‘objective definition of equity’ and no ‘undisputed good’.64

Notes 1 There is a relatively vast literature that considers the stakes in naming these communities. For problems with the term ‘tribe’, see, for example,

Dispossessing memory 171 André Béteille, ‘The Concept of Tribe with Special Reference to India’, European Journal of Sociology, 1986, 27: 296–318. For problems with the term ‘indigenous’, see Adam Kuper, ‘The Return of the Native’, Current Anthropology, 2003, 44(3): 389–402. For problems with the term ‘Adivasi’, see Gail Omvedt, ‘Are “Adivasis” Subaltern?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1988, 23(39): 2001. I choose to use ‘Adivasi’ here largely because this is the term which interviewees used to refer to themselves. There was, however, a wide range of meanings ascribed to the word. While some interviewees said it meant ‘we were here first’, others said it meant ‘we used to live in the jungle’, and one interviewee interestingly responded ‘Adivasi matlab Hindu’ – ‘Adivasi [just] means Hindu’. 2 ‘Pachmarhi area was designated as [a] Biosphere Reserve by [the] Government of India vide notification no J – 220116/17/94-BR dated 3 March 1999 on the basis of [a] Project Document prepared by [the] Environmental Planning and Coordination Organisation (EPCO), an autonomous body under the Department of Housing and Environment, Government of Madhya Pradesh, and after getting concurrence from the Govt of Madhya Pradesh’. R.P. Singh (ed.), Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, Bhopal: Environmental Planning and Coordination Organization (EPCO), Biosphere Reserve Information Service (BRIS), 2001, 1(1): 16. www.epco. in/pdf/brisvol1no1-b.pdf (all websites accessed on 15 November 2015). 3 UNESCO, Biosphere Reserves: The Seville Strategy and the Statutory Framework of the World Network, Paris: UNESCO, 1996. Goal 1 of the Seville Strategy reads: ‘Use Biosphere Reserves to Conserve Natural and Cultural Diversity’. 4 Environmental Planning and Coordination Organization (EPCO), ‘Projects: Domestic Projects – Biosphere Reserves’, 2011. www.epco.in/epco_ projects_domestic_biosphere.php 5 The Government of India (hereafter GOI) had notified Pachmarhi as a Biosphere Reserve a decade earlier than UNESCO, in 1999. In August 2000, all three protected areas were also declared a Project Tiger Reserve. 6 ‘Tawa Matsya Sangh, Fishing Co-Operative in Madhya Pradesh, Loses Licence’, Down to Earth, 15 March 2007, 15(20). 7 ‘Hoshangabad Adivasis Struggle for Survival’, Petition addressed to Chief Minister/Forest Minister, Madhya Pradesh Government, Sponsored By: Tawa Doob Sangharsh Samiti, Tawa Matsya Sangh, Elected Representatives – Tara Barkade, Member, Zilla Panchayat and Zilla Planning Committee, Hoshangabad. www.petitiononline.com/tms2006/ 8 Antoine Lasgorceix and Ashish Kothari, ‘Displacement and Relocation of Protected Areas: A Synthesis and Analysis of Case Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2009, 44(49): 40. 9 Cf. Kaera L. Coetzer, Edward T.F. Witkowski and Barend F.N. Erasmus, ‘Reviewing Biosphere Reserves Globally: Effective Conservation Action or Bureaucratic Label?’, Biological Reviews, 2013: 1–23; Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology makes a similar critique of the Biosphere Reserve network in India. 10 UNESCO, ‘Man and the Biosphere Programme Leaflet’, 2015. www. unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SC/pdf/MAB_leaflet_2015_web_en.pdf; UNESCO, ‘Man and Biosphere Programme: Main

172  Ezra Rashkow Characteristics of Biosphere Reserves’. www.unesco.org/new/en/naturalsciences/environment/ecological-sciences/biosphere-reserves/maincharacteristics/ 11 GOI, ‘Protection, development, maintenance and research in biosphere reserves in India: Guidelines and Proformae’, MoEF, New Delhi (October 2007), 6. See also: National Green Tribunal – Narmada Khand Swabhiman Sena vs State of Madhya Pradesh, 1 October 2014. 12 Coetzer et al., ‘Reviewing Biosphere Reserves Globally’, p. 1. 13 Unless otherwise indicated, interviews were recorded between May and August 2011. Video clips from these interviews have been presented at various conferences and seminars (e.g. the University of Wisconsin– Madison Annual Conference on South Asia 2012, and the SOAS South Asian History Seminar Series 2013). Special thanks to Rakesh and family for the incredible help in making these oral histories possible. 14 David Baker, ‘State Policy, the Market Economy, and Tribal Decline: The Central Provinces, 1861–1920’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1991, 28(4): 341–370. 15 Stephen Fuchs, ‘Folk Tales of the Gond and Baiga in Eastern Mandla’, Asian Folklore Studies, 1965, 24(2): 53–116. 16 M. Low, ‘Nagpur’, in Alfred Comyn Lyall (ed.), Gazetteer of the Central Provinces, Part I, Nagpur: Chief Commissioner’s Office Press, 1867, p. 266. 17 Charles Grant (ed.), The Gazetteer of the Central Provinces of India, 2nd ed., Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1870, p. xiv. 18 R.V. Russell and Hira Lal, The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, vol. 3, London: MacMillan, 1916, p. 139. 19 S. Sengupta, D.N. Pandey and A. Roy, ‘Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve: Core Area Study’, in Sadhan Sengupta (ed.), Man in Biosphere: A Case Study of Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, p. 56. 20 Very few, if any, villagers had actually ever heard of the term ‘biosphere reserve’. In keeping with local usage, I thus also occasionally refer to the ‘reserve’ as a ‘park’ within these pages. 21 Chandra Shekhar Silori, ‘Perception of Local People Towards Conservation of Forest Resources in Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, North-Western Himalaya, India’, Biodiversity Conservation, 2007, 16: 211–222. 22 R.K. Maikhuri, S. Nautiyal, K.S. Rao and K.G. Saxena, ‘Conservation Policy-People Conflicts: A Case Study From Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (a World Heritage Site), India’, Forest Policy and Economics, 2001, pp. 2, 355–365. 23 Donald Ritchie, ‘Foreword’, in J. Jeffrey and G. Edwall (eds), Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience, Boston: University Press of America, 1994, p. vi. 24 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 178–179. 25 Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. 26 A. Gold and B. Gujar, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 27 Personal communication, Uday Chandra, 2012. 28 ‘In 1832, Captain Ouseley, Assistant Agent at Hoshangabad, climbed to Pachmarhi and collected geological and botanical specimens, probably for

Dispossessing memory 173 the first time. Dr Jerdon, a surgeon, visited the plateau in 1852. But it was not until after 1854 – when the entire territory of Nagpur escheated to the Crown – that British officers started visiting Pachmarhi more frequently. Major Snow, Deputy Commissioner of Chhindwara, walked across the hills to Pachmarhi from Delakhari in April of 1856; Snow was followed soon after by J.E. Medlicott, a geological surveyor who also reported (not very favourably) about the suitability of Pachmarhi for establishing a sanitarium for British troops’. All this is worth chronicling only to correct the completely mistaken notion that Captain James Forsyth in 1862 was the first British officer to visit Pachmarhi. He went there in 1862, and he was far from being the first. Pradip Krishen, ‘The Satpura National Park’, unpublished report, 2011, p. 15. 29 In the early nineteenth century, the Pachmarhi region also became a refuge for the Pindaris, so-called bandits, who were a scourge to the British in their early forays into establishing dominance over Central India. As the EPCO, ‘the Nodal Agency on behalf of Govt of Madhya Pradesh for Implementation of Management Action Plan’ for Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, describes: ‘This land was racked by much unrest due to the tensions between Marathas and Moguls and was ransacked by Pindaris and renegade soldiers. Around 1818, with the advent of British rule and administration, the Pindaris were liquidated’. The EPCO also states that ‘BRs are . . . special environments for both people and the nature [sic] and are living examples of how human beings and nature can co-exist while respecting each others’ needs’. EPCO, ‘Projects: Domestic projects – Biosphere Reserves’, 2011. www.epco.in/epco_projects_domestic_biosphere.php. 30 Walter Hamilton, The East-India Gazetteer, 2nd ed., vol. 1, London: Allen, 1828, p. 619. 31 When the British executed the Gond Raja of Jabalpore by cannon for his part in the ‘mutiny’ in September 1857, the annexation of Central India was nearly complete. This Raj Gond kingdom in Jabulpore, said to have been founded by kshatriyas who married with local ‘aborigines’, had survived from 1180 to 1857. Lyall, Gazetteer, p. 216; Henry H. Presler, ‘Patronage for Public Religious Institutions in India’, Numen, 1973, 20(2): 116–124. 32 ‘Working plan report of the Bori Forests in the Hosh. Dt’., p. 4. Reg. no. 15, s.no. 235, fn.1–2, 1897, bn.9. Madhya Pradesh State Archives (MPSA). 33 James Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India: Notes on Their Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History, and Sports, London: Chapman and Hall, 1871, pp. 80–81. 34 J.C. Doveton, Progress Report of Forest Administration in the Central Provinces, 1876–77, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1877. Forms D & F (insets with no page numbers) clearly list Bori, est. 1864, as the oldest Reserve Forest in the Central Provinces. 35 ‘Proposals in connection with the proposed appointment of cantonment magistrate at Pachmarhi’. Home, Jud (A), July 1874, no. 81–88. National Archives of India (NAI). 36 ‘Transfer of certain Lands to Thakur Gharab Singh in exchange for the Pachmarhi Plateau’. Home, Jud (B), July 1874, no. 191. NAI. Question By Court: ‘You quite understand that I can make no promise about this, that I can only tender Rs. 23,916 and 1 anna, and you accept that tender in full compensation of all your rights, titles and interests in the land included within the boundary line painted red on the map now made over to you

174  Ezra Rashkow which we both agree is to be held by the measurement as made under the Act to contain 14,580 acres’.   Reply: ‘I am quite content with the tender in rupees, all I ask is that as a favour, I may get the land instead’. The Thakur did eventually receive noncontiguous and far less valuable land in the plains of Hoshangabad. 37 Home, Jud (B), July 1874, S of AOH 23/6. NAI. Said Mr Ellis of the R&A dept: ‘The place is worthless now if it becomes valuable, it would be the result of our expending capital on it. Had I lived 2000 years ago, I should have had no hesitation in purchasing even with my present knowledge, the site of London, from a British Chief for 2 swords and a shield. I should have seen no injustice in this. I quite agree with Mr Bayley that the terms are not too liberal, but I am unable to adopt Mr Howell’s view of the moral iniquity. I mean inequity, involved in the transaction. I expect that from his point of view the Thaqur has got a precious good bargain’. 38 NAI, Home, Jud (A), July 1874, no. 81–88, ‘Proposals in connection with the proposed appointment of cantonment magistrate at Pachmarhi’. 39 F.N. MacNamara, Report on the Analysis of Potable Waters of Cantonments in the Bengal Presidency, Calcutta: Office of Superintendent to Government Printing, 1869, p. 31. 40 See Archana Prasad, ‘Political Ecology of Swidden Cultivation’, Tools and Tillage, 1995, 7(4): 206-230, and A. Prasad, ‘The Baiga: Survival Strategies and Local Economy in Colonial Central Provinces’, Studies in History, December 1998, 14(2): 325-348. 41 G.F. Pearson, Progress Report of Forest Administration in the Central Provinces, 1863–64, Calcutta: Public Works Department, 1865, p. 84. 42 Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India, pp. 83–84. 43 Tiger Task Force, Joining the Dots, p. 3. http://projecttiger.nic.in/ TTF2005/pdf/full_report.pdf 44 GOI, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, New Delhi, No. 17014/4/2005-S7M (Pt.) of 03.06.2005, p. 3 (my emphasis). 45 GOI, The Scheduled Tribes (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill, no. 158 of 2005, p. 1. 46 Valmik Thapar quoted in Ramachandra Guha, ‘Ecology for the People’, The Telegraph of Calcutta, 14 November 2005. 47 Report on the National Seminar on The Scheduled Tribes and Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006: Problems Encountered in Implementation and Ways to Overcome Them’ Organized by Council for Social Development on 26–27 April 2010. 48 Lovleen Bhullar, ‘The Indian Forest Rights Act 2006: A Critical Appraisal’, Law Environment and Development Journal, 2008, 4(1): 20–34. 49 In terms of Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) for resettlement, along with other similar studies in the region my work has found that while, since 2006, consent to move has been mostly freely given, villagers have not always been fully informed. Furthermore, as Sekar writes, ‘forest villagers in favor of relocation emphasized how the social and economic costs of remaining in the forest had become greater due to the relocation of neighboring villages’ as well as because of mounting pressure to relocate. Nitin Sekar, ‘Tigers, Tribes, and Bureaucrats: The Voluntariness and Socioeconomic Consequences of Village Relocations From Melghat Tiger Reserve, India’, Regional Environmental Change, August 2016, 16(1): 111.

Dispossessing memory 175 50 Ezra Rashkow, ‘Idealizing Inhabited Wilderness: A Revision to the History of Indigenous Peoples in National Parks’, History Compass, 2014, 12(10): 818–832. 51 Ezra Rashkow, ‘Making Subaltern Shikaris: Histories of the Hunted in Colonial Central India’, South Asian History and Culture, 2014, 5(3): 292–313. 52 Verrier Elwin, The Baiga, London: J. Murray, 1939, pp. 515–517. 53 Verrier Elwin, Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 291–292. 54 ‘Tribal People Illegally Evicted From “Jungle Book” Tiger Preserve’, Survival International News, 2014. www.survivalinternational.org/news/10631 55 For an earlier usage of the ‘struggle for survival’ rhetorical in India, see Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 56 Even when putting aside for the moment all of the thorny questions of how to assess the criteria by which to measure the threat of extinction for a human population, the Gond population by all measures is presently expanding, not contracting. 57 Arun Agrawal and Kent Redford, ‘Conservation and Displacement: An Overview’, Conservation and Society, 2009, 7(1): 3. 58 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe, London: Chatto and Windus, 1965, p. 77. 59 G.N. Devy, A Nomad Called Thief, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006, pp. 70, 97–104. 60 Ibid., p. 95. 61 Here I borrow the idea of history in the service of life from Nietzsche’s 1878 essay ‘On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life’ where he writes, ‘To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditation (trans. R.J. Hollingdale), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 62 Jacob Juhl, Clay Routledge, Jamie Arndt, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, ‘Fighting the Future With the Past: Nostalgia Buffers Existential Threat’, Journal of Research in Personality, 2010, 44: 309–314. 63 Cf. Tariq Thachil, Elite Parties, Poor Voters: How Social Services Win Votes in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 64 For the article that coined the concept of a ‘wicked problem’, see Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, Policy Sciences, 1973, 4: 155–169.

Part 2

Colonial encounters I Encounters with regional governance

8 Heroinism and its weapons Women power brokers in early modern Bhopal Richard B. Barnett

Heroine: 1. a woman admired and emulated for her achievements and qualities 2. the principal female character in a literary or dramatic work; 3. (In mythology and folklore) a woman of superhuman qualities and often semidivine origin, in particular one whose dealings with the gods were the subject of ancient Greek myths and legends. – OED

The literature on women’s history of colonial and postcolonial India continues to grow rapidly, enriched by wide-ranging methodological and theoretical debates.1 But because the overwhelming majority of these works focus on the modern era, the student of late precolonial India does not enjoy such a developed literature, since the problematics, assumptions, and even source materials are not only situationally different, but far less familiar.2 Vast materials on precolonial women await exploration, about regional regimes, political and economic adjustment, cultural redefinition and creativity, military adventurism, and resistance to the new European presence. Early modern history may have been just as gendered as colonial and postcolonial, but there is no consensus on how constrained or emancipated its women actors actually were. In contrast either to the highly questionable stereotype of the Golden Age of Gender Equality in Vedic India, or to that of the assertive, professional or owning-class reformers of the colonial period, the view of women in the 18th and early 19th centuries seems limited to two extremes: either they were brazen courtesans, or voiceless, unseen nonentities rustling within the latticed corridors of the zenána, the women’s quarters. There is an unmet demand for evidence-based, de-romanticised assessments of women and their arenas in the period between empires and after. What follows is thus meant as a partial and tentative – but contextualised – assessment of roles that a few women managed to play during this formative

180  Richard B. Barnett period. This was a time when, although Indian political autonomy was no doubt eroding, region by region, Indian elites outside British territories still enjoyed a great deal of cultural, political, and psychological autonomy, within which many Indian women were testing not only the changing limits on their power and selfhood, but ways to expand and even transcend these limits. I will focus on an anomaly in South Asian history: an entire dynasty of five women rulers, in Bhopal, Central India. Their roles were, as we will see, fascinating, and because they spanned more than five generations of rule, including the transition from 18th-century autonomy to a subsidiary alliance with the English East India Company, they were atypical. Whereas early modern India had dozens if not hundreds of women power brokers, in as many distinct circumstances with as many unique resources at their disposal, these women of Bhopal were exceptional in the alacrity they showed in invading the spaces of opportunity arising in the period between empires.3 This essay attempts to capture and assess the means whereby they clambered into roles of power and crossed gender boundaries in the exercise of it, both during a time of relative independence, and the later era of British influence and interference.

The long century of women’s rule in Bhopal Bhopal, in Central India, was small, relatively poor, and frequently troubled by its neighbours. Ruled by a dynasty begun in 1720 by Orakzai Pashtun military entrepreneurs rather than the more typical Turani or Irani aristocrats, it was not a successor state at all, but arose on a modest niche of highly strategic terrain.4 The East India Company only gradually took more than a polite interest in its affairs, but by 1818 had decided that its strategic location, next to Maratha-held Gwalior and Indore, and their clients, deserved a political agent, and a subsidiary alliance (a written agreement between the British and a regional ruler promising protection and mutual assistance, in exchange for a revenue grant to the former from the latter, to support a British-commanded unit of soldiers). Unlike Hyderabad, Awadh, or Mysore, Bhopal does not stand as one of the great success stories of the period, but its distinctiveness lies in the fact that, for most of its two-plus centuries of existence, its most powerful figures were a series of five women who, in unique ways, came to exert a remarkable degree of political, military, administrative, diplomatic, and cultural influence, often against formidable odds, especially including dissidents within the realm, and foreign aggression from outside it. Starting with the assertion over the state’s affairs by Mamola Begam, who had not even been born Muslim, but converted as an adult, these women defied one faction after another of ambitious Pashtun elites, as well

Heroinism and its weapons 181 as their own husbands, and occasionally even the East India Company. The question of the alleged role of the Shari’ah Law, which forbids women even from leading communal prayers, much less meddling in affairs of state, arises here, as well as the means by which these women managed to exert such sustained control over precarious institutions and often capricious political interests. I regard such women’s roles as a sign of pragmatism and vitality, not effeteness, for they were by definition members of ruling families, either wives or daughters, whom male-dominated political core groups chose to retain in power, often in opposition not only to male heirs, but also to the British who almost always backed male heirs, however incompetent. Not only did no ruler of Bhopal ever fight the Company (being the only princely state or subsidiary ally with that distinction), but several rendered assistance to it in numerous episodes. Nonetheless, there was frequent tension and jostling for advantage between them and the agents of the Raj. It was ironic to hear the British political agent at Bhopal, as well as various Governors-General, repeatedly cite the Shari’ah Law against the rule of these women, but it remained an argument that did not succeed, because these women mustered their resources and moved into the political vacuums left by their living or dead husbands or fathers. As with the Awadh Begams, those of Bhopal seemed to be appalled by the political and moral incompetence of most of their male relatives, and took steps to save the dynasty time and again, including going into battle.

Maaji Mamola Bibi (de facto r. 1742–1794) Yaar Muhammad Khan, son of founder Dost Muhammad Khan, is credited with having ruled Bhopal from 1723 to 1758, during a period of contention and challenge. He married a Rajput woman in 1740, who however quickly rose to great eminence in the zanana, to the extent that her favourite among Yaar Muhammad’s sons, Faiz Muhammad Khan, her stepson, was named heir. Known also as Mamola Bai and Maaji Sahiba (Venerable Mother), she seemed to dominate both husband and his heir, so that when the former died, and the latter was only 11 years old, she was recognised as regent, even though she was not his mother. More importantly, she sent an army of Pashtun regulars against the late Nawab’s brother, who was challenging the succession, and upon it being repulsed, quickly hired a mercenary force of Hindu ascetics (Gosains) to combine with the surviving Afghan troops and force the challenger to renounce his claim.5 The relationship she had with the new Nawab, Faiz Muhammad, is not clearly portrayed in the sources. He was not only unusually tall (2.3 metres) and somewhat ungainly (his hands reached below his knees), but somewhat of a hermit, being shy and self-effacing. He left the confines of the palace

182  Richard B. Barnett only once, to join the siege of Bhilsa, and it being successful soon after his arrival, he acquired the reputation of a saint. When he came of age to rule, he meekly announced that he would be only a titular nawab, and that she should continue to rule in his name. He retired into seclusion, dying alone and childless in 1796 at age 49, of severe oedema leading to cardiopulmonary failure.6 The brother of the late Nawab, Hayaat Muhammad Khan, was expected to succeed him. Even though this brother shared the Nawab’s reclusive, mystical tendencies, his influence had grown during Faiz Muhammad’s later years. But Mamola Bai had prepared for this as well. Hayaat Muhammad had adopted four non-Muslim orphans in their infancy and brought them up as educated Muslims: a Gond, renamed Faulad Khan, descended from forest dwellers; a low-caste Ahir, renamed Jamshed Khan; and two formerly Brahmin boys, now named Islam Khan and Chhote Khan. Mamola Bai volunteered to rear Chhote Khan as her own son, since she was childless too. When Hayaat’s choice as diwan, Faulad Khan, was mysteriously assassinated, she managed to have Chhote Khan replace him, and had to defend him with violence when another of Faiz Muhammad Khan’s widows, Bahu (‘Daughter-in-law’) Begam, attempted a coup in favour of two of the founder’s grandsons. Thus Chhote Khan and Mamola Bai ruled while Hayaat Muhammad reigned, both showing remarkable enterprise, flexibility, cooperativeness, and creativity over the course of several decades. The urban landscape of Bhopal slowly became a proper capital city, including the building of a 300-metre-long dam, still intact and used today, across the small Halati River, which formed the Lower Lake. Chhote Khan lived up to Mamola Bai’s expectations, as one example will show: in a departure from the pattern of routine interregional warfare, he met a serious Pindari incursion by capturing 400 of the attacking force, but instead of executing or imprisoning them, or holding them for ransom, he tactfully gave each of them a rupee, a pagri (turban), and a stern lecture, then set them free; this generous but risky move ended Pindari raids for many years.7 An admirer of the Delhi-based Sufi scholar Shah Abdul Aziz, Chhote Khan sent him Rs 500, an invitation to visit, and a Persian-speaking parrot.8 Alas, he never came. While assessing the rule of the five begams, a caveat about our primary sources: Much of the history of Bhopal is written from a special point of view, namely that of the begams themselves, including entire books by them, and must be treated cautiously. The major sources are overlapping in coverage, assertive in tone, and often narrated in the first person. Also, most Urdu primary accounts were translated by British political agents

Heroinism and its weapons 183 (they probably supervised qualified munshis), indicating trust and close relationships with the begams. Other Urdu works – there are no Persianlanguage accounts – are written by members of the educated elite close to the Court, so none of them is overtly critical or even sceptical about the roles or performance of the five major begams. The overall tone is matterof-fact, descriptive, thorough, respectful, and occasionally nostalgic.9

Nawab Gauhar Begam, aka Begam Qudsia (r. 1819–1837) However impressive the performance of Mamola Bai (which for me earns her a place in the succession of women rulers), she was not, except by her daring example, part of the hereditary matriarchal dynasty of Bhopal’s 19th century. The founder of the family-based portion of the dynasty was the daughter of Bhopal’s fifth nawab, Ghaus Muhammad Khan, during whose early reign (1806–1807) a cadet branch of the family, led by Wazir Muhammad Khan, took over the apparatus of power, defending it successfully against repeated Pindari and Maratha invasions. It was his son, Nazar Muhammad Khan, who assumed the role of heir-apparent in 1816, marrying Begam Qudsia, then 17 years of age, the next year. Their happy and celebrated marriage produced one child – a daughter, the future Sikandar Begam.10 Begam Qudsia’s bliss was shattered, however, the next year, when her eight-year-old brother, alone in a room with the Nawab, playfully grabbed the Nawab’s pistol and mortally wounded him. Company officials, who had just negotiated a treaty with the young and dynamic Nawab, upon whom moreover they had justifiably pinned hopes for the renewal and consolidation of the state, promptly launched a detailed investigation, and concluded that the death was indeed accidental – the traumatised boy’s story held up well, and this verdict was never challenged by any Pashtun faction. It would be easy for us to suspect the widow, but she utterly lacked a motive. She did not stand to inherit power. She was the Nawab’s only wife – indeed, he had resisted family suggestions that he take a second wife. Moreover, as proof of his loyalty to her, he banished concubines as well as young female servants from the zenána. Her grief was so thorough that she soon miscarried the second child they had conceived.11 The Pashtun nobles and officers of the late Nawab could not agree on a successor. An 1818 treaty with the East India Company had guaranteed the throne to the Nawab and his heirs. The solution urged especially by the highest officers of the state, the senior most of whom was a Christian named Hakim Shahzad Masih, was that the late Nawab’s nephew, a boy

184  Richard B. Barnett named Munir Muhammad Khan, should succeed upon coming of age, that this boy should further be betrothed to the late Nawab’s infant daughter, Sikandar Begam, and that until this time Begam Qudsia should act as regent. This arrangement seemed to work for nine years, while the Begam and a loyal platoon of officials carried out statecraft and defensive wars. But the yet-unmarried heir-apparent, Munir Muhammad Khan, was slowly surrounded by intrigue and special interests, and started recruiting an army to take over the state violently. After extensive consultations with British officials, who preferred not to intervene beyond writing letters to the teenaged pretender, the Begam had no choice but to suppress his rebellion by force, which took a week. Munir Muhammad Khan was treated with clemency, but the Begam forced him to resign his claim in favour of his younger brother, Jahangir Muhammad Khan, who became her daughter’s new fiancé, marrying her in 1835.12 It was at this time that Begam Qudsia, after spending the early part of her life in the strictest pardah, decided to abandon the veil in order to rule more assertively. She said that ruling in pardah was like working in the dark, besides which there were threats on her life, and she needed her peripheral vision. Not wanting to offend public sentiment abruptly, however, she first asked her two brothers and her ministers how this would be received in the realm. They not only supported her, but cited cases from among ancient ruling families of women who had been unveiled and who held darbars (courtly audiences). She carefully engineered a period of transition, during which she learned how to ride a horse. More importantly, she developed an argument that the demands of pardah in India exceeded the requirements of Islamic Law and tradition, and instructed her daughter to abandon the veil as well, since it would soon be her turn to take charge of the regime.13 However, the stress, resistance, and tension of the situation facing the Begam started to get to her. Company officials, all the way up to Lord Bentinck, condemned her pardah announcement as indecent and unIslamic, seeing in it a portent of her increasing intransigence and refractoriness. In a fit of temper she pulled a tactic out of a familiar South Asian elite archive, and claimed that she wished to go to Mecca on pilgrimage and that the governments concerned would just have to wait for her return. Her family’s and her ministers’ dissuasive attempts having failed, she set off on foot towards the political agent’s house (in Sehore, 16 km to the southwest) one night in heavy rain, accompanied by only one footsoldier, and marched seven km before camping on the veranda of a merchant. Met by a stern message from the political agent, she was finally persuaded to return to the capital, but not before decking the hapless soldier with a single punch in her rage.14

Heroinism and its weapons 185 At this point we might pause and comment on the motivations of the principle players in this growing confrontation. The Begam had grown accustomed to ruling Bhopal, with the help of a small number of intensely loyal officials. She was also enormously protective of her daughter, possibly even controlling and overbearing, as in the tendency she had of accusing her daughter of siding with her husband.15 Jahangir Muhammad Khan, her daughter’s fiancé, although aware of the conditions and requirements of the situation, nonetheless had no experience beyond that of an interested outsider, and the people who now surrounded and controlled him had only one overriding ambition, namely to share in the power that had been denied them under the Begam’s regency. He may well have felt suffocated by his new situation, a symptom of which was the Begam’s insistence that she adopt him, in a verbal campaign so intense that his father, the troublesome backer of Munir’s rebellion, was forced to renounce his fatherhood in writing, stating that the Begam was now Jahangir’s master. The Begam wished to tutor her new son (also son-in-law) in the arts of governance during an indefinite period of apprenticeship, which included what must have been humiliating lessons from a tutor appointed by the political agent. There was thus no possibility of any affection whatever between heirapparent Sikandar Begam and her bridegroom; she remained fiercely loyal to her domineering mother even after the wedding, and he lived in a puddle of resentment. The Company, in a series of consultations between the political agent and higher officials all the way up to the Governor-General, were becoming increasingly exasperated as this crisis persisted, and seemed to want to wash their hands of the entire thing. While acknowledging in writing that her rule had been superior to most princes in the neighbourhood, they stood idly by as Jahangir Khan raised a substantial army nearby the political agent’s cantonment at Sehore.16 They also launched a public relations assault on the Begam’s morals, including the accusation that she had allowed a minister to ride with her on the same elephant, a charge which soon forced her to sack him.17 The Company seemed to delight in accusing both her and her daughter of indiscretions unbecoming of Muslim noblewomen, a process that helped fuel Jahangir Muhammad Khan’s claim that, since the Begam had clearly lost her reason, she should be replaced. Matters came to a climax in June 1837, when the Bhopal army, commanded by the Begam’s kayastha general, Raja Khushwaqt Rai, soundly defeated the forces collected by Jahangir Muhammad Khan, who had to retreat into a fort at Ashta.18 At this point, the political agent finally intervened and, with the Governor-General’s backing, forced her to abdicate in October, and to retire within Bhopal’s original capital, Islamnagar, about 12 km north of Bhopal City. Properties worth £12,000 per year were set aside for her support, and a pledge obtained from the new nawab to

186  Richard B. Barnett secure her safety.19 Tellingly, Sikandar Begam chose to live in the relatively neglected fort at Islamnagar with her mother and infant daughter, rather than with her husband, the new nawab, in Bhopal City. We are told that she nursed the baby girl herself, a somewhat uncommon practice among ashraf women in India.20 One of the most partisan accounts reveals a possible reason for the young bride to distance herself: in 1838, six months pregnant, she is said to have awakened just as her husband stood over her with a drawn sword. The resulting outcry allowed her to slip out of the palace unharmed.21

Sikandar Begam (r. 1844–1868) After seven unremarkable years of rule, Jahangir Muhammad Khan died at age 27, of what probably were pharmaceutical causes, but the chronicles record that he had a chronic bowel disease. The Begam and her daughter, knowing his illness was terminal, moved back to Bhopal City. He had written a will, naming his illegitimate son as heir, but the political agent and his superiors did an abrupt about-face and declared the infant Sikandar Begam as heir, naming Begam Qudsia’s brother, Faujdar Muhammad Khan, as regent. He resigned after three years, however, and Sikandar Begam, advised regularly by Qudsia, took full power in 1844.22 Her rule was assertive, brisk, and productive, eliminating the regime’s debt and reordering its revenue and military administrations. Her daughter, after years of the family searching for a suitable elite husband for her, finally was able to marry, but her bridegroom, army commander Baki Muhammad Khan, was to become only a titular nawab in his turn. This development, given the coercive resources at his disposal, is a convenient indication that the matriarchal dynasty had by now achieved a safe degree of legitimation among both elites and commoners. Still devoted to her mother, who had long since taught her finance, revenue, riding, and shooting,23 she seemed quite happy to have her mother manage the state as long as she wished. In 1859, a minor but threatening conflict occurred when Shah Jahan Begam came of age (i.e. 21), but waived her right to rule; her mother pleaded, but she adamantly refused, so the Company had to intervene again and redeclare Sikandar Begam nawab, and her daughter, the heir-apparent. Sikandar Begam was both savvy and popular as a ruler. She gave the British just enough help during the Revolt of 1857–1858 to acquire considerably more territory, much gratitude, and a title. She cut deals with the Great India Peninsula Railway, which had to go through her state, to enrich the treasury; she sponsored rest houses and subsidies for pilgrims to Mecca; she provided free water to all of the city and suburbs through the Bhopal

Heroinism and its weapons 187 Water Works, set up fiscal controls that balanced the budget, and kept strict boundaries between public and crown accounts.24 All the while, the persistent Begam Qudsia, who lived until 1881, kept on writing strident memorials to British and state officials, arguing the case for women’s right to rule, staking out rhetorical territory for Shahjahan Begam and future matriarchal generations. She named not only the Queen of Sheba and the Holy Prophet’s junior wife Aisha, who led Medinan and Meccan troops into battle; but also Shujarat ud-dar, a descendant of Salah ud-Din in Egypt; Raziyya Sultana of Delhi; Chand Sultaana of Bijapur who defeated Mughal armies; and Ishkhatoon of the Atabeg dynasty in Shiraz. Needless to say, it did not help the British narrative for Queen Victoria to inherit the throne when she did. Even with a Queen Victoria, the British response was an increasingly feeble, and somewhat patronising, Islamist one.25 This eventually led to a British retreat, as the demand that the begams would have to turn over affairs of state to their husbands or other male relatives was abandoned. Unimpressed, Begam Qudsia unrelentingly continued her fusillade of memoranda and personal appeals.

Shah Jahan Begam (r. 1868–1901) and Sultan Jahan Begam (r. 1901–1926) These women were the last female rulers of Bhopal, and each stood in marked contrast to their predecessors in unique ways. Shah Jahan Begam (Figure 8.1) was a reactive, cultured, but somewhat passive ruler, sponsoring much cultural and literary and architectural activity while enjoying the fruits of her more dynamic mother’s rulership. In place of the mother’s austerity, she developed a pompous, indulgent, florid, and egotistical style, jauntily portrayed in her first portrait. This was expressed most vividly when she took a second husband in 1871, a man well below her station who had been her personal secretary. This caused her almost to be disowned not only by her grandmother, the livid Begam Qudsia, then age 70, but also the bluenoses of Victorian Indo-British society. She was slowly marginalised in Bhopal’s public life, many of the affairs of state being taken over by her remaining ministers. She died in 1901, to be succeeded by the last woman ruler of Bhopal, Sultan Jahan Begam, whose first task was to restore the finances of the state, which had been undermined by her mother’s and stepfather’s extravagances. She was hardened and embittered by four personal tragedies – the deaths of her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and Queen Victoria (to whom she referred as ‘my real mother’). She also lost her husband a few months after succeeding, and so she resolved to dedicate her life

188  Richard B. Barnett

Figure 8.1 The youthful Shah Jahan Begam. Source: Drawing by Chelsea Heil

to modernising the state, becoming in the process Bhopal’s most famous and admired ruler. Completely overhauling the judicial system, she also convened a legislative assembly and a state council, served during much of her reign as the Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, started building what is still the largest mosque in India, wrote or dictated more than

Heroinism and its weapons 189 50 books and pamphlets, including much of the history of the state, and invested heavily in women’s public health, education, and emancipation. In 1918, she instituted free and compulsory primary education throughout the state. She abdicated in 1926, weary of office, in favour of her son, thus ending the long century of women’s rule in Central India. Moving to London, she abandoned pardah, and became a strident advocate of women’s rights, dying finally in 1930, at the age of 72.26

The legacy of women’s rule in Central India Bhopal’s matriarchal dynasty has until recently been relatively ignored in the mainstream historical literature of early modern and colonial India. The state lasted a long time, from 1720 to 1954, but even though it was small and relatively unglamorous, its governance and public culture are instructive for several reasons. It is a case study of the legitimation of women rulers, charisma only slowly becoming legal and then dynastic, in a cultural context which devalues women in almost every arena of everyday life. Bhopal’s history shows to a remarkable degree how one generation of women rulers takes care of succeeding ones, through nurturing, training, and an assertive, almost pugnacious idiom of public relations. More remarkably, it reflects the flexibility and pragmatism of conciliatory statecraft and social sensitivity in an environment of uncertainty and enormous stress. These ruling matriarchs did not rule as men would; they had in fact to meet challenges and attacks from male insurgents, rebels, competitors, and the British Raj itself. They realised that their exertions, including considerable ideological efforts, had to outdo and outwit those of their male detractors and attackers, even at the level of the frequently demanding, intervening, and for the most part patriarchal, imperial government. Tellingly, and in contrast to the practice of the many female power brokers in Awadh, Rohilkhand, the Maratha Confederacy, and elsewhere, whose visages even in miniature paintings are extremely rare (and absent in Awadh), every portrait of Bhopal’s women dynasts, from Begam Qudsia to Sultan Jahan Begam, shows them boldly facing the camera or artist, without the veil. Barbara Metcalf points to a month-long period during which Sikandar Begam openly invited a British Army photographer, James Waterhouse, to preserve images of her, her nobility, and her subjects, carefully posed and staged in regal, post-Mughal settings. She used this to assert her status as a female sovereign within the tradition of imperial power and glamour.27 Sultan Jahan Begam’s own words mirror the ethos of her heritage: The writer, from a study of the histories of the world and from her knowledge of her own dynasty, has come to the conclusion that

190  Richard B. Barnett administrative capacity is more inherent in women than in men, and that nature specially intended them for rulers. Men are given bodily strength to earn their living and to enable them to fight in battles. Women have been granted the qualities of mercy, sympathy, fidelity and firmness. These render them specially suitable as rulers of kingdoms though no doubt education and careful upbringing are necessary for both sexes. Given these, women are superior to men.28 More generally, how are the begams of Bhopal treated in the history and literature of the period? In the Urdu sources, they are depicted matter-offactly as rational actors responding to challenges. There is very little male shame involved, no Jeremiads about gender boundaries, no rhetoric about a crisis of masculinity. It seems that the writers of an India in crisis coolly accepted heroinism as a welcome complement to heroism, even though both were seen to be in short supply when faced with the overwhelming power of the encroaching farangí. The Urdu poetic genre of the shahr-i áshob, or ‘ruined city’, lamenting Mughal decline and the dispersal of Delhi’s service gentry and nobility, openly notes that men, as humans in great distress, are weak, but gender guilt as such is absent from the contemporary source materials.29 This tendency of business-as-usual historiography has persisted through earlier monographs in English, including the authoritative Gazetteer of Bhopal.30 It is replicated in the main scholarly assessment of the Bhopal Court’s patronage of Urdu.31 Other monographs, following this tendency, seem to shun feminist theory or narratives of liberation concerning these begams.32 A welcome exception and corrective to this trend, however, has emerged in the last decade, which infuses an otherwise matter-of-fact narrative with a more nuanced and annotated awareness of the societal constraints on women’s roles, behaviours, and statuses. Canadian scholar Siobhan LambertHurley, currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Nottingham-Trent, has emerged as the Anglophone world’s reigning authority on the Begams of Bhopal, having written her PhD thesis, ‘Contesting Seclusion: The Political Emergence of Muslim Women in Bhopal, 1901–1930’ at the University of London in 1998. Editing and annotating Abida Sultaan’s profoundly revealing Memoirs of a Rebel Princess (OUP, 2004) soon followed. Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal is an expanded version of her dissertation.33 Lambert-Hurley’s scholarship not only brings the Bhopal begams into sharper focus, foregrounding the daily diaries that some of them kept, supplemented by a full range of primary sources in both Urdu and ­English. Her ongoing cascade of books and articles elevates the gender-based discourse on the historical meanings of this dynasty. Geraldine Forbes’s

Heroinism and its weapons 191 succinct categorisation of feminist historiography into three progressively sophisticated categories can be invoked to clarify this recent body of work. At the most elementary level is ‘additive history’, which reexamines the usual source materials to extricate and document the roles of women actors. Then there is ‘genderised history’, which invokes feminist perspectives, but only to make gender distinctions a basic feature of historical analysis. Finally there is ‘contributory history’, which focuses on female functioning and successes, while ‘recognising how patriarchy impedes women’s actions’.34 This remarkable dynasty of women rulers has finally been re-evaluated in a manner that accords them a more nuanced, successful, and analytically potent position in the history of early modern and modern South Asian history.

Notes 1 For example, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Gender in South Asia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013; Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (eds), Women and Social Reform in Modern India, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008; Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities, London: Routledge, 2000; Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006; Durbha Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Ayesha Shahid, Silent Voices, Untold Stories: Women Domestic Workers in Pakistan and their Struggle for Empowerment, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; Sue Morgan (ed.), The Feminist History Reader, New York: Routledge, 2006; Taj Hashmi, Women and Islam in Bangladesh: Beyond Subjection and Tyranny, London: MacMillan, 2000, and Patricia Uberoi, Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family and Popular Culture in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. See also the journals Manushi and The Journal of South Asian Women’s Studies. 2 Major exceptions include Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), Women Writing in India: 600BC to the Present, vol. 1, 600 BC to the Early Twentieth Century, New York: Feminist Press, 1991; Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, and Gavin Hambly (ed.), Women in the Medieval Islamic World, New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.   Let me here express my appreciation for the perceptive views shared by the hundreds of students who have passed through my South Asia gender class over the past quarter century, and for the many colleagues who have helped me sharpen and focus the materials for this course. 3 A detailed account of political intervention by Maratha women is Robbins Burling, The Passage of Power: Studies in Political Succession, New York: Academic Press, 1974. See also R.B. Barnett on the elite women of Awadh, in ‘Embattled Begams: Women as Power Brokers in Early Modern India’,

192  Richard B. Barnett in Gavin Hambly (ed.), Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage and Piety, New York: St. Martin’s, 1998, pp. 521–536. 4 Bhopal is now the sprawling capital of Madhya Pradesh. According to its earliest census in 1868, which was undertaken by the Court at the urging of British officials, a population of 900,000 (about that of present-day Birmingham) occupied an area of 23,300 sq. km. (about twice the size of Yorkshire, or equal to the state of Vermont). The best Urdu account of its history is Abid Ali Vajdi al-Hussaini, Taarikh-i Riyaasat-i Bhopal, Bhopal: Bhopal Buk Haus, 1988. Secondary accounts include William Hough, A History of the Bhopal Principality in Central India, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1845; Syed Afshaq Ali (comp. and ed.), Bhopal Past and Present, 2nd ed., New Delhi: D.K. Publishers, 1981; Charles Eckford Luard and Mir Dabir Syed Qudrat Ali, Gazetteer of Bhopal, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908; and Abidah Sultanah, ‘The Begams of Bhopal’, History Today, October 1980, 30: 30–35. See also note 28, below. 5 Hough, History of the Bhopal Principality, pp. 7–9. For the roles of ascetic freebooters in early modern India, see William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 6 Hough, History of the Bhopal Principality, pp. 10–11; Lt-Col WilloughbyOsbourne [political agent at Bhopal], ‘Historical Sketch of the Reigning Family of Bhopal’, Appendix to Nawab Sikandar Begam, A Pilgrimage to Mecca, London: Allen, 1870; reprint ed. Calcutta: Spink, 1906. 7 Pindaris were multi-communal, irregular military freebooters, usually encouraged by the Marathas but capable of independent campaigning, who lived on plunder and ransom, largely in Central India. The British assembled an army of 120,000 in 1817–1818, forcing the Maratha rulers of Gwalior to stop encouraging them. See B.B. Ghosh, British Policy Towards the Pathans and the Pindaris in Central India, 1805–1818, Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1966, and M.P. Roy, Origin, Growth and Suppression of the Pindaris, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd., 1973. 8 Muhammad Irfan, ‘The Creator of Lower Lake’, Appendix 8 in Ashfaq Ali (ed.), pp. lxxi–lxxiii. 9 Sultan Jahan Begam [r.1901–26], Hayaat-i Qudsi [A Life of Nawab Gauhar Begam, Alias Begam Qudsia (r.1819–37 as Regent)] (trans. W.S. Davis) [Political Agent, Bhopal], London: Kegan Paul, 1918; Hafiz Ubaidullah Khan, Hayaat-i Sikandari [Biography of Nawab Sikandar Begam (r.1847– 68)], Bhopal: Daftar-i taarikh, gavarnment-i Bhopal, 1930; Nawab Shahjahan Begam [r.1868–1901], Taj ul-Iqbal Taarikh-i Bhopal (trans. H.C. Barlow) [Political Agent, Bhopal, 1874–75], Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1876; Sultan Jahan Begam [r. 1901–26], Hayaat-i Shahjahani [Biography of Nawab Shahjahan Begam] (trans. B.Ghosal) [Supt. of Archeology, Bhopal], Bombay: Times Press, 1926; Sultan Jahan Begam, Gohur-i Iqbal: An Account of My Life, vol. 1 in English, London: John Murray, 1912; vol. 2 in Urdu (trans. Abdus Samad Khan), Bombay: Times Press, 1922; vol. 3 in Urdu (trans. C.H. Payne), Bombay: Times Press, 1927.   See also Muhammad Amin Marharvi, Begumaat-i Bhopal, Bhopal: Matba’ Sultani Riasat, 1918; and Major William Hough, A Brief History of Bhopal Principality in Central India, From the Period of Its Foundation, About 150 Years Ago, to the Present Time, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1845.

Heroinism and its weapons 193   Note: I am deeply grateful for the generous assistance of Hakim Syed Zillur Rahman, founder of Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Sciences, Aligarh, from whom I obtained several Urdu and translated sources on the history of Bhopal, his birthplace. 10 Willoughby-Osbourne, p. 148; Sultan Jahan Begam, Hayaat-i Qudsi [hereinafter cited as HQ], 18–22. 11 HQ, 22. 12 Willoughby-Osbourne, p. 148. 13 HQ, 104–107. Centuries of scholarship on the relevant Qur’anic verses in Surah ‘an-Nur’ (the Light) emphasise Allah’s command that both men and women observe strict modesty. There is no injunction to keep a woman’s face covered. Cf. Matthew 5:27–28. 14 Lancelot Wilkinson [political agent to Bhopal] to John Bax, resident at Indore, 17 May 1836, Bhopal Political Agency, General Branch [BPAG], Part I, 1845, file 2, Bhopal Central State Archives. 15 Ibid. 16 HQ, 68–80. 17 L. Wilkinson, BPAG I, 1845, file 2, Bhopal Central State Archives. 18 Kayasthas are a centuries-old clerical and administrative caste cluster in North India. 19 HQ, 81–88. 20 Sultan Jahan Begam, Hayaat-i Shahjahani [hereinafter cited as HS], 1. Royal women in Islamdom usually enlisted aankaas, or noble wet-nurses, for this duty. 21 Abida Sultaana, p. 33. 22 Willoughby-Osbourne, p. 149. 23 HS, 2–3. 24 Details of the state’s governance during this period of reform are crisply portrayed, without deferring to British influence, and using both CE and Hijri dates, in Hafiz Ubaidullah Khan’s chapter, ‘Nizam-i Hakumat’, pp. 190–96. Confirming details, in the same style, are available in Ghulam Saiyid Abid Ali Vajdi al-Hussaini, Taarikh-i Riyaasat-i Bhopal [History of the Bhopal State], Bhopal: Bhopal Buk Haus, 1988, pp. 66–101. 25 HQ, 99–103. 26 Abida Sultaan, p. xl. 27 Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Portraits of a Colonial Queen’, paper presented at the Simon Digby Memorial Conference, SOAS, 10 June 2014. 28 Hayaat-i Qudsi, pp. 102–103. 29 For this genre, see Carla R. Petievich, ‘Poetry of the Declining Mughals: The Shahr Ashob’, Journal of South Asian Literature, 1990, 25(1): 99–110; Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics, and Society in Early Modern India: Bihar, 1733–1820, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996, ch. 9; Fritz Lehmann, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Transition in India: Responses of Some Bihar Intellectuals’, unpublished PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1967; Fritz Lehmann, ‘Shah Ayat Allah “Jauhri” and His Shahr Ashob’, in Abadula Karima and Muhammad Enamul Haq (eds), Abdul Karim Sahitya-Visarad Commemoration Volume, Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1971, 73–82. 30 Charles Eckford Luard and Mir Dabir Syed Qudrat Ali, 1908. 31 Salim Hamid Rizvi, Urdu Adab ki Taraqqi men Bhopal ka Hissa [Bhopal’s Role in the Progress of Urdu Literature], n.p., 1965, 496pp.

194  Richard B. Barnett 32 See, for example, Claudia Preckel, Begams of Bhopal, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2000, and Shaharyar M. Khan, The Begams of Bhopal: A Dynasty of Women Rulers in Raj India, London: I.B. Tauris, 2000. 33 Abida Sultaan, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal, London: Routledge, 2007. She also edited and annotated Sikandar Begam’s journal of her pilgrimage to Mecca (originally published by W.H. Allen in London in 1870), as A Princess’s Pilgrimage, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 34 Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India [New Cambridge History of India, part IV.2], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 2.

9 Changing horses The administration of Sikkim, 1888–1918 Alex McKay

Between 1888 and 1889 when the British took over Sikkim, and 1918 when the Maharaja Tashi Namgyal was invested with full powers of internal administration, the ruling structures, economic systems, and racial composition of the Himalayan state of Sikkim were significantly transformed. The transition process was within certain established British colonial parameters and was thus broadly similar to that which occurred elsewhere on the frontiers of territory directly ruled by the British Government of India, although there was a distinct shift in the tone of the process after 1908 that clearly reflects individual agency. The transition process in the neighbouring region of Northeast India and its effects on the construction of Indian identity have been examined by Peter Robb in a foundational article that appeared in Modern Asian Studies in 1997. That article considered – among other issues – how personal ideologies effected those developments and in this article I shall discuss the process with particular reference to how two very different British officials exercised their power to shape the ‘structures and processes’ within Sikkim and how their ideological perspectives and personalities reshaped the state and its relations with the British colonial government.1 Prior to 1888–1889, the Himalayan state of Sikkim existed outside the nation-state system. It was ruled by a Buddhist king (Chogyal) and was under an undefined form of Tibetan suzerainty (with Tibet itself under the suzerainty of the Manchu emperor of China since the late 18th century). During the 19th century, however, Sikkim was increasingly drawn into the orbit of British India as the colonial power expanded its influence into the Himalayas. Relations between the two powers had developed as a result of the 1814–1816 Anglo-Nepali war when Sikkim allied itself with the British. They were consequently rewarded after British victory by the restoration of territory Sikkim had lost to Nepali expansion in the late 18th century. In return, however, Sikkim agreed – in theory – to British control over their foreign relations.

196  Alex McKay In 1835, the Chogyal agreed to cede control over what is now Darjeeling district to the British, who planned to develop a hill station there. Darjeeling then became a non-regulation district of Bengal. In return, the Chogyal was granted an annual allowance of 3,000 rupees, increased to Rs 6,000 in 1846.2 But relations between the two powers later deteriorated and British forces entered Sikkim in 1860, with the subsequent Treaty of Tumlong (1861) strengthening British influence over Sikkim at the expense of the Tibetans.3 British India was, however, increasingly concerned to establish relations with Tibet, and Sikkim offered the most direct access route from Calcutta to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. With the Tibetans refusing to even communicate with the British, Sikkim found itself caught between the two powers and tended to lean towards Tibet, its traditional protector. Prior to 1888, the British had not stationed officials in Sikkim and no Europeans were resident there, but in spring of that year British-Indian troops entered Sikkim and took over the administration, exiling the Chogyal to the Darjeeling district town of Kalimpong, where he was placed under house arrest. To administer Sikkim, the British appointed John Claude White as the Political Officer of Sikkim in May 1889. Political officers (or ‘Residents’), were appointed to supervise ‘Native’ or ‘Princely States’ outside British India and in many cases were effectively their rulers. That was the case with J.C. White, who had an unusual background for such an appointment. Born in India in 1853 and educated in Britain and Germany, he joined the Public Works Department in Bengal as an engineer in 1876 and had been employed in road-building in the Darjeeling region. He was thus of a very different background to most political officers, whose earlier service was in the much higher status ICS or the Indian Army. White owed his appointment to an absence of other candidates for the position, with most ambitious political officers seeking appointment on the north-west frontier or favouring the more cosmopolitan princely states such as Hyderabad or Baroda. The process by which the colonial government took over neighbouring states in India was a well-established one.4 An important initial part of that process was the building up of a body of information concerning the local state, not least the identification of alternative power sources there who could provide legitimate traditional authority under British overlordship if the existing leadership failed to ally itself with the British and follow their ‘advice’. In the case of Sikkim, diplomatic envoys to the Chogyal’s court such as J.W. Edgar, Deputy Commissioner in Darjeeling (1874), the LieutenantGovernors of Bengal (in 1875 and 1877), and Colman Macaulay, the Bengal Finance Secretary (1884), had enabled the identification of a coterie of leading Sikkimese who were potential allies of British rule. Macaulay, for

Changing horses 197 example, refers to ‘my old friend the Lasso Kazi’ and records his meeting with Kangsa Dewan and his brother Phodang Lama, all of whom were already well known to the British. He describes the brothers as ‘affable, shrewd and enlightened’, terms that implied their willingness to support British modernising projects. At a ‘confidential meeting’, Macaulay ‘asked them how a small council consisting of themselves, the Purba Dewan, Lama Tulku [i.e., Phodang Lama], and . . . with Kangsa as President at first, would work under the Raja. This suggestion gave them evident satisfaction. . . ’5 Lasso Kazi (Tonzang), whose ancestors had been ministers in Sikkim for eight generations, had been the Sikkimese representative (Vakil) in Darjeeling until 1887, and was well known to the British there. Khangsa Dewan (Lhundup) and the Phodang Lama (Karma Tenkyong) were brothers from an influential land-owning clan in southeastern Sikkim, with interests also in British Darjeeling. The Purba, or Shoe Dewan (Tokhang Kuzhyab Yarpas; hereafter Shoe Dewan) was an ally of theirs. These men were therefore potential British allies highly placed in Sikkimese society. Indeed when Macaulay met the Chogyal these men were attendant on the ruler, who told Macaulay that Khangsa Dewan was his most trusted adviser and Purba Dewan his second. The Chogyal did not mention Phodang Lama who, as the abbot of the powerful Phodang monastery was theoretically above worldly matters, but Macaulay described the Lama as ‘the ablest and most powerful of them all’ and noted that ‘he did not hesitate to interpose his own remarks during the interview’.6 When White took control of Sikkim and removed the Chogyal from the centre of power, he turned for local support to those aristocrats whose abilities had so recently been endorsed by the Chogyal but who had also been identified by the British as potential allies. Khangsa Dewan, the Phodang Lama, and Shoe Dewan switched their loyalties from the Chogyal to become White’s key allies. Western concepts of loyalty/disloyalty may not be appropriate here. The Sikkimese Chogyal ruled by consent of the aristocracy and in deciding with whom to ally each of the leading aristocrats would consider the interests of their own clan in the shifting political currents of the day. Whether to side with Tibet, the British, or the Chogyal was no simple matter. Many Sikkimese lacked understanding of the extent of British power and nationalism did not then exist in its modern form in Sikkim (or Tibet), while an ‘Indian’ identity was then entirely absent from this Tibetan Buddhist cultural realm. Although such individuals are far less prominent in British sources, the royal chronicle History of Sikkim7 records that many of the leading men in Sikkim did remain loyal to the Chogyal throughout the 1890s, notably the Bamiok, Dallam and Yangthang Kazis, along with the powerful Barphung clan. The price of opposition to the British was quickly made clear

198  Alex McKay to them. White imposed a series of economic and social strictures on these men and their clans, confining them to their estates, reducing the extent of those estates, and deliberately humiliating them. The Yangthang Kazi, for example, died while under arrest for leaving his confinement to attend to his elder wife’s funeral rites. The History indicates, however, that although the Chogyal had professed his trust in Phodang Lama and the Khangsa and Shoe Dewans during his meeting with Macaulay, there had actually been considerable tension at court and in the land over a policy supported by these men but opposed by the Chogyal and many of his supporters. The issue that divided them was the question of Nepali immigration.8 The indigenous population of Sikkim consisted of three groups. The Bhotias (now termed Lopo) were of (eastern) Tibetan origin, while the presence of the Lepcha and Limbu tribes predated the 17th-century arrival of significant elements of the Bhotias. These categories were blurred, Bhotia and Lepcha peoples in particular had intermarried, although early British ethnographers constructed the Lepcha as a distinct ‘peace-loving, forest-dwelling, hunter-gatherer’ culture. But there is no evidence for any Nepali population, although the traditional territory of the Limbu straddled what became the Sikkimese-Nepali frontier. British India had formed an alliance of interests with Nepal after the conclusion of hostilities between the powers in the early 19th century and British officials had developed considerable respect for the industry of the Nepali cultivators and merchant class. One such official was Dr Archibald Campbell IMS, the prime mover in the development of Darjeeling as a hill station in the 1830s and 1840s, who had previously served as Resident at the Court of Nepal. As Superintendent of Darjeeling, he encouraged Nepali settlement there in order to develop the agricultural potential of the region, fill the demand for labourers in the rapidly growing urban centre, and ultimately to increase the tax base.9 Having been conquered by the Gurkhas in the late 18th century, the Sikkimese rulers were less enamoured of a Nepali presence in their ancestral lands and after the restoration of the Chogyal’s territory following the Anglo-Nepal war, Sikkim was apparently free of a Nepali presence.10 But the role of Nepali labour in the economic development of Darjeeling was recognised by certain Sikkimese, particularly those whose estates or trading interests were involved in the Darjeeling economic boom. The Phodang Lama and his brother Khangsa Dewan were among the first Sikkimese to sublease their agricultural land to Nepali businessmen, who then sent Nepali labour to work that land.11 Although there may have been Nepali immigrants in Sikkim as early as the 1840s, it was Laksmidas Pradhan, a Bhaktapur Newari with business interests in Darjeeling who is the first

Changing horses 199 prominent Nepali we may identify as resident in Sikkim. He first leased land from the Phodang Lama in 1867.12 Despite an order that was issued by the Chogyal in 1871 forbidding Nepali immigration,13 J.W. Edgar, who visited Sikkim in 1873, recorded the presence of numerous Nepalis in the southeastern districts of Sikkim bordering Darjeeling. The issue was already divisive however, with the Gangtok Kazi among those who refused to allow them in his district.14 In 1877, those Sikkimese opposed to immigration appealed to Ashley Eden, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. Led by the Tatsang Lama (of the Barphung clan), they claimed the Nepali presence upset the local and tutelary deities, who then took revenge on the Sikkimese people. Eden convened a meeting of the leading men of Sikkim later that year and following his advice it was agreed that any Nepali immigration must be into uninhabited land, and that that land must continue to be under the authority of Sikkimese headmen. The History records that Phodang Lama and his brother, along with the Lasso Kazi, had been prominent among those importing Nepali labour, and despite the agreement they continued to import Nepalis as the Chogyal, who was then a minor, lacked the power to enforce the agreement.15 Their continued support for Nepali immigration led to riots, in one of which a lama from Tatsang monastery was killed by the Phodang’s men.16 While Eden had sought compromise, the prevailing British view of Nepali immigration into Sikkim was positive. In the context of evolutionary and racial ideas of the time, the ‘virile, industrious’ Nepalis were seen as inevitably progressing at the expense of the ‘indolent’ Sikkimese, whose Buddhist monasteries absorbed much of the potential labour force within the state and whose revenue systems were still largely outside the cash economy. Macaulay thus framed Phodang Lama as ‘progressive’ for supporting Nepali immigration, and made the point that ‘The Paharias pay revenue in cash, the old Bhootea and Lepcha ryots [are] still paying in kind,. . . .’17 L.A. Waddell, Darjeeling Sanitary Commissioner (and medical officer on the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa in 1903–1904), writing in the late 1890s, described how ‘swarms of Nepalese are being imported into the country, to reclaim its forests and give to it a large settled population of industrious peasantry’.18 He too associated the Nepalis with modern economic systems. He observed that they ‘make an excellent settled peasantry, as compared with the easy-going Lepchas and Bhotiyas, who are neither good cultivators, nor yet do they pay any revenue worth mentioning in cash’.19 While Waddell constructed an idealised category of ‘Lepcha’, whom he speculated were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a Darwinian view of the Lepcha’s prospects in the face of Nepali immigration prevailed. ‘The Lepchas’, it was stated in the 1894 Sikkim Gazetteer, ‘are rapidly dying out’.20

200  Alex McKay John Claude White had also served in Nepal,21 and formed a positive opinion of Nepali industry. As Political Officer of Sikkim his primary duty was to transform Sikkim into a revenue-producing state. That was necessary in order to fund development there for the colonial government allocated very little funding to the princely states beyond that intended for defence and associated communications. During his reign over the state in the 1890s White thus encouraged Nepali immigration in order to increase the taxation base and he used the ensuing funds to develop Sikkimese state ­structures – justice, postal services, health, etc. With his closest local associates having been the main proponents of Nepali immigration anti-­ immigration voices were ignored and Nepali immigration took place on a massive scale. The 1891 census indicated that the population of Sikkim was just 30,458, of whom just over half were already of Nepali origin.22 By 1909, according to White, there were nearly 50,000 people of Nepali origin alone in Sikkim,23 suggesting that some 30–35,000 Nepalis immigrated into Sikkim in the 1891–1909 period. This migration permanently altered the racial make-up of Sikkim. Where that term had once meant a person of Bhotia (‘Lhopo’), Lepcha, or Limbu descent (or some combination thereof, with many clans best identified as Bhotia-Lepcha), it now had to embrace the new Nepali community, which itself consisted of a considerable number of subgroups. Yet it is notable that the voices of Sikkimese of Nepali origin are almost entirely absent from contemporary accounts of Sikkim. Both the representatives of the colonial power and other visitors to the state continued to refer almost exclusively to Bhotia, Lepcha, and Limbu Sikkimese. The long-term consequence of Nepali immigration was to reduce the former majority groups to minority status. While the Nepali presence was initially restricted to the southern regions, ultimately only the extreme northern region of Sikkim, which had its own distinct cultural identity, was declared out of bounds to immigration. The north was allowed to retain its own land tenure system, and these internal administrative frontiers of social distinction were mirrored in the land settlement and tax system in the rest of Sikkim, under which the Nepali cultivators were assessed at a higher rate than those from the Bhotia-Lepcha communities.24

I Prior to the British takeover, the Chogyals had ruled Sikkim with the aid of a state council comprising representatives of the Bhotia, Lepcha, and Limbu communities. 12 of these councillors held ministerial rank (Kazis) and were responsible for revenue collection from their respective regions. A small number of court officials termed Dewans oversaw that administration.

Changing horses 201 There also existed a broad-based council on the Tibetan model, the Lhada Medi (lhade mide or lhasde mi sde), which included monastic representatives and community leaders. That council was consulted in times of national emergency.25 When White took over Sikkim, he sought to institutionalise local support through the creation of a similar form of council, albeit one whose members he appointed and in which he acted as president. In effect, he made himself the sole arbitrator of power in Sikkim with the council expected to rubber stamp his decisions. Those Sikkimese he appointed to the council were Khangsa Dewan, Phodang Lama, and Shoe Dewan, along with Lari Pema (representing the leading monastery of Pemyangtse and the monastic community) and the Gangtok, Tassithang, Entchi, and Rhenock Kazis, all of whom had proved amenable to British rule. In his memoirs White recorded that the council rendered him ‘the utmost help and assistance . . . more especially the first three’ and rather unsurprisingly gave him ‘loyal and whole-hearted support’.26 The council actually met very rarely.27 But a land survey as a basis for taxation assessment was invariably fundamental to colonial rule and White reformed Sikkim’s traditional land holding systems within the first few years of his rule, during which time the Chogyal remained under house arrest and isolated from his supporters. The land reforms were thus carried out without his approval. Indeed, with White primarily concerned with British-Indian relations with Tibet during the early 1890s, the men who actually drew up the reforms were Phodang Lama and the Khangsa and Shoe Dewans. Those who lost land under the reforms were primarily the Chogyal and those Kazis who had supported him. (While they were compensated with 30 per cent of the rent paid by the new lessees to the government that rent was fixed, and they did not benefit from any profit increase from improvements to land productivity.28) Under the precolonial system, all land in Sikkim had theoretically been owned by the Chogyal. In practice, landholdings were leased to the aristocracy on a hereditary basis, while in addition to the royal estates six of the major monasteries also held land. The result of that system had been that Sikkim effectively consisted of ‘semi-independent fiefdoms. . . ’, for while the Chogyal could theoretically ‘issue or remove land grants from individuals in reality he was also dependent on the local lords for tax collection and for raising armies. . . ’.29 White’s reforms centralised power over the land, and thus over the land-owning aristocracy. The earlier system of hereditary land grants in the power of the Chogyal was replaced by a lessee system, originally of 24 such leases.30 These were roughly surveyed and assessed for taxation on the basis of their productivity per acre (with, as noted, the Nepali immigrants actually paying a higher

202  Alex McKay rate of tax than the traditional social groups). As the tax revenue required from each parcel of land was fixed, the small group of lease-holders profited from any productivity or other revenue increase, which in practice encouraged the importation of more Nepali labour in order to increase productivity per acre.31 Forestry management and customs excise were also regulated with the result that total Sikkimese revenue was increased from 8,000 to 2.2 million rupees in the 1889–1908 period.32 White’s hopes that mineral exploitation could become the main revenue source for the state foundered, however, on indigenous beliefs in the power of the autochthonous deities who were believed to object to any disturbances to their subterranean abodes. It is notable that in instituting reform White was careful to avoid alienating the socially powerful monastic sector, whose traditional landholding rights continued to be acknowledged. This was consistent with the post1857 British understanding of the extreme dangers of interference in indigenous religious customs. But in contrast, the Chogyal was treated with a contempt that is difficult to account for other than as an abuse of power based on petty personal considerations; at one point, White even auctioned off some of the Chogyal’s personal possessions. The former ruler refused to accept the land settlement and was deprived of both the income from the royal estates and the allowance formerly paid to him by the British, which White kept and used for his own purposes. At one point, the Chogyal even escaped British detention and sought asylum in Nepal, but the Nepalis promptly returned him to British jurisdiction. Even when he was allowed to return to Gangtok, the Chogyal was forced to live in what he later recalled was ‘a miserable bamboo hut’, while his remaining supporters were similarly harassed.33 In October 1895, the explicit suppression of the Chogyal’s authority ended when an agreement between White and the Chogyal was brokered by the deputy commissioner of Darjeeling. It was agreed that the Chogyal would head the council, albeit under White’s overall command, and the difficulties of the preceding five years were diplomatically agreed to be the result of ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘a few mischief makers’. The Chogyal returned to Gangtok and his supporters were now allowed to attend his court.34 Quite why White changed his approach to the Chogyal is difficult to ascertain. He may have concluded that governing Sikkim would be easier with such a unifying figurehead. But the intervention of the Darjeeling DC suggests that it was imposed upon him, probably because the ill treatment of the Sikkimese ruler was complicating wider imperial strategies. In particular, with British India trying to develop ties with Tibet, the ill treatment of the Tibetan Buddhist Chogyal (who was married to a Tibetan and

Changing horses 203 considered by Tibetans to be under their ultimate authority) was harming British diplomatic efforts in that regard. The Chogyal’s travails at White’s hands were common knowledge among the elites of the Himalayas and the Buddhist world and clearly reflected badly on the British government. Certainly White’s diplomatic abilities were not highly regarded by his superiors and during the Viceroyalty of Lord Curzon, relations with Tibet were effectively taken out of his hands. As Sir Francis Younghusband, chosen by Curzon instead of White to head a British mission to Tibet in 1903–1904 privately observed; White ‘treat[ed] the Sikkimese as if he was a little God’.35 His superior’s problems with White were accentuated by questions over White’s financial probity. The political officer was censured for these and other matters and his successor was in little doubt that White had profited from his position.36 White did accompany the Younghusband mission to Lhasa in 1903– 1904 and preparation for that mission, along with absences on leave and on diplomatic visits to Bhutan and Tibet meant that he had much less day-to-day involvement in Sikkimese affairs in the early years of the 20th century. White was relieved during most of his absences by Charles (later Sir Charles) Bell, a studious Winchester and Oxford ICS officer who was ‘attached’ to the Foreign and Political Department in order to succeed White as the Sikkim political officer early in 1908. Under the ‘relatively progressive’37 Bell, what Emma Martin termed a ‘new political order’ was instituted in Sikkim.38 The transition from White to Bell was not clear-cut, with Bell spending May–November of 1904 and September 1906–January 1907 relieving in Gangtok before taking the political officer’s position permanently in March 1908. By that time, White’s early confrontational style had given way to new approaches (that may reflect Bell’s presence). But his relations with the Chogyal remained strained. In 1899, White had decreed that the Chogyal’s younger son Sidkeong Tulku, regarded as pro-British, would inherit the throne rather than the eldest son Tsodrak Namgyal, who was resident in Tibet and considered pro-Tibetan by the British. The selection of Sidkeong Tulku was against the Chogyal’s wishes and suggests that tensions between Chogyal and political officer persisted. But Bell’s private diaries state that White gave the Maharaja and Maharani ‘a lot of land in the last few years [of White’s service] that he might petition for his [White’s] services to be extended’. That ensured, Bell stated, that their relations were improved in White’s last years.39 With the Chogyal restored to his position and at least nominally heading the council, the position of White’s initial Sikkimese allies, Phodang Lama, his brother Khangsa Dewan, and the Shoe Dewan must have been difficult if not untenable. They fade from the historical record as the British

204  Alex McKay established an alliance with the royal family. The trio cease to be mentioned in the royal History of Sikkim after the events of 1895 and are not listed among those who accompanied the Chogyal on any of his ventures outside Sikkim, such as to the 1903 Delhi Durbar.40 They seem to have been effectively banished from court. By 1904, none of them held a position on the council and Shoe Dewan and Phodang lama both died before White retired. With White’s frequent absences in the early 20th century and wider British interests in the region focused on the Younghusband mission to Tibet, the council was largely in abeyance, but in 1904 it nominally consisted of the Chogyal, Kusho Jerung Dewan, Lasso Kazi, Bamiak Kazi, Yangthang Kazi, and the Tassang Lama representing Pemiongchi and the monastic community.41 The Bamiak and Yangthang Kazis had been loyal supporters of the Chogyal both before and throughout the White era, and in contrast to the Kazis on the earliest council had been among those whose loyalty to the Chogyal had led to their being penalised by White. Bamiak Kazi (Wangyal Tenzing), whose ancestors, like those of Lasso Kazi, had been ministers in Sikkim for eight generations, were particularly influential. Later described by Bell as ‘courteous and simple, [he] has common sense . . . [and is] much respected by all’, Bamiak Kazi managed to be regarded as both ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’, which was something of a British ideal of its local rulers. Lasso Kazi, the former Vakil in Darjeeling, was considered close to the British yet had avoided close association with White’s three loyalists. Jerung Dewan (Karma Dubgyut), a large land owner and by then ‘the most influential Kazi in Sikkim’, was described by Bell as one who ‘sits on the fence politically but is inclined to come down on the British side now, as White got him a lot of land in Sikkim’.42 The result of these personnel changes was a council much more conciliatory in style than White’s first ensemble. Yet it was far from representative of the new demographic realities in Sikkim,43 which were first acknowledged when the ‘honest and straightforward’44 former Darjeeling Police Inspector Rai Hari Das Pradhan Bahadur (the eldest son of early settler Laxmidas Pradhan) was added to the council by 1907 in recognition of the growing Nepali majority. That tendency was further acknowledged when Hari Das Pradhan resigned from the council on grounds of ill health in 1914 and was replaced by two Nepali representatives, Hari Das Pradhan’s son Rai Sahib Lambodar Pradhan and Rai Sahib Lachminarayan.45 But the Nepali members remained in a minority and subject to the Chogyal’s majority on the council. Apart from its economic benefits, the influx of Nepalis into Tibetan Buddhist Sikkim had another aspect. While there were Newari Buddhists among them, the Nepali immigrants were largely Hindu, and Nepal and

Changing horses 205 Tibet were traditionally hostile neighbours. Thus the influx helped to dilute the traditional religious and political ties between Sikkim and Tibet and to reorient them towards British India.46 For it was to the British that the Nepalis – whether traders or cultivators – owed their position and thus gave their loyalty.47 But there seems no evidence that this was in any sense an adoption of an ‘Indian’ identity in the period under consideration, nor did any such Indian identity emerge until the postcolonial period. Yet while the Gazetteer classified the Nepalis according to preexisting categories – Gurung, Chetri, Kami, etc. – it seems reasonable to suggest that the predominance in Sikkim of their general categorisation as ‘Nepali’ tended to construct that as their primary identity in contrast to earlier communal identities. A Nepali community identity thus came to predominate in Sikkim, and to contest an ‘Indian’ identity in the postcolonial period. Bell’s published and private works give no indication as to his opinions on any particular racial or communal group beyond a tendency to support the traditional elites, being notably devoid of the kind of generalisations based on essentialised identities that are characteristic of the writings of many contemporary colonial administrators. His actions indicate his support for the traditional power structures of Sikkim; yet, in expanding the political influence of Nepali community leaders by their inclusion on the council, he also recognised the realities of 20th-century Sikkim. Those realities were not necessarily welcomed by the traditional elites. One prominent Nepali had warned Bell as early as December 1908 that if the Chogyal was restored to full power ‘the Nepalese will be turned out within a year’, with Jerung Dewan notably keen on their expulsion. The Dewan’s territory included Lachen in the north and in April 1909 his concerns were acknowledged by the ruling that lands north of the Penlong la were reserved for Lepchas and Bhutias and that any Nepalis settled north of that line were required to leave by 31 December.48 But by that time the flow of Nepali immigrants had passed its peak. As Bell noted in the Sikkim annual report for 1909–1910: Immigration from Nepal is less as there is very little land now available for cultivation and the demarcation of the forests has almost put a stop to the clearing of fresh land. Some raiyats had to vacate their lands which came within the forest areas and have emigrated mostly to Bhutan. Bell’s relations with the Chogyal were very different from those of his predecessor. To an extent this was largely a matter of style, of Bell acknowledging the Chogyal’s stature in terms of protocol, while persuading rather than commanding him to act in line with general British policies of

206  Alex McKay ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’. Consensus replaced command, albeit that like White, Bell was actually more concerned to deal with Tibet than with Sikkim. But Bell considered that White had ‘mismanaged’ Sikkim – there had been ‘too little tact and sympathy, too much of the hobnailed boot’,49 and he altered the tone of command. His policies were aimed at obtaining consent from the various Sikkimese social groups rather than simply imposing British systems of order and government. The most obvious indication of a new approach to Sikkim under Charles Bell was the transformation of the council from the one that existed only to rubber-stamp White’s decisions into a genuinely consultative body that was at least intended to allow democratic debate.50 In contrast to its occasional assemblies in the White years, the council met on 12 occasions in 1909–1910.51 White had ruled Sikkim with a small coterie of local allies as a democratic fig leaf, and even after the return of the Chogyal to his seat, it is difficult to ascertain any intention on White’s part to delegate authority to Sikkimese. In contrast, Charles Bell seems to have understood his role as being to prepare the Sikkimese ruling class for autonomy under the British imperial system, and to cultivate broad-based support for the existing leadership structures through policies designed to appeal to different social groups – excluding Nepalis from northern Sikkim while allowing their community leaders increasing political influence, preserving monastic privileges, providing free healthcare, education, and so on. In his Modern Asian Studies article, Peter Robb refined Ranajit Guha’s statement that ‘Improvement was a political strategy to persuade the indigenous elite to “attach” themselves to a colonial regime’,52 pointing out that – as was the case in Sikkim – different elites and communities of citizens were appealed to by the colonial government through various policies. Robb concluded that: ‘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’.53 Yet in the case of Sikkim we might ask, what was that nation? In the wider context, control over Sikkim was part of the strategy of creating ‘buffer states’ under British-Indian influence on India’s land frontiers in order to exclude Russian (or Chinese) influence on India. No thought seems to have been given to the eventual status of Sikkim even by imperial strategists such as Sir George Dunbar or Sir Alfred Lyall.54 But its peoples were not regarded by any British authorities as ‘Indians’. Indeed Sikkimese were clearly distinguished from the population of the plains and there seems to have been no attempts made to stimulate any ‘Indian’ identity in Sikkim. In retirement, Bell, who wrote extensively of possible futures for Tibet, was much less forthcoming as to Sikkim’s future. But he noted ‘a good deal of

Changing horses 207 anti-Indian feeling’ there’,55 and while acknowledging the possibility of Sikkim falling under Chinese influence stated ‘the desirability of Home Rule in our States of Bhutan and Sikkim, as well as in Tibet’,56 and envisaged that Sikkim could become a regular part of the British Commonwealth.57 That suggests that in this case the strategies of ‘improvement’ by the colonial Government were designed to bind the various social groups in Sikkim to the colonial state, but were not associated with an Indian national project. Rather, in this case they were designed to strengthen a buffer state, ultimately for reasons of the security of India which was always the paramount concern of the frontier officials. The British officials of the Government of India who served in Tibet sought to encourage the development of Tibetan nationalism in order to unify and thus strengthen that state,58 and Bell’s actions in Sikkim seem to have had a similar intent: one that did not aim at linking Sikkim into India, but rather encouraging the development of Sikkim as a self-governing part of the British commonwealth, presumably as a state with a separate but equal status to that of India, or Nepal. That paradigm remained dominant in imperial thinking about Sikkim until Indian independence. Nonetheless, the Chogyal was never entirely reconciled to British authority or their plans for succession to the throne. While the British groomed his younger son Sidkeong Tulku to inherit the position – educating him at Oxford,59 appointing him to the council, and placing him in charge of monastic and forestry reforms – the heir and his father disagreed on many issues. When he succeeded to the throne on the death of his father in February 1914, there was considerable optimism that Sidkeong Tulku would lead Sikkim into colonial-approved forms of modernity, but the young king died of a fever in December that year, to be succeeded by the 11th Chogyal Tashi Namgyal (1893–1963), a younger brother of the previous ruler. Educated at the elite St. Paul’s School, Darjeeling and Mayo College, Ajmer, the new Chogyal, having been thoroughly infused with a British or at least modern world view, was given increasing responsibilities by Bell. In May 1916, he was given control over police, jails, income tax, and excise, in addition to those departments over which his father had already been given authority. Then on 5 April 1918, Tashi Namgyal was given full administrative powers over Sikkim’s internal affairs, along with control of the now 12,000 rupee annual subsidy.60 Having overseen the transition, Bell handed over the position of Sikkim’s political officer to his successor Major W.L. Campbell on 16 April and went into retirement [albeit temporarily]. Sikkim then remained a form of princely state outside the direct rule of the British Indian government until Indian independence in 1947. Only after 1975 was it taken into the full control of the Indian government.

208  Alex McKay

II Prior to their takeover of Sikkim, the British identified several Sikkimese aristocrats as potential allies who could provide local support for their rule in the event that the Chogyal proved hostile to British interests. Those local allies were powerful figures at court, but as active supporters of Nepali immigration they were at odds with the anti-immigration philosophy of the Chogyal. After the British takeover of Sikkim and the deposition of the Chogyal, those local allies duly supported the colonial power and were employed in the fundamental task of reforming the land tenure system. The new system effectively encouraged continuing Nepali immigration and benefitted these local allies at the expense of the Chogyal and his supporters. But in introducing direct taxation of the cultivator by the state rather than via the landlords, the reforms also encouraged the centralisation of power and revenue in state hands. In the political sphere a modified form of the traditional state council was established in order to provide a measure of traditional authority that would legitimate colonial rule. The Sikkimese aristocrats who had allied with the British were further rewarded with positions on that council, although under J.C. White that organisation was nothing more than a fig leaf covering his personal rule over Sikkim. While the Chogyal was harshly treated after the British takeover, an uneasy truce was eventually established between White and the Chogyal, probably as a result of wider diplomatic imperatives. That truce effectively removed the need for British reliance on the small group of local allies they had used in the early years of their rule and those erstwhile supporters were soon sidelined from the centre of power.61 In the early years of the 20th century, with White preoccupied with Tibetan affairs and less involved in Sikkim, his eventual successor Charles Bell modified the more extreme aspects of White’s rule and made this ‘change of horses’ explicit. Most notably, Bell reintegrated Sikkim’s traditional leader and his family into the ruling structures of the state by encouraging their taking control over its internal administration. The actions of White and Bell demonstrate the importance of individual agency in the colonial process and so diverse were the approaches taken by these two officials that they can be seen to represent very different tendencies within the range of possibilities offered by colonial power. In retrospect the greatest impact of the British colonial period on Sikkim was the transformation of the racial make-up of the state. In the period between the late 1860s and the early 20th century, immigration from Nepal took place on such a vast scale as to render the indigenous Bhotia, Lepcha, and Limbu populations a minority in the land. But that immigration had already been of such scale in the period 1867–1887 that the

Changing horses 209 tipping point occurred even before the British took over Sikkim. The British did not initiate the immigration policy in Sikkim; rather they inherited it from the dominant aristocratic land-owners of southern Sikkim with whom they allied. In turn, however, those indigenous elites had adopted the policy from the British in Darjeeling, and the positive image of the Nepali ­cultivator – as with the Nepali (Gurkha) soldier – was a fundamental colonial construct. So widely held was the belief in the value of a Nepali cultivator vis-à-vis those of other Himalayan races that there seems to have been very little discussion in colonial circles over the wisdom of the policy and in particular its likely consequences. While the Nepalis formed a community loyal to the British, those loyalties were not used for political benefit by the colonial state. The British continued to deal with the traditional elites of Sikkim in all political matters and even when Nepalis were taken onto the ruling council they remained in a minority despite their demographic dominance and pro-British sympathies. Throughout the colonial period ‘Sikkimese’ identity continued to be imagined by observers as comprised of the traditional population groups despite the fact that they were in a minority and Sikkim’s economy rested on Nepali taxpayers. The actual fragmentation of that identity was not represented in colonial memoirs or manifest in the political system. But again in retrospect what emerges as most obvious is the absence of any association either by the colonial state or the various social groups within Sikkim, of Sikkim with India or with an Indian identity. Articulating a future for Sikkim was not something with which the colonial state was concerned but there is certainly no evidence that that future was seen as being within a greater India and no evidence that the various groups within Sikkim envisaged a future as part of India. The Indian nation-building project had many strands but at least in the period under consideration it did not embrace the Himalayan Buddhist state of Sikkim.

Notes 1 Peter Robb, ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s’, Modern Asian Studies, 1997, 31(2): 245–283. I am pleased to offer this article as a token of appreciation and respect for Professor Robb and his works on South Asian history. 2 There is a question as to whether in Sikkimese understanding the Chogyal ceded or leased that territory; on which see Hope Namgyal, ‘The Sikkimese Theory of Landholding and the Darjeeling Grant’, Bulletin of Tibetology, 1966, 3(2): 46–58; also see History of Sikkim, [see note 7] pp. 60–61; Sikkim Royal Archives (X10; the Chogyal to the British Superintendent in Darjeeling, dated 1842), the latter reference courtesy of Saul Mullard.

210  Alex McKay 3 On the events of this period, see Alex McKay, ‘A difficult country, a hostile chief, and a still more hostile minister’: the Anglo-Sikkim war of 1861’ (forthcoming, 2016). 4 On this process in the Sikkim-Tibet region, see Alex McKay, ‘19th Century British Expansion on the Indo-Tibetan Frontier: A Forward Perspective’, Tibet Journal, 2003, 28(4): 61–76. 5 Colman Macaulay, Report of a Mission to Sikkim and the Tibetan Frontier: With a Memorandum on Our Relations With Tibet, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885, pp. 1, 8, 9–10. 6 Ibid., p. 12. 7 The History of Sikkim was compiled under the authority of the Maharaja Sir Thutob Namgyal and the Maharani Yeshay Dolma in 1908 and translated into English by Kazi Dawa Samdup. It exists in several unpublished forms. I cite a printed and bound copy in the possession of the author. 8 The term ‘Nepali’ is of course itself a modern category. I use it here in the general sense of persons originating in the modern nation-state of Nepal. 9 L.S.S. O’Malley, Bengal District Gazetteers, Darjeeling, New Delhi: Logos, reprint ed. 1999 (first published, 1907), p. 29; L.A. Waddell, Among the Himalayas, London: Constable, p. 39. 10 Writing in 1828, Walter Hamilton refers to Sikkim’s population as consisting of Bhotia (Lhopo), Lepcha, and Limbu peoples, with no mention of Nepali communities; see Walter Hamilton, The East India Gazette: Containing Particular Descriptions . . . of Hindostan . . .and the Adjacent Countries . . ., 2 vols, London: Parbury, Allen & co, 1828, p. 547. 11 Leo E. Rose, ‘Modernizing a Traditional Administrative System: Sikkim 1890–1973’, in J.F. Fisher (ed.), Himalayan Anthropology, Paris/The Hague: Mouton, 1978, p. 65. 12 Bal Gopal Shrestha, ‘Ritual and Identity in the Diaspora: The Newars in Sikkim’, Bulletin of Tibetology, 2005, 41(1): 25–54. 13 History of Sikkim, p. 72. 14 J.W. Edgar, Report on a Visit to Sikhim and the Thibetan frontier, Calcutta: Government of India Press, 1874, p. 74. 15 Ibid., pp. 71–73. 16 History of Sikkim, pp. 77–78. 17 Macaulay, Report of a Mission to Sikkim, p. 11. 18 Waddell, Among the Himalayas, p. 152. 19 Ibid., p. 243. 20 Gazetteer of Sikhim, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1894, p. xxi. 21 Perceval Landon, Nepal, 2 vols, London: Constable, 1928, vol. 1, p. 298. 22 Gazetteer, p. 27. 23 John Claude White, Sikkim and Bhutan, New Delhi: Cosmo publications (first published, London, 1909), p. 9. 24 The Administration Report of the Sikkim State, 1914–15, Calcutta: Government of India Press, records that; ‘As mentioned in my report for the year 1912–13 the rates of assessment of terraced rice fields was fixed at one fifth of the produce for Nepalis and at one-eighth for Bhutias and Lepchas in accordance with the report of the Committee appointed to enquire into the matter. The late Maharaja Sidkeong Namgyal was of [the] opinion that these rates bore somewhat heavily on the raiyats, and he proposed that the

Changing horses 211 assessment should be on the pathi of seed sown and not on the produce. At a meeting of the Council held on 30 October 1914 it was decided to revert to the old system of assessing ‘Koot’ as a temporary measure, pending the final settlement of the question. The matter was finally settled at a meeting of the Council held on 26 January 1915 – land of 1st, 2nd and 3rd class and rates per pathi of seed sown – Nepalis 2rps., 1rp 8 annas, and 1rp., and Bhutia and Lepchas 1rp., 8annas, 1rp., 2 annas and 12 annas. . . . These rates have been accepted by landlords and raiyats and are generally considered to be satisfactory solution of the vexed question of “Koot” ’. 25 Rose, ‘Modernizing a Traditional Administrative System’, pp. 205–226. 26 White, Sikkim and Bhutan, p. 26. 27 See for example, Administration Report of the Sikkim State, 1905–06; this records that there were no meetings of the council that year! White was notoriously poor at record-keeping, perhaps understandably so in the first years of his rule when he lacked supporting staff, but I have not sighted any records of the council meetings. 28 Rose, ‘Modernizing a Traditional Administrative System’, p. 215. 29 Saul Mullard, ‘Constructing the Mandala: The State Formation of Sikkim and the Rise of a National Historical Narrative’, in Anna Balikci-Denjonpa and Alex McKay (eds), Buddhist Himalaya: Studies in Religion, History and Culture; vol. I, The Sikkim Papers, Gangtok: Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, 2011, p. 57. 30 Anna Balikci, Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors: Village Religion in Sikkim, Leiden: Brill, 2008, p. 48. 31 Ibid., p. 50. 32 White, Sikkim and Bhutan, pp. 26–27. 33 Ibid., pp. 100–111. 34 History of Sikkim, p. 120. 35 Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental & India Office Collections), the British Library, London, MSS Eur F 197–145, Younghusband to his father, 19 July 1903. 36 British Museum; [Sir Charles] Bell, Sikkim and General notebook, p. 211, undated comments on White, also see comments dated 3 June 1909. 37 Robb, ‘The Colonial State’, p. 254; Bell might be seen as what Robb terms one of Viceroy Rippon’s men in that he was ‘representative of an interventionist and relatively progressive line that had been favoured by Ripon . . . these men generally favoured steps to create in India a modicum of prosperity and a kind of civil society by state intervention’. 38 Emma Martin, ‘Sidkyong Tulku and the Making of Sikkim for the 1911 Delhi Durbar’, Bulletin of Tibetology, 2012, 48(1): 18. 39 British Museum; Bell, Sikkim and General notebook, p. 211, undated comments on White in Sikkim. Not that Bell was unaware of the range of powers available to a political officer. He complains that White had had some papers [presumably reflecting badly on the Maharaja] that were ‘valuable to the Political Officer as giving him a hold over the Raja’, but that White had kept them to himself and then given them back to the Maharaja when he retired, ‘thus depriving his successor of a valuable weapon’. 40 History . . ., p. 127. 41 British Museum Bell, Sikkim and General notebook, p. 173.

212  Alex McKay 2 Ibid., pp. 206–07, entry dated 2 April 1909. 4 43 Ibid., pp. 19–20, entry dated 8 December 1909, where Bell states Nepalis formed 75 per cent of the population. 44 List of the Leading Officials, Nobles and Personages in Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet 1907, Calcutta: Government Printing Office, 1908, p. 4. 45 Administration Report of the Sikkim State, 1914–15. 46 Balikci, Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors, p. 49. 47 British Museum; Bell, Sikkim and General notebook, pp. 19–20, entry dated 8 December 1909. This states that ‘speaking generally’, the Nepalis were ‘pro-British’, while the Bhutia/Lepcha community, ‘esp., the former’, supported the Maharaja (Chogyal). 48 Administration Report of the Sikkim State, 1909–10, also see British Museum; Bell, Sikkim and General notebook, p. 3, entry dated 19 December 1908. 49 Charles Bell, Tibet Past and Present, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1992, reprint ed. (first published, Oxford, 1924), p. 170. 50 Ironically, Bell was informed by his confidential clerk and long-time informant Achuk Tsering that the Chogyal ‘had told the Councillors that they had to agree with him in the Council and they were afraid to voice their opinions’; British Museum; Bell, Sikkim and General notebook, pp. 10–11, entry dated 4 June 1909. 51 Administration Report of the Sikkim State, 1909–10. 52 Ranajit Guha, ‘Dominance Without Hegemony and Its Historiography’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies VI, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 242. 53 Robb, ‘The Colonial State’, p. 252. 54 Neither Alfred Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, London: John Murray, 1894 (and later editions to 1910), or George Dunbar, Frontiers, London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1932, mention Sikkim. 55 Bell, Tibet Past and Present, p. 245. 56 Ibid., p. 200. 57 Ibid., p. 262. 58 See Alex McKay, Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre 1904–1947, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1997, esp., pp. 195–211. 59 On which see Alex McKay, ‘ “That He May Take Due Pride in the Empire to Which He Belongs”: The Education of Maharajah Kumar Sidkeong Namgyal Tulku’, Bulletin of Tibetology, 2003, 39(2): 27–52. 60 Administration Report of the Sikkim State, 1918–19. 61 This was not uncommon. The British sought to ally with the existing leadership of princely states and local allies who assisted in the takeover process were frequently abandoned once a traditional ruler had accepted British authority. When Bell established an alliance of interests with the 13th Dalai Lama of Tibet, he similarly abandoned earlier support for the Panchen Lama, who had been identified as a possible alternative leader there.

II Encounters with surveillance and resistance

10 Lost in transit? Railway crimes and the regime of control in colonial India Aparajita Mukhopadhyay

‘Crime pays handsomely, at least to the social historian who explores its links with society’, so claimed Anand Yang, as the editor of a volume of crime and criminality in British India.1 Meanwhile, nearly three decades following this observation, historiographically speaking, themes of crime and the nature of order and control in colonial India continue to yield rich dividends. Among others, scholars such as David Arnold, Sanjay Nigam, Radhika Singha, and more recently, Nitin Sinha, have enriched our understanding of the imposition of ‘order’ in colonial India by nuanced explorations of the links between crime and the nature of colonial control.2 This chapter, at one level, aims to contribute to this ongoing debate. Inasmuch, it broadly agrees with the conclusions reached by scholars that the imposition of colonial order and control was a long-drawn and brutal process, which had consequences for Indian society. But at a more critical level, the chapter intends to interrogate the scale, nature, and the existing chronological framework of the Pax Britannica through the prism of railway crimes. More specifically, the chapter argues that one, the colonial control and order was not as rigid as hitherto claimed. Two, the process of colonial knowledge gathering that has been identified as a central component of colonial control, was often faulty, and not total. Three, as railway crimes illustrate, through the 19th and 20th century, new crimes, criminals, and crime networks were created – an effective control of which was beyond the abilities of the colonial state. Thus, this chapter intends to reappraise our understanding of the imposition of colonial order and control in Indian society. Railway crime, in this context, implies crimes that were specific to the railways and committed against passengers and their properties, including preexisting forms of crime that were modified to suit the demands of a new form of transport. Broadly speaking, in the literature on issues of crime and control in colonial India, hitherto it is argued that the colonial administration brought ‘order’ to Indian society, by forcefully pacifying it, and imposing control

Lost in transit? 215 from above. Historiographically, the colonial ‘regime of regulation’3 has been identified (among other things) with two principal elements: from c.1840 order and control were sought primarily by restricting mobility through the introduction of surveillance in general, and attempts at controlling movement of specific groups (‘criminal tribes’) in particular. More specifically, Sanjay Nigam has argued that the driving force behind legislating the Criminal Tribes’ Act (Act XXVII of 1871) was to allow the colonial state to ‘exercise disciplinary techniques to effect wider social control’.4 In other words, it is suggested that though the legislation of such Act was meant for specific groups, it was nevertheless symbolic of the desire of the colonial state to exercise wider control over crime in Indian society. In a related point, Sandra Freitag claimed that the colonial state, for reasons of its own, was more concerned with collective criminal activities, and as such attempted systematic control over Indian society.5 Additionally, scholars argue that the imposition of the colonial order was inextricably related to restricting the mobility of peripatetic groups in particular. This restrictive movement is also argued to be a part of a broader movement that led to sedantarisation and pacification in 19th-century India.6 More recently, Nitin Sinha has argued that restricting mobility was an essential component of the colonial ‘regime of regulation’, and it influenced the ways in which the state understood criminality in India.7 Last but not least, scholars claim that the imposition of colonial control was the result of specific kind of knowledge gathering, which in turn enabled even greater control over Indian society.8 In this chapter, I suggest that these analyses, though accurate, have, however, overstated both nature, and the scale of the colonial mechanisms of control. Based on hitherto unused archives on railway crime, I argue that that the ability of the colonial state to impose order was limited. The colonial officials were aware of their limitations, which resulted in both negotiations and even compromise with the criminals. Moreover, these negotiations were punctuated by Indian participation – suggestive of a process mediated through Indian conditions and agency. Moreover, I claim that the introduction of railways in mid-19th century India increased mobility instead of restricting it. Railway operations commenced in 1853. Thus, mobility was introduced precisely at the time when according to current historiographical assumptions, the colonial state was either increasingly restricting mobility or regulating it to create permissible forms. Here, it is instructive to note that the railway-induced mobility was even encouraged by the colonial administration. Furthermore, railway travel was a popular and accessible form of transport since its inception, and a huge cross section of people used the expanding railway network to travel for diverse reasons.9 Evidence of widespread railway crimes, therefore,

216  Aparajita Mukhopadhyay question our current assumptions of restrictive mobility of specific groups. Railway crime details reveal that the ‘criminal tribes’ not only travelled by railways, but the authorities found their activities difficult to control, because admittedly, their knowledge about the movements of these groups was not comprehensive.10 This lack of knowledge further exacerbated as railway network also attracted criminals from ‘non-criminal’ (in the absence of a better word) background. At a related level, therefore, this evidence also challenges our understanding of the cohesiveness of the process of colonial knowledge gathering. In other words, here I suggest that the railway crimes, and the inability of the colonial state to effectively curb them, question our prevalent notions of the nature of the imposition of colonial order and control. The use of railway crimes as an analytical index to assess issues of colonial control requires explanation. I was mainly curious to explore what happened to crime and mechanisms of control when a faster mode of transit was introduced in a society that arguably was being pacified with restrictions on movements. Furthermore, hitherto, no attempt has been made to explore the ways in which the widespread evidence of railway crimes challenge our assumptions of colonial order and control.11 The consequent research offered a new perspective to analyse themes of crime and control in colonial India. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first focuses on specific examples of railway crime and the measures taken to curb them. It explores the gap between crime and control in colonial India, albeit in a railwayspecific context. The second part analyses the ways in which the gap between crimes and mechanisms of control influenced the Indian perceptions of the colonial state. It also demonstrates how the imposition of colonial control was mediated through Indian conditions and agency. Additionally, it brings together an interpretative analysis of the evidence, with concluding remarks.

Crime in transit: Railway crimes in colonial India In a Bengali detective story written in the late 19th century, the author chose a railway compartment to situate his narrative, and by so doing signalled (pun intended) the link between crime and railway journeys. In this story, two passengers travelling to Calcutta in a second-class carriage were robbed of their cash and jewellery while in transit.12 The theft occurred at night, and the passengers did not have any inkling of the incident as the thief drugged them. When they regained consciousness the next morning, complaints were lodged with the railway police and an investigation followed. But the police could neither catch the criminal nor recover the

Lost in transit? 217 stolen items. As a theme in a detective story, theft in transit is not surprising. Evidently it is indicative of the popularity of detective novels in vernacular,13 and of the writers’ search for themes and settings. But it also suggests that by this time, railway travel came to be associated with railway crimes, and, therefore, could be legitimately used as a backdrop for a detective story. According to official reports, theft was the most common form of crime inflicted on the railway passengers, accounting for about one-third of the total amount of property stolen in transit.14 The category of theft included: thefts committed by pickpockets, and thefts of luggage and other things belonging to passengers whether on a train or at stations. Reports also noted that pickpockets frequented all large stations and thefts usually committed by those who made a livelihood by practising their trade on the railway.15 In the first Annual Report of the Government Railway Police (hereafter GRP) for North Western Provinces (hereafter NWP), 459 cases of thefts (for that year) were registered.16 The officials believed this number was much fewer than the actual cases. Thefts and pickpocketing were described as the ‘most systematic’ kinds of crime committed on the railway. They were also the ones that were committed with the greatest impunity.17 The report also contained a comprehensive note on the railway pickpockets by the Inspector General of the GRP which is worth quoting in full. It [pickpocketing] is a regular trade, and I [Inspector General of Police, GRP] may almost assert that the whole trade belongs to one gang, or at any rate known to each other. I cannot merely say what numbers of men ply this trade; but if I were asked what estimate I had formed of the number at a guess, I should say that there were no fewer than 500 pickpockets on the line between Delhi and Howrah. (. . .) It is needless for me to enter into a description of the ways in which this class of thieves commits these thefts, as they are well known to all police officers. At large stations such as Allahabad, Cawnpore, Agra, where native passengers often wait for hours for a train, and where there is always a crush at the ticket office, they thrive best, but they also drive a good trade by robbing a fellow passenger in the train when he is off his guard. Having fixed on a victim who he knows, or has good reason to think has valuable property about him, the thief will accompany him perhaps for hundreds of miles until he gets the required opportunity of plundering him.18 So pervasive was the incidence of thefts and pickpockets that a pamphlet published by a retired police officer claimed ‘railway thieves’ to be more dexterous and efficient than other classes of professional thieves.19

218  Aparajita Mukhopadhyay The police reports also offer detailed information about the modus operandi of the thieves, indicating that thefts were usually committed by wellorganised gangs who fixed their ‘headquarters’ in big towns. Some of their members travelled up and down the line while others remained behind to watch the arrivals of trains and took measures for speedy disposal of any property that were brought back. If the police, having received notice of robbery committed, were alert in the stations where a train was due to arrive, then the gang members warned their colleagues who were travelling in those trains. Consequently, the thieves left empty handed, having passed on the stolen goods to their associates or travelled towards a smaller station where they could alight without fear of detection.20 Railway thieves were also noted to travel often in the second or intermediate class carriages to avoid detection. Railway travellers were routinely cheated and robbed by various other means. Of these, the most common was to drug passengers with food laden with sedatives. In these cases, the thieves usually posed as pilgrims and offered prasad to their fellow travellers. When the passengers lost consciousness, their bodies and luggage were thoroughly searched and valuable items stolen.21 Besides using drugs, a newspaper article reported that on the Sindh-Punjab and Delhi Railway, thieves frequently disguised themselves as ticket collectors, entered the carriages at night, and decamped with whatever they could steal. If travellers were awake, they simply asked them to show tickets to remove any suspicion, and got off the trains.22 Passengers were also swindled by groups of professional criminals who idled about the railway stations, entered into conversations with ignorant passengers and offered to purchase their tickets. After collecting the money, they either purchased tickets for a short journey or ran away with the entire amount.23 At Kanpur station, a police investigation revealed a gang that made a livelihood by swindling passengers through these means.24 The enquiry noted that, as there was always a large crowd of passengers, this gang operated undetected and chose their victims carefully. Most often they preyed on those who were unaccustomed to railway travelling and groups including several women and children. Usually, such passengers rather felt glad of the offer to buy tickets. In return, they got tickets for the first few stations on their way out. When detected, the victims of such fraud were invariably thrown out of the trains by the ticket inspectors. This method of cheating passengers was commonplace enough to cite in the contemporary travelogues, warning the readers to refuse any such solicitous behaviour from strangers.25 From the preceding discussion, it can be argued that the railway operations certainly offered new opportunities for crime.26 The advantages of speedier transit, anonymity, and the reduced prospect of detection in a

Lost in transit? 219 large assembly of people – all added to the attraction of railway as a new site of criminal depredations. The novelties of railway travel practices, especially the rules regulating ticketing or having people sleep in places accessible to any passer-by and the sharing of carriages or waiting rooms with strangers offered new opportunities to criminals. Whether they were swindling passengers of their money for fares or stealing valuables by posing as railway employees, the criminals utilised the rules and demands of the new transport technology to their advantage. In a not-so-rare instance of complementing the ability of the criminals to familiarise themselves with the nuances of the railway system, a police officer noted that on questions of distances and fares, ‘railway thieves’ might be consulted as safely as a Bradshaw!27 Railway operations were also modified existing forms of crime. Being drugged and robbed in transit was certainly not new. For instance, writing at the turn of the 20th century, the author of a Bengali travelogue reminisced how in pre-railway days pilgrims on their way to Puri often suffered at the hands of thieves who offered drug-laden prasad and decamped with their valuables.28 However, the introduction of railways, the author noted, had not made much difference as the thieves had just expanded their area of operation. If anything, the speed and anonymity offered by the railway transformed the mechanics of this kind of theft offering easier means of escape and fewer (often late) chances of detection. Police and Railway officials admitted railway’s role in engendering a distinct group of offenders – the ‘railway criminals’.29 But this claim contained a caveat: ‘railway criminals’ were identified as members of ‘criminal castes and tribes’. Thus, while acknowledging the emergence of new forms of crime in response to the railway, the officials argued that the assaults were committed by those who were criminals by nature or birth. The obsession with caste/group affiliation is evident in the official records. In most cases, only the caste background of the railway criminals is recorded. Offenders noted as Bhamtas, Mewatis, Ahirs or GondBarwars, and the link between their caste identity and chosen profession was underlined without any nuance. Being members of ‘criminal castes’, these individuals were argued to be ‘exceptionally alert’ to new opportunities of expanding their professional activities. For instance, the police officers of the NWP noted the extensive use of the Awadh and Rohilkhand railway network by Gond-Barwars, Mallahs and Passis to travel to destinations on the East Indian Railway Company’s line to reach Bengal without much trouble.30 To the officials investigating railway crimes, the identification of ‘railway criminals’ as members of the ‘criminal castes’ seemingly offered two related advantages: first, since the offenders were predetermined to commit

220  Aparajita Mukhopadhyay criminal acts, their activities were beyond control or reform. Second, being members of specific caste groups, they were expected to behave or function in ways peculiar to their calling and their modus operandi was seen as distinct to their castes. The ‘knowledge’ of such distinctive behaviour was argued to make these criminals easy targets for arrest and conviction. For instance, the Bhamtas was claimed to dress well to avoid suspicion and usually travelled in gangs with members scattered over in different carriages. Once their co-passengers were asleep, they stole whatever valuables were in the luggage and passed on the stolen goods to one of their gang members in an intervening station.31 Officials argued that a thorough knowledge of such behaviour was useful in preventing and controlling crimes. Though as we will see later, more often than not, claims to possess such knowledge was more rhetoric than reality. Evidently, this identification of ‘railway criminals’ as members of ‘criminal castes and tribes’ was part of a wider administrative endeavour in colonial India, which classified individuals as members of groups possessing specific characteristics. At the risk of simplifying a vast, critical literature around the subject, it can be noted that this official impulse created typologies of social groups based on a principle of guilt by blood, descent, or association, rather than proven individual acts of criminality.32 Here it would be instructive to note that the ideologies propelling such efforts in colonial India were drawn from ideas and beliefs popular in Britain. Here, the notions of habitual offenders or a separate criminal class, whether due to social conditions or physical inheritance, were very much part of the 19th-century wisdom about criminal causation.33 On the other hand, as Radhika Singha, and more recently, A. Pillavsky’s works show, the stereotypical prejudice against peripatetic groups and an aversion to their way of life were also widely shared by Indian agriculturist communities, presumably to save their crops and cattle from wandering groups.34 Such overlapping of imperial prejudice and indigenous beliefs certainly question our understanding of the colonial knowledge gathering, in general, and the sources of the colonial states’ preconception about ‘criminal tribes’ in particular – an analysis of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, it would suffice to note that such beliefs influenced methods of regulating railway crimes. In most cases, an argument was made for close surveillance on the movements of the members of the ‘criminal castes’. In a report noting the activities of the Gond-Barwars, the officials claimed that in a year, at certain times, the members of the tribes made long journeys either by land or by water to commit a crime. The police, therefore, urged the Awadh and Rohilkhand railway officials to give information to the Government of Bengal of the departure by rail of gangs of professional thieves.35 Similarly, working on a suggestion of the Inspector General of police on the Great

Lost in transit? 221 Indian Peninsular Railway Company, Bhamtas of Deccan were regularly mustered while at home and were ‘obliged’ to account for themselves when absent.36 Not surprisingly, the widespread nature of railway crimes also contributed specific surveillance techniques to the police departments. For instance, registers and descriptive rolls (at times with photos) of well-known or suspected railway thieves were maintained. Whenever an ‘unmistakable’ pickpocket got arrested, their accounts and antecedents were verified from the police of their home districts.37 The information was subsequently recorded and printed in local languages to be kept with the police officers to familiarise them with the descriptions of these offenders as well as to enable them to bring previous convictions to the notice of the court when such criminals were arrested.38 Such methods of surveillance was certainly a part of a wider process of crime control mechanism that the colonial state was instituting as well as elaborating from the mid-19th century onwards.39 But relevant here would be to note that though moderately successful, neither the identification of railway criminals as members of ‘criminal castes’ nor the efforts at monitoring movements of suspected offenders were much effective in controlling crime against passengers.40 If arrested, the rate of conviction for railway crimes was very high, at times even 100 per cent. But the issue was, as the officials admitted in their reports, that the number of cases reported fell far short of the actual number of offences committed.41 More importantly, despite these measures, railway crimes, especially thefts, continued to plague railway passengers. A variety of reasons was cited to explain the failures. In particular, it was argued that railways had created a distinct class of thieves which transcended easy classification. In a pamphlet written by the retired Superintendent of the GRP, Madras, the author claimed railway thieves comprised people belonging to all castes and classes. To substantiate this claim he referred to the operations of a gang of railway thieves from Tanjore whose members were Brahmins.42 This discrepancy between stereotype and reality illustrates well the contradictions of colonial administrative logic. But it also underlines a need to revise our understanding of colonial rhetoric by looking more closely at the realities. Broadly speaking, officials claimed that thefts were difficult to detect as most often passengers were robbed when they were asleep and did not realise their loss until long after the crime had been committed. This time lapse usually offered the perpetrators enough time to escape. Further, being asleep, victims could not provide any clues for the identification of the suspect. Passengers were also content to put up with their loss because they often did not discover that they had been robbed until they had left the station and then did not think it worth their while to return. Additionally, passengers were said to be unwilling to report the crime because they knew

222  Aparajita Mukhopadhyay the enquiry would be long and tedious and would impede their journey.43 Light sentences passed by magistrates on the convicted thieves were also blamed for the level of crimes, as it balanced out arrests and releases. Upon release, it was claimed, thieves returned to their old ways only changing the scene of their operations.44 The district police was also accused of being unaware of ‘true calling’ of the habitual railway thieves. It was argued, though well known to the railway police, these thieves were not known in the districts where they resided and were passed off as well-to-do men of business, especially when they dressed well. Therefore, they came under suspicion only if they were travelling without tickets.45 Such claims and counterclaims also bring out the ways in which surveillance methods such as descriptive rosters at the local police stations were rather ineffective, if only because of lack of coordination. The ‘peculiarities’ of ‘native’ character was also identified as a factor responsible for permitting criminal behaviour.46 Police reports claim that Indian railway travellers ignored constant warnings against listening to ‘friendly advice’ from thieves and charlatans, and consequently paid the penalty.47 Of all ‘native’ habits, the proclivity to openly show wealth in the carriages was said to be the major cause of thefts. A police report cited the following incident as an instance of this inclination: a 14-year-old boy returning from the Sonepur fair showed his fellow passengers 1,100 rupees in cash, all in one bag, as a proof of his success in business. He eventually fell asleep and on arrival at MughalSarai station found his bag gone. This behaviour, according to the report, offered an ‘irresistible temptation to professional pickpockets’.48 In a curious turn of logic, however, Indian travellers were also blamed for being parsimonious, especially while travelling by train. Police officials unanimously agreed that ‘native’ passengers wished to save a trifle and insisted on travelling third class when they could well have travelled in second class if not higher.49 Such allegations exhibit racial stereotypes. Occasionally, it is possible Indian passengers chose to travel in the lower class carriages to avoid travelling with Europeans. But more importantly, it also challenges the official claim that upper-class carriages were immune from criminals. In reality, upper-class passengers were as much susceptible to criminal assaults as lower-class carriages.50 As noted above, criminals routinely travelled upper class to avoid suspicion and detection. European passengers were also robbed. In one such instance, one Jung Bahadur, an English educated, well-dressed ‘railway thief’ targeted European passengers travelling first class. He did not raise any suspicion as he appeared to be a ‘native gentleman of affable manners’.51 Despite ubiquitous evidence of railway crime, one of the most important components of the colonial state’s crime control mechanism (i.e.

Lost in transit? 223 policing arrangements, in this instance, for passenger safety in railway transit) remained woefully inadequate both regarding human and financial resources. Arrangements for railway police for passenger safety passed through several phases and came under complete government control only around the early 20th century. The nature of the railway enterprise in India – a curious mix of public and private management, which left plenty of scope for inefficiency, partly contributed to the problem.52 But, it was also because initially, the main concern was to safeguard railway property and freight; the safety of passengers was not on the agenda of the railway companies. The problem was compounded when the Boards of the railway companies did not want to spend money on policing. Their agents based in India demanded better policing, as they were aware of the assaults on passengers, and claimed that failure to control criminals seriously undermined the Company’s prospects of attracting ‘native’ passenger traffic.53 Consequently, for a very long time, ‘railway police’ consisted of guards employed by the railway companies with limited powers and jurisdiction. They could only prosecute people who had contravened by-laws of the railway companies and their territorial jurisdiction was limited to ‘railway property’.54 Further, the district or provincial police had limited or no access to the railway precincts. If this rule was violated, it would complicate any legal procedures.55 The provincial and central governments were aware of the limitations, which they thought created conditions conducive for assaults on passengers’ property and persons. They also expressed their concern at the unsatisfactory condition of public safety in railway transit.56 Eventually in 1866, the East India Railway Company agreed to finance a police force (the subsequent GRP) jointly with the government. But other railway companies joined this effort much later. For instance, on the Oudh and Rohilkhand line, the GRP was introduced as late as 1894.57 Evidently, railway policing was rather a delayed and inadequate response to railway crimes. More importantly, as the GRP was not used by all railway companies, the squabbles over finances, as well as jurisdictions, led to frequent deadlocks that certainly undermined the capacity to control crimes. It is not without significance that railway criminals being aware of these legal wrangles took advantage of it and routinely fled to non-railway properties, including the princely states to either avoid or delay detection and control.58 The preceding discussion is indicative of the gaps that existed between the rhetoric and mechanisms of crime control and actual crimes in colonial India. Evidently, railway operations introduced new crimes and modified the existing ones. While, at one level, this necessitated new methods of control and surveillance, at another, the very transient and mobile nature of the railway transport also substantially undermined such efforts. Further, as the

224  Aparajita Mukhopadhyay evidence suggests, despite surveillance mechanisms, mobility increased – both of ‘criminal tribes and others. Evidently, the colonial state could not control the mobility of the ‘criminal tribes’ as much as has been argued. At a more theoretical level, official acknowledgements of the inability to control railway crimes in an effectual manner perhaps underline the practical and even logistical difficulties encountered by the colonial state to impose order and control over India. As the protracted and inefficient evolution of GRP indicated, the colonial state’s ability to either prevent or control widespread crime was limited. Last but not least, as a related point, it can be argued that the failure to curb railway crimes suggests that despite our existing assumptions to the contrary, the ‘colonial knowledge’ was neither total nor did it always serve the colonial state well.

Lost in transit: crime and control in colonial India This section primarily explores the ways in which Indians interpreted the gap between railway crimes and mechanisms of control, and how this gap influenced their perceptions of the colonial state. Here, the responses and perceptions of Indians to issues of railway crimes will mainly be gleaned from Indian language newspapers. I rely on newspaper reports here, because despite widespread evidence of railway crimes, many cases went unreported in police records.59 Consequently, official records do not tell us much about how the victims of the railway crimes responded. Moreover, barring one instance, any reference to railway crimes is virtually absent from contemporary Bengali and Hindi travelogues.60 The newspaper reports about railway crimes, however, reveal an important pattern – until about the 1890s, the focus is primarily, though not exclusively, on issues such as demand for bribes by railway employees and ill treatment of passengers. Complaints about criminal assaults on passengers’ persons and property begin to appear only in the late 19th or early 20th century. Yet the non-performance of the GRP began to appear in the newspapers almost immediately after its formation in 1867. For instance, as early as 1869, a newspaper article declared that the GRP ‘has not realised the object intended’.61 This shift in the focus of newspaper reports is instructive, because as the preceding discussion demonstrates, railway crime did not appear on the scene in the 1890s, and therefore, its near absence from newspapers before this period belies logic. But this shift can be explained once we realise that railway crimes per se were not the issue. If anything, by the 19th century, the railway travelling public was inured to railway crimes. The issue rather was political. Here, I suggest that Indians (or a cross section of them) chose railway crimes and the inability of the government or railway authorities to

Lost in transit? 225 effectively curb it, as a convenient entry point to question the ability and legitimacy of the colonial government to rule India. The shift, therefore, reflected the broader changes in the anti-colonial politics in India from the late 19th century; this had very little, if anything, to do with the ways in which railway crimes routinely jeopardised passengers’ persons and properties. In other words, I argue that the railway crime was a well-chosen political stick to beat the colonial government, especially by an educated, urban, middle class, which was becoming politically strident, but also taking on a self-proclaimed role of ‘representing’ all Indians. Interestingly, if somewhat conveniently, this shift in the newspapers’ concern also coincided with an official acknowledgement of a spate of railway crimes during the late 19th century. The official records of the period show a rise in railway thefts.62 The Annual Report of GRP for NWP for 1891 noted: ‘the number of thefts committed on passengers by professional railway thieves is becoming very serious. These thefts are committed so cleverly that they are seldom discovered till the victims reach their destinations, or wake up in the morning’.63 The successive police reports from the NWP continue to show an increase in reported thefts across the East Indian Railway Company, the Indian Midland Railway, and the Oudh and Rohilkhand lines.64 A similar rise was noted in the police reports of the Bengal division of the early 20th century.65 The railway authorities blamed famine conditions and the paucity of the police force for this sharp rise in railway crime. How far the famine led to an actual growth of railway crime can be debated, especially when official records admitted that many cases of crime went unreported. Possibly, the distress caused by the famine led to more attention being given to cases of crime so that more of it was reported and recorded. But in the newspaper reports, the increase in crime on the railway was interpreted differently. The reports argued that the rise in railway crimes was symptomatic of a wider malaise – the government’s loss of control over the reins of administration. The reports focus on two related issues: (a) railway travel becoming increasingly unsafe and (b) the inability of the government to ensure passenger safety. A newspaper report from 1901 argued: ‘. . . the frequent occurrence of thefts on the railways of late had begun to affect public confidence. If these thefts are not immediately put down, the loss of public confidence would be equally injurious to the railway companies as well as passengers’.66 A report in the Daily Hitavadi drew the government’s attention to the frequent occurrence of dacoities and murders in trains and pointed out how these incidents had made it ‘extremely unsafe for passengers to travel on railways, as opposed to earlier times when trains were regarded as extremely safe’.67 Few months later, another report claimed the railway authorities were ‘outwitted by clever budmashes who

226  Aparajita Mukhopadhyay had rendered the precautions taken for the safety of passengers utterly useless’.68 It lamented the loss of the safety which intermediate and third class passengers had earlier enjoyed. Here evidently, the specifics of passenger safety was not the main concern. It is interesting to note that contrary to official reports and frank acknowledgement of railway crimes ever since the commencement of the railway operations, the newspaper reports claimed that railway travel used to be safer. While one can certainly argue that the increase in railway crimes from the late 19th century finally brought the issue into sharper focus, a close reading of the tone and content of the newspaper reports suggests otherwise. As noted already, the timing of the shift in the focus of these reports is crucial. The shift to a greater willingness to find fault with government and to hold it to account coincided with a rising anti-colonial movement in the late 19th century. Moreover, by the late 19th century, railway policing no longer remained a curious mix of private enterprise and government control. The GRP were employed along the entire railway network, and the Government of India became responsible for ensuring the safety and security of railway passengers. The measure brought the government closer to complete control over the ‘railway system’ – arguably one of the most important instruments of the colonial administration. But it also made it susceptible to claims that it should ensure the safety of railway passengers. Given these changes, instances of criminal assaults on passengers offered an appropriate political point to challenge the authority and the security claims of the government. Not surprisingly, the newspaper reports argued that the assaults on the railway passengers severely undermined the government’s ability to ensure safe and orderly travel. The report was a classic technique to question the wider legitimacy of the colonial government to rule over India. If the colonial state failed to ensure the safety of people in general and railway passengers, in particular, then its claims to rule were proportionately undermined. That the political climate added a crucial dimension to these responses is also evident from these reports. Their critical tone, though never forsaken, was usually tempered, and passenger safety demanded a responsibility as well as a paternal duty of the government. The use of this technique is well brought out in two newspaper reports. One ‘hoped’ that Sir Edward Baker (the then Lieutenant Governor of Bengal) would protect and offer security to his ‘subjects’. While the other ‘requested’ the government to show at least one-fourth of the readiness to prevent frequent railway thefts as it did to stamp out sedition.69 The ongoing discussion is indicative of several issues. It brings out (once again) the inability of the colonial state to control railway crimes. But more

Lost in transit? 227 importantly, it demonstrates the ways in which Indians (albeit a section) used and interpreted this lack of control for making their political claims while challenging the very logic on which colonial state staked its political claim, i.e. better governance and security than Indian rulers. The demand underlines the fact that the imposition of the colonial order and control was mediated and shaped by Indian agency. This mediation, however, was not restricted to political critiques of the colonial state. As the discussion in the previous section revealed, by running away to the princely states and various other non-railway jurisdictions, the railway criminals too were successful in subverting the system. In their turn, the colonial government certainly understood the imperatives of the mediation and the measures taken by them certainly reflect this awareness. It is significant that when given a chance to prosecute everyone who ‘overrode’,70 including railway thieves’ habit to override detection, the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal turned down the proposal. He noted the ‘measure would cause annoyance to honest travellers and would outweigh the gain to the police administration’.71 Similarly, one can see that concessions of some variety were being made, even at the risk of jeopardising passenger safety, when railway thieves avoided detection because they dressed well and spoke like ‘native gentleman’. The discussion here indicates how status and class, as opposed to race, determined socio-political relations in colonial India both inside and outside railway jurisdictions – various other aspects of which are beyond the scope of this chapter. At another level, it does bring us back, in the main, to interrogate colonial knowledge,72 and its incomplete nature of control.

Conclusion Evidently, the mechanisms of colonial order and control were not as rigid as has been hitherto assumed. Moreover, contrary to our current understanding, even for specific groups such as the ‘criminal tribes’, mobility was not restricted in this period. Rather it increased. As the preceding discussion suggests, new crimes and criminal networks were created which challenged and subverted the imposition of colonial order and control. Additionally, it can be argued that this inability of the colonial state to impose control over Indian society was indicative of a wider problem, i.e. that the knowledge and capacity of the colonial state were not as total as it has been thought to be. As the wide social profile of the railway criminals suggests, the colonial state’s understanding of the Indian society was both incomplete and inaccurate. Last but not least, to the contemporary Indians, the proverbial chink in the colonial armour was sufficiently noticeable to use and interpret it to their advantage, politically and otherwise.

228  Aparajita Mukhopadhyay To conclude, this chapter makes two specific points: first, the colonial ‘regime of regulation’ was incomplete and uneven. Second, the mechanisms of control were mediated through Indian conditions, which in turn affected the nature and the scale of control; and the Indian interpretation of this lack of control had consequences for the power and perceptions of the colonial state. The conclusions drawn are of course specific to the railway enterprise throughout North India. The railways representing as one of the cornerstones of colonial control and order yield valuable contrary evidence to suggest the limits to the colonial state and its powers. The specific findings on railway crime can be extrapolated to open possibilities for further research, such as a reassessment of the Pax Britannica, perhaps overdue, for the importance given to order and regulation under the colonial regime.

Notes 1 A. Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. 2 For an overview see, Yang, Crime; A. Rao and S. Dube (eds), Crime Through Time, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013; R. Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; S. Nigam, ‘Disciplining and Policing Criminals by Birth: Part 1: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype – the Criminal Castes and Tribes of North India’, IESHR, 1990, 27(2): 131–164; N. Sinha, ‘Mobility, Control and Criminality in Early Colonial India, 1760s–1850s’, IESHR, 2008, 45(1): 1-33. 3 Sinha, Mobility. 4 Nigam, Disciplining. 5 S. Freitag, ‘Collective Crime and Authority in North India’, in Yang, Crime. 6 Singha, A Despotism; Nigam, Disciplining. 7 Sinha, Mobility. 8 Nigam, Disciplining; Singha, A Despotism. 9 Annual reports to the Secretary of State for India in Council on Railways in India. Volumes consulted: 1860–1910, V/10 Series. Asian and African Collections, India Office Records, the British Library, London (Hereafter: IOR). 10 Annual Railway Police Reports, various governments and agencies, IOR. 11 Presently, railway crimes have attracted scholarly attention mainly for their role in developing policing techniques in colonial India. L. Appleby, ‘Social Change and Railways in North India, c.1845–1945’, unpublished PhD diss., University of Sydney, 1990; D. Campion, ‘Railway Policing and Security in Colonial India, c. 1860–1930’, in R. Srinivasan, R. Tiwari and S. Silas (eds), Our Indian Railway: Themes in India’s Railway History, New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006. 12 N. Gupta, ‘Churi na bahaduri’ (1890), in R. Chattopadhyay and S. Ghosh (eds), Goenda aar Goenda, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1994. 13 F. Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India, Bangalore: Permanent Black, 2009.

Lost in transit? 229 14 Administration report of Government of India for the year 1867–68, V/10/30, IOR. 15 Ibid. 16 Annual Report of the Assistant IG, Railway Police, NWP, for the year ending 31 December 1867 in P/433/44, 1868, IOR; the report claimed many cases went unreported and the registers too were not kept up properly due to frequent reorganisation of the police force. 17 Report of the working of the GRP in the NWP for 1868, in P/433/47, IOR. 18 Ibid. 19 P.M. Naidu, The History of Railway Thieves With Illustrations and Hints on Detection, Madras: Higginbotham, 1915. 20 Report of the police administration of the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 1865, V/24/3192, IOR. 21 H.D. Ross, ‘A Memorandum on Wandering Gangs of Criminals’ in ‘The Report on the Inter-Provincial Crime’, United Provinces, 1888, in V/27/120/6, IOR. Evidently, this was common form of railway crime. Some contemporary travelogues had travel advisories informing readers not to take prasad from strangers, even at the risk of offending religious sensibilities. G. Dhar, Sachitra Tirtha Yatra Vivaran, Calcutta, 1913; N. Sen, Prabaser Patra, Calcutta: Gosthabihari Kayari, 1875. 22 ‘Koh-i-Nur’, 14 March 1871, in Selections from Native Newspaper Reports, North-Western Provinces, L/R/5/48, 1871, IOR. 23 Report on the Police Administration in NWP, 1871 in V/24/3166, IOR. 24 Annual Report of the Assistant IG, GRP for the year 1871 in V/24/3167, IOR. 25 Dhar, ‘Sachitra’. 26 S. Banerjee makes a passing reference to the contribution of railways in creating a new era of mobile crime. S. Banerjee, The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2009, ch. 5. 27 ‘Prevention of offence in the Native States by contractors’, 1872. A note by Colonel Harvey, Consulting Engineer to the Government of India for State Railways, in The Proceedings of the Railway Department, Government of India, P/585, 1872, IOR. 28 D. Rakshit, Bharat Pradakshin, Calcutta, 1903. 29 Report of the Police Administration of Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 1865, in V/24/3192, IOR. 30 Letter from IG police, Lower Provinces to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, dated 26 September 1869, in The Proceedings of the Railway Department, Government of India, P/585, IOR. 31 Naidu, ‘The History’. 32 Yang, Crime; Singha, A Despotism; Dube, Crime. 33 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin, 2002. 34 Singha, A Despotism; A. Piliavsky, ‘The Criminal Tribe in India Before the British’, paper presented at the Centre for Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, 31 October 2012. 35 Letter from IG Police, Lower Provinces to the Secretary of the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department dated 26 September 1869, in The Proceedings of the Railway Department, Government of India, P/585, IOR. 36 Report of working of police of the GIPR, 1880 in V/27/160/6, IOR. 37 Report of the working of the GRP in NWP for 1868, P/433/47, IOR.

230  Aparajita Mukhopadhyay 38 Annual Report of the Inspector General of Police, GRP, NWP for the year ending 31 December 1868, V/24/3165 (1861–1868) IOR. 39 C. Anderson, Legible Bodies; Race, Colonialism and Criminality in South Asia, Oxford: Berg, 2004, ch. 4. 40 ‘Police Regulations’, Bengal, Volume VI for the Criminal Investigation Department and the Railway Police Department, Calcutta, 1915, IOR. 41 Ibid.; Report of the working of police of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for the year 1880, V/27/160/6, IOR. 42 Naidu, ‘The History’. 43 Report of the Police Administration in NWP in the year 1870 in V/24/3166 [1870–1872], IOR. 44 Report of the Police Administration in Bengal, 1889 in V/24/3198, IOR. 45 Report on the Police Administration in NWP for the year 1871 in V/24/ 3166, IOR. 46 Report on the Police Administration in Bengal in the year 1889, in V/24/ 3198, IOR. 47 Ibid.; interestingly, the travel advisories offered in the travelogues concur with the official claims and underline the importance of shunning strangers. 48 Report on the Police Administration in NWP, 1878, in V/24/3169 [1876– 1880], IOR. 49 Report on the working of police on the GIPR, 1880, in V/24/3151, IOR. 50 In the detective story used earlier in this section, the assault took place in a second class carriage. 51 Report on the Police Administration in NWP for the year 1871 in V/24/ 3166, IOR. 52 For an overview of the railway managements and the problems arising out of it, see A. Mukhopadhyay, ‘Wheels of Change? Impact of Railways on colonial North Indian Society, 1855–1920’, unpublished PhD dissertation, SOAS, 2013. 53 Extract of a report by DIG police, Meerut and Rohilkhand division, 1864– 65, in Police Report, NWP V/24/3165 IOR. 54 ‘Railway Property’ included railway stations, ticket-booking counters, platforms, yards, railway lines, trains, carriages, and waiting rooms. 55 Extract of a report by DIG Police, Meerut and Rohilkhand Division, 1864– 65, in Police Report, North-Western Provinces, V/24/3165 IOR. 56 ‘Railway Police Management’, August 1864, extract of a report from Lt. Colonel H. Bruce, Inspector-General of Police in India to the Secretary to Government of Bengal, in P/163/33, 1864, IOR. 57 ‘Railway Police’, note by IGP, NWP, in P/433/42, 1867. Ever since its opening in 1871, the Awadh and Rohilkhand Company refused to have Government police force on its lines. Report on the administration of NWP for the year 1873–74, V/10/137, IOR. 58 ‘Prevention of offence in the Native States by contractors: 1872’. A note by Colonel Harvey, Consulting Engineer to the Government of India for State Railways, in The Proceedings of the Railway Department, Government of India, P/585, 1872, IOR. 59 See section I. 60 The exception is G.B. Dhar’s ‘Tirtha Yatra’. The silence in the travelogues can perhaps be explained by the nature of the texts, as well as by the fact

Lost in transit? 231 that the authors were educated, which made them less likely candidates of being victims of railway crimes, especially swindling. 61 ‘The Indian Mirror’, 15 September 1869, Selections from Native Newspaper Reports, NWP, L/R/5/46, 1869, IOR. 62 Police Administration Report NWP, 1890, in V/24/3171 [1886–1890], IOR. The report acknowledged the rise in thefts in all railways for the year 1890 and noted that property worth nearly 10,000 rupees was stolen in that year. 63 Police Administration Report, NWP, 1891, in V/24/3172 [1891–1896], IOR. 64 Police Administration Report, NWP, 1901, in V/24/3174 [1901–1910], IOR. 65 Police Administration Report, Bengal, V/24/3203 [1901–1905] IOR. 66 ‘Bharat Jiwan’, 2 December 1901, in Selections From Native Newspaper Reports, NWP, L/R/5/78, 1901, IOR. 67 Emphasis mine. ‘Daily Hitavadi’, 19 July 1910, in Selections from Native Newspaper Reports, Bengal, L/R/5/37, 1910, IOR. 68 Ibid., 18 December 1910. 69 ‘Daily Hitavadi’, 19 July 1910, and ‘Bangabasi’ [Hindi Edition] 27 January 1908, in Selections From Native Newspaper Reports, Bengal, L/R/5/35, and L/R/5/37, IOR. 70 In Indian railway parlance travelling further than the destination to which a fare had been paid was known as overriding. Annual Report of the Assistant IG, GRP NWP for the year ending 31 December 1867 in Proceedings of the Police Department, Government of NWP, P/433/44, IOR. 71 Letter dated 20 December 1878, from J. Monro, IG, Lower Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, in the Proceedings of the Police Department, GOB, P/1325; and ‘Reply to Monro from J. Macaulay’, secretary to the Lieutenant Governor, GOB, dated 11 January 1879, in the Proceedings of the Police Department, GOB, P/1325, IOR. 72 After all, the colonial claim to know India and Indians was based on (among other things) a detailed knowledge of their deportment and appearance, which in turn was argued to be directly related to their social background. Given this understanding, it is not surprising that railway criminals successfully avoided detection – as their appearance seemed respectable and therefore belied their choice of professional pursuit.

11 From London to Calcutta The ‘Bolshevik’ outsider and imperial surveillance, 1917–1921 Suchetana Chattopadhyay

The spectre of Bolshevism haunted the British Empire at the end of the First World War and in its immediate aftermath. From Cairo to Shanghai, and across South Asia, cities falling within the orbit of formal and semi-formal colonialism were seen by Imperial policymakers and intelligence-gatherers as susceptible to Bolshevik influence. Based mostly on imperial intelligence and colonial surveillance records, this chapter argues that anti-Bolshevik policy-thinking in London was imposed upon and adapted within a colonial climate with distinct racial, class and gender dimensions. The organisation of anti-Bolshevik surveillance in urban spaces such as Calcutta, which forms the focal point of this chapter, branched out of considerations marking the paradoxes of imperial liberalism and cosmopolitanism during an intensified crisis of empire. No identifiable left formation was visible between 1918 and 1921 in Calcutta. The response of the authorities combined advanced planning and panic-driven anticipation. Escalating material hardship from below and stifling political repression that touched daily life in the city during wartime and towards the end of the war bred local discontent and formed the immediate context of such a strategy. Wartime and post-war protests unfolded within an international wave of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism. These currents contributed to the urban base of the emerging Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements, the chief vehicles of popular upheaval against colonialism in the coming years. The Khilafat movement was led by Indian Muslim leaders as a display of solidarity with Turkey. It preceded the Gandhi-led Non-Cooperation movement, and in due course was supported by and combined forces with it.1 They disturbed colonial rule by facilitating the entry of the masses into the sphere of organised politics and the first major articulations of their demands in the public arena, culminating in an industrial anti-employer upsurge in the form of strike-actions, and encompassing Calcutta and its suburbs, in tune with the rest of the

From London to Calcutta 233 globe during 1920–1921. It was against this backdrop of mounting political and social turbulence that the anti-Bolshevik surveillance network in the city originated. Born and nurtured during heightened challenges to liberal imperialism, it was a retreat from colonial cosmopolitanism and manifested through the myth of the outsider.

The spectre of Bolshevism in the White Hall gardens The British war cabinet met in Downing Street to consider the new Bolshevik regime’s peace proposals to Germany at four o’clock in the afternoon on the last day of 1917. Despite suspicions directed at both the Germans and the Bolsheviks, it was recognised in a climate of military fatigue that the latter sought a ‘Just Peace’. However, when the war cabinet reassembled the following day the tone had altered sharply. The Bolsheviks, it was felt, had a programme of their own, inimical to British interests, and they were probably advocating the cause of the enemy. This preliminary judgment would henceforth penetrate all such discussions. Underlined by prosaic considerations as well as xenophobic stereotyping, official perceptions and policies were supported and reinforced in the public sphere through networks of newspaper reports and informal rumours. The Bolsheviks were initially projected as Germany’s agents, and after the fall of Germany as its successor as a hostile force. Britain’s rulers recognised, as contemporary records reveal, that the Bolsheviks were not a creation of the Germans, that the Kaiser Reich was equally interested in crushing them and that the Bolshevik-led mass upheavals in Russia had not been artificially fomented. It was recognised that the Bolsheviks had given a coherent political direction to the chaotic protests against the tsarist autocracy and a feeble provisional government. To the empire of capital, the anti-imperialist and internationalist appeal of Bolshevism was interpreted as a source of deep danger. In November 1918, the month of the armistice, the British government joined other Allied powers to invade Russia. The step was taken in trepidation of internal opposition to continuing the war by another name. A propaganda campaign against Bolshevism among the ‘inflammable’ British workers was thus also deemed expedient. By July 1919, as counter-revolutionary forces met with reverses, the cabinet became divided over the issue. Winston Churchill, as war secretary and a champion of direct military intervention, felt making peace with the Bolsheviks was a recipe for disaster and ‘could not conceive that we could sink so low’. Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, adamantly insisted on an exit strategy. His position was probably guided by intelligence reports on counter-revolutionary armies, especially the Polish contingents, as a hopeless, brutish and corrupt collection of anti-Semites

234  Suchetana Chattopadhyay and self-seekers who were alienating the local populace and driving them into the arms of the Bolsheviks. Though the British forces were withdrawn, support continued to be given to Kolchak, Denikin and the Polish forces till they collapsed. It was recognised by early 1920 that Britain could not commit troops in Russia since a revolutionary situation had emerged within the Empire due to militant strikes and mass upsurges against colonial rule, from Ireland to Egypt to India. Intelligence reports from that year also acknowledged that the Bolsheviks, though repugnant, were ruling with a degree of popular support and that the Red Army had become a highly trained and organised force in the course of the Civil War. The position of negotiating with the Bolsheviks gained ascendancy. In February 1920, Lloyd George insisted in a speech before the Commons that the civil war in Russia could not continue forever. He advocated future commercial relations to ‘bring Russia back to sanity by trade’ and declared: ‘We must use abundance to fight anarchy’. Peace talks began in May 1920 which concluded 10 months later with a commercial treaty with the Soviets.2 The fear of imminent Bolshevik ‘invasion’ of prize colonies such as India, through the land routes of Central Asia, Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier, was henceforth to be superseded by anxieties over ideological ‘infiltration’. While Conservatives debated whether or not to negotiate with their ideological nemesis, there was a consensus among all fractions of the British ruling class on the pressing need to safeguard the empire from its influence. In-house differences over cautious and militant strategies vis-à-vis Bolshevism thus converged to produce a stable network of long-term intelligence gathering on communism. The voices of moderation took advantage of the more extreme opinions to legitimise imperialism in rational tones. AntiBolshevik surveillance, as the scheme became loosely known in official circles, originated in the existing system of policing political opponents and combined with new strategies adopted in the wake of the revolution. It was a microstructure within the wider institution of imperial surveillance. In the propaganda war against Bolshevism, the paradoxes of liberal imperialism unravelled, and there were clashes with, and simultaneous adjustments to, the more xenophobic routes of self-preservation.3 The widespread anti-establishment feelings within Britain were cited to bring the measures into force. As the British state was preparing to deploy troops to Russia, attention fell on British workers sympathetic to Bolshevism, and on the general hostility of the poor towards the government. The state feared that the internal social situation could become even more volatile and the popular mood turn violently anti-establishment after the formal end of the war. Though force and legal prosecution were never ruled out as available options for dealing with dissent, the policymakers were anxious

From London to Calcutta 235 to emphasise that it was more important to persuade and convince people that ‘Bolshevism rather than the Government’ was the real ‘enemy’. Rather than tight censorship, counter-propaganda was advocated to highlight the aberrant presence of a malevolent ‘external’ force. The case of Lionel Britton (1887–1971), a neglected leftist writer of working-class origin, revealed the anxieties and perceptions guiding the British establishment. Britton had been a ‘conscientious objector’ during the First World War and was arrested as an absentee on 21 October 1918. His jailors believed he had been harboured by the British Socialist Party and was in possession of a typewriter belonging to the Food Commission and a stolen bicycle. Letters found on his person to a Harry Humphries of 27 Camac Street, Calcutta were quoted as ‘an indication of the state of mind of some of the people who are members of the British Socialist Party’: Dear Harry . . . I’m jolly glad to hear of your homecoming . . . if you call this blasted country home. . . . The question now is which of us can last out the longest, Germany, the British Empire, or L.B. I have had to follow some of their methods or I should have succumbed before this. I have now definitely decided to become a thief. I make sure of at least one meal a day free . . . It’s the only blessed earthly way one can live. These filthy stinking thieves, OBEs, etc., have overrun the country. Honesty is now a punishable offence. The only way to keep out of gaol is to thieve. Britton confessed to stealing an Onoto fountain pen at the British Museum to replace the one he had lost and felt guilty for trespassing on the public ‘flavour’ of the museum space. The war had completely demoralised him and he claimed the ‘dirty filthy swine’, denoting champions of war who profited from its devastations, who could afford fountain pens and believed in compulsory enlistment, should have been killed if it was safe to do so. He went on to say he had ‘committed no murders’ but had come to experience, influenced by the climate of war, ‘an extraordinary effect of the cheapness of human life’. If he had been ‘willing to accept the blessing of the Church’, he ‘should now be ankle deep in blood’, a prospect that revolted him. He called for an understanding of the pathology of the state by advocating a serious ‘study the application of bacteriology to politics’.4 Britton’s letter, bristling with irony and dejection, was also a conscious attempt to present the petty violations of private property as desperate self-help measures in hard times. But these individual views, feelings and acts were seen by officials as ‘dangerous’, containing the seeds of collective upheaval against the existing order in future.5

236  Suchetana Chattopadhyay The fictive and practical interpretations emanating from official readings enabled the British authorities to promote Bolshevism as the cause of postwar global afflictions besetting the empire of capital, from economic inflation to labour protests. Popular xenophobic positions and ideas, deplored in secret cabinet meetings, were given currency in the propaganda war against Bolshevism. This exposed the paradoxes of liberal imperialism that contradicted and simultaneously accommodated more extreme currents. Institutional and socially widespread anti-Semitism was harnessed to depict the Russian Revolution as a Jewish conspiracy. The unsophisticated Asian counterpart of the cosmopolitan, wandering ‘Jewish Bolshevik’, in the official imagination, was the ‘Muslim Bolshevik fanatic’. Though occasional reports stressed the need to win over the Muslim populations within the British Empire, an official stamp of approval was given to existing racist stereotypes of Islam as a religion of dangerous, seditious agitators. Jews and Muslims, it was emphasised, were the peripatetic carriers of subversive ideologies like Bolshevism since their transterritorial convictions could absorb the principles of communist internationalism.6 As one report observed: The danger of this [Bolshevik] propaganda consists in the idea of internationalism. This theory enables the Bolsheviks to find accomplices and allies in the most unexpected places outside Russia – in battleships, wireless stations, military barracks, post offices, consulates, palatial hotels and mansions. The result is that no one holding a responsible position in a non-Bolshevik country can be sure that he has not in his employ an embittered subordinate sometimes with a genuine grievance against society and a genuine belief in communism as a cure for all the ills in the world . . .7 The ‘Bolshevik Menace’ was perceived by the government as a pathological disorder with a global reach, comparable to the influenza pandemic of 1918. The case of Lionel Britton also showed how opponents of capital and empire were also capable of reading existing authority through the lens of ‘bacteriology’. Since the flu resulted in mass death on a global scale, its familiar imagery triggered horror and insecurity. In official speeches and narratives, Bolshevism became a virus and an epidemic: a political threat infecting the minds and actions of working-class troublemakers and disaffected intellectuals from outside. It was also projected as a strain that could combine with other anti-imperialist currents and mutate into a force of formidable opposition. A Bolshevik or a supporter of Bolshevism was necessarily an alienated outsider, equipped to corrode the body-politic of a healthy empire.8 Lenin and the ‘Bolshevik standpoint’ were described in

From London to Calcutta 237 apocalyptic terms in a confidential report from May 1920, when the AngloRussian negotiations had formally begun: Lenin has no thought for humanity, no shrinking from the disasters with which his policy may afflict it in the intermediate stage. To him, leaning on the rim of the world, wars and pestilences, should they come, merely usher in a new age. Compared with the establishment of the regime of Individual Liberty and Capitalism they are not disastrous, but transitory wisps of cloud that will clear. He is not unwilling that they should come, for they are among the former things that must pass away. They are instrumental merely, to be taken up and laid down like an artificer’s tools . . . One shrinks from the conclusion; but Lenin’s inhuman aloofness may have set the intricacies of the European situation in a true perspective, and his calculation that he will have his way whether the people’s fight or refuse to fight, has an appearance of foresight that is both disquieting and sinister.9

Receptions in Calcutta While the myth of the dangerous Bolshevik alien was taking shape, the colonial world was gradually becoming acquainted with Bolshevism through hostile news networks based in the West. In Calcutta, glimpses of the revolution were transmitted by The Statesman, a leading English daily with regular foreign pages and a dedicated European readership. A British film on the February Revolution was released for general viewing in Calcutta during April 1917. According to a contemporary account, this celebrated the fall of Tsardom and the establishment of liberal democracy under Kerensky. But from October onwards, Russia’s revolutionary upheavals came to be condemned in the European newspapers and The Statesman played a leading role in the sphere of print.10 On 4 November 1917, The Sunday Statesman printed cartoons depicting the Petrograd revolutionaries as ridiculous and impractical speechmakers oblivious to the war raging around them. Another cartoon portrayed Russia as a rustic soldier precariously walking a tightrope from autocracy to democracy; he could lose his balance at any moment and fall into a chaotic abyss below. Six days later, the news of a ‘Maximalist’ capture of power hit the headlines. Hourly news bulletins on the revolutionary events in Petrograd, disseminated through Reuter’s telegrams to London during 7–8 November, were reproduced. In the days that followed, incredulous glimpses of a world turned upside down were offered, laced with optimistic forecasts of an imminent Soviet debacle. By the end of November, these hopes were dashed. Kerensky, ousted leader of the provisional government, had proved to be a ‘tragic failure’ while the Bolsheviks – a term

238  Suchetana Chattopadhyay that replaced ‘Maximalists’ and ‘anarchists’ only in 1918 – were engaged in a ‘peace-plot’. Other platforms of European capital in the city were equally morose. The Scottish jute mill owners, representing one of the most powerful monopolistic lobbies in Eastern India, felt business with Russia was suffering as large consignments of jute were waiting to be shipped. Capital, a mouthpiece of colonial capital, expressed deep disquiet over a separate peace between Germany and Russia following the ‘defection’ of the Bolshevik government from war ‘for many months past’.11 The hostility of the British state and white colonial community encouraged many intellectuals and activists in Calcutta to develop a positive attitude towards the Bolsheviks. This was especially evident among alienated younger members of the city’s literary circles. Pabitra Gangopadhyay, an impoverished writer from a bhadralok background, had been dismayed by the loyalty displayed to the imperial war effort by the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the principal organisation of Indian nationalist opinion. In the wider context of mounting wartime and post-war poverty, he recalled participating in the informal political discussions among young intellectuals in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution; they welcomed the event precisely because the British government was against it.12 From the metropolitan to the colonial cities, they belonged to a global generational segment rejecting war, capitalism and empire-building. Although neither coherent nor organised, the sympathy for Bolshevism was interpreted by the colonial authorities as a potential social tendency for turning left. As the Russian civil war was fought concurrently with the launching of anti-colonial mass movements and a strike wave in and around Calcutta, solidarity towards Bolshevism increased and filtered down the social scale. One intelligence report described a meeting held in 1920 in the industrial suburb of Kankinara. A young Hindu speaker, whose precise identity could not be detected, had delivered a ‘fiery’ speech. According to the police, he was either a troublemaking outsider from Punjab or Allahabad working for the Bengal Khilafat Committee or an unemployed Calcutta clerk. The speaker reportedly told the assembled Muslim factory hands, who formed the majority in the area, that if the people of the country knew what Bolshevism meant, they would welcome it with open arms. The English, he pronounced in a millenarian vain, trembled at the very name, because they were conscious of their sin. He also stated that the Bolsheviks had destroyed the tsarist authoritarianism, an oppressive power that had ruled Russia in the same way that the British controlled India. The Bolsheviks were about to take Germany where the Kaiser’s tyranny has collapsed. They had assisted the Amir of Afghanistan so that the latter did not have to bow before the British Empire. Soon they would open a united front with Turkey. The speaker asked his Muslim brethren to see the

From London to Calcutta 239 coming together of Muslim powers and Bolshevism as a sign of the future decimation of colonial rule. According to the police agent present, the speech was ‘highly seditious and . . . delivered in the strongest terms’. Hitherto workers had not conspicuously armed themselves against the forces of colonial surveillance. The mood of a section of the crowd at the meeting caused worry: a little after the ‘Panditji’ began speaking, some Muhammadans moved about among the audience with canes in their hands and when enquiries were made as to what they were after they said that they were in search of ‘khapia police’ meaning the CID. They were purposely sent to be assured if any CID officer was taking notes, for they knew that the Pandit would deliver a fiery speech.13 The colonial government in India was preparing for this response. The horizons of post-war political policing suddenly expanded when the Intelligence Branch of the Bengal Police and the Special Branch of the Calcutta Police, in their Elysium Row headquarters, were instructed to watch out for an influx of Bolshevik literature and agents.14 As the former capital of British India, Calcutta’s system of colonial policing was highly developed. One of the official reasons cited to justify the transfer of the capital to Delhi in 1911 had been the growth of militant opposition to British rule in the city and its immediate surroundings. Even after the shift to Delhi, the central authorities continued to consult officials in Bengal on effective strategies to adopt in the face of rising political violence in the form of revolutionary nationalism. It was also in Calcutta that the Russian White provisional government based in London maintained a mission until this was closed down on grounds of cost in 1919.15 From the end of 1919, the anti-Bolshevik surveillance scheme was put in place following discussions between the central authorities in Delhi and local authorities in Calcutta. It was keenly felt that in a cosmopolitan port city surrounded by an industrial belt and peopled with workers, Bolshevik agents and literature would find a haven unless checked in advance. While local authorities reported that the Bolsheviks had not yet arrived, but would make their presence known once labour became organised, the centre took no chances. The local intelligence was asked to compile watch reports on activities of individuals and organisations suspected of Bolshevik sympathies. These reports were then incorporated into a confidential monthly bulletin of the Home Political Department in Delhi, which was circulated within India and regularly sent to London. The reports mostly concentrated on the nationalist and labour upsurge and individuals who had little to do with Bolshevism. The central authorities created two official

240  Suchetana Chattopadhyay positions within the Criminal Intelligence Department to deal with the ‘Bolshevik Menace’. However, the administration in Calcutta was reluctant to appoint a local ‘Anti-Bolshevik Officer’. Instead, it proposed the expansion of regular policing and the entrustment of an existing officer with the monitoring of this tendency. There was agreement with the central administrators that Bolshevism could be interpreted in a ‘loose way’ as subversive ideas and radical actions directed against the existing social order and political authority. Where they differed was regarding the presence of Bolshevik activists or organisation. Overemphasising an invisible threat was not favoured, and the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal gently chided the central authorities for their ‘loose’ use of the term: I gather that the Bengal Police, at all events, know nothing of any emissaries charged with spreading the principles of Bolshevism and the establishment of Soviet rule. We have had cases of convicted Bolsheviks landing at Calcutta, but I understand there is no reason whatsoever to believe that they were charged with any mission. He wryly observed if an officer went around looking for Bolsheviks, local Bolsheviks would indeed appear.16 Amid boasts by the local police of having personnel trained in latest methods at Scotland Yard and well equipped to deal with any potential danger, a compromise was reached.17 Two inspectors were appointed as ‘Bolshevik Guards’ and watch reports on local protests were regularly sent to the central Anti-Bolshevik officer in charge of collating such news. This step was combined with enforcement of strict passport control at the Calcutta Port. The banning and censorship of imported and locally produced periodicals and books deemed politically and socially radical were also seen as effective measures.18 At the end of 1921, with the conclusion of the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement and the reduction of the surveillance budget in India, the special anti-Bolshevik scheme was abandoned.19 This move meant the abolition of official posts created at the central and local levels. However, through the special scheme, the colonial authorities and intelligence services were alert to the possibilities of a left formation in the future, and when a tiny communist nucleus emerged in the city, the state was already awaiting such a development.

The outsider in Calcutta During the enforcement of the special surveillance scheme in Calcutta in 1920, the local intelligence, conforming to the demands of the imperial authorities in London and Delhi, regularly sent reports on suspected Bolsheviks spotted in the docks, neighbourhoods and industrial suburbs.

From London to Calcutta 241 Their targets were individual visitors who fitted certain stereotypes related to class, race, gender, ethnicity and politics. The process had begun earlier. In March 1918, by communications sent from Bombay, the officers and crew of the Russian vessels S.S. Eduard Barry and S.S. Baikal were detained upon arrival in Calcutta under wartime security acts. The following month, the Marine Department of the colonial government cancelled the internment orders on the 14 officers involved, but the 17 sailors accompanying them remained incarcerated. Two of them fell sick and were removed to a general hospital under strict orders of detention.20 Preferential treatment as natural class allies could thus be extended to the officers while the sailors were seen as potential mutineers from below. Two years later, when the White Russian ship Ural landed in the docks, it was welcomed and refuelled. The three hundred cadets and officers, half of whom were exiled from Petrograd, were described as ‘Kolchak’s men’. The Englishman, a newspaper catering to the European community, lightly observed that a section of this cheerful young crew was seen playing music and entertaining ladies in their saloons. Unable to conceal the uncertainties facing the counter-revolutionary forces, the report also described the ship as old, battered and rusty. Loaded with ammunitions by the British forces at Vladivostok, it had sailed through Japanese waters and British colonial ports of Hong Kong and Singapore and stopped for coal at Calcutta on its way to Alexandria. Its final destination was unknown.21 No attempt was spared to keep the port, city and region free of the ‘Bolshevik Menace’, as the deportation of Frank Bilboa and John Burtovich demonstrated. Respectively of Spanish and Russian origin, Bilboa and Burtovich, two workers in their early twenties, arrived adventitiously in 1919 on a British merchant vessel, the SS Boverie, with a mixed crew ‘of all nations’. They had previously participated in strikes led by the Industrial Workers of the World at Broken Hill, New South Wales in early 1918, and having been sentenced to six months in jail were detained until November as the Australian authorities pondered on ways to get rid of them. After 10 months in prison, they were served with deportation orders to Chile, but the Chilean government refused to receive them, having also adopted anti-radical measures. The British police in Calcutta were aware that they were coming and, though sympathetic to the officers of a British vessel, informed them that the ship could not land. According to a statement of the ship’s officers, they had tried unsuccessfully to put the men on other steamers belonging to the same shipping line and had already separated them from the rest of the crew to prevent the spread of revolutionary ideas. The same statement branded the two as ‘well known bad characters’ forcibly placed on their vessel by the Australian authorities and complained that the ship had been refused entry at every port because of them. The Deputy Commissioner of

242  Suchetana Chattopadhyay the Port Police consequently arrested them under the wartime Defence of India Act, for allegedly carrying on Bolshevik propaganda and given the ‘impossibility of allowing them to remain at large in India’. Following interrogations and a close examination of their papers, the colonial authorities readily concluded that the two were in close touch with Bolshevism and confirmed the claim of the ship’s officers that they were ‘dangerous and a menace to the ship’. The papers indicated anarchist and anti-authoritarian links rather than any clear ‘Bolshevik’ position, reflecting the wide interpretation made of the term at this point. They were incarcerated at Alipur Central Jail, a familiar destination of political prisoners in the city though the authorities pressed for their transfer to the Ahmednagar military internment camp; they argued the latter was more suitable since it held ‘prisoners of this type of Bolshevists’. Ultimately, in August, Balboa was put on a ship sailing to Port Said, and Burtovich on one sailing for Shanghai, from which the British authorities intended to deport him to White Russia. Apparently Burtovich resisted this course of action, getting off the ship at Singapore. After their deportation, the trail of the two strikers faded from official reports.22 The circumstances of their arrival and departure nevertheless suggest that local authorities in the port cities of the colonial and semi-colonial world were becoming increasingly vigilant regarding the ‘Bolshevik Menace’. A powerful and effective network of surveillance against political dissidents already existed but was expanded at this point to look out for the so-called Bolshevik agents travelling by sea. Transterritoriality among the targets of surveillance was often underlined by phobic perceptions of water in official thinking; sailors, ships, sea routes and port cities were seen as entry points of an enemy with ever-changing, liquid physiognomy. Since the imperial authorities specifically asked for them, the volume of reports on Bolshevik agents increased in 1920. Through guidelines sent in 1919, closely following instructions from London, on a potential ‘ingress’ of Bolshevik ‘agents’ and literature into India, the specific parameters of anti-Bolshevik surveillance were set.23 Reports drawing on the experiential and mythic and bordering on the curious and the fantastic were supplied by local intelligence agents, to keep up with the demands from above. Random impressions were often rarefied into facts. Slices of daily life, isolated from other mundane aspects, became staples of political policing. They enveloped surveillance accounts in a haze of rumours, hearsay and stereotypes. Versions of events and descriptions of individuals were concocted and embroidered. In early 1920, a certain Madam Dass was watched briefly. The male gaze of the agents followed her across the city. She was described as a prosperous and ‘beautiful’ middle-aged lady of Indo-European origin, ‘a gift to the nation by a Kashmiri mother and a European father’. But she was

From London to Calcutta 243 also of ‘questionable character’, having become estranged from her Indian husband, a retired doctor and government servant who had served in the Indian Medical Service. She had visited militant Khilafatist and nationalist figures in the city and wished to join the revolutionary movement. The leaders had disapproved of her smoking habit and manners. Furthermore, they suspected her of being a government agent but were interested in utilising her contacts among émigré Indians. Madam Dass, whose full name was never given, was implied to be a political adventure-seeking femme fatale, and painted in the literary shades of Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Mata Hari. She disappeared from the dossier as suddenly as she had appeared. The discussions on her, like so many other investigations, ceased abruptly and remained inconclusive. Other suspected Bolshevik outsiders also disappeared without actions being taken against them. Bishop Fisher, an American Methodist Minister, was watched after the police read an article published by his rival in a New York journal accusing him of political radicalism. When he realised he was being shadowed, the bishop bitterly complained and the watch was withdrawn. Artem Arunoff, a ‘Bolshevik Armenian’, was interrogated in the Poona Jail by the ‘Anti-Bolshevik’ officer; he claimed that three Bolshevik agents, William Rainer, Haji Moor and Ivanoff, were in Calcutta. Subsequent enquiry among the city’s small Armenian diaspora yielded little. Ivanoff reportedly came to Calcutta, was watched and left. Harry S. Durkee, holder of US and Russian passports, allegedly a Bolshevik agent with ‘somewhat Jewish features’, arrived and departed through the Calcutta port. Preetz, a German textile merchant who had apparently worked in pre-war Calcutta and acted as a Bolshevik representative in Berlin, was also investigated. Nothing could be found on his local contacts in Calcutta. A confidential report stated that another man bearing the same name had been discovered. He was a doctor attached to the Old Mission Church and in the habit of visiting brothels to blackmail the patrons, and liquor dens where he kept ‘low-class’ company. A report was also prepared on the nonexistence of an Esperanto Club in the city since they were tipped as centres of Bolshevik internationalism and intrigue in port cities such as Shanghai.24 Tan Pei Yun, a Chinese actor who played the role of a clown and stopped the dramatic performance early to deliver a subversive anarchic-Bolshevik lecture, was expected to land in Calcutta. He could sow ‘mischief’ among the large Chinese community of the city, having travelled through Britishcontrolled Kuala Lumpur with his troupe. He never arrived.25 Finally, in January 1922, an unnamed ‘source’ from Moscow reported the arrival in Calcutta of four Russia-trained British Bolsheviks, Whitehead, Keller, Karolinade and Markov. One of them was supposedly missing two fingers on his hand. No one matching such a description could be found.26

244  Suchetana Chattopadhyay Potential Bolshevik penetration, following central directives, was seen in the movements of people, money, treasures and literature. The central authorities banned new rouble notes and the local authorities kept an eye on their possible circulation even if none was detected.27 Lenin was personally accused of planning to flood Bengal with forged paper currency and the Bolsheviks were seen as successors to the Kaiser government in attempting to increase inflation by ruining Britain and the empire with fraudulent money.28 Intelligence reports from London projected Jews as potential carriers of Russian crown jewels, confiscated and put on the market by cash-strapped Bolsheviks. Consequently, Jewish jewellery shops in the fashionable business districts of Dalhousie Square and Chowringhee were watched constantly. The Perry brothers, Joseph and Nathan, were investigated. Joseph was found to have been insolvent for a while, but it was ultimately decided that neither was a Bolshevik. Ele Levy Menashe, travelling on a passenger ship from Rangoon, was also suspected, but instructions on him arrived too late and his luggage was not searched; by this time, he had left for Bombay.29 In 1920, left literature circulated by the Third International was scarcely noticed. Publications of the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain were banned before they could be distributed.30 ProBolshevik views, expressed in Daily Herald, the British labour paper, were suppressed when the Government of India prohibited its import during the high tide of Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movements.31 The entry of proscribed communist literature remained thin and only increased in volume from 1922 with the emergence of a local network of left activists to receive and disseminate it.32

Conclusion The focus on the myth of the Bolshevik outsider to explain the post-war sympathy among different class segments, conceived and cultivated in the metropolitan surroundings of the Whitehall Gardens and transplanted to imperial outposts such as Elysium Row in Calcutta, operated in the dual realms of illusions and practical strategy. In the gardens of deep reaction, myths could take on lives of their own. The illusion of imperial policymakers and the consequent recourse to xenophobic stereotypes stemmed from a fixed belief in the perfection of an order that could not weaken or crumble from within. Illusions regarding liberal cosmopolitanism and multiple identities made the British state project Bolsheviks as both narrow-minded and flexible, as parochial peasants and travelling subversives. This attitude also prompted the establishment to celebrate variously and downplay, in unsystematic and contradictory ways, its claims to sophisticated cosmopolitanism and racist anti-cosmopolitanism. The illusion was also aimed at

From London to Calcutta 245 winning over the subjects of this order when many tried to resist capitalism at home and imperialism and colonial capital abroad. State vigilance in the colonial world had unintended consequences. Bolshevism entered an urban dreamscape. As a utopian vision, it was seen as erasing the interlinked webs of scarcity, artificial price rise, wastage of resources, profit accumulation, poverty and exploitation. In Calcutta, the official vision of the ‘Bolshevik’ outsider was contested at the moment of its circulation. In 1920, Mohammadi, a weekly Bengali-Muslim newspaper, observed that the ‘Bolshevik Menace’ was a myth created by the government and the Bolsheviks were not sending agents to organise labour strikes in and around the city; the workers themselves were rising against hunger and exploitation.33 The left appeared in Calcutta from these experiences of labour activism and receptions of Marxism and Leninism following the Bolshevik Revolution. Once an identifiable yet microscopic left nucleus had indeed emerged, the state lost no time in projecting its central figure, Muzaffar Ahmad, a former Muslim cultural activist and Bengali journalist, as ‘a Bolshevik agent’ recruited by M. N. Roy on behalf of the Communist International.34 Thereby, the myth of the outsider could be transformed and effectively utilised as a practical strategy to suppress individuals and new collectives, and the local responses to an international current.

Notes 1 For a historical treatment of the wider context, see Peter Robb, The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards Politics and the Constitution, 1916–1921, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Also, Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, New Delhi: MacMillan, 1983, pp. 198–227. 2 Cabinet Office Papers (CAB) 1917–1921. See ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the War Cabinet Held at 10 Downing Street, S.W., on Monday 31 December 1917, at 4.0 p.m’. The cabinet met again on 1 January 1918 at 2 Whitehall Gardens (CAB/23/13). Bolsheviks II: March-November 1917, Political Intelligence Department, Foreign Office, Report dated 5.4.18 (CAB/24/47). The exchange between Churchill and Lloyd George is recorded in ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the War Cabinet, held at 10, Downing Street, S.W., on Tuesday, July 29, 1919, at 10.30 a.m.’ (CAB/23/11). See ‘Polish Peace Terms to the Bolsheviks’ (CAB/24/101). For observations on the Red Army as a trained force, see ‘Conclusions of a Cabinet Conference in the Prime Minister’s Room at Claridge’s Hotel, Paris, on Friday, 16 January, 1920 at 5 p.m.’ (CAB/23/35). Also A Monthly Review of Revolutionary Movements in British Dominions Overseas and Foreign Countries, No. 25, November 1920, Directorate of Intelligence, Home Office (CAB/24/69). For Lloyd George’s speech before the Commons and impending negotiations with Moscow, see IB 117/1920. ‘IB’ stands for dossiers of the Intelligence Branch of the Bengal Police. Also L/P&S/10/886 (1229/1920 Part.1). ‘P&S’ stands for ‘Political and Secret’ dossiers of the British Foreign Office. For further details on internal

246  Suchetana Chattopadhyay debates and positions on the Russian civil war and trade negotiations within the British cabinet, see Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, London: Allen Lane, 2009. 3 For descriptions and analysis of the architecture of post-First World War imperial intelligence arrangements, see R.J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924, London: Frank Cass, 1995; Marku Ruotsilla, British and American Anti-Communism Before the Cold War, London: Frank Cass, 2001; Robert Gregg, ‘Valleys of Fear: Policing Terror in an Imperial Age, 1865–1925’, in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880–1950, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 169–190; Suchetana Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913–1929, New Delhi: Tulika, 2011. 4 Fortnightly Report on Pacifism and Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom and Morale in France and Italy, Secret Report No. 25. 4 November, 1918, circulated by the Home Secretary (CAB/24/69). 5 Fortnightly Report on Pacifism and Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom and Morale in France and Italy, Secret Report No. 25. 4 November, 1918, circulated by the Home Secretary (CAB/24/69). 6 Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist, pp. 118–126. 7 A Monthly Review of Revolutionary Movements in British Dominions Overseas and Foreign Countries, No. 20, June, 1920, Directorate of Intelligence, Home Office (CAB/24/108). 8 Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist, pp. 118–126. 9 A Monthly Review of Revolutionary Movements in British Dominions Overseas and Foreign Countries, No. 19, May 1920, Directorate of Intelligence, Home Office (CAB/24/107). 10 Satis Pakrasi, Agnijuger Katha (Burning Times), Calcutta: Nabajatak Prakashan, 1982, pp. 105, 109. 11 The Statesman, November 1917. The fact that the Press began to use the word ‘Bolsheviks’ to denote ‘advanced revolutionaries’ from mid-1918 was noticed in Fortnightly Report on Pacifism and Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom and Morale in France and Italy, Secret Report No. 25, 4 November 1918, circulated by the Home Secretary (CAB/24/69). For the response of colonial capital in Calcutta, see Indian Jute Mills Association, Report of the Committee for the Year Ended 31 December 1917. Also Capital, 14 February 1918. 12 Pabitra Gangopadhyay, Chalaman Jiban (Life in Motion), vol. 1, Calcutta: Calcutta Book Club, 1956, pp. 66–67, 93, 100, 205. For a historical account of the position adopted by the Congress leadership during the war, see Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, pp. 149–150. For further details on the local reception of left ideas, see Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist, pp. 76–78, 98–101. 13 IB 80/1920 (112/20). 14 Home (Pol.) 87/1920. ‘Home (Pol.)’ denotes Political Intelligence files of the Home Department, Government of Bengal. 15 L/P&S/11/136 (P2888/1918). 16 H.L. Stephenson’s opinion was expressed on 8.12.19. See Home (Pol.) 405/1919.

From London to Calcutta 247 7 Home (Pol.) 405/1919. 1 18 Home (Pol.) 87/1920. Annual Report of the Police Administration of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs for the Year1921. 19 IB 106/21(280/21). 20 Home (Pol.) 142/1918. 21 IB 80/1920(112/20). 22 Home (Pol.) 281/ 1919. 23 Home (Pol.) 405/1919. 24 IB 80/1920 (112/20). 25 L/P&S/10/887(1229/1920). 26 IB154/22(109/22). 27 IB15/1920 (350/20). 28 Subodh Roy (ed.), Communism in India: Unpublished Documents 1919– 1924, Calcutta: National Book Agency, vol. 1, 1997, p. 39. This collection consists of excerpts from Home (Political) reports of the Government of India. IB 66/21 (20/21). IB 41/1920 (311/20). 29 IB15/1920 (350/20). 30 IB 38/1921(130/21). 31 IB130/21(61/21). 32 Annual Report of the Police Administration of the Town of Calcutta and Its Suburbs for the Year1922. Also Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist, pp. 99–109. 33 IB 117/20. 34 See Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist, p. 128.

III  Encounters and ‘improvement’

12 Competition or collaboration? Importers of salt, the East India Company, and the salt market in Eastern India, c. 1780–1836 Sayako Kanda S. G. Palmer, Assistant Secretary to the Bengal Board of Customs, Salt and Opium, stated with puzzlement on 27 April 1834: The state of the salt market [in Bengal and Bihar] for some time past has been so difficult to understand. . . . The price in the mofussil [upcountry], by the last returns, is hardly remunerating, although salt has sold at the public sales lower than it has sold for many years; yet how is this to be accounted for? . . . we see that . . . they [prices] are really rather lower than ordinary; a fact only to be accounted for by supposing that these markets are illicitly supplied.1 Why was the government of the English East India Company (hereafter the Company) concerned with the price of salt and perplexed by the state of the market? First, by that time, salt had become the second largest revenue source for the Company’s government, playing a crucial role in consolidating its rule. The Company began to monopolise the production of salt in Eastern India (Bengal and Bihar, in this chapter) in 1772 to improve financial stability and expand financial capacity. By a series of reforms of the production and sale systems during the 1780s, it successfully established a stable system of monopoly. High prices characterised the Company’s salt policy between c. 1790 and 1836. All the Company’s salt was sold at public sales, which were held in Calcutta in limited numbers. This system led to an emergence of a group of large salt purchasers, who bought up the salt at public sales and controlled salt prices in the market.2 This synergy of the Company and large purchasers worked to maintain high salt prices and promised them large profits. Second, the Company faced growing pressure from Britain and private traders who supported free trade. The growth of the salt industry in

250  Sayako Kanda Cheshire, and Liverpool shipping which sought a market for Cheshire salt in India, saw the salt monopoly as an impediment that prevented them from entering the market, even though the import of salt had been permitted since 1817, long before the cessation of the Company’s trading activities in 1833. The Company endeavoured to maintain the salt monopoly by stressing its significant financial role. Thus, a fall in salt prices, which led to a decline in salt revenues, had to be avoided. However, as Palmer lamented, salt prices did fall, which nullified the Company’s efforts to maintain high prices. The salt revenue inevitably declined. The average net revenue for the five years between 1823 and 1828 was £1,342,210 sterling, falling as low as £1,251,951 sterling between 1829 and 1834.3 In 1836, the Company finally abandoned its high-price policy. It managed to maintain the monopoly, and the customs duty on privately imported salt, which was on the increase after the cession of the Company’s trading activities, began to make up for declining revenues by the salt monopoly. As Palmer’s statement strongly suggests, changes in the salt market made it difficult for the Company to maintain revenues through the high-price policy. It means that the pressure from Britain, namely, the British industrial, shipping and trading interests was not the sole cause for the Company’s modification of its system. Dichotomous approaches, such as free trade and monopoly; India and Britain; and Bengal salt and English salt, inevitably overlook other factors of change.4 A combination of factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic, actually contributed to the change in the salt market of Eastern India, including environmental surroundings of salt production, the state of Calcutta’s money market, the commercial and social activities of indigenous merchant families, consumer preference, illicit production and smuggling, and trade connections to adjacent regions.5 Moreover, the Company had to negotiate those factors; as Peter Robb urges us to bear in mind that ‘there will be no need to assume that everything stemmed from’ colonialism.6 Among the above-mentioned factors of change, this chapter particularly focuses on the trade connections to adjacent regions. More precisely, it examines the role of Coast salt, the salt imported from the Coromandel Coast (hereafter the Coast), in the monopoly system, the consumers’ attitudes towards it, and the activities of importers. Coast salt was different from Bengal salt, in terms of the production method, quality and price, and cheaper and unpopular Coast salt was consumed mostly in remote areas. The existence of different kinds of salt in the market was beneficial to the Company to tackle the problem of illicit production and smuggling, which was stimulated by its own high-price policy. However, the dependency on

Competition or collaboration? 251 the market would make the Company’s revenue collection vulnerable to changes in that market. These types of preventive measures can be called ‘market/trade oriented’, as opposed to ‘administrative and legal’.7 A typical example of market/ trade-oriented measures was the importation of Coast salt, as will be examined in this chapter. Another was the utilisation of the ability of native merchants to control prices.8 The Company intervened in the trade and market extensively to maximise revenues; as P. J. Marshall puts it, the ‘salt monopoly was by far the largest of the Company’s commercial operations conducted for purely fiscal purposes’.9 At the same time, the necessity to solve the problem of illegal actions that would lower prices made the Company utilise the indigenous trade and market formation to this advantage. Despite its ‘decommercialisation’ of the Company state, which started in the late 18th century,10 the Company’s two contrasting faces of government and merchant seem to have been ingrained in the salt monopoly system. As Palmer’s statement clearly suggests, the preventive measures of this kind ended in failure, and after 1836 the relationship between the Company and the trade and market was no longer the same as before. The abandonment of the high-price policy in 1836 was not merely one of the institutional modifications of the salt monopoly, but it also marked a watershed of the Company as government as well as merchant.

The company as a promoter of trade Bengal, with its abundance of agricultural produce and advances in manufacturing technology, had long attracted merchants of different backgrounds, and it served as a hub of international trade, connecting people and commodities.11 However, scholarly interest in Bengal’s connection to other regions and countries during the period of the Company’s rule has been weak, except for Britain. Britain became Bengal’s largest trading partner, and that was unlike the situation in Madras and Bombay, which maintained and developed trade connections with various neighbouring regions. China also emerged as Bengal’s new export destination because of its demand for opium.12 It is well known that the financially motivated Company and the interests of British private traders led to an expansion of opium exports to China, which became the most important branch of trade in 19th-century Asia, as well as the major source of revenues for the Company, and later, for British India. The presence of Bengali or other Indian merchants in this export trade of opium from Calcutta was limited; this contrasted sharply with the case of the opium exported from Bombay, in which indigenous merchants were extensively involved.

252  Sayako Kanda The Company’s fiscal policies also encouraged growth in the salt trade. While the main consumers of opium were in China, those of salt were in the monopoly area of Bengal and Bihar. The export of salt from the saltproducing districts along the Bay of Bengal was actually in the hands of indigenous merchants, unlike the case with opium. Who were those indigenous merchants? In addition, where were the salt-producing districts along the Bay of Bengal whence salt was exported for consumption in Eastern India? The Company monopolised the production of salt in Bengal and Bihar, confining the production sites to a certain area along the Bay of Bengal from Midnapur to Chittagong (see Figure 12.1), and prohibiting the production of any saline substances for culinary purposes in the monopoly area. The Company’s Bengal salt was exported to the interior by a small number of newly emerged Bengali merchants. They bought up salt at public sales, through which salt prices were

Figure 12.1 The salt monopoly area of Eastern India. Source: Based on the map attached to the report from the Select Committee on Supply of Salt for British India, BPP, vol. 17, 1836.

Competition or collaboration? 253 controlled throughout the monopoly area. In other words, the Company’s salt monopoly depended on the ability of indigenous merchants. These merchants accumulated wealth and climbed the social ladder in Bengal. Importantly, they were not the only indigenous merchants who benefited from the Company’s monopoly. The Company’s monopoly in Eastern India and intervention in the trade also involved indigenous merchants outside Bengal, especially Telugu merchants on the Coast, encouraging it to export salt to Eastern India. This also developed the export-oriented salt production on the Coast. The existence of vigorous trading activities along the Bay of Bengal and close trading connections between South India and modern-day Southeast Asia have attracted scholarly attention, especially to the periods before 1800 and after the late 19th century.13 The manner in which Bengal was related to the trade along the Bay of Bengal has not yet been fully explored. Moreover, little empirical work has been done to understand the situation in the early 19th century, between the two periods. Although the actual movement of salt between Bengal and the Coast was not included in the trade statistics, a large amount of Coast salt was actually imported into Calcutta by the Company. As a monopolistic trading company, the Company has usually been seen as an obstacle to private trade, but as a government, the Company did promote both internal and external trade in India in the early 19th century. This means that the Eastern Indian market was not isolated from the coastal trade along the Bay of Bengal.

Coast salt in the salt monopoly in Eastern India, c. 1780–1820 When the Company established the salt monopoly in 1772, its initial policy on foreign salt was to exclude it entirely from the Eastern Indian market since an increase in cheaper salt, especially from the Cape Verde Islands,14 was expected to lower prices. Cheaper foreign salt was basically a threat to its monopoly system. The private importation of salt was banned, both by land and sea, although it had been one of the most important sectors of Bengal’s import trade during the pre-British period. The embargo of private importation of salt was lifted by regulation in 1817. Nevertheless, few importers were willing to import salt into Calcutta, let alone export it farther into the interior beyond Salkhia, on the right bank of the Hugli, where foreign salt was first stored. This was because the salt market was considered extremely unpredictable.15 Only some Arab merchants imported salt from Mocha and Basra and traded in Bengal on their own account. Yet, a large amount of salt was actually imported into Bengal on the Company’s account starting in the early 1790s, especially from the Coast and Orissa.

254  Sayako Kanda As salt was ‘a source of revenue, and not of commerce’,16 any proof of the existence of this movement of salt was completely excluded from trade statistics. The Company’s intervention in the salt trade changed the salt market not only in Eastern India but also in adjacent regions, and restricted the types of salt consumed there. Major items of private imports for Bengal around this time, other than treasure, included various kinds of metal, glass and stationery, liquor, and spices.17 Imports of British cotton yarn and cotton piece goods were on the increase. The total value of merchandise imports during the fiscal years of 1820 and 1821 was Rs 39,967,140.18 These statistics included 42,860 maunds of imported salt (worth Rs 128,100). Although absent from the statistics, the Company did import 2,275,162 maunds of salt during the same years, the value of which can be estimated at Rs 6,825,486.19 About half of the salt was brought from the Coast. Bengal’s imports of merchandise from the Coast in these two fiscal years was valued at Rs 1,489,075. The actual movement of goods between Bengal and the Coast was about three times larger than the figures shown in the trade statistics. The share of foreign salt in the Company’s public sales was less than one per cent in the early 1780s, but it gradually increased, forming about one-fourth of the total supply to public sales in the mid-1810s. Foreign salt can be divided into three categories: Coast salt, Orissa salt, and other varieties, including Mocha, Rock, Basra, Bombay, Arakan, and later Liverpool (Cheshire). In terms of variety, Bengal salt was a boiled salt, known as panga, and Orissa, Arakan, and Liverpool salt imported into Bengal were also a boiled variety. Coast salt and Bombay salt were karkatch, or solarevaporated salt. According to Figure 12.2, which shows the quantity of foreign salt sold at public sales, Coast salt had the largest share throughout the period. Although it is not within the scope of this chapter, mention should be made of Orissa salt, which was another major variety of ‘foreign’ salt. The Company annexed Orissa to the Bengal Presidency in 1803, which was followed by the establishment of a salt monopoly there in 1804. However, the monopoly in Orissa was treated separately from the monopoly in Bengal and Bihar. The Company was already dependent on the high price of salt for its revenues in Bengal and Bihar. Because of that, the integration of markets would have impinged on its policy since Orissa salt, which was cheaper in price, higher in quality, and abundant, was likely to have reduced the price in Bengal and Bihar. Orissa salt was thus imported to Bengal on the Company’s account and sold at the public sales alongside other foreign varieties, but the private import of Orissa salt was prohibited. The Company’s aim was to incorporate the excess Orissa salt into the system of monopoly in Bengal and Bihar through legitimate channels.

Competition or collaboration? 255 million maunds 4.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5

17 8 17 1 83 17 8 17 5 87 17 8 17 9 91 17 9 17 3 9 17 5 97 17 9 18 9 0 18 1 03 18 0 18 5 07 18 0 18 9 1 18 1 13 18 1 18 5 1 18 7 1 18 9 2 18 1 23 18 2 18 5 2 18 7 29

0.0 Year

Coast Salt

Orissa Salt

Other Foreign Salt

Bengal Salt

Figure 12.2 Foreign salt and Bengal salt at public sales, 1781–1830. Sources: BRP – Salt, P/89/2 (5/12/1792); P/100/13 (26/12/1817), no. 4; P/100/23 (16/12/1818), no. 1; P/100/28 (24/9/1819), no. 2; P/100/36 (20/10/1820), no. 4; P/100/43 (14/9/1821), no. 3A; P/100/52 (24/9/1822), no. 8A; P/100/61 (30/9/1823), no. 11; P/100/72 (19/11/1824), no. 29; P/101/12 (28/2/1826), no. 5; P/101/31 (4/12/1827), no. 7; BRC – Salt, P/98/26 (28/7/1794), no. 5; P/98/27 (8/5/1795), no. 4; P/98/27 (20/7/1795), no. 2; P/98/32 (18/7/1796), app. no. 1; P/98/35 (25/7/1799), no. 3; P/98/43 (5/8/1802), no. 3; P/99/16 (30/1/1806), no. 2; P/99/26 (11/9/1807), no. 2; P/99/30 (12/8/1808), no. 3; P/99/34 (25/8/1809), no. 2; P/99/39 (29/10/1810), no. 3; Bengal Board of Trade Proceedings – Salt, vol. 75 (4/8/1812); vol. 85–2 (17/8/1813); vol. 95 (23/8/1814); vol. 113 (16/8/1816). Note: A year here means the 12 months from October to September for Bengal salt, and, for foreign salt it was the 12 months from May to April.

Coast salt had been imported into Bengal on a large scale during the 1760s and 1770s.20 It played a crucial role as a return cargo for grain, which was exported from Bengal to the Coast for military use and famine relief.21 The amount of Coast and Orissa salt imported into Bengal

256  Sayako Kanda annually between 1771 and 1775 was about 665,500 maunds, comprising one-fourth of the total supply in Bengal and Bihar. The ban on private salt importation in 1781, however, was unable to stop French ships coming into the French settlement in Bengal with cargoes of salt from the Coast. To cope with the problem and to control the quantity of foreign salt entering into Bengal, the Company agreed to purchase salt from the French under the Anglo-French Convention of 1787.22 The quantity was fixed at 200,000 maunds per annum. By this agreement, the French enjoyed the privilege of importing salt to Bengal from the Coast. It also gave the French a great advantage in the coastal trade when grain from Bengal was in great demand on the Coast. Other nationals on the Coast had to come to Bengal to buy grain with their ships unloaded. During the French-dominant decade, the French actually imported more than 310,000 maunds per annum, and the extra amount was confiscated by the Company and sold in Calcutta along with other foreign varieties of salt.23 Experiencing a failure in salt production in 1791, which adversely affected its salt revenue, the Company realised the importance of having a certain amount of foreign salt in case of emergency and started to import salt on contract. This gave an opportunity to British merchants in Madras who were desperate for a return cargo from the Coast and were disgruntled with the French dominance in the coastal trade and with the Company, which supported the French for purely financial purposes. They were finally allowed to participate in the salt trade as contractors, importing a total of 1,022,640 maunds of salt in 1790 and 1791 (see Figure 12.2). As Mr Tyler, one of the contractors, mentioned, his contracts ‘operated to check very considerably the whole French commerce to Bengal’,24 and the French dominance in the coastal trade rapidly withered away. The following seven firms served as contractors: Tyler; Porcher; Hall; Roebuck and Abbott; Abbott and Maitland; Yeats; and Chase, Cheney, and McDowall. Contracted salt was imported from several ports within Rajamundry and Vizagapatnam Districts and from Madras.25 Most of the ships from Rajamundry District were hired from local owners. The contractors, however, faced difficulties in obtaining enough ships to carry salt to Bengal since native shipowners were dissatisfied with the freight money paid to them.26 In many cases, the contractors failed to fulfil their contracts. In 1796, the Company attempted to utilise native ships by granting native shippers permission to carry salt to Bengal, at the cost of Rs 57 per 100 maunds. This permission system of salt import was known as the ‘Madras Permit’. When the Company in Madras (hereafter the Company-Madras) also established a salt monopoly in the Madras Presidency in 1805,27 the rate was raised to Rs 66 per 100 maunds to encourage more shippers to

Competition or collaboration? 257 participate in this trade.28 The unstable and costly contract system was thus abolished in 1807. The Madras Permit system of import was open to British and other merchants, too. Under the system, the quantity for export from the Coast was allotted to each salt-producing district in the Madras Presidency by the agreement between the Company’s governments at Bengal and Madras. It was decided according to the demand in Bengal, production conditions, and stock in the coastal districts. Procuring Coast salt of good quality for sale in the Bengal market was no easy task. In Bengal, the solar-evaporated variety was not popular owing to its dirty appearance and to consumers’ ritual prejudice.29 Among the varieties of Coast salt, brown salt was little in demand, and inferior red and black salt was totally unsalable. For instance, in 1793, inferior Rajamundry salt imported by Roebuck and Abbott Co. faced serious objections from merchants in Calcutta. The sale of inferior salt at a giveaway price at the public sales yielded little profit for the Company.30 Thus, procuring the best white salt became its top priority. Among the salt districts on the Coast, Tanjore, and Nellore and Ongole (hereafter Nellore) were famous for superior quality, but there were difficulties in procuring salt from these districts. Being situated at the southernmost part of the Coast, Tanjore posed the problem of expensive salt in terms of the charges for transporting it to Bengal. In addition, the costs and charges for procuring salt were higher because the saltpans there were mostly privately owned and additional charges were levied.31 The Company was thus too reluctant to commit to the development of Tanjore salt even though the quality was superior. For the reasons cited above, the Company depended on the Northern Coromandel Districts of Nellore and Rajamundry, from where it was able to procure and transport salt at a much lower cost. Rajamundry had a large capacity for producing surplus salt for consumption in Bengal, but the problem was that the best Rajamundry salt was still inferior to the worst Nellore salt. While giving the highest priority to procuring Nellore salt, the Company introduced various measures to improve the quality of Rajamundry salt. For instance, it offered a much higher rate for white salt than other inferior types. Moreover, the Company-Madras too agreed to develop export-oriented salt production in Nellore and Rajamundry, and encouraged native shippers to carry salt to Bengal, because it was beneficial for the Madras Presidency to keep close trade relations with Bengal. First, native shippers had been importing grain from Bengal at very low freight charges, without which severe grain shortages on the Coast would not have been mitigated. Second, a lack of native shipping would have disrupted the pattern of sailing that

258  Sayako Kanda included the distribution of paddy from Madras to numerous small ports in Northern Coromandel. As Figure 12.3 demonstrates, a large quantity of grain was exported from Bengal to Coromandel, especially around the time the Company-Madras established the salt monopoly. This suggests how urgently the Company-Madras needed to encourage the salt trade between the Coast and Bengal to maintain political and social stability on the Coast. million maunds

Number of Ships 500

3.0

450

2.5

400 350

2.0

300

1.5

250 200

1.0

150 100

0.5

50

0.0

0 Year Grain Exported from Bengal to Coromandel Salt Imported into Bengal from Coromandel Total Number of Native Ships Arrived at Calcutta Number of Native Ships Arrived at Calcutta from Coromandel

Figure 12.3 Number of native ships arrived at Calcutta and the salt-grain trade between Bengal and Coromandel. Sources: BCR, P/174/13–45 (1801–1802 to 1833–1834); Wilson, A review of the external commerce, tables, pp. 8–9. For the importation of salt, see Figure 1 and Appendix L to the salt report, BPP, vol. 26, 1856. Note: Although the information of the number of native crafts arrived at Calcutta from Coromandel in the 1810s and 1820s is limited, we can use the total number of native crafts arrived at Calcutta as reference because the majority of the native crafts that arrived at Calcutta was from Coromandel.

Competition or collaboration? 259 Native shipping was based principally in the port of Coringa at the mouth of the Godavari River. In 1805, there were 250 ships around the port,32 but the Company observed that, without further encouragement, the number of ships could easily decline. In 1818, there were only 175 ships in Coringa, of which 165 ships were employed in carrying salt to Bengal and bringing back grain, first to Madras and then to other ports. Such a decline in the number of native ships arrived at Calcutta from Coromandel from the mid1810s is also shown in Figure 12.3. According to E. Smalley, Collector at Rajamundry District, the shippers expressed a great dislike for sending their vessels to Calcutta since the sailing route was dangerous, and they had to go there without cargoes, which would cause delay and expense. He also stated in his letter to the Board of Revenue at Madras that the exportation of salt to Calcutta was ‘indeed a material assistance to the merchants as it pays the expenses of their ships on the voyage to Bengal and during their stay there’.33 This was why the Company agreed to increase the rate given to native shippers. As said, Coast salt was initially imported to adjust the supply of salt in Eastern India for the Company’s benefit. But it began to play another important role in the monopoly system. High prices in the monopoly area inevitably encouraged illicit production within the area and smuggling from adjacent regions. The Company tried to suppress illicit activities by administrative and legal measures. Prices were monitored closely through monthly reports from the collectors, magistrates, and commercial agents. With rules and regulations as well as the supervision by a chain of native and British officers, wrongdoings were checked and miscreants were penalised. The supply of Coast salt too began to work as one of the preventive measures against illegal actions. As explained in the following section, it largely supplied remote markets such as Bihar and North-­western Bengal. Such market formation, in fact, brought significant benefits for the stability of the Company’s monopoly. Although the supply of Coast salt would seem to compete with Bengal salt, it did not really do so because the latter did not sell in those markets anyway. In fact, Coast salt reduced the opportunities for smuggling of illegitimate Bengal salt, which would have otherwise competed with the legitimate Bengal salt. The Company was better able to push up the price of Bengal salt since Coast salt played the part of the legitimate cheap alternative. It would also reduce the scale of illicit production because inexpensive legitimate salt was relatively abundant in the market. This was why the Company was keen to incorporate a certain amount of Coast salt in its monopoly system, despite its negligible financial importance and difficulties in procuring and transporting it to Bengal.

260  Sayako Kanda

The salt trade along the Bay of Bengal and the East Indian market Salt import into Bengal from the Coast commenced in large part to mitigate food shortages on the Coast through grain exports from Bengal. That trade between Bengal and the Coast had emerged in the 18th century.34 Telugu shippers, especially from Northern Coromandel, turned most of their capital and shipping to grain exports from Bengal since their trade with Southeast Asia had dwindled owing to an increasing dominance of Europeans in trade between South India and Southeast Asia. The growing demand for food grains in South India thus became a new lucrative venture for native traders in the 18th century. Three main routes were observed in this trade: the route between Madras/Pondicherry and the ports in Tanjore, between Madras and the ports in Northern Coromandel and Orissa, and between Bengal and all the ports along the Coast.35 Madras played a pivotal role in the trade in rice and paddy; it imported rice from Bengal and paddy from the ports along Northern Coromandel and Orissa such as Kalingapatnam and Ganjam, and then it reexported them to the ports in its vicinity and to Ceylon and Western Indian ports.36 Bengal’s salt imports played a crucial role in facilitating these movements of rice and paddy in South India. British and other European private traders also took part in this profitable grain trade. Their problem was that there were not many items for export from the Coast,37 and in many cases, they had to sail their ships unloaded.38 The demand for salt in Bengal thus gave both Telugu and European traders a favourable opportunity to have suitable freight from the Coast. Almost all the export trade in salt from Nellore and Rajamundry Districts was in the hands of Telugus from Northern Coromandel.39 Let us see Table 12.1,40 which provides the list of principal exporters of Coast salt from Rajamundry, Nellore, and Vizagapatnam in 1818. The shippers were relatively large exporters-cum-shipowners who owned a number of sloops, snows, brigs, and dhonis.41 The majority of them were from the towns at the mouth of the Godavari, including Tallarevu, Nilapalli, Gutinadevi, Bendamurlanka, and Narsapur (see Figure 12.4). Some Vizagapatnam and Masulipatnam shippers joined this trade at Coringa. Nellore salt was shipped at several ports: Iskapalli, Zuvyaladinne, Tummalapenta, Binganapalli, Krishnapatnam, Gogulapalli, and Durgarajupatnam. Rajamundry salt was exclusively exported from the port of Coringa. The Telugus’ pattern of voyage was described as follows: in August and September, when the sailing season commenced, they sailed to Calcutta and, with a cargo of grain, proceeded to Madras, usually at the end of January.42 From Madras, they sailed to the ports in Northern Coromandel

Narkadamilly Kristnniah of Nilapalli

Teroocooty Ramoodoo of Tallarevu

Coonchypurty Reddy

Coonchypurty Reddy of Gutinadevi

Narkadamilly Kristnniah

Appana Rajapah Teroocooty Ramoodoo

Panupathoo Chinna Ramoodoo Teroocooty Ramoodoo

Choppurty Bramiah of Gutinadevi Madepella Pulliah of Gutinadevi Palapoo Kristnniah of Gutinadevi

Shipowners

Exporters

3,480

Sloop

Doni Sloop Sloop Sloop Snow Sloop Doni

1,140 3,000 1,620 3,120 3,732 2,100 660

3,600 3,600 2,820 3,120 1,740 1,980

2,400

Sloop

Sloop Sloop Sloop Sloop Doni Snow

3,000 2,820 3,780 600 1,500

Quantity (Bengal maunds)

Sloop Sloop Sloop Sloop Sloop

Types of vessels

Coringa

Iskapalli

Durgarajupatnam

Coringa

Tummalapenta

Tummalapenta Coringa

Ports

Table 12.1 Exporters of coast salt from Rajamundry, Nellore, and Vizagapatnam in 1818

Rajamundry

Nellore

Rajamundry

Nellore

Nellore Rajamundry

Districts

(Continued)

April June September

February

September

May

April

May September

Month of permits

Ponaloo Runganaicooloo

Autamoory Venkiah

Ponaloo Runganaicooloo of Narsapur

Autamoory Venkiah of Narsapur

Allada Venkata Reddy

Garoodah Reddy

Allada Venkata Reddy of Nilapalli

Garoodah Reddy of Vizagapatnam 3,960 2,850

Snow Sloop

126,552 311,972

5,160 3,900 2,760

2,700 2,850

3,360 3,360 420

2,160 2,310 1,500 1,560

2,820 3,690 3,300 1,800

Quantity (Bengal maunds)

Brig Brig Sloop

Sloop Snow

Sloop Brig Snow

Sloop Sloop Snow Sloop

Sloop Brig Sloop Sloop

Types of vessels

Vizagapatnam

Zuvyaladinna Iskapalli

Zuvyaladinna Coringa

Kottapatnam Iskapalli Coringa

Vizagapatnam

Nellore

August

March April May

May September

September

Rajamundry Nellore Rajamundry

May

February May September

Nellore

Rajamundry

Nellore

September

Rajamundry

Zuvyaladinna Coringa Tummalapenta Krishnapatnam Coringa

May June

Month of permits

Nellore

Districts

Iskapalli

Ports

Sources: BRC-Salt, P/100/20 (29/5/1818), no. 26; P/100/21 (24/7/1818), nos. 6, 7; (28/8/1818), no. 6; P/100/22 (2/10/1818), no. 15; P/100/23 (4/12/1818), no. 7.

Total of Principal Exporters Total Quantity of Coast salt exported from Rajamundry, Nellore, and Vizagapatnam

Grandy Ranganayakooloo Garoodah Reddy

Colloo Chinniah

Colloo Chinniah of Bendamurlanka

Pusampoo Chintah of Narsapur

Shipowners

Exporters

Table 12.1 (Continued)

Figure 12.4 The major ports on the Coromandel Coast. Source: Author

264  Sayako Kanda with a cargo of paddy to distribute, and then they returned to Madras and other southern ports. Then, during March, April, and May, they called at the ports in Nellore to procure salt for the next voyage to Bengal. They finally returned to Coringa or other homeports in May or June for repairs of their ships, reshipped the salt, and sailed again to Bengal in August and September. Some of them sailed to Calcutta during the second sailing season in January and February. Table 12.1 clearly shows this voyage pattern. They put salt on board at the ports in Nellore in April, May, and June, and at Coringa in September. Narkadamilly Kristnniah of Nilapalli and Autamoory Venkiah of Narsapur sent their ships to Calcutta during the second sailing season, too. The former sent one dhoni and one sloop from Durgarajupatnam in February and again sent the same vessels from Coringa in September. One of the sloops of the latter, sent from Tumalapenta in February, went to Calcutta in May of the same year from Krishnapatnam. In addition to those shipowners-cum-exporters, the list includes shipowners who hired out their ships to exporters, and exporters who contracted for the exportation of salt using hired ships. Chemacoorty Bauliah (Chetti) of Gutinadevi was a large shipowner; one of his snows was able to carry 12,000 maunds of salt, which was unusually large for a native vessel. Chemacoorty Bauliah hired out three snows and five sloops to Mannem Canakiah of Ingeram, a large exporter who exported 43,440 maunds of salt from Krishnapatnam in February 1820.43 In September 1824, Canakiah sent 16,829 maunds of salt from Coringa with four hired vessels from Yanam shipowners.44 Madras was another port for the shipment of salt by these Telugu shippers, but their trade at Madras appeared to have been restricted to the second sailing season in January and February. For instance, between October 1823 and September 1824, nine permits for exportation of salt to Bengal from Madras were given to native shippers, all issued in February 1824.45 British and Portuguese traders mostly carried on the exportation of salt from the port of Madras. They exported salt to Bengal from March to August, when few native ships went to Bengal.46 This arrangement was important to keep up the constant supply of Coast salt in Bengal. They occasionally called at larger ports on the Coast such as Covelong, Iskapalli, Krishnapatnam, and Vizagapatnam for the shipment of salt. The Chulias (the Marakkayars) and the Chettis of Nagapatinam and Nagore were the other key groups trading solely in Tanjore salt. However, as the export of Tanjore salt was costlier, as mentioned earlier, only a small quantity was allotted to Tanjore District. The Company did not exclude Tanjore salt completely because it needed to secure a certain amount of Tanjore salt against any failure in production in other coastal salt districts.

Competition or collaboration? 265 It also considered ‘the benefit of the Labbai merchants’,47 who maintained a regular annual intercourse with Calcutta. Table 12.2 is the list of exporters of Tanjore salt in 1818. Among the 14 exporters, we can identify six Chettis, two Marakkayars, and two Labbais. It is likely that many of the Chettis on the list were Tamil Chettis.48 The Nakarattars, more commonly known as the Nattukottai Chettiars, were also engaged in the salt and grain trade between Calcutta and Madras. This trade was one of their main operations before moving to a successful international commercial and banking business.49 In Eastern India, Coast salt was sold in the Company’s commercial stations at Patna, Maldah, Jangipur, Kasimbazar, Sonamukhi, and other western Bengal stations, according to the price reports from the commercial residents in the first decade of the 19th century.50 Purnia in Bihar was the market for Coast salt of inferior quality.51 Reports from the early 1830s suggest that Coast salt was sold to the districts along the Hugli and Bhagirathi rivers, such as Burdwan and Murshidabad, and in Bihar, including Gaya, Shahabad, and Bhagalpur.52 These reports clearly suggest that the markets for Coast salt were limited to the districts in Bihar and to North-western and Western Bengal (see Figure 12.1). There was little or no demand for

Table 12.2 Exporters of salt from Tanjore in 1818 Exporters-cum-shipowners

Residence of shipowners

Quantity (Bengal maunds)

Canagasabah Chetty Savendralinga Chetty Teyoraya Chetty Neelacunda Chetty Saumynada Chetty Adevaraga Chetty Vencata Row Veneata Row Maramadoo Tumby Maicoir Majamadellee Maricoir Causemaumiah Labby Labayvapomalimee Cunder Saib Seeadennaina Nagoda

? Nagore Nagapatnam Nagapatnam Nagore Nagore Nagore Nagore Nagore Nagore Nagapatnam Nagore Nagore Nagore

4,200 3,600 3,120 3,000 2,640 1,440 3,120 2,880 9,600 4,200 3,600 2,400 4,200 840

Total Quantity of Coast Salt Exported from Tanjore

Remarks

                Marakkayar Marakkayar Labbai Labbai    

48,840

Sources: BRC-Salt, P/100/20 (29/5/1818), no. 26; P/100/21 (24/7/1818), nos. 6, 7; (28/8/1818), no. 6; P/100/22 (2/10/1818), no. 15; P/100/23 (4/12/1818), no. 7.

266  Sayako Kanda Coast salt in Eastern Bengal except in Chittagong District, where the salt was directly imported from the Coast. The early 1830s records show that the market for Coast salt had extended to Rajshahi, Jessore, and Pabna in central Bengal, but the amount was still limited.53 What factors determined the market for Coast salt? First, as with Bengal salt, geographical features should be taken into account as factors. The upriver routes from Salkhia, where all the foreign salt was first stored and examined, facilitated the transportation of salt northwards up the Hugli River. Second, the price should be considered. Owing to consumer prejudice, Coast salt was always sold at a much lower rate than boiled salt. As transportation charges were added to the original price, salt prices were always higher in the areas located far from the coastal salt districts. That was why the market for inexpensive Coast salt developed mainly in remote areas. The third factor was consumer preference. Generally, solar salt was not popular in Bengal, ‘both from taste and through a religious prejudice’, and its consumption was limited to ‘the particular classes of the population, who prefer the imported article’.54 The Hindus in Birbhum District, western Bengal, did prefer solar salt to the boiled variety because ‘it was a popular belief that the refinement was done by the application of bone dust’.55 Opinions about consumer preference were diverse among the British. H. M. Parker, junior member of the Board of Customs, Salt, and Opium, alleged that Hindus disliked foreign salt because it ‘may have touched the grease used on shipboard and pump leathers, or other articles of leather’.56 On the other hand, John Crawfurd claimed that this was not true because Cuttack (Orissa) boiled salt, which was imported by a sea voyage in the same way as Coast salt, fetched a much higher price than Bengal boiled varieties.57 Nevertheless, the fact that the market for Coast salt was confined to Western Bengal and Bihar suggests that there was a clear regional difference in the perception of solar-evaporated salt between the western regions and Eastern Bengal, but the difference did not apply to foreign salt in general. Regarding consumer preference, Eastern Bengal districts in general expressed a strong preference for boiled salt, which may have pushed solar salt to western districts.

Changes in the late 1820s The production of Bengal salt began to fluctuate wildly starting in the mid-1820s, and the level of production in the 1830s was very low. In 1824, 1827, and 1831, Bengal experienced extremely bad seasons, and the annual production went down to 2,500,000 maunds, which was 1,257,000 maunds fewer than the average annual production for six years from 1819

Competition or collaboration? 267 to 1824. Even in 1833, the production was just over 3,000,000 maunds.58 Foreign salt already had a one-fourth share in the total supply from the mid-1810s, but in response to such volatile conditions in the production of Bengal salt, foreign salt’s importance in Bengal grew from the late 1820s, in terms of both value and volume. As stated earlier, the consumer preference for boiled salt kept the price of solar Coast salt lower. Therefore, Coast salt was of little financial importance for the Company, which gained greater profits from high salt prices. However, the cheapness of legitimate Coast salt played a crucial role in preventing illicit salt from entering the market. Therefore, when the price of Coast salt rose relative to Bengal salt, smuggling received an impetus, and the overall effect was to reduce the demand for legitimate Bengal salt. The relative price of Coast salt did indeed begin to increase. Coast salt was generally about Rs 100 cheaper per 100 maunds than boiled salt until the mid-1820s.59 However, it was no longer cheaper than boiled salt in the late 1820s. Its average price at public auction for 10 years from 1824 to 1833 was Rs 378.43, which exceeded that of Bengal Bhulua salt and was high enough to compete with other Bengal varieties.60 Higher-priced Coast salt was no longer able to function as a cheap legitimate alternative to Bengal salt, and that provided more of an incentive for illegal activities in the monopoly area. The expansion of coastal trade and of export-oriented production on the Coast contributed to such changes. The Company-Madras and the shippers began to exert pressure on the Company, which originally had led the way in the development and growth of production and trade of salt on the Coast. In the coastal regions, especially Northern Coromandel, salt began to be produced mainly for consumption in Bengal. As Figure 12.5 shows, during the period from 1812 to 1818, 54.6 per cent of production in Rajamundry was exported to Bengal. In other districts too, Bengal’s share was high. The rest of the produce was supplied for home and inland consumption.61 Moreover, the production fluctuated according to the demand from Bengal. Especially when Bengal experienced successive abundant years in the early 1810s, the production on the Coast declined remarkably. Many new saltpans had already popped up, especially in Nellore, where the best white salt was produced for Bengal. These new saltpans were made on borrowed capital so that any sudden or temporary suspension of salt exports to Bengal would have made it difficult for those salt manufacturers to repay their debt. As stated, the number of ships in Coringa engaged in transporting salt to Bengal dropped once in the mid-1810s. The following two reasons attributed to this change. First, the grain trade declined because of the recovery

268  Sayako Kanda million maunds 1.8 1.6

Rajamundry

Nellore

1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0

Year Consumption within the District Volume Exported to Inland Markets Volume Exported to Bengal Volume of Production

Figure 12.5 Production, consumption, and exports of Rajamundry and Nellore districts, 1811–1817. Sources: BRC – Salt, P/100/23 (16/12/1818), nos. 14, 16, and 17.

of agricultural production on the Coast. Figure 12.3 clearly suggests that the quantity of grain exported from Bengal to Coromandel declined drastically in the mid-1810s. Second, the Company restricted salt imports from the Coast owing to successive abundant seasons in Bengal in the mid1810s. However, because of a temporary scarcity of grain on the Coast and repeated bad seasons in Bengal from the mid-1820s, the Company at both presidencies took various measures to encourage the trade. The Company increased the rate paid to the importers and gave premiums to them in 1827, while in 1829, the Company-Madras reduced the rate at which it sold to the exporters for Bengal from Madras from Rs 24 to 21.62 With such encouragement, the number of ships increased again. In 1829, 200

Competition or collaboration? 269 ships from Coringa were used for transporting salt to Bengal. In addition, there were 38 native ships at Vizagapatnam available for the same purpose. The port of Masulipatnam, which had been one of the major ports in preBritish India, was also revived by the production and trade in salt, and its trade connections to West Asia were encouraged too.63 Grain had played a leading role in the Bengal-Coromandel trade, but after the inactive years of trade in the mid-1810s, salt gradually began to lead the trade, and more ships became dependent on the trade in salt than in grain. Fluctuations in salt trade were thus particularly problematic for small shippers, the majority of whom were completely dependent on salt trade, as opposed to large shippers, for whom salt was simply one of a number of commodities transported. Here, too, any suspension or restriction of salt imports into Bengal unilaterally decided in Bengal was extremely disastrous in terms of the welfare of the people of the Coast. The agency houses in both Calcutta and Madras, such as Palmer and Co. and Binney and Co., also participated in the trade, especially when the demand from Bengal increased in 1819, 1824, and 1827.64 The agency houses in Madras also began to exert pressure on the Company-Madras. As the export of grain from Bengal to Mauritius grew starting in the mid1820s, they became more interested in the coastal salt trade. This was because the grain exported from Bengal was used to purchase sugar in Mauritius, which was then exported to Britain.65 In a letter to the Collector of Madras, the agency houses expressed concern over the restriction of the export of salt to Bengal in 1829. Parry, Dare, and Co. stated that ‘a restriction of the export of salt at the present time will be attended with serious loss to the owners of ships who look forward to a cargo of salt as the only return freight to Calcutta’.66 Arbuthnot & Co. wrote in its letter to the Collector as follows: We have no hesitation however in saying that a restriction of the exportation of salt from all parts of the coast to Calcutta would be severely felt by shipowners who depend on this article for a freight, particularly ships returning from the Isle of France to Calcutta of which last year a considerable number loaded on the coast with salt, and they will no doubt expect cargoes this year.67 As expressed in their letters, these agency houses attached great importance to salt cargoes destined for Calcutta for their ships conveying grain from Bengal to Mauritius. The Company, heavily relying on Coast salt to secure profits from the monopoly in Bengal, was no longer able to ignore such pressures from various interests on the Coast. The change in the role of Coast salt starting

270  Sayako Kanda in the mid-1820s deprived the Company of one of its chief measures for keeping up the price of Bengal salt, and the change facilitated the expansion of the market for illicitly produced and smuggled salt.

Conclusion The maintenance of high prices was the Company’s overriding concern in securing salt revenues. The high-price policy, however, facilitated illicit production and smuggling, which would lower prices. Realising that inexpensive and unpopular Coast salt, which was legitimate, was consumed in remote markets where legitimate Bengal salt was insufficiently supplied, the Company incorporated Coast salt in the monopoly system to reduce the opportunity for illegal actions and to keep the price of Bengal salt high. Despite the degree of unprofitability and difficulty in dealing in inexpensive Coast salt, the Company endeavoured to import it. The scheme worked successfully, giving the Company large revenues. But this scenario lasted until the mid-1820s. An increase in the price of Coast salt began to affect the scheme adversely. Originally, the Company developed the salt trade along the Bay of Bengal for fiscal purposes. It depended entirely on the existing networks of indigenous merchants, especially Telugus, on the Coast, but at the time, it revitalised their coastal trade that was on the decline. However, the revival of the trade, the growing interests of British merchants on the Coast, the expansion of export-oriented salt production there, and the interests of the Company-Madras as a government began to exert pressure on the Company to import more Coast salt. Besides, owing to the Company’s encouragement, the quality of Coast salt improved, and as a result, its price in Bengal rose. The trade and market developed beyond the control of the Company. The high-price policy was discontinued in 1836 against the background of these changes. As this chapter shows, the Company’s ability to raise salt revenues was much dependent on the indigenous merchants, in this case merchants on the Coast, as well as on the market, particularly regional differences in consumer preference and taste within that market. Moreover, the ability of merchants and the market formation were also utilised to suppress illicit actions, which was an integral part of revenue collection. The Company did not directly depend on intermediaries such as revenue farmers in the collection of salt revenues after the 1780s, but its high-price policy itself incorporated the ability of various indigenous merchants and the market that the Company formed to raise revenues. It can be said that such dependency in the collection of salt revenue was ‘to an extent just another quasi-feudal response by a weak state’, as Peter Robb stated on the permanent settlement of the land revenues in Bengal 1793.68

Competition or collaboration? 271 At the same time, as he stressed, the administrative capacity of the colonial state to match any will to ‘improve’ India gradually grew.69 After the changes described in the trade and market, which were followed by the discontinuation of high-price policy, the relationship between the Company and merchants and the market changed fundamentally. One crucial difference was that the process of revenue collection became completely separated from any commercial activities and the market. Government salt began to be sold at a fixed price, removing any negotiation with merchants or markets in order to determine prices. The retreat from the market was not easy for the Company, as it needed to maintain revenues. By that time, as Robb argues, the growing administrative capacity of the state gradually expanded the revenue-base and enabled the state to ‘promote the trade of others by general “improvements” ’.70 Further, as Jon Wilson rightly suggested, in the 1830s the state started to govern the people as ‘strangers’, by general and abstract rules.71 Importantly, this so-called ‘modern’ governance was not transplanted from Britain but arose from the fear and despair experienced by the early Company officials in Bengal. The lament of Palmer was probably one of such experiences.

Notes 1 Appendix no. 25, British Parliamentary Papers (hereafter BPP), vol. 17, 1836. 2 For details about the public auctions and speculation in salt, see Sayako Kanda, ‘Forged Salt Bills, Speculation, and the Money Market in Calcutta: The Economy of Bengal in Colonial Transition, c. 1790–1840’, International Journal of South Asian Studies, 2013, 5: 89–112. 3 Calculated from Appendix no. 77 to the Report from the Select Committee on Salt, British India, BPP, vol. 17, 1836. 4 The recent work by Indrajit Ray stresses that the decline of the salt industry in Bengal in the mid-19th century was a typical example of ‘de-industrialisation’, arguing that the Company’s monopoly, under the growing political pressure from Cheshire salt and Liverpool shipping interests, devoured the established salt industry by depriving it of its competitiveness through imposing discriminatory practices. The work itself is empirical, not ideological, but other factors, especially other types of salt, are not taken into account. This makes the work less persuasive. Indrajit Ray, ‘Imperial Policy and the Decline of the Bengal Salt Industry Under Colonial Rule: An Episode in the “De-Industrialisation” Process’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2002, 38(2): 181–205; ‘Decline of the Salt Manufacturing Industry: An Episode of Policy Discrimination’, in Indrajit Ray (ed.), Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution, 1757–1857, Routledge: Abington and New York, 2011, pp. 133–170. 5 For the details of some of the factors, see Sayako Kanda, ‘Environmental Changes, the Emergence of a Fuel Market, and the Working Conditions of Salt Makers in Bengal, c. 1780–1845’, International Review of Social

272  Sayako Kanda History, 2010, 55 (supplement): 123–151; Kanda, ‘Forged Salt Bills’. Most of the factors mentioned here are discussed in Sayako Miki, ‘Merchants, Markets, and the Monopoly of the East India Company: The Salt Trade in Bengal Under Colonial Control’, unpublished PhD diss., University of London, 2005. 6 Peter Robb, ‘British Rule and Indian “Improvement” ’, The Economic History Review, 1981, 34(4): 507–523, 522. 7 Administrative and legal measures included seizures of illicit salt, captures of smugglers, supervision of production and transportation of salt, with rules and regulations as well as by a chain of native and British officers. 8 See, Kanda, ‘Forged Salt Bills’. 9 P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead, Eastern India 1740–1828, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 111, 115–116. 10 Sumit Guha, ‘Weak States and Strong Markets in South Asian Development, c.1700–1970’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1999, 36(3): 347–348. 11 See, for instance, Sushil Chaudhury, Trade and Commercial Organisation in Bengal, 1650–1720, Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975; Tilottama Mukherjee, Political Culture and Economy in Eighteenth-Century Bengal: Networks of Exchange, Consumption and Communication, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2013. 12 M. Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–42, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951; Amar Farooqui, Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium, New Delhi: New Age International, 1998. 13 For example, Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Maritime Commerce and English Power: Southeast India, 1750–1800, Aldershot: Variorum, 1996; Om Prakash and Denys Lombard (eds), Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal 1500–1800, New Delhi: Manohar, 1999; David Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. 14 Appendix no. 4, the Report from the Select Committee on the affairs of the East India Company, BPP, 10[2], 1831–32, pp. 552–557. 15 Bengal Board of Revenue (Miscellaneous) Proceedings-Salt (hereafter BRP– Salt), P/105/20 (02/01/1836), no. 16; Appendix 4, BPP, vol. 10[2], 1831–32, pp. 552–557. 16 ‘Report on the External and Internal Commerce of Bengal in the Year 1818/19’, Bengal Commercial Reports (hereafter BCR), P/174/30 (1818–19). 17 K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments (1757–1947)’, in Dharma Kumar (ed.), Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 821–823, 828–829. 18 Calculated from BCR, P/174/31 (1819–20); P/174/32 (1820–21). The value of total imports of metals such as copper, iron, lead, quicksilver, tin, and tutenag was Rs 6,414,341, making up the largest category of Bengal’s imports. Cotton goods, including piece goods and broad cloth, came mainly from Britain and were valued at Rs 4,555,238. The total value of liquor imported from several countries was Rs 1,739,839. 19 This estimate is based on the customs duties levied on salt imported on private account, which was Rs 3 per maund on British ships.

Competition or collaboration? 273 20 N.K. Sinha, The Economic History of Bengal from Plassey to the Permanent Settlement, vol. 1, 3rd ed., Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1981 (first published in 1965), pp. 218–220. 21 Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘Long-Distance and Coastal Trade 1750–1800’, in Sinnappah Arasaratnam (ed.), Maritime Commerce, p. 259. 22 Arvind Sinha, The Politics of Trade: Anglo-French Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1763–1793, New Delhi: Manohar, 2002, pp. 109–110. 23 Calculated from Bengal Revenue Consultations (Salt, Opium and c.) – Salt (hereafter BRC–Salt), P/98/27 (8/5/1795), no. 5. 24 Enclosure in the letter to J.H. Harington, Secretary to the Board of Revenue from E.H. Barlow, Council Chamber, BRP–Salt, P/88/74 (29/9/1790). 25 In 1805, 683,838 maunds of contract salt were imported into Bengal, out of which 527,240 maunds were from Rajamundry, 58,757 maunds from Vizagapatnam, and 77,741 maunds from Madras (BRC–Salt, P/99/16, 2/1/1806, no. 12). 26 BRC–Salt, P/99/16 (2/1/1806), no. 3. 27 The monopoly of salt in the Madras Presidency continued until 1878. After that, an excise system was introduced, which did not apply to only two districts that supplied salt to Pondicherry, according to the French convention of 1837. For details about the monopoly in Madras, see K.V. Jeyaraj, A History of Salt Monopoly in Madras Presidency, 1805–1878, Madurai: Ennes Publications, 1984. 28 BRC–Salt, P/99/17 (24/4/1806), no. 3. 29 For details about consumer preference, see Kanda, ‘Environmental Changes’. 30 BRC–Salt, P/100/15 (30/1/1818), no. 12; P/100/15 (6/3/1818), no. 5. 31 BRC–Salt, P/100/23 (16/12/1818), no. 11. 32 BRC–Salt, P/100/23 (16/12/1818), no. 12. 33 Ibid. 34 Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘The Rice Trade in Eastern India 1650 – 1740’, Modern Asian Studies, 1988, 22(3): 531–549; ‘Long-Distance and Coastal Trade’, pp. 258–260. 35 Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘Coromandel’s Bay of Bengal Trade, 1740 – 1800: A Study of Continuities and Changes’, in Prakash and Lombard (eds), Commerce and Culture, p. 323. 36 W. Milburn, Oriental Commerce: A Geographical Description of the Principle Places in the East Indies, China and Japan, vol. 2, London: Black, Parry and Co., 1813, pp. 47–48. 37 They exported mainly piece goods (both British and foreign) and copper. Copper was imported into the European settlements on the Coast from Europe and other Asian ports, but the copper trade gradually declined from the 1810s. Instead, precious stones, corals, and skins and hides were on the increase. BCR, P/174/39–46 (1827–28 to 1834–35); H.H. Wilson, A Review of the External Commerce of Bengal From 1813–14 to 1827–28, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1830, tables, pp. 52–55. 38 Arasaratnam, ‘Long-Distance and Coastal Trade’, p. 259. 39 It is likely that many of the Telugu shippers were Chettis. For the details of Telugu Chettis, see Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1650–1740, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 214–221.

274  Sayako Kanda 40 Indian personal and family names in the Company records follow a variety of spellings. In order to avoid incorrect transliterations, I have used the spellings found in the original documents, ignoring modern versions. In the interest of consistency, I refer to the spelling most commonly used in the documents for a particular person. 41 In 1824, the average quantity of salt loaded was 3,395 maunds per sloop, 5,316 maunds per snow, 4,657 maunds per brig, and 1,804 maunds per dhoni. A European ship was able to carry between 13,000 and 25,000 maunds of salt (calculated from BRP–Salt, P/100/66, 9/3/1824, no. 8A; P/100/67, 2/4/1824, nos. 2, 3; P/100/68, 21/5/1824, no. 17; P/100/69, 16/7/1824, no. 2; P/100/70, 14/9/1824, no. 3; P/100/71, 15/10/1824, no. 2B; P/100/73, 21/12/1824, no. 11). 42 BRC–Salt, P/100/23 (16/12/1818), no. 12. 43 BRC–Salt, P/100 32 (4/2/1820), no. 7. 44 BRP–Salt, P/100/73 (21/12/1824), no. 11. 45 During the same period, 29 permits were given to the British and to the Portuguese (BRP–Salt, P/100/65, 16/1/1824, no. 12; P/100/66, 9/3/ 1824, no. 8A; P/100/67, 2/4/1824, nos. 2–3; P/100/69, 16/7/1824), no. 2; P/100/70, 14/9/1824, no. 3; P/100/73, 21/12/1824, no. 11). 46 For example, out of 349,770 maunds of salt that were exported on European ships in 1819, 258,830 maunds were exported between March and August (BRC–Salt, P/100 32, 4/2/1820, no. 14). 47 BRC–Salt, P/100/32 (4/2/1820), no. 4. Labbai literally means Arab. The definition of the Labbais is rather controversial, but they were likely to be the Chulias, one of the Muslim mercantile communities in South India. On the definition, see Bhaswati Bhattacharya, ‘The Chulia Merchants of Southern Coromandel in the 18th Century: A Case Study for Continuity’, in Prakash and Lombard (eds), Commerce and Culture, pp. 285–289. 48 On the Tamil Chettis, see Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies, p. 271; Rudner, Caste and Capitalism, pp. 26–31. 49 Rudner, Caste and Capitalism, pp. 53–64. 50 BRC–Salt, P/99/2 (19/2/1803), no. 3; P/99/17 (20/2/1806), no. 10; P/99/41 (16/2/1811), no. 2. These reports were based on January prices. 51 BRP–Salt, P/100/73 (14/12/1824), no. 29. 52 BRP–Salt, P/104/84 (15/1/1834), nos. 13–38; P/101/48 (24/2/1829), no. 38; P/101/48 (6/3/1829), no. 29; P/101/70 (21/1/1831), no. 31. 53 BRP–Salt, P/101/70 (21/1/1831), nos. 14, 28, 51. 54 BRP–Salt, P/104/84 (15/1/1834), no. 39. 55 Ranjan Kumar Gupta, The Economic Life of a Bengal District: Birbhum 1770–1857, Burdwan: University of Burdwan, 1984, p. 227. 56 Appendix E, no. 58, BPP, vol. 26 (1856), p. 546. 57 Appendix F, no. 2, BPP, vol. 26 (1856), p. 573. 58 BRP–Salt, P/102/28 (27/12/1833), no. 27. Further, see Kanda, ‘Environmental Changes’ for the details of salt production. 59 For instance, the average price of Coast salt for eight sales from May to December 1825 was Rs 317.08 per 100 maunds, while that of Hijili salt, a Bengal variety, was Rs 419.5 (Calculated from Calcutta Exchange Price – Current, vol. 2, nos. 332, 337, 341, 345, 350, 355, 359, and 363).

Competition or collaboration? 275 60 The price of Bhulua salt was Rs 376.17, and the average price of Bengal varieties was Rs 397.88 (Calculated from BRP–Salt, P/105/21, 2/2/1836, no. 11H). 61 BRC–Salt, P/100/23 (16/12/1818), nos. 12–17. Only 7.7 per cent of salt was produced for foreign markets in Tanjore. 62 BRP–Salt, P/101/53 (18/8/1829), no. 3. 63 BRP–Salt, P/101/25 (10/4/1827), no. 6. 64 BRP–Salt, P/100/67 (2/4/1824), nos. 2–3; P/100/69 (16/7/1824), no. 2; P/100/70 (24/9/1824), no. 3; P/100/73 (21/12/1824), no. 11. 65 Wilson, A Review of the External Commerce, p. 98. 66 Cited from the letter from L. Murray, Collector of Madras to the Board of Revenue at Fort St George, BRP–Salt, P/101/53 (18/8/1829), no. 4. 67 BRP–Salt, P/101/53 (18/8/1829), no. 4. 68 Peter Robb, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, and British Rule in India, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997, pp. 66–67. Simultaneously, he stated that the permanent settlement ‘marked a beginning of a transformation in the revenue-base of the state’. 69 Ibid., pp. 36–75. 70 Ibid., p. 72. 71 Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Acknowledgements This article originated from part of my Ph.D. thesis written under the supervision of Professor Peter Robb. I am very grateful to him for his intellectual guidance and stimulating comments which always helped and inspired me. Part of this article has been published earlier in Japanese (‘Kan–Bengaru–Wan Shio Koeki Nettowaku to Tobu Indo Shio Shijo no Henyo, 1780–1840 Nen [The Trading Networks along the Bay of Bengal and the Transformation of the Salt Market in Eastern India, c.1780– 1840]’, in Naoto Kagotani and Kohei Wakimura eds, Ajia ni okeru Choki no Jukyu-Seiki: Teikoku to Nettowaku [The Long 19th Century in Asia: Empires and Networks], Kyoto: Sekaishisosha, 2009, pp. 249–61). I would like to thank the editors of the book for their helpful and valuable suggestions and comments.

13 Challenging the 3Rs Kindergarten experiments in colonial Madras Avril A. Powell

Compared to other aspects of British colonial policy and practice in India, little attention has been paid to evaluating the ‘primary’ sector of educational provision.1 Studies critical of the British Indian educational system, in general, have concentrated on an instrumentalist ethos, an emphasis, as in Britain, on the narrow teaching of the 3Rs, constant testing in very formal classroom settings and, especially, rote learning from prescribed textbooks.2 Alternative methods, their proposers, principles, implementation, and effects, have mostly been ignored. This chapter provides a case study of an alternative pedagogy that was introduced in late 19th-century India for some new classes of ‘infant’ and ‘lower primary’ pupils. This particular pedagogy aimed to implement in India the principles and practices of Friedrich Froebel, a German educationist. Influenced by Swiss educator, Johann Pestalozzi, and more generally by Romanticism and Idealist philosophy, Froebel had criticized the educational practices current in early 19th-century Europe. Central to his pedagogy was that a young child, like a plant, must be free to grow spontaneously in phases appropriate to the development of his or her nature and without pressure from externally imposed curricula, attainment targets, tests, and punishments. Believing the very early years to be a vital stage in such growth, Froebel considered that children aged 3 to 6 years would thrive best in a ‘kindergarten’ (children’s garden) where their interests and capabilities could unfold in an environment conducive to self-directed activity or ‘free play’. In place of the 3Rs, which should be introduced only much later, some very specific educational tools, of Froebel’s invention, should be introduced to the young child in a very specific, but interconnected, order. These were, first, his ‘gifts’ (sets of coloured woollen, and later wooden balls, spheres, cubes, and cylinders), and, second, ‘occupations’ (including paper folding and cutting, clay modelling, stick laying, bead threading, and drawing on squared paper). Critics, then and later, found Froebel’s insistence on the ‘gifts’ and ‘occupations’ to be either incomprehensible and mystical or

Challenging the 3Rs 277 esoterically symbolic. Third, however, his ‘object lessons’, which involved the close study of physical objects to encourage verbalization and hence conceptualization, were already familiar to any reader of mid-19th century educational works, having been advocated by Pestalozzi and in daily use in many schools, including in Britain. Fourth, physical activity was encouraged through group participation in ‘action songs’ and various games, all designed to increase coordination between brain, hand, and eye in the classroom but also in the garden, a necessary adjunct to any kindergarten.3 Despite Froebel’s best efforts, neither in his homeland of Prussia, where kindergartens were banned in 1851, nor in Britain nor the United States, where a diaspora of zealous German ‘kindergartners’ began to settle in the 1850s, were his ideas welcomed at first by state educationists, though some private and philanthropic educational societies adopted Froebel.4 Even more unlikely was it that the education authorities in a colony such as British India, already embracing an examination-dominated education model with as much enthusiasm as in Britain, would feel any sympathy for what seemed, at best, a utopian and at worst, an entirely misplaced model that seemed to substitute ‘play’ and gardening for the 3Rs. Against the odds, some interesting experiments were to ensue in India at the hands of Froebelians both British and Indian. These Indian kindergarten experiments are hitherto unstudied, even though some recent comparative studies have ranged from Japan to the Ottoman Empire.5 The focus of this chapter is a period of Froebelian experimentation carried out in Madras between 1870 and the early 1900s though comparative reference will also be made to some other regions, notably Calcutta and Bombay. Froebel’s main advocate in Madras was a Mrs Isabel Brander (née Bain), India’s first inspectress of female education, who has received no recognition hitherto in either ‘memsahib’ or education studies but who, even apart from her writings and activities on behalf of Froebelism, deserves attention for her other roles in furthering female education in Madras more generally.

Isabel Brander: formation of a feisty Froebelian schoolmistress Brander’s efforts to introduce kindergarten methods against the mainstream of educational opinion reflected some qualities and skills rather rare among the memsahib sisterhood. Her father, Alexander Bain, from a poor crofting family in the Scottish Highlands, had ‘made good’ by leaving home for London to pursue interests in practical science that resulted in international recognition by the 1840s for some important contributions to horology and telegraphic communication. Having made a quick

278  Avril A. Powell fortune, he soon lost it, through a series of ill-judged court actions to try to protect his patents and died in a home for ‘incurables’ back in Scotland.6 His wife had died long before him, leaving their four young children to fend for themselves. In later life, Isabel never mentioned her ill-fated father, but although there are hints that she disapproved of him, her later interest in acquainting her Indian female charges with scientific ideas may have drawn from the same genes. Despite her unpromising family situation, Brander was brought into contact in her early ‘teens with some social reforming circles in late 1850s London that would provide her an entrée to higher education and then to a teaching career. For she had been fortunate to be taken up by various influential London families, who ensured she received the most advanced form of secondary education then available to girls at the recently established Queen’s College, still thriving in Harley Street today.7 Significantly, during these school days she boarded at the nearby home of the Octavia Hill family, along with one of her teachers at Queen’s, Sophia Jex-Blake, a pioneer of medical education for women.8 Little is known directly of any impact upon this 13-year-old of her co-boarder, Jex-Blake, or of her hosts, the Hill sisters and their mother, Caroline Hill. However, Octavia Hill, only nine years older than Isabel, was already active in the educational and other social reforming concerns that would later make her name as a pioneer provider of housing for London’s poor. Caroline, her mother, was engaged at this time in projects inspired by the educationist who had inspired Froebel, Johann Pestalozzi. Frequent visitors to the Hill household included John Ruskin and Charles Kingsley. The latter’s ideas on sanitation Brander would cite enthusiastically much later in her lectures on hygiene for Indian women. Several pioneers of higher education for women were also in the Hill circle, notably Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and the Shirreff sisters, Emily and Maria, who later became active Froebelians. Conversations around the Hill dining table surely rubbed off on an intelligent young listener such as Brander.9 Following Queen’s College, Brander spent some time at one of the very few training establishments existing at that time, the Home and Colonial School Society in London, whose teachers initially published manuals advocating Pestalozzian pedagogical methods.10 By the late 1850s, however, the training programme had been remodelled, partly on Froebelian principles.11 Brander then took various governess and school teaching appointments in London and also in France. Particularly significant was a year she spent, in 1865, on the invitation of her former teacher, Sophia Jex-Blake, as the latter’s ‘companion’ on a tour of the United States to study America’s educational systems. Jex-Blake’s record of this tour recounts details of the colleges and schools they visited.12 But Brander then abandoned her

Challenging the 3Rs 279 mentor, to study more systematically for several months at one of the training colleges that had most impressed her, the progressive Salem Normal School for Women, in Massachusetts.

Teaching Indian teachers to teach When Brander, by then about 22, was put forward in 1869 by the Secretary of State for India to fill a new post as principal of one of India’s first government training colleges for girls, she certainly merited the recommendations that accompanied her papers. In purely pedagogical terms, she was exceptionally well prepared, despite her youth. She appeared to hold no strong religious convictions, and although she had mixed in nonconformist as well as Anglican circles, her secularist stance fitted her well for a government post in a province otherwise long accustomed to strong missionary influences on education. Regardless of her personal religious beliefs, she kept them to herself and professed herself open to Indian cultural influences. She was also a linguist of promise, through her Queen’s College studies and some teaching experience in France, and so fulfilled the Indian Government’s request for a ‘moderately young’ woman ready to learn the vernaculars spoken by her future pupils.13 Brander arrived at the new Government Female Normal School in Madras in 1870 to commence a career that, apart from a short marriage break, would last until 1903, after which she would ‘stay on’ in India for several more years. During this exceptionally long residence in Madras she promoted, alongside her other educational activities, the introduction, and spread of Froebelian pedagogical principles and practices. How did she first encounter this educational philosophy, and in what ways and with what results did she promulgate it? She was already familiar with Pestalozzian educational ideas, both from their frequent discussion in the Hill household and from her training period at the Home and Colonial Society. Froebel’s particular method she later claimed, she only encountered after arrival in Madras, explaining, ‘It was when in charge of the Government Female Normal School in Madras that my attention was first drawn to Froebel’s system of education’.14 This is not surprising, given that advocates of Froebel, both in Britain and America, like prophets without a following, were objects of suspicion to many educationists, and hence unable to get their methods and practices accepted in government schools. Institutionalization of Froebel’s followers in the mid1870s into the London Froebel Society and, slightly later, the establishment of journals and branches in provincial towns, marked a new acceptance, especially as the Froebel Society almost monopolized the teacher training and accreditation processes for a newly emerging professional career path

280  Avril A. Powell of infant and primary school teachers. The Home and Colonial School Society too was forsaking Pestalozzi for Froebel by the 1870s. Froebelians, it seems, now had their uses, even if many still considered them misguided. Brander’s channels of communication from far-off Madras were presumably these new journals that she certainly cited in her later publications. More specifically, her membership of a new secular society, the National Indian Association (NIA), founded by Mary Carpenter in 1870 mainly to further female education in India, provided her a direct line of communication, especially when the sympathies of some influential members of the NIA became strongly Froebelian in the late 1870s. Particularly important proved her friendship with Carpenter’s successor as secretary to the NIA, Adelaide Manning, who would act as an intermediary between London and India in the years to come.15 A later article of Brander’s shows how she began to experiment using Froebel’s gifts and occupations with ‘some little Hindu girls’ in the kindergarten ‘practicing class’ she attached to the normal school.16 Some of her Indian trainees and assistants she also initiated into his system and then arranged for the most promising of these protégées to study kindergarten methods in London with the help of funding from the NIA and the Madras government. However, in 1876, Brander was married in Madras, necessitating her return to Britain, where she became more closely involved with the NIA and with visiting Froebel schools.

Touring Madras’s schools Brander had probably assumed that, following marriage, her Indian career would be over. However, after her husband’s sudden death, the India Office reappointed her in 1880 to fill the post of its first inspectress of government girls’ schools in Madras, efforts thus far for female education having depended almost entirely on private, especially missionary, initiatives. Known to be a Froebelian, she had been headhunted for this post. Her appointment papers cited accolades on her earlier successes at the Female Normal School and tributes to her suitability for the newly created inspectorate. Her married title, ‘Mrs. Brander’, yet her recently widowed condition, gave her an aura of authority and certainly access to male deliberations she would have otherwise lacked. From a position of such strength, she was able to dictate terms about her ‘office’ requirements, including a stipulation that she should have the services of a female Indian clerk, seemingly a ‘first’ in India.17 Respected by many of her male colleagues, Brander was certainly fortunate in the Directors of Public Instruction (DPIs) under whom she served for the next 20 years, several of whom shared her views not only on female

Challenging the 3Rs 281 education generally, but also on the need for kindergarten provision. She became particularly close to Henry Grigg, DPI from 1880 to 1892, whose support for her plans was crucial to the success she then achieved in getting the sanction of, first, the Madras government, and then the Government of India and the London India Office.18 Grigg selected Brander to give evidence to the Madras committee of the important Hunter Commission on Education in 1882. Apart from other recommendations on female education, she requested ‘better provision . . . for infant teaching’, and less ‘rote’ teaching at all levels.19 She then exerted influence on Madras’s implementation of the Commission’s findings, especially those on female and primary education, and on teacher training, achieving several modifications to the Madras grant-in-aid code including, in 1885, the addition of an ‘infant standard’ to its ‘primary’ provision.20 Thus Madras established, much earlier and for much longer than elsewhere in India it will be shown, a full-fledged programme of infant education in government schools that can be attributed directly to Isabel Brander’s influence. The Madras education proceedings and reports of the mid-to-late 1880s show the extent to which these new infant and lower primary classes adopted Froebel’s principles. The curriculum in 1887–1888 made the 3Rs compulsory, but ‘object lessons’, ‘children’s occupations’ and ‘action songs’ were now ‘options’.21 There was no mention of Froebel’s ‘gifts’. However, no one seemed to comment on the anomaly that, flouting Froebel’s rejection of ‘testing’, thousands of ‘infants’ were entered for examinations in these same ‘Froebelian’ subjects that year and afterwards. ‘Payment by results’, which by definition required such ‘tests’ was a recently introduced carrotand-stick incentive, imported from England, to achieve educational progress in Madras and elsewhere, extending down even to the infant level. Despite this ‘testing’ anomaly, consideration was now being given by the government, for the first time in British India, to recognizably Froebelian methods of child development. Brander, generally pleased with the innovation, commented optimistically in her annual report that, ‘the introduction of children’s occupations, object lessons, and action songs, and the grants offered for them, have awakened an interest in the subject of the education of young children. Many managers have bought books on the subject, and knowledge of the best methods of teaching young children is certainly spreading’.22 Even she, however, while commenting on the advantages of kindergarten methods over prevailing indigenous practices, hinted that deep embedding of Froebel’s principles would remain problematic, mainly because of the shortage of suitably trained teachers. Yet, determined to maintain her optimism, she concluded, ‘Even where the teachers are untrained, and where they conduct occupations mechanically, the children are happier and better employed in weaving paper, threading

282  Avril A. Powell beads, or looking at pictures of animals, than they were in shouting the alphabet for an hour at a time on the old pyal school system’.23 Her close friend, Adelaide Manning, secretary of the NIA, testified to Brander’s role during a visit to India in 1898–1899, claiming that, ‘Greatly through Mrs. Brander’s efforts, Kindergarten methods have been introduced widely in the Madras Presidency, and the occupations, games, &c., have for some time been recognized by the Madras code’. She further commented, ‘the effect on the children of this more rational form of teaching is very remarkable’, taking into account their improved powers of observation, confidence, and ‘natural enjoyment’ in learning.24 Apart from her direct impact on infant education, Brander’s influence in Madras was multifaceted and pervasive. A lively ‘drawing room’ lecture Brander gave to the NIA during one of her London furloughs provides some insights not only into the energies she put into her inspectress duties but also into her feisty character and the sense of humour that won her the comradeship and respect of her male colleagues. Her hardiness was stressed, for instance, in having to inspect areas of the presidency much vaster than any male colleague, often by bullock cart, ‘many nights have I spent in them’. She contrasted this experience with lavish hospitality ‘in great splendour’ occasionally offered to her by local rajas, recording that, ‘the transitions from a ruined bungalow to a palace, and back again, are often very sudden and rather amusing’. Tongue in cheek (since that particular governor was chairing the meeting), she explained her preference for following behind the governor’s cavalcade when on tour as an insurance that the roads would be in good condition.25 Back in Madras city, Brander was a ‘committee woman’, active in founding and organizing teachers’ associations, in the School Book and Vernacular Literature Society, and as Secretary to the local branch of the NIA. She frequently held children’s parties in her garden, joining in the games with energy. In her later years in Madras, the setting up of a joint government and NIA-funded ‘home education’ scheme for the many girls still obliged by community pressures to leave school early, was innovatory. For women who were able to meet publicly she arranged magic lantern lectures on astronomical, botanical, and anatomical subjects, and published an article herself on the magic lantern in a British science journal.26 To a purda-nashin Muslim woman, she suggested sitting out of sight behind the screen from where she could observe the silhouettes, shadow puppet fashion. She accompanied some Brahmin women belonging to the Hindu Social Reform Association to the Madras Observatory for lectures and to try the telescopes. She lectured and frequently published on sanitation and health in both English and Tamil. Her writings give the impression of an ability to transcend the boundaries between memsahibs and Indian women

Challenging the 3Rs 283 that characterized the British colonial setting, as exemplified by her close relations with ‘my best assistant’, her deputy inspectress, Sarah Govindarajulu, whom she appointed in her place during her overseas furlough.

The kindergarten for India The course of Brander’s experiments on how to transpose Froebel for Indian classrooms is best evaluated against the backdrop of her growing reputation in Madras and by comparing her early plans, published in 1878 in ‘The Kindergarten for India’, with some manuals, containing model lessons for infant teachers she published in 1899–1900, under the title, Kindergarten Teaching in India.27 The former, which encapsulated her experience after six years directing the Normal School, is important more generally for being the earliest detailed exposition of ‘Indian Froebelism’ in any part of India. The latter detailed her more considered conclusions after a further 20 years spent inspecting schools over a huge part of the Madras Presidency. In her 1878 article, Brander had declared her intention at the Normal School as being to discover whether Froebel’s system ‘is suited for the training of Hindu children’. She had attempted, therefore, she recalled, ‘to teach my little Hindus according to Froebel’s principles’, by using the Normal School’s ‘practicing class’ as her laboratory. Discovering that ‘all the means employed, the songs, games, occupations and conversations were foreign to Hindu minds’, she decided the means must be ‘carefully Hinduised’, adding circumspectly, ‘if I may use such a word’. This certainly proved no easy transposition for she ‘soon learned that it is far easier to carry out the letter of Froebel’s law than to adopt its spirit’. Each of Froebel’s categories of activity, she decided, would require different treatment. Rather surprisingly, given that the ‘gifts’ usually present great difficulty for those uninitiated into Froebel’s system, she considered ‘the ideas taught by them are common to all races’, and she, therefore, encouraged use of the sets of wooden balls and cubes which Froebelians in Britain, mainly belonging to the NIA, were busily sending out to her.28 However, Brander’s later teaching manuals contain no mention of Froebel’s ‘gifts’. Omitted from the government curriculum, she too had dropped them without comment by 1900. In fact, she had realized by then that most village schools could not afford such specialized equipment and that even when obtained, most teachers were perplexed about how to use them. However, education reports up to about 1910 continued to make random references to the presence of ‘gifts’ in schools all over India, whether or not they were used. Brander’s plans to ‘Hinduise’ the kindergarten curriculum she first articulated in 1878 in advice on the Froebelian categories of ‘occupations’,

284  Avril A. Powell ‘games’ and ‘action songs’, for which she urged the substitution of ‘Indian’ activities for English and German prototypes, for example substituting in the ‘occupations’, ‘native beads for English ones, Bengal grain . . . for peas in the stick and pea work, strips of palm leaf and plantain leaf for paper in the weaving, and chunam or clay for plaster in the modelling’. Games too should reflect the local environment, using ‘Indian animals, plants, birds, methods of agriculture’. She planned to devote much attention in the future to replacing some rather sentimental English children’s songs she had initially used with songs in South Indian languages, using collections of Tamil and Telugu folk songs made by both Indian and European scholars.29 That she was no mean Tamil scholar herself is revealed in a later letter to a Cambridge Sanskritist, Caroline Ridding, who requested her comments on the title of a Tamil text. Brander’s detailed reply showed a considerable feel for the nuances of the language.30 Over the following years, she delegated the task of a new compilation of kindergarten songs in Tamil to Susan Rajagopal, one of her Normal School teachers. By 1900, she expressed herself indebted to a formidable range of such ‘Indian’, especially Tamil, stories, games, and songs that she then included in her kindergarten teaching manuals. She thanked particularly Swaminatha Iyer, of the Diffusion of Knowledge Agency in Madras, for an Indian ‘ball game and song’ which she proposed using for pupils of the second standard, considering this to improve, rather like juggling, the children’s hand and eye coordination, a very Froebelian concern.31 Another Indian source was Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, collected by Toru Dutt, a young Bengali poetess. Recent European orientalist endeavours were reflected in her usage of C. E. Gover’s compilation, The Folk-Songs of Southern India.32 The result, by 1900, was a set of three manuals, geared to the new government elementary grades of ‘infant’, ‘standard one’ and ‘standard two’, that set out model lessons on stories, object lessons, occupations and action games, and songs. The title and contents could not have been more Froebelian in terminology, although Froebel’s name never appeared in the substance of the manuals. Lessons were to be based entirely on locally available materials, such as clay and plantain, and on what she considered to be wellknown Tamil or other Indian literary sources. For ‘all the stories, games and songs’ now recommended to teachers, Brander asserted, ‘are Indian . . . culled from the folklore of the country’.33 Stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics frequently recurred for standards one and two, seemingly reflecting Brander’s particular realization of their usefulness after she had attended a performance of the Ramayana.34 For standard one, for example, ‘Rama and the squirrel’, popular in South India, told of how the stripes on the back of the Indian squirrel were acquired in an attempt to help Rama find Sita, thus, Brander thought, teaching courage, helpfulness,

Challenging the 3Rs 285 and unselfishness.35 ‘Object lessons’, at the core of both Pestalozzian and Froebelian pedagogy, must also be based, Brander stressed, only on objects already very familiar to Indian children. Like other critics, she deprecated the increasing trend, in Britain as well as in India, to substitute pictures for physical ‘objects’, even to the extent that, in a government circular she published for girls’ school managers in the course of her inspectress’s duties, she recommended that parts of a horse’s body, including hooves, teeth, skin, and hair from the mane and tail, should be brought into the classroom for the girls to touch and examine, instead of merely relying on pictures.36 ‘Kindergarten occupations’ which, unlike ‘gifts’, would remain a required category of Froebelian practice everywhere, were exemplified in Brander’s manuals by detailed lesson plans, including illustrations and charts, on how to execute stick placing, bead threading, clay modelling, and drawing activities, each subcategory to be replaced by more demanding alternatives as a particular class advanced in manual dexterity. In her 1878 article, Brander had made no mention of her views on teaching the 3Rs in government schools, confining there her criticisms of existing practices to the ‘childish voices chanting together the uninteresting alphabet and numbers’ in the indigenous pyal schools. By 1900, by when government schools included infant classes, the question of when the 3Rs should commence was very significant. As the Madras 1885 education code had combined compulsory 3Rs with ‘payment by results’, reading, writing, and arithmetic had to commence as early as possible if grants were to be earned. The 3Rs, therefore, appeared on the syllabus alongside ‘kindergarten’ subjects, which were also examinable, all unacceptable to any pure Froebelian. Brander could do little about this, even in her capacity as inspectress, but her kindergarten manuals certainly played down the time allotted to the 3Rs. Thus, her manual for ‘infants’ reserved only 2 out of 80 pages, right at the end of the book, for ‘Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic’. Rather oddly, instead of attacking their inclusion on principle, she merely commented, ‘These subjects are generally very troublesome and dull to little children’. If they must indeed be taught at such a young age, as the government required, it should, she wrote, be ‘in close connection with stories, object-lessons, occupations, and songs’, reiterating here her familiar watchword, ‘connection’. ‘Arithmetic’, for example, ‘in the Infant Class may be connected with the stories, object lessons, occupations, etc.’37 Writing for the already converted, as she had been in her early article published by the NIA, Brander’s self-imposed plan to ‘Hinduise’ Froebel was certainly, in some of its strictures, very condescending and naive. For she shared the prejudices of many British officials about the perceived shortcomings of indigenous education, shown especially in a scathing reference to current practices in the village pyal schools of Madras, blaming

286  Avril A. Powell what she deemed their ‘stupifying process’ of ‘dreary rote teaching’ for their pupils’ seeming unreadiness for Froebel. The impracticality of the task she was setting herself was shown in her utopian hope of finding someone to compose new children’s songs in Tamil who should be ‘imbued with Froebel’s principles and also familiar with Hindu customs and modes of thought and expression, in fact . . . a Hindu poet who had studied Froebel’.38 Though she was never to find such an unrealistic combination of qualities in a single person, she had, by 1900, partially succeeded in a more down-to-earth part of her 1878 plan of action. This was the sending of Indian women to be trained in the kindergarten system in Britain. As elsewhere in India, it proved impossible to find Hindu female teachers both sufficiently qualified and willing to go, but she did manage to send several Indian Christian women to London. Brander’s early article had concluded on the cautionary note that unless her suggestions were implemented, the kindergarten system, if merely ‘loosely grafted on to a few schools in its present European form . . . will but excite a little curiosity for a time and then die out, or, worse still, become a formal routine’.39 The publication of her later manuals, commissioned by the Madras government, would seem to show that by 1900, the kindergarten system had succeeded in becoming more deeply embedded here than anywhere else in India. However, the old problem of finding teachers suitably qualified and motivated to implement Brander’s recommendations persisted throughout. This perennial ‘teacher problem’ might partly explain why the advice Brander gave to teachers, both through her ‘model’ lessons and her lectures, emphasized an extremely controlling role for the teacher rather than the ‘free play’ that Froebel had advocated. Village school teachers she saw as very reluctant ‘kindergartners’, needing the help of such model lessons before introducing the alien methods she was recommending. Thus the model questions she suggested teachers should ask on a particular ‘object’ or story were followed by the imagined responses of individual children, each question and answer set out to the last detail, these imaginary respondents even supplied by her with imaginary Indian names. To put this in perspective, this was a format characteristic of most of the teaching manuals currently produced in Britain for home use, whether Pestalozzian, Froebelian, or neither. Brander’s teaching manuals received some reviews by converts to Froebelian methods, mainly by members of the NIA. The ‘infant section’ was reviewed very favourably in that association’s journal, probably by Brander’s friend, Adelaide Manning, who enthused that, when translated into the Madras vernaculars, it will ‘mark an epoch in the history of education in India, for it is the first practical book on Froebel’s principles and methods

Challenging the 3Rs 287 founded on Indian experiences for the guidance of teachers’. A wide circulation was anticipated and its adaptation to other regions of India recommended.40 When the three parts were published together in 1900, the NIA reviewer commented, ‘The slow but sure unfolding of children’s powers, in which true education consists, is aimed at in the books under notice . . . she adapts the teaching with great ease, and apparently with success, to the associations and surroundings of Indian children. This is in accordance with the main principles of Froebel’. Gratifying no doubt to Brander was praise that ‘she has kept up a connexion between the various sides of the teaching’. Such methods were deemed ‘rational’ and the entire scheme was ‘approved’.41 Despite such strong endorsement by a philanthropic society in England, it was another matter altogether to get this scheme taught effectively in India, even in Madras where Brander had the strong support of the department of education. However, she had some other outlets for her ideas, notably through the many lectures she gave to teachers’ organizations, and the articles she published in various Tamil journals. For Brander was the founder in 1890 of India’s first female teachers’ organization, the Madras Women Teachers’ Association, and closely involved too in the Madras Teachers’ Guild, founded five years later for both male and female teachers. Her lectures to these associations were often published in full, or summarized, in mainstream newspapers, such as the Madras Standard, as well as in the journal of the NIA and influential Tamil journals such as Swaminatha Iyer’s Viveka Chintamini. For example, the first of three lectures Brander gave to the Madras Teachers’ Guild in 1900 was summarized in both the Madras Standard and the IMR as consisting of ‘a short account of the life of Froebel’, and explanations of the use of toys, play, stories, songs, games, and nature studies in what was here termed ‘the economy of modern teaching’.42 Throughout the 1890s, Brander had published advice in Tamil in the ‘teachers’ column’ of the Viveka Chintamini, which also published translations of articles from overseas Froebelian journals, such as the American Kindergarten Magazine and the English Hand and Eye. Her ‘Hints to teachers in elementary schools’ appeared in Tamil in 1893 in the Viveka Chintamini to be followed by a paper on ‘Kindergarten’ she had presented to the Madras Educational Conference in 1899.43 Although her own Tamil was good, she no doubt sought help from her Indian staff in translating these articles, her lectures on health and hygiene topics being in demand too in a range of vernacular journals, such as the Tamil Zenana Magazine and the weekly Dravidavarthamai as well as in various Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam journals. These activities of Brander’s represent the most sustained attempt to extend government education in India to ‘infants’ and to ensure that the

288  Avril A. Powell methods followed in such classes overtly followed the principles and practices recommended by Friedrich Froebel. Yet several other provincial governments in India also added the new category of ‘infant classes’ to their grant-in-aid codes in the mid-to-late 1880s, thus providing an opening for DPIs and their subordinate officials, if so inclined, to recommend the use of ‘kindergarten methods’ that, either directly or indirectly, would reflect Froebelian principles. Hence, many provincial education reports of the late 1880s and 1890s contain scattered references to ‘object lessons’, ‘occupations’, ‘action songs’ and, occasionally even, to the acquisition of sets of Froebel’s ‘gifts’. Some of the new government training colleges chose to lecture their pupils on the ideas of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, and in one case, Herbert Spencer. But in practice, funding restraints, opposition from teachers and parents, plus the bewilderment of teachers when faced with the new requirements, meant that such classes, where they existed at all, tended to adhere to the 3Rs, and there was much complaint that teachers, rather than using ‘kindergarten’ as a desirable ‘method’, were merely treating it as an additional timetable ‘subject’. Some simultaneous experiments tried in Bombay and Bengal will be mentioned briefly here to set Madras in perspective.

Experiments in Froebel-influenced education in Bombay and Bengal The Bombay education department also introduced infant classes in 1887, with a curriculum consisting of the 3Rs, but with great emphasis also on ‘object lessons, story-telling, chorus singing, games’.44 However, a crucial difference from Madras was the absence in Bombay of government officials convinced of the appropriateness of kindergarten methods; there was no Bombay equivalent of either DPI Henry Grigg or Isabel Brander. Infant classes remained in the code but full implementation of kindergarten methods was rare, an unannounced visit by an inspector finding, for example, a class ‘engaged on an object-lesson with the object carefully locked up in a wooden cupboard’.45 However, private initiatives were more successful in a few missionary schools in the Presidency. The most full-fledged experiment in Froebelian education in this region, it has recently been shown, was in the Sharada Sadan widows’ schools established in Bombay and Pune by the social reformer, Pandita Ramabai, beginning in the late 1880s. Certainly there is plenty of evidence from the extant copies of Froebel’s works annotated in her hand, and her contacts with Froebelians while she was studying in the USA, that Ramabai had returned to Western India in 1889 a convinced advocate of Froebel’s methods. However, circumstances conspired to concentrate her attention almost wholly on her widow reclamation

Challenging the 3Rs 289 schemes, and she never succeeded, it seems, in publishing the Marathi translations of the kindergarten manuals she had prepared in America for use in Indian schools. Her kindergarten experiments remained confined to her institutions and, even there, often took second place to her other reforming concerns. Keith White, who has examined Ramabai’s life very fully from some new perspectives, including her concern with Froebel, has had to admit her ‘marginalization’ in this as well as some other spheres.46 Completely separately, an Indian headmaster, N. G. Welinkar, almost succeeded in getting the London Froebel Society to open a branch of its society in Bombay. This was turned down, however, in 1908, in favour of establishing a single Indian branch in Calcutta. Despite this decision, Bengal had initially been slower than both Bombay and Madras to take advantage of Government of India approval of kindergarten methods. Until the late 1890s its education officers had showed little inclination to relinquish a solidly 3Rs-based curriculum. Then, almost overnight, the Bengal DPI introduced a new ‘vernacular scheme’ of primary education that, criticizing the ‘present entirely mechanical system of training the memory’, claimed explicit inspiration from Froebel for its introduction of ‘kindergarten methods’ in its infant and ‘lower primary’ classes, placing a particularly strong emphasis on teaching science.47 Significantly, the viceroy, Lord Curzon, gave the new scheme his strong backing, as evidenced by his notes and statements during the Simla Education Conference of September 1901.48 Such support from on high has been rather lost sight of among some fiercely critical reactions to the other changes Curzon made simultaneously to university education, but it was certainly a major factor in ensuring that the Bengal kindergarten experiment lasted as long as this particular viceroyship. However, acknowledging in the light of experience in Bombay and Madras, that many village teachers would prove unable to teach the new curriculum competently, its introduction remained optional. Even so, this new Bengal curriculum quickly aroused disquiet in educational circles. Successor DPIs took every opportunity to ridicule the experiment, also drawing on inspectors’ reports that cited opposition from parents demanding a return to the 3Rs. Even before Curzon resigned, a series of committees was planning a further revision of the syllabus that would see the jettisoning of ‘kindergarten methods’ and return to the 3Rs, with a new set of textbooks, a process that was complete by 1910. Froebel, it seems, had been tried, tested, and found inappropriate in Bengal. The enigma remains that, just as this government kindergarten experiment was foundering, some Calcutta schoolmasters who had studied in Britain succeeded, in 1909, in setting up a branch of the London Froebel Society in Calcutta that was to draw much support from government education

290  Avril A. Powell officers. This branch society then kept Froebel’s influence a talking point in Bengal for a further few years, after which its meetings, lectures, and the Bengali kindergarten journal it had launched, ceased abruptly.49

Brander’s legacy in Madras The quinquennial report on the Progress of Education in India certainly gives the impression that by 1918 in British India as a whole, ‘the curricula aim at instilling a knowledge of the 3Rs’.50 Was Madras, therefore, exceptional? Brander’s kindergarten experiment had certainly proved longer lasting than in Bombay and Bengal, especially as she ‘stayed on’ in Madras after her retirement in 1903, continuing her efforts unofficially for several more years. Several of her important articles on women’s ‘home education’, on health and sanitation, as well as on kindergarten matters were published in this final leisure period. Her input into female education more generally has been acknowledged in many tributes to her as the vital factor that placed the Madras Presidency in the vanguard of ‘getting girls to school’ in India, and of the establishment of a secular form of ‘home education’ for Indian women. That ‘Female Education in the Madras Presidency to-day takes the proud lead in India’ was frequently attributed to Brander, who was considered one of the education department’s ‘best and most valued officers’.51 But what of Brander’s specifically kindergarten plans? Some of Froebel’s ideas on infant education certainly did leave a mark in Madras. Although no subsequent Director of Public Instruction shared Henry Grigg’s enthusiasm of the 1880s, education officers in the early 20th century continued to value what they called ‘the kindergarten method’. This was facilitated by the Madras education department’s relative flexibility that allowed for local decision-making on curricula. Sir Alfred Bourne, DPI from 1903 to 1914, an eminent biologist, introduced a new curriculum in 1906 that dropped Brander’s Froebelian terminology, replacing her ‘kindergarten occupations’ and ‘object lessons’ with ‘space and number work’, ‘general knowledge’, ‘civics’, and ‘nature study’ in an effort to combat the ‘almost total dislocation between the school curriculum and life outside’. Bourne still urged, however, ‘the adoption of the kindergarten method in the first two or three school years’.52 Furthermore, his emphasis on science and nature study, a personal enthusiasm, might also be seen as a direct legacy of the ‘object’ lesson and the Froebelian emphasis on the garden. His successor, J.H. Stone, praised Froebelian principles when introducing a new manual on kindergarten teaching, but criticized their current application, feeling that the present author, ‘writes in the true spirit of Froebel. She has, however, in my opinion, wisely, discarded much of his practice’.53 Such comments reflected the considerable critical rethinking currently taking

Challenging the 3Rs 291 place within the Froebel movement in Britain, and especially in the United States, where advice on infant education had taken on a revisionist tone that rejected much of Froebel’s child psychology and especially the rigidity of his ‘gifts’ and ‘occupations’.54 Despite considerable modifications, there was no vitriolic backlash in Madras against Froebelian practices as ‘a great failure’ as had happened in Bengal. An important channel through which Froebel’s educational philosophy continued to spread was the Government Female Normal College, founded by Brander in 1870 and later renamed Presidency Teachers’ Training School. As the first to teach kindergarten pedagogy, it maintained Brander’s impetus, being staffed by some of the Indian teachers she had appointed and sent for training in London. Brander’s first protégée, Susan Rajagopal, having studied the English educational system, ‘more especially in infant schools’, was appointed after her return as the Normal School’s first Indian acting superintendent. She remained active in educational circles in Madras throughout the 1880s and early 1890s. Her Tamil translation of ‘Kindergarten Action Songs’, reviewed favourably in the NIA’s journal in 1889, continued to be used in other colleges until at least 1913. Rajagopal spoke at several educational conferences presenting, for example, a paper to Brander’s Association of Women Teachers in 1893.55 A second Indian teacher, Henrietta Bernard, also trained in London, was later appointed principal of the Presidency Training School. She organized the proceedings when, in 1906, a portrait of Brander was unveiled in appreciation of her services to education.56 However, after this first generation of Brander protégées, the strong Froebelian emphasis appears to have waned. Instead, enthusiasm for kindergarten pedagogy shifted to a new teacher training college at nearby Saidapet, in the Madras suburbs, where two British women supervised ‘practice’ schools for boy pupils, and also published kindergarten manuals. Both Carol Gillingham and Corrie Gordon had experienced the revisionist influences that were modifying understandings of Froebel in the US and Europe. Gillingham’s manual, The Indian Kindergarten, published in English in 1908 and Telugu in 1910, prefaced its model lessons with ‘A few mistaken ideas of Kindergarten’, of which none was more widespread in India, she stressed, than the confusion, noted already, between kindergarten as a ‘subject’ rather than, correctly, as a ‘method’. Reemphasizing the ‘spirit’ of the methodology, Gillingham nevertheless produced a manual that contained detailed recommendations for classroom teaching along Froebel’s lines. Like Brander, she too emphasized the need to ‘Indianize’ materials, stories, songs, and games.57 Her colleague, Corrie Gordon, who remained in Madras until about 1930, published prolifically on kindergarten teaching, but although a Froebelian herself, she showed awareness of the recent advances in psychology that

292  Avril A. Powell now questioned Froebel’s understanding of ‘the child’ as unscientific, and discussed new revisionist ideas, such as those of the American educational philosopher, John Dewey and the new, ‘rival’, Montessorian child-centred methodology.58 If some infant teachers were still being trained in the 1920s in a revised kindergarten methodology, how far had such methods spread into classrooms beyond the metropolis? Apart from Gillingham’s Telugu edition of her Indian Kindergarten, there is little evidence that the government continued to commission vernacular kindergarten teaching manuals. A few such manuals were still privately published by Indian teachers, an example being a Tamil kindergarten manual by the headmaster of the Hindu Religious Charity Girls’ School in Madras.59 The scarcity of surviving vernacular texts bears comparison with Pandita Ramabai’s failure to get her kindergarten manuals published in Marathi and the Calcutta Froebel Society’s failed project to issue a kindergarten journal in Bengali. If a revised and hybrid form of Froebelian teaching still survived in some urban, and mainly middle-class settings, it had not taken deep root, it seems, in more than a few kindergartens attended by erstwhile pyal pupils in the Tamiland Telugu-speaking rural mofussils, and new schools sponsored by the Theosophical Society and others interested in ‘national education’ gained more prominence as alternatives to government education in the early 20th century.60 Another way of evaluating long-term legacies is to consider the place of Froebel’s ideas in, or in contrast with, some child-centred approaches that were attempted during the rest of the colonial period in India, but especially in Madras, in the face of the apparent victory by 1918 of the 3Rs, the attendant re-emphasis on cramming and examinations, and the reduction in attention to the infant sector after education was devolved to Indian ministries in 1919. Resonances, direct or indirect, of both Pestalozzi’s and Froebel’s principles, can certainly be found in some ‘new’ educational movements with offshoots in India in the 1920s. A recent study has shown strong Indian links with a ‘progressive’ school in Germany, the Odenwaldschule, founded, in a spirit of idealism and romanticism near Heidelberg in 1910, to emphasize each child’s individuality in the choice of his or her courses. The ‘New Education Fellowship’, a discussion forum on progressive education, which attracted a worldwide membership in the 1920s, also drew an Indian following, with links to already existing, Madras-based, Theosophical circles.61 The educational projects of Zakir Husain and Rabindranath Tagore, both critical of government education, particularly reflected these new foci on the nature and needs of the child. Of the latter, a recent study has commented, ‘Tagore’s educational endeavors were an always implicit and often explicit critique as much on Rousseauan and

Challenging the 3Rs 293 Pestalozzian grounds as nationalist ones of the existing educational system’.62 The resonances in Madras of such child-centered concerns have had little attention and deserve brief mention here. Most resonant of the ‘spirit’ of the earlier Froebelian kindergarten experiments in Madras, but with close personal links to the Odenwaldschule ethos, was the Children’s Garden School Society, established in 1937. Its founder, Ellen Teichmueller, and her husband, Dr V.N. Sharma, the latter educated in the Theosophical University in Madras, had met in ‘New Education’ and Odenwaldschule circles in Germany. The kindergartens this Indo-German family then established in Madras aimed to combine ‘the best of Western methods with values drawn from the Indian gurukul system’.63 The Sharma kindergartens and schools still thrive in South India, aiming at an alternative to government primary schooling through a ‘judicious amalgam of “learning through play” and classroom teaching’, using the local vernaculars as well as English, and providing access to ‘children from all socio-economic and religious backgrounds’. Brander would have approved. While the Sharma ‘garden’ schools have had a continuous, nearly 80-year history in the Madras region, another European movement that also put down strong roots in this region has had a wider, all-India influence. Maria Montessori’s ideas were first adopted and indigenized in Gujarat in the 1920s by Gijubhai Badheka and Tarabai Modak. The Froebel and Montessori methods have very much in common when contrasted with mainstream educational systems, especially in their focus on the pre-primary child, but Montessori’s criticism of Froebel as mystical and unscientific compared with her own, medically trained, psychological perspective undermined his influence considerably in India, as also elsewhere. Maria Montessori’s invitation from Theosophists in Madras in 1939 resulted in a nearly 10-year residence in India and facilitated the spread to other regions of the preschool pedagogy that carries her name. Tracing possible relationships between these European ‘progressive’ ideas and Gandhi’s educational ethos is more difficult. He denied any influence from progressive Western educational ideas and never commented directly on Froebel, it seems, though his craft-based curriculum bears comparison with an offshoot of Froebel pedagogy called Sloyd, which initiated in Sweden in the 1890s, concentrated on teaching woodcraft skills. Gandhi met Montessori several times, initially seeming to welcome her focus on the nature of the young child, but later criticized her imposition of a foreign pedagogy on India. His blueprint for a ‘Nai Talim’ (New Education) system, which would have included classes for 3- to 6-year-olds, emphasized teaching crafts as real-life skills for practical application, not as merely symbolic classroom play.

294  Avril A. Powell In practice, any possible influences from progressive Western models mattered little, since neither in the late colonial nor the early independence years were Gandhi’s, or any other alternative, pedagogies implemented. Only quite recently has the Indian government begun to take seriously ‘early years’ education for the masses, looking for foreign as well as indigenous models for ideas. Consequently some recent studies of early years education pay tribute, among others, to Froebel, saying, for example, that today’s ‘good’ kindergartens ‘are very much a product of Froebelian philosophy and methods’.64 Froebel, but more especially Montessori, continue to be invoked in the advertising of many a middle-class kindergarten in India’s cities, with very little sign, however, in a highly competitive ‘examination’ climate, of paying more than lip service to Froebel’s philosophical or practical precepts. What is left of Froebel, in India as elsewhere in many parts of the world, is his recognition of the vital importance of the ‘early years’. Under the umbrella of ECCE (Early Childhood Care and Education), a range of programmes, drawing from government, private, and NGO resources, now aspire to turn such recognition into educational reality.65

Notes 1 Significant recent studies of aspects of Raj educational policies bearing on the primary sector include, Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007; Tim Allender, ‘How the State Made and Unmade Education in the Raj, 1800–1919’, in K. Tolley (ed.), Transformations in Schooling: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, pp. 67–86. 2 For criticism of colonial educational policies, Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas, 2nd ed., New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, 2005. 3 Friedrich Froebel, The Education of Man (trans. W.N. Hailmann), New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898; repub. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005; Pedagogics of the Kindergarten: Or His Ideas Concerning the Play and Playthings of the Child (trans. Josephine Jarvis), London: Edward Arnold, 1897. 4 Kevin J. Brehony, ‘The Kindergarten in England, 1851–1918’, in Roberta Wollons (ed.), Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 59–86. 5 Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures. 6 R.W. Burns, ‘Bain, Alexander (1810–1877), Clockmaker and Inventor’, ODNB, article 1080 (accessed on 23 July 2013) 7 Elaine Kaye, A History of Queen’s College, London, 1848–1972, London: Chatto and Windus, 1972. The curriculum in the mid-1860s included modern European languages, Latin, history, geography, theology, music, and drawing.

Challenging the 3Rs 295 8 The 1861 census enumerated the residents of the Hill household at 14 Nottingham Place, London. www.London-footprints.co.uk/peooctavia. htm (accessed on 5 June 2014). 9 Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill, London: Constable, 1990, ch. 4, ‘Nottingham Place’. 10 For example, Rebecca Sunter, The Home and Colonial School Society’s Manual for Infant Schools and Nurseries, London: Home and Colonial School Society, 1856; A Manual of Instruction for Infant Elementary Schools and Private Tuition, London: Home and Colonial School Society, 1871. 11 Nanette Whitbread, The Evolution of the Nursery-Infant School, London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p. 36. 12 Sophia Jex-Blake, A Visit to Some American Schools and Colleges, London: Macmillan & Co., 1867; Margaret Georgina Todd, The Life of Sophia JexBlake, London: Macmillan & Co., 1918. 13 Brander ‘furnished excellent testimonials of her fitness for the post’, Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for 1870–71, Madras: Government Press, 1871, p. 55. 14 Brander, ‘The Kindergarten for India’, Journal of the National Indian Association (hereafter, JNIA), September 1878, 93: 358. 15 Manning sent sets of Froebel’s gifts to Brander in subsequent years. On Manning, Gillian Sutherland, ‘Manning, (Elizabeth) Adelaide (1828– 1905)’, ODNB, article 48424 (accessed on 19 February 2015). 16 ‘The Kindergarten for India’, JNIA, September 1878, 93: 357–363. 17 ‘Mrs Brander wishes to be allowed to employ women as clerks. To this idea I have no objection’. R.M. Macdonald, DPI, to chief secretary to government, 3 June 1880, no. 2553, Madras Education Proceedings, 1879–80. Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental & India Office Collections), the British Library, London. Commented on favourably by the journalist, Mary Frances Billington, in Woman in India, London: Chapman & Hall, 1895, p. 22. 18 On Grigg’s career as DPI, see S. Satthianadhan, History of Education in the Madras Presidency, Madras: Srinivasa, Varadachari & Co., 1894, pp. 286–291. 19 Evidence of Mrs Brander in, Report by the Madras Provincial Committee With Evidence Taken Before the Committee, Calcutta: Government Press, 1884, pp. 8–13. 20 Satthianadhan, History of Education, p. 244. 21 Madras Education Proceedings, 16 June 1885, no. 395, loc. cit; Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for 1887–88, Madras: Government Press, 1888, p. 111. 22 Ibid., p. 112. 23 Ibid. 24 Indian Magazine and Review (hereafter IMR), May 1899, 341: 115. 25 IMR, January–February 1891, 241–242: 3–18; 59–66. Part of this lecture was later incorporated in an interview for the Woman’s Herald, 12 March 1892, p. 176. 26 Isabel Brander, ‘Work With the Lantern in India’, Optical Magic Lantern Journal, January 1902, 12(148): 120–121. 27 ‘The Kindergarten for India’, JNIA, September 1878, 93: 357–363; Kindergarten Teaching in India: Stories, Object Lessons, Occupations, Songs and

296  Avril A. Powell Games, London, Bombay and Calcutta: Macmillan & Co. Part I: Infant Standard, 1899; Part II: First Standard, 1900; Part III: Second Standard, 1900. The ‘infant’ part had been authorized by the Madras DPI and first published in 1893. 28 Brander, ‘The Kindergarten’, pp. 358–361. 29 Ibid., pp. 361–363. 30 Isabel Brander to Caroline Ridding, London, 29 January 1902, concerning the title of ‘The Tereo Valiandul Torannum’, translated by Brander as ‘The Holy Plaything Garland or The Garland of Sacred Playthings’. Brander added that, coincidentally, she had recently come across a review ‘of this very Purana’ in a Tamil magazine. Letter attached to the flyleaf of GBR/0012/MS Add. 3828, Cambridge University Library. 31 Brander, Kindergarten Teaching, Part III, pp. 100–106. 32 Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (ed. Edmund Gosse), London: K. Paul and Trench, 1888; The Folk-Songs of Southern India, Madras: Higginbotham, 1871. 33 Brander, Kindergarten Teaching, Part I, p. v. 34 Accompanied by Adelaide Manning to the performance, they appreciated ‘the excellence of the principles and doctrines of the Ramayana’. Indian Magazine, February 1889, 218: 92. 35 Brander, Kindergarten Teaching, Part II, pp. 1–2. 36 Indian Magazine, July 1889, 223: 372–373. ‘An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy’, ch. 3 in Parna Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2011, is the only critical study of the use of ‘object lessons’ in an Indian educational context. 37 Brander, Kindergarten Teaching, Part I, p. 80. 38 Brander, ‘The Kindergarten’, pp. 360–363. 39 Ibid., p. 363. 40 IMR, November 1893, 275: 580–583. 41 IMR, June 1900, 354: 156–157. 42 IMR, February 1901, 362: 49. 43 Viveka Chintamini, December 1893, 2(8): 250–253; June 1899, 8(2): 62–63. 44 J.P. Naik (ed.), A Review of Education in Bombay State 1855–1955, Poona: Government of Bombay, 1958, pp. 475–477. 45 Cited in Progress of Education in India 1912–1917, vol. I Calcutta: Government Press, 1918, p. 117 (hereafter, PEI). 46 Keith John White, ‘Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922): A Re-Evaluation of Her Life and Work’, unpublished PhD diss., University of Wales, 2003. 47 Resolution of the Government of Bengal, No. 1, January 1901, described in PEI, 1897–98 to 1901–02, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904, vol. I, pp. 161–162. 48 Curzon Papers, vol. F111/248a-c, Asian and African Collections, loc. cit.; Indian Educational Policy, Being a Resolution issued by the Governor General in Council, Calcutta: Government Printing, 1904, p. 19. 49 Reports of the Calcutta Branch, in Froebel Society: Report and Calendar, London: Froebel Society, Years 1909–1913; Child Life, London: George Philip & Son, vols. 1908–09. 50 PEI, 1912–1917, Calcutta: Government Printing Press, 1918, p. 116.

Challenging the 3Rs 297 51 The Indian Ladies Magazine, November 1906, 6(2): 152; G.H. Stuart, DPI, Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for 1902–03, Madras: Government Press, 1902, p. 10. 52 Quoted from Bourne’s annual report in PEI, 1902–1907, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1909, pp. 114, 123–125. 53 J.H. Stone, ‘Introduction’ to C.L. Gillingham, Indian Kindergarten, Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908, p. xi. 54 On ‘revisionism’ in Britain see, Brehony, ‘Kindergarten in England’, pp. 75–76; E.R. Murray, ‘That Symmetrical Paper Folding and Symmetrical Work With the Gifts Are a Waste of Time for Both Students and Children’, Child Life, 1903, 5(17): 14–18. 55 Susan Rajagopal’s career is recorded in the Madras Education Proceedings. 56 The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, November 1906, 6(5): 151. 57 Gillingham, The Indian Kindergarten. 58 Corrie Gordon, Essays on the Child and His Education, Madras: Srinivasa Varadachari & Co., 1917; For the Saidapet curriculum see, Detailed Scheme of Work for Kindergarten Department, Bulletin No. I, Teachers’ College Saidapet, Madras: Government Press, 1913. 59 P.V. Dorasawmi Aiyengar, Kindergarten-bodhana-murai/A Manual of Kindergarten, Vepery, Madras: Genesa Press, 1909. 60 Sita Anantha Raman, Getting Girls to School: Social Reform in the Tamil Districts, 1870–1930, Calcutta: Stree, 1996, especially ch. 5. 61 For the networks between the Odenwaldschule, the New Education Fellowship, and some Indian educationists, see Joachim Oesterheld, ‘Tagore, Geheeb and Others: Indo-German Encounters in New Education during the First Half of the 20th Century’, in Michael Mann (ed.), Shantiniketan – Hellerau: new education in the “pedagogic provinces” of India and Germany, Heidelberg: Draupadi-Verlag, 2015, pp. 31–52. 62 Seth, Subject Lessons, p. 163. 63 For the ethos of the Sharma schools, Let None Be Like Another: The Children’s Garden School Society, 1937–2007, Chennai: The Children’s Garden School Society, 2007. 64 S. Anandalakshmy, ‘The Cultural Context’, in Mina Swaminatha (ed.), The First Five Years: A Critical Perspective on Early Childhood Care and Education in India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998, p. 280. 65 Venita Kaul and Deepa Sankar, Early Childhood Care and Education in India: Education for All- Mid-Decade Assessment, New Delhi: National University of Educational Planning and Administration, 2009.

14 Scientific knowledge and practices of green manuring in Bengal Presidency, 1905–1925 Sanjukta Ghosh The capital and chemical intensive ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s has been often earmarked as the beginning of scientific agrarian practices in India – a view that fails to acknowledge the nature and scope of complex technological research in Indian agriculture during the colonial period. Prior to the ‘Green Revolution’, not only did the Indian agricultural scientists try to find alternatives in local biological and chemical resources, the colonial state and its officials did not adopt a singular model of agricultural development following the trends in Western Europe. Many conflicting ideas and creative forms of engagement remain buried in institutional practices of scientists who found the appropriate partners for research and reasons for the dissemination of knowledge based on interpretations of ‘imperial science’. The history of such institutions is only beginning to surface in academic research that focuses on the decolonisation of science – by reinforcing the eclectic approaches to Indian agriculture in the colonial past and narrative shifts in the synthesis of local and European knowledge. The colonial official policy of agrarian reconstruction in the second half of 19th and early 20th-century India was marked by an increasing concern for institutional agricultural knowledge. The emphasis in government initiatives shifted from the universal application of higher scientific learning to an elaborate structure of practical management of agriculture. ‘Scientific’ knowledge gained from institutional farm experiments was deployed, but indigenous knowledge and existing local production were considered as well. The policy addressed the particulars of Indian environmental conditions based on ideas of ‘tropicality’, in the larger historical context of a transfer of botanical knowledge between the metropolis and other tropical/ subtropical colonies. The study of Indian agriculture was intricately linked with ideas on tropicality1 – a distinctive body of knowledge that was based on the classification of plants, species and other indigenous categories found in the geographical zone of the tropics. An independent traffic in plants and seeds

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 299 between British colonial gardens emerged to increase the resources of the colony and improve the science of botany in Europe. Properly organised botanical establishments and experimental gardens in the colonies promoted the global transfer of economical plants. By the middle of the 19th century, success in importing and exporting living plants and seeds rapidly intensified because of effective cooperation between colonial botanical gardens and the Royal Gardens at Kew.2 The Kew Gardens transformed into a great botanical exchange house for the Empire as the overseas activities expanded to introduce plants useful in commerce, medicine, agriculture and domestic economy. Kew’s pioneering work led to the formation in 1887 of the Botanical Survey of India with authority to explore the flora of the subcontinent and to coordinate all botanical research. Botanical investigation of the tropics revealed to officials the differences in both climate and progress in agricultural experiments. The results of the temperate zone guided further investigation. It was necessary to collect experimental facts patiently, group them and test these to build up a sound science of tropical agriculture. Scientific surveys and professional specialisation of the experts through farm experiments replaced the earlier nonspecific interests of Orientalist scholars, amateur travellers and company surgeons. In India, the farm experiments focused on how increased agricultural production affected existing indigenous cropping based on a symbiotic relation between soil, water, plants and farm animals. These experiments testified the contemporary belief in the shortcomings of tropical agriculture associated with characteristic climatic factors and farm technology dependent on traditional products and methods such as manure and fallowing. The emphasis in text books on tropical agriculture was not simply on the poverty of farmers, but on the methods of soil conservation and cultural practices using living plant material that required practical administration.3

Practical management of soil husbandry In the early 18th century,4 agricultural treatises in Britain focused on the farm as a productive unit, the soil as an integral part of farm experiments and systematically record the ‘preparation of the field’ to improve the soil. During the period 1840–1900, the limits of chemical science to reverse the shortages of the soil were tackled by adding suitable artificial manure. By the 1860s, scientific research showed that soil was not simply a nutritive medium in chemical terms, but ‘the seat of physical processes’, affected by the supply of heat, air, water and ‘a complex laboratory peopled by many types of lower organism’. The soil has a natural form because of climate, vegetation and geological origins. Systems of soil classification based

300  Sanjukta Ghosh on the soil profile with a proper nomenclature developed in tandem with these views. The value of good soil management developed the idea that productivity was ‘not strictly speaking, the chemical composition, but the physical condition of the soil, its permeability to roots, power of absorbing and radiating heat, and above all its ability to absorb and hold moisture’.5 In colonial India, similar efforts to classify soil and relate their nutrient levels to crop yields began with general observations such as those of J.W. Leather in the 1890s and the Royal Commission on Agriculture in the 1920s.6 These records refer to plots of land cultivated by peasant families with the assumption that knowledge of soil characteristics was embedded in farming practices. Similarly, in the government farms of India, the importance of soil management underlined the practical experiments with manure. These included, for example, tests to value different manure already in use, the economic effect of various manurial ingredients on particular crops and the principles behind superior methods of manuring. Farmyard manure, green manure and night soil which had elements of ‘organic manure’ were compared. Therefore, two methods of soil improvement needed experiments to increase crop production – preparing quickacting manure from waste organic material and the use of green manure crops. Both these methods depended on securing locally available resources and on existing indigenous practices. Early writings on the 18th-century Bengal peasant such as the works of Colebrook pointed the inadequacies and often a lack of knowledge of manuring, fallowing and crop rotation practices to increase soil productivity.7 However, later writers and Imperial chemists such as Voelcker and Leather approached the issue differently and complained not about the lack of knowledge but for inefficient application of manure. Usually, the cultivators depended on village waste and cow dung, the latter used to meet fuel needs, which officials complained, in general terms as an inefficient and a wasteful practice. Conventional field experiments focused on the optimum use of cattle manure as the universal fertiliser available to Indian peasants. Voelcker’s survey of manurial practices in 1893 showed the restricted use of farmyard manure because of a shortage of alternative fuel, forcing peasants to use dried dung as fuel for cooking. Local practice of making solid excrement into cakes (locally known as bratties) for burning and waste of cattle urine had severely reduced the annual return of manure to the soil.8 While travelling in the neighbourhood of Serajgunge in Eastern Bengal, Voelcker mentioned that peasants usually had two heaps of dung, one for fuel and the other kept for manure. The civil servant A.C. Sen in his survey of the Birbhum district in Bengal wrote in a similar vein that everything of manurial value piled in the dung heap was seldom used as fuel. Stalks and straw were often wasted to make good farmyard manure, as these were not

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 301 collected in pits but left in loose heaps exposed to the sun or rain. Although this was common practice, piled dung was rarely conserved to be more productive.9 By contrast, farm experiments had shown that selecting a more favourable site for heaps of manure with an embankment could save the waste of large amounts of cow dung. The dung fermented with the stalks and straw to form a uniform mass of farmyard manure enabling cattle to trample on it. Pits rammed down and plastered over with clay saved the liquid to drain from a manure heap. The drained elements contained rich solid matters such as potash and nitrogen. Surveys showed that practices of burning cattle manure varied between regions.10 It became necessary to show through scientific experiments the value of such resources. Since the reorganisation of the agricultural departments in 1905, government farms laid out a short series of permanent manurial plots over several years to accommodate local practices. These trials were designed to compile a systematic set of records to draw definite conclusions on crop yields.11 To develop cost-effective local practices of conservation of cattle manure, farm experiments in Bengal took several samples of the solid droppings of cattle, the urine and the draining from manure heaps, the ashes of burning cakes and samples of leaves used for litter. Such an approach, however, paid little attention to valuable regional practices which showed a careful management of farmyard manure – a judicious organic mixture of straw, cow dung, urine and other plants. In Bihar, traditional practices (bathan) of spreading the cow urine in soil needed farmers to do careful feeding of animals with a rich diet of pulses and cotton seeds to improve the nutrients held in the soil.12 The practical use of cow dung suggested reconsidering the needs of peasants, in contrast to the official emphases on conservatism, waste and reform of traditional practices. As manure applied was restricted to small plots, the planter D.N. Reid noted the best way to help raiyats was to provide quickacting manure to overcome the problem of nitrogen shortage in the soil.13 Besides, an efficient combination of nitrogen top dressing adding ready roughness to the crop surface that was likely to minimise pest incidence impacted on government decision to promote the economic practices of green manure.

Survey of local green manuring practices In the later 19th century,14 scientific explanations on green manuring practices theorised that vegetation added to the content and altered the physical properties of the soil, as well as hastened the chemical decomposition of the soil. It also helped to hold the substances essential to fertility within

302  Sanjukta Ghosh easy reach of vegetation. Top vegetation heightened both water-holding and permeability in the soil. General scientific theories on green manuring had particular relevance to Indian soil conditions, which contained little organic matter and nitrogen content compared with English agricultural land. The theories on green manuring were applied during farm experiments, but this also meant contact with indigenous vegetation and learning about their use for improving soil fertility from Indian peasants.15 The difference between western science and Indian practice came up in the writings of British scientists such as Voelcker about improving agricultural practices. Voelcker paid attention to the complex basis of cultivators’ decision-making and practices and suggested that Indians in part knew what they were doing. Following a long period of dispute, towards the end of the 19th century, western agriculture accepted green manuring as an intervention in methods for restoring the soil. By contrast, Indian peasants regarded it as part of a fixed routine in traditional crop rotations to cope with the relative scarcity of animal manure. Peasants followed traditional techniques of soil conservation with the universal use of a deep-rooting crop – the pigeon pea for breaking up the soil and to impel aeration. Voelcker had noted plentiful leguminous crops, weeds and shrubs during his soil survey including the babul, grams such as arhar (Cajanus indicus), and many varieties of pulses, indigo and other crops that often spread on the land or were ploughed in as manure. The leguminous crops known by different local names were mostly compiled by the regional Agricultural Departments.16 Reports from Bengal government officials (including those from Indians such as B.C. Basu) showed peasants understood the principle of green manuring and the use of locally available weeds. Basu compiled the local practices: ‘Raiyats like to see a plentiful growth of grasses on their paddy stubble, for grass, as they say, is nothing but manure. They do not, however, wish to see all kinds of grasses growing on the stubble, on account of the difficulty, which many of them cause in weeding them out . . .’17 Voelcker wrote in 1890 that cultivators were used to ploughing in san/ sann or tag (Crotalaria juncea), indigo and mustard on rice fields, where these weeds were allowed to grow and then turned in to act as manure.18 In Lohardaga, the favourite grass was sawan (a wild form of Panicum miliaceum) grown often on dhan (paddy) lands, while all other grasses were carefully weeded out. Sawan was nurtured till bidhali (when the rice was ploughed and harrowed in order to destroy the grasses), and then it was easily destroyed to add manure in the soil. Basu reported that this practice of green manuring existed but in a different form on the plateau of Chota Nagpur. Here, sawan grew for a year and harvested, followed by the long stubbles buried in by ploughing. The result was clear in the next season or following the harvest when the yield of upland paddy increased.19

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 303 In local agricultural practices, all kinds of vegetation were used for manure. Their wide-ranging benefits were not known20 and needed resolving other practical impediments. Often, the importance of a cash crop affected the extent of green manuring practices. In Bengal, jute cultivation influenced the purpose and nature of green manuring practice among peasants. The dominance of jute as a significant cash crop affected the cultivator’s choice of using leguminous crops suitable during monsoon in parts of Rangpur, Pabna and Mymensingh (Greater Bengal). This became true for other parts of India as well. Faced with the competitive jute crop in Bengal, the practice of using dhaincha (Sesbania cannabina) had not spread widely for green manuring of paddy. During the monsoon on typical jute land, peasants preferred to grow sunn hemp and plough it in as green manure. Often, the stems and tops removed for various purposes with the roots were left in the ground. Finlow, the Fibre Expert to the Bengal Government, kept a note of this local practice according to his observations of the peasants manuring on the spot.21 The practice encouraged feeding the sunn hemp to the cattle,22 allowing parts of the leafy stem trampled into the ground. Ploughing this resulted in 50 percent increase of fibre in the succeeding jute crop. In Greater Bengal, continuing this local practice led to producing a heavy crop of high-priced jute, despite the great value of a leguminous fodder crop. Under such circumstances, the peasants were more likely to consider modifying crop rotation and increase the proportion of leguminous crops to use them as fodder instead of green manure alone. Official surveys suggest that peasant motives for green manuring had several contingent reasons rather than focused on the use of resources. Consequently, the nature of official observations on indigenous practices changed for green manure. Instead of conforming to a critical view of waste in local manuring practices and of ignorance among Indian peasants, as discussed in the case of cow dung applications, British officials seemed more positive in their approach to reform. They were keen to consider the values of accessible local resources and low-cost manure in ‘scientific’ farm experiments and for subsequent recommendations. The survey of local green manuring practices found a compatible routine in existing agricultural practices, but did not explain optimum usage and effective management of soil fertility. Therefore, some intervention to modify local practices was necessary.

Farm experiments of green manure In the second half of the 19th century, farms set up in India as centres to disseminate agricultural knowledge formed an important area of the state’s patronage over scientific agricultural improvement. ‘Model farms’

304  Sanjukta Ghosh or ‘demonstration farms’ and experimental farms were formed to show cultivators the result of scientific agricultural experiments, which would bring profits to the Indian cultivators. Some of these were uncritical enthusiasm in fashionable ventures for importing exotic species, belief in universal scientific laws based on the assumption that crops that grew well in one place would be successful in another.23 However, attitudes to farm-level intervention among government officials changed between the 1870s and those adopted in the Pusa farm (Bihar) in the later decades. In 1873–1874, the government laid down a cardinal principle that ‘first the most approved and native system should be adopted, and afterwards improvements are cautiously and gradually introduced’.24 Writers such as Voelcker commented on some cultivator’s ability and on the ‘general excellence’ of Indian cultivation. W. Smith, the Imperial Dairy Expert, admitted that a huge amount had to be learnt on the variations in Indian conditions imposed on European methods, through repeated experiments and careful observation.25 Scientists believed that gradual modification and adaptation through scientific experiments could narrow the differences in existing indigenous knowledge and practices. Hence, farm reports gave a scientific explanation for the ‘Otherness’ of the Indian entity and added descriptive value to the indigenous categories. Some officials also wanted to spread good Indian practices of using manure that could be improved through scientific demonstrations and dissemination of results.26 Experiments on manure as an example of effective soil management showed that changes were feasible without losing the suitable rational equivalents in existing knowledge and indigenous practices. The emphasis on local knowledge almost led to distinguishing between foreign and indigenous as types or categories, and their respective values earned more meaning and needed attention to detail under the tropical environment. ‘Tropicality’ refers here not simply in the spatial sense but represents a cultural creation of Western environmentalism that highlighted both exotic nature and fear of alien disease. ‘Tropicality’ in this sense also frames descriptions of an ‘Otherness’. It represents a field of scientific enquiry and objective reasoning on particularities, divisions and/or negotiations between existing indigenous agricultural practices and rational codes of agricultural knowledge. ‘Tropicality’ reinforced the idea of local specificities, which the scientists working in colonial India used to set the agenda of the farm experiments against the assumptions of imported remedies for crops or to develop improved strains and improve existing agricultural practices. The agricultural experiments that were carried out in the farm of Pusa in Bihar (the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and college set up by Lord Curzon in 1905 and later renamed the Imperial Agricultural Research

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 305 Institute) represented institutional responsibility for agricultural ‘improvement’ in the Bengal Presidency. It was modelled on the 19th-century British traditions at the Rothamstead Research Station (1843) and the Cirencester Agricultural College (1845). However, the works of scholars, specialists, students and information gatherers in Pusa were marked by striking contrasts in fundamental and applied or local research, laboratory findings, field experiments and context affecting results or agendas. They had different views on applying agricultural knowledge – aspects of which differed from romantic perceptions and selective appropriation of indigenous knowledge for scientific use.27 The object of official observation with regard to farm experiments was not just to identify local good practices but to measure outcomes. This distinction constituted an important stage on the way to other developments, such as the investigations carried out by the British scientist Sir Albert Howard (1873–1947).28 Albert Howard, considered as an important advocate of organic agriculture, was a mycologist and agricultural lecturer in the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies. He then served as the Imperial Economic Botanist to the Indian government from 1905 to 1924 and as director of the Institute of Plant Industry, Indore, from 1924 to 1931. He teamed up with his wife Gabrielle Matthaei Howard who was an economic botanist to conduct experiments with the plant in relation to its environmental factors such as soil conditions and manure. Their joint contribution to various experiments will be referred to as the Howards in the paper. Albert Howard’s focus on practical agriculture involved criticising mainstream approaches in specialised agricultural research geared to statistics on profits rather than on sustainability. In the early decades of the 20th century, he promoted modern methods of fruit cultivation, composting, irrigation, soil aeration and developed genetically improved wheat and tobacco cultivars.29 As an Imperial Economic Botanist, he swiftly moved from laboratory work to grow plants on a plot of land. One key area of both his professional interest and belief was the loss of soil fertility seriously threatening the future of agriculture and that recycling organic materials by composting was necessary to avoid an agricultural catastrophe. Howard used the term ‘disease’ loosely, applying it to all types of soil problems, including erosion, alkaline soils, and low soil aeration as major problems in India. He solved some with various low-capital technology methods, including incorporating potsherds into the soil, adding compost and using deep-rooting plants as natural soil aerators. Howards’ solutions differed considerably from the mainstream trends of using nitrogen-based fertiliser for improving crop production. The period during the First World War also saw agricultural science stimulating food

306  Sanjukta Ghosh production through the use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Howard had already shown his aversion to chemical pesticides used to fumigate select crops, reiterating his views in an early treatise on ‘The Wheat of India’ (1909), the different ways to return nutrients to the soil. The green manure experiments, as Gregory Barton notes, formed an important prelude to the later composting methods famously known as the Indore method that elaborated his ideas in organic farming.30 Apart from adhering to the value of plant refuse, more importantly, Howards’ green manure experiments measured both input and output from soil to decide the results on crops. The series of green manure experiments determined the extent to which soil fertility was affected by growing in the rotation, leguminous crops which were first removed from the land and then returned as green manure. Pusa experiments in green manure showed the optimum use of cheap good manure either as an alternative to or in combination with the more bulky organic farmyard manures available to peasants. In keeping with these trends in official enquiries, which were likely to influence local methods of cultivation, agricultural departments followed two distinct general methods of developing a green manure crop. First, these considered ploughing in a leguminous crop after settling its value for other purposes and second estimated the value of the most profitable alternative crop.31 But both these methods involved modification of local practices, and ascribing value to indigenous resources. Based on official surveys, farm experiments to modify local green manuring practices looked into contingent factors – season or monsoon, availability and supply of alternative and cash crops to support the ploughing in of a green manure crop, and the use of leguminous fodder.32 The practicalities of indigenous methods depended on the supply of materials close to the land and on cheap labour for cutting vegetation. In contrast to the existing indigenous practices, farms promoted the growth of a crop for using it as green manure rather than depending on what officials described as the practice of bringing in of jungle vegetation. Government farms also considered growing leguminous crops for the dual purposes of forage and green manure. In Pusa, the Howards experimented with green manure following exhausting indigo seeth (the wastes of indigo) as a source of manure in the tobacco plots of Pusa. The effect of seeth on tobacco land (usually left fallow in the monsoon), was greater than a heavy dressing of farmyard manure. On the other hand, the sann or tag hemp plots of tobacco at Pusa in 1909 gave a much greater yield by acre than the plots manured with cattle dung, rape cake or old tobacco stems.33 These considerations prompted a survey of the varieties of sunn hemp in India with particular reference to their rapid growth and capacity for seed production.

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 307 The farm personnel in Pusa in a scientific survey of sann had insisted the growth of a crop for purposes of green manure would enable peasants to increase overall crop production without necessarily depending on prices governing cash crops. Besides, early farm experiments with dhaincha and groundnut, for example, showed the leaves could be used as green manure without interfering with the commercial value of the crop. It was equally important to see the effects of growing dhaincha with food crops such as rice. Officials of the Bengal agricultural department paid special attention to manuring of the rice fields with dhaincha and showed its effects on local methods of cultivating paddy. This meant a detailed study of the local methods of rice cultivation and impact of dhaincha both for transplanted and broadcasted rice crops.34 Pusa scientists developed a commercial green manure crop, by collecting information on varieties of leguminous crops used in regional practices and recording new ones, obscured by faults in agricultural practice. By surveying local practices of leguminous rotations and green manuring, the Howards during their tenure in Pusa noted that Indian peasants, without an understanding of the scientific process at work, took advantage of the natural technique of the legume nodule. Therefore, Pusa experiments on leguminous crops benefiting the growth of commercial crops such as paddy, jute, tobacco and wheat were considerably influenced by indigenous crop rotation practices. Nitrogen fixing by the legumes contributed directly to soil fertility. The most influential newcomers such as soybeans, dhaincha and mati kalai (Phaseolus mungo var) were tested to check the nitrogen content fixed under ‘favourable conditions’ and at various stages of growth. The scientific reports on experiments from other parts of India showed the success of local green manuring practices depended on the effects of monsoon and on the value of seasonal leguminous fodder crops (usually sown after the first paddy crop). Existing local practices considered reasons such as the intimate relation between rainfall and ploughing in the green manure or before seeding the next crop and its effect on the yield of that crop. Scientific reports reflected on these time and seasonal frames, showing the monthly sowing details of the seed for a particular crop, followed by transplantation. Therefore, Pusa scientists had noted indigenous practices with respect, contributing to their understanding of tropical conditions. In keeping with the intimate connection between rainfall/monsoon and green manuring practices, they concentrated on the following: (a) distribution of rain, (b) the effect of rain on the varying soil moisture and (c) correlation between soil moisture and leguminous crops. Hence, what started as an examination of the effects of monsoon on local practices mostly based on deductive knowledge transformed into a more systematic understanding of soil moisture and its impact on crop rotation.

308  Sanjukta Ghosh Peasants traditionally sowed sanai with the early rains in May and ploughed it in during the middle of July. But against this norm of traditional practice dependent on rainfall, experiments had shown that different green manure crops showed different rates of transpiration of water. Walter Leather as chemist of the Agricultural Department in Bengal inferred the transpiring of water from soil was less with dhaincha than with sann hemp. Leather’s findings enabled other scientists in Pusa to secure massive improvement in the yield of rabi crops – wheat, barley, oats, gram, linseed, mustard and peas sown at the beginning of October to December and harvested in the months of February to April/May. To gain the largest possible yield of rabi crops, conservation of soil moisture was important in the final preparations and sowing. By comparison, experiments with the use of sann hemp, as green manure for the succeeding rabi crops, depended on enough soil moisture to rot the dry stems and roots. These also showed the soil moisture was inadequate to decay or allow growth of a second crop. Therefore, the Howards introduced a typical scheme of controlling leguminous green manure crop, which included early sowing of a hardy leguminous crop on vacant land, with enough supply of moisture for the succeeding crop. The Howards’ scheme of growing hardy leguminous crops needed further observations based on controlled scientific experiments governed by a different set of agendas distinctive from observations and respect for indigenous practices. The Howards kept records of field or plot preparation that showed systematic instructions on green manuring based on a prescriptive calculation of seasons and rainfall, evaluation of soil conditions and value of cash crops. In the Botanical area of Pusa, reserved for growing tobacco, experiments with sanai 35 followed specific rules for sowing, during the early rains in May and for ploughing it in closer to mid-July or until the third week in the case of large areas. Sanai inevitably decayed faster if it was cut and left to wither a few days on the moist soil before it was ploughed into the soil.36 Trials showed the interval between the ploughing in of the sanai and transplants, the tobacco should be ideally eight weeks to obtain maximum benefit. Setting specific time frames for decomposing green manure enabled the Howards to explain changes in the texture and colour of the soil and promote rapid growth on succeeding series of crops. The Howards and other tobacco planters of Bihar had noted the difference in cash crop yield: on tobacco, the land for which is left fallow in the monsoon, the effect is greater than that of a heavy dressing of farmyard manure. Equally rigorous calculations on the time best suitable for sowing in the green crop helped to show a cycle of efficient measures for the maximum conservation of soil fertility. Keeping the characteristics of a tropical country in mind, the Howards drew attention to the importance of the ‘time of ploughing’

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 309 which maximised the utility of green manure crops while adhering to crop rotations followed by peasants. In this case, the scientific appreciation of particular conditions was in part representative of the inductive scientific method. But the Howards based their reasoning of plough timing by incorporating deductive knowledge as well. Hence, by an evaluation of existing practices, the Howards drew a time frame for their experiments best suited for the growth of green manure crops such as sann and suggested suitable remedial measures for its control. As peasants lacked full knowledge of the correct procedures about the stages of ploughing in the green crops or the best method of burying, experiments on the Pusa farm showed the accurate timings for methodically growing the common indigenous leguminous crops. Following a temporal rhythm for traditional food crops among peasants, Pusa officials could clearly plan and work out a time frame for the different green manure crops used and adjusted to minimise the loss of nutrients for the following crops. Therefore, suitable adjustments in cropping and techniques of sowing green shrubs in large parts of Greater Bengal were carried out to increase the overall yield of the main crops such as rice. The Howards had streamlined the green manuring experiments to an appreciation of particularities under hot weather cultivation governing the tropics. They could respond to the ‘actual conditions’ of North Bihar – floods, periods of heavy rainfall in monsoon or winter and the consequent effects of waterlogging or drainage of moisture likely to influence soil fertility.37 As moisture conditions in soil were important in the scheme of green manuring experiments, officials in Pusa pointed to the problems of waterlogging and its effect on crop yield. For example, the overall yield of tobacco and wheat plots was distinctively different, with proper attention to drainage and to the interval between the ploughing in of the green crop sann and the sowing of wheat.38 In a long interval, the effects of green manuring were decreased. However, different results showed after turning in the sann crop on land swamped with water. In this case, the mass of decaying vegetable decreased yield far greater than those crops grown on land without manure. These queries reflected concerns about specific environmental issues that needed resolving rather than serve the purpose of completing a stock of knowledge about the tropics. Hence, the involvement of Pusa scientists with local agrarian economic and environmental ‘problems’ meant that it was not simply a site for collecting information and collating scientific data. The Howards had to fulfil their scientific pursuits, but they developed agricultural knowledge about ‘actual’ environmental conditions, the problems on soil fertility and sought to improve crop yield relevant to the regional economy. They also developed strategies to combat pest attacks and remained vigilant towards flood damage.

310  Sanjukta Ghosh These strategies required soil treatment and studying soil organisms utilised for the various stages of decomposition of green crops. Thus, green manuring experiments looked into the bacteriology of soil preparation, and changes that helped to convert nitrogen in plant tissues, or residual stock in the soil, into forms available to plants. Field reports filed by officials emphasised on the chemical and biological elements in local green manuring practices. Scientists were concerned with the rate of decomposition of the green crop under varied local climatic, physical conditions and practices. Therefore, these reports gave two important facts for the growth of green manure crops: the best stage of maturity for burying green crop, best method of burying with special reference to depth and resulting treatment of soil. Through these physical and practical observations, it was possible to decide the nitrogen content of green crops depending on maturity, depth of burial, aeration, water content and the rate of formation of humus under varying conditions. Equally important were the interconnected issues of moisture content, absorption of rain and the effects of waterlogging to uphold nitrogen content in the soil. Experiments with ploughing in green crops had practical value for many possible users of information. But the approach to combining with artificial fertilisers represented a theoretical bias. These manure experiments looked into the prospects for advancing commercial farming, with fewer reasons to explore the question of access for the ordinary farmer. The effect of adding artificial ingredients such as superphosphate and bone meal, following the growth and decomposition of green manure was also brought within the scope of the experiments. A twofold benefit arose from using artificial manure with green crops. Several other combinations showed the effect of phosphate fertiliser on the green manure and rapid plant growth helping the quantity of nitrogen fixed. While green manure without the additions of bone meal or superphosphate produced around 1,040 lbs of dhaincha each acre, adding these had increased the amount to 4,575 lbs and 5,690 lbs per acre respectively in paddy cultivation.39 In 1921–1922, demonstrations in South Bhagalpur showed that phosphate with green manure had increased both the yields of grain and straw increasing the net profit from 17 to 20–24 rupees each acre. In Pusa, adapted methods of green manuring increased returns on the rabi (winter) crop and by 30–60 percent in other crops on plots added with nitrate of soda and oilcake over three seasons.40 These experiments were meant for raiyats ploughing in the seasonal crop and ready to use select cash crops but also depended on the available cash. In Bengal, often the green crop was sown as a mixed crop with broadcast paddy and incorporated in the soil when the crop reached six weeks, or was used for intercropping with the standing crops of sugarcane, cotton and maize.41 Although cash crops often substituted subsistence crops,

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 311 most raiyats could not buy or afford to meet the extra costs of manure. Therefore, there were limits in the adaptive empiricism of the Howards to measure peak results and in their attempt to resolve indigenous ‘problems’. The limits brought to the fore various knowledge forms surrounding the green manure trials, with different ‘functional ends’ to which technical knowledge was put to use at different times – improving the crop yield, practicalities of season, soil nourishment and moreover, to facilitate adaptation among the peasants.

Adaptation of green manure by peasants Adapting scientific green manuring seemed relevant against traditional ideas of soil nourishment and other sustainable methods of farming.42 Modern western agronomists preached soil equilibrium, by balancing the chemical and nutritional input and output in the crop cultivation cycle. Traditional soil management stemmed from a holistic understanding of the role of plants and soil, the former being a symbol of well-being in arboriculture. Indian farmers unanimously believe that land has its elements (tatv) and it also needs a chance to relax (sastavein). Manure as a substance and manuring as an act, therefore, have complex social and cultural meanings in agrarian practices.43 These meanings and practices of soil nourishment determined peasant attitude towards adapting new manure and application methods promoted by farm experts. Traditional methods of crop rotation, for example, influenced peasant decision to rely on external supplies of manure. Crop rotation enabled farmers to keep a close eye on signs of soil exhaustion, believing that soil was best nourished by cultivating added crops, following the harvest of the main seasonal crops. For the raiyat, crop rotation minimised the risks of increasing the costs of production, such as through purchase and addition of chemical manure. The rationale for the internal nourishment of soil determined the tendency to adapt. But more importantly, newer strategies fitted to the existing scheme of cultivation. There were norms of manuring practices in parts of India, based on a deeper understanding of the sustainable management of soil. Many small farmers practised both sequential and intercropping in which they cultivated two crops of different statures in alternate rows such as groundnuts with either black or red grams. The practice of sequential cropping in marginal or dry lands allowed farmers to sow two or three short duration crops in succession, like legumes or oilseeds in lines between trees. The system enabled marginal and small-scale farmers to produce enough protein-rich crops enriching the soil. Rajat Datta’s 18th-century study of Bengal highlights the findings of the surveyor Francis Buchanan Hamilton

312  Sanjukta Ghosh (1762–1829), which lists ‘alternate cropping’ as one important agricultural practice employed to prevent soil exhaustion in parts of Rangpur.44 The simplest and most prevalent practice was to sow a combination of rice and lentil on relatively lower lands while rice and mustard were sown on higher lands. Similarly, the practice of adding organic green manure on rice land existed in varying degrees, the use of which spread rapidly when differences in yield became clear through farm demonstrations. Rice cultivators took to dhaincha for manuring aman rice as it increased the margin of profit by acre compared with cow dung and bone dust. Typically, application of green manure increased the yield of grain to 40.5 maunds (1 maund = 82.2 lbs) and 61 maunds of straw each acre.45 The records of potato yield showed similar differences. In the East Bengal private farm of Gouripur, under the patronage of a local zamindar Brajendra Kishore Roychowdhury, the results of a controlled plot experiment (Table 14.1) attracted the interests of local villagers. The experiment confirmed the possibilities of good returns from both the crops with definite results for paddy.46 In terms of both goals and methods, the farm experiments showed that scientific intervention needed a tacit understanding of the value or appropriateness of indigenous categories (including natural resources, knowledge and practices) relevant to peasants’ choices. Experiments with green manuring, therefore, looked into the problems of differential fertility, the records of which were tabulated and compared using the results of experiments. These comparisons pointed out regional variations in indigenous practices of cultivating leguminous crops, conservation of cattle manure and ploughing techniques. Taking comparative experiments as a starting point, Pusa farm instructions on green manuring, covering subjects such as seasons, soil and rotation of crops used a comprehensive survey of available resources, traditional practices of cropping and

Table 14.1 Results of Dhaincha experiment Plot no.

Manure

Paddy/acre

Manure value/acre (Rs)

Profit/acre (annas)

1

Dhaincha

1

6

2

Cow dung (100 maunds per acre) Bone dust (3 maunds per acre)

24 maunds 22/5 seer 22 seer

2

4

21 maunds

9

2

3

Source: Adapted from Krishi Sampad, 1318 B.S./1911, 2, (2): 63–64.

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 313 emphasised the need to transfer ‘good Indian practices’ from one region to another. In addition, the farm calculations emphasised quantifying losses in farmyard manure or the temporal rhythm found out in the modified methods of green manuring. Their experiments with green manure as a medium for effective soil management showed that changes were feasible without losing sight of the appropriateness of rational equivalents in indigenous practices. Such an approach was an advance from the experiments with farmyard manure and use of cow dung that dealt with ‘ignorance of cultivators’ and highlighted the wastage. Green manure experiments, on the contrary, showed the changes that were likely to occur through improved knowledge of the relations between crops and soil, environment and yield, crop diseases, water, seed, manure and their effect on the production. Scientists and other personnel of the farms employed methods of experiment, which added specific ‘value’ to the environment, resources and associate indigenous agricultural practices. Modification of agricultural practices and suitable take-up of farm experiments could only be possible if they justified the needs of Indian physical conditions and cultivation practices. The farm thus emerged as a productive unit and its experiments secured a decisive role in agricultural improvement, rather than aim to maximise the revenue collection. But in India, the experiments also showed how peasants engaged in improving agriculture or were ready to comply with the ‘desired’ targets set in farms such as Pusa. Trials and experiments opened a complex interaction between the scientific experts on farms, farm personnel including Indians and the ordinary peasants, while serving diverse pragmatic ends. The latter willingly took some risks in trials and the valuable results of experiments on their smallholdings. The chapter infers that experiments on government farms were set up to establish contact with Indian conditions, with the precise aim of dissemination of agricultural knowledge, as a discrete category to resolve particular problems, rather than offering ‘top heavy’ solutions to drawbacks in indigenous agricultural practices. Use of scientific agriculture influenced existing practices and the suitable take-up of experiments, prompting the need for modifications both by the scientists and by the peasants and communities. The experiments served as plastic resources that accommodated local needs and constraints without losing the robust characteristics of an institutional initiative. The Howards attended to empirical detail, and India’s physical conditions were in the main, within the effective remit of their investigations. There were limiting preconditions of agricultural decisionmaking – lack of independence, input, scarcity, labour problems, the risk aversions, cultural and ritual sanctions. Lack of knowledge was, of course, another impediment, which agricultural departments sought to put right.

314  Sanjukta Ghosh Despite these existing shortcomings, farm experiments encouraged innovation in crops, seeds, manure and machinery. However, at times, fantastic schemes and scientific data on local conditions differed from the real socio-economic dynamics of agriculture. For example, experiments devised to combine artificial fertilisers with green manure were effectively meant to commercialise its prospects, taking the question of access out of the hands of ordinary cultivators. On the contrary, those based on evaluating indigenous practices and knowledge, and an understanding of the Indian peasants’ rational choices contributed to change. The changes in uptake happened when the benefit was clear, secure and other impediments to change were accommodated or overridden. Experiments in green manure, therefore, reveal the complexities of the transfer of scientific knowledge, raising doubts over one of the most dominant themes for explaining agricultural change and development in colonial society – a discourse of science replaced a diverse indigenous worldview in agricultural practice. This displacement suggests a polarity between ‘modern’ technologically advanced agriculture and a traditional system. Traditional knowledge, which was environment-bound and ‘archaic’ with its local underpinnings, succumbed to the ‘new generalised knowledge’ attuned to market, education, science or the standardisation of the state and capitalism.47 The development of adaptive empiricism among the scientists of Pusa revealed that not all officials and agriculturists asserted technological superiority that separated the rational, active and progressive British from the irrational and passive ‘natives’. Very often, the problems of adaptation in green manuring showed conflicting interests between conservation techniques and science. The Howards tried to resolve and value these seemingly opposing areas but without enough attention to community rights and usage – an area of conflict that has been more sharply defined in postcolonial times. In the colonial period, agricultural improvement considered contingent factors such as ecology and environment. Postcolonial agriculture considers the wider issues of environment and sustainability. Hence, the political debate of manure and manuring in postcolonial India stems partly from the negative impact of the Green Revolution. Pesticide safety and pollution caused by fertiliser usage, for example, have led to a reappraisal of organic and sustainable agricultural techniques such as composting to improve soil nutrition. The complex relations of low-cost technology, ecology and peasant practices, imminent in the Howards’ approach as overlapping categories, resurface as significant yardsticks in organic farming at present. The historical experience, therefore, shows the way to transform state-regulated farm agriculture to a framework suitable for the wider community. These are challenges in postcolonial debates on agricultural

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 315 development that require an intellectual balance between practice and science. Similar intellectual concerns existed in the Howards’ framework of adaptive empiricism, demonstrated by his desire to value indigenous knowledge and practices so as to formalise their meanings within the mainstream discourses on agricultural improvement.48 The Howards’ empiricism undoubtedly incorporated the colonial relations and imperial frameworks of knowledge formation but also exemplified the results of practical amalgamation in ‘colonial science’ emerging from trials and experiments since the early and mid-part of the twentieth century. Moreover, the work of the Howards as pioneers in organic farming was no exception to the discipline of pioneering scientific research following from the works of several other experts and enthusiasts. Their eclectic experiments were built on similar independent interventions, as was the case with the scientific research in tobacco and indigo plants that developed along with the commercial pursuit of planters in Bihar.49 These attempts to objectify nature were not bounded by imperial, colonial and indigenous categories, but were meant to harness empirical knowledge that could be adapted to a multipronged improvement of India’s agriculture. The meanings, objectives and pragmatic potentials of such an initiative are found in the numerous accounts, diaries, journals and memoirs of the Pusa scientists. To retrieve the narrative of the Howards’ adaptive empiricism would be useful to create some analytical distance from the profit statistics used to interpret the productive aims of colonial science.50 However, the institutional site of Pusa was destroyed following an earthquake in 1934 that obliterated the visual and material reminders of the Howards’ holistic approach to colonial science51 – the legacy of which remains disjointed from its relocated chapter in Delhi.52

Notes 1 I thank Peter Robb for suggesting several key ideas in this essay and for teaching me agricultural history. For specific ideas on the tropics discussed here refer to David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 162–171. 2 For a broader historical perspective on how Kew became ‘the botanical metropolis of the world’ by forging colonial links, see Ray Desmond, Kew the History of the Royal Botanic Garden, London: The Harvill Press, 1995, pp. 251–267, 290–301, 302–320. 3 Harold Augustin Tempany, The Practice of Soil Conservation in the British Colonial Empire, London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1949; Tempany and D.H. Grist, An Introduction to Tropical Agriculture, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1958. 4 Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse, London: Routledge, 1978, pp. 53–79.

316  Sanjukta Ghosh 5 The need to adopt those forms of soil husbandry which required little or no input of fertilisers was emphasised by Robert Elliot on the basis of trials carried out on the estate of Clifton Park in Roxburghshire. Accounts of the trials were noted by Elliot in his monograph The Agricultural changes required by these times and how to carry them out. For more contemporary views on sustainable improvement of soil fertility, see John Sheail, ‘Elements of Sustainable Agriculture: The UK Experience, 1840–1940’, The Agricultural History Review, 1995, 43(2): 178–192. 6 Schokalskaya published a soil map of India in 1932 based on the Russian concept of climate-based classification, followed by the Indian scientist, Wadia and his co-workers in 1935 emphasising on geological formations. These observations categorised soil characteristics rather than the management of its nutrients, an aspect dealt with in case of the manure observations. T. Bhattacharya et al., ‘Soils of India: Historical Perspective, Classification and Recent Advances’, Review article. www.currentscience. ac.in/Volumes/104/10/1308.pdf (accessed on 01 September 2016). 7 Rajat Datta, ‘Peasant Production and Agrarian Commercialism’, in Rajat Datta, Peter Robb and K. Sugihara (eds), Agrarian Structure and Economic Development: Landed Property in Bengal and Theories of Capitalism in Japan, London: SOAS, 1992, p. 101. 8 J.A. Voelcker, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1893. Voelcker noted that scientists often commented on the poor quality of Indian cattle manure and no loss in burning it. Common practice of saving ashes and using on the fields showed that it was of some value in the dung; the dung is of very poor quality and burning does not lose a great amount of nitrogen. 9 For example, while testing the Serajgunje jute in 1889–90, it was found that use of cow dung gave the largest out-turn of fibre. The superior value of cow dung over other manure effective on the jute crop was demonstrated in experiments for 10 successive years. See the Annual Report of the Director of Land Records for the Year Ending 31 March 1899; Notes of the economic botanist Hector on the persistent wastage of cattle manure in the jute districts are found in Revenue and Agricultural Department Agriculture Branch A, henceforth as Rev&Agr, Agr. A, 36–44, March 1915, National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi. Although application of cattle manure had increased yield significantly, very often the peasants had failed to apply it to obtain any consistent yield. 10 Voelcker noticed the practice to impregnate stable litter with urine before throwing it on the manure heap in Rawalpindi; earth was often thrown over manure heaps in Tinnevelly; and in Gujarat peasants knew the benefits of keeping manure in pits rather than in heaps. See Voelcker, Improvement, pp. 127–128. 11 Initial manurial experiments in the farms of Dumraon, Burdwan (both established in 1885) and Sibpur (1887) in Bengal failed to arrive at any definite results as the manure used (green manure, cow dung, lime, saltpetre, oilcake and sweepings) was more mixed in terms of ingredients. See Voelcker, Improvement, pp. 373–374. 12 Yamini Kumar Biswas, ‘Amader Krishi o Tahar Unnati’ (Improvement of our Agriculture), Sibpur College Patrika, April–May 1903, 2(4–5): 114.

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 317 13 Peter Robb, ‘Bihar, the Colonial State and Agricultural Development in India, 1880–1920’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1988, 25(2): 221. 14 The first formal experiments on this subject were carried out in the 1880s by Schulz-Lupitz on the sandy soils of North Germany. Since then, the subject has continued to be a matter for scientific investigation. 15 The Agricultural Departments paid a great deal of attention to green manuring and regular accounts of experiments conducted at Cawnpore, Nagpur and Dumraon showed that this became a favourable site for compiling information on indigenous practices. See The Agricultural Ledger, No. 20 of 1893 and No. 8 of 1897, Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections), the British Library, London. 16 Paddy cultivation in the Tinnevelly District (Madras) showed some interesting local practices of green manuring with the use of kolinji as a green manure for the main crop. Dhaincha was also used here as the ideal green manuring crop, which proved to be useful on uncertain double croplands. In Bombay, sunn-hemp or tag as it is called locally was sown at the beginning of monsoon. In the Central Provinces, sunn-hemp and sawri (the local wild sesbania) was tried on poor soil. The experiments with sanai as a green manure for tobacco in the Botanical Area at Pusa produced significant results from both practical and theoretical points of view. See ‘Green Manuring in India: Theories and Practices’, Agricultural Research Institute, Pusa Bulletin 1915, (henceforth as ‘Green Manuring’), New Delhi: India, pp. 17–42. 17 B.C. Basu, Report on the Agriculture of the District of Lohardaga, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1897, p. 41. 18 ‘Green Manuring’, p. 5. 19 Ibid., p. 6. 20 Voelcker, Improvement, pp. 106–107. 21 ‘Green-Manuring’, p. 43. 22 The practice of sowing other varieties of green manure crops as fodder for cattle before the paddy harvest was quite common in many parts of India. 23 For an extensive account on the opinions of local officials and contemporary intellectuals on the Bengal model farm, see (Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce Department, Agriculture and Horticulture A) Agr, Rev&Commerce, Agr&Hort A, 14–17 & keep-with, October 1872, NAI, New Delhi. 24 Rev&Agr, Agr A.12–14, February 1886, NAI: New Delhi. 25 Royal Commission on Agriculture in India – Evidence Taken in Bihar and Orissa, vol. XIII, London: HMSO, 1928, p. 339. 26 Indigenous practices here and elsewhere in the article refer to those derived from farmers possessing indigenous knowledge system that is founded on locally derived and long held knowledge of the farming community. 27 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, Basingstoke, Hamps: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 28 In 1905, Albert Howard took up the post of an Economic Botanist at Pusa. As a pioneer of the organic method, he pursued a lifetime of practical research and study in the West Indies, India and England. He conducted

318  Sanjukta Ghosh practical experiments in India over a period of 25 years, much of which is embodied in the text An Agricultural Testament, London: Oxford University Press, 1940. 29 David R. Hershey, ‘Sir Albert Howard and The Indore Process’, Hort Technology, Proceedings of the Workshop on the History of the Organic Movement, April/June 1992, 2(2). 30 Gregory A. Barton, Albert Howard and the Decolonisation of Science: From the Raj to Organic Farming’, in Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge (eds), Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800–1970, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 163–186. 31 Madras Department of Agriculture, Leaflet No. 18 of 1911, New Delhi: Indian Council of Agriculture. 32 Reports from the Madras Agricultural Department showed that the extension of green manuring was possible due to an evolution of a large number of hardy deep-rooting leguminous plants such as kolinji (Tephrosia purpurea) and dhaincha, which were sown on land not suitable for cash crops. However, the situation was different where more tender plants were used as green manure. See the Madras Agricultural Calendar, 1912–1913, p. 10; Quoted in ‘Green Manuring’, p. 43. 33 Note the word sann is interchangeably used as sunn-hemp in official literature without distinction of provenance. The subject on green manuring with sann is referred to in detail in a paper published in Agricultural Journal of India, 7 January 1912. 34 See report by D.R. Sethi (Deputy Director of Orissa Circle) on major investigations of the impact of dhaincha on rice crop in Rev&Agr, Agr A, 5–8 October 1918. 35 As for most cash crops, the best date for turning in the green crop was noted. Generally a period of two months was recommended for the green crop to decay because after two months there is a loss of fertility following green manuring. ‘Green Manuring’, p. 203. 36 Albert Howard and Gabrielle L.C. Howard, ‘Notes on Drainage and Green Manuring’, Agricultural Journal of India, April 1914, 9(2): 201–204. 37 Albert Howard, ‘Some Aspects of the Agricultural Development of Bihar’, Bulletin No. 33 of Pusa, 1912–1914, Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections), the British Library, London. 38 ‘Some aspects of the Agricultural Development of Bihar’, an address delivered to the Bihar Planters’ Association at Mozzaffarpore, Calcutta, 1912. 39 C. Somers Taylor and Manmathanath Ghosh, ‘Experiments on the Green Manuring of Rice’, Agricultural Journal of India, March 1923, 18(2): 108. 40 Scientific Reports of Pusa, 1917–18, p. 122, Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections), the British Library, London. 41 For more details on cropping techniques of green manure and the significance of indigenous methods of crop rotation, see A.R. Khan, Scientific Farming in India, New Delhi: Orient, 1968, pp. 38–45. 42 The early sixth-century encyclopaedia Brihat Samhita written by Varahamihira advised that flowering sesame could be incorporated as green manure. 43 Vanaja Ramprasad, ‘Manure, Soil and the Vedic Literature: Agricultural Knowledge and Practice on the Indian Subcontinent Over the Last Two

Green-manuring in Bengal Presidency 319 Millennia’, in R. Jones (ed.), Manure Matters: Historical, Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives, Oxford: Routledge, 2016. 44 Rajat Datta compares Buchanan’s evidence on fallowing with conditions in England in the late eighteenth century, where alternate cropping or sequential uses of fodder crops and corn crops to obviate fallowing had only begun to spread to the enclosed and fairly large farms of England. See ‘Peasant Production and Agrarian Commercialism’, p. 103. 45 Report of the Agricultural Department, Bengal, 1908–1909: Appendix 1. Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections), the British Library, London. 46 Annual report of Gouripur farm (Mymensingh district) by the farm superintendent on the results of ‘dhaincha’ experiments on ‘aman’ land in Krishi Sampad, 1318 B.S./1911, 2(2): 63–64. 47 David Ludden, ‘Archaic Formations of Agricultural Knowledge in South India’, in Peter Robb (ed.), Meanings of Agriculture: Essays in South Asian History and Economics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. 48 A recent example of integrating green manure in soil management, as an important solution to recover from the effects of the tropical tsunami was felt in the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu. T. Kume, C. Umetsu and K. Palanisami, ‘Impact of the December 2004 Tsunami on Soil, Groundwater and Vegetation in the Nagapattinam District, India’, Journal of Environmental Management, July 2009, 90(10): 3147–3154. 49 Prakash Kumar, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 50 For an account of Albert Howard’s dislike for statistics see Daniel Brett (ed.) writings of Louise E Howard, Sir Albert Howard in India and the Earth’s Green Carpet, Cambridge: Fitchet Press, 2012, pp. 214–216. 51 The loss of Pusa and the move to the new capital was symbolic of the wider fate of imperial science, as David Arnold has argued in Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 153. 52 The Imperial Agricultural Research Institute was shifted to New Delhi the year after the earthquake towards the end of 1936. Phipp’s laboratory was destroyed and the remnants serve as a regional station of its main research institute at New Delhi that developed its own objectives. The recent facelift evident from the establishment of the Rajendra Prasad Agricultural University in 2016 could well be an attempt to recover the roots of a lost heritage in Bihar.

Appendix Major publications and supervised theses by Peter Robb

(a) Monographs  1 The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards Politics and the Constitution, 1916–1921 (Oxford University Press: Oxford 1976), 379 pp.  2 The Evolution of British Policy Towards Indian Politics, 1880–1920: Essays on Colonial Attitudes, Imperial Strategies and Bihar (Manohar and Riverdale: New Delhi 1992), 412 pp.   3 Rajat Datta, Peter Robb and Kaoru Sugihara, Agrarian Structure and Economic Development: Landed Property in Bengal and Theories of Capitalism in Japan (Occasional Papers in Third World Economic History, pamphlet no. 4: SOAS 1992); ‘Agrarian Structure and Economic Development’, pp. 1–23.  4 Ancient Rights and Future Comfort: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 and British Rule in India (Curzon Press: Richmond, Surrey 1997), 404 pp.  5 Clash of Cultures? An Englishman in Calcutta in the 1790s (inaugural lecture, 12 March 1998, SOAS, University of London 1998), 57 pp.  6 A History of India (Palgrave Macmillan: Hampshire 2002), 358 pp. Second revised edition, 2011, 387 pp.  7 Empire, Identity and India: Liberalism, Modernity and the Nation (Oxford University Press: New Delhi 2007), 241 pp.  8 Empire, Identity and India: Peasants, Political Economy and Law (Oxford University Press: New Delhi 2007), 233 pp.  9 Sex and Sensibility: Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791–1822 (Oxford University Press: New Delhi 2011), 267 pp. 10 Sentiment and Self: Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791–1822 (Oxford University Press: New Delhi 2011), 267 pp. 11 Useful Friendship: Europeans and Indians in Early Calcutta (Oxford University Press: New Delhi 2014), 317 pp.

(b) Edited books 12 (with David Taylor) Rule, Protest, Identity: Aspects of Modern South Asia (Curzon Press: London 1979).

Appendix 321 13 Rural India: Land, Power and Society Under British Rule (Curzon Press: London 1983). Second edition with new ‘Preface’, p. vii (Oxford University Press: Delhi 1992). 14 Rural South Asia: Linkages, Change and Development (Curzon Press: London 1983). 15 Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History presented to Professor K.A. Ballhatchet (Oxford University Press: Delhi 1993; second impression 1994). 16 Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India (Oxford University Press: Delhi 1993; paperback editions 1996, 1999, 2004). 17 (with David Arnold), Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asia Reader (Curzon Press: London 1993) with ‘Preface’, p. iv, ‘Ideologies’, pp. 1–4, ‘Institutions’, pp. 145–147, and ‘Ideas in Agrarian History’ (revised reprint of no. 47 below), pp. 201–223. 18 (with K.N. Malik), India and Britain. Recent Past and Present Challenges (Allied Publishers: New Delhi 1994). 19 The Concept of Race in South Asia (Oxford University Press: Delhi 1995; paperback editions 1997, 1999. . . 2011). 20 (with Kaoru Sugihara and Haruka Yanagisawa), Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India: Japanese Perspectives (Curzon Press: Richmond, Surrey 1996; Indian edition, Manohar, New Delhi 1996). 21 Meanings of Agriculture: Essays in South Asian History and Economics (Oxford University Press: Delhi 1996).

(c) Articles and chapters in books edited by Peter Robb 22 ‘The Bureaucrat as Reformer: Two Indian Civil Servants and the Constitution of 1919’, in Robb and Taylor, Rule, Protest, Identity, pp. 49–82. 23 ‘Land and Society: The British “Transformation” in India’, in Robb, Rural India, pp. 1–22; second edition, pp. 1–23. 24 ‘State, Peasant and Moneylender in Late Nineteenth-Century Bihar: Some Colonial Inputs’, in Robb, Rural India, pp. 106–148; second edition, pp. 109–152. 25 ‘The External Dimension in Rural South Asia’, in Robb, Rural South Asia, pp. 1–22. 26 ‘Texts, Communities, and the History of Change in Modern South Asia’, in Robb, Society and Ideology, pp. 1–21. 27 ‘The Impact of British Rule on Religious Community: Reflections on the Trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah of Patna in 1865’, in Robb, Society and Ideology, pp. 142–176. 28 ‘Meanings of Labour in Indian Social Context’, in Robb, Dalit Movements, pp. 1–67. 29 ‘India and Britain: Some Reflections on their Material and Cultural Interaction since Independence’, in Malik and Robb, India and Britain, pp. 3–30. 30 ‘South Asia and the Concept of Race’, in Robb, The Concept of Race, pp. 1–76.

322  Appendix 31 ‘Distinctive Aspects of Rural Production in India: The Colonial Period’, in Robb, Sugihara Yanagisawa, Local Agrarian Societies, pp. 1–47. 32 ‘Variant Meanings of Agriculture: Implications for Research and Policy’, in Robb, Meanings of Agriculture, pp. 1–35.

(d) Chapters in books edited by others 33 ‘Officials and Non-Officials as Leaders in Popular Agitations: Shahabad 1917 and Other “Conspiracies” ’, in B.N. Pandey (ed.), Leadership in South Asia (Vikas: New Delhi 1977), pp. 179–210. 34 ‘Some Aspects of British Policy Towards Indian Nationalism, 1885–1920’, in Colin Simmons and Mike Shepperdson (eds), The Indian National Congress and the Political Economy of India, 1885–1985 (Gower Publishing: Avebury 1987), pp. 61–97. 35 ‘In Search of Dominant Peasants: Some Notes on the Implementation in Bihar of the Bengal Tenancy Act 1885’, in Clive Dewey (ed.), Arrested Development in India (Manohar: New Delhi 1988), pp. 187–222. 36 ‘The British Empire in India, 1858–1947’, in F.C.R. Robinson (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of India, Pakistan (Cambridge University Press: New York 1989), pp. 116–20. 37 ‘The Ordering of Rural India: British Control in 19th-Century Bengal and Bihar’, in David Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York 1991), pp. 126–150. 38 ‘Town and Country: Economic Linkages and Political Mobilization in Bihar in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries’, in John L. Hill (ed.), The Congress and Indian Nationalism: Historical Perspectives (Curzon Press and Riverdale: London and Wellesley Hills 1991), pp. 158–191. 39 ‘Intermediaries and Change in Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: A Note on G.D. Sharma’s View of Credit, Revenue and Commerce’, in Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara (eds), Local Suppliers of Credit in the Third World, 1750–1960 (Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press: London and New York 1993), pp. 29–35. 40 ‘Landed Property, Agrarian Categories and the Agricultural Frontier: Some Reflections on Colonial India’, in Gregory Blue, Martin Bunton and Ralph Croizier (eds), Colonialism in the Modern World (M.E. Sharpe, Armouk: New York 2002), pp. 71–99. 41 ‘From Law to Rights: The Impact of the Colonial State on Peasant Protest in Bihar’, in William R. Pinch (ed.), Speaking of Peasants. Essays on Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser (Manohar: New Delhi 2008), pp. 29–56. 42 ‘Place and Difference: Reflections on Indian Identities and on Swedish Baptists During British Rule’, in Swarupa Gupta (ed.), Asia Annual 2010: Nationhood and Identity Movements in Asia: Colonial and Post-Colonial Times (Manohar: New Delhi 2012), pp. 31–54 [ISBN 9788173049606].

Appendix 323 43 ‘Rational Scepticism and the Teaching of (Indian) History’, in Crispin Bates (ed.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, vol. 6: Perception, Narration and Reinvention: The Pedagogy and Historiography of the Indian Uprising (Sage: New Delhi 1914), pp. 188–208. 44 ‘Introduction’, to Archibald B. Spens, A Winter in India: Light Impressions of its Cities, Peoples, and Customs (first published, Stanley Paul & Co. 1913; Dodd, Mead & Co.: New York 1914), National Archives of India Historical Reprints (Routledge: New Delhi 2014), pp. ix–xxxix. 45 ‘Memory, Place, and British Memorials in Early Calcutta’ lecture transcript in Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh, and Upal Chakrabarti (eds), Memory, Identity, and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in Honour of Peter Robb (Routledge: New Delhi, this volume).

(e) Articles in journals, periodicals and series 46 ‘The Government of India and Annie Besant’, Modern Asian Studies 10, 1 (1976), pp. 107–130. 47 ‘The British Cabinet and Indian Reform, 1917–19’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History IV, 3 (1976), pp. 318–384. 48 ‘Hierarchy and Resources: Peasant Stratification in Late NineteenthCentury Bihar’, Modern Asian Studies 13, 1 (1979), pp. 97–126. 49 ‘British Rule and Indian “Improvement” ’, Surveys and Speculations XII, Economic History Review 2nd series, XXXIV, 4 (1981), pp. 507–523. 50 ‘The Challenge of Gau Mata: British Policy and Religious Change in India, 1885–1920’, Modern Asian Studies 20, 2 (1986), pp. 283–319. 51 ‘New Directions in South Asian History’, South Asia Research 7, 2 (1987), pp. 123–142. 52 ‘Law and Agrarian Society in India: The Case of Bihar and the NineteenthCentury Tenancy Debate’, Modern Asian Studies 22, 2 (1988), pp. 319–354. 53 ‘Bihar, the Colonial State and Agricultural Development in India, 1880– 1920’, Indian Economic and Social History Review XXV, 2 (1988), pp. 205–235; reprinted in Binoy N. Verma (ed.), Agrarian Relations, Institutional Change and Colonial Legacy: The Case of Eastern India (Agrarian Relation in Transition series, vol. III; Ashish Publishing: New Delhi 1993), pp. 47–82. 54 ‘Ideas in Agrarian History. Some Observations on the British and NineteenthCentury Bihar’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1990), pp. 17–43. 55 ‘Muslim Identity and Separatism in British India: The Significance of M.A. Ansari’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies LVI, Part 1 (1991), pp. 104–125; reprinted in Islam and the Modern Age XXIV, 2 (May 1993), pp. 155–189. 56 ‘Peasants’ Choices? Indian Agriculture and the Limits of Commercialization in Nineteenth-Century Bihar’, Economic History Review XLV, I (1992), pp. 97–119.

324  Appendix 57 ‘Labour in India 1860–1920. Typologies, Change and Regulation’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 4, 1 (April 1994), pp. 37–66. 58 ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the North-East Frontier in the 1880s’, Modern Asian Studies 31, 2 (1997), pp. 245–283; reprinted in Bharati Ray and David Taylor (eds), Politics and Identity in South Asia (K.P. Bagchi, Kolkata 2001), pp. 1–40. 59 ‘Completing “Our Stock of Geography”, or an Object “Still More Sublime”: Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of Mysore, 1799–1810’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 8, 2 (1998), pp. 181–206. 60 ‘Credit, Work and Race in 1790s Calcutta: Early Colonialism Through a Contemporary European View’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 37, 1 (2000), pp. 1–25; reprinted in Meena Bhagarva (ed.), Exploring Medieval India, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Culture, Gender, Regional Patterns, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010), pp. 391–421. 61 ‘On C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870’, Comparative Criticism 22 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2000), pp. 243–249. 62 ‘Children, Emotion, Identity and Empire: Views From the Blechyndens’ Calcutta Diaries (1790–1822)’, Modern Asian Studies 41, 1 (February 2006), pp. 175–202. 63 ‘On the Rebellion of 1857: A Brief History of an Idea’, Economic and Political Weekly XLII, 19 (12 May 2007), pp. 1696–1702; reprinted in 1857: Essays From Economic and Political Weekly (intro. S. Bandyopadhyay; Orient Longman: Hyderabad 2008), pp. 59–79. 64 ‘Mr Upjohn’s Debts: Money and Friendship in Early Colonial Calcutta’, Modern Asian Studies 47, 4, pp. 1185–1217 (2013). On line, January 2013: journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X12000625 65 ‘Categorisation, Education, and Modernity: Reflections on Abdul Latif (1828–93) and British India’ (forthcoming).

(f ) Supervised theses (1978–2013)   1 Syed Anwar Husain, ‘The Organisation and Administration of the India Office, 1910–1924’ [SOAS 1978].  2 Swapan Das Gupta, ‘Local Politics in Bengal: Midnapur District 1907– 1934’ [SOAS 1980].   3 James Chiriyankandath, ‘Social Change and the Development of “Modern” Politics in Travancore: From the Late Nineteenth Century to 1938’ [SOAS 1985].   4 Rani Dhavan Shankardass, ‘Vallabhbhai Patel: His Role and Style in Indian Politics 1928–1947’ [SOAS 1985].   5 Bindeshwar Ram, ‘Land and Society in North Bihar, India: Agrarian Relations in the Later Nineteenth Century’ [SOAS 1988].   6 Mohammad Shah, ‘The Emergence of a Muslim “Middle Class” in Bengal: Attitudes and Rhetoric of Communalism, 1880–1947’ [SOAS 1990].

Appendix 325   7 Alex McKay, ‘Tibet and the British Raj, 1904–47: The Influence of the Indian Political Department Officers’ [SOAS 1995].   8 Andrew Grout, ‘Geology and India, 1770–1851: A Study in the Methods and Motivations of a Colonial Science’ [SOAS 1995].   9 Shompa Lahiri, ‘Metropolitan Encounters: A Study of Indian Students in Britain, 1880–1930’ [SOAS 1995]. 10 Sanjay Sharma, ‘Famine, State and Society in North India c.1800–1840’ [SOAS 1996]. 11 Sanjoy Bhattacharya, ‘ “A Necessary Weapon of War”: State Policies Towards Propaganda and Information in Eastern India, 1939–45’ [SOAS 1996]. 12 Pragati Mohapatra, ‘The Making of a Cultural Identity: Language, Literature and Gender in Orissa in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’ [SOAS 1997]. 13 Subhajyoti Ray, ‘Jalpaiguri Under Colonial Rule, 1965–1948’ [SOAS 1997]. 14 Suhit Sen, ‘The Transitional State: Congress and Government in U.P., c.1946–57’ [SOAS 1998]. 15 Vaswati Ghosh, ‘The Dynamics of Scientific Culture Under a Colonial State: Western India, 1823–1880’ [SOAS 1999]. 16 Charu Gupta, ‘Obscenity, Sexuality and the “Other”: Gender and Hindu Identity in Uttar Pradesh, 1880s–1930s’ [SOAS 2000]. 17 Rajit Mazumder, ‘The Making of Punjab: Colonial Power, the Indian Army and Recruited Peasants, 1849–1939’ [SOAS 2001]. 18 Bernard Dale Ethell, ‘Portugal and Portuguese India, 1870–1961’ [SOAS 2003]. 19 Swarupa Gupta, ‘Samaj and Unity: The Bengali Literati’s Discourse on Nationhood, 1867–1905’ [SOAS 2004]. 20 Sanghamitra Misra, ‘Spaces, Borders, Histories: Identity Construction in Colonial Goalpara’ [SOAS 2004]. 21 Chinnaiah Jangam, ‘Contesting Hinduism: The Emergence of Dalit Paradigms in Telugu Country 1900–1950’ [SOAS 2005]. 22 Miki Sayako, ‘Merchants, Markets and the Monopoly of the East India Company: The Salt Trade in Bengal Under Colonial Control, c.1790– 1836’ [SOAS 2005]. 23 Suchetana Chattopadhyay, ‘Muzaffar Ahmad, Calcutta, and Socialist Politics, 1913–1929’ [SOAS 2005]. 24 Ezra Rashkow, ‘The Nature of Endangerment: Histories of Hunting, Wildlife, and Forest Societies in Western and Central India, 1857–1947’ [SOAS 2008]. 25 Aditya Sarkar, ‘Regulated Labour, Unruly Workers: The Making of Industrial Relations in Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay 1860–1910 [SOAS 2009]. 26 Prabhu Narain Bapu, ‘Constructing Nation and History: Hindu Mahasabha In Colonial North India 1915–1928’ [SOAS 2010].

326  Appendix 27 Sanjukta Ghosh, ‘Colonial State, Agricultural Knowledge Transfers and Indigenous Response: Bengal Presidency 1870–1930’ [SOAS 2010]. 28 Sohini Dasgupta, ‘Contending Authenticities: Representations of ‘Hindu Custom’ in Late Nineteenth Century Colonial Bengal’ [SOAS 2010]. 29 Tara Mayer, ‘Clothing and the Imperial Image: European Dress, Identity and Authority in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century North India’ [SOAS 2010]. 30 Anna Gust, Empire, Exile, Identity: Locating Sir James Mackintosh’s Histories of England’ [UCL 2011, supervised jointly with Catherine Hall]. 31 Alison Safadi, ‘The Colonial Construction of Hindustani 1800–1947’ [Goldsmith College, University of London 2012]. 32 Valerie Ellen Rourke Anderson, ‘The Eurasian Problem in Nineteenth Century India’ [SOAS 2012]. 33 Upal Chakrabarti, ‘Interconnections of the Political: British Political Economy, Agrarian Governance, and Early Nineteenth-Century Cuttack (1803–1850)’ [SOAS 2013]. 34 Anushay Malik, ‘Narrowing Politics: The Labour Movement in Lahore 1947–1974’ [SOAS 2013]. 35 Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, ‘Wheels of Change? Impact of Railways on Colonial North Indian Society, 1855–1920’ [SOAS 2013].

Index

Abbey of Bliss see Anandamath (novel) Adi Hindu movement 112 adivasis 151 – 70; oral histories 151 – 75; see also Bhotias; Gonds; Kurkus; Lepchas; Limbus agriculture xv, xvii, xix, 17 – 19, 26n39, 102, 155, 164, 198, 251, 268, 284, 298, 299, 300 – 9, 313, 314, 315 Ahirs 219 Aligarh Muslim University 188 Ali, Meer Hassan 73 Ali Shah, Nawab Wajid 139 Amar Bhubane Ami Benche Thaki (autobiography) 95 Ambedkar, B.R. 101 ambivalence 2, 6, 8, 19, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106 amnesia 92, 169 Amritsar Massacre 10 Anandamath (novel) 133 – 50 anarchists 238, 242 ancestors/ancestral/ancestry 6, 11, 56 – 60, 66, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 82, 94, 166, 170, 197, 198, 204 Ancient Funeral Monuments (1631) 36 Anderson, Valerie 6 Anglo-French Convention 256 Anglo-Indians 5, 24n22, 44, 71, 72, 87n6; see also Eurasians Anglo-Maratha War 160 Anglo-Nepali war 195 Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement 240

Anna Lombard (novel) 73 anti-Bolshevik policy-thinking: in London 232 anti-Bolshevik surveillance 234, 239; in Calcutta 232 anti-capitalism 232 anti-colonialism 232 anti-imperialist 233, 236 anti-Semitism 236 archives 160 arhar (cajanus indicus) 302 Arunoff, Artem 243 Arya Samaj 115, 118, 124 Atabeg dynasty 187 Atmacharit ba purbasmriti (autobiography) 94, 97 – 100, 104 Austro-Hungarian Empire 65 autobiography 7, 20, 91 – 107 Awadh 180 Ayodhya 139; see also Babri Masjid; Ramjanambhumi Aziz, Shah Abdul 182 Babri Masjid 9, 140 – 2 babul 302 Badheka, Gijubhai 293 Bahadur, Rai Hari Das Pradhan 204 Baithakhana 31 Baker, Edward (Sir) 226 Bakker, Hans 143 Ballhatchet, Kenneth xv ‘Bande Mataram’ (Tagore) 136 Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar 7, 8 Bangiya Sahitya Parishad 137 Banyan tree of Calcutta (Kolkata) 31

328 Index barbarism 39, 45, 117, 162 Barnett, Richard 13 Basu, B.C. 302 bathan 301 Bauliah, Chemacoorty 264 Bayly, C.A. 12, 44, 64 Bay of Bengal 260 – 6 Becher, Charlotte 37 Becher, Richard 38 Begam, Shah Jahan 186, 187 – 9 Begam, Sikandar 183, 186 – 7 Begam, Sultan Jahan 187 – 9 Begam, Mamola 180 Bell, Charles 203, 206, 208 Bengal xiv, xv, 3, 7: Greater Bengal 303 Bengal-Coromandel trade 269 Bengal Famine 10, 139 Bengal Khilafat Committee 238 Bengali language 81, 103, 137, 216, 219, 290, 292 Bentinck, Lord 184 Bernard, Henrietta 291 bhadralok 106, 238; anarchist 238 Bhamtas 219 – 21 Bhonsle, Appa Sahib 160, 161 Bhopal, Begam of: Begam Qudsia 183 – 6; Shah Jahan Begam 186, 187 – 9; Sikandar Begam 183, 186 – 7; Sultan Jahan Begam 187 – 9 Bhotias (Lopo) 198 – 200, 208 Bibi, Maaji Mamola 181 – 3 Bihar xiv, xv, xxi, 19 binaries 2, 8, 18, 22n4, 56, 92, 98, 105; frameworks 6, 55; opposition 24n21, 66 Biswas, Manohar Mouli 92, 94, 101, 103, 104, 106 Blechynden, Richard 32, 110 Boigne, Benoît De 61 Boitacannah (Baithakhana) tree 31 Bolshevik(s) 15, 233, 234, 238; menace 236, 240, 242, 245; revolution 238 Bolshevism 232 – 7 Bombay 254 Bori reserve forest 11 Bori Wildlife Sanctuary 151 Bose, Acharya Jagadish Chandra 32

Bose, Subhas Chandra 66 Bosnia 36 botanical gardens 10 botany 299 Bourne, Alfred 290 Bow Bazar: chapel 81; east end 31 – 2 Boxwallahs 80 Brahmins 83, 95, 96, 101, 118, 145 Brander, Isabel 18, 277 – 9; Indian teachers, teaching 279 – 80; kindergarten for India 283 – 8; legacy in Madras 290 – 4; Madras’s schools, touring 280 – 3 Brendish, William Beresford 73 British Empire xvi, 45, 46, 67, 232, 235, 236, 238 British memorials 31 – 47 British Museum 235 Britishness: defining 56 – 60; political history of 55 – 70 British ruling class 56 British Socialist Party 235 Britons 43, 62 Britton, Lionel 235, 236 Bruce, Anna 37 Buckingham, James Silk 64 Burma 5 Burmese Days (Orwell) 5 Byapari, Manoranjan 96 Cairo 232 Calcutta (Kolkata) 216, 256, 289; British memorials in 31 – 47 Camden, William 36 Campbell, Archibald 198 Campbell, W.L. 207 Canning, George 64 Carey, William 82 Carpenter, Mary 280 Carson, James 117 caste/casteism/upper-caste/ upper-caste reformist/lower-caste 96, 124, 125 caste-patriarchal discourse 8 Catholicism 74, 80, 84 censorship 235 Central India 11, 151 – 75, 180, 189 – 91 Central Provinces 11, 160, 162, 163, 317n16

Index  329 Charnock, Job 32 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra 134, 138 Chatterjee, Partha 38, 45 Chattopadyay, Suchetana 14 chaturashrama 97 Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 169 Chettis 265 China 25n34, 52n38, 70n46, 195, 206, 207, 243, 251, 252 Chogyal (Buddhist king) 195 – 202,  207 Chota Nagpur 302 Christians 7, 35, 36, 37, 40, 53n45, 72, 74 – 83, 86; Indian Christians 82, 83, 286; native Christians 72 Christianity 40, 58, 74, 79, 80, 82, 83, 97, 98, 111, 112 Church/Church of England (CofE) 79 – 82,  84 Churchill, Winston 3, 233 civilisation xxiii, 3, 46, 142, 155; civilisational encounters 17; civilising process 117 civil war 234 civis Romanus sum 65 Clavering, John 38 clergy/clergymen 79 Cleveland, Augustus 39 Colebrook 300 colonial/colonialism 1 – 21; administration xiii, xix, 13, 14, 201; encounter 1, 11 – 21, 55, 162, 169; knowledge 12, 15, 18, 214, 216, 220, 224, 227; regime 2, 164, 206, 228; and governance 11 – 15; hegemony 12, 56, 107, 114; and improvement 15 – 19; memory and identity 19 – 21 and surveillance 14, 215, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 232, 239 commemoration 33, 47n2, 50n24 communism 234 communist internationalism  236 Complete Monumental Register 35 conservation-induced displacement 153 constructed identity 21 consumer 257

Coomaraswamy, Ananda 73 Cornwallis, Lord 55 – 70; Cornwallisian 6, 56 – 60 Coromandel 16, 250, 257, 258, 259, 260, 267, 268 cosmopolis 65 cosmopolitanism 232; forms of 63 – 7 Cotton, Bishop 79 counter propaganda 235 Court of Directors 56 cows 300 – 13, 316n9; cow urine 301; cow dung 300, 301, 303, 312, 313; farmyard manure 300 Craddock, Reginald 4 Crawfurd, John 266 Creole India: demise of 55 – 70; in different contexts 60 – 3 Creolisation 63 crime 14, 214 – 28; in transit 216 – 24 criminal castes 220 criminal tribes 216, 220, 227 Criminal Tribes’ Act 215 criminality 214, 215, 220 crop rotation 311 Crotalaria juncea 302 curriculum 289 Dalits xiii, xvii, xix, 46, 47, 83, 84; Dalit bodies 120, 123, 125, 126; Dalit movement 8, 93, 94, 110, 116, Dalit writings 95, 101, 115; Namasudras 8, 92, 99, 101 – 3, 106, 107; see also Dalit agricultural caste; Dalit autobiographies; Dalit women Dalit agricultural caste 8 Dalit autobiographies: identity in 91 – 109 Dalit emancipatory transcendentalism 105 Dalit women 8; in colonial North India 110 – 31; grotesque to submissive 120 – 3; iconographies of sympathy 111 – 15; melodramas, sentimentality 117 – 20; suffering and sentimentality 111 – 15; suffering bodies, polluted 115 – 16; surpanakha to shabari 120 – 3; sympathy, thresholds 123 – 5 Darjeeling 196, 198

330 Index Dass, Madam 243 Delhi xxii, xxiii, 33, 73, 99, 162, 187, 190, 204, 217, 218, 239 Denikin, Anton 234 Derozario, M. 35, 42 Derozio, Henry Vivian 64 development-induced displacement 11, 151, 158 Dewan, Khangsa 197, 198 Dewan, Shoe 203 Dewey, John 292 dhaincha (Sesbania cannabina) 303, 307, 308, 310, 312, 317n16, 318n32, 318n34 Directors of Public Instruction (DPI) 280, 281, 288 discrimination 104 Downing Street 233 Dudh ka Daam (novel)119 Dutt, Toru 284 East Indian Railway Company 223, 225 Eden, Ashley 199 Edgar, J.W. 199 Egypt 187, 234 Elwin, Verrier 168 Emperor Constantine 35 empiricism 311 encounter 1, 11 – 21, 162, 169 England 36, 39, 40, 41, 44, 60, 73, 76, 79, 81, 85, 93, 94, 98, 117, 281, 287, 317n28, 319n44 East India Company, The 16, 56, 78, 80, 138, 139, 180, 181, 183, 249 – 75 Englishman, The (newspaper) 241 Englishness 17, 55 enlightenment xxi, 2 environment 18, 31, 55, 62, 151, 189, 250, 276, 284, 304, 309, 313, 314 Episcopal churches 85 epistemological violence 2 epitaphs 43, 44, 46 esprit de corps 83 eulogy 36, 43 Eurasian clergy 85 Eurasians 58, 62; in colonial India 71 – 87; Hindu 74, 78

Europe/European 1 – 3, 6, 7, 15, 17, 32, 34, 45, 56, 58, 60, 65, 72 – 81, 84, 85, 86, 222, 260; gravesites 10 farangí 190 farm 298 Farquhar, J. N. 145 Ficus religiosa 32 fieldwork 159 Finlow, R.S. 303 First World War 232 Fisher, Bishop 243 Forest Rights Act 164 – 7 forests xvii, 11, 41, 153 – 6, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 199, 205 Forsyth, James 160, 162, 164 fortress 144 Froebel, Friedrich 17, 276 – 8, 288, 294 Froebelian school mistress 277 – 9; see also Brander, Isabel Froebelian/s/Froebelian pedagogy/ Froebelian practices/Froebelian principles 290 – 2,  294 Froebel-influenced education 288 – 90 Furber, Holden 59 Gandhi, M.K. 66, 67, 70n44, 93, 95, 100, 102, 115, 232, 293, 294 Gangopadhyay, Pabitra 238 Gardner, Alexander 77 Gardner, William 76 Gazette/Gazetteers: Bengal District Gazetteers 210n9; Gazetteer of Bhopal 190; Gazetteer of Central Provinces 154, 172n16; Sikkim Gazetteer 199 gender 7, 13, 55, 111, 113, 114, 118, 136, 179, 189, 190, 191, 232, 241 George, Lloyd 233, 234 Germany 238 Ghosh, Aurobindo 136 Ghosh, Barin 136 Ghosh, Sanjukta 18, 19 Gillingham, Carol 291 Gleig, G.R. 139

Index  331 global 12, 18, 26n37, 53n43, 60, 62, 168, 236, 238, 299 Goan community 64 Gond-Barwars 219, 220 Gond kingdoms 154 Gonds 11, 151, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 163, 167, 168, 182, 219 Gordon, Corrie 291 gosains 144 Gover, C.E. 284 Government of India 4, 14, 151, 171n5, 195, 207, 226, 244, 281, 289 Government of India Act xvi green manuring: adaptation by peasants 311 – 15; in Bengal Presidency 298 – 319; farm experiments of 303 – 11; survey of 301 – 3 Green Revolution 298, 314 Grigg, Henry 281, 290 Grosjean, Bishop 84 Guha, Ranajit 56, 206 Gupta, Charu 8, 9 Gupta, Hemen 137 Gurkhas 198, 209 Halbwachs, Maurice 7 Halttunen, Karen 117, 120 Hamilton, Francis Buchanan 312 Hand and Eye 287 Hanumangarhi 133 – 50 Hastings, Warren 56, 57 Hayes, Fletcher 142 Hazarat Bal riots 93 heritage 10, 19, 74, 151 heroinism 179 – 94 hills xxiv, 136, 153 – 5, 160 Himalayas 195 Himmat Bahadur Ghat 144 Hindi language 8, 92, 95, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 170; literature 111, 115, 116, 117; print culture 111 Hind Swaraj (Gandhi, M.K.) 66 Hindu/Hinduism 3, 23n10, 46, 76, 96, 97, 98, 101, 112, 120; naishthik Hindu 96 Hindu extremism 10 Hindu nationalism 4, 10, 133

Hindu population 154 Hindur puja parbon 98 History of Sikkim 197 – 9,  204 Holmes, John 37, 76 House of Commons debate, 1925 71 Howards 305 – 9, 311, 313 – 15 Howard, Albert 305 – 9, 311, 313 – 15, 317n28, 318n36 Howard, Gabrielle Matthei 305 – 9, 311, 313 – 15, 318n36 humanitarianism 9, 112, 117, 119; humanitarian reform 120 Hunt, Anthony 38 Hunter, W.W. 139 Husain, Ghulam 45 Husain, Zakir 292 hybridity 1, 6, 17, 25n33, 107,  292 Hyde, John 39 iconography/iconographic/ iconographies 111 – 15 identity 1 – 12, 14, 19 – 21, 42, 71, 74, 82, 84, 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 101, 104, 105, 107, 121, 169, 195, 197, 200, 205, 206, 209, 219, 238, 244 imagined communities 7 imperial citizenship 65 imperial liberalism 232 imperial surveillance 232 – 47 imperialism 4, 15, 34, 43, 66, 233, 234, 236, 245 improvement 15 – 19 Independence (of India) 14, 33, 151, 159, 160, 180, 207 Indian Froebelism 283 Indian gurukul system 293 Indian Kindergarten, The (Gillingham) 291, 292 ‘Indian Missionary Directory’ 86 Indian National Congress 238 Indian nationalism 64, 103, 145 Indian Ocean 12 Indianness 4 indigeneity 2, 4, 12, 16, 17, 22n7, 45, 46, 134, 202 indigenous agency 17 indigenous knowledge 16, 18, 19, 298, 304, 305, 315

332 Index indigenous peoples 11, 20, 151, 166, 167, 168 indigenous responses 14 Indo-British colonial encounter 55 Indo-European 242 Indo-Portuguese 72 Indonesia 3 Indus River 3 infiltration 234 internationalism 236 internalisation 3, 46 investigative modalities 2 Ireland 234 Irish Fenians 66 Islam 46, 47, 74, 77, 111, 112, 236 Itibritte Chandal Jibon 96 James, C.L.R. 61 Japan 136 Jews, Judaism 72, 82, 236, 244; Jewish Bolshevik 236 Jex-Blake, Sophia 278 jaributi 165 jibancarit (autobiography) 92 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali 3 Jones, William Townsend 40 jurisdiction 202 Kaiser Reich 233 Kanda, Sayako 16 Kannada language 101, 147n15, 287 Kanpur 218; Kanpur memorial 34 karkatch 254 Kazi, Bamiak 204 Kazi, Lasso 197, 199 Kazi, Yangthang 198 Kerensky, Alexander 237 Kerr, James 38 Kew Gardens 299 Khan, Baki Muhammad 186 Khan, Dost Muhammad 181 Khan, Faiz Muhammad 181 Khan, Faujdar Muhammad 186 Khan, Ghaus Muhammad 183 Khan, Hayaat Muhammad 182 Khan, Jahangir Muhammad 184 – 6 Khan, Munir Muhammad 184 Khan, Nazar Muhammad 183 Khan, Noor Inyat 74 Khan, Wazir Muhammad 183

Khan, Yaar Muhammad 181 Khilafat movement 66, 100, 232 kindergarten 17, 18, 292 – 4 kindergarten experiments 276 – 97 Kindergarten Magazine 287 Kindergarten Teaching in India (Brander) 283 Kolchak, Alexander 234, 241 Krishna, Baul Guru Raj 92 kumbha mela 145 Kurkus 11, 155, 160, 161, 162, 164, 167 Kurku-Mewasi Adivasis 151 Labbais 265 Lama, Phodang 197 – 9 Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan 190 land xv, 1, 16, 31, 35, 40, 41, 42, 76, 94, 142, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 198 – 206, 208, 209, 220, 234, 300 land rights 31, 41 landscape 31, 33, 134, 144, 153, 160, 165, 182 Law, Joseph 37 Leather, J.W. 300 legacy 11, 17, 19, 20, 31, 44, 47, 145, 160, 189 – 91, 290 – 4,  315 Lenin, V. I. 237 Lepchas 198 – 200, 205, 208, 210n24 Lhada Medi 201 liberal imperialism 15 liberalism 12, 15, 46, 232 life-writing 91 Limbus 198, 200, 208 liminality 104 – 7; texts of 91 – 109 Livesay, William 38 Lohardaga 302 London xvii, xviii, 15, 232 – 45 Lyall, A.C. 154 Macaulay, Colman 196 Macaulay, Thomas 17 Macbeth 6, 23n20 Madhya Pradesh 151 Madras/Madras Presidency 258, 289, 290 Madras Permit system 257 Madras Standard 287

Index  333 Madras Women Teachers’ Association 287 Mahabharat 115, 116 Mahomedanism 76 Mahomedans 140 Mandal, Jogendra Nath 100, 103 Manning, Adelaide 286 Manusmriti 115, 116 Marakkayars 264, 265 Marathas 61, 154, 173n29, 189, 192n7 Marathi language 66, 92, 95, 101, 289, 292 Markovits, Claude 6 Marochetti, Carlo 33 Marshall, Peter 59, 60, 251 Maršic, Ivan 36 masculinity 53n45, 77, 130n52, 190 Masih, Hakim Shahzad 183 Masulipatnam 260, 269 mathas 133 mati kalai (Phaseolus mungo var) 307 Matua religious movement 8, 92 – 107 Matua Mahasangha 101, 103, 105, 106 McFarlane, Robert 40 McKay, Alex 13, 14 Mead, C.S. 97, 99 memorials 4 – 6, 31 – 47 see also British memorials memory 1 – 11, 19, 20, 21, 31 – 53, 91, 95, 104, 114, 289; autobiographical 7, 20, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107; collective 5, 7, 19, 20, 21, 133; dispossessing 151 – 75; public 19; selective 10, 47, 157; sites of 133 – 50 merchant 270 metropolitan 238 Mewatis 219 Modak, Tarabai 293 Mohammadi (newspaper) 245 monastery 134; monasteryfortresses 10 monopoly 258 Montessori, Maria 293, 294 monuments 10, 20, 34, 35, 37, 38, 45, 50n20

Morony, Edward 37 mosque/masjid 141 Mughals 23n10, 41, 43, 56, 76, 78, 145, 154, 187, 190 munshis 183 Muslims 3, 4, 74, 75, 86, 98, 103, 125, 138, 140, 142, 143, 182, 236; Muslim Bolshevik 236 Nakarattars see Nattukottai Chettiars Namasudras 8, 92, 99, 101 – 3, 106, 107; Namasudra movement 102; see also Dalits Namgyal, Chogyal Tashi 207 Namgyal, Maharaja Tashi 195 Nandy, Ashis 44, 46, 52n35, 53n43, 98 Naoroji, Dadabhai 65 narrative 1, 9 Natal villages 31 National Archives xxi, xxii, xxiii nationalism xvi, 1, 4, 10, 45, 64, 66, 67, 100, 102, 103, 105, 133, 145, 197, 207, 239 nationalist: fort 143 – 5; memory 143 – 5; monastery 143 – 5 native 56, 61, 77, 78, 86, 163, 196, 222, 223 Nattukottai Chettiars 265 Navdanya 18 Nawab Gauhar Begam see Qudsia, Begam Nehru, J. 66, 67 Nepali immigration 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 208 New Zealand xxiii nineteenth century xiv, 12, 13, 15, 16, 43 – 6, 55, 61 – 3, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 114, 119, 133, 134, 142, 155, 183, 195, 198, 215, 216, 220, 224, 251, 253, 265, 301, 302, 303, 305 Nissa, Mah Munzel Ool 76 Non-Cooperation movement 232 Nora, Pierre 5, 10, 19, 31, 35, 45, 46, 133 – 50 Northern India 110, 111, 113, 116, 117, 134, 142 North-Western Provinces 217

334 Index nostalgia xviii, 24n22, 50n24, 156, 169 – 70, 175n62,  183 novels 5, 10, 65, 73, 115, 119, 133 – 9,  217 opium 252 oral history 11, 151 – 70 organic farming 315 orient/oriental/orientalism 2, 3 Orissa 254 Orr, Alexander 140, 141 Orwell, George 5 other, othering, otherness 23n21, 304 Outram, James 141 Pachmarhi (town) 11, 151 – 75 Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, Central India 151 – 75 Pakistan 3, 8 Palmer, S.G. 249, 250 pamphlet 40, 189, 217, 221 panga 254 panicum miliaceum 302 Park Street cemetery 40 Pashtun, Orakzai 180 Passis 219 Pathans xx, 192n7 Pax Britannica 15, 214, 228 peasants 99, 102, 103, 138, 244, 300, 301, 302, 303, 306, 307, 308, 309, 311 – 15 pedagogy 291 Pestalozzi, Johann 276 – 8, Pestalozzian education methods 293 Petrograd 237, 241 pickpockets 217 pilgrims 218 Pillavsky, A. 220 Pinch, William 10 Pindaris 173n29, 192n7 Pitt’s India Bill of 1784 79 Polish 234 political history, of Britishness 55 – 70 political radicalism 243 postcolonial India 104, 105, 153, 179, 314 postcolonialism 4 Powell, Avril 17

power xx, 2, 5, 10, 11, 12 – 14, 16, 19, 46, 49n20, 59, 96, 99, 105, 107, 123, 125, 140, 141, 143, 155, 168, 180, 181, 183, 185, 189, 190, 195 – 7, 199 – 202, 208, 228, 238 power structures 133 – 50 Pradhan, Laksmidas 198 pragmatism 181, 189 prejudice 58, 80, 166, 220, 257, 266, 285 Premchand, Munshi 118 Princely States 196 propaganda xvii, 40, 115, 233 – 6,  242 protestants 78, 79 Pusa: experiment 306, 307; farm 19, 304, 309, 312 Pushta, Umraogiri144 pyal schools 285 Qudsia, Begam 183 – 6 rabi crops 308, 310 race 71 – 87 railway crimes 214 – 16; in colonial India 216 – 24; criminal castes 219, 221; thefts and pickpocketing 217 railway criminals 219, 220; railway thieves 217, 218, 222 Rai, Raja Khushwaqt 185 raiyats 301 Rajputs 61, 154, 181 Ramabai, Pandita 288, 289 Ramayan 115 Ramjanambhumi 9, 140, 142, 145 Rashkow, Ezra 10, 11 Red Army 234 Reed, Elizabeth 37 refugees 93, 94 reform xiv, xv, xvi, xx regime: colonial India 214 – 31; control 14, 214 – 31; regulation 14, 215, 228 Regulating Act of 1773 56 Reid, D.N. 301 religion 1, 7, 23n10, 24n22, 25n35, 32, 55, 96, 101 – 3, 105, 106, 141, 236; race and 71 – 87 religiosity 8, 94

Index  335 rice 307, 309, 312 Ripa, Matteo 32 Risorgimento 66 Robb, Peter xiii, xxv, 1, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 14 – 18, 21, 78, 110, 111, 206, 250, 270, 271; Agrarian Structure and Economic Development: Landed Property in Bengal and Theories of Capitalism in Japan 27n48, 316n7, 320; Ancient Rights and Future Comfort: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 and British Rule in India 320; Clash of Cultures? An Englishman in Calcutta in the 1790s 320; Empire, Identity and India: Liberalism, Modernity and the Nation 320; Empire, Identity and India: Peasants, Political Economy and Law 320; The Evolution of British Policy Towards Indian Politics, 1880 – 1920: Essays on Colonial Attitudes, Imperial Strategies and Bihar 320; The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards Politics and the Constitution 245n1, 320; A History of India 320; publications by 320 – 6; Sentiment and Self: Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries 320; Sex and Sensibility: Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries 51n31, 126n4, 127n6, 320; Useful Friendship: Europeans and Indians in Early Calcutta 51n27, 320 Rothamstead 305 Roy, Rammohan 45, 97 Royal Asiatic Society xix Royal Commission 300 Russia 233 Russian Revolution 236 Russo-Japanese War 66 Sabarna 8, 92 Sadhus 96, 144, 145 Said, Edward 2, 3 St. Stephen’s Memorial Church 32 salt 258 salt trade: Bay of Bengal 260 – 6; East Indian market 249 – 75; importers

249 – 75; salt monopoly: in Eastern India 253 – 9; revenue 250, 256; routes 260; voyage pattern 264 Coast salt 253 – 9, 266, 270 san/sann or tag 302 sanai 308 sanatana dharma 135 ‘Sanyasi and Fakir Rebellion’ 139; Sannyasi Rebellion, The 137 Sanyasis 144, 145, 149n36; sanyasi movement 135, 138, 139 Sarkar, Jagadish Narayan 137 Satchidanandan, K. 91 Satpura National Park 151 Satpuras 153, 158 Satyananda 135 Scheduled Tribes (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006 164 science 298, 290, 298, 299, 302, 305, 314, 315; scientific knowledge 298, 299, 301, 303, 304, 305, 307, 312; in Bengal Presidency 298 – 319 sculpture parks 10 secularism 5 sedentariation 151, 155, 158, 164 seeth 306 self-determination 166 Sen, A.C. 300 sentiment/sentimentality 111 – 13, 116, 118, 119 Shabari 120 – 3 shahr-i áshob 190 Shari’ah Law 181 Shinto 136 shipper 260 Siva 98, 143, 144; Saivite/Saivism 143, 144, 149n36 Short, William 77 Sikhs 76, 77 Sikkim 14; administration of 195 – 212; indigenous population of 198 Sikkimese-Nepali frontier 198 Sikkimese revenue 202 Sindh-Punjab 218 Singha, Radhika 214, 220 Sinha, Nitin 214, 215 Siraj ud-Daulah 32, 45 site of memory 10, 133 – 50 Skinner, Hercules 61

336 Index Skinner, James 61 Skinner’s Horse 61 Smalley, E. 259 Smith, W. 304 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) xv, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxv, 25n31, 47n1 Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPG) 84 soil, classification, management 299 – 300 soil fertility 307 soil husbandry, practical management 299 – 301 Sombre, David Dyce 74 South Asia xiii, xvi, xvii, xix, 2, 9, 12, 24n28, 25n30, 26n38, 50n24, 73, 191n2, 232 South Asian Studies xix Southern India 80, 83, 84, 85, 253, 260, 284, 293 Spencer, Herbert 288 ‘Stain of White, The’ (Abraham) 77 Statesman, The 237 stereotypes xv, 20, 96, 111, 179, 220, 221, 222, 236, 241, 242, 244; see also prejudice Stone, J. H. 290 Strachey, John 3 subaltern 2, 12, 55, 91, 92, 103, 104, 159 suffering/suffering bodies 111 – 16 Sufi/Sufism 87n8, 143, 144, 182 Surpanakha 120 – 3 surveillance 220 Sykes, Catherine 37 Tagore, Debendranath 97 Tagore, Rabindranath 66, 74, 136, 292 Tamil Chettis 265 Tamil language 18, 282, 284, 286, 287, 291, 292 Tamil Zenana (magazine) 287 Tan Pei Yun 243 3Rs 276 – 97 Telegu language 147n15, 253, 260, 264, 270, 284, 287, 291, 292 temple 9, 31, 82, 118, 122, 136, 141, 142, 169; mandir 118

tenancy xiv, 15, 41 Thackeray, Richmond 39 Thakur, Guruchand 102 Thakur, P.R. 92, 95, 98, 103,  104 Thakur ka Kuan (story) 118 Thapar, Valmik 165 Thiyyas 78 Tibet, Tibetan 195, 196, 197, 198, 201 – 8 Tiger taskforce 164 tombstones 35, 43 Topi, Tantia 34, 161 travel 215, 217, 218, 219, 222, 225, 226 travelogue 224 Travers, Robert 56, 61 Treaty of Tumlong 196 tribes 155, 161, 164, 168, 198, 199 Trois Glorieuses 64 tropic/tropicality 298, 299, 304, 307, 308, 309 Turkey 238 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 151 Urdu 147n15, 182 – 3, 190, 192n4, 192n9, 193n9 usucapio 41 Varna 129n33 Vedanta 136 Vepary Grammar School 84 Vepary Church Pastoral Aid Society 85 Verdi, Guissepi 6 Victims/victimhood 8, 9, 34, 35, 39, 62, 110 – 31, 217, 218, 221, 224, 225 village school teachers 286 Vishnu 96, 135, 137; Vaishnavite/ Vaishnavism 96, 97, 98, 101, 106, 143 Voelcker, V.A. 300, 302, 304, 316n10 Waddell, L.A. 199 Wahhabi 47

Index  337 War of 1857 133; Delhi Mutiny Memorial 33; The Mutiny or War of Independence 161 ‘Wasikadas of Awadh, The’ 77 Weever, John 36 Welinkar, N.G. 289 Wellesley, Richard 81 West/westernisation 12, 15, 65 Western India 64, 114, 159, 160, 288 wheat 305, 307, 308 Wheeler, Roxane 58 Wheler, Edward 39 Whitehall Gardens 244 White, John Claude 196, 200, 202, 204, 208

whites 78, 82 women power brokers: Begam Qudsia 183 – 6; heroinism and weapons 179 – 94; legacy, rule in Central India 189 – 91; Maaji Mamola Bibi 181 – 3; in modern Bhopal 179 – 94; rule in Bhopal 180 – 1; Shah Jahan Begam 187 – 9; Sultan Jahan Begam 187 – 9 Wyatt, Charles 32 Xenophobia 244 Yate, Thomas 38 Yonge, George 57 Younghusband, Francis 203