Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia 9780415780629, 0415780624

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TRANS-COLONIAL MODERNITIES IN SOUTH ASIA Edited by Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher

Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia

Presenting cutting-edge scholarship dedicated to exploring the emergence and articulation of modernity in colonial South Asia, this book builds upon and extends recent insights into the constitutive and multiple projects of colonial modernity. Eschewing the fashionable binaries of resistance and collaboration, the contributors seek to reconceptualize modernity as a local and transitive practice of cultural conjunction. Whether through a close reading of Anglo-Indian poetry, Urdu rhyming dictionaries, Persian Bible translations, Jain court records, or Bengali polemical literature, the contributors interpret South Asian modernity as emerging from localized, partial, and continuously negotiated efforts among a variety of South Asian and European elites. Surveying a range of individuals, regions, and movements, this book supports reflection on the ways traditional scholars and other colonial agents actively appropriated and re-purposed elements of European knowledge, colonial administration, ruling ideology, and material technologies. The book conjures a transcolonial and transnational context in which ideas of history, religion, language, science, and nation are defined across disparate religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. Providing new insights into the negotiation and reinterpretation of Western knowledge and modernity, this book is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, as well as of intellectual and colonial history, comparative literature, and religious studies. Michael S. Dodson is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is a historian of British imperialism in South Asia, focusing particularly upon the intellectual, cultural, and urban history of the nineteenth century in north India. Brian A. Hatcher is Professor and Packard Chair of Theology at Tufts University, USA. His research addresses such issues as the transformation of intellectual practice among Sanskrit pandits in colonial Bengal, the interrogation of modernity under the conditions of colonialism, and the expression of religious change in emergent Hindu movements.

Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia

1. The Police in Occupation Japan Control, corruption and resistance to reform Christopher Aldous 2. Chinese Workers A new history Jackie Sheehan 3. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya 4. The Australia–Japan Political Alignment 1952 to the present Alan Rix 5. Japan and Singapore in the World Economy Japan’s economic advance into Singapore, 1870–1965 Shimizu Hiroshi and Hirakawa Hitoshi 6. The Triads as Business Yiu Kong Chu 7. Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism A-chin Hsiau 8. Religion and Nationalism in India The case of the Punjab Harnik Deol 9. Japanese Industrialisation Historical and cultural perspectives Ian Inkster 10. War and Nationalism in China 1925–1945 Hans J. van de Ven 11. Hong Kong in Transition One country, two systems Edited by Robert Ash, Peter Ferdinand, Brian Hook and Robin Porter

12. Japan’s Postwar Economic Recovery and Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1948–1962 Noriko Yokoi 13. Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950–1975 Beatrice Trefalt 14. Ending the Vietnam War The Vietnamese communists’ perspective Ang Cheng Guan 15. The Development of the Japanese Nursing Profession Adopting and adapting Western influences Aya Takahashi 16. Women’s Suffrage in Asia Gender nationalism and democracy Louise Edwards and Mina Roces 17. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902–1922 Phillips Payson O’Brien 18. The United States and Cambodia, 1870–1969 From curiosity to confrontation Kenton Clymer 19. Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim Ravi Arvind Palat 20. The United States and Cambodia, 1969–2000 A troubled relationship Kenton Clymer 21. British Business in Post-Colonial Malaysia, 1957–1970 ‘Neo-colonialism’ or ‘disengagement’? Nicholas J. White

22. The Rise and Decline of Thai Absolutism Kullada Kesboonchoo Mead 23. Russian Views of Japan, 1792–1913 An anthology of travel writing David N. Wells 24. The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese, 1941–1945 A patchwork of internment Bernice Archer 25. The British Empire and Tibet 1900–1922 Wendy Palace 26. Nationalism in Southeast Asia If the people are with us Nicholas Tarling 27. Women, Work and the Japanese Economic Miracle The case of the cotton textile industry, 1945–1975 Helen Macnaughtan 28. A Colonial Economy in Crisis Burma’s rice cultivators and the world depression of the 1930s Ian Brown 29. A Vietnamese Royal Exile in Japan Prince Cuong De (1882–1951) Tran My-Van 30. Corruption and Good Governance in Asia Nicholas Tarling 31. US–China Cold War Collaboration, 1971–1989 S. Mahmud Ali 32. Rural Economic Development in Japan From the nineteenth century to the Pacific War Penelope Francks 33. Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia Edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig 34. Intra Asian Trade and the World Market A J H Latham and Heita Kawakatsu 35. Japanese–German Relations, 1895–1945 War, diplomacy and public opinion Edited by Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich

36. Britain’s Imperial Cornerstone in China The Chinese maritime customs service, 1854–1949 Donna Brunero 37. Colonial Cambodia’s ‘Bad Frenchmen’ The rise of French rule and the life of Thomas Caraman, 1840–1887 Gregor Muller 38. Japanese-American Civilian Prisoner Exchanges and Detention Camps, 1941–45 Bruce Elleman 39. Regionalism in Southeast Asia Nicholas Tarling 40. Changing Visions of East Asia, 1943–1993 Transformations and continuities R.B. Smith (Edited by Chad J. Mitcham) 41. Christian Heretics in Late Imperial China Christian inculturation and state control, 1720–1850 Lars P. Laamann 42. Beijing – A Concise History Stephen G. Haw 43. The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War Edited by Rotem Kowner 44. Business–Government Relations in Prewar Japan Peter von Staden 45. India’s Princely States People, princes and colonialism Edited by Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati 46. Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality Global perspectives Edited by Debjani Ganguly and John Docker 47. The Quest for Gentility in China Negotiations beyond gender and class Edited by Daria Berg and Chloë Starr 48. Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia Edited by Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack

49. Japanese Diplomacy in the 1950s From isolation to integration Edited by Iokibe Makoto, Caroline Rose, Tomaru Junko and John Weste 50. The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia Spaces of disorder in the Indian Ocean region Edited by Ashwini Tambe and Harald Fischer-Tiné 51. On The Borders of State Power Frontiers in the greater Mekong sub-region Edited by Martin Gainsborough 52. Pre-Communist Indochina R.B. Smith edited by Beryl Williams 53. Communist Indochina R.B. Smith edited by Beryl Williams 54. Port Cities in Asia and Europe Edited by Arndt Graf and Chua Beng Huat 55. Moscow and the Emergence of Communist Power in China, 1925–1930 The Nanchang Rising and the birth of the Red Army Bruce A. Elleman 56. Colonialism, Violence and Muslims in Southeast Asia The Maria Hertogh controversy and its aftermath Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied 57. Japanese and Hong Kong Film Industries Understanding the origins of East Asian film networks Kinnia Shuk-ting 58. Provincial Life and the Military in Imperial Japan The phantom samurai Stewart Lone 59. Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War Ang Cheng Guan 60. Southeast Asia and the Great Powers Nicholas Tarling 61. The Cold War and National Assertion in Southeast Asia Britain, the United States and Burma, 1948–1962 Matthew Foley

62. The International History of East Asia, 1900–1968 Trade, ideology and the quest for order Edited by Antony Best 63. Journalism and Politics in Indonesia A critical biography of Mochtar Lubis (1922–2004) as editor and author David T. Hill 64. Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia Trial by army Louise Barnett 65. The Japanese Occupation of Borneo, 1941–1945 Ooi Keat Gin 66. National Pasts in Europe and East Asia P. W. Preston 67. Modern China’s Ethnic Frontiers A journey to the west Hsiao-ting Lin 68. New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia Continuing explorations Michael Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall 69. Food Culture in Colonial Asia A taste of empire Cecilia Leong-Salobir 70. China’s Political Economy in Modern Times Changes and economic consequences, 1800–2000 Kent Deng 71. Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia Edited by Liping Bu, Darwin Stapleton and Ka-che Yip 72. Russo-Japanese Relations, 1905–1917 From enemies to allies Peter Berton 73. Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 Alien prescriptions? Christopher Aldous and Akihito Suzuki 74. Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia Edited by Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher

Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia

Edited by Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher

First published 2012 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the contributors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by them 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. 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 Trans-colonial modernities in South Asia / edited by Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher. p. cm. -- (Routledge studies in the modern history of Asia ; 74) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. India--Colonial influence. 2. Nationalism--India--History. 3. Nationalism--Philosophy--India. 4. National characteristics, East Indian. 5. India--History--British occupation, 1765-1947. I. Dodson, Michael S., 1968- II. Hatcher, Brian A. (Brian Allison) DS463.T698 2011 954.03--dc23 2011030245 ISBN: 978-0-415-78062-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-13539-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India

Contents

Preface List of contributors

ix xi

Introduction

1

MICHAEL S. DODSON AND BRIAN A. HATCHER

PART I

Local agents, local modernities 1

The schools of Serfoji II of Tanjore: education and princely modernity in early nineteenth-century India

13

15

INDIRA VISWANATHAN PETERSON

2

Pandits at work: the modern shastric imaginary in early colonial Bengal

45

BRIAN A. HATCHER

3

Knowledge in context: Raja Shivaprasad as hybrid intellectual and people’s educator

68

ULRIKE STARK

PART II

Strategies of translation 4

Modernity’s script and a Tom Thumb performance: English linguistic modernity and Persian/Urdu lexicography in nineteenth-century India

93

95

JAVED MAJEED

5

The trans-colonial opportunities of Bible translation: Iranian language workers between the Russian and British Empires NILE GREEN

116

viii Contents 6

Indology as authoritative knowledge: Jain debates about icons and history in colonial India

137

JOHN E. CORT

PART III

History and modernity 7

A conceptual history of the social: some reflections out of colonial Bengal

163

165

ROCHONA MAJUMDAR

8

Three poets in search of history: Calcutta, 1752–1859

189

ROSINKA CHAUDHURI

9

A “well-traveled” theory: Mughals, Maine and modernity in the historical fiction of Romesh Chunder Dutt

208

ALEX PADAMSEE

Afterword: Bombay’s “intertwined modernities,” 1780–1880

231

C. A. BAYLY

Index

249

Preface

This volume has its origins in a two-day conference organized by Michael Dodson at Indiana University Bloomington in October 2008. Originally entitled “Traditional Scholarship and Asian National Modernity,” the conference brought together scholars from around the world to discuss the intellectual projects of “traditional” Asian scholars in a variety of modern contexts, from Egypt and Syria to India and China. One of the chief concerns behind the conference was to question standard historical treatments of modernization beyond the European world, and to eschew neat formulations regarding the arrival, articulation, or meaning of modernity within particular Asian contexts. We hoped to produce an occasion at this conference for critical reflection on hitherto little-understood areas of Asian intellectual life and localized expressions of modernity. In this respect, participants shared the desire to explore ways that learned elites went about negotiating and reinterpreting not only their own texts, traditions, and institutions, but also Europe’s “new knowledge.” The high quality of the papers originally presented at the conference, as well as the engaging discussions they provoked—conversations that were at once crossdisciplinary and transregional—suggested that the conference might be the occasion for creating an edited volume dedicated to rethinking the variable expression of modernity across the Asian continent. But as sometimes happens, this original plan faced some early challenges, and the co-editors of the current volume took the decision to reconceive the project somewhat, dedicating it solely to the examination of what we here call “trans-colonial” modernity in South Asia. Regrettably this meant having to omit several excellent essays on topics related to the Middle East and China. This was not an easy decision and we would like to express our deep regrets to Arif Dirlik, Jim Gelvin, and Ori Sela, as well as to reiterate our thanks for their understanding in this regard. We would also like to thank the original participants at the 2008 conference in Bloomington whose contributions are not directly represented here: Ashish Chadha, Marwa Elshakry, Michael Gasper, Adi Hastings, Matthias Lehmann, Paul Losensky, Rebecca Manring, Klaus Muehlhahn, Ron Sela, and Rebecca Spang, as well as Sandrine Catris, who served as graduate student assistant for the conference. We gratefully acknowledge here the generous financial support of Indiana University’s Office of the Vice-President for Research, and its New Frontiers in Arts and Humanities grant program, as well as the support

x Preface of Indiana University’s History Department, Islamic Studies Program, India Studies Program, and Cultural Studies Program in making possible the original workshop. We believe that the present volume, as it now stands, offers a rich and compelling set of essays through which to begin asking new questions about the nature of modernity in South Asia, its relationship to colonialism, transnational linkages, local cultural authority and expertise, and identity formation. Such a volume is entirely dependent upon the scholarship and goodwill of its contributors, several of whom provided chapters at relatively short notice, thereby allowing us to round out our coverage of traditions, regions, individuals, and themes from colonial South Asia. Thus we thank all of our contributors for their essays, and hope that our readers will find their work as compelling and thought provoking as we have. Finally, we would like to thank our editors, Dorothea Schaeffer and Jillian Morrison at Routledge in Abingdon, for their patience and understanding throughout the development of this book. Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher Bloomington and Boston, June 2011

Contributors

C. A. Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. Amongst his many publications are Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (1983), Empire and Information (1996), and The Birth of the Modern World (2004). His latest book is Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, c. 1800–1950 (2011). Rosinka Chaudhuri is a Fellow in Cultural Studies at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata. She is the author of Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (2002) and editor of Derozio, Poet of India: The Definitive Edition (2008). John E. Cort is Professor of Religion at Denison University. He is the author of Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (2001) and Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (2010), as well as editor of Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History (1998). Michael S. Dodson is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770–1880 (2007) and editor of Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (2011). Nile Green is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Indian Sufism Since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (2006), Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (2009), and most recently, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (2011). Brian A. Hatcher is Professor of Religion and Packard Chair of Theology at Tufts University. He is the author of Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (1996), Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (1999), and Bourgeois Hinduism, or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists, (2008). His latest book is a translation of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar’s Hindu Widow Marriage (2012). Javed Majeed is Professor of Post-Colonial Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the author of Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s

xii Contributors The History of British India and Orientalism (1992), Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (2007), Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (2008), and co-author of Hali’s Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam (1999). Rochona Majumdar is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009) and Writing Postcolonial History (2011), as well as the co-editor of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (2007). Alex Padamsee is Lecturer in English at the University of Kent. He is the author of Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse (2005) as well as, most recently, “Postnational Aesthetics and the Work of Mourning in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi,” in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2011). Indira Viswanathan Peterson is David B. Truman Professor of Asian Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints (1989), Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi (2003), and Scholar-king of Tanjore: Serfoji II and the Shaping of Indian Modernity (forthcoming). Ulrike Stark is Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is the author of An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, 1858–1895 (2007). She is currently writing a book-length study entitled “In Times of Transition. Raja Shivaprasad ‘Sitara-e Hind.”

Introduction Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher

The concept of modernity is now nearly ubiquitous in historical scholarship, and not least in attempts to decipher the cultural, social, and economic impacts of Western Europe upon Asia and Africa. The practices of colonialism, strengthened through self-consciously cultivated ideologies of European superiority and colonial difference, have long been understood as constitutive to the imagining of the salience of this modernity.1 Derived from directed although limited industrialization, transfers of technology2 and knowledge, and strategies of linguistic and religious conversion,3 amongst much else, this was imagined as a form of “enacted modernity,” played out by Europeans in the theater of their overseas territories. Or perhaps, more forcefully, one might think of colonialism as leading to an “imposed modernity,” always tempered with the foreknowledge amongst Europeans that this was a long-term, perhaps even unrealizable project, especially after the “disappointments” of “native rebellion” against British rule in India and Jamaica in 1857 and 1865, respectively. In other words, modernity has often been understood as a set of European phenomena and experiences, identifiable and definable in character; a modernity borne of scientific “revolution,” industrialization, overseas exploration and conquest, war, and nationalism, drawing its especial salience and perspicuity from a juxtaposition with its conjured non-modern other in the colonies.4 Of course few scholars in recent years have read European modernity’s selfgenerated and self-justifying text so literally,5 at least amongst those interested in religious, cultural, and social histories of the non-European world under various species of colonial rule. Skepticism about such claims to universality and progress on the part of Europe’s modernity, even its “essential goodness,” certainly existed within the colonial world itself, epitomized by the thought of figures such as Gandhi or Aurobindo,6 and by attempts to redirect the force of Enlightenment “progress” from strictly colonial enterprises to forms of social egalitarianism.7 Thus for historians of the past several decades, the questioning and limiting of such claims made on the part of Europe’s modernity project within colonial rule have ranged from initial attempts within the pages of Subaltern Studies to map out spaces untrammeled by forms of an ultimately Western-derived Indian national modernity8 to analyses that read the constitutive projects of colonial modernity as always partial and inherently subjected to reinterpretation and redeployment by Indian elites.9

2 Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher It was a dedication to this sort of understanding of Europe’s modernity overseas— as importantly influential in the lives of Indians, but also ultimately circumscribed in its ability to reproduce itself in unquestioned or unmediated forms—that first brought us, as scholars and now as editors, to the present task of this book. We have shared for some years an interest in understanding the ways in which European modernity, as forms of social norms and intellectual values, were negotiated amongst the pandit (that is, the “traditional” Sanskrit scholar) communities of Banaras and Bengal.10 In particular, what has driven our work has been a curiosity about the kind of “colonial modernity” men such as Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar or Bapudeva Shastri inhabited as more or less “traditional” figures thrust on to the stage of an educational system dedicated to perpetuating a vision of European superiority. We have found consistently that modernity, far from being imposed wholesale from without, was always partial and subjected to reinterpretation and negotiation. Additionally, and importantly, we have found that in colonial South Asia modernity was often re-forged into forms of intellectual capital for a variety of projects, whether in the areas of education and social reform in the envisioning of quasi-national pasts. Such an approach to South Asia’s so-called “traditional” scholars emerged in part from our engagement with a body of scholarship that tended to understand pandits as essentially non-modern historical actors, and which sought to formulate a space of political agency within a “retreat” to wholly traditional intellectual pursuits.11 Certainly it can be questioned whether there even existed such a nearly “self-contained” intellectual space in colonial India during the nineteenth century, untouched by colonial epistemologies and institutions. But such a valorizing of the “traditional,” as a retreat into the non-modern past—as existing only in memories that are actively being subordinated to the colonial order of knowledge (i.e. modernity)—can also be seen to lurk in a strain of scholarship most closely identified with Sheldon Pollock. Although Pollock does not address the colonial period in South Asia directly, he has advanced a formulation of historical change that enshrines a dialectic of modernity and non-modernity for the turn of the nineteenth century. Pollock has argued that Sanskrit, not merely as a medium of expression, but as a set of intellectual practices, lost its “creative vitality” and its ability to “make history” by about 1800. In such a view, Sanskrit during the colonial period is understood to no longer represent an intellectual medium through which Indians could engage with the evolving nature of their lived experiences under colonialism, and the challenges presented by its modernity.12 But while Pollock sees this decline as the culmination of several longer-term processes, it is Sudipto Kaviraj who has more recently attempted to substantiate the principal precipitating factor in Sanskrit’s decline as the “epistemological rupture” that accompanied British rule in the subcontinent. This process of rupture is at once the replacement of Sanskrit with English as a medium of expression and a “comprehensive cognitive change,” in which, for example, “traditional” Sanskrit education was displaced by a pedagogy and curriculum based on Western models, or in which South Asian medical knowledge (for instance, ayurveda) was replaced by Western medical theory and techniques. Sanskrit intellectual life, then, is conceptualized as a

Introduction

3

“traditional” and hence non-modern activity, a set of epistemological structures allowing for a non-modern way of asking questions, of conceptualizing the world, and of seeking answers. It is a non-modernity, moreover, chased from the streets by colonial modernity except, perhaps, in the ability of old men to still retreat into a past no longer present.13 In contrast, Dipesh Chakrabarty has persuasively and more subtly argued for “provincializing” our conception of European intellectual hegemony in the colonial and post-colonial era.14 However, the question remains as to how scholars interested in the advance of colonial forms of knowledge, of an essentially “colonial modernity,” can historicize the manifold forms of engagement with such epistemic and cultural change that arose within the colonial sphere of South Asia. Moreover, how can we, as historians, displace Europe as the assumed centre point of all conversations about modern life in an imperial state? How can we glimpse the experiences, interactions, and questionings that must have taken place, and which would have worked to constitute a range of identities that escaped the near-panoptic view of the colonial state? These are the key questions that animate this collection of chapters. Our goal is to acknowledge the existence of the disruptive epistemology of Western modernity without, however, reducing all histories to variations on that theme; that is, we seek to account, historically, for the overarching importance of European-authored subjectivities while seeking to depict Indians not simply as reductive actors in the shadow play of colonialism. We are not isolated in this endeavor, of course. It has been noted recently by Dipesh Chakrabarty,15 Chris Bayly (in this volume), and several others,16 that there has in recent years been an explicit move to acknowledge the essential validity of alternative national and cultural trajectories into the “modern world.” Such approaches have given rise to such concepts as “multiple modernities” and “alternative modernities.”17 At the same time, the notion of “cosmopolitanism” has been taken up by a range of scholars as a way of engaging with multiplicity and hybridity in identities that run through essentially “modern” forms of language and urban belonging.18 Yet there is also a danger here, for if modernity is conceptualized in too blithe of terms—as simply “an attitude of questioning the present,”19 for example, to account for multiple points of origin, perhaps, or for a rendering of specific chronologies as “pre-modern” rather than “late-medieval,” or to understand intellectual processes under colonial modernity as a free marketplace of ideas20—we serve to obscure the essentially undemocratic and inegalitarian nature of modernity and its constituent identities in the colonies. Moreover, the related question is whether modernity, as a historical concept, when “democratized” in such a fashion is also drained of its usefulness as an analytical tool for studies of colonialism. On a related point, it has been argued by David Scott that in the post-colonial scholar’s anti-colonial stance—specifically the concern to expose the “negative structures of colonialism’s power” and simultaneously “the colonized’s agency in resisting or overcoming these conditions”—there has been a tendency to conflate the “problem spaces” of past and present, or rather, the disputative contexts of past and present and the questions that animated them.21 The issue at stake, then, is whether modernity,

4 Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher when employed as an analytical concept, can be made to bear the burden of a robust historical enquiry; whether its historical salience disappears beneath attempts to put forward an understanding of it as multiple and contested, or indeed (to take the broader view) as too closely driven by contemporary concerns to produce alternative modernities based on resistance to or subversion of the dictates of colonial rule. We believe, ultimately, that modernity can still be made a useful conceptual tool for the historian of colonial South Asian religion and culture, and that in the two related concerns noted above there actually emerges a way forward for historiographies of this period. We assert here that historians must be explicit (not least with themselves!) about how they go about conjuring the terms of “modernity” from a conjunction of the concerns of both the past and the present. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently argued, we must not only understand the past on its own terms, but as historians we must also “take responsibility for the normative freight” that the term “modernity” carries for us.22 In our own rendering in this volume, we view it as the core responsibility of the historian to analyze the processes of modernity within the colonial sphere in an explicit conversation with both the concerns of her or his subjects and the historian’s own political stance taken as a post-colonial scholar. Our own past work, to be certain, has been driven by specific interpretive lenses designed to elicit forms of Indian intellectual resistance within prolonged engagements with the prerogatives of the colonial state, as a way of acknowledging both colonial state power and Indian cultural creativity. To reiterate, the chapters in this collection are united through a desire not to be overly concerned with an elucidation of what constituted modernity per se, in an abstract or ahistorical sense—modernity was, and is, not a thing-in-itself, after all, defined in its origins and the terms imagined for it by its progenitors—but to use the notion of modernity as a conceptual lens or a mode of interpretation. This is not to drain the notion of modernity of its power as a rhetorical device deployed in the colony so as to differentiate people on the basis of their perceived possession or non-possession of this characteristic, but to recognize that we, as historians, are now a part of that series of conversations and debates, and that we now make choices in how we understand the constitution of modernity and its relevance for the lives of people now long dead. In a sense, then, modernity as conventionally understood is turned on its head, explicated not as a thing to be possessed (or denied possession of ), but as an interweaved set of processes encompassing living, enacting, embodying, authorizing, and analyzing, which unite local colonial contexts, the imperial metropolis, and the contemporary academy, despite the obvious differences of both space and time. It should noted at the outset that we have pluralized the term “modernity” in the title of our book. This is not because we necessarily see modernity within South Asia as having multiple points of origin (that question remains unresolved). Rather, it is because (as our contributors show) the nature of modernity was understood in multiple ways within specific local contexts. For while “modernity” may have been understood as a transregional or transnational phenomenon, it was also conceptualized and made use of not on transregional or multi-regional terms, but in decidedly local ones. Moreover, it is entirely the case that the political and historiographical

Introduction

5

stakes for our authors in interrogating the local historicities of modernity are differently conceived, and thus if we subscribe to the notion that modernity is best understood as a conceptual lens of sorts, then it must also be rendered so as to allow for such divergent points of view, whether these are based in disagreements over the key constituents of modernity or over how we conceptualize it according to what we believe “enriches our thinking today.”23 We have also chosen to qualify the term “modernity” by a notion of “transcoloniality,” which does here reveal many of our own theoretical, political, and historiographical affiliations to the study of modernity in the colonial world. At the most basic level of historical analysis, we invoke the prefix “trans” to refer to the sense that modernity, as conceptualized and lived in the South Asia of the past, always transcended the terms envisioned for it by the colonial state. Modernity, in other words, was never a phenomenon (or set of phenomena) that could be wholly controlled by Europeans, but instead inevitably exceeded their grasp. Beyond this, we make use of the notion of “trans” to invoke more specific historical conceptualizations. For example, in spatial terms, the composition of modernity was conducted in dialogue with “transregional” and “transnational” flows, which approximated not the centre-periphery model of diffusionist historians of science, but something more akin to the “webs” of empire envisioned by Tony Ballantyne: without any necessary centre, and rife with unexpected connections across empires and often without reference to them.24 Furthermore, when thought of in linguistic terms “trans” is intended to point to a range of processes of translation, to exchanges between languages, and to the necessity of individual negotiations through different linguistic registers that marked much of the debate and discussion about the nature of modernity. Lastly, it is worth noting that in terms of disciplinarity, “trans” might also be understood to highlight the points of academic engagement and departure that the contributions here represent: from histories of religion to literary studies, our explorations of modernity in colonial South Asia begin from different disciplinary and personal experiential grounds, as well as encompass a diverse set of historial-cultural forms.25 Our goal in this volume, therefore, is to provide a range of vantage points from which to reconsider the history, expression, and problematics of encounters with, and creations of, modernity in South Asia. Toward this end, we have called upon a range of scholars whose work represents a series of attempts to identify productive sites, influential agents, or compelling frameworks for conceptualizing trans-colonial transformations in South Asia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Our contributors all share with us the desire to highlight understudied processes of indigenous intellectual change, to bring forward new agents and highlight new localities, and to interrogate the received paradigms of historical interpretation that have long served to make sense of such change. As will be clear by now, there is no single disciplinary or methodological focus to the volume. Instead, what our contributors bring, each in their own fashion, is the desire to promote sustained reflection on long-standing trajectories of South Asian cultural practice; on the incursion into South Asia of European imperial aspirations, cultural norms, and material technologies; and on the patterns of convergence,

6 Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher conjunction, contestation, and translation that characterize in varying ways the milieus out of which South Asian modernities have emerged. We are fortunate to be able to gather here the work of scholars with training in a range of fields—such as Asian Studies, History, Religious Studies, and Comparative Literature—and with a range of expertise in a variety of distinctive regions, moments, and archives from across southern and southwest Asia. This unique combination of disciplinary and regional expertise becomes especially fruitful because our contributors have shown themselves to be willing to work against and across some of the presumed boundaries shaping disciplinary work and to challenge commonplace assumptions about modern South Asia, whether these have been handed down by the likes of G. W. F. Hegel, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sumner Maine or invoked more recently by post-colonial and subaltern critics. If we have chosen to organize this volume in terms of the concept of trans-colonial modernities, it should be clear that we do not use this phrase as necessarily synonymous with such increasingly familiar concepts as cosmopolitanism, globalization, or transnational flows. To be sure, such critical categories have begun to yield important results for the study of South Asia, imperialism, and diasporic experience. Indeed, the original workshop out of which this volume emerged was dedicated to exploring nationalism and a range of intellectual modernities across the broad sweep of Asia, from Cairo to Beijing. And if in the end we have chosen to constrain the focus of the volume to South Asia alone, our quest to range across boundaries and criss-cross regions remains central to the project. In addition, we would like to couple the insights gained by situating South Asian modernity in a more global framework with the awareness that there is a pressing need to coin theoretical alternatives for what has fast become the dominant discourse of colonialism/post-colonialism. The concept of the trans-colonial, as we use it, offers a way to study South Asian modernity without committing to such binary formulations as before/after, premodern/modern, European/Asian, national/ international, or resistance/accommodation. The logic of such binaries not only leads to intractable dilemmas—for instance, having to choose between an emphasis on historical continuity or rupture—it also tends to suppress the lively dynamics of cultural translation out of which South Asian modernities emerge. We hope this volume might begin to suggest some alternate pathways for bringing forward the vibrant local translations and sometimes messy lived negotiations that allowed South Asian actors to articulate new worldviews and establish new forms of life. The work of our contributors therefore necessarily includes a measure of reflection on the second-order languages we invariably invoke in order to make sense of our research material, languages that turn upon such necessary analytical tasks as comparison, categorization, typology, and periodization. In this respect, our contributors are engaged broadly in the work of translation—not merely in the narrow sense of rendering South Asian texts or practices intelligible in Western categories (though readers will find much of such work within these chapters) but in rendering more transparent to ourselves the fit and function of the categories we bring to our work. Of late there has been much methodological reflection on such acts of

Introduction

7

disciplinary translation and we hope to build upon that work and provide relevant linkages to existing scholarship. There are nine chapters in the volume (not including the Afterword), which we have chosen to arrange in light of three disciplinary vantage points. We might call these vantage points the local, the linguistic, and the historiographical. We begin the volume on the theme of particular localities and local agents, so as to suggest an important counterpoint to the current emphasis on global communication and migration. Perhaps here we might revise some popular bumper-sticker wisdom: ‘Think global, study local.’ The chapters in this first section seek to ground the global impact or salience of European colonial knowledge and material culture in the particular lives and activities of agents in selected local contexts. Thus Indira Peterson focuses intensively on the knowledge project of the Tanjore ruler and polymath, Serfoji II. Through her meticulous and extensive overview of Serfoji’s engagements with indigenous intellectuals, Christian missionaries, and British officials we are able to discover in Serfoji an Indian intellectual with an avid appetite for Western learning and technologies. But we also encounter a man dedicated to engaging with these new tools and techniques for projects that emerged out of his concerns as a South Indian scholar, educator, and patron of what might be called an indigenous scheme of “improvement.” Ulrike Stark’s chapter also focuses on a single individual in a particular context, Raja Shivaprasad of Varanasi, who one might compare in some respects with Serfoji II (for instance in his zeal for education, print publishing, and local improvement). Yet as Starke’s “hybrid” intellectual biography reveals, Shivaprasad needs to be understood within the context of North Indian educational and administrative developments. She allows us to enter into the details of Shivaprasad’s regional engagements, religious commitments, and professional duties—all of which are crucial for appreciating the nature of his particular engagement in broader debates of the day. So while one might think of parallels to Serfoji II, it also becomes clear that Shivaprasad shares many of the goals and strategies for reform that had been articulated by such elite intellectuals as Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar in nineteenth-century Calcutta. This makes the juxtaposition with Brian Hatcher’s chapter on the “modern shastric imaginary” valuable for reflecting on issues of comparison and historical diffusion. Focusing on the activities of Sanskrit intellectuals (pandits and other elite bhadralok agents), Hatcher attempts to outline a rubric under which to consider the particular conjunction of attitudes, habits, norms, and technical skills characteristic of a wide range of Sanskrit intellectual life in Bengal during the first half of the nineteenth century. By disengaging our understanding of this imaginary from the nationalist and more overtly Hinduizing discourse that would come to characterize intellectual life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Hatcher hopes to provide a way not only to appreciate the persistence of Sanskrit intellectual practice in colonial Bengal but also to identify among pandits across a wide ideological spectrum similar sorts of attempts to engage with, and put to particular ends, new technologies, institutions, and norms that were emerging in early colonial Calcutta.

8 Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher From the interplay of the three chapters in this first section, we hope readers will derive a rich set of tools and compelling local data to support further reflection upon factors shaping the differential expression of modernity and “public sphere” activity in colonial South Asia. In the second section of the book, we seek to foreground what we might call the practice and the metaphorics of translation. This section features a trio of chapters that each in their way follows people, texts, scripts, finances, and meaning as these are translated or “moved across” geographic regions, religious and linguistic boundaries, and even normative categories. Hitherto, indigenous feuds during the colonial era over language and scripts have received a great deal of attention, typically being viewed as important factors contributing to or shaped by the rise of communalism and nationalism. Javed Majeed attempts in his chapter to put the powerful salience of script into a properly trans-colonial framework by considering the promotion of romanized script by British Indologists and administrators. For the likes of C. E. Trevelyan, this was effectively “modernity’s script,” as Majeed puts it—the very expression of the global hegemony of reason and capital. Translating the universalizing imperatives of this romanizing impulse into conclusions about British racial and religious identity, Majeed brings into view the “unassimilable” Arabic letter ‘ain—the very marker of Muslim otherness upon which British claims of superiority must rest. Over against the mechanized logic of the British transliteration system, Majeed then explores the issues of continuity within what he figures as a transliteration aesthetic found within Persianate culture. In so doing, he provides striking insights into alternate modernities predicated on new linguistic opportunities for vernacular appropriation. Modernity’s script is thereby instantly shaken from its universalizing perch. Nile Green’s chapter on the social and commercial enterprise of Bible translation in Eurasia brings into view trans-colonial flows of missionaries, monies, and print technologies via far-flung itineraries stretching from Edinburgh and St Petersburg to Isfahan and Calcutta. In his chapter, Green eschews the grand concepts of nation and empire in favor of exploring the fluid pulse of travel networks and commercial negotiations. We meet, as if visiting one caravanserai after another, a host of evangelical missionaries, diplomats, and Persian scribes, figures with convergent interests if widely varying masteries of local knowledge. One important contribution Green makes in this context is to provide insights into a range of Persianate language workers who were drawn into the ambit of Bible translation and who thereby acquired new skills and learned new technologies that generated striking returns in the form of influence, prestige, and wealth. It is rare in volumes dedicated to intellectual transformations in colonial India to find explicit focus on developments within the Jain tradition and, as such, we are delighted to feature as the third chapter in this section a chapter by John Cort on Jain engagements with Indology and debates over authoritative knowledge. Jains had for centuries actively debated among themselves, if across sectarian divisions, such issues as the reality status of icons (or murtis) and the legitimacy of image worship (murtipuja). Cort’s chapter allows us to observe the way these debates were transformed in the colonial period. He shows us how Jain scholars adopted the

Introduction

9

resources of European Indology and colonial institutional frameworks, mobilizing them to their own ends but also shaping them, too. Of particular significance here are the ways in which Jain intellectuals negotiated with the authority claims of modern “scientific history” in order to conduct not only intra-Jain debates but also to counter the charges of modern-day reformers such as Swami Dayananda and the Arya Samaj. In his exploration of influential Jain polemicists such as Atmaram and Raja Shivaprasad, Cort gives us far more than the outlines of modern Jain doxography; he demonstrates the agency of indigenous scholars in actively shaping forms of Jain modernity. The final set of three chapters is dedicated to sustained reflection on key concepts of society and history as they figure both in the emergence of particular articulations of South Asian modernity and in our conceptualization of that emergence. Here, almost by chance, we zero in on Bengal, though there are obviously very good reasons for thinking of these issues in relation to intellectual currents that would in short order ripple forth from the colonial epicenter of Calcutta. The section begins with a chapter that carries over in an explicit fashion the concern with practices of translation that characterized the previous three chapters. Rochona Majumdar’s chapter explores the semantics and cultural valencies of the Bengali concepts of samaj and samajik as these come to serve as key terms for conceptualizing the social in late colonial Bengal. As she concludes, the realm of the social in Bengal cannot be understood in an abstract sense, least of all as an abstraction given an essential meaning within the discourse of European modernity. The social in Bengal is itself a trans-colonial category, infused with or structured by the particular resonances of colonialism, South Asian civilizational norms, and emergent notions of the Indian nation. We pair Majumdar’s chapter—so clearly indebted to the practice of conceptual history as developed in the work of Reinhart Koselleck—with a chapter by Rosinka Chaudhuri, which also finds its point of departure in Koselleck’s work, in this case pairing the latter’s reflections on Albrecht Altdorfer’s sixteenth-century painting, Alexanderschlacht, with her own reflections on the meaning of history within two important works of eighteenth-century Bengali narrative poetry, Gangaram’s Maharashta Purana and Bharatchandra’s Annadamangal. Beginning in this fashion, Chaudhuri hopes to open up a conceptual space to reflect upon the way past and present were conceptualized in late medieval and early colonial Bengal. In order to flesh out the latter context, she turns to the work of three rather different nineteenth-century poets active in Calcutta—Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Ishwar Gupta, and Antony Firingi. In these poets, Chaudhuri finds nothing like a neat teleology of emergent modernity, but instead the tense and sometimes ironic manifestation of alternate modernities spun out in relation to, but not necessarily in strict conformity with, hegemonic notions of European temporality. In Alex Padamsee’s chapter, readers have an opportunity to revisit two seminal thinkers from the late nineteenth century—Henry Sumner Maine and Romesh Chunder Dutt. By pairing the historical work of Maine and Dutt, Padamsee undertakes something like an exercise in trans-colonial criticism. In particular, he juxtaposes Maine’s scientific historiography over against Dutt’s work, both as

10 Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher one of India’s first economic historians and his engagements as an author of creative fiction writing in the Bengali language. The central question for both these authors was how to conceptualize the advent of British rule, especially in relation to their imperial predecessors, the Mughals. If both Maine and Dutt can be said to represent the practice of liberal historiography, there remains an important difference, according to Padamsee, insofar as in Dutt’s work Maine’s resolute evolutionary teleology is up-ended by a quest to define the Indian nation coming-to-be as a transgressive act in opposition to the reality of British hegemony. Padamsee’s recourse to the lesserstudied vernacular novels of Dutt is not only valuable in its own right, but provides stunning affirmation of the decision taken by so many of our contributors to explore the rich archives of modern South Asian vernacular literatures. If we have set apart the chapter by C. A. Bayly as an Afterword, it is not because Bayly was charged with summing up the volume or handed the task of bringing the disparate chapters into tighter resolution. While we did not look to him for this, after reading his chapter we felt that it both creatively and ambitiously achieved a kind of trans-colonial mapping—or what one might call a conjunctural cartography. The operative logic in such mapping is less the mechanics of cause and effect than the organic rhythms of fluid exchange, lived transaction, and worldly negotiation. Though centered on western India and Bombay, his attempt to bring into view the complex vectors of religious, linguistic, ethnic, and commercial identities might well serve as a kind of model for the study of other regions in modern South Asia. In this respect it seemed a fitting chapter with which to close the volume. In the end, we trust that readers will find far more connectivity among the chapters gathered here than the volume’s tripartite structure reveals. We feel certain, for instance, that taken collectively these chapters offer ample opportunity to engage the trans-colonial from a variety of spatial locations, whether from linguistic regions to political realms to missionary itineraries; from royal courts and pandit sabhas to colonial courtrooms and Bible societies; from print shops and parlours to marketplaces and imperial colleges. Likewise readers might wish to follow the thread of language and communication along a network of routes and pathways charted across the chapters. Here there are opportunities to trace the genealogy of particular texts and text practices, the emergence of print-based strategies from Tanjore to Tehran, or the implementation of such technologies in contexts of polemical debate or pedagogical innovation. Along these same routes one is able to observe the mutual conditioning and re-tooling of numerous intellectual techniques, from grammar and lexicography to ethical instruction, from theological commentary to historical narrative. Finally, readers will encounter in this volume a host of figures whose lives and activities give meaning to the idea of trans-colonial modernity. In some cases our authors allow us to consider familiar figures from colonial history, such as H. H. Wilson, Henry Sumner Maine, or Rammohan Roy in new or unexpected contexts, while in others we learn about hitherto less-studied figures such as Serfoji II, Raja Shivaprasad or Ishwar Gupta, each of whom can be figured as a point of contact and creativity within diverse but often interlocking intellectual webs. It is, overall, a rich feast. We hope readers will find much to whet their appetites and inspire their own research.

Introduction

11

Notes 1 See E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), ch 2. As Arjun Appadurai argues, even in cases in which the colonial state built upon pre-existing, indigenous social imaginaries and political or economic institutions in the construction of its enumerative practices (such as the census), such practices were nevertheless distinctively colonial in their character. See his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), chapter 6. A stronger version of this argument appears in N. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2 See, for example, D. R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Also, history of science scholarship has produced a still-largely unproblematized narrative of centre-periphery transfer. See R. McLeod, “Passages in Imperial Science: From Empire to Commonwealth,” Journal of World History 4, 1 (1993): 117–150. 3 For example, see G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 4 Marshall Berman, for example, sees European modernity as self-generated without reference to empire, and thus constitutes for us, in essence, an instance of modernity’s own internalized narrative. See All That is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1988 [1982]). 5 Except as a form of colonial discourse analysis or neo-conservative revisionism. For a magisterial treatment of modernity as a set of historical phenomena, see C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780−1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 6 M. K. Gandhi, ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings, ed. A. J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); see also the essays dedicated to the understanding the colonial relevance of the Bhagavad Gita in Modern Intellectual History 7, 2 (2010), esp. D. Chakrabarty and R. Majumdar, “Gandhi’s Gita and Politics as Such,’ 335−353 and A. Sartori, “The Transfiguration of Duty in Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita,” 319−334. 7 Best developed, arguably, in the thought of Bhimrao Ambedkar. 8 Most memorably by Shahid Amin, in his “Gandhi as Mahatma” in R. Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies III (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). 9 For instance, see P. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 4 (2003): 783−814. 10 B. A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and “What’s Become of the Pandit? Rethinking the History of Sanskrit Scholars in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 39, 3 (2005): 683−723; M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770−1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and “Contesting Translations: Orientalism and the Interpretation of the Vedas,” Modern Intellectual History 4, 1 (2007): 43−59. 11 N. Kumar, “Sanskrit Pandits and the Modernization of Sanskrit Education in the Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries,” in W. Radice, ed., Swami Vivekananda and the Modernization of Hinduism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); N. Leask, “Francis Wilford and the Colonial Construction of Hindu Geography,” in A. Gilroy, ed., Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775−1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 12 S. Pollock, “The Death of Sanskrit,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, 2 (2001), 392−426. 13 S. Kaviraj, “The Sudden Death of Sanskrit Knowledge,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 33 (2005), 119−142. For a critique of this position, see B. A. Hatcher, “Sanskrit and the Morning After: The Metaphorics and Theory of Intellectual Change,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 3 (2007): 333−361.

12 Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher 14 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 15 D. Chakrabarty, “The Muddle of Modernity,” American Historical Review 116, 3 (June 2011): 663−675. 16 See, for example, Hatcher’s discussion of K. P. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), in “Pandits at Work: the Modern Shastric Imaginary,” Chapter 2 of this volume. 17 D. P. Gaonkar, ed., “Alter/Native Modernities,” special issue of Public Culture 11, 1 (1999). 18 C. A. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H. K. Bhabha, and D. Chakrabarty, eds. Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 19 This is Gaonkar’s phrase, in “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture, 11, 1 (1999), 13, although he takes care to point out that it is “virtually impossible” to “abandon the Western discourse on modernity.” 20 On this point see Shruti Kapila’s invocation of Stefan Collini’s notion of “intellectual property” in her “Self, Spencer and Swaraj: National Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890−1920,” Modern Intellectual History 4, 1 (2007), 112. 21 D. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), esp. 1−9. 22 Chakrabarty, “The Muddle of Modernity,” 674. 23 Ibid. 24 T. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 25 We hyphenate the compound term “trans-colonial,” moreover, to draw attention to its component ideas, always sitting in a shifting and potentially uneasy relationship to one another.

Part I

Local agents, local modernities

1

The schools of Serfoji II of Tanjore Education and princely modernity in early nineteenth-century India Indira Viswanathan Peterson

This chapter explores the princely patronage of education and the construction of modernity in early nineteenth-century India. It focuses on the educational initiatives of Serfoji II, the Maratha Hindu king (raja) who ruled over the South Indian kingdom of Tanjore from 1798 to 1832. Tanjore (or Thanjavur) had been brought under the supervision of the English East India Company in 1799 by a subsidiary alliance treaty, with the raja’s jurisdiction reduced to the fort and city of Tanjore.1 A European-educated polymath, Serfoji distinguished himself as an ardent modernizer in multiple areas of culture and learning.2 Among his major projects of modernization were the promotion of “new learning” (navavidya) and the establishment of free public schools, not only within the fort, but also in the wider Tanjore region. Thanks in part to Serfoji’s projects, by the 1820s Tanjore had become a byword for modern education in South India.3 The Tanjore raja’s educational initiatives both complemented and differed from contemporary missionary efforts that dominated South Indian education, and anticipated the colonial state’s interventions in public education by many years. As early as 1798, Serfoji addressed many of the issues that were to engage diverse groups of British and Indian advocates for native education in the first half of the nineteenth century, in what Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir have called “The Great Indian Education Debate.”4 Among other things, Serfoji’s enterprise was distinctive in its configuration of Sanskrit, vernacular languages, and English, as well as of traditional and modern learning, key subjects of that debate. The scale and ambition of the project are impressive, especially in the context of Tanjore’s marginal status in colonial political hierarchies in the early nineteenth century. Much has been written about the central role played by education in the shaping of colonial modernity, from the perspectives of native elites as well as of colonial administrators. For diverse reasons, important groups of British policymakers, evangelists, and native elites tended to agree on the tenet that Europe’s supremacy rested on its superior rationality and scientific knowledge. They agreed as well that the diffusion of “useful knowledge” through education was the key to moral as well as social improvement.5 Recent scholarship has brought to light the important role of multiple forms of Indian agency and engagement in the formation of Indian modernity. However, studies of education as a modernizing strategy have focused largely on the activities of elites in the presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay,

16 Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Madras.6 By contrast, provincial initiatives have received little attention.7 Furthermore, much remains to be done to uncover the contributions of groups and individuals who were arguably marginal or interstitial to the history of education and the forging of multiple Indian modernities. As Manu Bhagavan has argued in his monograph on education in Baroda and Mysore, the princely states—territories brought under indirect rule through subsidiary alliance treaties, and eventually directly under Company and Crown rule—are one such group.8 Bhagavan has made a persuasive case for the paradoxically ideal positioning of princely states as modernizing agents in the colonial context.9 As quasi-autonomous states, says Bhagavan, the princely states were enabled, even challenged to assert their alterity, both from the mainstream bourgeois native elites and from the colonial state itself. As spheres of activity internal to the princely state, culture and society were areas in which leadership, innovation, creativity, and agency could be fully enacted. Lastly, the mandate (generated by indigenous as well as European ideologies) of princely states to serve as symbols and preserves of “tradition” resulted in a complicated relationship with modernity. I find Bhagavan’s concept of “princely modernity,” a term he uses to designate the distinctive nature of the constructions of modernity in the Indian princely states, useful overall in characterizing Serfoji’s engagement with modernity. However, Bhagavan’s study focuses on Mysore and Baroda in the twentieth century, and the detail of his theorization of princely modernity does not apply to the case of Tanjore in the early nineteenth century. Bhagavan’s argument that the princes of Mysore and Baroda were responding to clearly defined expectations on the part of the colonial state regarding “progressive” princely activity, as well as his observation that their autonomous projects in modernity were a form of nationalist resistance, do not apply in the case of Serfoji’s Tanjore. If anything, Serfoji’s projects in education demonstrate the existence of factors that stimulated Indian princes to undertake modernizing initiatives before the colonial rhetoric of progressive princely rule had become an entrenched code. Tanjore’s relationship with the colonial state was quite different from that of the major princely states with “British India” and the culture of nationalism in the twentieth century. In education, as in other areas, Serfoji’s career illuminates the value of close studies of individual interventions in colonial modernity at different points in the development of the rhetoric of colonialism and native response. It also underscores the importance of attending to the multiplicity of the discourses and conversations among diverse agendas embodied in the construction of princely modernity.

Serfoji II of Tanjore: enlightenment, education, modernity Serfoji’s pioneering investment in modern education is explained in part by his unique personality, in part by the unusual circumstances surrounding his early education and his accession to the Tanjore throne, and in part by his ambition to achieve a position of distinction in the emergent colonial public sphere. When the western Indian Marathas seized Tanjore from the Telugu Nayakas in the

Serfoji II: education and princely modernity

17

seventeenth century, they became rulers over a cosmopolitan, polyglot center of South Indian culture.10 Embroiled in the politics of the Carnatic, by the second half of the nineteenth century Tanjore had become a pawn in the English East India Company’s hands. In 1787, on his deathbed, King Tulajaji II adopted the 10-year-old Serfoji and designated him heir-apparent. He entrusted the young Serfoji to the care of C. F. Schwartz, a celebrated German Pietist missionary educator who worked in the Tanjore region for the English Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK).11 Serfoji’s legitimacy was contested, but the prince became a protégé of the English East India Company, which arranged for him to be educated in English in Madras by the German missionary educator C. W. Gericke.12 In 1798 the prince was awarded the Tanjore throne, but the very next year he was forced to transfer power to the Company, in return for a pension and a share in the revenue, with his authority reduced to the city of Tanjore.13 Serfoji’s engagement with European modernity was shaped by the distinct but convergent influences of the Company state and of the German Pietists.14 Thanks to his education in Madras, Serfoji acquired a deep and multifaceted knowledge of European languages and the sciences and arts of the European Enlightenment. He also garnered first-hand experience of the military, governmental, and scientific projects of the Company and other European individuals that were underway in Madras at the end of the eighteenth century, just before the consolidation of Company rule in the Carnatic.15 A scholar by predilection, throughout his life Serfoji actively pursued the study of Enlightenment disciplines, especially medicine and the physical and natural sciences. Along the way he amassed a library of more than 4,000 books and journals in the European languages. His intellectual ambition was nothing less than the mastery of Enlightenment knowledge. He became an active member of amateur European scholarly circles in South India. In time his correspondents and partners in conversation would include the German missionary scientist C. S. John, the eminent philologist F. W. Ellis, and the evangelist-Orientalist-improving administrator Sir Alexander Johnston, founding member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London.16 Yet Serfoji was also fully invested in cultivating his persona as an illustrious Hindu ruler through the traditional modes of royal practice, which included such things as patronage of indigenous learning and the arts, the renovation of Tanjore’s ancient Shiva temple, and a two-year pilgrimage to the holy city of Banaras. Establishing this persona was crucial to his sovereignty in the eyes of the native population as well as the colonial state. To resolve the inherent ambiguity of his position with regard to modernization, Serfoji drew on an enabling aspect of kingship, the power of symbolic capital in the form of local idioms of royal honor, fame, and lordship. Such symbolic power could be harnessed to the tasks of princely innovation and leadership in the public arena. Serfoji’s response to the challenge of princely modernization was to enhance the royal portfolio, not simply by imposing “improving” knowledge on his subjects, but by recasting indigenous forms of knowledge in an active conversation with European forms. Under Serfoji, traditional disciplinary knowledge was rendered in vernacular languages and framed in new forms, the palace library was transformed

18 Indira Viswanathan Peterson into a major archive of Sanskrit manuscripts (an archive that resonated with contemporary Orientalist scholarship), and the court physicians not only recorded Indian medical remedies but also studied European medicine. Serfoji forged his own brand of modernity in Tanjore, translating his personal engagement with indigenous and European knowledge systems into innovative public interventions in education, the sciences, and the arts. He asserted his difference from pre-colonial intellectuals by his explicit and relentless insistence on the “newness” and difference of his initiatives.17 Thus, although the king of Tanjore’s intellectual and royal career was shaped by unusual circumstances, he nonetheless became a paradigm for “progressive” princely modernity in colonial India. Serfoji’s educational projects both strengthened his connections with the missionaries who had educated him and asserted the court’s “difference.” The king valued his European missionary friends and mentors as friendly mediators with the colonial government. He continued to support missionary education in Tanjore, but in the curriculum of the schools and colleges he established, useful knowledge was disengaged from Christian frames of reference. There were other motivations for engaging in the promotion of modern public education. Such an engagement would enable the Maratha court establishment and his subjects, the people of Tanjore, to be incorporated into and benefit from the evolving colonial social and economic order. At the same time, however, innovation in this field would enable the Tanjore court to play a leadership role among peers, to some extent even to compete with the East India Company state, thus strengthening Tanjore’s status in the hierarchies of colonial rule. Equally importantly, public education afforded Serfoji a space in which to address constituencies beyond the court and beyond Tanjore’s considerably truncated territories, thus directly participating in and influencing the emergent public sphere. In what follows, I will examine the particular contours of Serfoji’s construction of princely modernity through education, and the ways in which this construction engaged with contemporary educational initiatives in South India’s changing polyglot ecumene.

Education in colonial India: 1780–1832 To set Serfoji’s educational projects in context, I provide here a brief history of educational initiatives underway between 1780 and 1832 in the English East India Company’s territories and regional centers, especially in Bengal and Madras, emphasizing the role played by three groups who often worked in collaboration with one another: missionaries, the Company government, and elite Indians.18 Missionaries made the earliest sustained efforts for native education and dominated the scene into the middle of the nineteenth century. Until the renewal of its charter in 1813, the English East India Company, ever intent on protecting its military and commercial interests by preserving good relations with native populations, prohibited proselytizing activity by British missionaries in territories under its control. The rule seems to have been applied more stringently in Bengal than in the south. In the early nineteenth century, the British Baptist evangelical missionaries William Carey and Joshua Marshman achieved remarkable feats in native education in the

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vernacular, but had to work from the Danish territory of Serampore, until the passing of the 1813 Charter Act, which made Calcutta and British territory amenable to missionary activity. The Baptists also led the way in printing vernacular books and the creation of materials for teaching natives.19 The Company’s projects in native education had begun with an Orientalist slant, with the establishment of institutions for traditional learning (the Calcutta Madrasa, established in 1781, and the Banaras Sanskrit College, founded in 1792), but the ideology of improvement through education—in varying combinations of utilitarian and evangelical ideologies—was gaining favor among British administrators and educators as well as among native elites. Colonial Britons—Company administrators included—embraced the ideology of the English charity school movement, which combined Evangelical religion and charity with the agenda of imparting moral values and useful knowledge through elementary schooling.20 In 1782, a Military Orphan Asylum school, based on voluntary charity from the British community and support from the colonial regime, was established in Calcutta, but it was restricted to Eurasian orphans.21 At the time, government initiatives in vernacular education, begun with the establishment of the College of Fort William in Calcutta in 1801, were directed at British civil servants, not at Indians. The Serampore missionaries played an integral role in the college’s curriculum and ventures in print. The Charter Act of 1813, marking the renewal of the East India Company’s charter, removed the prohibition on English missionary activity in British territories. It also set aside government funds for native education, through the “introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences,” but also through “the revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India.”22 The ambiguous messages sent by these provisions set off vigorous debates among Indian elites as well as among British officials and intellectuals in Bengal. New questions arose about elite versus mass education, about the relative value of “traditional” learning and Oriental languages, and about the possibilities for providing a modernizing education through English or the vernaculars. The Bengali elites overwhelmingly preferred the promotion of elite education in “useful” subjects, especially in English. In 1817, Indian initiative founded the Hindu College in Calcutta, an institution of modern higher learning in English for Indians. Recent studies have shown that the so-called Great Education Debate, which continued for quite some time after 1817 in Bengal and elsewhere, should not be viewed through the teleology of the victory of the Anglicists over the Orientalists. Indeed, we now recognize that the separation between these two ideological positions was not as watertight as it might seem. If anything, there was a spectrum of opinion, entailing complex alignments.23 While the majority of participants in the education debates agreed on improvement and useful knowledge as the differentia of modernity, they disagreed on whether useful knowledge would be best imparted through English or the vernaculars, and whether it was best to impose European ideas in European media or to engraft them through local means and forms. Moreover, colonial administrators with Orientalist sensibilities and those who advocated conciliation of the traditional elites as the means for winning

20 Indira Viswanathan Peterson popular support for the government, continued to found and nurture institutions for traditional learning, such as the Sanskrit colleges in Poona and Calcutta.24 As we have seen, the German Protestant missionaries were the leaders of education and printing in Madras and South India, where they worked closely with the English East India Company.25 From the inception of the Tranquebar mission, the German missionaries had also run a limited number of free vernacular and English schools in the provinces; these were “orphan” or charity schools based on the precepts of the Pietist educator August Hermann Francke of the Francke Foundations in Halle, Germany, where they received their training.26 In Madras presidency, as in Bengal, the colonial government was slow to support public education.27 There was, however, an early and anomalous, if short-lived, experiment in the provinces. In 1787, John Sullivan, the Company Resident at Tanjore, had persuaded the Company, with the collaboration of the German Pietist missionary C. F. Schwartz, to sponsor three provincial schools for the instruction of elites in English. These were to be created in the kingdoms of Ramnad, Shivaganga, and Tanjore. Overseen by the German missionaries, these schools were maintained through a combination of Company funds, voluntary donations, and support from native rulers.28 Princely families and local elites flocked to these provincial schools, eager for English education. In the mid-eighteenth century Madras city itself became a great center for vernacular schools run by the German missionaries under the auspices of the SPCK and other evangelical organizations, with informal support from the Company and the British population.29 When a Military Female Orphan Asylum for Eurasians was established in 1787 through charity (but also with support from both the Company and from the local prince, the Nawab of Arcot), C. W. Gericke, Serfoji’s missionary teacher, was appointed director.30 Meanwhile, at the Military Male Orphan Asylum in Madras, the Scottish clergyman Andrew Bell developed his famed “Madras system of education,” based on a combination of indigenous and European pedagogical methods.31 The sole government project in vernacular education up until 1820 was the founding of the College of Fort St. George in 1812. Like the College of Fort William in Calcutta, this institution was aimed at British civil servants. However, thanks to the initiative of the philologist-administrator F. W. Ellis, it also made provision for the instruction of a small number of native students in English, Sanskrit, and the vernaculars at an advanced level.32 Thomas Munro, the governor of Madras from 1820 to 1827, undertook a complete overhaul of education in the presidency and its environs. From 1822 to 1826 Munro conducted a survey of education and census of schools in the Madras presidency, as well as in the provinces, with the aim of determining the state of indigenous education.33 Munro was a subscriber to what Zastoupil and Moir have termed “an empire of opinion” ideology. Munro, and his contemporary Mountstuart Elphinstone, for example, paid attention to “conciliating disaffected South Asian elites, respecting local customs and institutions, promoting … friendly relations with … Indians of all classes, and generally rejuvenating what was believed to be an ancient civilization gone temporarily bad in modern times.”34 Munro envisioned the strengthening of indigenous schools and state-sponsored vernacular public

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education at the elementary level as the road to gaining the trust of the people in the colonial government.35 His project involved teacher training, the enhancement of indigenous schools, and the establishment of a few vernacular elementary schools (in Tamil and Telugu) in the provinces, for the diffusion of modern learning.36 However, Munro’s sudden death in 1827 put an end to these plans on the large scale. Meanwhile, the middle class in Madras became increasingly energetic in its demand for government support for English schools. In 1820 the Madras School Book Society was established, featuring both Indian and British members. For its part, the colonial government did not directly sponsor a public school for Indians in English (or any other language) in the city of Madras until 1841.

Serfoji’s schools An 1823 official report on educational institutions in Tanjore district, produced as part of Munro’s survey of education, noted that there were 884 schools and 109 colleges in the Tanjore district: “Of these schools 41 were free schools: 19 run by the Christian missionaries, 21 maintained by the Raja [of Tanjore] and 1 by the Tiruvarur temple.”37 Except for the missionary schools, all of the schools noted in the report were indigenous institutions. The majority of the elementary schools were of the local tinnaip pallikkutam (school conducted on the porch of a house) type.38 These were sponsored by community funds and offered education mainly in Tamil or Telugu. All of the missionary schools in the city of Tanjore and the Tanjore district, and the free schools in particular, were heavily subsidized by the Tanjore court. Serfoji donated to the mission schools in Madras and Trichy, and gave substantial support to the indigent Tranquebar mission.39 Thus, in effect, the majority of the free elementary schools in the region were subsidized or directly run by the Maratha court of Tanjore. The “colleges” referred to in the official report were private institutions of higher learning. These were funded by local communities or religious foundations and provided instruction in Sanskrit, Tamil, Arabic, Telugu, Marathi, or other languages. The majority of these colleges were Sanskrit pathashalas, where instruction (mainly for Brahman students) spanned elementary to higher learning. Seventy-one of the pathashalas situated in the town of Tanjore or in the raja’s villages in the wider region received aid from the Maratha court, or were fully supported by court endowment. Clearly Serfoji, who had by rights had jurisdiction only over the Tanjore fort, in fact dominated the landscape of public education throughout the entire district. More impressive than these statistics, however, are the extent and variety of Serfoji’s innovations. In 1822, in response to a request from the Madras government (again in the context of Munro’s survey of education), Resident Blackburne forwarded “A Detailed Account of the present state of the Colleges at the Capital of Tanjore and at the Mooktambapuram chutrum which His Highness the Maha Rajah of Tanjore has been pleased to establish for the education of young men.” The document, titled Statistics of Raja’s Colleges, included information about the number of teachers, their subjects, salaries, number of students, and “regulation regarding attendance, and hours of reading, morning and evening.”40 In 1823, in

22 Indira Viswanathan Peterson response to a second request from the government, the king sent to Madras “two plans of the schools and colleges established by me within my jurisdiction and in the several places in the districts attached to the palace and two catalogues of the students thereof, in number two hundred and twenty leaves, and a statement which gives a full account of the schools and colleges and its students.”41 From these reports, and from scattered notes about the schools that appear in the Tanjore court records, we learn that Serfoji brought about change in at least five areas. The first of these innovations was signaled by a change in name. Soon after assuming the throne, Serfoji made changes in the setup and curriculum of the palace school, where the members of the court were educated at the elementary and secondary levels. He also established several free public elementary schools in Tanjore city, identical in curriculum with the palace school. In 1807, he changed the name of the palace school from sarvavidyakalanidhishala (“school-treasure house for the study of all [sarva] the sciences and arts”) to navavidyakalanidhishala (“school-treasure house for the study of the new [nava] learning”).42 For the present, I will defer detailed investigation of the question: “What innovations did the ‘new’ in the name indicate?” However, as I will show below, the particular spectrum of languages of instruction was innovative. Students could choose to be educated in any one of five languages: English, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Persian. In some cases, learning could also take place alongside Sanskrit instruction in a pathashala. Just one year previously, in 1806, Serfoji had established a “college” for higher education in the Fort area, which offered instruction in the same five languages, and in Sanskrit as well. What was originally conceived as an arrangement for the education of his future sons-in-law, young Maratha warriorcaste (kshatriya) men brought in from Hyderabad, quickly turned into a modest project in public education, though limited to the Brahman and Maratha caste elites of Tanjore. As Resident William Blackburne wrote to the Madras government in 1806, “the raja, who is assembling the most eminent and learned Masters in Tanjore … has considered that the talents and services of these masters may become of much more extensive and general use by being properly combined and directed upon a larger scale. His Excellency proposes therefore to form a College, for the education of the youth of Tanjore.”43 In 1822, 11 teachers were teaching 20 students in two classes at the court’s Tanjore college.44 Important among Serfoji’s initiatives was the addition of new elementary and secondary schools for the education of orphans and the poor of all castes and creeds. These schools were attached to most of the 13 chattram travelers’ almshouses, established and run by the Maratha court on the road to the coastal pilgrimage site of Rameshvaram.45 One of Serfoji’s most ambitious projects, initiated just four years after his accession to the throne, was the establishment of a new chattram almshouse in the name of his concubine Muktambal. This almshouse featured greatly enhanced educational amenities.46 In 1822, at the Muktambal Chattram School, 15 teachers taught a total of 464 students, in two classes, in morning and evening sessions. There were 74 boys taught in English, 32 in Marathi, 35 in Persian, 60 in Telugu, and 175 in Tamil.47 Already before Serfoji’s reign, Maratha court almshouses housed pathashalas that provided free traditional Sanskrit

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education for Brahmans. The court also supported Brahmans in endowed villages. As we shall see, a major change introduced by Serfoji was the direct intervention of the court in the curriculum of the Brahman pathashalas at the palace, in the city, and at his chattrams. Lastly, Serfoji took a pioneering step in education by establishing a printing press in his palace, where books were printed in Marathi and Sanskrit for use at the court-run schools, including the chattram schools. Among the textbooks produced by the press was the first translation of Aesop’s Fables in an Indian language. With his free elementary schools, Serfoji became the sponsor of the first fully state-run public schools in South India—well in advance of the colonial state. Serfoji’s venture was also impressive for the (at the time unmatched) scope of its initiatives, range of language instruction, and breadth of target audiences, which included court elites, traditional literati, and the public. The uniformity of the court’s five-languages-plus-Sanskrit policy, and the parity of curriculum between the court and public schools is yet another surprise. What do Serfoji’s schools tell us about his conception of navavidya, the “new learning”? What was the relationship between English and the vernaculars in navavidya? And how, if at all, did improvement and useful knowledge enter the curriculum? How and why did Serfoji “translate” European knowledge in local languages and terms? What was the place of Sanskrit and Tamil learning in the spectrum of the king’s educational project and in his vision of princely modernity? Finally, there is the question of language and its relationship to knowledge, a question that was at the center of colonial debates about education in a polyglot society. As in cosmopolitan Madras, the languages of Tanjore ranged from Tamil and Telugu, the majority languages, to Marathi, Persian, Portuguese and Saurashtra, Hindustani, and Kannada. At the time, the Maratha court already boasted an atmosphere shaped by five literary languages. What was the rationale for Serfoji’s particular five-language formula for education? Furthermore, how did Serfoji envision the role of print culture in education? What kinds of textbooks did he produce, and in which languages? What do Serfoji’s imprints and other educational texts tell us about the curriculum of the Tanjore schools? For some answers to these questions, let us examine the component elements of Serfoji’s project in education.

Navavidya and courtly modernity Important among Serfoji’s target populations for a navavidya education were the officers and elite members of the Maratha court itself. The palace school and Tanjore college were aimed at modernizing these elites; it sought both to facilitate their entry into the emergent colonial public sphere and to maintain their identity as a courtly elite. Through education at the new schools and college, Serfoji’s young sons-in-law and other upper-caste young men in Tanjore would be transformed into a “modern” generation, educated in useful knowledge in English and the modern vernaculars. An equally important agenda, however, was the modernization of the court’s officers, the majority of whom were Maratha and Telugu Brahmans hailing

24 Indira Viswanathan Peterson from the high-ranking deshastha, niyogi, and chitpavan groups that, on account of their traditionally high levels of education and multilingual and graphological skills, dominated intermediary administrative posts in the colonial government.48 Routinely recruited to carry out the king’s many modernizing projects, these officers were required to be proficient in English and several Indian languages, and were trained in the European arts, sciences, and technologies that Serfoji engaged in and wished to promote.49 Examples include the Sanskrit pandit Kuppa Bhatta, who worked at Serfoji’s printing press, and the celebrated “Senadhurandhar” (“Army Commander”) Dharmayya Ramasamayya, who was much appreciated as a pianotuner among Tanjore’s European population.50 Ramasamayya read European staff notation, and conducted the king’s innovative ensemble of European harps and Indian vinas in recitals of “God Save the King” and pieces from Handel’s opera Samson.51 As for scientific learning, when Serfoji was studying European medicine and chemistry in 1810, he sent his court officer Soob Row to be instructed in experiments in electricity and pneumatics by Dr. Klein and the Revd C. S. John at the Tranquebar mission.52 The training of court officials in European languages, technologies, and manners was standard practice at early modern Indian courts.53 In every case, these men were trained for the purpose of acting as the court’s agents and intermediaries in its negotiations with European commercial and colonial powers. However, Serfoji’s project of training a new generation of such men in acquiring and mediating a courtsponsored “navavidya” education was unprecedented. What did the king have in mind? The Tanjore court, like other contemporary courts, also harbored a floating population of men who occupied responsible posts in the colonial administrative machinery or worked for Europeans in projects of information gathering, such as Colin Mackenzie’s Mysore Survey and William Lambton’s Great Trigonometrical Survey. The majority of these men were “Maratha” Brahmans, like Serfoji’s permanent court officers, but there were also Tamil Vellalas and Tamil Christians; for instance, David Pillai, Serfoji’s secretary (Huzur Navis) was a Tamil Christian. Baburao Chitnis, Serfoji’s Marathi language court writer, and the Tamil Christian court poet Vedanayaka Shastri worked as Mackenzie’s assistants (Chitnis from 1811 to 1821, and Shastri in 1811).54 Shastri, who, like Serfoji, was trained by the missionary Schwartz, taught science and mathematics at the mission school and served Serfoji as court poet. Not only did Serfoji want his court officers to equal these men as agents of modernization, he also wished to change the direction and balance of power in knowledge transfer. Through its modernized agents, as through its productions, the court would be the disseminator, rather than the receiver of improving knowledge for modernity. Tanjore Maratha Brahmans, educated in Tanjore and Madras, such as the famed “English” Subba Rao, appointed Dewan of Travancore in 1830, served as influential agents of education and modernization in Travancore, Mysore, and elsewhere.55 In other words, diverse princely states were able to enhance their prestige by acquiring administrators who possessed the aura of a Tanjore education or training at the Tanjore court. What is more, Serfoji kept tight control over his agents, in education as in other court initiatives.56 By so doing, Serfoji guaranteed that the court’s agents would carry his own innovative

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brand, rather than strike out on their own as public intellectuals or artists. As we shall see, the policy applied equally to the pandit scholars in Sanskrit, Tamil, and other languages and disciplines patronized at court. Panchabhasha: useful languages and a courtly vernacular In Serfoji’s five-language (panchabhasha) formula for navavidya we may see a focus on language itself as an agent of change and modernity, an approach that the king shared with other groups in colonial society, such as the advocates of English as the medium of instruction in Calcutta and Madras. Serfoji’s response to the debate over language choice was to offer the widest range to his constituents. As Lisa Mitchell has shown, in South India at the beginning of the nineteenth century, language was still a medium and register of communication and textuality, not a marker of identity, and the languages of education catered to a wide variety of needs.57 In order to offer elementary instruction to pupils with backgrounds in diverse spoken tongues, the earliest Tanjore missionaries had taught (and preached) in Tamil, Telugu, Hindustani, Portuguese, and English. In the 1790s Schwartz tried to cater for elite needs by running schools in Tanjore and Kumbakonam, in which instruction was apparently conducted in the language of a pupil’s choice; options included Hindustani, Persian, Marathi, Tamil, and English.58 The specific palette of languages was dictated by the demand on the part of the clientele for education directed toward employment in the colonial administration in Madras. By the 1800s, however, the majority of the missionary schools taught mainly in Tamil and English, and the Tranquebar missionary C. S. John campaigned for Company government support for free schools and instruction in English.59 Munro planned instruction chiefly in Tamil and Telugu, because these were the languages spoken by the majority of the population in the Tanjore and Madras regions. In Serfoji’s palace school and all of the court-sponsored schools, by contrast, pupils were taught in the language of their choice, out of the widest range of languages, again in a five-language formula. What, if anything, was different about the king’s language policy? Already in the eighteenth century the Tanjore Marathas had promoted a five-language formula at court. However, the languages in question—Telugu, Marathi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Bhasha (literary Hindustani)— represented the polyglot world of local literature, scholarship, and the performing arts, rather than the languages of utility and the everyday.60 One index of Serfoji’s innovation is that he adapted the language formulae of the missionaries and the court for the pragmatic purpose of taking control of educating Tanjore’s youth for modernity, in the same way that he took charge of the modernization of the courtly elite. This meant focusing on English, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Persian, the five “useful languages” of administration, transactions, and communication in the region. Sanskrit and poetic Hindi were dropped from the court formula, just as Hindustani was dropped from the missionary plan. As administrative languages, English, Marathi, and Persian were retained, and Telugu was restored alongside Tamil, this time as a language of communication rather than of art. At the most basic

26 Indira Viswanathan Peterson level, by navavidya (“new” learning / education) Serfoji appears to have denoted instruction in the five languages of employment in colonial South India. All languages, however, were not equal in Serfoji’s Tanjore. In addition to favoring Maratha Brahmans, the king vigorously promoted Marathi alongside English, both through the production of new literary texts and the translation of European Enlightenment and Sanskrit Shastric knowledge into Marathi at court as well as through the increased use of Marathi in public spaces.61 For example, in 1803, Serfoji highlighted his descent from Shivaji Bhonsle and the Deccan Marathas by means of a Marathi genealogical narrative composed by Baburao Chitnis. The raja had this narrative inscribed on the walls of Tanjore’s ancient temple of Shiva Brihadishvara. Thereby he bolstered his claim to legitimacy vis-à-vis the Company, which was engaged in wars and diplomacy with the Maratha successor states in the Deccan.62 However, the promotion of Marathi did not imply the eclipse of the other languages. Telugu and Tamil reigned as the public languages of art and literature as well as of everyday transactions in Tanjore, and when Serfoji wanted to disseminate his standardization of Indic systems of medicine to local physicians, he chose Tamil poetry as the vehicle for his medical texts.63 But English would be the key to the mastery of useful knowledge and the passport to jobs.64 Chattrams, charity, and public education In 1801 Serfoji wrote a letter to the Resident Benjamin Torin, explaining why autonomous control over the Maratha court’s chattram almshouses, located on the Rameshvaram pilgrimage route and therefore in British territory, was crucial to his royal reputation and honor.65 He described the chattram as a monumental charitable foundation of the court, comprised of multiple public charities and articulating the concept of praja-paripalana (“the protection of the subjects”), the fundamental sacred duty of kings (rajadharma), in its aspects of munificence and the promotion of public welfare.66 From the mid-eighteenth century, Maratha court chattrams had provided not only free food and shelter to travelers and the poor, but also charitable services ranging from medical care to lifecycle rites for travelers of all castes. Chattrams also housed pathashala schools for Brahmans. When he built the Muktambal Chattram in 1802, Serfoji added to this list of amenities free elementary and secondary schools, open to boys of all castes, and offering instruction in five languages.67 In nearby Kannandangudi, the king supported a school run by missionaries for Christian orphans; he also sponsored a school for the disabled in or near the fort.68 Serfoji’s chattram schools were aimed in particular at orphans and the poor—who were given room, board, and medical care.69 “All the orphans of strangers who may come to the chattram,” the raja wrote, were “placed in the charge of a schoolmaster and … instructed in the sciences to which they may express a preference.”70 The chattram almshouse emphasized the breadth of constituencies the Maratha king protected, ranging from Brahmans to pariahs and Europeans, and orphans and strangers in territory well beyond the limits of the Tanjore kingdom. With the Kannandangudi charity school, missionaries and native Christians were enfolded

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into a complex of Maratha royal charities. The chattram projected the Maratha court’s self-image as a utopian paternalist state, whose protection extended to all humankind. In this way, Tanjore’s prestige was enhanced among peer princely states and the colonial regime.71 The choice of the royal almshouse as the muchpublicized venue for free and orphan public schools was a stroke of genius on Serfoji’s part. It made for a unique convergence of the English, missionary, and European “charity school” with the concept of state-sponsored public education. Along the way it demonstrated the superiority of the Tanjore court’s leadership and capabilities. The chattram schools were Serfoji’s boldest educational initiative and it is through them that the Tanjore court had a lasting impact on education and modernity in South India. A Tanjore school education paved the way for employment in the Tanjore kingdom or in colonial Madras. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Serfoji’s state-run chattram schools afforded unprecedented access to a free education to needy boys of all castes, and to orphans as well. Before Madras became a center for state-supported public education, men with a Tanjore education (some of these men had begun their career at a Maratha court chattram school) led the ranks of those who garnered jobs in government and educational institutions. It was this theme that Serfoji emphasized in the letter he wrote on 11 October 1828, to Sir Alexander Johnston to acknowledge the award of honorary membership in the Royal Asiatic Society. The king stated: It is true, indeed, that I have always taken great pleasure in endeavoring, by the establishment of free schools and every other means in my power, to promote among my people the general diffusion of useful knowledge, and the study of such arts and sciences as I thought might be conducive to their temporal advantage or moral improvement; but it would be wrong to say that from what little has been done much good has already resulted. … In the present state of India, while knowledge is unprofitable, few can afford to become wise, or to devote themselves, whatever predilections may exist, to any particular study or pursuit which does not hold out a fair prospect of a livelihood.72 It was only such a prospect that would lead to the “moral and political improvement of the people, the development of useful talents and good qualities, and their progress in literature, science, and the arts.”73 Whatever the king’s intentions, the parity of language instruction and curriculum at Serfoji’s elite and chattram schools ultimately had the effect of lessening the distance between the court and the public. Overall Serfoji’s public education project reflects his appreciation of the value of educational modernity as a kind of social and political capital. Through it he sought to distinguish himself as a princely pioneer of Indian modernity in the larger canvas of the colonial public sphere. In fact, in subsequent decades when public education and the promotion of the English language became indices of a princely state’s level of “improvement,” both peer princes and the colonial regime regarded Serfoji as an effective role model for the ideal “progressive” prince.74 In the final analysis, however, for Serfoji the promotion of public education as a progressive agenda

28 Indira Viswanathan Peterson was both an assertion of “different” leadership and an attempt to take control of the direction and content of modernization; it was never merely a measure to ingratiate himself with the colonial power.

Useful knowledge and indigenous idioms In the absence of extensive information about the curriculum of Serfoji’s schools, it is difficult to determine how radical a transformation of the content of education was implied in the navavidya concept. Examples of vernacular textbooks produced at the court are rare, but they suggest that navavidya might also have accommodated the gradual engraftment of European ideologies and knowledge into the curriculum.75 In the process, instruction in “improving” content was disengaged from its Christian/European context and embedded in indigenous idioms and pedagogical methods, such as the mnemonic use of poetry and the oral manipulation of arithmetical and grammatical forms. Serfoji was not alone in the use of such indigenous pedagogies, for the German missionaries also used them.76 Likewise, the Scottish clergyman Andrew Bell was a major advocate of some techniques, such as mental arithmetic and the modified use of learning the alphabet by writing in the sand.77 But Bell’s curriculum employed only European texts for the transmission of useful knowledge, while the Bible and Christian catechism remained dominant components of missionary and Asylum school curricula.78 Even in the area of the sciences, which were upheld as one area of European superiority in the scale of improving knowledge, Serfoji did not uniformly favor European over Indian systems. In his favorite field of medicine, for example, he showed equal interest in studying European medicine and synthesizing multiple Indian medical systems.79 On the other hand, convinced of the superior rationality of the heliocentric cosmology and modern terrestrial geography (over the cosmology of the Hindu puranas), he was determined to teach them in his schools. As an illustration of Serfoji’s translational approach to pedagogy, we can examine a Marathi poem on European cosmology, the Devendra Kuravanji (“The Fortune-teller Play of the King of the Gods;” henceforth DK), written in his name. In or around 1806, at a time when he was studying European astronomy, Serfoji commissioned the DK, a modern cosmology-geography composed in Marathi. The kuravanci, or “fortune-teller” drama, was a popular contemporary vernacular dance and operatic genre.80 A textbook meant for use in the court’s schools, DK is framed in the vibrant idioms of oral tradition and the courtly performing arts in nineteenthcentury Tanjore.81 The drama unfolds as a series of song-dialogues between Indrani, consort of Indra, king of the gods, and a space-traveling nomadic fortune-teller who flies to Indra’s paradise. Queen Indrani entreats the fortune-teller: kindly tell me about mountains, rivers and countries, about the spherical earth! Does the earth revolve around the sun, or does the sun revolve round the earth? What is the moon’s orbit, and what planets revolve around the sun? What is the diameter of the Earth-sphere?’82

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Describing the sun as “a flaming torch whirled round and round … (that) rotates in place on its own, and not around anything else,” the fortune-teller teaches the queen the “cosmology of the Huna siddhantas” (i.e. the European astronomical canon), which is accompanied by a complete modern geography.83 It is quite likely that Serfoji drew his inspiration from Tamil poems on European science that had been composed for his pupils by Vedanayaka Sastri, the science teacher at the mission school, who also served as poet at Serfoji’s court in the 1820s. However, Sastri’s poems are clearly driven by the nineteenth-century Pietist doctrine of “natural” theology, whereas DK affirms the king’s advocacy of enlightenment cosmology as a coherent, systematic view of the natural universe, detached from Christian teaching.84 Whatever its inspiration, the poem’s charming mythic tropes, and the popular song forms of the fortune-teller play, were clearly intended to persuade and to facilitate acceptance of the “new” vidya (knowledge) through a considered transition from local systems. As we shall see, Serfoji deployed somewhat different strategies for vernacularizing European ideas in the Marathi translation of Aesop’s Fables he commissioned.

Sanskrit, shastra, and the new learning Sanskrit was by no means eliminated from the educational landscape in Tanjore. At the fort college and the chattram, Serfoji’s five-language elementary schools nestled side by side with a flourishing Sanskrit pathashala. The central function of the Sanskrit pathashala was to train Brahmans for fulfilling the Maratha state’s ritual needs. The four Vedas, Vedic ritual texts (shrauta), and shastras were at the core of the pathashala curriculum, which also included secular shastra disciplines such as grammar, logic, hermeneutics or critical enquiry, philosophy, poetry, drama and poetics, astronomy, and mathematics.85 Both Brahmans and Maratha warrior elites acquired secular Sanskrit learning at the Tanjore schools. In 1822 at the Muktambal Chattram Sanskrit pathashala, 39 students studied Veda, while there were more than 40 students enrolled in the remaining subjects.86 On the one hand, by investing in Sanskrit schools and pandits, Serfoji was fulfilling his sacred duty (dharma), as king, to be a patron of traditional learning. On the other hand, he operated with an awareness of the Company’s Orientalist initiatives toward the preservation of Sanskrit knowledge. In either case, it seems clear he was committed to promoting the Tanjore court’s reputation as a great center of Sanskrit and brahmanical learning. Although Serfoji followed earlier Deccan Maratha models in the patronage of brahmans and Sanskrit, he worked to address not only rival courts and indigenous populations, but also Orientalist scholars and the colonial state.87 Among the highlights of his 1821 pilgrimage to Banaras and eastern India were the collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, a visit to the Banaras Sanskrit College, and the inspection of the pandit-translators who worked for the Serampore missionaries.88 With the more than 5,000 manuscripts that he collected in every branch of learning, the king raised his Sarasvati Mahal library to the status of one of the finest Sanskrit libraries in India, a reputation that it retains to this day.89 The collection, which he carefully documented, reflected his awareness of the past

30 Indira Viswanathan Peterson as an archive that was valuable both for its own sake and as a resource for mobilizing toward the future.90 Eager to garner a reputation for his court as the premier source of Oriental knowledge, Serfoji exchanged ideas and information with eminent Orientalist scholars of the day. He gifted a copy of the Sanskrit lexicon Amarakosha, printed at his press, to the Telugu philologist C. P. Brown; in return Brown gave him his own Prosody of the Telugu Language. In 1827, Captain Henry Harkness, secretary of the Madras College (the College of Fort St. George), wrote to Serfoji on behalf of the Board for Public Instruction, requesting a number of Sanskrit and Marathi books to be sold as textbooks for use at the College and in public instruction; he noted that “the books, the college feels, are more likely to be found in Tanjore than in any other place.”91 The king had the texts copied by his pandits, and donated the manuscripts to the College.92 In 1824, impressed with Serfoji’s combination of service to improvement and to traditional learning, Sir Alexander Johnston secured for the king honorary membership of the Royal Asiatic Society.93 Serfoji knew that his pandit scholars were the most valuable resource of his court. The king’s jyautisha pandits provided astronomer John Warren of the Trigonometric Survey office in Madras with information about Sanskrit calendrical systems and astronomical calculations.94 Likewise, his legal experts provided Sir Thomas Strange, chief justice of the Madras court, with a determination in a case about adoption.95 There is good reason to think that Serfoji, unlike his famed contemporary, the Bengali intellectual Ram Mohan Roy—who dismissed Shastric pedagogy as rote learning, useless for the rational mastery of knowledge—valued the efficacy and sophistication of the pathashala curriculum and pedagogy.96 For Serfoji pathashala education represented a process through which students progressed from unanalytical memorization and pattern recognition to the highest skills in analysis and ultimate mastery of both the content and method of the Shastric disciplines.97 The chattram pathashalas would thus serve the court as a kind of nursery for impeccably trained pandits who would preserve this very ideal of mastery. By contrast, although Serfoji patronized a number of Tamil scholars and poets at court (Sivakkolundu Desikar is an illustrious example), we cannot tell whether he nurtured in his schools the sophisticated system of classical and medieval learning in the Tamil language, that was patronized at other regional courts and at monastic establishments. Serfoji thus located Sanskrit learning in the realm of “tradition.” However, rather like the “improving Orientalist” H. H. Wilson in the 1830s, he also worked to draw Sanskrit learning into the arc of public education, alongside the vernaculars.98 In other words, he sought to establish a space for traditional learning within modernity. As with the administrator-Brahmans, Serfoji wanted both to control and to modernize his pandit scholars and literati; he saw them as agents of modernization. Contemporaneously with similar projects at Serampore and the College of Fort William, and earlier than the one at Fort St. George, Serfoji commanded the Tanjore court pandits to produce printed Sanskrit and vernacular textbooks for the chattram and city pathashalas. In this way he introduced print culture into the pathashala, thereby harnessing it to the court’s many modernizing projects.

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At Serfoji’s behest, his Sanskrit and Tamil pandits were routinely recruited to translate texts and knowledge systems into the vernaculars. Such pandits included Subbaji Sasho, who translated Aesop’s Fables into Marathi for Serfoji’s press; Sakkhanna Pandita, who set types at Serfoji’s printing press (varna-yantra); and the Tamil poet Sivakkolundu Desikar, who wrote works ranging from dance dramas to modern medical texts for the king. When his court pandits were solicited for posts in government institutions, Serfoji was only too happy to send them off with his blessing; in so doing they would serve as agents of “Tanjorean modernity” in the metropolis. Already in 1801 Subbaji Sasho had been invited to serve as Marathi pandit at the College of Fort William, and he later became head Marathi pandit at the Fort St. George College.99 Sivakkolundu Desikar became deputy Tamil headmaster at the Madras College, and went on to become a distinguished editor and publisher of classical Tamil texts.100 To better illustrate the symbiosis between Serfoji’s Orientalist and vernacularist objectives, we can turn now to the printing press and the textbook project run by the Tanjore court pandits.

Textbooks, translation, and a printing press at court Serfoji’s press and its productions Early in 1802 Serfoji wrote to the Revd Gericke, his mentor in Madras, saying that he wanted to install a “Mahratta printing press” at his court. He also sought Gericke’s help in acquiring a press and fonts in order to print in devanagari, the principal script for Sanskrit.101 A press sent from England, equipped with fonts cut by the celebrated Orientalist Charles Wilkins, arrived at the palace in 1807.102 Almost exactly a century after the arrival of the German missionary press in Tranquebar, Serfoji became the first owner of a printing press in Tanjore.103 His Brahman pandits ran the press, set the types, wrote, translated, and printed the texts; they even made the paper. A Eurasian Christian printer sent from the Tranquebar mission trained Serfoji’s pandits in printing.104 Between 1807 and 1814 the palace press produced eight books in Sanskrit, and two in Marathi.105 In 1806 Serfoji wrote to William Hunter in Madras, enquiring about the availability of presses and types for English, Tamil, and Telugu.106 And in 1810–11 the king bought a set of Tamil fonts from the Revd John in Tranquebar.107 However, nothing seems to have come of these enquiries and acquisitions. Like many early Indian imprints, and like the other Tanjore imprints, the Tanjore books are hybrid objects, combining features of manuscripts with those of European printed books. Done in octavo and folio sizes, they are sectioned rather than paginated; they lack title pages, but provide a colophon at the end of the text, typically giving the Shalivahana shaka era, sometimes as a chronogram, and the European date as well.108 At least three imprints add a novel feature: woodcuts of Hindu gods (Ganesha, and Shiva with his consort Parvati); in the Tanjore Aesop, each fable is illustrated with a woodcut in a modification of the style of the woodcuts in the English original.

32 Indira Viswanathan Peterson Serfoji’s press and textbook project was pioneering on an astonishing number of counts. Among the earliest private Indian ventures in printing, the king’s press was the first devanagari press in South India, printing books in Sanskrit and Marathi, languages that were not yet the focus of local print culture. The German missionaries had concentrated on Tamil, publishing in the main Bible translations, dictionaries, and grammars.109 The Madras College press favored Tamil and Telugu, as did the Indian presses that sprang up in Madras in the early nineteenth century.110 Right from the start, Serfoji intended to use the press to print textbooks for use at his schools. He signaled his intention in the choice of books, and in the grandiose name he gave to the press: Navavidyakalanidhivarnayantrashala (“printing press of the schools that are the treasure-house of the new learning”).111 In Bengal, the Serampore missionaries and the College of Fort William had led the way in producing vernacular (including Marathi) and Sanskrit texts. Yet Serfoji’s project to produce editions of core texts in the Sanskrit curriculum, including classics of Sanskrit poetry and shastra was ahead even of the vigorous contemporary Sanskrit publishing industry in Calcutta.112 Beginning with the first edition of the Amarakosha, the standard lexicon in Sanskrit, the press produced two classical kavya poems: the Raghuvamsha of Kalidasa (first edition), and Magha’s Shishupalavadha. The remaining imprints of the Tanjore palace press were standard texts in several Sanskrit shastra disciplines: Annambhatta’s Tarkasamgraha (“Compendium of Logic”), along with the author’s auto-commentary Dipika; Vishvanatha Panchanana Bhattacharya’s Karikavali, and the commentary Muktavali, both standard texts in the disciplines of critical enquiry (mimamsa) and logic (nyaya).113 The last text printed at the press appears to have been Kumarasambhavachampu, a prose-verse paraphrase of Kalidasa’s classic poem Kumarasambhava, written in Serfoji’s name by Chokkana Kavi and printed in 1814. Large numbers of copies for some of Serfoji’s Sanskrit books are still available at the Sarasvati Mahal library at the Thanjavur palace; these include 64 copies of the Tarkasamgraha, the standard Sanskrit manual of logic. Sadly, no trace of the press can be found today. Serfoji’s leadership in Marathi printing and education is equally impressive. Despite the delay in the arrival of the fonts, the Tanjore press’s two 1809 Marathi imprints, Balabodhamuktavali, a translation of Aesop’s Fables, and the Yuddhakanda (“Book of War”) of the sixteenth-century poet Ekanatha’s Bhavartha-ramayana (with commentary) were among the earliest books printed in Marathi—especially using the devanagari script, which was not the “default” script for Marathi. William Carey in Serampore, who pioneered Marathi printing with his Marathi grammar and New Testament (1805) used devanagari fonts only as a second choice, since types had not yet been cast for the standard Modi.114 In fact, Marathi printing and vernacular education did not really take off until the 1820s when the Bombay presidency became the center of Marathi linguistic culture.115 Although Modi was the default script for official and private communication in Marathi in places such as Tanjore and Madras, for a number of reasons Serfoji preferred devanagari for textbook production. Both Sanskrit and Marathi works could be printed with the same fonts (with some modification), and unlike Modi,

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which was a cursive script used in confidential correspondence, devanagari was a standard, public script, accessible to non-Marathi readers; it was also exempt from the vagaries of cursive writing. All of these are features of the modern. The use of devanagari print would enable Serfoji to standardize and thus modernize Marathi as a vernacular. In 1826 the Bombay government shifted from Modi to the devanagari script for Marathi for similar reasons.116 In the case of the Marathi Aesop, Serfoji indicated his intentions by his use of the term balabodha (“children’s instructor”) in the title, which was an alternative Marathi name for the devanagari script. The book was thus intended to be Balabodhamuktavali (henceforth BBM), which is to say either “String of Pearls for the instruction of children” or “Composed in the Children’s Instructor script of Marathi.” The king’s instructions were that the book of fables (kahani, instructive tale) was to be used in his schools, to give moral instruction as well as to teach writing in the normative devanagari script.117 The Tanjore imprints in Sanskrit served the traditional curriculum, as did the Marathi Ramayana epic, but the Marathi Aesop, the most fascinating product of the Tanjore press, was a different matter. Balabodhamuktavali (BBM) was the first complete translation of Aesop’s Fables from English into an Indian language.118 The source for the translation was a popular eighteenth-century edition of the Fables published by the evangelical pastor Samuel Croxall, and reissued well into the nineteenth century. Serfoji was justifiably proud of the book, and it served him well as a sample of his modernizing projects; he presented a copy to Sir Alexander Johnston in 1817.119 He also requisitioned a copy for display during his Banaras pilgrimage.120 Serfoji’s Aesop, as an early example of an Indian translation of a European text into an Indian vernacular for use as a textbook, raises many questions about translation, both literary and cultural. Not least among them is the question of textual translation, which was a novel concept in a culture in which the production of new versions of works tended to stand in an “indexical” relationship to older texts. The production of new works that would offer “iconic” translations was unprecedented.121 Indeed, the Aesop project was one of Serfoji’s more adventurous steps toward fashioning the “new learning” at the heart of his navavidya. Several themes bear emphasis in this connection, including: the choice of moral tales; the translation of a European work; an effort at iconic translation; the question of the relationship between the translation and its English source text; the form and mode of the translation; and the collaboration of pandits in the production of the translation itself. Translating moral fables in nineteenth-century Tanjore: Croxall’s Aesop and the Balabodhamuktavali Three Brahman pandits, at least two of whom were fully trained in the Sanskrit shastras, collaborated on the BBM. Marathi pandit Subbaji Sasho translated the Croxall text. “Vedamurti” (“Embodiment of the Vedas”) pandit Shivarama Shastri composed Sanskrit verses for each fable, and Sakkhanna Pandita set the type and

34 Indira Viswanathan Peterson printed it.122 European collaboration with pandits and other indigenous literati was the cornerstone of translation and text production in Indian languages in Calcutta, Serampore, and later, Madras. In the 1800s, Indian publishers in Calcutta, also working with scholars, were producing vernacular translations for a popular market, but Serfoji’s pandits were unusual in taking on the role of typesetter and printer, typically borne by men of the artisanal castes, such as the artists who produced the BBM woodcuts. Unlike the pandits who worked with Europeans at the Calcutta and Madras Colleges or the Banaras College, the Tanjore pandits did not benefit from the kinds of dialogue with European scholars and administrators that recent studies have shown tended to transform both the traditional pandit and his European “partner.” Nevertheless, through their involvement with the press, shastric pandits such as Shivarama Shastri became agents of vernacular modernization. Like the court Brahmans involved in other fields of European knowledge, the team of Brahmans working at the printing press were themselves transformed by their engagement with the English language and their participation in the culture of the European book. Subbaji Sasho rendered the English prose of Croxall’s fables literally, in a rather stilted prose, the style of which was different from that of traditional bakhar historical narratives, letters, and other pre-modern prose genres available in Marathi. Considering that the year was 1806, it was still very early in the development of modern Marathi prose, whether in original or translated texts.123 Verse, not prose, was the norm in traditional Indian literatures, and we know that poetry was Serfoji’s preferred medium, even for scientific works. Prose was promoted as the signifier of rationality and morality, in contrast to Indian poetic and mythic modes in the colonial vernacular educational projects.124 The selection of Aesop, however, provided Serfoji with a happy convergence of native and European practices. In contrast to the majority of Indian literary texts, the celebrated Sanskrit animal and moral tale collections Panchatantra (“Five Strategies”) and Hitopadesha (“Wholesome Counsel”)—both standard texts in the traditional Sanskrit and vernacular curriculum and both embodying Indian equivalents of Aesop—were written largely in prose. This parallel lent a measure of iconicity to Serfoji’s Aesop. Likewise, the stylistically hybrid woodcut that illustrated each of the 110 fables demonstrated another attempt at iconicity. Such illustrations had become the sine qua non for the presentation of fable literature as children’s textbooks in the English curriculum.125 But in the Marathi Aesop, as elsewhere, Serfoji’s mimicry was only partial. In each fable, after giving the narrative, Croxall provided a long-winded “Application” in turgid prose. Leaving the application intact, but capping each kahani with one or more short niti verses (moral epigrams) in Sanskrit (a signature of the Sanskrit Panchatantra and Hitopadesha) the Tanjore pandits re-inserted poetry into their text.126 The pandits at once naturalized the English Aesop and anticipated the later English editors of Croxall, who either rewrote the Croxall application, or replaced it with a pithy one-sentence moral, and even with poetic verses.127 This brings us to the most important question raised by Serfoji’s Aesop’s Fables: why translate European moral tales? If “useful knowledge” was code for European

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knowledge in general and European science in particular, the nineteenth-century concept of “improvement” connoted above all moral improvement. This moral goal was usually achieved through education, through the reading of what came to be called “moral class-books.” Moral tales and fables were among the most frequent choices for vernacular book production in the early nineteenth century. In England, the charity school and evangelical movements had intensified the use of moral tales and fables for the moral instruction of very young schoolchildren.128 The practice was carried over into colonial Indian education, and continued well into the nineteenth century, in missionary and government schools and in the initiatives of native schoolbook societies. However, early publishing at the government colleges and at the Calcutta missionary and native presses focused on Sanskrit classics, entertaining stories, and local equivalents of “moral tales,” classified under the rubric of niti-shastra (science of conduct in the world), with new versions of older Sanskrit texts produced in the vernaculars. Niti discourse facilitated a viable mutual translation of improvement, detached in the Indian case from the sorts of religious discourses of virtue and duty embedded in concepts such as dharma.129 The indigenous Panchatantra and Hitopadesha became the top favorites for vernacular prose translation, both among Orientalist scholars and educators.130 In time Aesop’s Fables would make their appearance in vernacular translation projects.131 Nonetheless, the Indian tale collections continued to remain staples.132 In producing a modern vernacular prose fable text with moral content, Serfoji was thus both following the time-honored local practice of teaching niti through animal tales, and responding to colonial educational ideologies of improvement. But why Aesop? Why not the Panchatantra, the most popular local niti text? It is clear that Serfoji hoped to infuse European moral ideas into the school curriculum, yet his ultimate goal was the “improvement” of Tanjore youth. This he sought not through complete Europeanization but through a considered understanding of crucial (and useful) points of intersection among cultures through literature in translation. We must recognize that Aesop was “familiar” in more ways than is immediately apparent. In the Preface to his work, Croxall had quoted Joseph Addison’s essay on fables to point out that as entertaining tales, fables were particularly effective in teaching children morality in a “playful” manner.133 In dedicating the book to the young Lord Sunbury, Baron Halifax, Croxall also argued that such tales were most useful as a guide to action in the world of politics and governance; they were a primer for princes, as it were. Such thinking coincided with the intent and use of the Panchatantra and Hitopadesha, which were expressly conceived as princely counsel texts.134 Above all, in addition to being similar to the very popular Panchatantra, Aesop was a viable European alternative to the moral class-book material, which otherwise often carried a heavily Christian flavor. In his introduction to his own translation Sasho clarifies Serfoji’s intention: This is the king’s command: ‘There are many Sanskrit shastra texts on niti, but their meaning is obscure and we cannot understand them, but we still need to teach morality in order to enable men to act virtuously. And even today (a time

36 Indira Viswanathan Peterson when the shastras are neglected or lost), popular texts such as the Panchatantra teach morality. But there are many countries on the globe, and many kinds of people live in them. If you enquire into their religion, beliefs and customs and laws and so on, you will find that they are as different from us as a goat from an elephant, but when you ask about their morality, you will find that the morals taught in the books of one people (jati) are perfectly applicable to other peoples. To take advantage of this situation we must study and accept the moral tales of another culture. Since moral education can be applied effectively and with ease, moral tales are most appropriate for teaching children at school.’135 As Sasho reveals, Serfoji’s view of the value of “foreign moral tales” was a perfect expression of the Enlightenment universalism that he shared with other late eighteenth-century intellectuals such as Ram Mohan Roy and William Jones.136 Serfoji avoids any implication of directly imposing European morals on native subjects through Aesop. His message in the BBM is that, while custom and cultural practices may be diverse, morality is universal. It is not enough to know morality only in the context of one’s own jati. Rather, by “accepting” other peoples’ stories, one discovers that, different as they are, they share with us a common morality. Didactic stories allow a foreign culture, however different from one’s own, to become translatable. But the foreign had to be domesticated and engrafted. In order to become a Marathi kahani (instructive tale) each of the Aesop fables had to be furnished with a familiar Panchatantra-like Sanskrit verse in order make its moral transparent to young boys in Tanjore. Serfoji’s press simply could not keep pace with the burgeoning publishing industry in the Indian metropolises in either scale or impact, nor was it his intention to publish books on a large scale. Indeed, the press ceased to be active in 1814, just when native publishing ventures were proliferating at an accelerated pace in Madras. By the 1820s lithography had begun to revolutionize printing. By 1826, when the printers struck off a “sentence in Mahratta” on the occasion of a visit from Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, the press might no longer have been active.137 But generations of children in Tanjore engaged with Europe through Aesop, and in this respect Serfoji’s goal of modernizing his pandits through print succeeded fully. After editing and publishing Tamil classics at the Madras College, Desikar, Serfoji’s Tamil pandit set himself up in Madras as an editor and publisher in his own right. A short-lived and limited experiment, Serfoji’s pioneering press was nevertheless a nucleus for the spread of print in the service of education and scholarship in South India. In education, as in other areas of endeavor, Serfoji fashioned his version of princely modernity through a considered engagement with a wide range of issues that drove contemporary projects of modernization, and with the diverse constituencies that undertook them. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of his vision of modernity is the ambitious imperative to signify his own royal leadership through the translation of the personal into the public; through the constitution of the court as the controller, disseminator, and mediator of navavidya, not only for his own

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subjects, but also for the wider, emergent colonial public sphere. Thanks to Serfoji’s projects, the Tanjore court became a center of Indian colonial modernity in education, rather than remaining at the periphery.

Notes 1 For accounts of the East India Company’s relations with Tanjore from 1763 to 1799, see K. Rajayyan, British Diplomacy in Tanjore (Mysore: Rao and Raghavan, 1969), 72–112. 2 For a brief introduction to Serfoji II of Tanjore, see Prince Tulajendra Rajah P. Bhosale, Rajah Serfoji—II (With a short history of Thanjavur Mahrattas) (Thanjavur: Marathi Abhyas Parishad, 1995). For an intellectual biography of Serfoji, see I. V. Peterson, Scholar-king of Tanjore: Serfoji II and the Shaping of Indian Modernity (forthcoming). 3 Education in colonial Tanjore is covered in T. Venkasami Row, A Manual of the District of Tanjore, in the Madras Presidency (Madras: Lawrence Asylum Press, 1883), and B. S. Baliga, Tanjore District Handbook (Madras: Government Press, 1957). See also S. A. Raman, “From Chattrams to National Schools: Educational Philanthropy in South India, 18th–20th centuries,” Selected Papers in Asian Studies, n.s. 52 (1994). 4 L. Zastoupil and M. Moir, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Richmond: Curzon, 1999). 5 On moral improvement and education, see the discussion in B. A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1996), 118−127. 6 See, for example, D. Kopf, British Orientalism and The Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773−1835 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement; and V. Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). 7 For welcome contributions, see R. F. Young, “Receding from Antiquity: Hindu Responses to Science and Christianity on the Margins of Empire, 1800−1850,” in R. E. Frykenberg, ed., Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-cultural Communication since 1500 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 183−222; and M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770−1880 (New York: Palgrave, 2007). 8 M. Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education and Empire in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). On the princely states, see B. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and their States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Following the defeat of Mysore’s Tipu Sultan in 1799, the Company gained control over the entire Carnatic. By 1801 it demoted the majority of the principalities of peninsular South India, Tanjore included, from the official status of “princely states” to that of zamindaris (territory ruled by landholders, rather than “kings”); but in the realms of culture and ceremonial, the local rajas remained “princes,” both in their own territories and in the eyes of the Company state. 9 Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres, 1−31. 10 On the Thanjavur Nayakas as cultural innovators, see V. N. Rao, D. Shulman, and S. Subrahmaniam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). 11 On the events surrounding Serfoji’s accession to the Tanjore throne, see Rajayyan, British Diplomacy, 82−106. Schwartz was the most illustrious missionary in South India. See H. Pearson, Memoirs of the Life and correspondence of Christian Frederick Schwartz (Boston: Perkins, Marvin, 1835), 271−393. 12 On Serfoji’s education in Madras, see Peterson, Serfoji, ch. 2. 13 Rajayyan, British Diplomacy, 99−112. 14 The Pietists had begun their work as early as 1706 in the Danish territory of Tranquebar near Tanjore. See R. E. Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the

38 Indira Viswanathan Peterson

15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 142−165; and H. Liebau, “Faith and Knowledge: The Educational System of the Danish-Halle and English-Halle Mission,” in A. Gross, Y. Kumaradoss, and H. Liebau, eds., Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India (Halle: Franckesche Stiftungen, 2006), 1181−1214. This included, for example, astronomer Michael Topping’s Marine Survey project, (1785−96). M. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765−1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 347 et passim. In a letter to Schwartz, Serfoji speaks of a visit to Topping’s house “to see the Stars.” Tamil Nadu State Archives, Tanjore District Records (henceforward TDR) 4448, 26−27, Dec. 16, 1795. See Peterson, Scholar-king of Tanjore, chs 2 and 6. On Serfoji’s circle of European friends and correspondents, see Peterson, Scholar-king of Tanjore, ch. 3. Sir Alexander Johnston is a good example of the seemingly unlikely convergence of ideologies such as orientalism, evangelism and improvement in a single colonial intellectual. See Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 44−60, for a classificatory schema for such combinations. Serfoji’s position regarding innovation contrasts with that posited for pre-colonial intellectuals by Sheldon Pollock in “New Intellectuals in Seventeenth Century India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 38, 1 (2001): 4−31. I follow Zastoupil and Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate, 1−54. See M. A. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793−1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). For example, M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of EighteenthCentury Puritanism in Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1933). C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773−1833 (London: Curzon, 1996), 24, 176n8. East India Company Charter Act of 1813, section 43, in Zastoupil and Moir, Great Indian Education Debate, 91. See Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 44−68. The Poona Sanskrit College was established in 1821 and the Calcutta Sanskrit College in 1824. The German missionaries at Tranquebar (and eventually in Madras) were pioneers in South Indian and Tamil print culture as well as the production of vernacular grammars and other books. Unlike the Bengal Baptist missionaries, however, they focused more on translating and publishing the Bible and other Christian texts. Liebau, “Faith and Knowledge”; and Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 149−150. See S. Sathianadan, History of Education in the Madras Presidency (Madras: Srinivasa Varadachari, 1894) and Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 301−341. F. Penny, The Church in Madras: Being the History of the ecclesiastical and Missionary action of the East India Company in the Presidency of Madras in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (London: Smith, Elder, 1904), 518−522. The Ramnad and Sivaganga schools quickly folded. See Sathianadan, History of Education; and Penny, Church in Madras. Penny, Church in Madras, 523−533. Bell exported his system to England. A. Bell, The Madras School: Or Elements of Tuition. Comprising the analysis of an experiment in education made at the Male Asylum (Madras: J. Murray, 1808). T. R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 116−150, 195−202. See “Minute of Sir Thomas Munro,” 10 March 1826, Fort St. George Revenue Consultations, cited in Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (Delhi: Biblia Impex, 1983), 248−251. Zastoupil and Moir, Great Indian Education Debate, 10. Ibid.

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39

36 On Munro’s educational initiatives, see R. E. Frykenberg. “Modern Education in South India, 1784−1854: Its Roots and Role as a Vehicle of Integration under Company Raj,” American Historical Review 91, 1 (1986): 37−65, 44; and Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 316−320. For the statistics gathered in the survey, see Dharampal, Beautiful Tree, 114−127. Detailed accounts are given about the teachers in Serfoji’s chattram schools. 37 Cited in Baliga, Tanjore District Handbook, 273. Baliga provides a summary of data for Tanjore district originally published in 1826. 38 Ibid. Bhavani Raman discusses the institution of the tinnaip pallikkutam in “Disciplining the Senses, Schooling the Mind: Inhabiting Virtue in the Tamil Tinnai School” in A. Pandian and D. Ali, eds., Ethical Life in South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 43−60. 39 In addition to contributing regularly to the Tanjore mission and its schools, run by the Revd J. C. Kohlhoff (see TDR 3540, 241−242, 22 June 1820: donation of 120 pagodas, and TDR 3469, 365, 9 March 1801, donation of books), Serfoji also donated funds to the Vepery School in Madras, run by Gericke. For example, in 1803 Serfoji pledged 45 pagodas per month for the support of orphans studying under Gericke in Madras; see TDR 3478, 432, 13 February 1803. 40 Statistics of Raja’s Colleges; “A Detailed Account of the present state of the Colleges at the Capital of Tanjore and at the Mooktambapuram chutrum which His Highness the Maha Rajah of Tanjore has been pleased to establish for the education of young men,” TDR 4430, 30−31, Serfoji to Resident, 12 June 1822. Only a few bundles in the large collection the Marathi language records of the Tanjore court (in Modi script) have been summarized or translated into Tamil. See P. Subramaniyan, ed., Tanjai marattiya mannar modi avanat tamilakkamum kurippuraiyum, vols. 1−3. (Tanjavur: Tamil University, 1999), hereafter TMMATK. The few references to the court-run schools available in the records reveal little about the curriculum and pedagogy employed, but they do provide some information about the administration of the schools. See the summary in K. M. Venkataramaiya, Tanjai marattiya mannarkala arasiyalum samudaya valkkaiyum [Administration and Social Life under the Maratha Rulers of Thanjavur, in Tamil], (Thanjavur: Tamil University, 239−245), hereafter Administration. On the financial arrangements of the palace school and for lists of teachers for the year 1825, see TMMATK vol. 3, 16−18. 41 TDR 4431, 131−2. Serfoji to Captain William Hardy, Acting Resident, 15 April 1823. 42 Venkataramaiya, Administration, 240. 43 Resident William Blackburne to Chief Secretary, Fort St George, 27 June 1806, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, Board’s Collections F/4/218, 4787, 12. Political Consultations, Fort St George. 44 Statistics of the Raja’s Colleges, 30−31. 45 Note on the past and present administration of the Raja’s Chattrams in the Tanjore and Madura Districts, (Tanjore: V.G. Brothers, 1909), Appendix 1, 1−28. For a detailed study of the Tanjore Maratha court’s almshouses, and Serfoji’s Muktambal Chattram in particular, see M. C. Linderman, “Charity’s Venue: Representing Indian kingship in the monumental pilgrim rest houses of the Maratha Rajas of Tanjavur, 1761−1832,” Ph.D. Dissertation, (University of Pennsylvania, 2009). Untouchables were excluded from the chattram schools. However, Muslims studied at these schools, mainly in the Persian classes. Christians came under the jurisdiction of the missionary free schools, including one that was entirely supported by the Maratha court (see below). 46 C. Irasu, Tanjai marattiyar kalvettukkal (Tanjavur: Tamil University, 1987), 140−141, includes a Tamil translation of the Marathi inscription commemorating the foundation of the Muktambal Chattram. 47 Statistics of the Raja’s Colleges, 19. 48 Frykenberg, Modern Education, discusses these Brahmans; also see P. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,” Comparative

40 Indira Viswanathan Peterson

49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64

Studies in Society and History 45, 4 (2003): 783−814. In the colonial context I use the term “Maratha” Brahman to indicate Brahmans who spoke Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, and Telugu (not to mention Persian and English). In a handwritten note inserted into a copy of a book gifted to him by Serfoji, Sir Alexander Johnston, chief justice of Ceylon, remarked on Serfoji’s promotion of English and European art among his court Brahmans; see note 72 below. See, for example, TDR 3554, 17 September 1817, 9. On Serfoji’s ensemble and its European recitals, see H. Pearson, Memoirs of the life and writings of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan (New York: Kirk and Mercien, 1818), 295; T. Robinson, The Last days of Bishop Heber (London: Jennings and Chaplin, 1830), 163; and Peterson, Scholar-king of Tanjore, ch. 3. On Brahman officers in charge of music at Serfoji’s court, see V. S. Radhika, “Development of Sadir in the Court of King Serfoji II (1798−1832) of Tanjore” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Hyderabad, 1996). TDR 3500, 53−56, December 2 1810. See, for example, the letter from William Smith, a student of Andrew Bell, reporting Smith’s demonstration of a set of experiments and apparatus in natural philosophy for Tipu Sultan’s officials. See Bell, Madras School, 234−242. H. H. Wilson, The Mackenzie collection: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Manuscripts, 2nd edn (Madras: Higginbotham, 1882 [1822]), 571−572; K. M. Venkataramaiya, Tanjai marattiya mannar varalaru (History of the Maratha Rulers of Thanjavur, Mackenzie manuscript D3180) (Thanjavur: Tamil University, 1987), iv, 211−213. P. S. Menon, A History of Travancore from the earliest times (Madras: Higginbothams, 1878); S. V. Iyer, Svati Tirunal and his Music (Trivandrum: College Book House, 1975), 5−17. On the standardization of music and dance and the control of artists, see Radhika, “Development of Sadir;” L. Subramanian, “Embracing the Canonical: Identity, Tradition and Modernity in Karnatak Music,” in I. V. Peterson and D. Soneji, eds., Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008); and H. Krishnan, “Inscribing Practice: Reconfigurizations and Textualizations of Devadasi Repertoire in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century South India,” in Peterson and Soneji, Performing Pasts. L. Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). H. Pearson, Memoirs of the Life and correspondence of Christian Frederick Schwartz, 3rd edn, vol. 2, (London: J. Hatchard, 1839), 91. Heike Liebau, “Christoph Samuel John’s Essay on Education Policy” in Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity, vol. 3, 1323−1496. Shahji II’s (1685−1715) court had even produced and staged a drama about linguistic encounter in eighteenth-century Tanjavur, titled Panchabhashavilasa (“Playful encounter of five languages”), Journal of the Sarasvati Mahal Library 18−19 (1965−6): 1−22. Peterson, Serfoji, chs 3 and 4. V. Srinivasachari and S. Gopalan, eds. Bhonslevamshacharitra (Thanjavur: Thanjavur Maharaja Serfoji’s Sarasvati Mahal Library, 1990). On Serfoji’s promotion of the Marathi language, see Peterson, Scholar-king of Tanjore, chs 3, 4, and 7. On the Marathi inscriptions of the nineteenth-century Tanjore court, see Irasu, Tanjai marattiyar kalvettukkal. On Serfoji’s Tamil medical texts project, A. Krishnaswami Mahadick Rao Saheb, ed. and trans. Sri Sarabhendra Vaidya Ratnavali (Marathi) (Thanjavur: T. M. Serfoji’s Sarasvati Mahal Library, 1952), i−xvi; and I. Peterson, “Agastya for the New Age? Medical and Vernacular Translation at the Court of King Serfoji II of Tanjore,” paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, Philadelphia, Saturday, March 27, 2010. On the elite and popular demand for English in the 1820s, see R. E. Frykenberg, “The Myth of English as a ‘Colonialist’ Imposition on India: A Reappraisal with Special

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65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77 78

79 80

81

82 83

84

41

Reference to South India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1988): 305−315. Note on the past and present, appendix 1, 24−27. The dharmashastras define “the protection of the subjects” (prajanam paripalanam) as the fundamental function of the king; see R. Lingat, The Classical Law of India, trans. J. D. M Derrett (Berkeley: University of California Press), 222. See Venkataramaiya, Administration, 239−245. Pearson, Memoirs of Buchanan, 296. Note on the Past and Present, 26. Ibid. In Peterson, Scholar-king of Tanjore, ch. 5, I have argued that the Maratha chattram was distinguished as a utopian icon of the state, because it was excluded from the state’s revenue transactions. TDR 4436A, 522−525. Sir Alexander Johnston reproduced Serfoji’s letter in full in The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Science, 649 (1829): 426−427. Ibid. As well as Serfoji, in Travancore Gouri Parvati Bai (regent from 1815–29) and her son Raja Svati Tirunal (1813−46) focused on public education. Likewise, a succession of Tanjore Maratha Divans implemented educational reform in Travancore. See Menon, History of Travancore. I use the term “engraftment” in a conventional sense, and not in the sense in which it was used by British policymakers, for whom it indicated the policy of encouraging indigenous cultural practices in order to make natives more receptive to European learning; see Zastoupil and Moir, Great Indian Education Debate, 9. A. D. Campbell describes indigenous methods of teaching and learning in his “On the State of Education of the Natives in Southern India,” Madras Journal of Literature and Science, 1 (1833−4): 350−359. See also Frykenberg, “Modern Education,” 46. Bell, Madras School, 80, 157−5. See Ibid., 168−169 for a typical lesson plan at the Asylum school, which includes, in addition to Scripture, reading from the Spectator and use of Sarah Trimmer’s spelling and other books. For notes on the Tranquebar mission school, see Liebau, “Faith and Knowledge” and Liebau, “John’s Educational Policy.” See Peterson, “Agastya for the New Age?” and Peterson, Scholar-King of Tanjore, ch. 6. T. Jatavallabhar, ed., Devendra Kuravanji: A Drama in Marathi giving the Geography of the World in Songs. By Serfoji Rajah (Madras: Oriental Manuscripts Library, 1950) [hereafter DK]. See also I. V. Peterson, “The Drama of the Kuravanci Fortune-teller: Land, Landscape, and Social Relations in an 18th-Century Tamil Genre” in M. A. Selby and I. V. Peterson, eds., Tamil Geographies: Cultural Constructions of Space and Place in South India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 59−86. Most “First Geography” school texts in peninsular South India were printed after Serfoji’s time. See C. S. Mohanavelu, German Tamilology: German Contributions to Tamil language, literature and culture during the period 1706−1945 (Madras: Saiva Siddhanta, 1993), 149. DK, 5. DK, 6−7. We know the king had made use of a tellurion, a mechanical model of the heliocentric universe, to familiarize his court pandits with European cosmology. See TDR 3487, 22 January 1806, 19−22. and 3487, 9 March 1806. J. C. Kohlhoff (German missionary at Tanjore) to Serfoji. On Vedanayaka Sastri’s poems on European cosmology, geography and other sciences, see I. V. Peterson, “Bethlehem Kuravanci of Vedanayaka Sastri of Tanjore: The Cultural Discourses of a Nineteenth Century Tamil Christian Poem” in J. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg, eds., Christians, Cultural Interactions, and the Religious Traditions of India (Grand Rapids, MI: W. Eerdmans, 2002), 9−36.

42 Indira Viswanathan Peterson 85 TDR, Statistics of Raja’s colleges (12 June 1822), 19. 86 In 1826 the Revd Robinson reports comparable figures for four of the languages taught at the Muktambal Chattram, but the number of boys studying Tamil had increased to 298. Robinson, Last Days of Heber, 146. 87 Tanjore contrasted with contemporary South Indian zamindari kingdoms ruled by Tamil and Telugu kings, who (along with Tamil monastic organizations) vigorously patronized literature in Tamil, a language with its own classical tradition. 88 G. Smith, Life of William Carey, Shoemaker and Missionary (London: John Murray, 1885), 386. 89 P. P. S. Sastri, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts at the Tanjore Maharaja Serfoji’s Sarasvati Mahal Library, vol. 1 (Thanjavur: Sarasvati Mahal, 1929). 90 For information on the catalogues Serfoji commissioned, see C. Buchanan, Christian Researches in Asia, 2nd edn (London: T. Cadell and Davies, 1811), 53; and P. Perumal, “A Note on the Catalogue of the Tanjore Sarasvati Mahal Library,” Journal of the Thanjavur Maharaja Serfoji’s Sarasvati Mahal Library, 39 (1990): 49−56. 91 TDR 4435, 19−21, Captain Harkness to Serfoji, 29 January 1826. 92 TDR 4435, 54, 7 March 1827. Captain Harkness to Tanjore Resident John Fyfe. 93 Serfoji was one of four non-English noblemen named to honorary membership in the Society at its first meeting in 1823, the year of its foundation. Proceedings of the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society. Library of the Royal Asiatic Society, unpublished manuscript. 94 A. Krishnaswami Mahadick Rao Saheb, Sri Sarabhendra Vaidya Ratnavali, xi. 95 Strange, Hindu Law, principally with reference to such portions of it as concern the administration of justice in the King’s Courts in India, (London: Parbury Allen, 1830), vol. 1:102; vol. 2, appendix: 182−187. 96 See Zastoupil and Moir, Great Indian Education Debate, Document Eight, “Letter from Rammohun Roy to Lord Amherst, governor-general in council, dated 11 December 1823,” 110−114. 97 It is worth noting the multiple meanings of the term patha itself (e.g. reading, memorization, recitation, learning, education). My characterization of Sanskrit pedagogy is based on E. Gerow, “Primary Education in Sanskrit: Methods and Goals,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, 4 (2002): 661−690. 98 Adopting Hatcher’s nomenclature as developed in Idioms of Improvement, 60; see also Zastoupil and Moir, Great Indian Education Debate. 99 Subbaji Sasho had been sent to the College of Fort William College as Marathi pandit in 1803 (see TDR 3469, p 207−208, 31 January 1801, Captain Blackburne to the Revd Buchanan at Fort William College) but had apparently returned to the Tanjore court sometime before 1806. He became head Marathi pandit at Fort St. George in 1817. 100 TDR 4357, 275−276. 7 May 1829. 101 Gericke advised the king to send specimens of Marathi letters in the devanagari script to England for the creation of types (TDR 3473−3474, 233−236, 3 May 1802). The missionary also exhorted the king to print useful books with the press (TDR 3473–3474, 413−414, 24 June 1802). 102 Serfoji reported the arrival of the press to his agent Benjamin Torin (London), 4 April 1808, TDR 3494, 311. Wilkins was engaged in 1803 (TDR 3476, 333−334, 16 April 1803, Torin to Serfoji). For further details, see Peterson, Scholar-king of Tanjore, ch. 7. 103 See Buchanan, Christian Researches, 60. 104 In 1807 Kohlhoff informed Serfoji that a printer sent by the Revd John from Tranquebar had arrived in Tanjore. TDR 3490, 499, 19 November 1807. 105 On the imprints from Serfoji’s press, see G. Shaw, “The Tanjore ‘Aesop’ in the Context of early Marathi Printing” The Library, 5th series 33 (1978): 207−214. 106 TDR 3487, 25 August 1806, 297. Hunter wrote back to say that these would be difficult to obtain at a reasonable cost; TDR 3486, 10 September 1806, 287.

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107 Letter from John to Kohlhoff regarding the sale, TDR 3503, 16 February 1811, 45. 108 Only one Tanjore book, the Kumarasambhavachampu, is cut horizontally, and lineated and formatted like an Indian paper manuscript, with narrow dimensions. 109 See S. Blackburn, Print, Folklore and Nationalism in Colonial South India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 43−59. 110 See Blackburn, Print, Folklore, 90−102. 111 Writing in the 1870s, A. C. Burnell remarked on the use of the palace imprints at the king’s schools; see Classified Index to the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Palace at Tanjore (London: Truebner, 1880), v−vi, et passim. 112 On early Sanskrit publishing in Calcutta, see Kopf, British Orientalism, 87−88, and Diehl, Early Indian Imprints, 93−127. 113 The two kavyas were published in 1808 and 1812, respectively, Tarkasamgraha and Dipika in 1811, and Karikavali and Muktavali in 1810 and 1812. For details, see, for example, Shaw, Tanjore Aesop, 213−214. 114 A Modi font was cast only in 1806; see Diehl, Early Indian Imprints, 113. 115 On the history of devanagari printing, see Shaw, “Printing in Devanagari.” 116 Naregal, Language Politics, 163. 117 BBM, Introduction. 118 In 1803 William Gilchrist had published translations of selected fables of Aesop into several Indian languages in roman script for use as a textbook among British students at the Fort William College; see his The Oriental Fabulist, or Polyglot translations of Aesop’s and other’s fables (Calcutta: Hirkaru office 1803). 119 Johnston presented it to the then library of the British Museum in July 1821, and it is now one of two copies of the book available at the British Library. See Shaw, “Tanjore Aesop,” 207. 120 TMMATK, vol. 1, 494 (Modi record dated 26 January 1822). 121 The classification is that of A. K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” in P. Richman, ed., Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 22−49. 122 Peterson, Scholar-king of Tanjore, ch. 7. 123 Ian Raeside, “Early Prose Fiction in Marathi, 1828−1885,” Journal of Asian Studies 27, 4 (August 1968): 791−808. 124 See G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 81−83; Blackburn, Print, Folklore and Nationalism, 125−142; and Naregal, Language Politics, 43−44. 125 See J. E. Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651−1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 40. 126 See P. Olivelle, transl., The Pãncatantra. The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Introduction. 127 See W. Regier, “No Children’s Tale,” Chronicle of Higher Education (15 February 2008). 128 See Bell, Madras School, 168−169, 261, 345−346. 129 For an in-depth study and theorization of the “vernacularization” of “improvement” through the discourse of niti and the use of European and Indian moral tales in education in the colonial era, see Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 124–161. 130 For examples from Bengal and Bombay, see Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 139−150; I. Raeside, “Early Prose Fiction in Marathi, 1828−1885,” Journal of Asian Studies 27, 4 (1968): 791−808. 131 For example, in the Marathi Isapanitikatha (1828) of Sadashiv Kashinath Chatre, a founder member of the Bombay Education Society; Naregal, Language Politics, 128, 164n. 132 Raeside, “Early Prose Fiction,” 793. For the continuing popularity of the Hitopadesha and Panchatantra in the second part of the nineteenth century, see Naregal, Language Politics, 164ff; and Blackburn, Print, Folklore, 94−97, 101−102, 135−140.

44 Indira Viswanathan Peterson 133 Croxall, Fables, Preface, xv−xvi. 134 See Olivelle, Pãncatantra, Introduction; and Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 127−130. 135 Balabodhamuktavali, Introduction (n.p.). 136 On Enlightenment “cosmopolitanism” among Orientalists, see Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 46−49. 137 Robinson, Last Days of Bishop Heber, 167.

2

Pandits at work The modern shastric imaginary in early colonial Bengal Brian A. Hatcher*

Postcolonial intellectuals have been particularly acute spokespersons for the plight of the split subject, stressing at the same time the pervasive power of colonial discourse. But these writers, in their very positioning as postcolonial intellectuals have themselves been situated most directly in the colonial/postcolonial gaze. … From this assumption [the colonial subject] is left with only two possible subject positions: acceptance of a colonized subjectivity or resistance.1

In keeping with the purpose of this book, the present chapter proposes to explore the experience and expression of modernity in South Asia as a complex process best explored in particular local contexts and with due attention to what might be called its “trans-colonial” dimensions. As I see it, the purpose of the latter rubric is to bring into view the way modernity in South Asia arises out of various translations, translocations, and negotiations lived out amid the cultural, linguistic, and religious juxtapositions occasioned by colonial rule. Under this conception, there will be no singular modernity. Instead our task ought to be to identify a range of particular modernities shaped by the beliefs, habits, and material practices of particular agents in local contexts. As Katherine Pratt Ewing has rightly noted, modernity is by no means “a single entity that bears an overwhelming discursive and material force.” It may more profitably be viewed in terms of “the temporary conjunction of practices and ideologies that have diverse sources and divergent trajectories.”2 As an effort toward identifying one particular “conjunction of practices and ideologies” in colonial South Asia, this chapter sets out to explore the modernity of Sanskrit intellectuals broadly, and Sanskrit pandits more narrowly, who were active in Calcutta from roughly 1820 to 1880.3 My suggestion is that an examination of the lives and activities of Sanskrit pandits during this period will reveal how these intellectuals called upon existing norms of textual authority, social order, debate, and argumentation to engage with an emerging set of colonial policies, institutions, material tools, and professional opportunities. From this particular conjunction of lived concerns, normative beliefs, and evolving material practices arises a modernity that is neither “universal” (in the sense of being synonymous with a hegemonic European modernity) nor “unchanging” (in the sense of representing something like a discrete and persistent historical stage).

46 Brian A. Hatcher There is no need to underscore the degree of transformation occurring at nearly every level of colonial life during this period, from changes in urban space and lived environments to legal systems, taxation, landholding, education, or the transmission of knowledge. But this is far from admitting that all of these changes represented movement (let alone “progress”) toward some singular modernity that can be neatly demarcated from the culture out of which it emerged. If anything, taking the scope and intensity of such change, it seems more reasonable to narrow our gaze and interrogate particular sites and moments for what they might reveal about the colonial expression of modernity. This is what makes it both interesting and advisable to look in more detail at Sanskrit pandits during the first half of the nineteenth century. What one discovers is that the current critical categories central to post-colonial theorizing in fact force us to make certain false choices. For instance, little is gained by attempting to slot pandits into predetermined categories such as “collaboration” or “resistance”—a dichotomy scarcely more fruitful than that of “tradition” and “modernity.”4 And this is not—as a facile conception would have it—because one can always find representative individuals who fit either category. Rather the categories themselves are reductive, leading to simplistic notions of how any single individual might go about negotiating the complex (and trying) conditions of colonial rule in a rapidly growing metropolis such as Calcutta. As scholarship has recently made evident, the lives and activities of pandits in colonial South Asia are nothing if not complex and varied, not to mention subject to a great deal of distortion in Western scholarship.5 There is a real need to ask new questions and to frame new accounts that can help us consider just how individuals negotiated life under the conditions of colonial rule. In this respect, the neat binaries of a great deal of post-colonial theory simply cannot do justice to the complexity of trans-colonial experience. We need to think of the lived realm, especially the emergent colonial public sphere, as what Norbert Peabody has called “a tension-filled space” wherein “social and political hierarchies are … negotiated dialogically between dominant groups and those whom dominant groups need to co-opt into political alliance, yet whose own agendas may be construed on different terms.”6 The key concepts here are “negotiation” and “dialogue,” but understood as modes of everyday practice. These are not the idealized rubrics of official diplomacy. Instead, what we are talking about are such things as the push-and-pull of the workplace or market; the quest to feed one’s family while protecting one’s prerogatives as a Brahman, a Baniya, or a poet; the challenge of weathering disrespect or abuse while forging ahead on a cherished project; or the struggle to feel one’s way through a court case, print-based polemic, or college curriculum. By attending to the negotiated or dialogic quality of such endeavors, it becomes possible to think anew about how certain actors redirected what Peabody calls “the potentialities of colonial power” to attain goals that may have been neither directly imposed by, nor always necessarily congruent with, “the agendas of colonial power.”7 We can go further and say that the local intellectual did not simply redirect colonial agendas but also actively shaped (and was shaped by) other existing or emerging vectors of practice and ideology. This is important to note, because the

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difference between “redirecting” and “shaping” (or “being shaped”) is something like the difference between a bumper redirecting the course of a pool ball and a chemical reagent changing the reactive properties of another chemical. In an organic chemical reaction the properties of the reagent itself, along with other environmental conditions (heat, pressure, etc.), will have specific consequences for the changes that take place in the substrate.8 The analogy is not perfect, but it is simply a way to say that local actors must be seen as playing active and consequential roles in their worlds. Consider the case of one particular Sanskrit pandit about whom I have written before, Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–91).9 In Vidyasagar we have a pandit who was committed to a program of social reform (e.g. promoting widow marriage and banning kulin polygamy), which he understood and advocated in light of the Hindu shastras, those authoritative treatises dedicated to cataloguing and enunciating the entire gamut of Hindu knowledge and values.10 As committed as he was to an agenda of “native improvement” that had obvious roots in colonial ideology, he was also convinced that such improvement could be made to accord with the authoritative norms of his own religious and ethical tradition. On the one hand, he worked to make that presumed congruency apparent; on the other hand, he was compelled to address (and actively combat) the claims of other Sanskrit pandits who opposed his “improving” agenda on the basis of the same intellectual tradition. All of this helps explain the logic and structure of a work such as his “Proposal on Hindu Widow Marriage” (Vidhava vivaha prachalita haoya uchita kina etadvishayaka prastava; hereafter Hindu Widow Marriage).11 Such a work reflects a rather complicated intellectual scenario. Careful attention to the multiple commitments that structure Hindu Widow Marriage makes it impossible to write off Vidyasagar’s modernity as a mere imitation of the colonizer’s program or as a simple parroting of some static Sanskrit “tradition,” let alone as resistance to a hegemonic Brahmanical ideology. Instead, the key feature of a work such as Hindu Widow Marriage (and of Vidyasagar’s career more generally) is that of active negotiation amid a cluster of intercalated ideologies and normative visions. However, rather than focusing on a single (and singular) figure such as Vidyasagar as the paragon of Indian modernity, I want to draw attention to a larger and more dynamic field of lived negotiation as the best context for exploring one particular moment of South Asian modernity. In what follows, my point will be to argue that even those pandits who actively resisted Vidyasagar’s attempts at shastra-based (what we might call “shastric”) reform were themselves actively engaged in modes of selection, organization, and argument that reflected a shared attempt to negotiate between existing modes of belief and practice and colonialism’s new epistemologies and technologies. If modernity is to be found, it will be within this overall field of active negotiation, a field structured by shared institutions, attitudes, and practices. Because the authority of shastra served as a kind of common denominator for Sanskrit intellectuals during this period, I propose to call this field of negotiation the “modern shastric imaginary.”12 My use of the concept of “imaginary” is influenced by the work of Charles Taylor on “modern social imaginaries.”13 However, rather than pinning my usage to

48 Brian A. Hatcher Taylor’s larger project, what I find most helpful in the present context are simply his comments on how to understand an “imaginary” as a particular shared space of practice and imagination. Taylor stresses that “imaginary” does not refer to anything as simple as “ideas.” Rather, an imaginary is what both enables and makes sense of particular practices within a society.14 In this respect, an imaginary could be thought of as a worldview and the lived framework within which that worldview becomes actualized.15 An imaginary needs to be conceptualized not only in terms of ideas and beliefs, but also in terms of material practices, technologies, and institutions. Put differently, the imaginary and the material are mutually constituted through the interplay of understanding and practice; understanding makes practice, but practice also carries understanding.16 The social imaginary therefore names “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”17 This definition will be operative in what follows, as I attempt to demonstrate the saliency of the concept of the modern shastric imaginary for thinking about a particular moment and site of modernity in colonial Bengal. The phrase, as I use it, calls attention to the ways that colonial pandits worked with or against the shastra, and hence with or against one another; how things went between them, their intellectual peers, and members of the wider colonial public sphere; the kinds of values they held and ideas they endorsed; and the way these values and ideas articulated with particular sets of material and technical practices. When thinking about the problem of colonial modernity, the concept of the modern shastric imaginary allows us to enter more fully into Peabody’s “tension-filled space,” encouraging us to identify the competing expectations and practices of one set of local actors while also recognizing the degree to which that competition occurred within a common, lived matrix. In the process, we are better equipped to reflect on how the particular modernity thus revealed speaks of something other than the diffusion of a grand narrative of European modernity. Equally importantly, careful attention to changes occurring throughout the nineteenth century should allow us to recognize the way social imaginaries change over time and place. I would argue that as long as we fail to delineate such transformations over time, our histories of colonial India are destined to remain impoverished or enslaved to teleological accounts such as those predicated on the birth (or not) of the Indian nation. In fact, as I hope to suggest, the modern shastric imaginary is characteristic of a particular moment of Indian modernity that is in fact prior to (and therefore not intelligible in terms of) the nationalist narratives of Indian freedom.

Sanskrit before the nation For heuristic purposes, I would like to contrast two divergent (though not completely discrete) imaginaries; the dividing line between the two, inasmuch as one can be so precise, would be the Indian revolt of 1857. If the earlier imaginary is cosmopolitan, the later is nationalist. The former cosmopolitan (alternatively,

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liberal) imaginary is one shared by the likes of Rammohan Roy (d. 1833) and his contemporaries during the first several decades of the century.18 The latter nationalist imaginary can be readily associated with India around the 1870s and 1880s and is memorably evoked by Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–94) in his novel Anandamath, with its depiction of a “motherland” suffering abuse at the hands of an alien ruler.19 One of the distinguishing differences between these two imaginaries lies in the different valence and efficacy given to the Sanskrit language and the shastras. In the cosmopolitan imaginary shared by elite Hindu intellectuals in the first half of the century, shastra represented both an intellectual resource (a kind of treasury of knowledge) and a sophisticated set of tools for doing intellectual work (that is, tools such as rhetoric, grammar, logic, and exegesis). This was the heyday of shastric-based reform and shastric-centered debate. This was the time when it made perfect sense to approach contemporary problems “in light of the various shastras” (nana shastrer tatparya drshte).20 By contrast, in the nationalist imaginary, shastra took on a more politicized valence even as it ceased to be a lens through which to address pressing questions. By the 1880s we begin to find shastra being held aloft as a kind of banner under which to rally Hindus in defense of their religion and national culture. In the emerging nationalist imaginary, shastra would come to play an increasingly symbolic role in supporting “unified” conceptions of Hinduism. By contrast, Hinduism during the earlier imaginary had remained far more “inchoate”—even as, or perhaps because, shastra reigned as a flexible framework for viewing the world.21 Indeed, the very idea of going to the government with shastric arguments in search of new legislation was fast losing its legitimacy. We can note that the last effort to successfully argue for legislative action on the basis of an appeal to the shastras was Vidyasagar’s widow-marriage campaign, which led to passage of Act XV in 1856. It might be said that within the earlier shastric imaginary the “nation” had in fact not yet become a problem; this was a pre- or proto-nationalist imaginary. If anything, this earlier liberal imaginary featured significant aspects of behavior and belief that took for granted the providential character of British rule in India. Within this imaginary, it was widely thought that Indians ought to apply themselves to the task of “improving” Indian society through targeted social reform, which would be supported by the legal and administrative power of the colonial state. Intellectuals from Rammohan in the 1820s to Vidyasagar in the 1850s therefore applied themselves to the task of addressing a variety of presumed social evils (kusamskara), from widow burning (sati) to polygamy (bahuvivaha). The reformist initiatives of men such as Rammohan and Vidyasagar reflected their belief that British rule had opened up new avenues (legal, bureaucratic, and educational) for pursuing meaningful social change. In the words of Asok Sen, the reformer’s project was to enlighten the public, educate the government, and thereby win the “necessary state and social support for his desired goals.”22 Furthermore, so-called “native improvement” during this period was something that could be sought by working in tandem with British administrators and philanthropists —men such as George Thompson (1804–78), David Hare (1775–1842), and

50 Brian A. Hatcher John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune (1801–51). The 1830s, in particular, were a time of great activity in such public sphere activities as journalism, public debate, and the forming of voluntary associations, often featuring mixed rosters of Indian and nonIndian members.23 Finally, it was during this period that the genre of the polemical tract and the public petition came into their own as print-based devices allowing reformers to connect directly with the public and the state. By contrast, in the last quarter of the century we notice a distinct abandonment of such reformist causes. Often the proximate cause for the decline of the earlier shastric imaginary is taken to be an upsurge in Hindu “revivalism.” It is certainly true that the period after 1880 does begin to witness the promotion of a selfconsciously traditionalizing discourse of Hinduism; in fact, this was the period in which the very idea of a “rebirth” or renaissance of Hindu culture began to take hold.24 However, not only do the rubrics of “reform” and “revival” tend to bleed into one another, but we also would do well to look for more distant causes to explain what are often taken to be the fruits of a revived or reawakened Hindu consciousness. Such causes might include widespread and pained reaction to the repression of the uprising of 1857; heightened British racism; and the ultimate transfer of power from Company to Crown.25 In an atmosphere colored by such developments, the idea of working in tandem with European colonizers took on a different hue. Whatever the deepest cause, it remains the case, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, that by the last quarter of the nineteenth century reformers began to give up on the idea of calling for legislative intervention from the colonial state. Instead, a new imaginary began to take shape, premised on the Indian nation’s ability to “act for itself.” In one memorable example, Chatterjee notes how earlier reform efforts predicated on liberating women from a host of social evils came to lose their emancipatory force once the category of the Indian “woman” was redeployed for the task of safeguarding what was uniquely India’s—her spiritual realm.26 Recognizing the nature and causes of such shifts between two divergent colonial imaginaries is essential if we are to understand the interpretation, invocation, and contestation of shastra among Sanskrit scholars during the early nineteenth century. Put simply, we must beware of importing into the earlier shastric imaginary the force of subsequent nationalist aspiration. Recently Sumathi Ramaswamy provided a fascinating account of the “curious and puzzling status accorded to Sanskrit in the nationalization of the Indian past” during the twentieth century. When she spoke of “Sanskrit for the nation,” she captured a central feature of what I am here calling the nationalist imaginary.27 But we must recognize that this phrase does not apply to the earlier world of the modern shastric imaginary. In that case, one would do better to speak of “Sanskrit before the nation.” An illustration may help demonstrate this point. We know that for a pandit such as Vidyasagar there were valid shastric grounds and a palpable social need to outlaw the practice of high-caste (or kulin) polygamy. Put simply his opposition to polygamy was grounded in the same logic as his promotion of widow marriage; in his mind, both reforms were congruent with shastra. On the question of polygamy Vidyasagar wrote and published two important tracts under the title

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“An inquiry into the necessity of banning polygamy” (Bahuvivaha rahita haoya uchita kina etadvishayaka vichara) in which he sought to educate and encourage the government into passing legislation. In response to Vidyasagar’s proposals, his younger contemporary Bankimchandra Chatterjee denied there was any need for the British to enact new laws. On one level, Bankim’s argument was that the practice of polygamy would wither away of its own accord as soon as Indians became better educated. But on another level Bankim sought to avoid questioning the hallowed customs of Hindu tradition.28 Because we know Bankim was a literary innovator as well as an admirer of Western social philosophy, it makes little sense to reduce his views on polygamy to those of a narrow-minded “conservative.” Instead, this difference between Bankim and Vidyasagar is best understood in terms of a wider shift taking place regarding the character of Indian agency and Indian integrity vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Bankim’s objections to enacting legislation regarding Hindu polygamy, we detect signs of an incipient nationalist imaginary. In this emergent nationalist imaginary shastra is viewed less as something in and through which to formulate arguments and more as a kind of sacrosanct talisman.

The modern shastric imaginary In the remainder of this chapter I would like to consider the modern shastric imaginary as one way to bring into view forms of Indian modernity that emerged prior to, and outside of, the imperatives of nationalism. Looking at the urban colonial milieu in the period 1820–80 in light of the concept of the modern shastric imaginary immediately directs our attention to pandits such as Vidyasagar, or Ramchandra Vidyavagisha (1785–1845), or Madanmohan Tarkalankar (1817–58). Each of these men worked in concert with a range of bhadralok intellectuals and Europeans, whether to promote native education, to challenge purported social evils, or to think through new paradigms of religious belief and expression. Writing largely in Bengali, they nevertheless worked in and through the lens of shastra. Their goals were to situate and employ ancient and classical Sanskrit literature—the Upanishads, Tantras, Dharmashastras, and Nibandhas—within new patterns of reflection and argumentation. The work of such Sanskrit intellectuals was central to a number of major developments during this period, whether it was the articulation of the Brahmo religion according to Rammohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), the expansion of print journalism by the likes of Vidyasagar, Madanmohan Tarkalankar, and Dwarkanath Vidyabhusan (b. 1820), or the promotion of native female education in tandem with the likes of J. E. D. Bethune. In these and countless other ways, such pandits contributed to the project of social reform during this period. In addition, there were the other pandits to whom I have already referred, men who shared the same colonial space and inhabited the same imaginary, but who may not have shared all the goals of the more reform-minded intellectuals. Here we think of pandits such as Mrityunjay Vidyalankar (1762–1819), Dinabandhu Nyayaratna, and Madhusudan Smritiratna (1832–1900). Though differing from

52 Brian A. Hatcher the more well-known reformers in their vision of society, such men nevertheless operated with some of the same expectations regarding the continued saliency of the shastra, the role of colonial government, the conduct of public debate, and the purpose of organizational activity. These pandits mastered printing and polemic journalism, just as did the reforming pandits. Indeed, the fact that in some notable cases particular pandits moved back and forth across the putative battle lines in these culture wars is one sure indication that all these figures inhabited a common social imaginary. No matter how they responded to particular questions, they all were engaged in navigating through the same “tension-filled space” with shastra as their compass. In general, the first several decades of the nineteenth century were a time of optimism and great organizational activity. Certainly, there were disputes, with significant arguments boiling up over such issues as widow-burning, the status of English versus vernacular education, or the nature of landholding rights. However, earlier histories that tend to pit “conservative” figures such as Radhakant Deb (1784–1867) and the Dharma Sabha against “liberals” such as Rammohan Roy and members of the Brahmo Samaj, miss out on the striking commonalities of material, institutional, and intellectual life during this period. Rather than construing a particular pandit’s use of the shastra as evidence of his bondage to “tradition” or his “modern” skepticism, we should instead attempt to think in terms of how this particular pandit was engaged in actively exploring particular practices and new attitudes within this common imaginary. During this period, the public discourse of reform was predicated on a willingness to think through issues of change and improvement using the norms and strategies of pre-modern Hindu discourse as well as the emerging attitudes and technologies of the colonial arena. The rubric of modern shastric imaginary helps us identify this particular moment and particular confluence of belief and practice among elite (frequently Brahman) intellectuals, all of whom worked to muster scriptural materials to support reasoned arguments for and against socioreligious change. If we hope to bring into view the complex agency of the pandit, we will have to abandon simplistic interpretations that treat the use of shastra among pandits as either cynical or naive. Such judgments are premised on a priori notions of modernity that presume a necessary rejection of something known as tradition, in this case understood to include Sanskrit intellectual habits. Such simplistic interpretations betray their roots in the European discourse of modernity and actually say very little that helps when it comes to thinking about actual Sanskrit pandits. Some scholars have suggested, for instance, that a reformer such as Vidyasagar relied on proof-texts from the shastric archive only when such texts proved convenient for advancing his agenda.29 Such scholars assume that no truly “modern” reformer could be genuinely committed to scriptural texts or the worldview they represent; at best such a figure might use the shastra as a ploy to garner popular support for his views. Equally unhelpful is an approach that looks at someone such as Vidyasagar and concludes that despite his obvious “modernity” in so many other respects (e.g. adoption of print technology or curricular reform) he remained sadly enslaved by a naive or fideistic belief in the truth of the shastra.30

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In the modern shastric imaginary, the Sanskrit intellectual does not merely “appeal to” shastra; he works with shastra, even under (or precisely because of) rapidly changing norms of epistemology, government, and law. This should not be all that surprising. After all, what better way did the Sanskrit intellectual have to address contemporary issues and concerns than by turning to the tools he knew the best, tools like the shastra? These tools had served him well in the past. During this period, pandits retained their confidence in the meaningfulness of shastra; and it was this confidence that allowed many of them to tackle new problems in terms congruent with their lived experience. In this respect it helps to think of the pandit as someone who, in Michael Dodson’s words, acted “knowingly” with respect to his own Sanskrit intellectual tradition.31 Writing about the life and work of a group of Sanskrit intellectuals active in Benares (Varanasi) in the nineteenth century, Dodson argues that such intellectuals chose to engage with modernity in their own, local ways. One such way was by attempting to get a purchase on modern universals such as “reason” by invoking localized Sanskrit concepts, for instance the concept of tarka. This resulted in what Dodson calls “localized particularizations of universal values.”32 Likewise, when thinking of the pandits active in early colonial Calcutta, our goal should be to recover the ways they responded to the evolving colonial landscape by working to transform the “ritualized argumentation” of the shastra into “a new language” that held the promise of producing “an authoritative space from which to speak to a new series of cultural debates.”33 Here it may be helpful to recall Leela Prasad’s study of the moral universe of contemporary Brahman residents of the pilgrimage town of Sringeri. Prasad set out to explore how people living in close proximity to a preeminent Hindu monastic institution (the Sringeri Math) daily enact and articulate their own moral worlds. Would it be true to say that they simply followed an idealized Hindu ethic as embodied in the texts of the Dharmashastras? In fact, what Prasad demonstrates is that while “many times an individual may rhetorically invoke the phrase ‘the shastras say’ to validate a moral position … or to subvert and negate someone else’s position” the term shastra actually “indexes a complexity that is not fully conveyed by the dictionary meanings of the term.”34 In other words, while it makes sense to say that the lives of Sringeri residents are grounded in shastra, we must also acknowledge that this “grounding” is something complex and dynamic. Attending to the rich patterns of this complex moral discourse, Prasad is able to reveal how social and moral selves are articulated through a kind of “moral narration” that is far richer than any “ossified” shastric text.35 In the daily negotiation of precept and practice, shastra stands not as some kind of immovable textual beacon; rather it is a moving, dynamic set of narrative structures and practices that can be differently deployed in differing contexts. Though she does not put it this way, what makes Prasad’s account so valuable is that it encourages us to think about the lived meaning of shastra outside of modern discursive and legal frameworks. She is fully aware that recent scholarship has revealed how British colonial intervention in Hindu law worked to transform the once vibrant and polycentric shastric universe into a codified set of “laws”

54 Brian A. Hatcher amenable to the emerging colonial judicial paradigm.36 But what her study reveals is that despite such textualization of shastra, there remain places and contexts in which we can recover a sense for the lived salience of shastra. We must also bear in mind that the colonial “codification” of “Hindu law” did not happen overnight. As such it makes sense to ask whether it isn’t possible to point to moments in the lived experience of shastra during the early colonial period when the picture is rather similar to what Prasad found in Sringeri; that is, we are looking for a time when shastra named something both valued and fluid, namely the “performance of dharma, the creation of auspiciousness, and compliance with context-specific regulations on conduct.”37 One such moment occurs during what I am calling the modern shastric imaginary, when shastra speaks of a set of strategies and an overall moral repertoire that can be deployed in particular ways to initiate change, challenge dissent, or contest power. In identifying the modern shastric imaginary, our goal is to show just how such shastric practice helped intellectuals negotiate the challenges of colonial life. It would be difficult to say precisely when the modern shastric moment began, just as we cannot assign a hard and fast date to the eventual eclipse of the modern shastric imaginary. Regarding its inception, clearly the rise of British civil and political administration, the advent of European epistemologies, and the arrival in India of new material technologies have to be considered as influential changes associated with this early colonial imaginary. On the other hand, its eventual demise, as I have suggested, is associated with several other factors, not least the ascendancy of new forms of cultural nationalism that looked to shastra not for help in solving problems, but for a sheltering aegis under which to rally the Hindu nation. Whether we ponder the origin or the passing of this imaginary, it is just as important to recognize continuities as it is to identify definitive ruptures.

Surveying the range of pandit activity, c.1820–80 Space is limited, but it is important at this point to provide a brief survey of the range of pandit activity and thought within the modern shastric imaginary. The examples that follow are not meant to exhaustively canvass the range of pandit activity; rather they are meant to illustrate the breadth and persistence of shastric articulations of modernity throughout this period. The goal is less to capture some essential shastric consciousness than it is to suggest a field of enabling practices and shared assumptions centered on shastra. We can begin our survey with Rammohan Roy, not merely because of his reputation as the first great modern reformer. More importantly Rammohan made extensive and sophisticated use of the Sanskrit intellectual tradition, even as he “introduced in the country all the important techniques of agitation, i.e. the Press, the petition, personal pleading and speeches to drive specific issues home.”38 Furthermore, his social and religious projects had profound points of contact with those of other Sanskrit intellectuals during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Prominent in the case of Rammohan would surely be the example of his Vedanta Grantha (1815), an exposition and commentary on the classical Vedantic

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text, the Vedanta Sutras, which served to promote his version of a modern Hindu monotheism. Central to this commentarial project was Rammohan’s revaluation of the classical ideal of the householder (grhastha) as the center of a godly life of rational religion.39 But equally important is a work such as his 1818 Sahamarana vishaya pravartaka o nirvartaka Samvada, which he translated as “A Conference between an Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive” and published in 1821. This work, in which Rammohan inhabits the position of the “opponent” (nirvartaka), is really just an extended shastra vicara, or debate over the shastric validity of widow immolation (sahamarana or sati). As is widely known, Rammohan’s attempts both to move Hindu belief away from the putative polytheism of the Puranas, and to correct what he took to be social evils, both occasioned stiff opposition from contemporary intellectuals. As the work on sahamarana illustrates so effectively, these debates were inspired—and framed—by reflection on the shastra. It may be Rammohan in his role as opponent to widow immolation who asserts that it is the “Shastras, and the reasonings connected with them” that “enable us to discriminate right and wrong,” but this is a claim that both sides in the debate would have agreed upon.40 What is at issue, then, is not a referendum on the utility or validity of Hindu scripture. Quite the contrary, in a work such as Sahamarana vishaya we are witness to the application of shastra to contemporary concerns. In order to see this, it helps to consider one of Rammohan’s most celebrated opponents in his debates over image worship, namely Mrityunjay Vidyalankara. Mrityunjay had worked with William Carey and the Serampore Baptists. He published several works in association with the British administration of the newly founded College of Fort William. While Mrityunjay was a Sanskrit pandit, and while he opposed Rammohan’s attempt to repudiate image worship, it would be somewhat misleading to view him as more “traditional” than Rammohan or his associates. Rather, Mrityunjay participated in—and helped to shape—the same colonial imaginary as Rammohan. We should recall that while Mrityunjay differed with Rammohan over theology, when it came to the question of sahamarana, Mrityunjay employed the same approach as Rammohan: he churned the shastra (shastra-manthana) in search of evidence to help him arrive at a conclusion. In the end, his reading of the major legal sources led him to conclude that immolation was not in fact the best alternative for a woman. He argued that women who performed the rite of sahamarana were in fact not doing it to fulfill shastric injunction, but merely out of personal choice.41 Typecasting Mrityunjay as a “traditional” pandit leaves us no way to account for what is so obviously modern about his work; after all, here was a pandit who adopted the mechanisms of print technology and is remembered even today as one of the first people to give shape to modern Bengali prose. Mrityunjay may have faulted the quality of Rammohan’s scriptural exegesis, and Rammohan may have chided Mrityunjay for too heavy a reliance on Sanskrit vocabulary, but both men wielded the tools of shastric learning to negotiate a new set of challenges. Another example of a Sanskrit intellectual who opposed the reforms of Rammohan and the Brahmos, but who nevertheless clearly inhabited the same

56 Brian A. Hatcher imaginary, can be found in Nandakumar Kaviratna. Nandakumar was the author of several shastric works dedicated to legal questions, such as Vivadabhangarnava (1843), Vyavastha Sarvasva (1858), and Sandeha Nirasana (1863). But alongside such scholarly work, which we might tend to associate with a “traditional” pandit, Nandakumara also edited a widely read popular journal promoting his vision of dharmic order, the Nityadharmanuranjika. In the 1850s Nandakumara turned his attention from attacking the Brahmos to refuting Vidyasagar’s widow marriage proposal.42 He may have presented himself as preserving something ancient and static, but Nandakumara, like Mrityunjay, was also modern in his technical and strategic approach to addressing change. Like Rammohan, the thought worlds and lived habits of men such as Nandakumara and Mrityunjay were shaped by the sorts of intellectual praxis associated with traditional shastra—even as they were shaped by emerging colonial practices such as tutoring Europeans, garnering government patronage, establishing printing presses, editing periodicals, and debating within the urban public sphere. When we are no longer hamstrung by the need to slot specific individuals into prefabricated ideological categories such as “conservative” and “progressive” we are in fact freed to see with more clarity a wide range of behavior that is characteristic of the early colonial intellectual milieu. We come to form what is hopefully a more accurate and complete picture of the period. Thus, for Rammohan’s era, we do not find pandits lined up against reformers. Rather, we find a range of pandits active in a dynamic metropolitan arena. Some examples will hopefully illustrate this point. While we are unfortunately limited in the information we can retrieve about such activities, if we focus on the larger picture of shastric-oriented practice we can see the emerging outlines of the imaginary. Gadadhar Tarkavagish taught in the Bengali department of the College of Fort William from 1805 to 1830; no doubt William Carey invited him there. Gadadhar’s son Lakshminarayan Nyayalankar served as librarian at the Calcutta Sanskrit College from 1824 to 1831.43 He was later appointed to the position of judge-pandit in Purniya District Court, where he served for at least ten years.44 At the same time, Lakshminarayan was a “celebrated scholar.”45 Among the many editions he published in the area of Hindu law, one finds the Dayatattva and Vyavaharatattva of Raghunandan (published in 1828), the Dayabhaga of Jimutavahana with the commentary of Shrikrishna Tarkalankar and the Mitakshara of Vijnaneshvar (both published in 1829). But his learning radiated in other directions, too, as indicated by an 1830 edition of the Hitopadesha (in Bengali and English), the Kavirahasyam of Halayudha (1752 Saka), and even a dictionary of Persian legal terminology, the Vyavahara-vichara-shabdabhidhana (from 1838). We are also told that before moving to Purniya to take up his position as judge-pandit, Lakshminarayan was involved in the publication of a Bengali periodical entitled Shastra-prakasha.46 The title speaks to the desire to use the shastra to “shed light” (as it were) on contemporary life in Calcutta. Overall we can say that Lakshminarayan appears to have clung to the identity and praxis of a Sanskrit pandit even while channeling his mastery of shastra in new directions.

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The career of Kamalakanta Vidyalankar (d. 1843) reveals similar patterns, even if his is a somewhat less impressive curriculum vitae. We first come upon Kamalakanta teaching Sanskrit from his own chatushpathi within the Calcutta city limits. He was by no means unique in this regard, as we know of other pandits who had translated the traditional village school (tol or chatushpathi) into the urban milieu.47 In the course of things, Kamalakanta must have caught the eye of the British, for he was subsequently hired to teach Rhetoric (alamkara) at the Calcutta Sanskrit College. Like Lakshminarayan he then moved (in 1827) to assume the position of judge-pandit in Midnapur, where his shastric mastery was yoked to the work of the British court. However, sometime in 1837 he joined up with James Prinsep and began to assist the latter with his work on ancient epigraphy. This would have represented a rather new outlet for Kamalakanta’s skills as a pandit, but it was clearly one he found worthwhile. For the next four years he was employed as pandit at the Asiatic Society, where he helped Prinsep publish newly discovered inscriptions. In the end this work led him back to the Sanskrit College, where he was hired into the newly created department of Archeology (puratattva) in 1842. This busy intellectual and professional trajectory suggests that Kamalakanta’s shastric fluency equipped him well for negotiating a host of new professional opportunities. His example alone is enough to belie the stereotype of the pandit as inflexible and “tradition-bound.” As one further example from this same period, we might consider Kashinath Tarkapanchanan (d. 1851), who had early on worked with William Carey at the College of Fort William. As was true of so many of these pandits, Kashinath was recruited to teach at the Sanskrit College, where he taught Law (smriti) beginning in 1825. Two years later he was appointed judge-pandit for the 24 Parganas. For some unknown reason, Kashinath was dismissed from that post in 1831—an important reminder, perhaps, that navigating new professional and political opportunities was neither easy nor straightforward. All these career moves and professional challenges entailed certain costs, something we had less opportunity to note in the previous case of Kamalakanta. Fortunately for Kashinath, by the 1840s enrollment at the Sanskrit College had increased enough to warrant the addition of new instructors. In 1847 he returned to the college to teach Grammar (vyakarana).48 Further changes took place at the college during Vidyasagar’s tenure there, and this may explain why Kashinath was next appointed librarian in 1851. He held this position for only a matter of months before dying later that year. Having begun his career under the tutelage of William Carey, and ended it during the reforms of Sanskrit education undertaken by Vidyasagar, Kashinath reminds us once again of the complex negotiations and institutional entanglements that helped shape the modern shastric imaginary. The picture that emerges by the 1830s and 1840s is one in which a disparate group of Sanskrit intellectuals have gravitated to Calcutta, where they have come into contact with, and learned the techniques promulgated within, the colonial sphere of education, administration, law, and journalism. We have no need to lump pandits such as Lakshminarayan, Kamalakanta, and Kashinath into a single mold to be able to say that they nevertheless shared an obvious willingness to allow

58 Brian A. Hatcher the practical imperatives of life in this colonial sphere to color and shape the character of their thought, work, and writings. What we do not (and may never be able to) know, given the paucity of sources and the pandit’s notorious silence on matters autobiographical, is whether that willingness reflected a keen affinity with the colonizer’s project, a simple response to the need for employment, or a grudging acceptance of the fact that there was no getting around British intervention in Indian life. The fact of Kashinath’s termination from the post of judge-pandit should remind us that the paths taken by such pandits were not without pitfalls, aggravations, unanswerable allegations, and bitter disappointments. The sheer fact of colonial power should only further remind us just what “negotiating” this terrain actually meant for individual pandits. Nevertheless, the reality of colonial rule should also not tempt us into reading such lives as examples of either capitulation or defiance. If anything, both lived responses—the desire to find a way ahead and the instinct for self-preservation—are captured by the word “negotiation.” Nor is it necessary, for the purposes of fleshing out the modern shastric imaginary, to be able to plumb the consciousness of the pandit. It is enough to establish the fact that such men shared an ability and willingness to translate their shastric talents into new and diverse undertakings. As such, whether we think of Rammohan or Mrityunjay, Lakshminarayan or Kashinath, what we find are a number of local actors engaged in the task of harnessing the cultural resource of shastra to a variety of new tasks, often directly structured by the changing technological and institutional opportunities around them. To borrow a metaphor deployed by one such intellectual, shastra was for them the enlivening spirit that could infuse and empower the technologies and institutions of colonial India, just as steam can set in motion the “inert matter” of an iron steam engine.49 It is this total field of moral conviction, technical engagement, and lived intellectual praxis—this shastric imaginary—that helps make sense of Rammohan’s friend and colleague, Ramchandra Vidyavagisha. More truly a pandit than Rammohan, Ramchandra was Rammohan’s right-hand man.50 He actively applied his mastery of shastric sources to promoting the cause of religious reform. Sifting through the ancient Upanishads for proofs of Brahmo monotheism, he published several sermons that reveal his penchant for providing a learned spiritual gloss to these ancient texts. These sermons, whether delivered before the Brahmo Samaj (est. 1828) or the Tattvabodhini Sabha (est. 1839), are a fine example of a Sanskrit pandit employing the age-old techniques of exegesis and commentary in the service of a new theological agenda. For instance, a typical sermon might take as its launching point a short Sanskrit passage such as yasmin loka nihita lokinashcha (“in whom are placed the worlds and their inhabitants”) from the Mundaka Upanishad. This proof text then provides the occasion for Ramchandra to address the omnipresence of the supreme self (paramatman). This in turn provides an opportunity for him to chastise those who mistakenly worship god in physical objects. In a move that is characteristic of the modern shastric imaginary, Ramacandra would often then assert that his own monotheistic-cum-unitarian reading of the Upanishads was supported not just by shastra but also by reason (yukti) and empirical evidence (pratyaksha).51

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This habit of culling shastric sources for wisdom that is then applied to issues arising in the colonial context is central to the work of a number of Ramchandra’s contemporaries. We notice it especially in the discourses read before the Tattvabodhini Sabha in its inaugural year, 1839–40. While the printed format of these discourses betrays all the hallmarks of colonial print technology and Western publishing, the content of the discourses reveals the degree to which this new voluntary association coupled the tools of shastric-based reflection to the engine of the printing press in order to advance its scriptural agenda. Indeed, the opening words of the first discourse published by the Tattvabodhini Sabha 1841 invoke the Vedanta Shastra as one definitive—though not exclusive—source for knowledge of the Supreme Lord.52 Around this same period, the conservative Bengali periodical Samachar Chandrika, under the guidance of Bhavanicharan Bandyopadhyay, brought out published versions of the major texts of Dharmashastras and the tattvas of Raghunandan Bhattacarya. Unlike British Orientalist editions of legal and other Sanskrit literature, the Samachar Chandrika editions were clearly intended for local consumption; their destination was not the offices of administrators, barristers, and judges but the homes of well-to-do, literate bhadralok intellectuals.53 Rather than construing the publication of these so-called “traditional” legal texts as an index of Hindu “conservatism” it makes far more sense to think of them as products of the modern shastric imaginary. In this light, what the editors at Samachar Chandrika hoped to provide were the kinds of intellectual tools they thought might be useful for Hindus who were attempting to negotiate new modes of social life and employment. That this was the case may be seen from the fact that when Vidyasagar published his first tract in support of Hindu widow marriage in 1855, several of his quotations from the legal literature were drawn from these Samachar Chandrika editions. As a product of the new British Sanskrit educational program, and being closely affiliated with the Calcutta Sanskrit College, Vidyasagar was aware of a wide range of manuscript and printed editions of such legal literature. The Sanskrit College library would have provided ample source texts. That he nevertheless chose to cite the Samachar Chandrika editions suggests he was keenly aware that such resources were circulating among the very sorts of readers he hoped to address: educated, shastric-oriented intellectuals. In this respect, his tracts on widow marriage provide concrete evidence of how his own intellectual practice both shaped, and was shaped by, the dynamics of the modern shastric imaginary. Vidyasagar’s first tract on widow marriage appeared in January1855 and almost immediately generated a number of replies; pandits from Calcutta and Serampore began to weigh in on the issue. The very haste with which their rejoinders were composed and published reveals how easily they negotiated both the shastric and the technical challenges. Obviously the interpretation of shastra was their bread and butter. But they seem to have been equally adept at moving their shastric arguments on to the printed page and getting their tracts disseminated to the colonial reading public. They could do so because just as in the case with Rammohan’s opponents, these pandits participated in the same emerging public sphere. They read print

60 Brian A. Hatcher periodicals, they paid attention to the latest government initiatives, and they knew how to work a printing press (or they knew people who did). In fact, it would be wrong to suggest that it was Vidyasagar’s tracts that first brought the debate over widow marriage into the realm of print. As early as 1846, 12 pandits associated with the Dharma Sabha had published a short printed work in which they delivered the opinion (vyavastha) that widow marriage was not authorized by the shastra. This would suggest that by the time Vidyasagar went to press, such tools—not just shastric mastery but the ability to make use of emerging print resources—were easily put to use by a range of actors. Today’s archives are replete with the various printed books and pamphlets written in opposition to Vidyasagar and published by pandits and other like-minded intellectuals: men such as Dinabandhu Nyayaratna, Kalidas Maitra, Nandakumar Kaviratna, and Padmalochan Nyayaratna. When one plunges into the text of Vidyasagar’s Hindu Widow Marriage, two impressions are inescapable. The first is that what one is reading is in fact a species of modern-day Sanskrit commentary or legal digest (nibandha). While the work is widely understood to represent the epitome of a modern social reform tract, even a brief survey of its contents, organization, and argument reveals that the work shares far more with pre-modern shastric literature than it does with the literature of so-called “modern” reform.54 Second, Vidyasagar’s tract reminds us of the degree to which the urban sphere of public debate was indeed the kind of “tension-filled space” invoked by Norbert Peabody. We must strenuously resist the temptation to read a tract like this as an isolated work of genius; to the contrary, it is predicated on the prior existence of sustained contention over this one shastric issue. The issue of widow marriage was not something Vidyasagar plucked from the sky in a moment of discovery. This was a thorny issue that had been tackled on and off since at least the eighteenth century. We have already noted that the Dharma Sabha published a ruling on the matter almost a decade before Vidyasagar. Such persistent shastric debate, coupled with the material techniques of print-culture and the possibilities for shaping new government policy are what frame the modern shastric imaginary. This suggests that if we tend to remember the work of someone such as Vidyasagar, it is really because of his superior negotiation of this imaginary than it is due to his being somehow sui generis. Certain pandits, such as Vidyasagar, seem to have had a particular gift for enhancing the practice of modern shastric debate. Through their canny use of Sanskrit sources, their sophisticated understanding of the emerging colonial idioms of reason and historical proof, and their greater facility with print technology, such figures were able to produce work with both immediate and long-term resonances. Looking at Vidyasagar’s tracts one can see that they are qualitatively different from those produced by many of his opponents. Vidyasagar stands out for his commitment to clear and accurate typesetting, his use of such tools as footnotes, and his willingness to refer to European scholarship (he quotes from an 1835 printed edition of Rajatarangini and from the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal). But this is not to say that Vidyasagar was more “modern” than other pandits. For instance, his colleagues Taranath Tarkavachaspati (d. 1885) and Bharatchandra

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Shiromani (d. 1878) assisted him greatly in the task of locating and explaining essential proof texts from the shastra. Both of these men themselves had distinguished careers as editors of Sanskrit texts and compilers of important reference works, such as Taranath’s massive dictionary, the Vachaspatyam. The very fact that a man such as Taranath would later become a bitter opponent of Vidyasagar over the issue of high-caste polygamy only reinforces the point that what accounts for the modern shastric imaginary is neither a “progressive” nor a “conservative” religious agenda, but a commitment to putting the shastra into play in the colonial public sphere.55 The shastric imaginary therefore represents the carrying forward of norms of reading, interpretation, and debate that had long shaped pandit practice. Put differently, during the period from 1820 to 1880 the shastra remained “good to think.” This explains, for instance, Padmalochan Nyayaratna’s decision to publish his instructions to devoted wives on the basis of a careful reading of many shastras; or his attempt to reconcile Upanishadic Vedanta with the common Hindu practice of image worship.56 Interestingly, both projects seem to be closely related to the vision of Padmalochan’s patron, the Maharaja of Burdwan. As a progressive landlord, or zamindar, the Maharaja tended to be friendly with modernist Brahmos and men such as Vidyasagar. But, at the same time, he was heavily invested in projects aimed at carrying forward the Hindu shastric imaginary, as evidenced by his funding of a massive Mahabharata publication project that enlisted dozens of local pandits. Likewise, in continuity with earlier eras, the production and issuing of formal shastric rulings (vyavastha) persisted throughout this period, though with one major difference: pandits were now assisted by the printing press. In 1833 the Samachar Chandrika published a ruling on the question of what norms of respect apply between low-caste devotees and Brahmans in the context of Vaishnava worship. In 1855 we find a compendium of rulings published by Madhsudan Vidyavachaspati covering issues of caste conduct, death, impurity, atonement, and inheritance (Smarta vyavastharnava). In 1874, Vidyasagar’s colleague Bharatchandra Shiromani addressed himself to issues surrounding the behavior of renunciants in his Yogi-samskara-vyavastha. At the same time, pandits such as Vrajanath Vidyaratna of Nadia were busily compiling shastric arguments for the divinity of Chaitanya and the need to follow the norms and practices of the Vedic sages. In other words, shastra remained a medium and a source for reflection throughout this period.

Conclusion While I could go further in inventorying the range of individuals and projects that fall within the modern shastric imaginary, it is my hope that the concept will in fact motivate others to begin collecting examples of such cultural activity from this period. For present purposes, the examples I have provided should at least illustrate the point that from the early nineteenth century until well into its final quarter, significant work was being done in and with the shastra by way of coming to terms with the demands and promises of the emerging colonial public sphere. To the Sanskrit pandits and intellectuals discussed here, the shastra represented many

62 Brian A. Hatcher things: a sophisticated set of structuring principles through which to explore legal, moral, religious, and social problems; a flexible tool for establishing intellectual linkages with new epistemologies or disciplines; and a revered matrix of practices that could also be invoked to resist or redirect change. Within the modern shastric imaginary a host of colonial pandits demonstrated in varying ways their respect for, mastery of, and submission to, the shastra as ideal and as lived practice. The full-flowering of this imaginary can be seen in a figure such as Haraprasad Shastri (d. 1931), scion of a respected pandit family, who trained as a pandit but who also went on in the last decades of the nineteenth century to earn acclaim as a scholar-academician. Ironically, Haraprasad’s career illustrates one factor in the demise of the shastric imaginary, insofar as in him we witness how certain aspects of the shastric imaginary developed into a mode of academic scholarship increasingly recognized (and given increased institutional authority) in India just as in Europe and North America. The transformation of the pandit into university professional necessarily brought with it a change in the way shastra could and would be invoked. Here we are able to see how institutional forces acted upon the subjectivity of the pandit in such a way that an earlier modernity in which shastric reasoning operated on and against the norms of historical-critical scholarship gave way to another modernity, the rationality of which required a more disciplined renunciation or “bracketing” of the prior claims of shastra. One further factor that helped account for the eventual eclipse of shastric modernity was the somewhat relentless demotion or marginalization of the pandit in colonial discourse. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, this was a process in which British colonizers and native intellectuals each had a part to play.57 Beginning already with the denunciation of the purportedly fraudulent or inscrutable pandit by early administrators such as Jones and Colebrooke, the negative stereotype of the pandit was reinforced by the increasing hegemony of European Orientalist scholarship. A sure sign that the pandit and the shastra were becoming obsolete came with the removal of judge-pandits from the law courts after 1864. It is worth remembering that this slow process of downgrading the authority of the pandit, as well as utility of the shastra, was underway during the same era that witnessed the flowering of shastric modernity. This only underscores the tense, negotiated, and ultimately transient nature of this particular manifestation of South Asian modernity. A final, crucial role in the passing of the shastric imaginary was played by those pandits who sought to resist the increasing authority of British rule and the hegemony of European reason by making shastra into something of a fetish. As much as the concerns of the modern shastric imaginary helped pave the way for a recovery of national (or at least Hindu) pride, we must recognize that pandits also assisted in the closing of the shastric mind. The conversion of shastra from intellectual tool to cultural token can be seen rather clearly in the work of a figure such as Shashadhar Tarkachudamani (d. 1928) as well as in the work of groups from the 1880s and 1890s, such as the Bharatvarshiya Arya Dharma Pracharini Sabha (BADPS) and the Dharma Mandali, both of which were formed to protect the sanctity of “Sanatana” Hinduism.58 Shashadhar’s conviction that no Westerner

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(or Western-educated Indian) could ever grasp the “true essence” (prakrita marma) of the Vedas stands in stark contrast to the conviction of earlier pandits for whom shastric understanding had not been so directly linked to nationalist prerogatives. It was Shashadhar who in 1885 took to task his fellow countryman, Romeshchunder Dutt (1848–1909), for attempting to translate the Rig Veda into English. Shashadhar blamed Dutt for adopting the “flawed” epistemology of the West. According to Shashadhar, Westerners would always fail to misread the Veda because they could never understand the unique experience (anubhuti) that supported these ancient hymns. That this moment marked the passing of the earlier imaginary can be seen from the fact that it was Haraprasad Shastri who initially rose to Dutt’s defense. For Haraprasad, what Dutt had attempted was neither new nor necessarily problematic. It made perfect sense within the earlier shastric imaginary so familiar to Haraprasad. Shashadhar responded by proclaiming that Haraprasad was little more than a cultural imitator, who aped the standards of Western scholarship.59 From here, the debate descended into satire and invective. But the upshot was clear. For Shashadhar, shastra was a private concern of the Hindu, partaking of the “inner” world of the nation in much the way Partha Chatterjee has characterized the nationalist imaginary.60 How different this attitude is from the era of Rammohan or Vidyasagar (or even their opponents), when the doors of shastra were open to the wider colonial world. In Shashadhar, and the emergent nationalist imaginary, a curtain is drawn over Sanskrit’s ineffable character. Before long, all that would be left for Sanskrit, as Ramaswamy has shown, would be to take up a symbolic role, as it became the marker of India’s unique cultural essence.61 No longer considered good to think with, shastra became something simply to revere.

Notes * I would like to acknowledge that work on this chapter was supported by a Senior Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, which supported research in India and the United Kingdom during 2006–07. 1 K. P. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 43. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 The English word pandit (or pundit) derives from the Sanskrit adjective, pandita, “learned, wise.” On pandits generally, see B. A. Hatcher, “Pandit,” in K. A. Jacobsen, ed., Encyclopedia of Hinduism, vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 4 See Ewing, Arguing Sainthood, part one: “The Tradition-Modernity Dichotomy as Hegemonic Discourse,” from which the quote is taken that opens this chapter. The quote continues by suggesting that, in much post-colonial theory, the subject has two equally distorted/distorting options: “Either she accepts that she has been worshipping ‘old bones’ and gives it up in favor of some form of modernity or she clings to her ‘tradition’ … But if she resists in this fashion, hers becomes a practice that has passed through the Western Imaginary and has been reconstituted as an ideological position in the modern world—it has become ‘tradition.’” (43). 5 For works that explore the problem of the colonial pandit, see R. Rocher, “Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the Marginalization of Indian Pandits,” in B. Kellner et al., eds., Pramanakirti (Vienna: University of Vienna, 2007), 237–256; M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770–1880 (New York: Palgrave

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Macmillan, 2007); and B. A. Hatcher, “What’s Become of the Pandit? Rethinking the History of Sanskrit Scholars in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 39, 3 (2005): 683–723. N. Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 170. Compare the view of modern Indian public culture articulated by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, who speak of “an arena of cultural contestation in which modernity can become a diversely appropriated experience.” See their essay “Public Modernity in India,” in C. Breckenridge, ed., Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995), 5. Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity, 3. On the chemical analogy, see the Introduction to B. A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Whenever possible I will provide dates for the individuals I discuss, but for some pandits accurate dates are not available. On shastra, see S. Pollock, “The Idea of Sastra in Traditional India,” in A. Dallapiccola, et al., eds., Shastric Traditions in Indian Arts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989), 17–26. For a new annotated translation of this work, see B. A. Hatcher, trans., Hindu Widow Marriage: An Epochal Work on Social Reform from Colonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). As an alternative, I have elsewhere referred to “shastric modernity.” See B. A. Hatcher, “Sastric Modernity: Mediating Sastric Knowledge in Colonial Bengal,” in K. Bandyopadyay, ed., Modernities in Asian Perspective: Polity, Society, Culture, Economy (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2010). What initially drew me to Taylor was his emphasis that modernity be approached in the plural rather than the singular. For Taylor, the key to understanding the emergence of “multiple modernities” lies in investigating “the divergent social imaginaries involved.” See C. Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 91. Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 91. The concept of the imaginary (French, imaginaire) can be traced to French Marxists and historians of the Annales school; distant resonances may be heard in Durkheim’s comments on “collective representations.” See S. Collins, Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 58–73. See also R. Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories” in D. LaCapra and S. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 13–46. Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 107. Ibid., 106. On this theme, see C. A. Bayly, “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30,” Modern Intellectual History 4, 1 (2007): 25–41. Identification of a liberal imaginary is supported by the work of Andrew Satori, who contrasts the “liberal ideological paradigm” of the early colonial Bengal with the “culturalist paradigm” that begins to emerge after 1870. See his Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008). See J. J. Lipner, transl., Anandamath, or the Sacred Brotherhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). I take this phrase from the subtitle of Loknath Basu, Hindu dharma marma (Calcutta: Sucharu Press, 1856). The contrast between an earlier “inchoate” and a later “unified” Hinduism is taken from comments made by Sumit Sarkar in “Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva,” in D. Ludden, ed., Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the

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Politics of Democracy in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), 270–294. In thinking about Basu’s Hindu Dharma Marma (see previous note), Sarkar suggests that by relying on shastric notions of adhikara-bheda, and by avoiding “developed enemy images” of Muslims and Christians, Basu achieves a more flexible view of religion and society than is found in nationalist visions of Hinduism. However, it is probably worth noting that the preface to Hindu Dharma Marma does invoke the presence of “foreign” religions such as Islam and the proselytizing work of Christian missionaries. In this respect, one can glimpse even in Hindu Dharma Marma the seeds of later nationalist rhetoric. But it remains true that for Basu shastra provides the principal framework and the tools for thinking about Indian society and religion. A. Sen, Vidyasagar and his Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Riddhi, 1977), 73. Cf. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 132. See also Chatterjee’s comment that “Vidyasagar’s own attempts at social reform … placed great reliance upon liberal backing by the colonial government” in ibid., 25. On this period, see B. A. Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 4. B. A. Hatcher, “Great Men Waking: Paradigms in the Historiography of the Bengal Renaissance,” in S. Bandyopadhyay, ed., Bengal: Rethinking History: Essays in Historiography (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 135–163. Sartori identifies a number of attitudinal changes among Bengali intellectuals marking the demise of the earlier liberal paradigm, such as a “deepening sense of marginalization, subordination, dehumanization, and degradation … working to produce a sense of fragility at the heart of Bengali liberalism.” See his Bengal in Global Concept History, 107. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 132. S. Ramaswamy, “Sanskrit for the Nation,” Modern Asian Studies 33, 2 (1999): 339. See Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bankim rachanavali, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1986), 318–319. This is the tenor of Asok Sen’s otherwise insightful reading of Vidyasagar’s widow marriage campaign. Sen notes Vidyasagar’s arguments had a “distinct tone of reason” and adds that he “attempted to tap the root of popular sentiment” by appealing to shastra. See his Vidyasagar and his Elusive Milestones, 75. Elsewhere Sen remarks that the job of finding scriptural sanctions presented a “purely intellectual challenge,” thus suggesting Vidyasagar evinced little real commitment to shastra, in ibid., 73. But Bankimchandra was certain Vidyasagar harbored a firm belief in shastra, even though Bankim questioned Vidyasagar’s strategy. See Bankim rachanavali, vol. 2, 318. On this point, Partha Chatterjee’s interpretation is inadequate: “Vidyasagar, despite his professed disregard for the sanctity or reasonableness of the shastra, felt compelled to look for scriptural support for his programmes.” See his The Nation and its Fragments, 25. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture, 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 182. L. Prasad, Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 99. Ibid., 16. See ibid., 111. Ibid., 228. Quoting from Chittabrata Palit, ‘George Thompson and the Birth of Political Organization in Bengal,’ in his New Viewpoints on Nineteenth Century Bengal, (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1980), 76. See Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 202.

66 Brian A. Hatcher 40 Quoting from “Conference between an Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive,” in English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy (Allahabad: Panini Office, 1906), 330; the corresponding passage in Bengali appears in Rammohan-rachanavali, ed. Ajitkumar Ghosh (Calcutta: Haraph Prakashani, 1973), 174. 41 For helpful discussions of Mrityunjay’s opinions on sati, see Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay’s foreword to Pandit Mrityunjay Vidyalankar Prabandhavali, ed. Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1995), xviii; and Satyavati Giri, “Satidaha pratha nibarane Mrityunjayer bhumika,” in Mrityunjay Vidyalankar Prabandhavali, 73. 42 On the latter, see Nandakumar Kaviratna, Vaidhavya dharmodaya (1857), which was published from his own Nityadharmanuranjika Press. 43 Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay, Kalikata Samskrita kalejer itihas, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Sanskrit College, 1948), 41–42. The same pandit is identified as Lakshminarayan Sarasvati by J. D. M. Derrett in “British as Patrons of the Shastra,” reprinted in his Religion, Law and the State in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1968 orig.]). 44 See Samachar Darpan (29 February 1840): “For roughly the past 10 years, Pandit Lakshminarayan Nyayalankar has lived in Purniya where he has carried out the three tasks of scholar [panditya], writer [munsephi] and judge [sadar amani]. Moreover, while he has impartially resolved many civil and criminal cases, he has received a salary only for his work as judge.” Quoted in Kalikata Samskrita kalejera itihasa, vol. 1, 41 (my translation). 45 D. C. Bhattacharya, “The Sraddhasagara of Kulluka Bhatta (a spurious work),” Indian Historical Quarterly 27 (1951): 109. 46 Kalikata Samskrita kalejera itihasa, vol. 1, 42. 47 For example, the celebrated Raghumani Vidyabhusana (d. 1818) ran a chatushpathi on Chitpur Road in north Calcutta. 48 Kalikata Samskrita kalejera itihasa, vol. 1, 13. 49 The metaphor is originally deployed by Loknath Basu to illustrate how the immortal self (atman) enlivens and activates material nature; see Hindu Dharma Marma, 6. 50 Ramchandra came from a family in Palpara about 30 miles north of Calcutta. His father was a pandit, Lakshminarayan Tarkabhushan. Ramchandra’s eldest brother renounced the world to become Hariharananda Tirthaswami, whom Rammohan later came to know. Another of Ramchandra’s brothers taught as a pandit at a school in their village. It was Ramchandra who came to Calcutta and began his career as the man who replaced Kashinath Tarkapanchanan at the Sanskrit College when the latter left in 1827 to become a judge-pandit. Sadly, like Kashinath (mentioned above) Ramchandra would later suffer the humiliation of being terminated from an official teaching post under dubious circumstances. For more on Ramchandra, see Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 206–211. 51 See Ramchandra’s first sermon, printed in Parameshvarer upasanavisaye prathama vyakhyana avadhi dvadasha vyakhyana paryanta (Calcutta: Prajna Press, 1836), 1–5. 52 See Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, 141. 53 One index of the local audience intended by these works is that unlike printed editions of Manu or Kubera that were beginning to circulate through the direct support of British administrators, the Samachar Chandrika editions were printed to mimic pre-modern handwritten manuscripts; from font to paper to size and textual layout these works register visually as “punthis” not as printed books. 54 I develop this at length in my introduction to Hindu Widow Marriage. 55 See Taranath Tarkavachaspati, Bahuvivahavada (Calcutta: Kavyaprakash Press, 1872). 56 On the former theme, see Padmalochan Nyayaratna, Pativratopadesha (1861); on the latter see his Vidanmanoranjini (1878), which includes printed testimonials in Sanskrit (with Bengali translations), from the prominent Calcuttan Radhakant Deb, Maharaja Mahtab Chand of Burdwan, and various pandits associated with Navadvip. This diverse collection bears witness to the fact that so-called “traditional” pandits, “conservatives”

Pandits at work: the modern shastric imaginary

57 58 59 60 61

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(e.g. Radhakant) and “progressives” (e.g. Mahtab Chand) were all united in their respect for shastric mastery. See Hatcher, “What’s Become of the Pandit?” For some background on Sasadhar, see A. P. Sen, Hindu Revivalism in Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 225–236. Sen reproduces original documents outlining the goals of the BADPS and the Dharma Mandali in Appendices B and C (part 1). Sartori comments on Bankimchandra’s similar denunciation of the “liberal subjectivity” of the Bengali intellectual who adopts Western norms. See his Bengal in Global Concept History, 108. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments. Ramaswamy, “Sanskrit for the Nation,” 377.

3

Knowledge in context Raja Shivaprasad as hybrid intellectual and people’s educator Ulrike Stark

In February 1858, on the eve of his retirement, Benares Commissioner Henry Carre Tucker wrote a testimonial for his former munshi (secretary, clerk) at the Benares agency. Babu Shivaprasad, asserted Tucker, was a man whose “whole heart is in the work of education and improving his fellow countrymen”; he had done more for the cause than “any other individual.” Tucker’s characterization of his Indian subordinate was succinct and telling: “He is much more European in his ideas and feelings than any other native I know and I have derived both pleasure and instruction from his conversation. He is most thoroughly honest and truthful, and really acts from principle.”1 The year before, the man depicted here as the epitome of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s anglicized elite intermediary had received similar praise from the Revd James Long of the Church Missionary Society, whose review of the Bengali publishing trade featured a list of 41 Hindi and Urdu works by Shivaprasad, “as an encouragement to Bengali Authors, and an illustration of what even one individual can effect in the case of vernacular literature by supplying mental pabulum to tens of thousands.” Long added: “The Author is a good Sanscrit Scholar, we have no one Bengalee Author so prolific.”2 With their emphasis on vernacular education and Indian improvement, these two assessments provide a useful entry point into a discussion of the “modernity” of Indian educator and man of letters Babu, later Raja, Shivaprasad of Benares (1823–95). Shivaprasad, along with Muslim reformer Syed Ahmed Khan and Hindi litterateur Bharatendu Harishchandra, represented a new type of public intellectual who dominated public discourse in colonial North India after 1857. A “self-created man of publicity,”3 he deftly used modern print media and public-sphere institutions to promote his various agendas as government official, vernacular author, cultural broker, and self-styled politician. A polarizing figure, he is best remembered as a vociferous participant in the highly charged Hindi-Urdu debate, as the author of the first modern history of India written in Hindi, and as a prominent opponent of the Indian National Congress. This chapter is concerned with two lesser-known aspects of Shivaprasad’s multifaceted career: his engagement with Sanskrit learning and his professional life as a people’s educator. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first explores the critical interventions of a “modern” Sanskrit scholar in the contested terrain of nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholarship. How did new “hybrid” intellectuals, whose epistemic horizon

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spanned Indian and European knowledge, position themselves in a field occupied by traditional pandits and European Orientalists? How did they claim their place in circuits of intellectual exchange and lend authority to their voice? The category of “hybridity” as used here does not merely denote an ambivalent location along the East-West axis of epistemic systems. Rather, I view hybridity as a multilayered, dynamic space that encompasses the ways that nineteenth-century intellectuals in North India inhabited, and navigated, the literary-cultural domains of Sanskrit and Persian, and the politicized vernacular field of Hindi and Urdu. Shifting the focus from the urban to the rural context, the second section explores the pedagogical agenda of an Indian pioneer of popular education, who strove—and struggled—to disseminate Western “useful” knowledge at the grassroots level. A key player in vernacular education, publicly identified with the colonial apparatus, Shivaprasad occupied an uneasy mediating position. In outlining the tensions underlying his endeavor to bring scientific rationalism to rural India, this section seeks to emphasize the importance of the mundane domains of work, lived practice, and everyday experience in shaping visions of modernity. The urban-rural polarity collapses in the final section, which investigates Shivaprasad’s conflicted vision of a national language for modern India. In juxtaposing the cosmopolitan gentleman-scholar and the vernacular grassroots educator, I argue for a more closely contextualized approach to a colonial intellectual’s complex life that resists the conventional tradition/modernity binary. To situate this diversely erudite, polyglot intellectual within the rapidly changing sociocultural milieu of his time, let me begin with a brief sketch of his life. Shivaprasad belonged to a respectable Jain family connected with the Jagat Seths, the great merchant-bankers of eighteenth-century Bengal. His illustrious ancestry was essential to his self-image, while it also facilitated his career in colonial service. Despite his family’s straitened circumstances, he received a gentleman’s education. He was privately taught Sanskrit and Persian, before he enrolled in the Persian department of Benares Sanskrit College in 1830. He studied Arabic with a maulvi, and Bengali at the home of the well-known Bengali intellectual Tarinicharan Mitra. His early reading suggests a vibrant composite culture, including Jain, Hindu, and Persian Sufi works, while his social education combined Persianate etiquette with Jain virtues of austerity, discipline, industry, and a work ethic that British contemporaries would presumably have termed Protestant. At a time when North Indian elites had yet to embrace Western learning, Shivaprasad joined the Benares English Seminary. His first exposure to European education was an unhappy experience that generated in him a “great hatred of Christianity and Christians.” He recalled: “Had I continued this mindset, I would certainly have joined the rioters in the 1857 uprising.”4 His youthful rebellion against the colonizers did not last. British rule afforded new professional opportunities to the first generation of English-educated Indians. In this regard, Shivaprasad was a product of colonial modernity. His rise from subordinate Persian munshi to government official was based on his remarkable linguistic abilities, erudition, and social skills consistent with British notions of character (one thinks of Samuel Smiles’s truthfulness,

70 Ulrike Stark integrity, and industry). He was, in short, the civilizing mission’s favorite intermediary: an “enlightened native gentleman.” His career exemplifies Indian middle-class ambition and mobility: at 16 he became ambassador (vakil) to the Maharaja of Bharatpur at the British Rajputana Agency. Courtly decadence and the brutality of indigenous rulers repelled the young Jain, who quit his job and entered the colonial service as munshi in the Foreign Department. He became private secretary to H. M. Elliot, who introduced him to Indo-Persian historiography and the Western historical method, while also inculcating in him a colonialist view of India’s past. Later, as mir munshi (chief clerk) of the Simla Agency, Shivaprasad became involved in pioneering schemes of popular education in the hill states. After a stint at the Benares Agency, he rose to become the first non-British inspector of schools in the North-Western Provinces (NWP) Education Department. He retired in 1878, but remained in the public eye as a right-hand man of the Maharaja of Benares and a vociferous critic of the Indian National Congress. He died in 1895, a maligned and misunderstood man. In a sense, Shivaprasad outlived his time. He has been situated within the “culture of loyalism” and the attendant ideology of “imperial patriotism” of early nineteenth-century Indian service elites.5 His fall from public grace signals a shift in Indian political sensibility. It began with his speech on the Ilbert Bill (1883−1884), delivered while a member of the Viceroy’s Legislative Council in 1883. Lord Ripon’s liberal attempt to implement racial equality in colonial legal practice marked a turning point in Indo-British race relations. But this critical move disturbed the fragile equilibrium of Shivaprasad’s hitherto compatible ideologies of loyalty and patriotism. He couched his opposition to the bill in terms of a heartmind conflict: his head favored the bill for its “advanced liberal ideas” consistent with “the progress of the age,” but his heart—“a true heart of a true native, laboring under a sense of deep obligation and sincere respect to the British nation for all the good it has done to my dear country”—rejected it. Such deferential loyalty did not go down well with his contemporaries who branded him a “traitor to his country.” Emerging nationalism rejected his political vision of India as “a loyalist Hindu polity (dharmarajya) set within the wider protecting shield of British power.”6 While not in line with Congress nationalism, this vision nonetheless claimed a distinct nationalist modernity of its own.

Shivaprasad as hybrid intellectual Michael Dodson’s work on knowledge production in nineteenth-century Benares, the foremost seat of Sanskrit learning and Brahmanical authority, has challenged conventional notions of the power‒knowledge nexus of imperialism. The debate over the relative status of Indian and Western knowledge, Dodson argues, took the form of a complex dialogic engagement between Orientalists and Sanskrit pandits, which opened up a space for indigenous cultural authority: traditional pandits adapted the pedagogical project of “constructive” Orientalism to further their own cultural and Hindu nationalist projects.7 Shivaprasad represented an emerging class of intellectuals that participated in debates over Sanskrit versus new European

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knowledge. These were “modern” Sanskrit scholars, whose background combined traditional training with Western education and Orientalist methods. Shivaprasad was a philologist and antiquarian with expertise in comparative linguistics, archeology and epigraphy. A voracious and eclectic reader, he kept abreast of Orientalist scholarship through European books and journals. “He is emphatically an example of a self-made and self-instructed man,” noted the British linguist G. A. Grierson.8 Reflecting his hybrid intellectual formation, Shivaprasad occupied a fluid position in the city’s intellectual life. He moved between diverse institutionalized spaces with apparent ease, engaging with Sanskrit learning and modern Western science. From the 1860s, the emerging sphere of voluntary associational culture provided a new discursive arena to North Indian intellectuals, signaled by a proliferation of literary, scientific, and reform societies. A novel form of Indian sociability, transcending caste and religious community, voluntary associations have been linked to the self-fashioning of a hybrid urban middle-class eager to participate in the “project” of modernity.9 Functioning as sites for learned communication and cultural articulation, they forged notions of civility, civic engagement, and political participation. The Benares Institute (est. 1861) is a case in point. Initially a debating club of Western-educated Bengalis, it evolved into the foremost modern arena of intellectual exchange in the city, its members including pandits, Western-educated Indians, and Europeans. The cosmopolitan spirit and culture of science and reform cultivated at the Benares Institute was well suited to the varied intellectual concerns of the city’s modernizing hybrid intelligentsia. Shivaprasad was associated with the Institute as lecturer, head of a female schoolbook sub-committee, and vice-president, interacting closely with the pandits of Benares College, Westernizing Indians, and Orientalists. He lectured his compatriots on topics such as “Kuch bayan apni zaban ka” (“Our Vernacular”), presenting a model piece of comparative philology that proudly traced the evolution of the modern vernacular (Hindi/Urdu) from its Sanskrit roots.10 He eagerly engaged with European scholars such as the Revd M. A. Sherring, providing translations and epigraphic expertise for the latter’s classic The Sacred City of the Hindus. Sherring in turn lauded him as “one of the most enterprising men of the city … whose intelligence, enterprise, and extensive knowledge place him in the front rank of native gentlemen in these provinces.”11 Such valorization of Indian philological and cultural knowledge is also visible in the reports of Alexander Cunningham, head of the Archaeological Survey of India. Recognizing Shivaprasad’s “deep and intelligent interest in all archaeological subjects,”12 Cunningham relied on his “zealous friend” as a source of information, inscriptions, and expertise in Jain epigraphy. Cunningham readily acknowledged his dependence on Indian expertise, citing, for instance, his indebtedness to Shivaprasad for helping him identify the location of the famous Pala capital of Kosambi.13 While the power dynamic of these intellectual relationships requires further exploration, they support an interpretive model that emphasizes the dialogic, reciprocal element in local cross-cultural interactions. Shivaprasad considered himself intellectually on a par with European scholars; he engaged with them as interlocutor and cultural broker rather than merely as “native informant.” His

72 Ulrike Stark profound insider knowledge and rationalist approach appealed to Orientalists, who viewed him as a source of authoritative cultural information. More elaborate strategies were required to gain recognition among indigenous Sanskrit scholars. Shivaprasad’s desire to act as an intermediary between Orientalists and pandits is most visible in the Benares College journal, The Pandit (est. 1866). Offering a site for the East-West exchange on Indian philology, philosophy, history, and literature, the journal proposed to bring “the Pandits of Benares and Calcutta and the Sanskritists of the Universities of Europe” into a single discursive field.14 Shivaprasad, who really fit neither category, entered the new discursive medium with remarkable confidence. He established his credentials as a comparative philologist with a brief piece, in English, that linked the Sanskrit term “barbara” to the North African Barbary coast and the Greek “barbaros.”15 Orientalist practice formed the subject of a subsequent article that criticized scholarly failure to adhere to a uniform system of Roman transliteration of oriental words, such as devised by William Jones and H. H. Wilson. In a more political vein, Shivaprasad argued that Europeans presumptuously ignored “the twenty millions of India, whose taste and convenience must be, or at least ought also to be, now consulted.”16 The piece prompted a response from the eminent Bengali intellectual Rajendralal Mitra, who had been indirectly attacked by Shivaprasad.17 The ensuing dispute focused on subtle points of orthography and phonology, but centered on a fundamental question of authority: who was entitled to pronounce on pronunciation? Shivaprasad claimed indigenous authority: “The whole host of European Orientalists … is no authority for us Indians in the matter of the pronunciation of our own language.”18 Mitra accused him of being “totally wrong” in his philological and historical assumptions; he faulted him for raising “mere quibbles” instead of scientific arguments.19 The exchange is significant as a “modern” battle conducted on the scientific ground of comparative linguistics, in which both opponents deployed their Orientalist-philological training, citing an array of authoritative opinion, from Max Müller to Duncan Forbes. In the process, older regional patriotism was reaffirmed: the North Indian Shivaprasad’s dig at the notorious Bengali inability to pronounce certain sounds provoked an angry retort. Mitra declared that Bengalis were more capable of correct pronunciation than any other “nation” in India. If anything, Mitra commented, it had been “the Hindus of Benares, Oudh, Agra, and Delhi” who had corrupted Sanskrit phonetics.20 To Shivaprasad, the question was not merely academic, nor was it merely a matter of regional bias. He had already advocated a standardized system of transliteration, based on Jones and Wilson but with his own modifications, in a tract entitled Amgrezi aksharom ke sikhne ki [sic] upay (“Method of Learning the English Characters,” 1861). Orthographic uniformity was essential in the context of modern education, that is, in providing a standard to Indians grappling with the colonizers’ new language of command: “When we acknowledge the importance of making the natives learn the Roman characters, it is no less important that the Europeans should adhere to some one system of writing those characters,” he admonished Western scholars. The demand for a uniform transliteration system

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was part of a larger concern with linguistic standardization, a prerequisite for vernacular modernity. The combination of traditional linguistic training with Orientalist-philological practice put intellectuals such as Shivaprasad in a privileged position to negotiate different knowledge formations. In this regard, we may view intellectual hybridity as an enabling condition. The sense of intellectual superiority underlying his contributions to The Pandit is evident, for example, when he dismisses the decipherment of a pillar inscription by a pandit of Benares Sanskrit College as “preposterous,” offering his own interpretation based on Lassen’s Indische Alterthumskunde and “the Asiatic Society’s books.”21 In a sense, his critical interventions were a foray into the discursive territory of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, “the centre of Western knowledge in India.”22 Shivaprasad coveted membership in the exclusive scholarly circle; why he was never admitted remains unclear. The same sense of superiority, tied to a belief in universal reason, is visible in Shivaprasad’s engagement with traditional pandits, with whom he entered into a dialogue in the context of Vedic translation. The Orientalist project of translating the Rigveda, it has been suggested, was central to establishing “grounds of authorization” within the competing knowledge practices of Orientalists and pandits.23 Shivaprasad had already produced a Hindi version of H. H. Wilson’s celebrated introduction to the Rigveda Samhita, when, in an interesting application of constructive Orientalism, he used The Pandit to “re-present” Max Müller’s Rigveda translation to traditional learned circles (panditamandalesu). In a significant linguistic shift, he retranslated Max Müller’s English translation of Rigveda 1.6.1 into Sanskrit, and discussed it alongside Theodor Benfey’s German and Alexandre Langlois’s French versions.24 This strategy was both ideologically and pedagogically motivated: to win the pandits over to the modern critical method, European scholarship had to be made accessible to them. Shivaprasad’s attendant critique of Brahmanical parochialism, couched in the mocking language of Sanskrit polemic, deserves quotation for its enlightenment rhetoric and universalist “truth” claim: I am not so rash as to say anything contrary to the customs of this country in the presence of the inhabitants of the Land of the Aryas, who are enveloped by the blind darkness of poor culture (kusamskara) and immersed in the mire of stubborn convictions, such as [the belief] that only the scholars of their country are real scholars, that only what they say is correct, that their shastra alone is real shastra, that only what is contained in it is good, and that everything else is bad, and whose eyes remain closed even in the very presence of the spread of the rays of light from the autumn sun in the form of the marvelous works by an insightful group of foreigners who are dispelling the darkness of folly and casting light on the entire collection of objects that can be known. This is because they [the pandits], without discriminating the true from the untrue or considering the claims of knowledge, will be accusing me of being a hostile apostate and will be rushing at me with swords in hand.25

74 Ulrike Stark Yet an “impartial capacity for critical examination” urged him on. In ancient times, Shivaprasad continued tongue-in-cheek, Vishnu had rescued the Vedas from sinking in the ocean of milk; now they were being rescued from sinking “in the ocean of Maharshi Sayana’s commentary” (the standard indigenous commentary) by men such as Max Müller “who live on a small island.” His critique was not of Vedic sacred knowledge, but of indigenous hermeneutic practice and methodology: the same pandits who failed to understand the real “import” of the shastra, he argued, dismissed the foreigners’ “accurate explanation” on account of its non-Brahmanical provenance. His advocacy of a rationalist approach to Vedic translation found the support of Adityaram Sharma of Benares Sanskrit College, who commended Shivaprasad for his intermediary effort. Sharma criticized his fellow pandits for dismissing “impartial” and “intelligent” scholar-translators such as “Mleccha Müller” on grounds of the Brahmans’ exclusive claim to Vedic interpretation. Such narrow vision, he echoed Shivaprasad, was “bad culture.”26 If the authority of science provided the ground on which to modernize Sanskrit knowledgeable practice, Shivaprasad deferred to the pandits’ authority in the context of religion. His engagement with Sanskrit was partly driven by a concern with the defense of orthodox Hinduism. He was a founding member of the Kashi Dharma Sabha, a religious association established in 1870 by the Maharaja of Benares that promoted sanatana dharma (eternal dharma) through annual examinations in the dharmasastras and the dispensation of legal opinion (vyavastha) on dharmic and ritual matters.27 As one of its few non-pandit members, Shivaprasad diligently served the association as corresponding secretary and examiner. The colonial critique of Indian civilization had generated a sense of Hindu decline and degeneration among Indian intellectuals, provoking orthodox and reformist responses. Educated elites championed a movement for Hindu cultural renewal that promoted a unifying, monotheistic vision of Hinduism and focused on moral regeneration. Shivaprasad’s vision of Hindu modernity shared these premises. Morality, he argued, could only come from within: “Indigenous moral principles find ready access to the hearts of the natives and are more firmly set there than any of recent importation.”28 He resorted to translation and print to promote a renewed national culture, based on a universally accessible Hindu dharma. Neither Sanskrit nor the highly Sanskritized Hindi espoused by Hindu revivalism were suitable vehicles to reach his fellow nationals. An experienced self-publisher, he propagated a return to the “original dharma of the Hindus” in popularizing vernacular tracts that addressed a unitary community of countrymen (deshvasi). The most influential was Manavdharmsar (“Essence of Manu’s Dharma,” 1857), an abridged Hindi version of the Manu Smriti. “It is a matter of great regret that our countrymen, though called Hindus, know not their Institutes of Manu. So all they do is contrary to them,”29 wrote Shivaprasad. In Manavdharmsar he promoted Manu as a foundational text of Hinduism: “The Manusmriti is the principal dharmashastra of the Hindus. No Hindu can deny its authority.” This bold claim was substantiated by a double strategy: having cited indigenous Vedic authorization of Manu, Shivaprasad then proceeded to assert Manu’s antiquity on the authority of

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“Greek, non-Aryan, and discerning English pandits,” most importantly Sir William Jones. It was Jones who had invoked the transcultural reach of Manu to distant places such as Greece and Egypt in his own 1794 translation. To further cement his position, Shivaprasad had his Hindi translation authorized by a vyavastha signed by several Benares pandits. Condensed in 196 verses, Manavdharmsar offered a standard social and ethical code for the modern, self-confident Indian nation. Sense-restraint, reverence of guru and elders, and correct behavior toward women were emphasized. Relegated to the footnotes was a critique of Brahmanical decadence, both symptom and cause of Hindu decline. The book was widely read as a manual of ethics rather than religion. As such, it was adopted as a prize book in government schools. The popularization of ancient Hindu thought also extended to Vedanta philosophy: Upanishadsar (“Essence of the Upanishads,” 1878) included extracts from Upanishads with Hindi paraphrases, while Mohamudgara (“The Mallet of Delusion,” 1880) offered a collection of verse ascribed to the philosopher Shankaracharya in simple Hindi translation.30 Shivaprasad proudly walked in the footsteps of his hero William Jones, the English translator of Mohamudgara and “the greatest Christian and Englishman who has come to India to this day.”31 In 1880, 11 years after a famous religious debate (shastrartha) with Hindu reformer Dayananda Saraswati had prompted the establishment of the Kashi Dharma Sabha, Shivaprasad staged his own debate with the illustrious founder of the Arya Samaj. The issue at stake was Vedic authority. Following a personal encounter, he challenged Dayananda in a letter—composed in heavily Sanskritized Hindi—to expound his reasons for accepting only part of the Veda as authoritative. Dayananda asserted his view: only the Samhitas (Vedic hymns) were self-evident revelation. He also extended an invitation to Shivaprasad to visit him and settle all doubts in conversation. Meanwhile, the Arya Samaj leader suggested Shivaprasad should study his commentary on the Rigveda, Bhashyabhumika. After consulting Dayananda’s work, Shivaprasad was convinced that the swami had failed to rationally prove his point. He reiterated his questions. In reply, Dayananda derided his interrogator’s scholarship: “I feel sure you have no knowledge of the inherent meaning of the words of any single book of the books of science, from the Veds to the Purvamimamsa.”32 He was upset that Shivaprasad had refused his invitation, which he took as an affront to his authority. “If you had come to me and learnt, you would have been able to learn,” Dayananda wrote. Somewhat sarcastically he proposed that Shivaprasad might at least listen to the Benares pandits Swami Vishuddhanand or Balashastriji: “Even then you will get to learn something; for if they instruct you, there’s hope you will be instructed.”33 Such acrimony was motivated by the increased publicity of the exchange, which, in an instance of modern discursive practice, turned into a pamphlet war. Shivaprasad, in a characteristic move, had brought their correspondence to the public sphere in a pamphlet entitled Nivedan (“Humble Submission,” 1880). Dayananda responded with Bhramocchedan (“Destruction of Error,” 1880), printed at his newly opened Vedic Press. More pamphlets followed, with Shivaprasad citing the opinion of G. Thibaut, principal of Benares College, and well-known Vedanta

76 Ulrike Stark scholar Swami Vishuddhanand to prove his arguments.34 The publicity of print not only transformed the exchange from polite altercation into caustic controversy, but also catapulted it into the transnational domain: Max Müller published an English translation of Nivedan in The Athenaeum, presenting it to the British public as “a specimen of how native fights with native.”35 Europe’s great Vedic scholar welcomed Shivaprasad’s rationalist critique as underpinning his own rejection of Dayananda, whose Veda editions he viewed as “useless to European students” and whose religious doctrine he dismissed as “unnatural, unhistorical, and uncritical.”36 Jainism, Shivaprasad’s own faith, formed the subject of another altercation with the Arya Samaj leader. Dayananda had come under attack for stating in Satyarth Prakash (“The Light of Truth,” 1874) that Buddhism and Jainism were essentially the same, the Jain faith being a mere offshoot of Buddhism. This assertion, ironically, was based on a passage from Shivaprasad’s history of India, which identified “Jain” and “Bauddh” as “synonymous terms.”37 Shivaprasad discredited Dayananda on the authority of German Indologist Hermann Jacobi, who in his recent introduction to The Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu (Leipzig 1879) had conclusively established the difference between Jainism and Buddhism. In the process, we can see that Shivaprasad significantly revised his own view of the matter. Once again, print was key to circulating new discoveries among vernacular audiences. Less than a year after Jacobi published his work on the Kalpasutra, Shivaprasad brought out an abridged Hindi translation of the English work.38 This underscores Shivaprasad’s close engagement with Jain studies, at that time a marginalized branch of nineteenth-century Indology. Shivaprasad perceived British rule as having initiated a renaissance of Jain religiosity and scholarship.39 At a time of important scholarly discovery, he kept abreast of Western scholarship and was eager to pass on the new knowledge to his Jain coreligionists. The two episodes throw significant light on the public face of a fluid religious identity: while acting as intermediary and spokesman for his community in contexts of Jain doctrine and collective identity, Shivaprasad explicitly situated himself within the larger Hindu fold whenever Hindu orthodoxy had to be upheld. As Gyan Prakash has argued, in giving ideological direction to emerging Indian modernity, Indian elites defined it in “a predominantly Hindu and Sanskritic idiom.”40 At the same time, modernity was rooted in the authority of science. Shivaprasad’s engagement with the Sanskrit legacy, a simultaneous effort toward cultural reassertion and renewal, clearly attests to this “indivisibility of science and religion.” Whether as scholar or educator, he viewed modernity largely as a pedagogical project.

Shivaprasad and popular education Since Gauri Viswanathan’s seminal Masks of Conquest, research into nineteenthcentury colonial education has tended to focus on its ideological agenda, power dynamics, and sociopolitical ramifications, foregrounding questions of cultural hegemony and elite formation.41 The pragmatics of the project of popular education and pedagogical practice in the field have received much less attention. As Tim

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Allender has argued, historians have largely ignored how “agents on the spot” shaped the state’s educational ethic.42 Allender’s argument, while important, fails to include Indian educational officers in the “community of thinkers, theorists, and practitioners” who influenced state policy. Their subaltern voices admittedly may not have reached Calcutta or London, but carried weight with their immediate British superiors as sources of social knowledge and first-hand experience. Shivaprasad’s opinions clearly mattered to the colonial rulers: on the rare occasions that he criticized state policy, he was immediately rebuked by the government of India. His professional life as a grassroots educator exhibits the tensions of a policy frequently at odds with the ground realities of rural India. It illustrates Gyan Prakash’s metaphor of the colonies as “underfunded and overextended laboratories of modernity.”43 Colonialism, it has been argued, was itself an essentially pedagogic enterprise, with formal instruction presenting only one aspect of the wider pedagogic mission of improving India.44 Rooted in eighteenth-century ideas of charity, reformation, and social control of the poor, the modern concept of popular education was implemented in British India in the 1850s, following the Anglicist/Orientalist debate. The Education Dispatch of 1854 provided the ideological underpinnings for the vernacularization of state education. A document of alluring liberal and utilitarian rhetoric, it linked education to ideas of public utility, invoking India’s “material interests,” “vast resources,” and the “advantages that accompany the healthy increase of wealth and commerce.”45 It opened with a credo of imperialist paternalism: it was one of empire’s “most sacred duties” to confer upon India “those vast moral and material blessings which flow from the general diffusion of useful knowledge.” The Dispatch confirmed Anglicist policy, advocating “the improved arts, science, philosophy and literature” of Europe. Yet, in a significant departure from Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education, it replaced the doctrine of filtration with a policy of “general” and “practically useful” instruction in the local languages. Colonial education had created its new mantra: “useful knowledge” for the “masses.” The implementation of the new policies was left to provincial education departments, which in turn recruited Indian collaborators—“men whose minds have been imbued with the spirit of European advancement”—as mediating agents of public instruction.46 Shivaprasad entered the NWP Education Department in 1856 as joint inspector of schools in the Benares Circle, assisting the British inspector, Sanskrit scholar Ralph Griffith.47 The size of their field of action signaled the enormity of the task: it comprised an area of 20,000 square miles, a population of 10 million, and some 1,700 schools. The temporary inclusion of the Allahabad Circle districts in 1857 further enlarged the area. As Griffith complained, it was now “almost that of England, more than double that of Ireland, and more than 5 times that of Scotland.”48 As Shivaprasad prepared to embark on an ambitious scheme to establish a system of village schools in the circle, he learned that the state’s commitment did not match his own: “I asked the Government for instructions; they said they had none to give. I asked for money to open halkabandi (village circuit) schools; they said they had none to give.”49 His scheme was only able to

78 Ulrike Stark succeed with support from the Maharaja of Benares and other local landholders. By 1872, 1,400 schools had been established. The financial constraints of an underfunded system were only one of the difficulties of a school inspector’s taxing work, which involved extensive travel in the Indian countryside. In 1858 Shivaprasad covered 4,000 miles on horseback, by camel carriage, and by palanquin. More than 10,000 pupils were inspected during the five-month cold-weather tour. While the protocol of official reports routinely reworked such numbers into a narrative of success, Shivaprasad was painfully aware of the limits of an inspection routine that left no room for individual evaluation. Poor attendance and a high dropout rate at schools further exposed a flawed system. Village India provided a stark demonstration of John Stuart Mill’s assertion in Principles of Political Economy that education was not compatible with extreme poverty. The scene that presented itself to the agent in the field was bleak: students crippled by malnutrition, peasants dependent on their children’s labor for survival, village teachers manipulating attendance registers for fear of losing their meager jobs. Shivaprasad tersely invoked the state’s responsibility in providing the economic underpinnings for popular education: “Men must be fed first and then instructed.”50 He vehemently protested the introduction of school fees, one of the rare instances in which he openly criticized government policy. Even England, a much wealthier nation than India, he argued, had made legal provisions for free schooling. Shivaprasad was not a theorist of education. Like many Western-educated Indian intellectuals, he was familiar with the ideas of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Matthew Arnold, but rarely engaged with it in his writings. His legacy consists of more than 40 vernacular schoolbooks on natural philosophy, geography, history, and grammar, alongside alphabetical primers and moral tales, in which he advocated a combination of scientific rationalism and Hindu moral philosophy. His educational philosophy combined essentialism with pragmatism. A strict disciplinarian, he believed in Spencerian evolution and promoted a system based on individual effort and competition: “The more competition there is, the better for education.”51 In this ethic, liberal and utilitarian ideas merged with remarkable egalitarianism: education must be free, impartial, and accessible to all. He invoked the state’s responsibility in providing an equal-opportunity system that supported even lower-class aspirations to higher education. To keep the educational pyramid intact and to avoid an “unfordable gulf” between primary and secondary schooling, he argued, greater state expenditure on higher education was required. It is important to note that Shivaprasad, the champion of Hindu dharma, urged that the state guarantee religious neutrality in education. Inspection, accountability, teacher training, standardized textbook knowledge, and scientific experiments were key elements in his scheme of modernizing popular education. Brian Hatcher has pointed to the centrality of “idioms of improvement” in Indian educational discourse.52 In assimilating the colonial rhetoric of improvement, Indian educators advanced their own agendas of moral and cultural renewal in a project of national self-assertion. If colonial education, as Kumar argues, was a project of socialization geared toward producing a “colonial citizen,”53 the perception

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of policymakers in London and Calcutta differed from that of educators at the grassroots, for whom improvement had a different meaning. To Shivaprasad, popular education was an instrument for the moral and material uplifting of the masses, but also a tool of empowerment. To advance the organic whole of the nation, it was essential to integrate the lower classes into the modern framework of reason, morality, and economic prosperity.54 Practical scientific experiment was integral to Shivaprasad’s pedagogy. His enthusiastic efforts to bring modern science to the village school reflect the colonized elite’s faith in the authority of science. A set of “simple philosophical instruments and apparatus” was purchased in London and shipped to Benares to give students the “improving” experience of witnessing the “wonders of science.” Such enactment and authorization of science as magic spectacle echoed the colonial “staging of science” described by Prakash.55 Shivaprasad exhibited the instruments himself, demonstrating the functioning of a magnet to “the wonder-distended mouth of the halqabandi child and the bovine gaze of the gray barbarian.”56 The patronizing tone of this comment, cited from an official report, should not surprise us: a typical expression of paternalism, it encapsulates the distance between urban elite and rural subaltern. Shivaprasad’s complex relationship with the peasant classes suggests a “colonial” predicament: his role in implementing state policy was frequently at odds with that of the people’s educator who sympathized with the plight of the agricultural class. The distancing stance of elite paternalism did not preclude bonds of affection forged on the spot: indeed, Shivaprasad’s sympathy with the peasants is a striking aspect of his official reports. Text-based experiments with modern science proved less successful. An attempt to introduce books on “political economy, agriculture, vaccination, conservancy, electroplating, &etc.” in village schools was abandoned.57 The problem was not book knowledge, but the village teachers’ lack of qualifications and pedagogic skills. Shivaprasad found indigenous schools dysfunctional and their teachers “most deficient.” His disciplinary regime of “improving” the teachers, cutting the salary of some and dispatching others to the Benares teacher-training school, failed “utterly and hopelessly.” It led to a categorical dismissal of traditional education methods: “Under no circumstance … can the indigenous schools be turned to any good account as part of a system of national education.”58 His efforts to modernize the teaching profession concentrated on individual improvement; he chose to overlook how the colonial state was systematically undermining the teachers’ traditional authority, material basis, and status.59 The colonialist belief in the authority of the printed word was widely appropriated by Indian educators, many of whom wrote textbooks themselves. Modern pedagogic practice was firmly invested in the schoolbook, the new “sacred icon of required knowledge.”60 Vernacular textbooks have been variously viewed as tools of cultural hegemony, contact zones, and sites of transculturation. A hybrid genre par excellence, drawing on European sources and produced under colonial patronage, textbooks opened up a space for Indian agency in complex processes of reconfiguration and naturalization of Western knowledge. As Brian Hatcher has shown, for example, the schoolbooks of Bengali educator Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar

80 Ulrike Stark functioned as a “site of convergence” between Victorian and Brahmanical ideologies, with Hindu moral pedagogy offering an entry point for middle-class bourgeois concepts of industry and self-improvement into the vernacular idiom.61 An “improving vernacularist” like Vidyasagar, Shivaprasad shared his famous contemporary’s “moral pedagogy” in many respects. His own pedagogy, however, accorded primacy to the development of reason. A champion of Western empiricism and the positivist-historicist method, Shivaprasad’s mission was to introduce his compatriots to the principles of scientific rationalism. The production of suitable vernacular teaching material was essential to this endeavor. A first series of schoolbooks, composed by Shivaprasad in the 1850s, was adopted by Lt Governor James Thomason for his pioneering schemes of primary education in NWP. It included a translation of Chambers’s Rudiments of Knowledge and Introduction to the Sciences. This was subsequently revised as Vidyankur (Urdu: Haqa’iq al-maujudat, 1855) and became the standard reader in primary schools. Its uneven language illustrates the difficulty of forging a suitable idiom for the vernacularization of science. Though widely used, Vidyankur was found to require “a great deal of explanation.” Shivaprasad’s principal achievement as a textbook author, however, was his popularization of history and geography, two “truth sciences” of which he found his contemporaries sadly ignorant. His advocacy of “useful” geohistorical knowledge was tied to the nationalist project of fostering patriotic pride in Hindu culture and territory. Manu Goswami has analyzed his works as instances of an emergent popular geohistorical discourse, in which India was re-constituted as Bharatavarsha, a “spatially bounded and historically determinate national entity.”62 Shivaprasad, she argues, provided a significant articulation of a “historically novel understanding of territory and history,” which linked ancient sacred space to the geography of the modern nation.63 Shivaprasad’s textbooks drew inspiration from the concept of universal history. It is important to note that his geography of Asia, Bhugol hastamalak (1855; Urdu: Jam-e Jahannuma), was originally conceived as a geography of the entire world. The ambitious project was cut down drastically, resulting in a three-volume Asian geography of which the unwieldy English subtitle—“The Earth as [a Drop of] Clear Water in Hand”—ruined the lovely title metaphor designed to attract Hindi readers to an “eminently useful” and accessible science.64 Bhugol targeted schoolchildren and the general readership, or, as Shivaprasad put it, “the rajas, babus, and mahajans of our country, who only know Hindi and are too old to attend primary school and learn Persian or English.”65 Drawing on an eclectic range of sources—including the Encyclopedia Britannica, Alexander von Humboldt, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Gasparo Balbi, numerous British travelogues, geographies, and histories—it offered an empirical geography of facts, numbers, and, importantly, maps. To the nineteenth-century audience, geography encompassed the natural and social landscape. Refuting traditional Puranic cosmography and adopting an empiricist idiom, Bhugol subsumed physical, botanical, historical, statistical, revenue, and census information in an account that integrated traditional and modern enumerative modalities. Facts of physical geography were presented alongside manners and

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customs, religion, politics, science, literature, manufacture, and commerce. Bhugol was infused with the “moral-climatic idiom” of Victorian geography, tying climate to race and region in a moralistic discourse of difference.66 Having established the common origin of mankind and subsequent division into races, Shivaprasad asserted the ancient superiority of Asia as the cradle of mankind and civilization: The region (mulk) of Asia is very famous in old chronicles and histories, because the first man, from whom we are all descended, was born in this part of the world, and from this part of the world, all things [regarding] intelligence, discrimination, and speech emerged. Glorious and powerful kings were first found in this part of the world, and prosperity and knowledge first set foot there. Besides, nowhere else can one find rivers, mountains, forests, plains, and fruit, flowers, medical herbs, grain, birds and animals, metals, jewels, etc., as exist in this part of the world.67 The text proceeded to invoke the former supremacy of India (conceptualized as Hindustan), a sort of primus inter pares among Asian countries: Earlier in this work we have described the greatness of Asia, but one should know that even within Asia, this country [Hindustan] was the most celebrated one. At one point, it was regarded as supreme among all for its knowledge and prosperity. Men from all over the world were desirous to visit it, and the merchants and traders who went there never had to worry again about their livelihood.68 India was the supreme seat of learning: even Egypt and Greece had sent scholars to sit at the feet of her pandits. The affirmation of superiority was extended to the arts, sciences, and crafts in a pervasive attempt to foster cultural patriotism and national pride. There was no glorification of India’s ancient past in Shivaprasad’s controversial history of India, Itihas timir nashak (“History as the Dispeller of Darkness,” 1864–73). The work, the first of its kind in Hindi, instead painted a picture of Hindu internecine struggle. At a time when nationalist historiography was rapidly gaining momentum, Shivaprasad placed himself in the tradition of colonial historiography, declaring himself “a pupil and admirer” of H. M. Elliot. Drawing chiefly on Elphinstone’s History of India, Shivaprasad’s Itihas followed the standard periodization of Indian history (Hindu, Muslim, European). Its teleological narrative posited British rule as the apogee of civilization in India. Shivaprasad’s emulation of his British predecessors did not preclude a critique of their many factual errors, which “obliged” him “to take recourse” to the higher authority of Persian historian Firishta (1560–1620).69 This was a time of deteriorating communal relations and Shivaprasad’s Itihas featured many passages that offended Muslim and Hindu sensibilities. The high visibility of Itihas as a state-sanctioned textbook only served to sharpen the debate. In the midst of a campaign to have the book removed from the curriculum,

82 Ulrike Stark Europeans continued to hail Shivaprasad as a harbinger of historical criticism in the vernacular. He was cited as proof that the “scientific method” had entered Indian schools: “That man, at least, has obviously got hold of the scientific view of history,” noted Indian Under-Secretary of State M. E. Grant Duff.70 In a rare reversal of colonial textual hierarchy, the Education Department invested in an English translation of Itihas. Itihas remains a problematic pedagogic project. In cramming a large amount of “useful information” into the history, Shivaprasad’s stated purpose was to create a “desire of enquiry” among his countrymen. He hoped to strengthen their “power of observation,” thereby forging a rational understanding of India’s past and her present condition. Working within a paradigm of historical criticism that equated fact with truth, he declared it the historian’s task to deal with “facts and facts alone.”71 Yet the book’s blatant anti-Muslim bias, ideological assertions, and invocations of divine intervention undercut its claim to scientific objectivity. Moreover, its scholarly prose, excessive factual detail, and sprawling footnotes made Itihas ill suited for school use, and necessitated the production of study guides. One further vexing issue was the choice of register in translating scientific terminology. The vernacularization of science required complex translational strategies. At the basic lexicographical level, textbook authors were combating a powerful colonial notion that the vernaculars lacked scientific and technological vocabulary and were therefore unsuitable vehicles of scientific modernity. Shivaprasad’s translational practice attests to this problem. He mostly avoided English terminology, opting instead for a high-register Sanskritic or Arabic/Persian vocabulary. In Bhugol hastamalak, for instance, lines of latitude and longitude were rendered by the terms “aksamsh” and “deshamsh,” while the expression “per square mile” became the hybrid “fi mil murabba.” This compromised his principle of writing in a simple and easily accessible idiom. The tension between scientific accuracy and simplicity is most visible in his Hindi schoolbooks, the language of which was dismissed as “pedantic” and “jejune” by contemporaries. As F. S. Growse suggested, Shivaprasad’s style betrayed an author who habitually wrote “not in Hindi, but in Urdu or English,” while the Bengal Magazine accused him of corrupting the nation’s mother tongue by writing “Persian-Oordoo in the Hindee character.”72 By the 1870s, the concept of “national education” was firmly entrenched in the discourse on Indian modernity. It formed the subject of a dispute between Shivaprasad and Syed Ahmed Khan. Following Khan’s early experiments with primary schools, the Muslim reformer’s visit to England in 1869–70 renewed his concern with popular education and working-class literacy as prerequisites for national progress. Indian education compared poorly to the British system. Soon after his arrival in England, Sir Syed penned Strictures upon the Present Educational System in India (1869), in which he denounced public education in India as “utterly useless.” Failing both the elites and the masses, colonial education had bred mediocrity. All it had produced, he asserted memorably, was “an insignificant number of letter-writers, copyists, signal men and railway-ticket

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collectors.” An “injustice” inflicted upon the country, it had stifled the intellectual abilities of Indians, ruined older knowledge formations and “despoiled” Indians of their mother tongue and “hereditary sciences.” Public education, in short, had thrown the nation into “worse than Egyptian darkness.”73 Shivaprasad rose in defense of colonial policy and the Education Department in a pamphlet entitled Strictures upon the Strictures of Sayyad Ahmad Khan Bahadur C.S.I (1870).74 Sir Syed had prefaced his critique with Alexander Pope’s famous line: “A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.” Shivaprasad retorted with a “homely proverb” that he attributed to the Bhagavad Gita: “Half a loaf is better than no bread.” He refuted Sir Syed with a developmentalist argument: “Civilization or the education of a nation is not the work of one day, nor can it be affected by fits and starts.” A nation’s “improvement,” the “perfection” of its education “to the highest standard,” was a gradual process; India was no exception. Moreover, the country labored “under many enormous difficulties.”75 He sardonically dismissed Sir Syed’s claim that Britain’s masses were well educated; one had only to look at the English regiments coming out to India! Shivaprasad also harped on his favorite theme: the real cause of Indian backwardness was Muslim misrule and oppression. Turning his defense of colonial education into a defense of imperialism, he bluntly attacked his opponent: “A man who denies the benefit of the British rule in India, is not only blind to the interests of his fellow countrymen, but disloyal to the State.”76 Indian institutions under colonial rule had produced excellent scholars, he argued, citing the example of Pandit Bapu Deva of Benares College, Master Ramchandra of Delhi College, and Rajendralal Mitra of Calcutta. Given that higher education was still in its infancy, India did not compare unfavorably to England: how many Shakespeares, Miltons, Humes, Burkes, Macaulays, or Mills had England sent to India or even produced at home? This proud assertion of Indian achievement was followed by a rather startling articulation of racial difference: Sir Syed had claimed Indians’ right to education, invoking the “equality of rights with our European fellow-subjects.”77 Shivaprasad, who shared this egalitarian ethos with regard to Indians, was not ready to apply it to the colonizer-colonized relationship. England and India were placed under “different circumstances,” he argued. To claim equality as a “right” was ignoring “the law of nature” under which the countries were advancing in their own ways.78 Even coming from a pragmatist, it is hard not to read this statement as the self-debasement of a colonized mind. Ironically, the two opponents’ educational philosophies had much in common. Both saw popular education as a prerequisite for national progress and declared it a chief responsibility of the state. Both shared the nineteenth-century belief in education as character formation, and viewed knowledge acquisition as a process of moral cultivation. Both had a strong pedagogical interest in the boarding house, arguably the most British of educational institutions. As Syed Ahmed Khan attempted to forge Muslim solidarity by grafting Victorian notions of characterbuilding on to the traditional sharif ideal at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Shivaprasad, inspired by the example of Thomas Arnold, lent active support to the boarding house of Benares College.79

84 Ulrike Stark At the time, Western-style boarding houses were a cultural battleground. Deployed by the colonizers as a reformist instrument of elite socialization in a deeply fragmented society, among the colonized they signified the combined threat of Christian proselytization, Western acculturation, and defilement of caste. The hard-won success of the Bareilly College boarding house (est. 1860), the first in the NWP, seemed to signal the triumph of the public school ideal: “Hindus of various castes, Musalmans of all sects, lived under the same roof and joined in cricket or other amusements as if they were English boys in a public school rather than members of races with whom exclusiveness is a religion,” gushed the 1882 Education Commission Report.80 In a flawed educational system, the boarding house was hailed as a “decided success.” However, Shivaprasad’s experience differed. His attempts to establish boarding houses in the district towns failed, largely due to caste and commensality restrictions. “We must wait till the caste prejudice is worn out, or India produces men like Dr. Arnold of Rugby,”81 he noted soberly. Meanwhile, he contented himself with making a generous donation to the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College. In later years, Shivaprasad looked back upon his active days in education with a sense of disenchantment. The nation’s commitment to the cause, he felt, had waned. Part of his frustration stemmed from the failure of female education, arguably the most challenging aspect of his professional career. Scholars have highlighted the colonial state’s reluctant and half-hearted investment in female education, which was flagrantly at odds with the centrality of the so-called “women’s question” in the discourse on Indian civilizational progress. It has been suggested that the standard theory of native resistance to girls’ education was a post-1857 construction of colonial administrators.82 If anything, when formal female education became institutionalized after 1854, educators on the ground faced obstacles of a practical rather than ideological nature: lack of funding, a high dropout rate due to poverty and early marriage, the dearth of female teachers, and the perennial problem of finding female inspectresses. It would be misleading to call Shivaprasad a champion of female education. A pragmatist, he shared the patriarchal belief in filtration and accorded primacy to male education. It made him no less determined to set up female schools and establish a system of “useful” education that promoted more than basic literacy and domestic skills taught in the standard gendered curriculum. Within two decades, several thousand girls were enrolled in government and aided schools. These pioneering efforts were erased by the Indian budget crisis of the 1870s. In short order the state’s withdrawal of financial support for female education ushered in the end of hundreds of girls’ schools. In light of his patriarchal conservatism, Shivaprasad’s principal contribution to female education, Vamamanranjan (“Tales for Women,”1856), is a remarkably progressive work. A collection of exemplary biographies based on E. Starling’s Victorian bestseller Noble Deeds of Women (1835), the book advocated a redefined notion of Hindu duty for Indian women.83 Hindu female rulers were depicted as model dharmic women, their life stories reworked into a double lesson of Hindu duty and active civic engagement. Equally striking is its pedagogic strategy of naturalizing a Western social geography within the moral-religious universe of the

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Indian girl reader. Shivaprasad redressed the awkward imbalance of the book (only 5 of the 17 exemplary women were Indian) by emphasizing the universality of cardinal female virtues: piety, chastity, modesty, and service. Western women were assimilated into traditional Hindu ideals of the pativrata (devoted wife) and brahmacharini (chaste student); their Christian faith was recast in the language of Hindu bhakti. Combining social conservatism with a progressive plea for female education, the book prefigured later nationalist reformulations of women’s public role. It valorized women as agents of social change, extending female agency into the public domain. Finally, a striking theme in Shivaprasad’s writings on public instruction is his emphasis on the Indian thirst for education. He persistently challenged stereotyped colonial assertions of Indian apathy and resistance toward modern education, affirming both his countrymen’s eagerness to avail themselves of educational opportunities and the monied classes’ willingness to lend moral and material support to the cause. “No assertion is less true than the one which says that the Natives do not appreciate higher education, or that they are not fit for it,” he wrote.84

The problem of a national language Never fully separable, the urban and the rural coalesced in the domain of language. Vernacular modernity in nineteenth-century North India hinged on resolving the vexed issue of the two competing sister languages spoken in the NWP: Urdu in Perso-Arabic script and Hindi written in Nagari. The Hindi-Urdu debate, which prefigured the struggle over India’s national language, has received detailed scholarly analysis both as an instance of Hindu−Muslim elite competition over economic and political assets, and as a process of identity-formation in which language became divided along religio-cultural lines.85 An important early landmark in the debate, Shivaprasad’s Memorandum: Court Characters in the Upper Provinces of India (1868) offered one of the first radical formulations of the linkage between Hindi and Hindu national identity. Building on the myth of the antiquity and ubiquity of Hindi, it declared Hindi, written in Nagari, the legitimate successor of Sanskrit and basis of the “universal speech” of Hindustan. Shivaprasad argued that Persian, as well as Urdu written in PersoArabic script, were both “foreign languages” forced upon the “helpless” masses by the British colonizers. His polemic was couched in the scientific idiom of comparative linguistics and contemporary Aryan race theory: “I cannot see the wisdom of the policy which thrusts a Semitic element into the bosoms of the Hindus and alienates them from their Aryan speech; not only speech, but all that is Aryan; because through speech ideas are formed, and through ideas the manners and customs,” he wrote. “To read Persian is to become Persianized, all our ideas become corrupt and our nationality is lost.”86 Hindi alone would restore “Hindu nationality” and unite North India by “one common bond of language.” Prefiguring later Hindu nationalist rhetoric, this aggressive articulation of the Hindi−Hindu nexus made Shivaprasad the hero of the nascent Hindi movement. It is doubtful

86 Ulrike Stark whether he had sought this role. Indeed, he soon distanced himself from the Memorandum. An alternative reading of the Memorandum in the context of Shivaprasad’s educational agenda may help us understand the embarrassing document. Beneath its caustic anti-Muslim rhetoric, the Memorandum was driven by a concern with “national education” and the promotion of the people’s vernacular. Hindi was explicitly linked to the advancement of science and literature, a prerequisite for national progress: sharing “scientific and technical terms” with Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, and other members of “the Aryan family of languages,” Hindi was ideally suited to forge a transregional culture of science rooted in Sanskrit. Interestingly, Shivaprasad cited James Ballantyne’s experiments with Sanskritic nomenclature to prove “how easy it is to form scientific and technical terms from Sanskrit roots.”87 Shivaprasad’s subsequent shift toward a more moderate position, which advocated the retention of common Perso-Arabic “household words” in Hindi, made him a traitor to Hindi supporters. In actual fact, his perceived about-face was a return to an earlier stance. Consider, for example, his statements in Bhugol hastamalak (1856), which valorized Urdu as “the principle language of this country” and advocated knowledge of Persian vocabulary as a means to refine the spoken idiom.88 What Shivaprasad firmly opposed throughout was linguistic artificiality. He advocated an organically grown, hybrid style that reflected natural linguistic change. Like many of his contemporaries Shivaprasad pressed for a unified idiom and script to bring about progress in the backward NWP. While in England Syed Ahmed Khan had invoked the link between civilizational progress and a common national language, identifying the “universally spoken vernacular language” as the cause of England’s “public improvement, enlightenment, and national prosperity.” To Shivaprasad, Bengal, with its single language and script, provided a model closer to home. However, to him the “language of the country” (deshbhasa) was Hindi, the vernacular of the people and medium of primary instruction. Anticipating post-colonial critics, he blamed the colonizers for communalizing the vernacular. The “absurdity” of having two vernaculars, he argued, dated back to the Hindu pandits and Muslim maulvis at Fort William College, who, for the sake of linguistic purity, had initiated the lexical divide by Sanskritizing Hindi and Persianizing Urdu. Shivaprasad’s refusal to view Hindi and Urdu as distinct languages necessitated a refashioning of the vernacular in a dual strategy: first, Urdu had to be subsumed under Hindi; second, both styles had to be simplified. In 1876, following a government directive, he began revising his Hindi and Urdu schoolbooks in an attempt to make their language “one and common.” As he intrepidly, and with premature optimism, declared at that point, the battle he had been fighting since the Memorandum was won—the unified language was “fixed.” At the surface level, the inconsistency of Shivaprasad’s views reflects the general contemporary “confusion” over language and script. Yet his pronouncements on language deserve a more closely historicized and contextualized reading. First, he commented on the language issue over a period of 30 years that saw both the rise of Hindi in the public sphere and a significant shift in official policy toward greater

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support for Hindi. Second, he spoke in different roles and voices. What has not received enough attention is his voice as a people’s advocate. Shivaprasad acted as spokesman of the underprivileged rural masses, who had no access to the Persianized court language nor to the high Hindi espoused by Hindu cultural revivalism. As a vernacular educator, he rejected any form of linguistic “pedantry” that disempowered the common man and impeded his participation in public life. His second voice was that of the urban intellectual affiliated to a speech community that cultivated a refined style of Urdu (the idiom in which he chose to write his memoirs). The incongruity between Shivaprasad’s two voices is pointedly reflected in his articulation of a unifying national idiom as “amfaham aur khaspasand,” “intelligible to the common people and pleasant to the genteel.” As he explained in 1876: “The State must have a State language understood by the greatest number possible, yet not derided by well-educated men of fashion and polished society.”89 The linguistic formula was nothing new—it had served eighteenthcentury Persianate elites as an aesthetic model. To reactivate it in the 1870s, however, was a highly problematic move, especially if we consider the prescription accompanying Shivaprasad’s inclusive “amfaham aur khaspasand” formula: written in either Nagari or Urdu script, it should not tolerate “more than 5 per cent Sanskrit or Arabic words,” he argued.90 This mechanistic approach to reconciling the common people’s speech with the cultivated elite idiom seems unworkable in all but the best of circumstances. In light of the relentless politicization and communalization of Hindi and Urdu in the late nineteenth century it appears strangely naive. Shivaprasad reiterated his plea for a common vernacular before the 1882 Education Commission in a more distinctly nationalist idiom: “It is a great mistake to think of Hindi and Urdu as two distinct languages. No nation’s colloquial can possibly be two.”91 The use of the “alien” Persian script in public life remained the chief obstacle to national progress in the NWP. He continued to advocate Hindi as a tool in the empowerment of the people: since the rural masses could only aspire to primary education, Hindi was the sole medium accessible to them, the Urdu script being difficult and better suited for secondary education. Hindi, in short, was the only alternative for “a national and popular education.”92 His 1868 Memorandum, Shivaprasad asserted, had simply addressed the issue of script; his “foolish” Hindu compatriots had turned it into an issue of language, proclaiming a “crusade” against Persian “household” words used “by all our women, children, the rustic population, as well as the urban.” By propagating a “sanitized” Sanskritized Hindi they had separated Hindi and Urdu. In reiterating his demand for a single “national” character for court and community, Shivaprasad anticipated Gandhi: he now referred to the mixed language of his choice as “Hindustani” (“Hindustan’s vernacular”).93 His conciliatory stance did not endear him to his compatriots. By striving for a compromise Shivaprasad ended up alienating partisans of both the Hindi and Urdu camp. He became anathema to the Hindi literary establishment, which has only recently rediscovered him as a champion of a purported Hindi renaissance.94 Shivaprasad was not the typical representative of Hindu national modernity. Yet the complexity of his thought and engagement in scholarly and pedagogical projects in the cause of Indian progress highlights the need to think beyond

88 Ulrike Stark ready-made labels of “loyalist,” “collaborator,” or “nationalist.” The colonial state, to be certain, had found in him a cultural mediator who was untiring in his efforts to interpret British educational policy to the Indian masses. Yet Western education to him was not a break with tradition, but a process of selective assimilation along the lines of what Rabindranath Tagore would later term “the great opportunity for the creation of new thought by a new combination of truths.”95 Provided that Indian cultural elements could be strengthened, Shivaprasad, like Tagore, viewed Western knowledge not as a “burden” but as “nourishment”; the way to assimilate it was by mastery. If Shivaprasad believed in the superiority of modern European science, he claimed the moral superiority of Hindu thought. If he assimilated the colonial rhetoric of improvement, he did so as a self-appointed agent of change, whose mission was the advancement of his countrymen. He firmly believed in a culturally and morally renewed Hindu nation: as he remarked in Itihas timir nashak, his endeavor in writing a history of India was simply to demonstrate to his compatriots that Indians, too, were capable of change. Shivaprasad never visited Europe. The civilization whose learning, science, and pedagogy formed an integral part of his intellectual universe remained, in a sense, an imagined and idealized one. While attempts to visit England during his youth were thwarted by external circumstances, the older Shivaprasad felt himself to be barred from overseas travel by Hindu caste restrictions. This is but one indicator that, for all his efforts to modernize the Hindu nation, his own modernity remained deeply fragmented. As the category of “modernity” is undergoing critical revision, let me conclude with a comment by Carlo Ginzburg, who problematizes modernity by invoking the difference between “the idiom of the observers and the idiom of the actors.”96 Indian educational discourse, as we have seen, was conducted in an idiom of improvement, focusing on key concepts of “civilization,” “progress,” and “reform.” That “modernity” was not part of the conceptual vocabulary of Shivaprasad, an eminent pioneer of modern Indian education, urges us to listen more closely to Indian intellectuals’ “vernacular” voices and explore how the vernacular converged with the cosmopolitan to create a trans-colonial engagement with the world. Much may be gained from understanding Indian modernity on its own terms.

Notes 1 Cited in Testimonials of the Raja Shivprasad (n.p., 1881), 10. 2 J. Long, Returns Relating to Publications in the Bengali Language, in 1857 [Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government, vol. 32] (Calcutta: 1859), xvi. 3 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 346. 4 Savanih-e ‘umri-e Raja Shivparshad (Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1894), 14−15. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from vernacular sources are my own. 5 C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 76−78. 6 Bayly, Empire and Information, 234−235.

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7 See M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture, India, 1770−1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 8 G. A. Grierson, The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1889), 149. 9 See S. Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 10 For an English version of the lecture, see Shivaprasad, Hindi Selections (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1867). 11 M. A. Sherring, The Sacred City of the Hindus (London: Trübner & Co., 1868), 339; 312. 12 A. Cunningham, Archaeological Survey of India. Four Reports Made During the Years 1862−63−64−65, vol. 1 (Simla: Government Central Press, 1871), 303. 13 Ibid. 14 For a detailed discussion, see Dodson, Orientalism, 174−178. 15 “To the Editor of the Pandit,” The Pandit 2, 23 (1868): 250. 16 “Memo,” Supplement to The Pandit 3, 28 (1868): i−iii. 17 “To the Editor of the Pandit,” The Pandit 3, 29 (1868): 114−117. 18 “To the Editor of the Pandit,” The Pandit 3, 35 (1869): 247. 19 “To the Editor of the Pandit,” The Pandit 4, 37 (1869): 16−20. 20 “To the Editor of the Pandit,” The Pandit 3, 29 (1868): 116. 21 “To the Editor of the Pandit,” The Pandit 4, 38 (1869): 43. 22 G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 52. 23 M. S. Dodson, “Contesting Translations: Orientalism and the Interpretation of the Vedas,” Modern Intellectual History 4, 2 (2007): 43−59. 24 “Max Müller’s Translation of the Rig-Veda,” The Pandit 4, 41 (1869): 110−114. Shivaprasad presumably had some reading knowledge of German and French. 25 Ibid., 110. I am grateful to Gary Tubb for his translation of the Sanskrit original. 26 “The Rig-Veda. Letter to the Editor,” The Pandit 4, 43 (1869): 157. 27 See Proceeding (No.1) of the Benares Dharmasabha, established by His Highness the Maharajah of Benares, (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1870). 28 Education Commission, Report of the North-Western Provinces & Oudh Provincial Committee (Calcutta: 1884), 323. 29 Shivaprasad, Manavdharmsar arthat Manusmriti ka samkshep samskrit aur bhasha mem (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1857), preface. 30 Mohamudgara artha samet (Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1880). 31 V. B. Talwar, ed., Raja Shivaprasad “Sitarehind”: pratinidhi samkalan, (Delhi: National Book Trust, 2004), 135. 32 F. M. Müller, “An Indian Religious Reformer,” The Athenaeum, 5 (1881): 197. 33 Ibid. 34 See Shivaprasad’s pamphlet Dusra aur Pichla Nivedan and Dayananda’s Anubhramocchedan. 35 The Athenaeum, 5 (1881): 197. 36 Ibid. 37 See J. T. F. Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati: His Life and Ideas (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), 190−193. For more on this debate, see J. Cort, “Indology as Authoritative Knowledge,” Chapter 6 of this volume. 38 Shivaprasad, Jain aur bauddh ka bhed, 2nd edn, (Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1888). 39 See Shivaprasad’s quaint propaganda piece: “A prophecy in favor of the British government,” The Pandit 10, 46 (1875): 146. 40 Prakash, Another Reason, 85. 41 G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). See also K. Kumar, Political

90 Ulrike Stark

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

70 71

Agenda of Education, (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1991); S. Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). T. Allender, “Cross-cultural Educational Ethics: How the State Made and Unmade Education in the Raj, 1800−1919.” http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/ASAA/biennialconference/2004/Allender%20-T-ASAA2004.pdf (accessed 1 May 2010). Prakash, Another Reason, 13. Seth, Subject Lessons, 2. J. A. Richey, ed., Selections from Educational Records, part 2, (Calcutta 1922), 364−393. Quoting the Education Dispatch of 1854 in ibid., 30. The Benares Circle included the districts of Fatehpur, Kanpur, Banda, Hamirpur, Jalaun, and Jhansi. Report on the Progress of Education in the North-Western Provinces, for the year 1858−59 (Allahabad: 1860), 34. Education Commission, Report of the NWP & Oudh Provincial Committee, 315. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 321. See B. A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1996). Kumar, Political Agenda, 25−41. For an account of another indigenous educator’s struggle with implementing popular education in Bengal during the same period, see Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 103–114. Prakash, Another Reason, 30−33. Report on the State of Popular Education in the North-Western Provinces, for the year 1862−63 (Allahabad: 1864), 21−22. Education Commission, Report of the NWP & Oudh Provincial Committee, 318. Ibid., 316. For an extensive discussion, see Kumar, Political Agenda, 72−94. Ibid., 64. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 54, 117−118, 127. M. Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 165. Ibid., 174. Bhugol hastamalak translates literally as “The earth as an amalaka fruit placed on the palm of the hand.” Shivaprasad’s reference to Hastamalaka, the enlightened child disciple of the Advaita Vedanta philosopher Shankaracharya, would not have been lost on Hindu readers. Shivaprasad, Bhugol hastamalak, part 1 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1876), preface. D. N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 223. Shivaprasad, Bhugol hastamalak, 17. Ibid., 19. The controversy surrounding Itihas and the “authentic” representation of India’s past has received detailed analysis and need not be rehearsed here. See A. A. Powell, “History Textbooks and the Transmission of the Pre-colonial Past in North-western India in the 1860s and 1870s,” in Daud Ali, ed., Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 90−133. M. E. Grant Duff, Notes of an Indian Journey, (London: Macmillan & Co., 1876), 261. Grant Duff later had Shivaprasad’s refutation of the “absurdities” of Puranic history reprinted in the British Contemporary Review. Pandit Bhavanidat Joshi, A History of Hindustan. Being an English Version of Raja Sivaprasad’s Itihas Timirnashak, part 3 (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1874), preface.

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72 Education Commission, Report of the NWP & Oudh Provincial Committee, 438; The Bengal Magazine 2 (1874): 239−245. 73 As cited in H. Malik, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Educational Philosophy: A Documentary Record (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1989), 100−116. 74 As cited in ibid., 117−131. 75 Shivaprasad, Strictures upon the Strictures, as cited in Malik, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Educational Philosophy, 118−119. 76 As cited in ibid., 121. 77 Syed Ahmed Khan, Strictures, as cited in Malik, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Educational Philosophy, 108. 78 Shivaprasad, Strictures upon the Strictures, as cited in ibid., 131. 79 On Sir Syed’s program, see D. Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 80 Education Commission, Report of the NWP & Oudh Provincial Committee, 22. 81 Ibid., 314. 82 See S. Bhattacharya, et al. eds. The Development of Women’s Education in India (New Delhi: Kanishka, 2001); Kumar, Political Agenda, 109−110. 83 See Bayly, Empire and Information, 236−237. 84 General Report on Public Instruction in the North-Western Provinces, 1873−74, (Allahabad: 1875), 34. 85 See P. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974); C. King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth-Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994). 86 Shivaprasad, Memorandum: Court Characters in the Upper Provinces of India (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1868), 5−6. 87 Ibid., 6. 88 Shivaprasad, Bhugol hastamalak, preface. 89 Shivaprasad, Vidyankur (Allahabad: Government Press, 1876), 2. 90 Proceedings of the Government. NWP. General Dept. (August 1876), 11−12. 91 Education Commission, Report of the NWP & Oudh Provincial Committee, 318. 92 Ibid., 327. 93 Ibid. 94 See Talwar, Raja Shivaprasad. 95 R. Tagore, “The Centre of Indian Culture” in his Towards Universal Man (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1961), 222−223. 96 C. Ginzburg, “Provincializing the World: Europeans, Indians, Jews (1704),” keynote address delivered at the conference “After Europe: Postcolonial Knowledge in the Age of Globalization,” University of Chicago, 12 March 2010.

Part II

Strategies of translation

4

Modernity’s script and a Tom Thumb performance English linguistic modernity and Persian/Urdu lexicography in nineteenth-century India Javed Majeed*

This chapter explores two interrelated topics. First, it seeks to understand the associations made between modernity and the English language in the writings of colonial officials in British India. It shows that arguments about the transliteration of Indian languages into the Roman script were crucial to the way these associations were made. The question of script determined how English as a language became a metonym for the values of modernity in these writings. While there have been a number of works showing how a cultural attachment to script has played a role in the way Indian languages have become icons for various kinds of communalism and sub-nationalism,1 the role of the Latin script in the cultural sensibilities of British officials in India has been understudied. English officials were as susceptible as Indians to forms of linguistic “nationalism” in which script became a culturally charged symbol. However, for some British officials the Roman script was more than this; it was a symbol of modernity itself. The second part of this chapter considers the continuation of a Persianate tradition of lexicography in nineteenth-century India. It shows how this tradition expanded to incorporate English lexical items through transliteration. The focus here is on rhyming glossaries in Urdu. Implicit in these is a different notion of linguistic agency from the schemes for transliteration discussed by British officials, as well as a different sense of multilingualism and how to render this textually. Moreover, these glossaries reproduce English within the frames of Indian pronunciation patterns. In doing so, they not only see English as a lexical opportunity, they also reproduce it as a “South Asianized” acoustic substance.

Modernity’s script It is important to stress that the association between (Western) modernity and the Latin script has also been made by linguists and others working in non-European societies that were not directly colonized by Europe. The obvious example is language reform in Turkey, where a strong link was made between script and modernity. The adoption of the Latin script for Turkish in November 1928 was motivated by a desire to break ties with the “Islamic East,” and to facilitate communication with the Western world. The rewriting of Turkish in the Latin script was seen as crucial to Turkey’s commitment to modernize and secularize.2

96 Javed Majeed Miyako Inoue has shown how language was the symbolic terrain on which Japan conducted a self-critical comparison with an undifferentiated West in the nineteenth century. Any linguistic discrepancy between Japanese and Western languages (such as the “lack” of third-person pronouns in the former) was seen as a defect. Moreover, divergent writing systems and literary styles, monopolized by diverse elites, meant that spoken Japanese was characterized by a diversity of mutually unintelligible dialects that were seen as a barrier to national integration. One plan for the creation of a standard language by Mori Arinori (1847–89) included the proposal to replace Japanese scripts with the Roman alphabet.3 What is involved in these perceptions is not so much the language of modernity as what might be called “its script.” This script for and of modernity is especially evident in some of C. E. Trevelyan’s (1807–86) writings. The visual appearance of the Roman script on the printed page becomes an ocular manifestation of modernity’s values. In these writings, what is highlighted is not how the Roman script corresponds to the sounds of the English language, instead the focus is on making connections between the Roman script and the values of capitalist efficiency and commodity production. In his argument for making the Roman script a common script for the whole of India, Trevleyan recommended it on the grounds of capitalist efficiency. In an article of 1836, the first reason he gave for the superiority of the Roman script over other “Eastern” writing systems is its “superior cheapness.” Books printed in this script are cheaper than those in Indian scripts because of the “superior compactness” of the Roman type. Cutting type in Indian scripts is more expensive because more fonts need to be prepared, as these scripts have more letters. This means a book transliterated into the Roman script will be more compact than that printed in an Indian script, and the binding of the book will also be cheaper as a result. Furthermore, because many Indian languages require vowel points above or below consonants, which rest on thin strips of metal, they easily break. The fonts of type for Roman are therefore more robust than those for Indian languages. Trevelyan also mentioned the higher cost of paying the wages of the European superintendent of any work being printed in an Indian language as a factor in the cost of production.4 Trevelyan’s commitment to the Roman script, then, is intertwined with his commitment to print capitalism and the commodification of books as mass-produced products for sale. This is the main burden of Trevelyan’s argument, not linguistic considerations of the script’s relationship to the phonological systems of languages. The “superior compactness” of Roman type, “its capability of compression,”5 means that the same text printed in that script as opposed to competing Indian scripts is cheaper and takes up less storage space. Moreover, in his argument for the Roman script, the statistical imagination of a British colonial epistemology is clearly evident, and this some decades before it reached its apotheosis in the AllIndia Census from 1871 onward. Thus, in another paper on the Roman script, in which he argued for the superiority of Sir William Jones’s system of transliteration in his “Dissertation on the orthography of Asiatick words in Roman letters” (1784) over that put forward by the lexicographer J. B. Gilchrist (1759–1841), Trevelyan calculated the relative sizes of a book printed according to each scheme. A book of

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500 pages, with an average of 304 words on each page, printed according to Jones’s system would have a total of 152,000 words. However, the same book printed in accordance with Gilchrist’s plan would turn out to be considerably longer, requiring an extra 136 pages.6 This preoccupation with books in terms of storage space for stock and as saleable commodities extends to market projections for the distribution of Roman type books in India. On the basis of estimating the number of people who were literate in Bengal and the Upper Provinces, Trevelyan also estimated the future literate population resulting from the expansion of government-sponsored education at the village level. He represented this literate population as an Indian market of willing consumers for books in the Roman script.7 Others who argued that all books in Indian languages should be written in the Roman script expressed a similar argument. The Revd R. C. Mather cited the sales figures of such books as proof for the feasibility of the plan to make the Roman script the only all-Indian script.8 In highlighting the distinctive features of print culture in contrast to manuscript culture, W. J. Ong has stressed how the former is consumer-oriented.9 This consumer orientation is clear in British colonial papers on “Romanization.” Thus, for Trevelyan and others who held his views, the Roman script is metaphorically linked to specific features and values of print capitalism. But it is also linked to some general features of modernity. The importance of the “idea of speed” to conceptions of modernity has been recently stressed by Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that “once the distance passed in a unit of time came to be dependent on technology, on artificial means of transportation, all extant, inherited limits to the speed of movement could be in principle transgressed.” For this reason, “velocity of movement and access to faster means of mobility steadily rose in modern times to the position of power and domination.”10 Arguments in relation to speed also play a role in the project to make the Roman script an all-Indian script, displacing other scripts. Trevelyan argued that the Roman script is easier to write and read, and so takes less time to learn than other scripts.11 He substantiates this by referring to an “experiment” in Hindu College that tested the rates of speed in writing in different scripts. According to him, teachers at that college asked a “native” copyist to write as rapidly as he could in the “native character” and in the Roman script. The result was that “in thus writing against time the advantage of the Roman characters was two and a half to one!”12 Moreover, these arguments in relation to speed sometimes elevate speed as an end in itself, as a self-sufficient and self-evident good. This becomes clear when Trevelyan shows that he is concerned with the comparative reading speeds in the Roman script and Indian scripts, irrespective of whether or not the reader can understand the language that he is reading. He asserts that a “native” who knows the Roman script will be able to read it fluently and quickly “whether he understands it or not,” whereas this is not the case with the same person reading in an Indian script.13 Speed of reading is here divorced from understanding the content of what is being read. At times, the language in these arguments almost refers to a kind of “virtual” speed, as when Trevelyan suggested that the adoption of the Roman script would facilitate the “constant communication of thought” in these “enlightened times.”14 At other times, speed becomes telescoped into a single instance, when Trevelyan asserted that if all Indian languages were cast into the

98 Javed Majeed Roman script, then the student could turn from one Indian language to another “at once.”15 What mattered for Trevelyan, then, is speed, or in his words, writing in “quick succession” and “quick and legible writing.”16 There are other specific features of modernity that he referred to in connection with the Roman script. One is the flow of scientific information and technology. He believed that the adoption of the Roman script in India would mean that modern scientific terms would be more readily and efficiently adopted into Indian ‘vernaculars.’17 This in turn would bring Indian literature closer to European literature, and thus closer to the West as the exemplar of an unprecedented modernity.18 This argument is developed in another direction, that of a global cultural homogenization. Trevelyan (and others) argued that just as the Latin script has unified Europe’s writing systems, and so has given the diverse countries of that continent a common cultural grounding, so too it would have a unifying effect on India, overcoming its many “national” differences and divisions, thereby also bringing India closer as a whole to Europe.19 There are striking references to an image of “the globe” in these arguments for the Roman script. The Roman script has been adopted by the “wisest nations all over the globe,” “by degrees one written character should be made to pervade the whole world”: what is needed is a “uniform system of orthography throughout the world.”20 Sir William Jones’s scheme of transliteration also falls prey to this image of the global; he is described as having “imitated the Universal Governor in embracing the whole world” in his scheme, and his object is to “fertilize the whole world.”21 What is particularly interesting about these images of a scriptural globalization is that different writers call upon the same example. They all refer to the scheme of transliteration being adopted by American missionaries in the Sandwich Islands as being very close to Sir William Jones’s proposal. In addition, Trevleyan referred to transliteration schemes adopted for writing the languages of “Aborigines” in North America, and for the languages of islands in the Pacific Ocean and the South Sea.22 For the proponents of the Roman script this example is a sign of the universality intrinsic to that script. It is not a happy coincidence but a realization of the universalizing logic that is immanent in the script itself as a “system.” Both parties “though acting on opposite sides of the Globe” arrived at the same conclusion as far as “a perfect system” of writing is concerned.23 This point of reaching the same conclusion from different ends of the globe is repeated in another article when Trevelyan referred to how American missionaries, as “the natural allies of our nation for the diffusion of every good word and work throughout the world,” arrived at the same “correct universal system of letters.”24 Similarly, in a jointly authored article, the transliteration scheme used by these American missionaries is described as a “system” that is “in a peculiar degree adapted to the power of speech, as possessed in common by natives of the remotest climes, and is therefore well adapted to form a character destined by degrees to become universal.”25 However, at times the language of a universalizing logic intrinsic to this “system” undercuts human agency. At one point, Trevelyan argued that although Gilchrist’s “system” made progress, it was progress that had to be made through his own efforts. It was not “spontaneous progress” and it had no “self-acting principle

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calculated to secure for its success independent of the exertions of the founder.” By contrast, Sir William Jones’s system had such a principle, and hence its success did not require the personal efforts of its founder.26 The vocabulary of a selfdirecting “system,” divorced from human agency, is paralleled in the way that Trevelyan discussed the funding of the scheme, which requires very little government intervention (the Government Educational Committee has “very properly remained neutral,” he noted). The proceeds from the initial printing of the books were made into a fund, which now finances the printing of other books. To this can be added the investment received from “private speculators and benevolent societies, quite independent of the original projectors, [who] have taken up the system and are actively engaged in the preparation of new books.”27 In addition to imagining connections between the Roman script and specific features of modernity, then, Trevelyan’s diction in his argument for the Roman script is laden with economic and capitalist connotations, such as the free market (as above, where the government properly remains neutral as private enterprise takes over), investment and the realization of capital,28 volume and speed of conversion rates,29 and stocks.30 This language is not limited to Trevelyan alone; the Hobson-Jobson Anglo-Indian dictionary also uses a metaphor from trading when it considers the history of words from Indian languages being incorporated into English: Words of Indian origin have been insinuating themselves into English ever since the end of the reign of Elizabeth and the beginning of that of King James, when such terms as calico, chintz, and gingham had already effected a lodgement in English warehouses and shops, and were lying in wait for entrance into English literature.31 For Trevelyan, though, the Roman alphabet, as a global script into which everything can be converted, becomes a metaphorical equivalent for the script of modern capitalism. It becomes a kind of self-functioning writing machine,32 overwriting all territories and all other scripts (some of which are referred to in terms reminiscent of terrain).33 However, there are some instabilities in this argument of a “self-directing” system, which becomes especially evident in later colonial formulations of transliteration as a system.

The deepening sound of ‘ain and Semitic inassimilability The concept of transliteration as a system reached its nineteenth-century apotheosis in the “Report of the Sub-Committee of the Madras Literary Society and Auxiliary of the Royal Asiatic Society, on writing Indian Words in Roman Characters.” Here a smooth-functioning system is expressed in six “rules”34 (which are also referred to as “axioms”35). These rules are that a distinct Roman letter should be employed to express each “established oriental letter”; the same character should always represent the same letter and should never be employed without some distinguishing sign to designate a second; two or more letters should never be used where a single

100 Javed Majeed character will suffice; diacritics should only be used in the last resort and should be kept simple; and varieties of type are inadmissible.36 The ideal aimed for here is ease of movement between scripts and speed of conversion into the Roman alphabet as the master script, or: the exact representation of every word occurring in the languages of India, under conditions at once easy of application and so exact, as to enable persons acquainted with the original tongue, to reproduce words written according to it, in their native characters.37 This ideal is reiterated thus: “The Roman rendering should be such, that one conversant with the rules, should be able to convert the words written or printed in that character, into their original character.”38 In this report, the Roman script becomes the transliterating and unifying framework for Indian languages, analogous to British ideologies of imperial rule in which the British were seen as providing the unifying framework for India’s heterogeneity, which Indians themselves could not provide.39 This analogous connection was also evident in Trevelyan’s arguments, when he expressed the view that the application of the Roman script to the languages of India would have a unifying effect on the subcontinent’s linguistic heterogeneity, thereby mirroring one of the imperial justifications for British rule in India. However, what is important in the report and its appendices is how the practice of the system of transliteration was regularly at odds with the rules that were set out. This is the case, for example, with the transliteration for the “re-duplicated Tamil sounds” of the stops ta, ṭa and ṛa, which have to be represented as tt, ṭṭ, and ťť when they appear in certain contexts. The report admits that this is: contrary to the third proposed rule [that is, two or more letters should never be used where a single character will suffice], but the genius of the Tamil language and its poverty in phonetic signs, requires a relaxation of the axiom, to provide for differences of sound of the same letter, under different circumstances.40 The transliteration system has to be modified in relation to the “genius” and unalterable character of specific languages. The ideal of the systematic is compromised in other ways, too, in that it is admitted that there are some sounds in the phonological system of a language that cannot be represented by a Roman letter. This is the case with the Tamil (medial) la, which is described as “a sound altogether sui generis, or as Professor Wilson expresses it, ‘the enunciation is singularly obscure, and cannot be precisely represented by any written character.’”41 In another appendix to the report, this sound is described as “impossible to imitate … exactly.”42 Furthermore, although one of the “axioms” of the report is that diacritics should be only be used in the last resort and should be kept simple, in fact the bulk of the report and its appendices is taken up by a discussion of diacritics, so much so that the reader would be forgiven for thinking that the crucial issue in transliteration is precisely the choice of diacritics used. Clearly, the Roman script on its own is not

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sufficient but has to be continually supplemented, and this supplement guarantees, and simultaneously undermines, its claims to completeness. Moreover, at times when criticizing how diacritics in printing can become detached from the letters they are supposed to supplement, the author paradoxically calls attention to how these signs inhabit a separate space of their own, as though they were fully formed letters. Discussing the various strategies used to render the Arabic letter ‘ain,43 W. H. Bayley is irritated by how sometimes a circumflex is written “above the place where a letter is to come, before writing the letter itself.” Indeed in some cases the term “circumflex” is a misnomer, when rendering a “quiescent” [i.e. jazm] ‘ain: “In these cases what vowel can the circumflex be ‘circum’ to, seeing that there is no vowel in the original syllable”?44 Far from supplementing the system of Roman transliteration, diacritics actually begin to inhabit a letter-like space themselves. For this reason, they need to be reined in and tied to the letters they serve. One entire appendix to the report, authored by Bayley, is dedicated to the question of how to transliterate the Arabic letter ‘ain. This appendix exhaustively discusses how the letter has been rendered into the Roman script since the late eighteenth century in terms of writers having been “puzzled how to manage it,” and in terms of their responses to its “deepening sound.”45 However, what interests us here is the simple solution Bayley suggests for this. For him, the most correct method of rendering ‘ain is simply to reproduce the Arabic letter itself, even though it has “an uncouth aspect by the side of roman letters.” Thus he suggests writing ma‫ﻉ‬múl, in‫ﻉ‬ám and so on.46 The “system” of Roman transliteration, based on “axioms” as the master script of modernity that can overwrite all other scripts, reproduces within itself what cannot be transliterated in its untransliterated form. Its “untransliteratability” is heightened as it appears side by side with Roman letters that render other letters in the same word from the Arabic script. What cannot be assimilated has to be reproduced in its inassimilable form within the system of this master script. Hence, Bayley writes not ‘ain, but “‫ ﻉ‬ain,”47 so that even the name of the Arabic letter is inassimilable and retains its self-identity even as it is rendered into the Roman script. If we read this appendix and report alongside Trevelyan’s articles on transliteration, we can open up some tentative perspectives on this question of the inassimilable “deepening sound of the “‫”ﻉ‬48 into the script of linguistic modernity. First, the racial term “Semitic” is often used to describe Arabic. This is distinguished from the term “Aryan” to refer to Sanskrit and Hindi, and “Dravidian” to refer to the languages of South India. An analogy is drawn between the difficulties of representing the Tamil medial consonant la and the Arabic ‘ain; the former is described as the “vexata litera of Dravidian, as ‫ ﻉ‬is of Semitic tongues.”49 The language of race also surfaces in relation to the discussion of this medial consonant in Tamil. The report argues that it is only the “pure Tamil races” who are able to enunciate it. The sound is never heard “from an Arian mouth.”50 The language of race, then, cuts across the linguistic terrain of transliteration. It is also clear that what is being centralized here is an “Aryan,” “Hindu” India in relation to which “Dravidians” and “Semites” are seen as problematic. This reflects the broader outlines of the cultural politics of the British state in India. As one recent work has stressed, British

102 Javed Majeed Orientalism focused heavily on the Sanskritic heritage of India from the late eighteenth century onward, and was closely intertwined with the judicial project to revive India’s “ancient constitution” in distinction from its Islamic heritage.51 Others have shown how consistently British colonial texts constructed Muslims as “strangers” in India.52 Furthermore, from the late eighteenth century onward, the British sought to legitimize their rule in Indian idioms.53 In this, the courting of pandits through patronage in the legal and cultural-scholarly spheres allowed the colonial state to claim elements of continuity with past practices in India, and to situate themselves within the established forms of South Asian sovereignty and cultural authority.54 The arguments for transliteration reflect these strands in the colonial state’s ideology of legitimization and in its Orientalist projects. There is a tendency in these papers to partly justify transliteration strategies with reference to Sanskrit and its learning. One of the reasons Trevelyan gives for advocating the Roman script in India was that it would make the derivation of “Hindu alphabets” from a common origin more readily apparent. This necessarily excluded Persian and Arabic, which were described as “unlike Indian letters,” and as having a separate origin from them.55 In his later paper, Trevelyan also invoked Sir William Jones’s theory of the monogenesis of mankind and the Indo-European family of languages to further justify his argument, suggesting that “Romans and Indians derive their origin from the same family of the human race, and that the analogy which is everywhere perceptible in their mythology and language extends also in a high degree to their alphabets.”56 The report singles out the Devanagari script for extravagant praise, describing it as “the most perfect phonetic system of classified sounds which, according to Professor Max Müller, has ever been invented.” Arabic, on the other hand, is “the most difficult character to deal with, both on account of the larger number of sounds peculiar to itself, which it contains, and because these are pronounced so differently by different races which make use of it.”57 Furthermore, in one of the appendices to the report, Walter Elliot argues for a dot above the Roman letter concerned as the diacritic to be used, because it mirrors the dot placed over the letter in the Devanagari script (anusvāra).58 Elsewhere, a reference is made to the ancient Sanskrit grammarian Panini to justify a transliteration strategy from Tamil.59 The linguistic terrain, then, produced by the attempts at a “system” of Roman transliteration reflected wider ideologies of British rule and its Orientalist projects. Clearly there were degrees of “inassimilability” to the Romanizing project. However difficult it was to transliterate the Tamil medial consonant in question, no one recommended reproducing it unaltered in transliteration. The “pure Arabic” letter ‘ain, as it was described,60 could only be reproduced unaltered, unassimilated into Roman transliteration. The deepening sound of its Islamic Semitism is the unintegrated supplement to the transliterating “system,” which nonetheless guarantees its integrity. Its conversion into the Roman script of modernity would threaten that system’s need for an outside that it has to overwrite, but which it could not overwrite completely without undermining its own self-identity. Here, then, on the linguistic terrain of modernity’s system of transliteration, we have the

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figure of the inassimilable Muslim, a version of the “backward” Muslim, who cannot be integrated into this script because to do so would threaten the existence of that script, even while that script sought to overwrite the entire globe. 61

A Tom Thumb performance How did the Perso-Arabic linguistic realm, increasingly produced in colonial accounts as foreign to India, respond to the master script of modernity in the nineteenth century? In responding to this question, I will examine a number of rhyming glossaries in Urdu that incorporated English words into their lexicon. I will also consider the tradition of Persian lexicography out of which these glossaries emerge, and which they refer to, and the distinctive character of linguistic agency that they articulate. Nineteenth-century rhyming glossaries that incorporated English words into their lexicon saw themselves as developing out of a tradition that began with rhyming glossaries such as Amir Khusrau’s (1253–1335) Khāliq Bārī and Abu Nasr Farahi’s (d. 1242) Niṣāb uṣ-ṣabīyān. The three commendations annexed to Mufīd ul-aṯ fāl (1870) by Munshi Wazir Singh refer to both Khusrau’s and Farahi’s works as the discourse (“kalām”), plan, and model (“andāz”) for his work.62 One of the commendations by Mirza Asadullah Ghalib (1797–1869) refers to its potential to be as famous as those works, while another suggests that the text is bringing these earlier works to completion by incorporating English words, thereby suggesting that the rhyming glossary is a continuation of an ongoing tradition that can expand to integrate new lexical matter.63 In the nineteenth century at least, traditional lexicography could renew itself and draw on its own resources in response to the increasing hegemony of English in Indian public life. That this tradition continued to have valence up to the end of the nineteenth century is also indicated by the number of lithographed editions of Persian lexicographical works in India, including those of Khāliq Bārī.64 These lithographs, it could be argued, not only extended the manuscript tradition in which Persian lexicography was embedded, but even renewed it, because manuscripts began to be copied from the lithographs themselves.65 Lithographs also represented a zone between manuscript culture and print that was difficult to integrate into the imperatives of print capitalism. Since Khāliq Bārī is a foundational text for this rhyming lexicographic tradition, I will consider this text first, in order to see how later glossaries continued as well as differed from it. This versified trilingual dictionary of Persian, Arabic, and an earlier form of Hindi-Urdu (in the edition I consulted the poet uses the terms Hindvī in 29 couplets and Hindī in 12)66 is composed in the masnavī format of rhymed distichs. It is some 192 couplets long. As Baevskii notes, each couplet consists of a dictionary entry, with a Persian word and its Arabic equivalent in one distich or miṣra‘ and the Hindi-Urdu equivalent in the other. The glossary is divided into 36 sections, signaled by the subheading bahr dīgar, or “another meter,” pointing to the division into sections of different metrical patterns, with each section ranging in size from 1 to 16 couplets.67

104 Javed Majeed The first notable feature of this glossary, then, is that its arrangement is not by any alphabetical order in its lemmata, nor by any thematic grouping in its lexical material. Instead, it is structured according to meter and the dictates of rhyme. This reflects the intimate tie between the Persian lexicographical tradition and Persian poetry as a whole. Baevskii has shown how the glossaries compiled in the tenth and eleventh centuries were motivated by the need to gloss difficult dialect words or archaic vocabulary used in the earliest literary works in New Persian, especially the Shāhnāma. Virtually all the glossaries compiled in India between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had as their principal object the creation of a manual for reading and understanding this epic poem.68 The farhangs (glossaries) of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries were also commentaries on the classics of Persian literature; they were oriented toward the reader of poetic texts, enabling him to appreciate the lexical ingenuity of the writer. They also catered for poets by expanding lexical options and facilitating the selection of rhymes.69 In general, too, citation of supporting verses from the early Persian classics is the rule in the definition of entries, so that many of these glossaries were also de facto anthologies of verse.70 Khāliq Bārī extends and deepens this connection between lexicography and poetry, because it is a poem itself. Some features of this glossary are pertinent to the discussion below of nineteenth-century Urdu rhyming glossaries. Khāliq Bārī is radically multilingual. It is composed in both Persian and Hindvī. This is borne out by an analysis of the “band”71 used in the couplets. Of the 192 couplets in the edition examined here, 52 had a Hindi-Urdu band, which consisted either of the copula ‘hai,’ or a Hindi-Urdu imperative, or a relative pronoun (or any two of these). For example, in the following couplet the copulas and the relative pronoun are Hindi-Urdu: Ātish [fire] is [hai] āg, āb [water] is pānī / khāk [dust] dhūl, that [jo] the wind storms.72 Another example, using a Hindi-Urdu imperative as the band, is the following: Know [jān] that a rap at the door [dastak] is Hindvī tālī / Recognise [pechān] a small finger [angusht] to be chuṭkī.73 The glossary also has some 70 couplets where the band is in Persian, usually the copula, but a Persian imperative is also used, as in: Know [dān] tafl [boy] to be kūdak, khurd bālā and mūnḍa-rā / Baiza [egg] in the Hindvī language to be anḍa-rā.74 Here the rhyme consists of the Persian rā suffix, indicating the conjoining of the Persian grammatical structure with its meter. So in its composition Khāliq Bārī is multilingual in terms of the grammatical band that ties together the hemistiches of the couplets. However, its multilingualism

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extends further than this. There are some 41 couplets that have a band in Persian in one hemistich and Hindi-Urdu in the other, so that some couplets re-create the glossary’s multilingual grammatical structure within themselves, rather than every couplet having either a Hindi-Urdu or a Persian grammatical structure exclusively. A good example is the following: Quvvat [power], that [ān] is nīr, and zor [strength] is bal / Know [jān] sāriq [thief] is [hai] duzd and chor.75 Here the band in the first hemistich is Persian and in the second is Hindi-Urdu. In some cases, the poet lexicographer goes even further, when he mixes Persian and Hindi-Urdu grammatical structures within the same hemistich. For example: Daihim [crown] and tāj and afsar in [dar] Hindvī mukuṭ / A crow with clipped wings [zāgh burīda par-rā] you know [tū jān] as a kāk kuṭ. A lie [durogh va digar kizb] you know [tum jāno] as jhuṭ / An elder [buzurg] and kalān-rā accept [māno] as baṛa jān.76 In these examples, the Hindi-Urdu imperative is combined with the Persian suffix to indicate a dative in the second hemistich. Furthermore, given that the orthography of the second person pronoun in Persian and of one of the second person pronouns in Hindi-Urdu is identical, the use of an imperative with to or tū suggests even more radically that the linguistic affiliation of the glossary’s addressee cannot be exclusive to any one language. Instead the addressee has a mixed linguistic affiliation in which neither one nor another language has priority. For example here is the order of lexical items literally: Gaihān [world] and dahr and gītī also dunyā jahān / In [dar] Hindvī you [tū] prathamī sansār jag know [bedān].77 Here the placing of tū and the fact that the Persian imperative does not generally need the personal pronoun to make the imperative sense clear, suggests that tū here might be the Hindi-Urdu second-person pronoun, being used with the Persian imperative. If we put together all the couplets with mixed grammatical structures, either within one hemistich or a Persian band in one hemistich and a Hindi-Urdu band in the other in the same couplet, we have some 56 couplets that fall into this category in the glossary. The radical multilingualism of Khāliq Bārī is also evident in those couplets that have no band at all, as in the opening couplet after which the glossary takes its name: Khāliq bārī [creator] sirjan hār [creator] / vāhid aik [single, one] badā kartār [maker].78 There are some 13 couplets like this. Such couplets create a suspended lexical world in which the linguistic affiliation of the addressee is unspecified and equivalences exist in relationships of correspondence, without requiring any connecting links.

106 Javed Majeed In the preface to his A Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee (1787), John Gilchrist referred to Khāliq Bārī as “a Tom Thumb performance”: performative, small, and relegated to the pre-modern world of folklore.79 If one compares this glossary with the many glossaries and dictionaries compiled in the nineteenth century by the British, as well as the cultural politics of transliteration discussed above, two features can be noted. The first is that the multilingualism in this glossary is constructed in such a way that no language is clearly the source or the target language. It is not clear which language is being glossed, nor does any language have a clear cultural priority. This is generally absent in nineteenthcentury British Indian glossaries and dictionaries, where there is a clear division between the language of the lemmata and the language used in the definition. The exception to this is Hobson-Jobson.80 The second is to note that multilingualism itself in Khāliq Bārī is a poetic text. Here lexicography is an aesthetic enterprise, enacted as such in the glossary, and multilingualism is a willed and self-conscious aesthetic construct. Trevelyan’s remarks about agency in his papers on Roman transliteration, where he argued for a “spontaneous progress” that was grounded in “self-acting” principles, are pertinent here. Implicit in this argument, and the entire argument for a “system” of transliteration that can be mechanically applied without thinking, is a different sense of linguistic agency, one that might be called “selfcolonizing.” What is evident in the colonial papers on transliteration is a “linguistic governmentality”; that is, an alteration of the linguistic terrain which is at once totalizing and centralizing, as well as individualizing and normalizing. The Roman transliteration “system” has to be self-acting and global. Those who are caught up in its web also have to be self-acting but only to ensure that they will do as they ought to linguistically. This assertion of individualistic autonomy within metaphors drawn from capitalism, and its willing self-abnegation in order to ensure the efficacy of self-acting principles, is suggestive of a new linguistic terrain in the making as a self-regulating field. The ideal is to put into place various arrangements to ensure that individual speakers make the choices they ought to. In contrast, implicit in Khāliq Bārī is a different kind of subjectivity and linguistic terrain, in which multilingualism is a playful aesthetic construct, and linguistic identity is rooted in a shifting polyglossia which precludes any one language achieving priority over others. Each language only exists in a series of playful rhyming equivalences with the others, not as lexical worlds to be disciplined and assimilated to one master language. At times, too, these languages interpenetrate each other within couplets or even within one hemistich, so that in addition to there being no clear source or target language, the boundaries between languages become porous. A number of commentators have argued that, in colonial India, no clear lines can be drawn between “tradition” and “modernity.”81 This also has its aesthetic counterpart. Meenakshi Mukherjee has drawn attention to the way in which the modern novel in South Asia is often complicated by pre-novel narrative traditions, to the extent that many of them can be called “narrative amalgams.”82 Others have commented upon the later emergence of “magical realism” in the global South in terms of its societies having encountered Western capitalism, technology, and education haphazardly, with pre-colonial economies and ways of seeing persisting

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alongside Western modernity. As noted above, the continuance and even renewal of the Persian lexicographical tradition in nineteenth-century India is evident from its many lithographed editions, including those of Khāliq Bārī. Rhyming glossaries in Urdu that incorporated English words are an offshoot of this tradition, but they also reconfigure that tradition within the new framework of colonial India. One such rhyming glossary is Ta‘līm-e angrezī by Abdul Ghaffur (1878), which has a number of interesting features. First, the style of cultural and linguistic hybridity is expanded to accommodate English. Thus, the preface is in English, while the glossary ends with some ghazals and chronograms in Urdu. Moreover, the preface is cosmopolitan in its references, alluding to both Fallon’s “Commercial Law Dictionary”84 and Sa‘di’s Gulistan for its sources.85 The author also has locations in multiple “life-worlds.” The author signals his authority through his relationships with figures who themselves are located in multiple institutional worlds, as signaled by their titles of munshi, and their roles as pleaders within the British judicial system.86 Finally, the text also contains two pages of proverbs and apothegms, in which Persian, Urdu, and English equivalents are given. These include “heaven helps those who help themselves,” and apothegmatic verses from Sa‘di translated into English.87 In the rhyming couplets, the English lexical items are written in both the Roman script and transliterated into Urdu, so that above each hemistich are two English words written out in Roman script. The result is an interlinear but broken text, with full lines in Urdu (including English words transliterated into the Urdu script) but single English words above each line. This visual appearance of the text creates the impression that Hindi-Urdu is the base language, in relation to which English is being fragmented and absorbed into the rhyming couplets. This impression is strengthened by the fact that in all the couplets the copula used is the Hindi-Urdu “hai” not the English “is.” The text, then, is hybrid and multilingual, but its multilingualism does not venture as far as that in Khāliq Bārī. Its mixture of forms, cultural invocations, proverbs, and lexical items is rooted in a HindiUrdu base suggesting a working distinction between English and Hindi-Urdu. This may in part reflect the fact that English words had not yet been incorporated into Hindi-Urdu to the extent with which we are familiar today. The author is also not fluent in English, as is evident from the spelling errors in the English preface.88 The glossary enacts the process of learning English in two ways, then. It is an “English training book … for the use of beginners,”89 but it also enacts the author’s own experience as a beginner. The aim is not mastery but a tentative early stage of learning. In other ways, Ta‘līm-e angrezī extends strands of the tradition of Khāliq Bārī to reflect upon English. The text is lithographed and not printed, so that it reproduces the appearance of a handwritten manuscript, and in this is at odds with the economy of print upon which the Romanizing transliteration schemes of Trevelyan and others were premised. This, together with the emphasis on rhyming, again suggests how a different linguistic subjectivity is at play here, one in which agency is rooted in the manual labor of writing, not the mechanical execution of texts into print, and in the enactment of lexicography through the self-conscious and willed artifice of

108 Javed Majeed poetry. Some of these features are also found in Mufīd ul-aṯfāl (1870) by Wazir Singh. Again, this is a lithographed text, calling attention to and reproducing the forms of handwriting. The author incorporates into his text letters of commendation in English by C. R. Cooke, the principal of Delhi College, and Piyare Lal, a schoolmaster in Delhi.90 These are preceded by panegyric references in elaborate Urdu by the author. There are also letters of commendation from others in similarly elaborate Urdu, as well as chronograms in Urdu at the end of the text.91 The author is thus keen to stress his locations in multiple worlds, both “traditional” and “colonial,” as a sign of his distinction. Like Ta‘līm-e angrezī, Mufīd ul-aṯfāl writes the English lexical items in the Roman script above their transliterated forms in the Hindi-Urdu couplets. The copula in all the couplets is the Hindi-Urdu “hai.” Each couplet always contains four lexical items, two English and two Hindi-Urdu. Generally, the author rhymes English words only with each other, and Hindi-Urdu words with each other. There are only eight couplets out of 125 in which Hindi-Urdu words rhyme with English words. These features again suggest a distance between English and Hindi-Urdu, which is in play alongside the mixed features of the text discussed above. The eight couplets where there is cross-rhyming across the two languages suggests the early stages of lexical mixing of the order we find in Khāliq Bārī but as yet, English and Hindi-Urdu have not interpenetrated to the extent with which we are familiar today in ‘Hinglish.’ To a certain extent, the use of rhyme in these texts (as in Khāliq Bārī) is a mnemonic device for memorizing lexical items. Baevskii has pointed out that the occurrence of anonymous quotations in the dictionaries of the eleventh to the fifteenth century suggests that lexicographers did not always copy from texts, but were often citing from memory. In carrying out their role of documenting the use of words, they intended their inclusion of an illustrative poetic example in the definition to improve the reader’s understanding of a word, and to make it easier for him to memorize it. As in other traditional but highly literate cultures, the Persian reader had an ability to memorize vast amounts of poetic material.92 The glossaries themselves were read aloud and memorized.93 The nineteenth-century glossaries, then, were the continuation of traditions of learning in which the arts of memorizing played a crucial role. As Sanjay Seth has recently stressed, memory-learning was an essential component of these knowledges.94 However, it is also clear from these rhyming glossaries that versifying was not a mnemonic device alone. It also had a phonological function, acting as a guide to pronunciation. In part, the supporting examples in verse in medieval Persian glossaries confirmed the proper pronunciation and reading of a word.95 Moreover, unlike the schemes for Romanizing transliteration discussed above, which privilege the letter-shapes of words, rhyming glossaries foreground the sound-shapes of words through rhyme.96 Their aim is to create the impression of an auditory utterance in the mind of the reader. In doing so, they also tempt the reader to read aloud, not silently, to utter the words rather than to digest them inwardly only. In this sense, the privileging of the acoustic shapes of words through rhyme also resonates with the residue of orality in the highly literate Persianate culture of India

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in the nineteenth century. As Ong has reminded us, orality depends heavily on mnemonic devices for its existence.97 In orality, hearing is primary, and texts exist as prompts for being read aloud. Chirographic cultures in general, and print cultures in particular, isolate individual selves, and are solipsistic, since they are oriented toward silent reading, and not reading aloud as a social activity.98 Ong also mentions how orality has a different orientation toward words in other ways, too. He argues that the “oral mind” is not interested in the definition of words, since words acquire their meanings from their actual habitats, gestures, vocal inflections, facial expressions, and the entire human existential setting. In print culture, on the other hand, dictionaries play an important role in defining words, generally listed in alphabetical order. They are a manifestation of an attempt to exert control over language by the visual transformation of language through dictionaries, grammars, punctuation, and all the rest of the apparatus that makes words something you can “look up.”99 It is worthwhile noting that Khāliq Bārī and the rhyming glossaries examined here do not actually define words as such; what they do is to provide lexical equivalents, and they create a lexical world of correspondences across languages, rather than to offer formal definitions. Moreover, they are not structured alphabetically, so that the written script is not the primary organizing sequence of the texts. Nor are they structured thematically; instead they offer rhyming couplets for memorization, with each couplet forming a lexical world of its own. In addition, the rhyming glossaries re-create a specific acoustic presence, or to use Inoue’s phrase an “acoustic substance.”100 By incorporating English words into their rhyme scheme these lexicographers literally re-accentuate them. In the case of the transliteration schemes discussed above, the “otherness” of Indian languages is assimilated into the master script of modernity. However, the rhyming glossaries impose South Asian pronunciation patterns on English lexical items. While English has 22 vowel and dipthong sounds, and 24 consonants, Hindi-Urdu has only ten vowel phonemes but distinguishes between more than 30 consonants. Sets of aspirated and unaspirated consonants are distinguished in Hindi-Urdu, and in place of the English alveolar series /t/, /d/, there are a series of dentals and a retroflex series.101 These differences between the phonological systems of Hindi-Urdu and English become apparent in the rhyming glossaries, so that their transliteration of English words magnify their sound shapes by “distorting” them according to Hindi-Urdu pronunciation patterns. Thus, in Ta‘līm-e angrezī, in one couplet the English word “cat” is transliterated and sounded like “kate,” that is, /ei/ and /æ/ are conflated, and the alveolar consonant /t/ is replaced by the retroflexive consonant /ʈ/. Similarly, in the same couplet “dog” is transliterated to sound like “dawg,” that is, the vowel /ɒ/ replaces / ᴐː/.102 “Bird” is sounded so that /r/ is retroflex, and is pronounced as a tap or fricative even though it comes before a consonant and is silent.103 Similarly, “wall” is transcribed to sound like “waal,” that is /ɑ/ and /ɒː/ are confused. In the same couplet there is a heavier dental emphasis in “pendant” to distinguish alveolar /d/ from retroflex /ɖ/.104 “Father” is sounded like “fader,” so that the fricative consonant /ð/ is pronounced as the unaspirated dental /d/. In the same couplet, “cook” is pronounced so that the English /ʊ/ is replaced by /u/.105

110 Javed Majeed Examples such as these could be multiplied, so much so that one could say that Ta‘līm-e angrezī is in fact a handbook of the Hindi-Urdu pronunciation of English words. The same can be said of Mufīd ul-aṯfāl. Some examples include the prefixing of /i/ to initial two-segment clusters beginning with /s/, thus “i-sister” for “sister,” the breaking up of clusters by the insertion of a short vowel to assist pronunciation, so “girace” instead of “grace,” and the retention of a full vowel, thus “laas” instead of “lass.”106 In “mango” /ə/ and /æ/ are confused, so that “mango” is pronounced like “maengo,” and the same occurs with “apple” which is pronounced like “aepple.”107 The dipthong /aʊ/ is pronounced as a closed monophthong.108 In addition, South Asian pronunciation is also manifested in the orthography of English lexical items when written in the Roman script. Thus, “horse” is written as “hoorse” in the Roman script,109 while in the preface to Ta‘līm-e angrezī, “completion” is rendered as “complition.” Aside from these rhyming glossaries, there are other Urdu glossaries that incorporate English. These are presented and organized differently from the rhyming glossaries, thematically structuring lexical items in tabular form. However, they also transliterate English words in ways that indicate South Asian pronunciation in general.110

Conclusion The cultural politics of the linguistic terrain of nineteenth-century India was immensely complex.111 What I have explored here is only one part of this terrain, namely the area of transliteration. In doing so, I have called attention to the specific associations made by British officials between “English” and “modernity.” The site on which the strongest metaphorical equivalences were created was script, not English in any broader sense of the term. Print in the Roman script was imagined as a transliterating “system” converting everything into its master script. But this system also required an “outside” to secure its own purposive identity, and this outside, which had to be reproduced within the transliterating machine as unassimilated, was the Arabic “Semitic” ‘ain. Transliterating systems were also tied to the hybrid ruling ideology of the colonial state. These systems were intertwined with notions of progress, which on one level justified British rule, but on the other hand, they also had to be justified in relation to Indian practices and idioms, especially in the reconstruction of an ancient “Aryan” and Sanskritic India, in contrast to other possible Indias, both “Dravidian” and “Semitic.” The diacritics of colonial linguistic modernity had to be linked to and continuous with aspects of the Devanagari script, and transliteration from Tamil had to be mediated via the Sanskritic knowledge system of Panini. Colonial linguistic modernity was also rooted in a divided sense of agency. On the one hand, transliteration systems evoked metaphors of capitalism, with autonomous rational agents responding to the prices of books as machine-made commodities, and rates of conversion between scripts. On the other hand, the transliterating system needed “self-directing” principles to initiate “spontaneous progress.” It had to be divorced from self-conscious agency. Self-conscious readers

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were to be directed by its rules to make the right reading decisions. Here linguistic modernity, then, required a print capitalist agency framed by a new linguistic governmentality. Entire reading populations become its target as they consume books in a master script that ensures they read as they should. Alongside this transliterating machine is a transliterating aesthetic rooted in a border zone between print and manuscript culture. For lithographed Persianate glossaries of the nineteenth century, like their foundational text Khāliq Bārī, multilingualism is a willed aesthetic construct, composed in metrical patterns, which keeps in play the sound shapes of words alongside the shapes of their letters. While the compact book of print capitalism is meant for the private reading of individual selves isolated by print, these glossaries prompt the reader to read aloud and to enunciate the words that rhyme. They resonate with the oral residue within the literate cultures of South Asia. In doing so, they transliterate English words in ways that re-accentuate them within South Asian patterns of pronunciation, and as such, they represent the beginnings of the structured world of Indianized English. For Trevelyan and his colleagues, it is the visual marks on the page that are all-important, but for Persianate lexicographers it is the acoustic substance of sound shapes, evoked through rhyme and meter, which also matters. For this tradition, the dominance of English in India, while oppressive, is also a lexicographical opportunity. It draws on its own resources to dramatize a space for the “vernacularization” and re-accentuation of English. Moreover, there is also some uncertainty in Trevelyan’s papers about the term “reading.” As noted above, he asserts that a “native” who knows the Roman script will be able to read it fluently and quickly “whether he understands it or not,” whereas this is not the case with the same person reading in an Indian script. Presumably the only way Trevelyan can substantiate this is if the person concerned were to read aloud, since only then would Trevelyan be able to gauge the speed and efficiency of the transliterating system in question. Silent reading, so much a part of print culture, cannot be checked for this. If this is the case, then the print capitalism of colonial linguistic modernity also had to partly call upon the performative strategies of an oral residue within Indian culture in order to secure and prove its own existence in the subcontinent. Like some aspects of South Asian literate cultures, colonial print modernity became partially linked to the oral residue within Indian society, and colonial linguistic modernity is entangled within the arena of a vernacular linguistic modernity, if only to prove aspects of itself.

Notes * This chapter is part of a larger research project, which was generously funded by a twoyear British Academy Research Fellowship. It was first presented at a Conference on “Traditional Scholarship and Asian National Modernity” at Indiana University, Bloomington, in October 2008, and then at the Department of English, University of Delhi, in December 2008. I am grateful to the participants for their comments. 1 This issue is discussed in P. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in India (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974); V. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi:

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2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29

Oxford University Press, 1997); F. Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). G. Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 2. M. Inoue, Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 82−83. C. E. Trevelyan, “The Romanizing System” (1 Nov 1836) in C. E. Trevelyan, ed., Papers originally published at Calcutta in 1834 and 1836, on the application of the Roman Letters to the Languages of India; to which is added A Letter from the Rev. R. Mather to Sir. C. Trevelyan, Showing the progress made up to the commencement of the Great Mutiny (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1858), 8. Ibid., 8, 1. C. E. Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones’ system” (27 Aug 1834) in Trevelyan, Papers, 29. Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 22. R. C. Mather, “From the Rev. R. C. Mather to Sir Charles Trevelyan, on the Progress made in applying the Roman Letters to the Languages of India up to the Commencement of the great Mutiny” in Trevelyan, Papers, 52, 54. W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London: Metheun, 1982), 125. Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 9. Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 9. Ibid., 10 fn. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 7, 14, 15. Ibid., 3−4; W. Yates, W. H. Pearce, C. E. Trevelyan, and J. Thomas, “Circular Letter Addressed By The Originators of the General Application of the Roman Letters to the Languages of the East, To The Principal Tutors, and Students, especially Students preparing for the Ministerial and Missionary work at the different Colleges in the United States” (Nov 1834) in Trevelyan, Papers, 45. Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 1, 24; Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 28. Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 31. Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 6; Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 33; Trevelyan et al., “Circular Letter,” 44. Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 6. Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 33. Trevelyan et al., “Circular Letter,” 44. For another example of this language of “system,” see Trevelyan, ‘”Romanizing System,” 18, where he refers to how previously the scheme to convert all Indian scripts into the Roman script was “a mere thought undigested, unpromulgated, unreduced to practice” but now it is a “system.” Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 36. Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 18. Trevelyan writes of Jones’s transliteration system in these terms: “the jewel must no longer remain shut up in a casket, but must be brought forth to shine in the face of day. The money must no longer remain hoarded in the treasury. The time has come to spend it for the general advantage.” See “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 36. When comparing the different sizes of books printed according to Gilchrist’s and Jones’s systems, Trevelyan asked the reader to apply these systems to the entire

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31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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literature of “half the world through the succession of ages, and conceive the result if you can,” ibid., 38. The conversion of scripts into another script is central to any argument for transliteration, but in Trevelyan this is allied to vocabulary that carries economic and capitalist connotations, such as speed, bulk, markets, sales, and the globe. At the moment, Trevelyan says, each province in India has a “separate character, and two, and sometimes more characters are current in every district.” Should the Roman script be adopted in all provinces, then anything printed in any of the provinces will automatically add to “the common stock.” Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 4. H. Yule, Hobson-Jobson. The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Ware: Wordsworth Reference, 1996 [1886 orig.]), xv−xvi. Trevelyan compares Jones’s transliteration system to the invention of gunpowder and steam power, both of which were “playthings” before they took “their proper place in the system of human affairs.” Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 34. Devanagari is described as “the rugged intractable Nagari character.” Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 20. W. Eliot, W. H. Bayley, and M. Norman, “Report of the Sub-Committee of the Madras Literary Society and Auxiliary of the Royal Asiatic Society, on writing Indian Words in Roman Characters” in Trevleyan, Papers. These “rules” are stated on p. 3, and re-stated on p. 18. Note the pagination begins from p. 1 with this report after p. 50 of the previous paper. Ibid., 18. There is a sixth “rule,” which I discuss below. Eliot et al., “Report,” 2. Ibid., 2, 35. For a discussion of these official perceptions of Indian society and their political impact, see D. Washbrook, “Ethnicity and racism in colonial Indian society,” in R. Ross, ed., Racism and Colonialism: Essays on Ideology and Social Structure (The Hague: Nijhoff for the Leiden University Press, 1982); and F. Sheikh, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India 1860−1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 49−75. Eliot et al., “Report,” 21, also 11. Ibid., 23. M. Norman, deputy secretary to government, Bangalore, “Appendix C. Memorandum to accompany a proposed scheme for the representation of native names and words in the English character” (12 March 1859) in Trevelyan, Papers, 61. This is the eighteenth letter in the Arabic alphabet and has no equivalent sound in English. As a pharyngal voiced fricative it is notoriously difficult for European speakers to pronounce. Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 36, 37. W. H. Bayley, “Appendix. Rendering of letter ‫ ”ﻉ‬in Trevelyan, Papers, 38, 44. Ibid., 39. Ibid. Ibid., 41. Eliot et al., “Report,” 12. Ibid., 21, 24. M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770−1880 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), chapter 2. A. Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). J. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings. James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), chapter 1. Dodson, Orientalism, chapter 2. Trevelyan, “Romanizing System,” 4.

114 Javed Majeed 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Trevelyan, “Defence of Sir William Jones,” 30. Elliot et al., “Report,” 18, 27. Appendix A to Elliot et al., “Report,” 18−28, Signed by Walter Elliott, 19−20 in ibid. Ibid., 26. Bayley, “Appendix. Rendering of letter ‫ﻉ‬,” 36. For a discussion of the figure of the backward Muslim, see S. Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), chapter 4. Munshi Wazir Singh, Mufīd ul-aṯfāl (Delhi: Hindu Press, 1870), 48, 50−51, 55. Ibid., 54, 48. S. I. Baevskii, Early Persian Lexicography: Farhangs of the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, revised J. R. Perry (Kent, UK: Global Orient Ltd, 2007), 175−176. Ibid., 176. The term Farsi is used to describe lexical items in four couplets, and tazi zaban, i.e. Arabic, in six couplets. Baevskii, Early Persian Lexicography, 124−125. Ibid., 30, 132. Ibid., 140, 174. Ibid., 165−166, 129−131. Literally: fastening, tie, knot; here the word that connects the lexical items with each other in the couplets, but which is not a lemmata itself. Amir Khusrau, Khāliq Bārī (Agra: Mustapha Muhammad Mustafa, 1841), 3: couplet 2. Ibid., 15: couplet 10. Ibid., 15: couplet 8. Ibid., 2: couplet 7. Ibid., 4: couplet 6; and 6: couplet 12. Ibid., 4: couplet 7. Ibid., 2: couplet 1. J. Gilchrist, A Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee, in which the words are marked with their distinguishing initials; as Hinduwee, Arabic, and Persian. Whence the Hindoostanee, or what is vulgarly but improperly, called The Moor Language, is evidently formed, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Stuart and Cooper, 1787), I: vii. I discuss the distinctive character of Hobson-Jobson in relation to other British Indian glossaries in my “‘The Bad Habit’: Hobson-Jobson, British Indian glossaries, and intimations of mortality,” Henry Sweet Society Bulletin, 46−47 (2006): 7−22. Most recently, Dodson, Orientalism, chapter 6. M. Mukherjee, Realism and Reality. The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). B. Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction. Seeing with a Third Eye (London: Routledge, 1998), 15−16. Presumably S. W. Fallon’s A Hindustani-English Law and Commercial Dictionary (Benares: 1849). Abdul Ghaffur, Ta‘līm-e angrezī (Arrah: Muḥammad Hāshim, 1878), Preface, 18−20, 56−57. Dodson, Orientalism, chapter 6 discusses how another learned group in Indian society, pandits, worked within multiple frames of institutional reference. Ghaffur, Ta‘līm-e angrezī, 18−20. Ibid., Preface. Ibid., Preface. Singh, Mufīd ul-aṯfāl, 27, 50−51. Ibid., 56−57. Baevskii, Early Persian Lexicography, 171. Ibid., 174. Seth, Subject Lessons, 35−36.

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95 Baevskii, Early Persian Lexicography, 160. 96 I say “privilege” and “foreground” because the difference is in emphasis, not the exclusion of one to the other. 97 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 34. 98 Ibid., 74, 100−101, 130. 99 Ibid., 46−47, 14. 100 Inoue, Gender and Linguistic Modernity, 39. 101 C. Shackle, “Speakers of South Asian Languages,” in M. Swan and B. Smith, eds., Learner English: A Teacher’s Guide to Interference and Other Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 228−229. 102 Ghaffur, Ta‘līm-e angrezī, 5: couplet 1. 103 Ibid., 5: couplet 3. 104 Ibid., 5: couplet 4. 105 Ibid., 4: couplet 1. 106 Singh, Mufīd ul-aṯfāl, 9: couplet 1; 9: couplet 2; and 5: couplet 1. 107 Ibid., 22: couplet 1. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., 15: couplet 3. 110 For example see Sayyid Abdul Fattah, Kitāb majām ‘ul-asmā (Bombay: Qazi Ibrahim Bin Hajji, 1871) and Sayyid Abdul Fattah, Kitāb maṣādir ul-af ‘āl, (Bombay: Qazi Ibrahim Bin Hajji, 1870). 111 This needs to be said because of the polemical simplifications of the area one sometimes finds in the secondary literature.

5

The trans-colonial opportunities of Bible translation Iranian language workers between the Russian and British Empires Nile Green* With Ibrahim in converse deep, … Beyond the distant Caspian shore Benjamin Allen, The Death of Abdallah (1814)1

Introduction Of the many translation projects that emerged from the global interactions of the early nineteenth century, none was bigger than the Bible. “Big” is a vague adjective but it matches in its indeterminacy the parameters of the project: the many books of the Bible had each to be sponsored as separate translations; those translations of holy writ demanded the utmost degree of diligence; that diligence required the application of highly specialized skills; those skills called for a commensurate level of remuneration; that remuneration involved the collection and redistribution of funds over vast distances; those distances had to be bridged by forging a diplomatic, scholarly and colporteur network; that network had to channel the disparate skills and resources for publishing on an unprecedented scale in previously unprinted languages; and those languages had above all to be brought into correspondence with the words of Christian scripture. In a period in which by way of dictionaries, grammars and chrestomathies, the apparatus of Eurasian linguistic interaction was still nascent and problematic, such correspondence was mediated through personal as much as paper transactions. Through these human interactions, the enterprise of Bible translation drew on and in turn gave back to the larger world surrounding it. For like any other form of language use, translation is a social activity, and the act of translation an aggregate of skills and resources that can be channeled toward other activities. The following pages pursue one particular example of this dialectic between the (i) borrowing and concentration of skills and capital for translating the Bible into Persian, and (ii) their return and dispersal along the same social networks that made the project possible to begin with. Truly Eurasian in its scope, the translation of the Bible into Persian required a complex web of transactions that c.1810–30 were concentrated in the multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional spaces around the Caspian Sea and, from there, reached out to Tehran, Shiraz, and Calcutta in one direction, and Saint Petersburg, Basel, and Edinburgh in the other.2 Assembled in the small and sometimes short-lived circles of translation activity that emerged on both the Iranian and

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Russian sides of the Caspian were persons, resources, and technologies that were drawn through trans-colonial networks that ultimately reached into the Atlantic and Indian Ocean realms. And with the dissolution of these circles based on the piecemeal projects of translating into Persian this or that book of the Bible, or this or that evangelical tract, the erstwhile co-workers—Scots and Iranian, German and Armenian—used the skills, contacts, and capital they had earned through their labor to navigate lives in the far corners of their trans-colonial geography. In speaking of co-workers, the aim is to capture the specific conditions of a business which, though taking place against a larger backdrop of imperial expansion, was less a story of repression and extraction than of an enterprise lending opportunities and openings across the spatial and social boundaries of empire. If the Iranian state did lose its Caucasian provinces to Russia during the wars of 1804–13 and 1826–8, a focus on individual rather than national histories, and on multiple rather than binary interactions, allows us to suggest ways in which individual actors responded to the life opportunities presented by changes in political conditions.3 For the purposes of the present chapter, rather than working with the political abstractions and longitudinal agendas of “nation” and “empire,” it is more useful to regard such entities as malleable human networks for the flow of persons, knowledge, and capital. If access to these networks was in certain times and places closely guarded (typically in “high colonial” eras characterized by imperial elite formation and boundary-marking), other periods and locales offered greater opportunities of access to or manipulation of these flows. While it is not the place here to revisit debates about syncretistic frontiers or negotiated empires, in the early 1800s the greater Caspian region offered a range of opportunities to a remarkably diverse set of prospect seekers drawn in many cases from well beyond the Russian Empire. The arrival of European missionaries in Iran, and the establishment of mission houses on the southern frontiers of the Russian Empire, presented precisely such opportunities. This was as true for the German and Scottish peasant settlers who preceded the Basel and Edinburgh missionary societies to the greater Caspian as it was for the Persianate men of the pen who sought careers there outside of their national arenas.4 The Iranian case was by no means unique and, by offering access to new forms of knowledge and technology and entry to lucrative social arenas, in the same years these trans-colonial networks attracted men as varied as the Mughal ambassador and Hindu reformer Rammohan Roy (1774–1833) and the Crimean Tatar educationalist and imperial lieutenant Sultan Kırım Geray (1789–1847), who, between Delhi and Bristol, Karass and Edinburgh, navigated the intersecting networks of mission and diplomacy.5 Whether at different times paralleling, intersecting, or competing with imperial networks, the missionary societies that emerged in the early 1800s offered access to relationships that could be likewise manipulated to gain access to the capital or intellectual flows that they directed. Nowhere was this more the case than with regard to the collaborative activity of translation. If an influential historiography has emphasized the colonial “command of language,” a scrutiny of the detailed records that Bible translation left behind suggests that even in this grandest of linguistic projects, European command of language was fragile at best and highly

118 Nile Green dependent on relationships with foreign language specialists.6 As the Revd Alexander Carson wrote in 1830 as part of a dispute over the reliability of the British side of this linguistic collaboration, “We have authority no higher than that of the translator.”7 This intrinsically “dialogic” process was all the more so in the trans-colonial contexts explored in the following pages, which saw talented, ambitious, and mobile Persianate language workers use Bible translation as an opportunity to access networks of knowledge, contacts, and capital, and to subsequently redirect those flows toward their individual life-ways.8 While the foundations and trajectories of Russian and British imperialism were markedly dissimilar, they were not disconnected. One of the clearest examples of these trans-colonial interactions is the missionary expansion into both domains in the early 1800s that saw the founding of the Russian Bible Society in 1812, the opening of East India Company dominions to missionaries in 1813, the establishment of the Scottish and German missionary stations at Astrakhan and Shusha in 1814 and 1824, and ultimately the relocation of their workers throughout India, Britain, and Russia.9 In their emphasis on literate and rational religion, these missionary societies were products of the Enlightenment; enabled by new developments in long-distance finance and industrialized book production, they were no less the product of globalizing capital. The very novelty and high promise of these missions brought them the patronage of imperial personnel: in the case of the Bible Society alone, the Russian Minister of Religious Affairs and first President of the Russian Bible Society, Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn (1773–1844) and the former Governor-General of Bengal and first President of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Lord Teignmouth (1751–1834).10 The trans-colonial character of these missions therefore lay not merely at the institutional level of their simultaneous expansion into India and Russia, but in the very persons involved, implementing an effective merger of the networks of diplomats, evangelicals and, ipso facto, scholars. Behind the founding of the Russian Bible Society in Petersburg, the missions at Astrakhan and Shusha, and the missionary entry to Iran lay a trans-colonial network forged by mobile evangelicals who frequently left their “national” missions to access resources elsewhere: Henry Martyn (1781–1812) began his godly labors as a military chaplain in Bengal before quitting the Company to preach in Iran; the Scotsmen John Paterson (1776–1855) and Ebenezer Henderson (1784–1858) entered the employment of Czar Alexander I in the Russian Bible Society after failing to gain permission in Copenhagen to sail to the Danish colonies in India; the Devonshire carpenter’s son Richard Knill (1787–1857) established himself in St Petersburg after a missionary apprenticeship in Madras; the German Jewish convert Joseph Wolff (1795–1862) only moved to India after assiduous contactbuilding in England and missionary tours of Iran; and the Bavarian baker’s son Karl Gottlieb Pfander (1803–65) spent a dozen years in the Russian Caucasus before taking the skills he had learned there to India. While each of these figures were key players in Persian Bible translation, given the collaborative nature of such work, they cannot be seen in isolation from their Persianate co-workers. As entry points to opportunities that were trans-colonial in ambit, missionary networks opened supranational conduits for ambition and endeavor. A formalized

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social apparatus lending access to tangible material benefits and instrumental forms of knowledge, the mission constituted “religion” into a workable means of accomplishing things. And as religion rendered an arena of professionalized interaction between starkly different Eurasian peoples, Bible translation formed an important means for non-Europeans to access such “instrumentalized” religion. The skills to be learned or deployed in the process were manifold. Like the “double practices” described in Michael Dodson’s account of Sanskrit scholars in East India Company service, these were skills and relationships that enabled alternative careers beyond the translation desk.11 Already skilled in one or more Asian languages and their own writing systems, the Persianate co-worker might learn the English, German, or Russian of his interlocutors or the Latin, Greek, or Hebrew of the scriptural source text. Later redeploying these skills, he might translate other works of his own or of other patrons’ choosing. Seeking equivalence between not only individual words but entire linguistic systems, he might gain the mastery required to write works of comparative grammar or work as a language teacher. Correcting proofs or setting type, he might learn the art of Arabic-script printing that until 1817 had not spread south of czarist Kazan or west of Company Calcutta. Scrutinizing every word of Christian scripture, he might think comparatively about the Quran and use this knowledge to alternatively defend or attack Christians or Muslims. Sitting daily in the company of his co-worker, he might grasp the mentality of the Christians and write a guide for his countrymen to European ways. Working hard on his duties, he might earn moneys or favors from men in high places and use these to help his family and friends. None of these opportunities are suppositions and, as the following pages show, all were realized by different language workers through their work on the grand project of the Persian Bible.

Trans-colonial networking in the British arena While the East India Company had maintained relations with southern Iran from early in its history, the early 1800s saw an increase in diplomatic activity between Tehran and Calcutta. The network of interpersonal ties established by this diplomatic traffic between India and Iran was to lay the foundation for the earliest employment of Iranians in Bible translation. The most important figures in the beginning of Bible translation in Iran were Henry Martyn (1781–1812) and his Iranian co-worker, Mirza Sayyid ‘Ali. After serving in Bengal as an army chaplain, Martyn moved to Calcutta to begin work on the New Testament in Arabic and Urdu.12 Indirectly drawing on the emerging colonial apparatus of munshi translators and language teachers, Martyn relied heavily on the assistance of the mobile scholar and convert “Nathaniel” Jawad ibn Sabat (1774–1827). The latter was born in Marya in Iraq to a notable Arab family who, after working alternatively in Ottoman and Iranian service, had fallen on hard times with the early death of his father in 1779.13 Seeking opportunities as a roving diplomat or secretary, Sabat traveled widely in Arabia and Iran before following many Persianate men-of-thepen to Calcutta and there finding work with Martyn. The translations they made were soon realized to be deeply flawed and, when their relationship dissolved,

120 Nile Green Sabat renounced his recently acquired Christianity. News of Sabat’s “apostasy” quickly reached the far corners of the missionary networks and, in upstate New York in 1812, the young American evangelical Benjamin Allen (1789–1829) published 150 pages of verse in response: “In haste before fierce Sabat fled, / … he said, ‘Sire! Be to Allah glory paid!’”14 Sabat used what he had learned of both Christianity and printing to acquire his own press in Calcutta and, in 1814, issued 600 copies of anti-Anglican polemic, Barahin al-Sabatiyya dar Radd ‘Aqa’id Nasara (“Proofs of Sabat Against the Christians’ Beliefs”), one of the very first books to be printed on a Muslim-owned press.15 Fleeing the debts he had incurred in Calcutta, Sabat first reached Madras, only to be pursued by his creditors, leading him to sail in search of work with the British on the new imperial frontier at Penang. When that failed, he sailed again for Aceh, where he found a Muslim patron for his skills but also new enemies and, in 1827, met his end thrown in a sack into the ocean.16 Determined to find more reliable financial and linguistic support for the Persian New Testament, Martyn in turn sailed away from Company service in Calcutta to the Iranian port of Bushire. Aided by letters of introduction to Iranian high officials from former and current ambassadors John Malcolm and Gore Ouseley, Martyn established himself in Shiraz at the house of Ja‘far ‘Ali Khan, the local representative of the East India Company at Shiraz.17 Ja‘far ‘Ali introduced Martyn to his brother-in-law, Mirza Sayyid ‘Ali Khan, whom Martyn recruited as co-worker on the revised translation of the Persian New Testament. After Martyn’s premature death in 1812, while still serving as ambassador, Gore Ouseley took charge of the manuscript translation and on his return journey to England oversaw its publication through the recently established Russian Bible Society in Petersburg.18 The overseer of the Russian Bible Society, John Paterson, recorded how Ouseley was “correcting the proofs in conjunction with a Persian Mirza then in Petersburg,” a figure who was described in British and Foreign Bible Society reports as “Mirza Jaffer,” the secretary to the Iranian ambassador in Petersburg.19 Three years before printing would be first introduced to Iran from Petersburg in 1817, Bible work had acquainted an Iranian with the novel procedures of Persian printing in Petersburg, just as it had at an earlier stage of the same translation with Jawad ibn Sabat in Calcutta.20 Back in Shiraz, Sayyid ‘Ali’s language work did not end with Martyn’s death. In recognition of his skills, in 1813 Ouseley wrote him a letter on behalf of the Bible Society offering a salary of 500 rupees for him to sail to Calcutta and “superintend … the imperfections of Mr Martyn’s work and others of the same nature,” an offer that he apparently accepted.21 The salary, though less than that of the European professors at Fort William College, was an attractive one that was much higher than that paid to the college’s Indian munshis.22 Sayyid ‘Ali’s connection with this missionary network would remain for the rest of his life and, as an old man in 1837, he wrote to the Bible Society in London, proposing in his Persian letter further employment—this time translating the Old Testament. In the letter, he explained how ten years of locust swarms over his lands had brought his family to the brink of ruin and how an earthquake had recently destroyed his house.23 While

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the major projects of Persian Bible translation were over by the late 1830s, Sayyid ‘Ali received in response a gift from the Bible Society of £100 sterling, a reward sufficiently noteworthy as to be recorded in the earliest surviving edition of Iran’s first newspaper.24 That newspaper was itself founded by another associate of Ouseley, the Iranian statesman Mirza Salih Shirazi, who in 1812 had been posted to the Ouseley embassy and had composed a language guide that the embassy’s under-secretary William Price (1780–1830) subsequently published featuring the name of “Mirza Sauli” as co-author.25 Building on these connections, in 1815 Mirza Salih traveled as one of four Iranians dispatched to study modern sciences in London under the care of the erstwhile Iranian military advisor, Joseph D’Arcy (1780–1848). However, once in England, Mirza Salih was effectively abandoned by his chaperone and used his earlier diplomatic contacts to cross into the networks of religion, a crossover enabled by the fact that, on his return from Iran, Gore Ouseley became vice-president of the British and Foreign Bible Society. During the four years he spent in London, described in detail in his Persian journal, Mirza Salih used this social network to make contact with a series of influential persons through which he was able to access the intellectual and technological resources he had traveled so far to acquire.26 Between 1816 and 1817, he studied English, Latin, and Anglican theology with the Revd. John Bissett (d. 1852), acquiring skills that not only laid the foundations of his diplomatic career but afforded him the theological and ethnographic insights to write probably the first Muslim account of Protestant Dissenter groups.27 Other contacts opened via these channels included the preeminent university Orientalists Samuel Lee (1783–1852) of Cambridge and John Macbride (1778–1868) of Oxford, whom Mirza Salih regularly visited. Through them he was able to meet a host of other men of rank, spend time in the libraries of the universities, inspect an industrialized paper mill, and ultimately gain an apprenticeship with the Bible Society’s oriental language printer, Richard Watts (d. 1844).28 Having completed Bible work in Watts’s workshop (most likely on the printing of Macbride’s Arabic translation of the Psalms), Mirza Salih acquired through Watts the small printing press that he took with him on his return journey to Iran.29 Excluding certain short-lived early modern Armenian enterprises, this would be only the second printing press to reach Iran. In 1837 Mirza Salih went on to establish Iran’s first newspaper, in which we have seen him reporting the Bible Society’s gift to Mirza Sayyid ‘Ali. Since Mirza Salih is on record as promising to use the printing press to print the evangelical tracts of Hannah More (which were issued in Arabic from the mission press at Malta at this time), it is doubtful that he was entirely frank about his aims in acquiring the printing press.30 For in an echo of Jawad ibn Sabat’s about-turn in his Barahin al-Sabatiyya, in 1830 Mirza Salih was one of the key players in the first Iranian printing of the Quran. Nonetheless, his contact with Professor Lee—who as we will see below was the leading British participant in Persian scripture translations—continued after his return to Iran and they corresponded on various matters.31 Since Mirza Salih was to supply Lee with the manuscripts of the famous “controversial tracts” written by Iran’s Shi‘i ‘ulama in response to Henry Martyn, there is reason to suspect that Lee dispatched English

122 Nile Green books or newspapers for Mirza Salih in return through the latter’s close acquaintance Henry Willock, chargé d’affaires at Tehran. A few years after Mirza Salih returned to Iran in 1819 and re-entered Qajar service, another Iranian translator used his entry to the British missionary/diplomatic network to move far beyond Iran. This was Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim (c.1800–57) who in the early 1820s was introduced to the missionary Joseph Wolff by Henry Willock.32 A German Jewish convert to Catholicism and then Anglican Christianity, Wolff was himself an assiduous opportunist who had worked for various institutions before finding the patronage of the English banker Henry Drummond (1786–1860), who supported his language studies in Cambridge and his subsequent Middle Eastern travels between 1821 and 1826.33 Soon after Wolff met Mirza Ibrahim, he set the young Iranian to work on translating a polemical tract by Professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge and completing “the translation of the tract of Grotius into the Persian language,” the latter presumably the classic early modern attack on Islam, De Veritate Religionis Christianae, of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645).34 Wolff’s diary recounts how Mirza Ibrahim traveled through Iran alongside him, advising him on local conditions. In reward, Wolff arranged for him to be brought back to England and receive an education from the British and Foreign School Society, founded in 1808.35 Mirza Ibrahim was quick to make use of Wolff’s contacts and even before reaching England he wrote a letter to Wolff’s Cambridge tutor, Samuel Lee. As Lee recalled the contents of the letter, it explained that Mirza Ibrahim “had translated some Arabic tracts … into the Persian and a Persian tract which I [Lee] had written he [Mirza Ibrahim] had improved, by writing a preface and adding a conclusion.”36 In a fund-seeking letter to the Bible Society, Lee described how Mirza Ibrahim “wishes me to cooperate with him in this and in any other way that may be acceptable,” adding that the Iranian “would not be extravagant in his demands.”37 In the event, in 1826 Mirza Ibrahim found more steady employment as Persian instructor at the East India Company’s college at Haileybury, receiving an initial annual salary of £200 (the same as English colleagues of the same rank), which within a few years was doubled.38 From Haileybury he did indeed work on further paid translations together with Lee (the latter referring to him in letters as “my friend the Mirza Ibrahim”), including Persian versions of the Anglican liturgy and the Book of Isaiah.39 At Cambridge and Haileybury, Lee and Ibrahim were both salaried faculty members and as co-workers on their translation projects they split the fees they received from the Bible Society equally (£25 each for the Book of Isaiah).40 The skills that Mirza Ibrahim employed in his work were highly professionalized. His Haileybury colleague, the Professor of Persian, the Revd Henry Keene, recounted his modus operandi on translating scripture: He knows Hebrew, which is cognate with Arabic, and he has made it a rule to use, in his translation, an Arabic word of the same root with the original, when such Arabic word had been adopted into Persian; and in rendering the sense of difficult passages, he first took that of our authorised version, then consulted the original Hebrew, compared it with the Arabic, and finally

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discussed the question with some one of the College, besides referring to several commentators.41 Even though Wolff was originally encouraged to bring Mirza Ibrahim to Britain through intimations of his conversion, the latter remained a Muslim throughout his years in England. Having learned Latin and Greek by working with the original texts of the Bible, he also used his skills for more secular ends, translating Herodotus into Persian and, amid an expanding imperial market for Persian language books, publishing a learner’s grammar of Persian.42 Retiring from Haileybury in 1845, he returned to Iran with a parting gift of £700 and a pension of £350 per annum.43 Such was the rarity of his command of the language, customs, and knowledge of English that on reaching Tehran he was appointed as private tutor to the future ruler, Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96). On the success of the tracts he had translated for Joseph Wolff as a young man, Mirza Ibrahim rose to be the teacher of scores of British officers and finally of the ruler of his own country. If Mirza Ibrahim’s success was hard to rival, the help given by other Iranians to Britons traveling in Iran afforded comparable opportunities. While Mirza Ibrahim followed the networks that Wolff opened westwards, Mulla Ibrahim Nathan (1816–68), a Jewish Iranian merchant from Mashhad, followed them eastwards. After the Allahdad riots of 1839 saw the forced conversion of Mashhadi Jews to Islam, Mulla Ibrahim pursued the relationships he had made by his earlier financial help to British travelers in Iran in order to improve his own and other persecuted Jews’ prospects.44 Through his association with the evangelical Indian Army officer Colin Mackenzie (1806–81), Mulla Ibrahim, too, was drawn into translating scripture portions into Persian—at the American Presbyterian Mission at Ludhiana, which in 1836 established the first printing press in Punjab.45 After subsequently settling in Bombay with a pension, Mulla Ibrahim established a flourishing textile business and sponsored the immigration from Mashhad of other members of his family and community. For all his cooperation with evangelicals, he not only declined to convert but became one of the leading institutional patrons of Bombay Jewry in the decades that saw hundreds of other Jews arrive in Bombay from Iran and Iraq.46

Trans-colonial networking in the Russian arena While the likes of Sayyid ‘Ali and Mirza Ibrahim entered the missionary networks in Iran itself before moving east or west to Calcutta or London, the trans-colonial dimensions of Bible translation become still clearer when we turn to Iranian interactions with the Russian imperial arena. As with Iranian official exchanges with Britain and Bengal, the early 1800s saw Qajar diplomats dispatched to Russia, where they compiled reports on educational practices, technology and even dining habits.47 Yet the loss of Iran’s Caucasian provinces during the Russo-Persian wars also opened up opportunities for some former subjects of the shah to choose which master to serve; some entered Russian service, such as the historian Mirza Jamal Javanshir (1773–1853) and the satirist Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzadah (1812–78).48

124 Nile Green As the nineteenth century wore on, for thousands of ordinary Iranian laborers as well, the Russian provinces of the greater Caspian opened up prospects for seasonal or permanent labor migration.49 It is within this larger context that the Persianate language workers employed in Russian domains by the German and Scottish missionaries must be located. The spatial entry point to the networks were the two missionary stations founded on the southern fringes of the Russian Empire at Astrakhan (on the Caspian) and Shusha (in the Caucasus) in 1814 and 1824 respectively by the German (subsequently Basel) Missionary Society and the Edinburgh (subsequently Scottish) Missionary Society. Far from simple instruments of Russian policy, these were foreign Protestant missions operating in an expanding empire that, before settling into the managed pluralism of the “confessional state,” was caught between policies of Russification through Orthodoxy and pragmatic tolerance.50 While Astrakhan had been incorporated into Russia for more than 200 years by the time the Scots missionary William Glen (1779–1849) arrived in 1817, the mission’s establishment was part of the larger strategy of evangelical opportunism that also saw Scottish mission houses founded in Karass (1802) and Orenberg (1815).51 Before their expulsion from Russia a decade into the reign of Nicholas I in the mid-1830s, these Protestant missionaries were in a permanent flux of negotiation with the authorities as to their rights of evangelical access to the local populations, though there is no doubt that to some on the Russian side they were viewed as useful to imperial aims. As the Crimean Tatars fell under Russian control after the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, the empire’s southern frontiers were subjected to an officially contested but nonetheless profound policy of Christianization.52 Bible translation undoubtedly belonged to this context, most vividly when the Tatar Turkish translations of the Psalms and Luke’s Gospel overseen by the Scots missionary Henry Brunton (d. 1813) were printed in Astrakhan in 1815 and 1816.53 But conceived in the distant kirks of Scotland, these remained transcolonial rather than plainly colonial projects, which were challenged by the Russian authorities and ultimately rejected as foreign interference with the subjects of the czar. This trans-colonial dimension was all the more apparent in the interactions in Astrakhan between Iranians and Scotsmen. As Glen wrote, in addition to the several hundred Iranian Muslims resident there, “Astrachan is a mart of trade; and every summer there are great numbers repairing to it from Persia, Bochara, [K] Hiva, and other places beyond the Caspian.”54 Not only were these Iranians intended as a local audience for the missionaries, in a period that represented only the very first decade of Iranian printing, the merchants were used as eager middlemen in distributing the novelties that any printed Persian or “Tatar” Turkish book represented, including Christian scriptures. During the 1820s and early 1830s, Glen consequently worked with a series of Iranians in Astrakhan, producing translations of the books of Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job, Ezekiel, Psalms, and Proverbs, as well as revising translations resulting from other collaborations elsewhere. The Astrakhan translations—which were themselves sent to Persianate scholars in Haileybury, Kazan, and Petersburg for review, to London or Calcutta

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for printing, and back to Astrakhan and elsewhere for final distribution—were part of the larger collective enterprise of translating the Old Testament, to which we have already seen Mirza Ibrahim drawn in England. Glen’s letters provide rich details of his work in Astrakhan with a series of Iranians whose wages were individually negotiated with the Bible Society: Mirza [Alexander] Kazim Beg, Hajji Mirza Abu Talib, Mirza ‘Abdullah and Agha Sayyid Muhsin. Each of these co-workers belonged to Astrakhan’s fluctuating Iranian community. Mirza ‘Abdullah, for example, was the son of an Iranian courtier who before relocating to Astrakhan was raised in the southern Caspian port of Mazandaran, where he received “a liberal education (as the phrase must be understood in its application to Persia)” in what Glen described as a “seminary,” presumably a madrasa.55 An evident freelancer, like many who tapped these networks, Mirza ‘Abdullah had also previously worked for the Iranian government.56 According to Glen’s letters, Mirza ‘Abdullah had wanted to leave Iranian service and took the opportunity of the renewal of hostilities in Georgia during the second Russo-Persian War to contact Glen through an unnamed intermediary and use this as his opportunity to leave Iran.57 Since Mirza ‘Abdullah made contact with Glen via the German missionaries at Shusha, it seems that the move took place during the Iranian siege of the former seat of the Karabakh khanate at Shusha in 1826.58 Even so, when Mirza ‘Abdullah was safely ensconced in Astrakhan he later took on the lucrative position of Iranian consul, mediating on behalf of the wealthy Iranian merchants doing business in the Russian port. For Glen, meanwhile, it was Mirza ‘Abdullah’s language skills that were most important: “some of his compositions transmitted to the court of Persia on public business had astonished the whole Court by the talents and command of elegant language which they displayed.”59 Through Mirza ‘Abdullah, Glen also gained access to an Iranian network comprising “the most learned and intelligent Persians in the city,” to whom Mirza ‘Abdullah read out his and Glen’s translations and collected their remarks for improvements.60 For another unnamed co-worker (possibly Mirza Abu Talib, with whom Glen worked on the Psalms), Bible translation was clearly a form of moonlighting, for during the daytime he worked “giving Parsee lessons in the Gymnasium [i.e. imperial school].” Negotiating with the Bible Society on his behalf, Glen urged his sponsors to offer the Iranian a long-term contract since his co-worker would only help him in the early morning and refused to give up his regular job at the school.61 Indirect references in Glen’s letters also suggest that another co-worker, Sayyid Muhsin, was also more usually employed in Astrakhan as a language teacher.62 The Bible Society archives also shed light on the salaries that these co-translators received. In this respect, what Nicholas Thomas has argued with regard to the Pacific of the early 1800s can also be said for the greater Caspian region in the same period: “The character of early contact was often such that foreigners were in no position to enforce their demands; consequently, local terms of trade often had to be acceded to.”63 In a situation where employers (no less than employees) were “foreigners,” this was inevitably all the more so. In accordance with Iranian rather than British employment customs, the co-translators’ wages comprised both the

126 Nile Green formal salary and a substantial additional sum (often comprising six months’ salary) “received in the Persian style as a present.”64 In 1827 and 1829, this amounted to a salary of 2,000 rubles plus anything up to an additional 1,000 rubles by way of a “present.”65 Glen broke down his Iranian co-worker’s fee for 1829 more specifically as: 2,000 rubles “allowance,” 250 rubles “entertainments,” 200 rubles “present,” 175 rubles “expenses,” and 375 rubles for transcribing additional copies of translations, rendering a total of 3,000 rubles.66 To gain an approximate sense of the value of these sums, we can turn to the inventory of goods available in Russia in 1829 made by the British traveler James Alexander, which included cotton jean at 59 kopecks, fine-woven woolen hose at 3 rubles, spades and axes at 3 and 4 rubles, Bolton quilts at 30 rubles, and a dozen elegant knives and forks at 45 rubles.67 When we bear in mind that Glen’s co-workers were at least in some cases drawing additional salaries in addition to the 3,000 rubles gained from work with him, it is clear that these language workers were well recompensed for their skills. When the Bible Society in London attempted to cut expenses, Glen defended his co-workers’ right to earn a proper salary, writing that “the idea of his [Mirza ‘Abdullah’s] serving gratis is entirely out of the question” and reminding the Society’s committee that though the Iranian was “of a noble family and to a certain extent provided for independently,” he had many dependents and needed to earn money for his family and not only himself.68 Glen was not above using the same skills and networks to advance his own family in turn, and, through his Bible Society contacts, dispatched his son James Glen to study at Cambridge, writing from Astrakhan to Professor Joseph Jowett that the son already “reads Persic fluently and understands a little of Arabic and Hindustani.”69 The same language skills and networks could serve anyone who mastered them. Of all the Iranians with whom Glen worked, the most successful in making use of these networks was Mirza Kazim Beg (1803–70).70 Born in the port of Rasht on the Iranian side of the Caspian, Mirza Kazim was the grandson of Nazir Muhammad Khan Beg, the first minister of the ruler of Darband, Fath ‘Ali Khan.71 Echoing the family background of Henry Martyn’s co-worker Jawad ibn Sabat, the family’s peregrinations had already begun during the first Russo-Persia War, when Mirza Kazim’s father moved to Mecca for several years of legal study before returning in 1809 after the establishment of peace. At that time, he took an official post as shaykh al-islam in the Caspian town of Darband, which had been absorbed into Russian territory in 1806. There, his son Mirza Kazim was raised, before again moving with his father to Astrakhan, where both father and son were counted among the numerous Iranians attracted by the curiosities and prospects of the Scottish mission house. It was in these circumstances that Mirza Kazim was converted to Christianity in 1823, taking the aptly chosen name of Alexander, a good Scots name and that of the ruling czar.72 From Glen and the other missionaries at Astrakhan, Mirza Kazim learned English and at least something of the languages of Christian scripture. In a close echo of the early work of Mirza Ibrahim in Iran before his relocation to Haileybury, while at Astrakhan Mirza Kazim wrote a tract in Arabic in vindication of Christianity, which after being published on Glen’s printing press was circulated widely enough to trigger a written rejoinder from

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Mulla Riza of Tabriz, to which Mirza Kazim in turn responded with another tract in Persian.73 When a few years later Mirza Kazim was called into imperial Russian service as a result of his conversion, his language skills and familiarity with European mores enabled him to gain a post in the oriental faculty at the new Imperial University at Kazan. There between 1826 and 1849, he rose to the position of full professor (like Mirza Ibrahim at the East India College at the same time), before transferring to St Petersburg and ultimately serving as dean of the faculty of Oriental Studies there.74 His Tatar and Persian Bible work may have laid the foundation for at least some of his later academic activities, as both a composer of one of the earliest grammars of Tatar Turkish and as a pioneer on the modern textual study of the Quran, transferring Protestant exegetical methods to compile a pioneering concordance of the Quran.75 For at least the first decade after his move to Kazan, Mirza Kazim stayed in contact with his missionary friends; Glen’s letters describe him working on corrections and revisions to the translations being made in Astrakhan.76 Mirza Kazim later became a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and a member of the editorial committee of the Journal Asiatique. Among the connections he forged with European artistic and intellectual life, he was the professor of the young Leo Tolstoy at Kazan. Mirza “Alexander” Kazim Beg’s long trans-colonial career was to culminate in 1869–70 with a scholarly tour of Germany, France, and England.77 Astrakhan was not the only site for these trans-colonial interactions and, like the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus mountains also represented a porous frontier for peoples from north and south.78 In 1824 the high Caucasian town of Shusha became one of the first foreign outposts of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society (Evangelische Missions-gesellschaft zu Basel). One of the distinctive features of the missions in the Caucasus region was their role in the combined liberation and conversion of slaves, positioning them in the end game of the Caucasian slave trade. Just to the north of the mountains, in 1802 a Scottish mission was founded at Karass and in the early years after its establishment it developed a policy of “ransoming” Kabardian slaves by purchasing them in the marketplace, raising them on the mission until the age of 22, and then giving them the option of staying on or leaving. Several of the Scottish missionaries married such converted slave women, while one of the “ransomed” Kabardian males (who despite being a subject of the czar took on the Scots name of John Abercrombie) was taught printing and, after the closure of the Karass mission, was employed by the Scots as printer at their Siberian station.79 The low status background of these former slave missionary converts and helpers was therefore quite distinct from what we have seen as the generally high status origins of the Iranian language workers. Even so, as we will see in the case of the principal Persianate translator at Shusha, such former slaves possessed comparable skills. Among the five missionaries and printer who staffed the Basel mission at Shusha, the most important for present purposes was Karl Gottlieb Pfander (1803–65).80 The reports of the Swiss/German missionaries at Shusha refer frequently to Pfander’s interactions with “Mirza Faruch,” his “local assistant” (National-Gehülfen).81 Mirza Farukh Amirkhanz (d. 1855) was born an Armenian

128 Nile Green Christian near Shusha, before at the age of six being captured and enslaved by a Qajar army officer named Amir Khan.82 Thereafter, he was raised as a Muslim until, after Amir Khan’s death during first Russo-Persian War of 1804–13, he returned home and found work as a schoolmaster at the new Russian school in Shusha. Soon after the establishment of the German mission there in 1824, Mirza Farukh found work as translator of Tatar Turkish and subsequently Persian as Pfander gradually expanded his ambitions across the border to Iran, no less than among the Muslim Tatars under Russian rule. Mirza Farukh traveled regularly with Pfander to preach to the Tatar tribes around the western Caspian, as well as to the townsmen of Baku and Shamakhi.83 As with the Scottish mission at Astrakhan, which printed a Tatar translation of the Psalms in Arabic type as early as 1815, the German mission at Shusha possessed a printing press which, under the charge of Johann Judt, was used to print a wide range of materials in Armenian, Tatar, Arabic, and Persian.84 The very presence of a press in so remote and rugged a corner of Eurasia was presented by the missionaries as a manifestation of Providence (Vorsehung), which would just as surely trigger a reformation among the Muslims of the region as it had among the Christians of Europe four centuries earlier.85 For the mission’s Muslim department, the largest of these translation/ printing projects was the Tatar Turkish New Testament, of which Mirza Farukh was co-translator with Karl Pfander and Felix Zaremba (1794–1874).86 They also worked together on translating tracts and, in his report for 1832, Pfander was quite frank about the indispensability of his National-Gehülfen: Since my return from Persia, I am working on a translation of this text into the Tatar-Turkish language. Mirza Farukh is an indispensible help to me in this, putting the utmost effort into improving parts of my translation, so that the language sounds appealing. The content of this text comprises new and strange imaginings in the Tatar language, such that it is often difficult to find the appropriate term, but so far Mirza Farukh has overcome all these obstacles with his zeal. Without him, the completion of the translation would have been impossible (unmöglich).87 The untitled text in question was described as “a short trial (prüfung) of Christian beliefs and the Muhammadan religion” and had already been printed in Armenian the previous year.88 As Pfander’s interest grew in the Muslims of Iran, Mirza Farukh’s skills were increasingly called on for translations into Persian as well as Tatar. At this stage in his career, at least, Pfander’s own Persian seems to have been rudimentary and he noted that it was Mirza Farukh who translated the prüfung into Persian.89 The text served as the foundation for Pfander’s move into the Persian polemical writings that crystallized in Mizan al-Haqq (“Balance of Truth”). Although Mizan al-Haqq later became famous in Indian languages, it was originally composed by Pfander in German in 1829, printed in Armenian at Shusha in 1831, and reissued there in Persian in 1835.90 Given the description in Pfander’s 1832 report of the untitled prüfung’s contents, the date and languages of its printing, and its number of pages, Mirza Farukh may actually have been translating the text that

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was subsequently given the title of Mizan al-Haqq. Whether this was actually the case or not, Mirza Farukh translated several other tracts into Persian for Pfander, who was clearly more competent at this point with Tatar rather than Persian. In a further pointer to the trans-colonial reach of their activities, the translations received a subvention from the London Tract Society.92 One of these Persian translations comprised a conversion narrative entitled Der Bekehrte Negersklave (“The Converted Negro Slave”), which had earlier appeared in evangelical publications from northern Germany.93 Der Bekehrte Negersklave seems in turn to have been a German version of the Authentic Account of the Conversion and Experience of a Negro, which from 1793 appeared in numerous editions on both sides of the Atlantic.94 Printed in Persian for the Muslims of the Russian Empire and Iran, the tract effected a striking trans-colonial repositioning of the experience of the Atlantic world to the closing slave markets of Caucasia. The Protestant missions, their presence a result of the pragmatic ecumenism of Alexander I, had always an ambiguous relationship with the imperial authorities and, on 5 July (23 August) 1835, Nicholas I issued an ukase ordering the closure of the Shusha mission. But the closure did not signal an end to the activities of the mission’s workers, no fewer than six of whom relocated to India and found work with the Church Missionary Society.95 In another trans-colonial repositioning of a tract that parallels the movements of Der Bekehrte Negersklave, after Pfander’s move to India in 1837, Mizan al-Haqq was reprinted in numerous Indian editions in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, and Marathi, and was widely read and responded to.96 The idiomatic elegance of the Persian Mizan al-Haqq was such that Pfander became regarded as the finest of all missionary compositors. Even though the chief mujtahid of Lucknow reportedly “strongly suspected some worldly Persian of having, from worldly motives, assisted in the composition,” by the mid-1840s Pfander was firmly defended as the chief writer, with a local assistant merely “polishing the style.”97 By then, Pfander—along with “his” text and reputation—was operating in a different colonial place and time in which the linguistic mastery of the ruling classes and their associates had acquired a special urgency. However, the Germans were not the only members of the Shusha mission to benefit from its far-reaching networks. On the strength of the connections Mirza Farukh had made through his translations, he had his son Abraham Amirkhanz (1838–1913) educated in Basel and subsequently employed by various European missions in Tiflis, Helsinki, Istanbul, and Sophia.98

Conclusion Such trans-colonial movements do not mean that the Basel or Edinburgh missionary societies played no role in Russian colonization. The establishment of the Shusha mission occurred as part of a larger pattern of German migration to Russia’s new Caucasian provinces, which by 1830 saw 2,000 German settlers in the Tiflis region, while the Astrakhan and Karass missions belonged to the smaller project of Scottish settlement in the Russian south.99 Yet this movement of Scots and Germans into the formerly Iranian provinces of the Russian Empire must be set beside the little-known Qajar policy to similarly attract European settlers to the Iranian frontier

130 Nile Green province of Azerbaijan. For when the Iranian diplomat and former Bible Society printer Mirza Salih Shirazi made his second visit to London in the early 1820s, he brought with him an announcement from the Qajar heir-apparent, ‘Abbas Mirza (1789–1833), which was circulated widely in the British press. In parallel to the Russian “development” policy across the border, the announcement sought to attract British and other European settlers to Iran. In the newspaper advertisements, ‘Abbas Mirza announced that as soon as the prospective immigrants arrived, he would: immediately assign to them portions of land, with residences attached, and every requisite for their comfort and subsistence. The soil will yield abundant crops of wheat, barley, rice, cotton, and every species of fruit or grain they may choose to cultivate; and the natural produce of the country exceeds that of any other quarter of the globe. Besides receiving grants of lands, such settlers shall, as long as they reside in Persia, be exempt from all taxes or contributions of any kind; their property and persons be held sacred, under the immediate protection of the Prince himself, who farther engages, that they shall be treated with the greatest kindness and attention, and, as is the custom of Persia, be at full liberty to enjoy their own religious opinions and feelings, and to follow, without control or interruption, their own mode of worship.100 Bearing the name of Mirza Salih as well as ‘Abbas Mirza, the detailed announcement explicitly compared its designs to the recent migration of Europeans to Russian Georgia and Daghistan, as well as to America and New Holland (that is, Australia).101 Such a project, envisaging an Iranian future through comparison with the far reaches of the European settler colonies, represented the visionary apogee of the many projects formed through Iranian engagement with the rapidly opening trans-colonial world of the period. Government-sponsored population movements were certainly critical to the transformation of the Caspian, Caucasian, and Crimean regions in the early 1800s, and ‘Abbas Mirza may have been responding to the emigration of Iranian Armenians to Russian Caucasia that would culminate a few years later in the mass exodus after the second Russo-Persian War of 1826–8.102 While his grand design never came to fruition, its very proposition shows how, in the pre-nationalist era, the Turco-Iranian Qajar elite was willing to engage with a variety of non-“Iranian” peoples in its attempt to make use of the population movements of the early nineteenth century. Like the small-scale emigrations of individual language workers, ‘Abbas Mirza’s larger-scale settler initiative shows that, however subsequently disenfranchised by the imperial politics of the nineteenth century, Iranian governmental or intellectual elites saw a range of opportunities in their increasing interactions with Europeans. As such, ‘Abbas Mirza’s proposal echoed at the level of state policy the private decisions of the individuals traced in the previous pages, who sought to develop the modest realm of the family through similar exchanges with Europeans. For a series of Persianate language workers between around 1810 and 1830, Bible translation served as a crucible for improving existing talents, acquiring new skills and forging

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social contacts. Supported by the flow of funds, persons, and technologies along diplomatic/missionary networks that connected Iran with Russia, India, Britain, and Switzerland, Bible translation was ultimately a social activity that placed Persianate and European language workers in direct relationships that could be manipulated by either party toward the achievement of different aims. In a period of increasing labor migrations, a range of subjects and former subjects of the shah made the best use they could of changing political conditions to serve themselves, their families, their communities, and, in some cases, perhaps the more abstract cause of the state. While the motivations of those pursuing Bible work were no doubt various and personal, it is not yielding to the historian’s equivalent of the intentional fallacy to state that the potential gains of such work were tangible and clear. In return for their exertions, different language workers gained access to new skills, cash, technologies, contacts, and routes into a wider world. If diplomacy and commerce represent the more familiar routes for Iranian engagement with the wider world of the nineteenth century, for a small but significant number of skilled workers, Bible translation laid the foundation for careers that carried them to positions of influence and prestige in London and St Petersburg, no less than in their own homelands. In an age of social and political upheavals across the Eurasian continent, the diplomatic/missionary networks traced in the previous pages served as routes of social mobility for the educated sons of Persianate men of the pen, just as they did in different but corresponding ways for missionary Bavarian bakers’ sons and children of Devonshire carpenters, and, more occasionally, for “ransomed” slaves of Caucasia as well.

Note * I am grateful to Abbas Amanat, Michael H. Fisher and Arash Khazeni for comments and suggestions. 1 B. Allen, The Death of Abdallah: An Eastern Tale, Founded on the Story of Abdallah and Sabat, in Buchanan’s Christian Researches (New York: W.B. Gilley, 1814), 32. 2 On periodic earlier translations, see W. J. Fischel, “The Bible in Persian Translation: A Contribution to the History of Bible Translations in Persia and India,” Harvard Theological Review 45, 1 (1952): 3–45. 3 A. Amanat, “‘Russian Intrusion into the Guarded Domain’: Reflections of a Qajar Statesman on European Expansion,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, 1 (1993): 35−56. On the conquests more generally, see M. Atkin, Russia and Iran, 1780−1828 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980) and F. Mostashari, On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006). 4 Here, as throughout the chapter, I use the term “Persianate” to refer to culturally and linguistically Persianized figures, including Azeris, Jews, and Armenians, as well as Iranian Muslims. 5 H. Kirimli “Crimean Tatars, Nogays, and Scottish Missionaries: The Story of Katti Geray and Other Baptised Descendants of the Crimean Khans,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 45, 1−2 (2004): 61−107. 6 B. S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command” in Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

132 Nile Green 7 A. Carson, Answer to the Letter of Rev. Professor Lee in Reply to the Proof and Illustration of his Incompetency for Translating, or Correcting Translations of, the Scriptures (Edinburgh: William Whyte & Co., 1830), 11. 8 E. F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795−1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 9 Eva-Maria Auch, “Zum Wirken deutscher Missionare in den kaukasischen Südprovinzen des Russischen Reiches” in M. Beer and D. Dahlmann, eds., Migration nach Ost- und Südosteuropa vom 18. bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ursachen, Formen, Verlauf, Ergebnis (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999); M. V. Jones, “The Sad and Curious Story of Karass, 1802−35,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 8 (1975): 53−81; and D. S. M. Williams, “The ‘Mongolian Mission’ of the London Missionary Society: An Episode in the History of Religion in the Russian Empire,” Slavonic and East European Review 56, 3 (1978): 329−345. On Iran (albeit drawing on printed European sources), see S. Barūmand, Pizhūhishī bar Fa‘āliyāt-e Anjuman-e Tablīghī-e Kilīsā C.M.S. dar Dawrah-ye Qājāriyah (Tehran: Mu’assasah-e Mutāla‘āt-e Tārīkh-e Mu’āsir-e Īrān, 1381/2002). 10 S. Batalden, K. Cann, and J. Dean, eds., Sowing the Word: The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804−2004 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2004). 11 M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770−1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 12 V. Stacey, Life of Henry Martyn (Hyderabad: Henry Martyn Institute, 1980). 13 Maulvi Abdul Wali, The Life and Work of Jawad Sabat, an Arab Traveller, Writer and Apologist (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1925), 38−43. 14 Allen, The Death of Abdallah, 128. 15 Wali, Life and Work of Jawad Sabat, 1−29; and E. Rehatsek, Catalogue Raisonné of the Arabic, Hindostani, Persian, and Turkish Mss. in the Mulla Firuz Library (Bombay: Managing Committee of the Mulla Firuz Library, 1873), 185−186. 16 Wali, Life and Work of Jawad Sabat, 67−69. 17 The circumstances are described in Ouseley’s own account: Archive of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Cambridge University Library [henceforth BFBS Archive], BSA/D1/1/(14−), Ouseley to Turgeneff (14 March 1815), 2. On Martyn and Ja‘far ‘Ali’s day-to-day collaborations, see S. Wilberforce, ed., Journal and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D. (New York: M.W. Dodd, 1851), 452−458. 18 Novum Testamentum Domini et Salvatoris Nostri Jesu Christi e Graeca in Persicam linguam (Petropoli: Jos. Joannem, 1815). 19 BFBS Archive, ‘Memoirs of John Paterson’, BSA/F3/Paterson/1/2 (1808−16), f. 222. Also Twelfth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society for the Year 1816 (London: Tilling & Hughes, 1816), 10; and Thirteenth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society for the Year 1817 (London: Tilling & Hughes, 1817), 338. 20 On the larger networks involved in the birth of Persian printing, see N. S. Green, “Journeymen, Middlemen: Travel, Trans-Culture and Technology in the Origins of Muslim Printing,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, 2 (2009): 203−224. 21 BFBS Archive, BSA/D1/1/(14−), Ouseley to Turgeneff (14 March 1815), 3. 22 S. K. Das, Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William (Calcutta: Orion Publications, 1978), 11−16. 23 BFBS Archive, BSA/D1/2/FC 1837.3.113.Ali 24 Akhbār-e Vaqā’ī‘, republished in “Persian Newspaper and Translation,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 5, 2 (1839): 362 (Persian), 369 (English). 25 Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Ouseley ms 390; printed as William Price, Persian Dialogues, Composed for the Author by Mirza Sauli, of Shiraz (Worcester: s.n., 1822). 26 Mīrzā Sālih Shīrāzī, Majmū‘a-ye Safarnāmahā-ye Mīrzā Sālih Shīrāzī, ed. Ghulām Husayn Mīrzā Sālih (Tehran: Nashr-e Tārīkh-e Īrān, 1364/1985); on the contents of which, see my articles in the following notes.

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27 Ibid., 169−170; Whitgift School Archives, Croydon (UK), ‘John Bisset’, Papers of Freddie Percy (SM/17/1). For fuller discussion, see N.S. Green, “Among the Dissenters: Reciprocal Ethnography in Nineteenth Century Inglistan,” Journal of Global History 4, 2 (2009): 293−315. 28 For fuller discussion and source references, see N. S. Green, “Paper Modernity? Notes on an Iranian Industrial Tour, 1818,” Iran 46 (2008): 277−284 and idem., “Journeymen, Middlemen.” I have translated the Oxford section of the journal as “The Madrasas of Oxford, 1818,” The Oxford Magazine 253 (2006): 13−14. 29 Green, “Journeymen, Middlemen.” On other Iranians learning to print through the missions established in the later 1830s, see J. Perkins, A Residence of Eight Years in Persia, Among the Nestorian Christians; With Notices of the Muhammedans (Andover: Allen, Morrill & Wardwell, 1843), 246, 374, 422, 446, 456. 30 W. Roberts, Memoirs of the Life of Hannah More, 2 vols. (London: R. B. Seeley & W. Burnside, 1836), 246, drawing on More’s diary. For Salih’s version and confirmation of receiving the tract Practical Piety (the title transcribed from the English), see Shīrāzī, Majmū‘a-ye Safarnāmahā, 331−332. 31 BFBS Archive, BSA/D1/1/185−186. 32 J. Wolff, Missionary Journal and Memoir of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, 3 vols. (London: James Duncan, 1829), vol. 3, 169−170. 33 H. M. Sengelmann, Dr. Joseph Wolff: Ein Wanderleben (Hamburg: J.G. Onden, 1863), 30−40. 34 Wolff, Missionary Journal, vol. 3, 169−170. Also J.-P. Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion: A Study of his Work De Veritate Religionis Christianae, 1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 35 Wolff, Missionary Journal, vol. 3, 113−114, 181−182, 234; also Sengelmann, Dr. Joseph Wolff, 76. On the BFSS in India, see G. F. Bartle, “The Role of the British and Foreign School Society in Elementary Education in India and the East Indies, 1813−75,” History of Education 23, 1 (1994): 17−33. 36 BFBS Archive, BSA/D1/1/(45−47), Letters of Samuel Lee, letter dated 1 March 1826. 37 Ibid. 38 Mirza Ibrahim’s career at the college has been meticulously reconstructed in M. H. Fisher, “Persian Professor in Britain: Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim at the East India Company’s College, 1826−44,” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 21, 1−2 (2001): 24−32. Also Barūmand, Pizhūhishī, 119−123. 39 BFBS Archive, BSA/D1/1/(45−47), Letters of Samuel Lee, letters dated 3 November 1826 (referring to “the accounts with the mirza”), 23 January 1830, and 22 July 1830. 40 BFBS Archive, BSA/D1/1/(45−47), Letters of Samuel Lee, letter dated 28 May 1830. 41 Twenty-Ninth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: BFBS, 1833), lviii. 42 Meerza Mohammad Ibraheem, A Grammar of the Persian Language, to which are Subjoined Several Dialogues (London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1841). On the Herodotus, see Sengelmann, Dr. Joseph Wolff, 76. 43 Fisher, “Persian Professor in Britain,” 29. 44 W. J. Fischel, “Mulla Ibrahim Nathan (1816−68): Jewish Agent of the British during the First Anglo-Afghan War,” Hebrew Union College Annual 29 (1958): 331−375. 45 H. Mackenzie, Storms and Sunshine of a Soldier’s Life, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1884), vol. 1, 162−163, 383−384; and G. W. Shaw, “The First Printing Press in the Panjab,” Library Chronicle 43, 2 (1979): 159−179. 46 Fischel, “Mulla Ibrahim Nathan,” 363−364. 47 Muhammad Gulbun, ed., Safarnāmah-ye Khusrow Mīrzā be-Pīterizbūrgh va Tārīkh-e Zindagānī-ye ‘Abbās Mīrzā Nā’ib al-Saltānah be-Qalam-e Hājjī Mīrzā Mas‘ūd (Tehran: Mustawfī, 1349/1970), 235−245, 341−350, 352−357, respectively.

134 Nile Green 48 G. A. Bournoutian, A History of Qarabagh: An Annotated Translation of Mirza Jamal Javanshir Qarabaghi’s Tarikh-e Qarabagh (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1994); and M. Kia, “Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzadeh and the Call for the Modernization of the Islamic World,” Middle Eastern Studies 31, 3 (1995): 422−448. 49 T. Atabaki, “Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subaltern on the Margins of the Tsarist Empire,” International Review of Social History 48 (2003): 401−426; and H. Hakimian, “Wage Labor and Migration: Persian Workers in Southern Russia, 1880−1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 17, 4 (1985): 443−462. 50 R. Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Review 108, 1 (2003): 50−83. 51 H. R. Huttenbach, “Muscovy’s Conquest of Muslim Kazan and Astrakhan, 1552−56,” in M. Rywkin, ed., Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917 (London: Mansell, 1988). 52 On fluctuating Christianization policies in the region, see M. Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea: Shaping Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); and Mostashari, On the Religious Frontier, ch. 3. 53 Extremely rare surviving copies are preserved in the BFBS Archive. On other Turkish translations, see C. T. Riggs, “The Turkish Translations of the Bible,” The Muslim World 30, 3 (1940): 236−248. 54 W. Glen, Address by the Rev. William Glen to the United Associate Synod (Edinburgh: privately printed, n.d. [1835]), 5. 55 BFBS Archive, Foreign correspondents, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to Joseph Jowett, 18 July 1835. 56 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to Robert Pinkerton, 20 June 1827. 57 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to Robert Pinkerton, 20 June 1827, letter to Joseph Jowett, 18 July 1835. 58 Ibid. and Atkin, Russia and Iran, 158. 59 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to Joseph Jowett, 18 July 1835. 60 Ibid. 61 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to John Jackson (Bible Society, London), 30 August 1832. 62 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to William Greenfield, 27 August 1830. 63 N. Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 84. 64 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to John Jackson, 19 October 1827. 65 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letters to Robert Pinkerton, 20 June 1827 and 22 January 1829. 66 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to John Jackson, 5 March 1829. 67 J. E. Alexander, Travels to the Seat of War in the East, Through Russia and the Crimea, in 1829 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), appendix I, p. 289. For comparative purposes, Alexander priced 1 ruble at 10d (English pence). 68 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to John Jackson, 20 October 1827. 69 BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to Joseph Jowett, 4 November 1835. 70 “H. K.,” “Mirza Alexander Kazem-Beg,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (1854): 375−378. 71 Ibid., 375. 72 On the circumstances of the conversion, see Anon. [William Glen?], A Brief Memoir of the Life and Conversion of Mahomed Ali Bey, a Learned Persian, of Darband (Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1827). 73 “H. K.,” “Mirza Alexander Kazem-Beg,” 375−376. Also A. D. H. Bivar, “The Portraits and Career of Mohammed Ali, Son of Kazem-Beg: Scottish Missionaries and Russian

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81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

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Orientalism,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 57, 2 (1994), 296. On other Iranian clerical responses to such tracts, see A. Amanat, “Mujtahids and Missionaries: Shi‘i Responses to Christian Polemics in the Early Qajar Period,” in R. Gleave, ed., Religion and Society in Qajar Iran (London: Routledge, 2004). On his academic career, see D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Mirza Kazem-Bek and the Kazan School of Russian Orientology,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28, 3 (2008): 443−458. Ibid., 454; my interpretations. The concordance was eventually published in 1859 in Petersburg. BFBS Archive, BSAX/1, Letters of William Glen, letter to Robert Pinkerton, 22 January 1829. Bivar, “Portraits and Career of Mohammed Ali,” 295−298. T. M. Barrett, “Crossing Boundaries: The Trading Frontiers of the Terek Cossacks,” in D. R. Brower and E. J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Jones, “Sad and Curious Story of Karass.” On the origins of both the society in Basel and in Shusha, see Auch, “Zum Wirken deutscher Missionare.” For the best overview of Pfander’s later Indian career, see A. A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India, revised edition (London: Routledge, 1993), ch. 5. See e.g. Magazin für die neueste Geschichte der evangelischen Missions- und Bibelgesellschaften, vol. 16 (Basel: Verlag des Missions-Institutes, 1832), 408. Anon., “Two Pioneer Missionaries in Bulgaria,” Moslem World 17, 4 (1927): 375−376; and J. Richter, A History of Protestant Missions in the Near East (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1910), 101−102. Magazin für die neueste Geschichte, vol. 16 (1832), Anhang/Appendix 1, 408, 434−435. BFBS Archive, BSS.276.E15.1, Zubūr Turk Muqadas Kitābī [The Astrakhan Psalms] (Astarākhānda: Īsā Masīhag Yīlanda, 1815). On Judt, see Auch, “Zum Wirken deutscher Missionare,” 260−261. Magazin für die neueste Geschichte, vol. 16 (1832), 412. Magazin für die neueste Geschichte, vol. 16 (1832), 408. Also reported in Anon., “Missionary Efforts,” Biblical Repository and Classical Review 7, 21 (1836), 172, with reference to “Mirza Faruch, a converted Moonshee.” Magazin für die neueste Geschichte, vol. 16 (1832), 416; my translation. Ibid., 415. Ibid., 416. On the original composition date and Armenian edition of Mizan al-Haqq, see Powell, Muslims and Missionaries, 139. On the subsequent translation, printing and content of the Persian edition, see Magazin für die neueste Geschichte 19, 3 (1834), 370−371, 440−441, 474−480. Magazin für die neueste Geschichte (1832), 418, 438, and Anhang/Appendix 1, 440. Ibid., 417, 440. The original German edition seems to have been that included in G. H. von Schubert, Altes und Neues aus dem Gebiet der innren Seelenkunde, vol. 1 (Leipzig: H. Reclam, 1825), 286−336. An Authentic Account of the Conversion and Experience of a Negro (Windsor [Vermont]: Alden Spooner, 1793), and reprinted in London by T. Wilkins in 1795. Auch, “Zum Wirken deutscher Missionare,” 262. S. M. Zwemer, “Karl Gottlieb Pfander, 1841–1941 [sic],” Muslim World 31, 3 (1941): 220. W. Muir, “The Mohammedan Controversy,” Calcutta Review 4 (1845): 445. Anon., “Two Pioneer Missionaries in Bulgaria.” Auch, “Zum Wirken deutscher Missionare,” 254; Jones “Sad and Curious Story of Karass”; and Mostashari, On the Religious Frontier, chapter 3.

136 Nile Green 100 The Times, 11 July 1823. Reprinted in Edinburgh Annual Register, vol. 16 (1824): 263−264. A follow-up announcement from Mirza Salih was also issued: see Morning Chronicle (16 July 1823). 101 “Australia,” the toponym proposed by Captain Matthew Flinders (1774−1814), was not officially adopted in Britain until the year after ‘Abbas Mirza’s announcement. 102 On the Armenian migration, see Mostashari, On the Religious Frontier, 41−44. Cf. Balkan and Greek re-settlement in Crimea in the same period in Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea, 67−78.

6

Indology as authoritative knowledge Jain debates about icons and history in colonial India John E. Cort*

Icons of the Jinas have been central to Jain ritual culture, and therefore Jain practice and identity, for more than two millennia. For nearly as long a period we also have evidence of anxiety about the propriety of the worship of icons among Jains.1 Not until the fifteenth century, however, and the rise of the dissenting traditions that trace their origins to the layman Lonka (c.1415–89) did this disquiet develop into explicit ideological criticism of icons, although never outright physical iconoclasm. Disputes between the North Indian Shvetambar Jain communities of the Murtipujaks (“Icon-worshipers”) and the aniconic groups (Sthanakvasi [“Halldwellers”] or Dhundhiya [“Seekers”]) have flared up frequently in the subsequent five centuries.2 In most cases, the arguments advanced by both sides have remained consistent; this is not a case of South Asian iconoclasm or aniconism that was created or shaped by the encounter with British colonialists and Christian missionaries. The debates have centered around perennial issues of whether or not the worship of icons contravenes the central Jain ethical imperative of ahimsa; the interpretation of scripture; the relative priority of the material and the spiritual in Jain ritual ontology; the meaning of the word chaitya; and whether icons as we know them are humanly created idols or an integral, eternal, and sacred part of the universe. The last of these arguments has involved the Jains in disputes concerning their history. Such historical disputes constitute a long and rich component of the Jain tradition. The Jains have related their own history for centuries—both the universal history of the Jains in the cosmos, and what I have termed “localized” histories of Jain mendicant lineages, castes, and pilgrimage shrines.3 In contrast to the old canard that Indians have lacked an understanding of “history,” in fact “history” per se is nothing new as an epistemology for the Jains. In the nineteenth century, though, Jain disputes about the historicity of Jina icons encountered a new epistemology of history in the form of scientific history. Indians were introduced to these new forms of evidence and proof through the work of Indologists, those British and German scholars who accumulated information in their quest for a fuller understanding of India’s past. Ever since the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and the extension of his analysis to India by scholars such as Ronald Inden and Sheldon Pollock, post-colonial theorists have problematized the work of the Indologists as being inextricably intertwined with

138 John E. Cort and thus implicated in the colonial enterprise.4 The historian Ronald Inden, in works explicitly influenced by Said, argued that three of the pillars upon which Orientalist understandings of India have long been based—the system of social and descent groups known as caste; the bounded, organic socioeconomic entity known as the village; and the world religion known as Hinduism—were all in large part constructed by nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship.5 The 30 years since the publication of Said’s book have seen several corrective responses to both his sweeping indictment of Orientalism, and the application of his argument to British Orientalism in India. Scholars have sought to rehabilitate key players and institutions in the British Orientalist project, arguing that such actors were sympathetic to the Indian subjects of their scholarship, collegial to their Indian collaborators, and had more nuanced and complicated relationships with the colonial project than their critics allowed.6 A second approach has been to investigate in greater depth the Indian intellectuals on whom the Orientalists depended, especially in the early decades of the British penetration of the subcontinent. Scholars have argued that these Indian intellectuals were not mere drudges who provided the raw data upon which the Orientalists constructed their grand theories. Instead, this revisionist scholarship argues, the Orientalists often depended upon Indian intellectuals for the very categories by which they understood the data. Further, through control of what material they presented to the Orientalists, Indian intellectuals exhibited far more agency in creating the Orientalist understanding of India than they have been given credit for.7 A third approach, which informs this chapter, says that in addition to researching the genesis of knowledge about India, it is important to study the ways that this information, and the epistemologies in which the information was embedded, were subsequently deployed by Indian intellectuals. There is no denying that the British colonizers and their Orientalist contemporaries (and frequently employees) introduced new epistemologies in India. To quote Michael Dodson, “the rather more important historical question, I think, relates to what particular uses Indians themselves made of these ideas, or rather, how Indians drew upon, altered, or contested these ideas in the furtherance of their own distinct educational, cultural, or nationalist projects.”8 This chapter looks at a set of disputes between icon-worshiping and iconrejecting Shvetambar Jains in the 1880s and beyond. These intra-Jain disputes also intersected with disputes between the Jains and the new Arya Samaj over issues of history, theology, and images. Such disputes were fought through the long-standing Indian institution of public debates, as well as several new technologies: letters and printed books and tracts, in which authors adopted the relatively new genres of discursive prose to advance arguments in the developing vernacular languages of Gujarati, Hindi, and Urdu. These disputes ranged across North India, with important centers in Gujarat and the Punjab, and contributions from Banaras. Further contributions came from the center of British imperial and economic power, Calcutta, and the newly dominant metropole of western India, Bombay. I do not aim to engage in a wholesale overturning of the Saidian and postcolonial criticisms of the Indological project. (Given the unavoidably contested

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nature of the terms “Orientalism” and “Orientalist” after Said’s book, in this chapter I use “Indology” and “Indologist.”) Instead, I argue that it is important to recognize the extent to which many nineteenth-century Indian intellectuals adopted Indology and scientific history as new forms of authoritative knowledge, finding them to be appropriate for their own intellectual projects. The imported conception of history based on scientific evidentiary principles wielded significant influence upon Indian intellectuals. This was not, however, a case of blind, passive acceptance of forms of knowledge controlled and imposed by their imperial masters. The nineteenthcentury Indian deployment of “history” was not a simple derivative discourse.9 The classical Indian Sanskrit genre of itihasa was adapted to the imported form of “history” and became a new hybrid vernacular genre of itihas. In the process of incorporating this new form, the Indian “hybrid intellectuals” (to borrow a term from Ulrike Stark’s chapter in this volume) were able to maintain and even expand their own agency. Hybridity was thus a very powerful means of resistance to colonial intellectual hegemony. As Douglas Haynes has said of nineteenth-century Surat, Jain intellectuals in this period “may have operated within the confines of languages adopted from their rulers, but they did so to accomplish ends that were largely their own and they constantly reinterpreted the meanings of the concepts they employed.”10 In summary, I take issue with two extreme interpretations of the colonial experience. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars, missionaries, and ideological defenders of colonialism too-often attributed all positive changes in South Asia to the benevolent and progressive influences of the British colonizers. In response, many post-colonial theorists have reversed the picture, and blamed the British colonizers for all that seemingly is wrong with India. Both approaches result in eliminating agency from Indians themselves. Instead, I argue, it is important that we return agency to Indian intellectuals, and see how they creatively responded to the new epistemologies and technologies of modernity brought to India by colonialism.

Atmaram At the center of the Shvetambar Jain debates about icons that erupted in the early 1880s was the Murtipujak mendicant Acharya Vijay Anandsuri (1837–96).11 As a young man, he took initiation in the Punjab as a Dhundhiya mendicant, with the name Atmaram. Through his studies he came to accept that the Murtipujak position on the worship of icons was correct, and from the mid-1860s he actively preached in defense of icon worship. In 1875 he traveled to Gujarat, where he took a new initiation as a Murtipujak mendicant, with the name of Muni Anandvijay (this was subsequently changed to Acharya Vijay Anandsuri in 1886; but throughout his life he was better known by his earlier name, Atmaram). He spent several years in Gujarat, and then returned to the Punjab to reinvigorate the small Murtipujak community there. In 1880, Atmaram spent his rainy-season retreat in Gujranwala (now in Pakistani Punjab). The laity there said they had no access to the Sanskrit and Prakrit texts in

140 John E. Cort which the teachings of Jainism were spelled out, and so their understanding of Jain doctrines was limited. They requested Atmaram to write a book in Hindi that would address this problem. He began to write Jain Tattvadarsh (“Essentials of Jainism”) to address this need. Dayananda Sarasvati and Satyarth Prakash While Atmaram was in Gujranwala, a Jain layman called his attention to Satyarth Prakash (“Light of Truth”), published five years earlier in 1875 by Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83), the founder of the Arya Samaj. Dayananda was born a Brahman in Saurashtra. As a young child, in a famous spiritual awakening in a Shiva temple, he had come to reject the worship of icons in Hinduism.12 As an adult Hindu renouncer, he became one of the best-known nineteenth-century Hindu “reformers.” He aggressively criticized icon worship and other practices that he viewed as corruptions of an original Hinduism, which, he argued, was to be found solely in the Vedas. He became famous through a highly publicized debate with orthodox pandits in 1869 in Banaras, the intellectual center of Hinduism, on the issue of icon worship. His greatest success as a missionizing reformer, however, came in the Punjab. It was there that his reformist organization, the Arya Samaj, which he had founded in Bombay in 1875, found its warmest reception. Dayananda’s criticisms were by no means limited to Hindu icon-worshipers. He also attacked Jainism, on several counts. He lumped Jainism together with Buddhism and Charvaka, the ancient Indian materialist school, for what he perceived to be their atheism. In the first edition of Satyarth Prakash in 1875, he expressed his view that both Buddhism and Jainism were derived from the materialist teachings of Charvaka. He contrasted the falsehood (anarth) of these atheistic sects with the truth (satyarth) that he revealed in his book. Dayananda also attacked the Jains for their supposed invention of the worship of icons. In his version of the religious history of South Asia, the Jains encouraged Indians to reject the Vedas; destroyed the books of the Vedas; persecuted the Aryas, the followers of the Veda; and instituted the practice of worshiping icons.13 While Dayananda was initiated into an orthodox order of Hindu renouncers, and his education showed many continuities with older, more traditional patterns of learning, his understanding and valorization of the Vedas was also in significant ways a product of the Indological enterprise. The short chapter on Jainism in the first volume of Satyarth Prakash was equally dependent upon Indological scholarship. One of Dayananda’s sources for his identification of Jainism with Buddhism and materialist Charvaka was a medieval digest of Indian philosophy, the Sarvadarshana-samgraha by the fourteenth-century scholar Madhava. The Sanskrit text was first edited by Pandit Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–91), the principal of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta, and published in the Bibliotheca Indica in 1858.14 The Bibliotheca was sponsored by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and constituted a central component of the Calcutta school of Orientalism.15 Vidyasagar wrote in his short preface, “manuscripts of the work are very rare, and … the great majority of the learned in this country are probably not even aware

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of its existence.” The pre-Indological obscurity of the text was confirmed by the Indologist E. B. Cowell in his preface to an English translation of the text he made several decades later with his fellow Indologist A. E. Gough.17 Jain responses to Dayananda When Atmaram read Satyarth Prakash in 1880, he saw that Dayananda had attacked Jainism in a manner that was without proper documentation (praman), and therefore was highly unsophisticated.18 The attribution of icon worship to the Jains would not have disturbed Atmaram—the Murtipujak Jains understood icon worship to be eternal, and were proud that they had always defended it against iconoclasts. What he did take offense at was Dayananda’s labeling of Jainism as an atheist (nastik, anaishvarvad) religion, and his claim that Jainism, Buddhism, and Charvaka were all the same. While Atmaram had already started to write Jain Tattvadarsh before he first read Satyarth Prakash during his rainy-season retreat in Gujranwala, the need to reply to Dayananda’s provocative claims shaped the evolving book. At the same time that Atmaram was writing Jain Tattvadarsh, however, the dispute between him and Dayananda took another, more public route. The Jain layman Thakurdas Mulraj, who was originally from Gujranwala but who had moved to Bombay, heard Atmaram publicly criticize Dayananda’s book. Thakurdas commenced a lengthy correspondence with Dayananda and his secretaries, which lasted from July 1880 until June 1882.19 The Arya Samaj intellectuals assumed that the real person behind the dispute was Atmaram, and so they began a separate correspondence with him. Dayananda himself entered the correspondence in November 1880, writing to say that the source of his information was the Sarva-darshana-samgraha.20 According to J. T. F. Jordens, “By this time the controversy had become quite public and was being aired in the newspapers.”21 A major part of Dayananda’s problem in discussing Jainism stemmed from the fact that he did not have adequate access to Jain texts in preparing Satyarth Prakash. In a letter to Thakurdas dated 6 November 1880, Dayananda’s secretary, Kriparam, expressly addressed this problem. He said that the Jains would continue to be misunderstood until they started to publish their authoritative texts, and to translate those texts into vernacular languages, as the Aryas, Christians, and Muslims had done.22 Few Jain texts had been printed, so Dayananda had to rely upon manuscript copies. These were also difficult to access, for the Jains were wary of giving non-Jains access to their extensive libraries. As a result, Dayananda’s treatment of the Jains in the first edition was short, limited to 11 pages. Furthermore, to argue effectively, it became increasingly clear that he would also need to conform to the new Indological rules of what constituted an authoritative source. He asked Krishnadas Sevaklal, the secretary of the Bombay Arya Samaj, to gather Jain books and manuscripts for him. In January 1881, Krishnadas sent him 73 books and manuscripts.23 Dayananda used these in subsequent letters to Thakurdas and Atmaram to support his arguments. These also became the basis for his greatly

142 John E. Cort expanded critique of Jainism in the second edition of Satyarth Prakash, published in 1884, after his death. In this edition, he devoted nearly 90 pages to the Jains. In his introduction Dayananda indicated that Jainism, Buddhism, and Charvaka were not identical, since there were points of disagreement among them. However, on the whole he held to his earlier position. He wrote, “the Charavaka faith … greatly resembles the Jain and the Buddhist religions in being an atheistic propaganda.”24 He steadfastly maintained his criticism of the Jains as atheists, and added new criticisms on the basis of his expanded reading. In what was evidently a direct response to Thakurdas and Atmaram (even though they were not directly named) Dayananda stated in the second edition of Satyarth Prakash that everything he wrote came directly from Jain texts, in many cases with precise citations of titles and pages. Whereas in the first edition of Satyarth Prakash he included no indication of the specific sources for his information, in the second edition his discussion is peppered with such sources.25 Many of Dayananda’s conclusions were still highly contestable, but his argumentation now more closely approximated to the forms of evidentiary proof that were increasingly the norm in the scientific discipline of history. In the manner of a scientific historian, he wrote, “The Jainees should not take offense at our comments, for in offering them we have been actuated solely by the desire of ascertaining what is true and what is false, and not by malice or the desire of injuring susceptibilities.”26

Shivaprasad’s Itihas Timir Nashak: scientific history Dayananda’s claim that Jainism, Buddhism, and Charvaka were a single ancient religion was based on a second source, a recently published and highly influential textbook on Indian history. This was Raja Shivaprasad’s Itihas Timir Nashak (literally “History as the Dispeller of Darkness,” although published in English under the titles A History of India and A History of Hindustan).27 Shivaprasad (1823–95) was a professional educator who worked for the British in the North-Western Provinces.28 This is the context in which he wrote his textbook. It was often reprinted, and soon translated into English. The first part appeared in 1864, and the third part, in which he discussed the Jains, in 1873—just as Dayananda was finishing his own book. Shivaprasad discussed the identity of the Jains and Buddhists in a lengthy footnote to his assertion in the body of his text that both groups long preceded the Hindus. He wrote: Jin from which Jain and Budh from which baudh is derived are synonymous terms, the meaning of both being the same in Kosh (Sanskrit onomastics). Both recognize Gautam. In the Dipvans and other Buddhist books, the word Mahavir is often used for Sakya Muni Gautam Buddh. It is clear therefore that the religion of the both must have been the same in his time.29 Since Shivaprasad was by birth an Osval Shvetambar Jain, and a widely read and published scholar as well, Dayananda not unsurprisingly took him at his word that

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Jainism and Buddhism were the same. He began his treatment of Jainism in the first edition of Satyarth Prakash by saying: “The Jain sect was the first of the traditions. It started 3,500 years ago. There have been twenty-four tithyankars [sic] or teachers. Their names are Jainendra, Parashnath, Rishabhdev, Gautam, and Baudha, etc. They believe that the dharm of ahimsa is supreme.”30 By the time Dayananda was writing the expanded section on Jainism in the second edition of Satyarth Prakash, Shivaprasad had publicly stated that Dayananda had been wrong to make this assertion, but Dayananda nonetheless repeated the identification of Jainism and Buddhism more explicitly in the second edition. He made two direct references to the third volume of Shivaprasad’s book: “Raja Shiva Prasad writes in his book called Itihasa Timirnashaka that they have got two names—Jain and Bauddha (Buddhist). These two terms are synonymous.”31 A little further on, he gave a lengthy direct quotation of a footnote from Shivaprasad’s book that repeated the same point.32 Dayananda had also called attention to the latter passage in his letter to Thakurdas dated 14 November 1880, citing the specific page and lines in volume 3 of Itihas Timir Nashak, noting, “It is clearly written that ‘Jain’ and ‘Bauddh’ have the same name.”33 The similarities in the history of Buddhism and Jainism as ancient shramana traditions, their mutual rejection of Vedic authority, and iconographies of their cult images that to the uninformed eye lead to conflation of Jina and Buddha images, can easily confuse the outside observer. Further confusion arose from the fact that Buddhists and Jains have used many of the same epithets for their enlightened teachers, and that the name of Mahavira’s chief disciple is the same as the name of the Buddha: Gautama. Shivaprasad was also influenced in his conflation of the Jina and the Buddha, as of Jainism and Buddhism, by the dominant understanding of the history of ancient India on the part of European Indologists. Many leading Indologists at the time were of the opinion that the two religions shared a single historical root; differences of opinion revolved largely around which was the root and which the branch.34 Shivaprasad, both through his intellectual interests, and his employment in the colonial educational administration, followed Indological scholarship closely. His writings were as likely to include references to European works as Indian ones. He took the Indologist H. M. Elliot as his scholarly model, and his history was based on Mountstuart Elphinstone’s History of India. In the Preface to volume 3 of Itihas Timir Nashak, he wrote, “I have freely taken advantage of old and most recent researches of such eminent persons as Sir William Jones, Mr. James Prinsep, Professor H. H. Wilson, Dr. Haug, General Cunningham, Dr. John Muir and Professor Max Müller.”35 As Ulrike Stark has written, he was “a champion of Western empiricism and the positivist-historicist method,” and it his “mission was to introduce his compatriots to the principles of scientific rationalism.”36 To this end, he wrote Vidyankur, a Hindi science textbook translated from William Chambers’s Rudiments of Science and Introduction to the Sciences. Shivaprasad wrote in what was a recognizable Indological scholarly style. He framed his role as author with a preface, and included footnotes to provide the evidence for his assertions.

144 John E. Cort For Shivaprasad, real history was based on evidentiary principles derived from natural science. He concluded his Preface to volume 3 by saying, “An historian has no choice to please this or that party. … he must deal with facts and facts alone.”37 Later in volume 3, when he introduced data on the ancient history of India from Jain sources, he wrote: Our readers must learn what real history means, and with this knowledge they will not take offence at what we write. But those who do not know what history is, have generally so deep-rooted a prejudice that they think, whatever they believe is right and what another affirms can never be so, though it be supported with as strong arguments as possible. Such men are not entitled to read this book. Fools of the common folly feel themselves wiser than those who can render a reason.38 He then contrasted the historical knowledge to be gained from Jain sources with that from Hindu ones. While both Hindus and Jains looked to their own equally ancient books as true, the Jains had an advantage: “they have very old and useful libraries still existing at Pattan [Patan], Jaisalmer and Khambhat [Cambay], such as the former cannot boast to possess at present.” In a footnote, he referred to Georg Bühler’s search for manuscripts in the Bombay Presidency.39 In another footnote, he contrasted the historical data available through Indological scientific text-critical methods with Brahmanical learning: “As to the knowledge of the Pandits regarding past ages, the less spoken the better. A single instance will suffice to show how the matter stands. If you ask a Pandit, when Panini the celebrated Grammarian lived, he will immediately reply that he flourished in Satya Yug, millions of years ago.” Shivaprasad then demonstrated through text-critical historicist methods that Panini lived after the reign of Chandragupta, not millions of years ago.40 In the years since the earlier editions of Shivaprasad’s textbook, and since the publication of the first edition of Dayananda’s Satyarth Prakash, scholarship on the Jains had significantly advanced. In his introduction to his 1879 edition of the Kalpa Sutra, one of the most important Murtipujak Jain scriptures, the German Indologist Hermann Jacobi had argued conclusively that Jainism and Buddhism were not the same. Jacobi’s introduction was a masterpiece of Indological historical research, as he employed a wide range of texts to establish his argument—so effectively that in subsequent scholarship no one has seriously doubted his conclusions. In his preface, Jacobi said that he wrote his introductory essay in English at the advice of Georg Bühler, “in order to make my book at once accessible to Indian readers. It seems to me that the Hindu [i.e., Indian] scholars who are willing to take into account the researches of their European colleagues, deserve some consideration, and that it is also in the interest of the latter to use, if possible, that language which at present is the lingua franca of India.”41 In part, no doubt, because an Indological publication from Leipzig, even with an English-language introduction, might not reach as wide a relevant scholarly audience as he desired, Jacobi published his argument the following year in Indian Antiquary, the leading

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Indological journal in India. He further published his conclusions in the introduction to his 1884 English translation of the Kalpa Sutra for the series, the Sacred Books of the East.43 To ensure that Jacobi’s arguments were easily accessible to those on both sides of the dispute who could not read English, in 1888 Shivaprasad published a Hindi translation of Jacobi’s 1879 introduction as a separate pamphlet with the title Jain aur Bauddh ka Bhed (“The Difference between Jain and Buddhist”).44 When Dayananda reported to the Jains that Shivaprasad was one of his sources for his assertion that Jainism was a form of Charvaka, Thakurdas wrote to Shivaprasad as a fellow Jain. In April 1881, Shivaprasad wrote a letter to the Jains of Gujranwala, in which he categorically stated that Jainism and Buddhism were not the same, and said, “an important German scholar has published a book that proves this.” He also said there was no connection between Jainism and Charvaka, and that to call the two the same would be the same as calling Dayananda a Muslim because both were iconoclasts. This letter was published in the Punjab newspaper Mitra Vilas on 4 April 1881.45

Atmaram and Jain Tattvadarsh Another Jain response came from Atmaram. He worked on Jain Tattvadarsh during the rainy-season retreat of 1880 in Gujranwala, and finished it the following year during his rainy-season retreat in Hoshiarpur. It was published in 1881 in Ambala.46 There is much about Jain Tattvadarsh that is unremarkable, as in it Atmaram summarized doctrinal material that has been found in over 1,000 years of Jain texts on philosophy, theology, and proscriptive lay conduct. On many of these points Jainism disagrees with the various Hindu schools as well as Buddhism, so the defense (mandan) of Jainism simultaneously involved Atmaram in extensive critique (khandan) of these other traditions.47 He did so, however, in a more generalized fashion, by employing the ancient Jain schema that there are 363 possible religious and philosophical stances, and then fitting the various South Asian non-Jain systems into this schema.48 In his emphasis on icon worship as an essential aspect of lay practice, and in his account of the Jain history of recent centuries, he raised points of disagreement with the Dhundhiyas. Again, however, this was a generic account, and only when read in light of his decades of active preaching in favor of icon worship was there anything notably combative about his text. In his discussion of karma and the Jain understanding of God as omniscient but inactive, and therefore neither the creator of the world nor the agent of karmic fruition, Atmaram implicitly responded to Dayananda and his recent Satyarth Prakash, and other Arya Samajis with whom he had debated in the Punjab.49 While he made no direct reference to either Dayananda or Satyarth Prakash in the body of his work, Atmaram did refer to Dayananda by name in the conclusion of the book. In a paragraph mentioning the new sects that had arisen in recent years, he wrote: In the time of the author many new sects have arisen. In Gujarat there is the sect of Swaminarayan, and in Bengal there are the Brahmosamajis. In the Punjab,

146 John E. Cort in the area around Ludhiana, in the village of Bhaini, there is the sect known as Kuka that has arisen at the teachings of a Tarkhana Sikh. In Koil there is the sect of the new pir Maulvi Ahmedshah. Dayananda Sarasvati has started a new sect, the Arya Samaj. Many other sects have arisen from the older traditions. Because they rely on their own intelligence, they do not understand the ancient texts nor the meaning of the Vedas.50 We can better understand Atmaram’s discomfort over these new sects, and in particular the Arya Samaj, if we turn to an earlier discussion in Jain Tattvadarsh. Atmaram began chapter 7, on the Jain definition of right faith, with a defense of icons based on Jain hermeneutics that could have been drawn from any Murtipujak defense of icons written in the preceding 500 years.51 He next discussed the important ethical duty of gifting (dana). This led to a discussion on the life span of humans in the fifth era of time on earth according to Jain cosmography, life spans of much greater length than known either to nineteenth-century Jains or those who follow “worldly science.”52 This in turn opened up a lengthy discussion of Jain cosmography, which differs profoundly from that of post-Copernican astronomy. Atmaram said that the descriptions of the world found in the Jain scriptures differed from the evidence of modern science coming from places such as America. But he refused to allow science to supplant scripture as an authoritative source of knowledge. He wrote: “I don’t believe I can explain this without following ancient acharyas. I don’t think Jainism cannot be true. The essence of Jainism is true.”53 Atmaram contrasted his own faith in and reliance upon the scriptures, and the related teachings of the ancient authoritative teachers, with the approach of an unnamed contemporary “heretical fool,” who was obviously Dayananda. Atmaram wrote: If I only follow my imagination, then I won’t remain true to the former acharyas. In these days some heretical fool has written about the meaning of the Rigveda and other Vedas according to the figments of his own imagination. I have read this. He has said that according to the Vedic mantras, people traveled in “fire-boats” or vehicles propelled by steam engines, people traveled by railways, the earth is a globe that travels around the sun, the sun is fixed, and all the sciences that the English have discovered through the strength of their wisdom were also found in the Vedas. He writes to tell his followers his own imagined meanings of the Vedas. He casts insults upon all the commentaries composed by the great scholars of the past, and displays his foolishness. They are fools, and do not understand the meaning of the Vedas.54 We see here the limits of science and history as a new authoritative knowledge (praman) for Atmaram. Scientific history was acceptable when it confirmed the truths enunciated in the Jain scriptures. History could not supersede traditional Jain sources of authoritative knowledge, but was fitted into a Jain hierarchy of knowledge. The scientific method could confirm the truth of the scriptures, but only the scriptures were fully authoritative. If scientific history contradicted those scriptures,

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then it was rejected as an inauthentic source of knowledge. Here it is useful to refer to what Paul Dundas has written on the omniscience of Mahavira, which is said to have been transmitted by the ancient authorities in the Jain scriptures: “All Jain doctrinal categories, whether ontological, metaphysical, ethical or cosmological, are ultimately validated by Mahavira’s immediate and unmediated experience of the totality of reality. … His teaching had full authority, against which the claims of other sects and schools were flawed and incomplete.”55 For Atmaram, science— and scientific history—fit into this latter category, as flawed and incomplete. But it was not rejected out of hand as unauthoritative. Dayananda employed a similar hierarchical ranking, in which science was used to validate the findings of the Vedas, but Vedic revelation was always superior to science. In the words of Kenneth Jones: “the entire thrust of Dayanand’s reaction to Western science and technology was to capture and incorporate it, not to refute it.”56 Scientific knowledge was useful in the arguments of Atmaram and Dayananda because its practical utility led to demonstrable results: “Railways, telegraphs, bridges and other features of modern times were to be seen everywhere and made for easy acceptance of the claims of science.”57 In other words, experiential knowledge was introduced into Indian debates to support the traditional authority of scriptural knowledge.58

Atmaram and Indology Just as pointed as his criticism of Dayananda was Atmaram’s rebuttal of the mistaken notion (bhranti) that Jainism was merely a branch of Buddhism. He began the eleventh chapter of Jain Tattvadarsh, dedicated to the topic of Jain universal history, by explicitly addressing the theories of the Indologists. While Atmaram did not mention Shivaprasad by name, he must have been included in those whom Atmaram criticized: Nowadays many honorable people have inquired into the origins of Jainism. Many of them have the mistaken idea that Jainism is a branch of Buddhism, and others that Buddhism is a branch of Jainism. … In this manner there are all sorts of imaginings. But all these are due to not knowing anything about Jainism.59 Clearly Atmaram was aware of the theories of the origin of Jainism advanced by European Indologists, and those Indian intellectuals such as Shivaprasad who worked within the Indological project. He may have had a rudimentary ability to read some English, but his knowledge of English-language scholarship must have come largely through what he was told by lay followers, and by the Hindi and Gujarati writings of contemporary Indian scholars. However Atmaram came by this knowledge, he understood that in the new global and colonial context of India in the 1880s, it was necessary for a Jain spokesperson to address himself to these new voices. In the remaining 15 years of his life, Atmaram actively assisted the scholarship of European Indologists. These scholars were eager for information about the Jains,

148 John E. Cort but had been frustrated by the reluctance of Jains either to engage them in correspondence or make their texts readily available. As we have seen, Dayananda had also complained that Jain texts were hard to come by, and blamed this in part for any mistakes he might have made in his portrayal of Jainism. A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, for example, wrote ten letters to Atmaram (through the latter’s lay disciple, Maganlal Dalpatram) between 1888 and 1891.60 Hoernle was a brilliant linguist who had taught Indian philosophy in Banaras from 1865 to 1873—during which time he had also met Dayananda—and then taught in Calcutta from 1877 until his retirement from the Indian Educational Service in 1899.61 During the time of his correspondence with Atmaram, he was principal of the Calcutta Madrasa, and also honorary philological secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In 1885–90 he published a critical edition and English translation of the Jain canonical Uvasagadasao, and between 1890 and 1892 published summaries of six Jain lineage texts in Indian Antiquary.62 He was one of the most respected British Indologists working in India, and a central figure in the Calcutta school of Orientalism. While we have only Hoernle’s side of the correspondence, it is evident that he received extensive replies from Atmaram. In a letter dated 22 September 1888, Hoernle referred to “the Muni’s valuable work Jaina Tattvadarsha.”63 In two of his printed works he thanked “the well-known Muni Atmaram-ji,”64 and “the well known and highly respected Sadhu of the Jain community throughout India.”65 He even dedicated one of the fascicles of his publication of the Uvasagadasao to Atmaram, along with a four-verse Sanskrit hymn of praise. He thanked Atmaram for copies of texts, and in turn sent copies of his books and articles to Atmaram. As a result of this increasing visibility, Atmaram was invited to attend the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. While he had to refuse this invitation (since to attend would have violated his vow of non-violence by requiring him to travel in mechanized modes of transport), he extensively trained the layman Virchand Gandhi to attend in his stead. In recent years, a number of scholars such as Michael Dodson, Thomas Trautmann, and Philip Wagoner have shown that the Indologists were dependent upon Indian intellectuals both for their primary data and many of their theoretical frameworks.66 We can apply this argument to the Jains as well. By cooperating with Indological scholars, Atmaram and other Shvetambar Murtipujak mendicants could determine the aspects of the larger Jain tradition to which the Indologists had ready access, and thereby exercise significant agency in shaping that scholarship.67 As a result, Indological scholarship on Jainism has focused almost exclusively on the Shvetambar Murtipujak Jains over the past century, and dealt largely with the normative doctrines emphasized by Atmaram and other orthodox ideologues. Only in recent decades has scholarly attention turned to the other Jain traditions. Atmaram’s exposure to foreign scholars, and the complaints of both Indological scholars and Dayananda that their writings about Jainism were hampered by lack of access to Jain texts, had one further result. In the words of a biographer of Atmaram, “Some of the ill-informed western scholars adversely criticized Jainism,

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which they would have never done if adequate materials had been placed in their hands. In the name of oriental research, they gave currency to untenable theories which misled the people by clouding truth.” The account goes on to say: “The vast literary treasures of illustrious Acharyas were locked in underground Bhandars, where even the light of the sun could not penetrate. … The custodians were reluctant to display the Bhandars … Although the times had changed, the ignorant Jains were apprehensive of the westerners engaged in valuable research work.”68 Atmaram urged the laity who controlled the libraries to prepare catalogues, preserve fragile manuscripts, prepare editions of texts, and arrange for their publication. According to Jain sources, Atmaram’s understanding that it was necessary to organize the libraries and publish selected texts, and his understanding of the importance of Indological scholarship, were reinforced when Peter Peterson came to see his work and publicly commended him for it.69 Peterson was a British Indologist and professor of Sanskrit at Elphinstone College in Bombay, where he was responsible for supervising searches for Sanskrit manuscripts in western and central India between 1882 and 1899. The result was that the mendicant disciples of Atmaram and other reformist mendicants initiated a widespread intellectual renaissance. Over the next century, hundreds of texts were edited and published by Shvetambar Murtipujak Jains. As Kendall Folkert said, “it is noteworthy that this undertaking, once launched, has been carried forward almost exclusively at Jain initiative and effort.”70

Indology in defense of icons There is no evidence that Dayananda ever saw Jain Tattvadarsh. Significant response to Atmaram’s work in fact came from another direction. Atmaram’s book was arguably the first major book in discursive vernacular prose written and published by a modern Jain intellectual. Atmaram’s intention in the book was to provide Jain laity in the Punjab with the requested vernacular overview of doctrines, practices, and history. Much of this information was contested between Murtipujaks and Dhundhiyas. In his standard descriptions of the proper conduct of a layperson in Jain Tattvadarsh, Atmaram necessarily had to defend icon worship; and in his standard discussion of the Murtipujak understanding of Jain history, he gave the Murtipujak interpretation of the history of Lonka and the Dhundhiyas. The defense of icon worship, however, was not a significant focus of the book. The Dhundhiyas viewed Jain Tattvadarsh in a different light; they saw it as another attack on them from this prominent apostate and Murtipujak propagandist. In 1882, the Dhundhiya layman Nemchand Hirachand Kothari published Jethmal Svami’s Samakitsar (“Essence of Right Belief”) in Rajkot. This defense of the Dhundhiya position on icons was probably first written in the immediate aftermath of an 1821 court case in Ahmedabad. Some of the Dhundhiya lay participants in the case committed the mendicant Jethmal’s arguments to writing in order to record them for posterity.71 Jethmal’s Samakitsar presumably circulated in handwritten copies among the Dhundhiyas of western India for six decades before it was finally published.72

150 John E. Cort The publication of Samakitsar commenced a round of sharply argued publications in Gujarat and the Punjab that lasted for more than two decades. Atmaram was sent a copy of Samakitsar by a Dhundhiya layman from Delhi.73 During his rainyseason retreats of 1883 and 1884, in Bikaner and Ahmedabad, Atmaram wrote a response to Samakitsar. This was his Samyaktva Shalyoddhar (“Removing the Thorn from Right Belief”).74 Jethmal’s book claimed to elucidate the essence (sar) of right belief (samakit, samyaktva). Atmaram said that Jethmal’s book was not a sar, but was a shalya, a painful thorn. His own book, in turn, aimed to remove that thorn through the process of uddhar. This word, which literally means “removal” or “uplift” (and so can accurately be translated as “reform”), has a long history in Jainism. Generations of Jains have used the term to characterize their actions as returning to the ancient tradition.75 Samyaktva Shalyoddhar represented a stylistic departure from Jain Tattvadarsh. In both books, Atmaram’s arguments in defense of icons demonstrated great continuity with those advanced by Jain theologians of the icon in previous centuries. In Jain Tattvadarsh these arguments were cast in a general way, against an anonymous, generic Dhundhiya opponent of icon worship. Samyaktva Shalyoddhar, however, involved a page-by-page, point-by-point refutation of Jethmal’s book. For example, Atmaram wrote: “On page 2, line 11, of the book called Samakitsar (Shalya), Jethmall has written …”76 In places he included footnotes. There is no evidence that Atmaram adopted a more Indological academic style directly from Shivaprasad. Nonetheless, we see here a transition, within the modern format of the printed and bound book, from a text in a more traditional disputational style to one that more closely resembled Indological scholarship. Atmaram’s book demonstrated an increased engagement with Indological scholarship on the part of the Jains. In his introduction to the 1886 second edition of the book, the anonymous Gujarati translator wrote that while the Dhundhiya sect was only 300 years old, evidence for Jina icons came from 2,500 years earlier.77 He cited an icon of Mahavira from Mahuva in Saurashtra that was from the lifetime of Mahavira.78 He said there were very old temples on the pilgrimage mountain of Shatrunjay.79 He cited the well-known Jain history of Emperor Samprati, grandson of Ashoka, who lived just 290 years after Mahavira; Samprati built thousands of temples and distributed thousands of Jina icons around India, “which can be seen in many places.”80 All of these are well-known Shvetambar defenses of icons, but are typically found only in Jain sources. Because they are confirmed neither by nonJain texts nor by scientific archeology, this evidence would fall within the purview of the kinds of arguments criticized by Shivaprasad as coming from “those who do not know what [real] history is.” But the author also added some new pieces of evidence: “In Aurangabad there is a temple of [the sixth Jina] Padmaprabhu that is 2,400 years old. An English author has seen it himself.” He also mentioned several 2,000-year-old Jina shrines and icons that had been studied by the English.81 He concluded by saying: “There are many examples of such proof (praman), but a logical person just needs one example to come to an understanding.” We here see a mixing of older Jain historical narratives and new “English”—i.e. Indological—forms of proof, used together to defend icons.

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Indological questions and Jain answers Interaction with Indological scholars affected how Jain intellectuals saw their work in other ways. In 1884 Atmaram returned to Gujarat, where he spent the next five years. He spent the rainy-season retreat of 1888 in Mehsana, in north Gujarat, writing another book, Jain Dharm Vishayak Prashnottar (“Questions and Answers on the Subject of Jainism”), which was published in late 1888 or early 1889. In the time-honored Jain genre of the question-and-answer text, Atmaram asked and then answered 162 questions on a wide range of topics. His correspondence with A. F. Rudolf Hoernle was just beginning, so he also included questions that emerged from this correspondence and from his growing awareness of the Indological scholarship on the Jains.82 Hoernle’s letters were full of questions that indicate just how little Indologists knew about Jainism. In question 143, the interlocutor said to Atmaram: “Many European scholars say that Jainism borrowed from Brahmanism, i.e., that the Jains composed their texts on the basis of things borrowed from Brahmanical texts.” Atmaram replied that this was because European scholars had not read enough Jain texts. He explained that the corpus of Jain texts was much vaster than the Brahmanical corpus. Therefore everything found in the texts of other traditions could be found in Jain texts, but not the reverse. In particular, he criticized Max Müller (to whom he gave the honorific bhatta, a respectful title for a Brahman) for asserting some things that were untrue and rather imagined.83 In the next question, Atmaram’s interlocutor asked about the contention of many European scholars that the Buddhist scriptures emerged from the Jain scriptures. Atmaram said that since no European scholar had yet seen the closed libraries of Patan and Jaisalmer, their scholarship could not be true. He went on to explain that the manuscripts had been kept secret to protect them from the depredations of the Muslims, who had burned thousands of Jain texts, and built thousands of mosques upon the ruins of the Jain temples they destroyed.84 When he was asked if it was still proper for the Jains to prevent others from using these manuscripts, Atmaram replied that it was not. Because Jains were allowing their manuscripts to turn into dust, they were ignorant of their own tradition. When the questioner asked if it was a matter of insufficient funds, Atmaram scoffed. The Jains had plenty of money, but did not want to spend it on their libraries. They were only concerned about their public reputations, for which they spent fortunes on building temples and sponsoring public feasts. The idea of renovating libraries didn’t occur to them even in their dreams.85 Later, the questioner asked if there was evidence (praman) to confirm the unbroken lineage of teachers from Mahavira up until the time of Devarddhigani Kshamashramana. The latter was the fifth century elder who oversaw the Council at Valabhi at which the Shvetambar canon, hitherto transmitted orally, was committed to writing in order to preserve it.86 This is a key point of contention in debates between Shvetambar Murtipujaks and both Sthanakvasis and Digambars. The latter traditions claim that the lineage was broken, and therefore the Murtipujak canon was not authoritative.

152 John E. Cort Atmaram’s answer indicated how the new Indological scholarship could be adopted into older intra-Jain disputes. He wrote that the archeological evidence from the recent excavations at Mathura, as studied and published by General Cunningham, Dr. Hoernle, and Dr. Bühler, provided precisely such evidence. Mathura had first been excavated by Alexander Cunningham in 1871. Among the finds were a number of Jain icons and other statuary. These featured detailed inscriptions, recording the names of lay donors, as well as the names and lineages of their mendicant preceptors. Georg Bühler had shown that the names and titles matched those found in the lineage of teachers preserved in the Murtipujak Kalpa Sutra.87 At Bühler’s request, the excavations at Mathura were reopened in January 1888, leading to a spate of further articles by Bühler that demonstrated that the historical claims found in the Jain texts were authentic, and therefore confirmed Jacobi’s argument that Jainism was distinct from Buddhism.88 Atmaram said that these ancient Jain inscriptions, now published in English books, proved beyond a doubt the authenticity of the Shvetambar teacher tradition from Mahavira to Devarddhigani, and therefore the authenticity of the Shvetambar canon. He said that, for this task, the Jains owed a great debt to the European scholars. Bühler published his findings in the Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes. Even though Bühler wrote in English, it is unlikely that this Indological journal from Vienna was readily available to Atmaram. In good Indological style, Atmaram indicated his primary source for this information: for four months in 1887, the Mumbai Samachar had run a daily series of articles that summarized the findings and therefore the authenticity of the Kalpa Sutra. He said that the Gujarati translation was based on what Bühler had written, and also on what Cunningham had published in his Archeological Survey Report. Atmaram then devoted 17 pages to a detailed discussion of this important Indological evidence.89 Indology as authoritative proof This process of incorporating Indological scholarship into the Jain icon debates continued in the third edition of Samyaktva Shalyoddhar. This was published in Lahore in 1903, six years after Atmaram’s death, in a new Hindi translation and edition by the lay scholar Jasvantray Jaini. Jaini was in close contact with Indologists in Lahore, such as Aurel Stein. In the first edition of Samyaktva Shalyoddhar, published in 1884, Atmaram had quoted and translated a passage in defense of icon worship from the Uvasagadasao, the Svetambar canonical text mentioned earlier. Since A. F. Rudolf Hoernle published an English translation of this text in 1885–90, Jaini included Rudolf Hoernle’s translation in a footnote, identifying him as secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, and thereby recognizing Western Indological scholarship as a worthy source of validation.90 In Jaini’s eyes, this Indological translation was corroborative proof of the Murtipujak position. In his introduction, Jaini translated the 1886 Gujarati introduction with its historical proofs (praman) for the ancient existence of icons. He was able to expand on this list, bringing in new evidence from Indological scholarship, such

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as Georg Bühler’s publication of results from the excavations at Mathura, and the 1884 publication by Bhagwanlal Indraji of the Hathigumpha inscription.91 Jaini also cited Dayananda Sarasvati’s Satyarth Prakash; Dayananda had blamed the Jains for introducing icon worship to India, but Jaini here cited his criticism as providing external support for the Murtipujak argument on the historicity of icon worship. Jaini concluded his marshalling of all this evidence by saying: From various proofs (praman) it has been established that Jainism has always believed and worshipped Jina icons, and in this book a thorough investigation concerning Jina icons is presented according to the Jain scriptures. Therefore the Sthanakvasi Dhundhaks are humbly invited to consider: “O friends! It is established by proof from Jain scriptures, by proof from ancient inscriptions, by proof from ancient Jina temples and Jina icons, by proof from believers in other religions, and by proof from English scholars, that every Jain has believed in, venerated, honored, worshipped, served, and been devoted to Jina icons.”92 Evidence from empiricist, scientific methods was here used side-by-side with older Jain forms of proof to establish a powerful historical argument for the antiquity of Jain icon worship. We can also see the continuing incorporation of Indological scholarly conventions in the 1903 edition. While the references to Jain texts retain the more traditional style (e.g. referring to texts by chapter and verse), Jaini included at the conclusion of the book a list of texts that Atmaram had consulted in writing the book. This simple list of names of texts does not have the bibliographical detail we would look for in a bibliography today, but it nonetheless represents a new stylistic addition to a Jain text, intended to ground the book in authoritative textual sources.

Continuities and innovations Jain texts in all languages are replete with historical discussions, and such historical evidence has long been used in intra-Jain disputes. The great Murtipujak theologian of the icon Yashovijaya, for example, had argued in defense of icons from history in a short Gujarati text he composed in 1662. In the Jin Pratima Sthapan Stavan (“Hymn on Consecrating the Jina Icon”), he listed the great kings and emperors in Jain universal history who had renovated and built temples, consecrated icons, and restored pilgrimage shrines.93 Some of the events cited date from ancient Jain mytho-history. Others involve people who are well known and well documented in reliable medieval historical sources. Yashovijaya did not explicitly invoke the concept of itihasa, but clearly the argument of his hymn was that history is replete with the well-known stories of powerful and well-respected people actively supporting the cult of temples and icons. The point is made that such cultic activity represents a fully legitimate religious practice. History, in other words, was not new to Jain scholarship in the 1880s. So what was new in the Jain appropriation of scientific, empiricist history?

154 John E. Cort One major innovation was the acceptance of new sources for historical knowledge. Earlier Jain authors typically cited other Jain texts, and one way of disputing historical evidence was to dispute the authenticity of a text as a Jain text. In the context of the late nineteenth century, however, it was no longer a problem if a text was authored by a non-Jain. Indeed, the very fact that an author was an English or German Indologist could give a source added weight. The assumption was that because Indological scholars used new scientific forms of evidence, their writings had an authenticity to them. Shivaprasad and others emphasized the need for the application of scientific, empirical principles to history. Reliable evidence could no longer come just from traditional texts. Those texts had to be subjected to critical analysis, and those that did not measure up to the new standards were not accepted as evidence. There were limits, however, to the extent to which Indian intellectuals accepted the scientific principles of evidence. Gyan Prakash has argued that by privileging scientific education, with its epistemology of context-free, universalist empiricism over “Orientalist classicism” and its roots in the more context-sensitive epistemologies of the humanities, the British colonizers were able to imagine their own vision of a modern India.94 According to Prakash, for Dayananda “it was necessary … to invoke modern science to show that Vedic knowledge deserved the status of scientific truths,” and Dayananda “draws on the authority of ‘profane sciences’ to establish the truth of Vedic knowledge.”95 This reading of Dayananda—and by extension, any similar reading of Atmaram—overstates the extent to which these hybrid intellectuals supplanted their older hierarchies of authoritative knowledge with the new universalism of science. For both Dayananda and Atmaram, scientific history was a powerful new weapon in their intellectual armories, but only because they were able to use it to bolster the eternal truths of the Vedas and the Jain scriptures.96 These new principles of evidence also involved new sources of valid evidence. Pre-modern Indian debates largely revolved around evidence from texts and teacher-student traditions of transmission of knowledge. The Indologists introduced new sources of data, such as inscriptions and archaeological finds, and these started to find their way into the intra-Jain debates. History is contained and presented in texts. The form of those texts underwent significant changes in the nineteenth century. The Murtipujak version of the 1821 Ahmedabad court case that resulted in Jethmal’s Samakitsar was also recorded for posterity by two Murtipujak Jain mendicants. Uttamvijay wrote his Dhundhakmat Khandan Ras (“Epic of the Refutation of the Dhundhak Sect”), which was largely devoted to a description of the case, in 1822, soon after the case itself.97 Rangvijay wrote his Pandit Virvijay Nirvan Ras (“Epic of Pandit Virvijay’s Liberation”), a biography of Virvijay, the monk who argued the case for the Murtipujaks, in 1855, 33 years after the case but just three years after Virvijay’s death.98 The ras was a vernacular genre for historical narrative that had been used for centuries in western India. In often rather pedestrian epic vernacular verse, the author narrated the great exploits of the text’s hero. A ras was publicly recited upon its completion, but in its subsequent life it became a text to be copied and studied by intellectuals and students to learn history. A manuscript of Uttamvijay’s ras, for example, was

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copied in 1832, ten years after its composition, by a monk named Kastursagar, so that the nuns Jivshri and Navshri could read it.99 By the 1880s the ras was nearly extinct as a genre, and would certainly not be viewed as a suitable vehicle for an historical treatise in the new Indological style. While Atmaram did write many liturgical and devotional texts in traditional vernacular genres, when he turned to doctrine and disputation he employed a new genre. In Jain Tattvadarsh, he was consciously writing a book. Rather than something to be hand-copied on to country paper by a professional scribe, Atmaram was writing a product that would be typeset and then printed on imported machine-manufactured paper.100 The arrival of the Gutenberg revolution in western India changed the way Indian intellectuals thought of the activity of producing knowledge.101 The new artifact of the book generated new genres of literature. Atmaram and his contemporaries were pioneers in a new style of writing, vernacular discursive prose. Vinay Dharwadker has written: One of the most far-reaching effects of print between about 1800 and 1835 was the more or less simultaneous invention of modern prose in various languages … Some of these had older indigenous traditions of prose-writing that went back several centuries and were connected in different ways to canonical prose in Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. Nonetheless, all these languages discovered an unexpected potential for innovation and renovation in the medium of print, and shifted quite dramatically to new lexicons and grammars, new principles of punctuation and syntax, new discursive forms and styles.102 The style of the first editions of Atmaram’s and Dayananda’s books indicates just how new the genre was. In both books, the authors employed long sentences, often strung together with copulatives—sentences today we would think of as “run-on.” Vasudha Dalmia has written of Hindi prose from mid-nineteenth century Banaras, “The sentences … are nearer the spoken idiom, the written prose style has yet to emancipate itself from this trait.”103 With later editions of these books, and later books authored by Atmaram, we start to see greater confidence in the new genre of discursive prose. The new history that was being adopted by Atmaram also entailed a new sense of scholarly apparatus. A book had a title page, with publication information. The main text was surrounded by other forms of information. The author explained his intention in the new genre of the preface (bhumika, prastavna). As part of the new evidentiary regime, he included footnotes, a bibliography, and other references. That the participants in the disputes were reading and writing books also allowed for new forms of intellectual interaction. Citation and quotation were not new in Indian debates, but the new stability of the printed text went hand-in-hand with the new evidentiary principles. Benedict Anderson has famously observed that print “gave a new fixity to language … the printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually infinite reproduction.”104 Not only was an author expected to indicate the text from which he derived information, he could cite exactly where in that text the information was to be found. Thus, publications began to abound with references to specific pages and lines.

156 John E. Cort In his 1869 debate with the orthodox pandits of Banaras, one pandit recited a verse that Dayananda did not recognize, and which did not have any further reference. Dayananda asked to see the manuscript. When he could not immediately identify the text, the pandits declared their victory and ended the debate.105 This could happen when the technology of texts involved handwritten manuscripts. It could not have happened with a printed book. We see how a distinct epistemology is embodied in the very physicality of the printed book. Some of the disputes in the late nineteenth century took the form of the traditional Indian face-to-face debate, judged by pandits trained in logic, or a local king. These disputes sometimes resulted in the creation of written texts. Many philosophical texts in Indian intellectual history presumably also were the result of face-to-face debates. Instead of handwritten manuscripts, the textual products of debates now took the physical form of printed books and tracts. The disputes also were carried on in the new genres of letter-writing and newspaper articles. Jain merchants had long used letter-writing to transmit information from one part of India to another, and Jain mendicant leaders had regularly used letters to keep in touch with their farflung mendicant and lay followers. However, the speed of communication facilitated by the colonial postal system, in which letters were quickly transported long distances by trains, gave new meaning to the form.106 With regard to the newspaper article, this was certainly a new genre based on a new technology. It meant that, for instance, the information on the Mathura excavations was published in a Gujarati newspaper in Bombay as fast as it appeared in an Indological journal in Vienna. These modern changes brought into India by colonialism and Indology resulted in new forms of scholarly activity among Jain intellectuals, such as organizing and cataloguing libraries. Both Shivaprasad and Atmaram saw the Jain libraries as important sources for introducing new scientific evidence of Indian history into long-standing disputes. Indology introduced new standards for producing critical editions of texts, a project that Murtipujak Jains quickly and enthusiastically adopted as their own. Jain intellectuals wrote books with introductions, footnotes, references, and bibliographies. They incorporated new forms of proof into their arguments. Some of the arguments themselves were new, as Indological scholarship generated historicist debates about the origins and later development of Jainism. Much of this Jain scholarship, however, was done in the pursuit of older, pre-modern disputes, as Jain hybrid intellectuals adapted the new epistemology of scientific history, with all its related technologies, to their intra-Jain debates over icons. History was a new source of authoritative knowledge. It was equally embedded within pre-colonial modes of scholarship and debate in which the nineteenth-century Jain intellectuals continued to wield great agency.

Notes * This chapter began as a paper delivered at the conference Modernity, Diversity, and the Public Sphere: Negotiating Religious Identities in 18th–20th Century India (University of Erfurt, September 2010), organized by Martin Fuchs and Vasudha Dalmia. See also John E. Cort, “Jain Identity and the Public Sphere in Nineteenth-century India,” in

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3 4

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6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

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Vasudha Dalmia and Martin Fuchs eds., Multiplicity and Monoliths: Religious Interactions in India, 18th–20th Centuries (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I thank them as well as Cassie Adcock, Anna Bigelow, Tim Dobe, Brian Hatcher, Jack Llewellyn, Bart Scott, Ulrike Stark, and my colleagues in the Denison University Global Studies Seminar. Part of the research behind this chapter was conducted on a grant from the Asian Cultural Council. J. E. Cort, Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (New York: Oxford University Press), 2010. P. Flügel, “The Unknown Lonka: Tradition and the Cultural Unconscious,” in Jaina Studies: Papers of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference, ed. C. Caillat and N. Balbir. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass), 210n108 has argued that the widespread use of the name Sthanakvasi emerged in the twentieth century. Dhundhiya and Dhundhak are the terms more often found in earlier texts. I use Dhundhiya in this chapter, since that is the term used in most nineteenth-century sources. J. E. Cort, “Genres of Jain History,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 23 (1995): 480–490. E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); R. Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of India,” Modern Asian Studies 20 (1986): 401−466, and Imagining India (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990); S. Pollock, “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power beyond the Raj,” in C. A. Breckinridge and P. van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 76−133. The ethnohistorian Bernard Cohn had been exploring similar themes for several decades before the publication of Orientalism, but his scholarship garnered new attention in the wake of Said’s work. In an oft-cited article from 1985, Cohn invoked Michel Foucault on the connections among knowledge, representation, and power, adopting the same theoretical framework that supported Said’s work. Most importantly, Cohn argued that British colonialism depended on “complicated and complex forms of knowledge created by Indians, but codified and transmitted by Europeans.” See B. S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16. See M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770−1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2−3, for examples of such rehabilitating scholarship. Ibid., 9−13. Ibid., 143. I have borrowed this term, obviously, from P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). I use it, however, in a very different setting, and do not intend to enter into the debate between Chatterjee and Benedict Anderson on the origin and spread of the concept and practice of the nation-state in the modern world. D. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of the Public Sphere in Surat City, 1852−1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), ix. Biographical information on Atmaram comes from Acharya Vijay Vallabhsuri, Navyug Nirmata (Ambala: Shri Atmanand Jain Mahasabha Panjab, 1959), except where otherwise indicated. See also Cort, Framing the Jina, 5−8. Information on Dayananda comes from J. T. F. Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati: His Life and Ideas (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). Dayananda Sarasvati, Satyarth Prakash, 1st edn, (Banaras: Istar Press, 1875), 326−327. Madhavacharya, Sarvadarsana Sangraha, ed. Pandita Iswarachandra Vidyasagara (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1858). On the Asiatic Society, see O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past 1784−1838 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). See also note 34 below.

158 John E. Cort 16 Vidyasagara, “Preface,” to Madhavacharya, Sarvadarsana Sangraha, 1. 17 E. B. Cowell, “Preface” to Madhava, The Sarva-Darsana-Samgraha, or, Review of the Different Systems of Hindu Philosophy, transl. E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1882), vii. 18 Vallabhsuri, Navyug Nirmata, 229. 19 The Jain version of the debate over Satyarth Prakash is found at Vallabhsuri, Navyug Nirmata, 229−230. The Arya Samaj version is found at Lekhram, Jivancaritra— Maharishi Svami Dayananda Sarasvati (Delhi: Arsh Sahitya Prachar Trust, 1986), 651−675. The documents themselves have been reprinted in Dayananda Sarasvati, Rishi Dayananda Sarasvati ke Patra aur Vijnapan, four volumes (Bahalgarh: Ramlal Kapur Trust, 1980−3). 20 Dayananda, Patra aur Vijnapan, vol. 1, 430−432. 21 Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati, 191. 22 Dayananda, Patra aur Vijnapan, vol. 1, 405. 23 The full list is found at Dayananda, Patra aur Vijnapan, vol. 3, 177−179. Of these, 61 were handwritten manuscripts and 12 were printed books. Jains were just beginning to print their texts. None of the printed books Krishnadas sent Dayananda was of the canon, for a printed edition of it was just then commencing in Murshidabad. Krishnadas did not indicate whence he procured this impressive collection. 24 Dayananda Sarasvati, Satyarth Prakash, 2nd edn, ed. Y. Mimamsak (Bahalgarh: Ramlal Kapur Trust, 1972), 6. Translation from Dayananda Sarasvati, Light of Truth, Chiranjiva Bharadwaja, transl. (Madras: The Arya Samaj, 1932), iii−iv. In my essay, all translations from the second edition are by Bharadwaja. 25 It is unclear whether this more text-critical approach to scholarship was introduced into the second edition by Dayananda himself or by the pandits who worked under him. 26 Dayananda. Light of Truth, 459. 27 See Shivaprasad, A History of India, in 3 parts (Allahabad: np, 1864) and A History of Hindustan, 3 vols., Pandit Bhavanidat Joshi, transl. (Banaras: Medical Hall Press, 1874). 28 On this important figure, see R. S. McGregor, Hindi Literature of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1974), 71−77; V. B. Talvar, Raja Shivaprasad ”Sitaraihind” (New Delhi: Sahitya Akadami, 2005); and U. Stark, “Knowledge in Context: Raja Shivaprasad as Hybrid Intellectual and People’s Educator,” Chapter 3 in this volume. 29 Shivaprasad, A History of Hindustan, vol. 3, 14n1. I have not seen a copy of the Hindi original of volume 3 of Shivaprasad’s history, and so have relied upon the English translation published one year later. 30 Dayananda Satyarth Prakash, 1st edn, 396. 31 Dayananda, Light of Truth, 481. 32 Dayananda, Light of Truth, 481−482. The note can be found at Shivaprasad, A History of Hindustan, vol. 3, 14. 33 Dayananda, Patra aur Vijnapan, vol. 1, 435. 34 K. W. Folkert, Scripture and Community: Collected Essays on the Jains (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 97−106. The conflation of Jainism and Buddhism was largely restricted to the Calcutta school of Orientalists, the school that was also dominant in Banaras (where Shivaprasad lived) and was most influential among European Indologists. Scholars in the Madras and Bombay schools of Orientalism had understood Jainism and Buddhism to be distinct religious traditions since at least the early nineteenth century, but their scholarship carried less weight in the broader Indological world. See L. C. Orr, “Orientalists, Missionaries, and Jains: The South Indian Story,” in T. R. Trautmann, ed., The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 263−287; and A. Luithle-Hardenberg, “Alexander Walker of Bowland’s ‘Account of the Jeyn’:

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

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A Starting Point of Jaina-British Encounters,” in A. Luithle-Hardenberg, ed., Co-operation and Competition, Conflict and Contribution: The Jaina Community, British Expansion and Scholarship during the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (forthcoming). Shivaprasad, A History of Hindustan, vol. 3, i. Stark, “Knowledge in Context,” Chapter 3, p. 80 of this volume. Shivaprasad, A History of Hindustan, vol. 3, ii. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Ibid., 14n. H. Jacobi, The Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1879), vii−viii. H. Jacobi, “On Mahavira and His Predecessors,” Indian Antiquary 9 (1880): 158−163. H. Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Part I, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), ix−xlvii. Shivaprasad, Jain aur Bauddh ka Bhed (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1888). Lekhram, Jivancaritra, 672. See also Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati, 192. According to Vallabhsuri, Navyug Nirmata, 232, the wealthy layman Rao Bahadur Dhanpat Singh heard about Atmaram, and came from Murshidabad to meet him. When he asked Atmaram what service he could render him, Atmaram asked him to publish his recently completed book. Dhanpat Singh was at the time also engaged in sponsoring the first printing of the Shvetambar canon, in Calcutta, a project that lasted from 1874 to about 1900. See W. Schubring, The Doctrine of the Jainas (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1962), 4; and R. Wiles, “The ‘Svetambara Canon’: A Descriptive Listing of Text Editions, Commentaries, Studies and Indexes” (Canberra: unpublished manuscript, 1997), 1−3. For the first printing, see Jain Tattvadarsh (Ambala: Rao Bahadur Dhanpat Singh, 1881). For a new edition, including new notes and appendices by Banarsidas Jain, see Jain Tattvadarsh (Ambala: Atmanand Jain Mahasabha Panjab, 1936). I have used a reprint of the 1936 edition, ed. Muni Bhuvanbhushanvijay (Ahmedabad: Parshvabhyuday Prakashan, 1993). See the discussion by K. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 120−153, on the use of techniques of defense (mandan) and criticism (khandan) in nineteenth-century Indian polemics. Folkert, Scripture and Community, 213−337. I have translated part of this section of Jain Tattvadarsh in J. E. Cort, “Jain Questions and Answers: Who Is God and How Is He Worshiped?” in D. S. Lopez, Jr., ed., Religions of India in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 598−608. Atmaram, Jain Tattvadarsh, 543. J. E. Cort, “In Defense of Icons in Three Languages: The Iconophilic Writings of Yasovijaya,” International Journal of Jaina Studies (online) 6, 2 (2010): 13−17. Atmaram, Jain Tattvadarsh, 293. Ibid., 298. Ibid., 298−299. The editor of the 1936 edition, Banarsidas Jain, added a three-page appendix (appendices pp. 14−16) in which he updated these critiques of the “imagined meanings” (kalpit arth) of the Vedas as propagated by Dayananda and subsequent intellectuals within the Arya Samaj. P. Dundas, The Jains, 2nd edn (London: Routedge, 2002), 89 Jones, Arya Dharm, 114. B. van der Linden, Moral Languages from the Punjab: The Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyahs (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008), 123. G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 92−93. Atmaram, Jain Tattvadarsh, 455. M. D. Desai, “Dr. Hoernle’s Letters,” in M. D. Desai, ed., Jainacharya Shri Atmamand Centenary Commemoration Volume (Bhavnagar: Jainacharya Shri Atmanand Janma-Shatabdi Smarak Samiti, 1936), 130−140 [English-language section].

160 John E. Cort 61 On Hoernle (1841−1919), see G. A. Grierson, “Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernle,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1919): 114−124. 62 See A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, ed. and trans. The Uvasagadasao (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1885−90). The lineage text summaries appeared in Indian Antiquary 19−21 (1890−2). 63 Desai, “Dr. Hoernle’s Letters,” 131. 64 Hoernle, “The Pattavali or List of Pontiffs of the Upakesa-Gachchha,” Indian Antiquary 19 (1890): 233. 65 Hoernle, Uvasagadasao, xiii. 66 Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture; T. R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and P. B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 783−814. 67 The same point is made by P. Flügel, “Changing Self-Perceptions: Reflections on the Social History of Modern Jainism,” in Luithle-Hardenberg, ed., Co-operation and Competition. 68 B. R. Jain [B.R.J.], “Acharya Shrimad Vijaya Anand Suri Swami Atma Ramji Maharaj,” The Jain Gazette 32 (1935): 455−456. 69 B. R. Jain, Krantikari Jainacharya (Jira: Shri Atmanand Jain Mahasabha, 1936): 57−58. On Peterson (1847−99), who was Professor at Elphinstone College from 1873 until 1899, see C. Bendall, “Peterson, Peter,” (revised by R. S. Simpson) in H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 43 (2004), 884−885. Peterson made no mention of meeting Atmaram in any of his six reports of activities in search of Sanskrit manuscripts, although the two were in Ahmedabad at the same time in November 1884. 70 Folkert, Scripture and Community, 17. 71 Anon., “Bhumika” to Jethmal, Samakitsar, 4th edn (Nagpur: Shriman Sardarmal Pugliya; Pirchand Parsevani: Shriman Ratanlal; and Barar: Jain Sangh, 1930), 4. 72 I have seen only the second edition (Rajkot: The Rising Star Printing Press, 1890) and fourth edition (see previous note). 73 Flügel, “Unknown Lonka,” 197. 74 Atmaram, Samyaktva Shalyoddhar (Bhavnagar: Jain Dharm Prasarak Sabha, 1884). This was reprinted in the 1903 edition, edited by Jasvantray Jaini (Lahore: Atmanand Jain Sabha Panjab), and this edition in turn was reprinted in 1996 (Ahmedabad: Parshvabhyuday Prakashan). I have used the 1996 reprint. 75 For an extended discussion of uddhar, see J. E. Cort, “Defining Jainism: Reform in the Jain Tradition” in J. T. O’Connell, ed., Jain Doctrine and Practice: Academic Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000), 165−191. On the semantics of sar and uddhar in the modern Hindu context, see B. Hatcher, Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29–31. 76 Atmaram, Samyaktva Shalyoddhar, 3. 77 “Prastavna” to Samyaktva Shalyoddhar, Gujarati transl. (Baroda: Bharatvarshiya Jain Pustakalay, 1886), 9. 78 See Cort, Framing the Jina, 155−168, on this Shvetambar conception of the lifetime icon of Mahavira, a theme that dates to at least the middle of the first millennium CE. 79 See ibid., 143−151, for Shvetambar narratives of Shatrunjay. 80 See ibid., 138−142, for the Jain narratives of Samprati. 81 “English” in nineteenth-century texts is often a cover-term for all foreigners. 82 Information on the genesis of Jain Dharm Vishayak Prashnottar comes from the editor’s introduction (“Sampadakiya”) by Acharya Vijay Punyapalsuri to Atmaram’s Jain Dharm Vishayak Prashnottar, reprint ed., (Ahmedabad: Parshvabhyuday Prakashan, 1996). 83 Atmaram, Jain Dharm Vishayak Prashnottar, 93−97.

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84 I discuss the long-standing trope in Jain historical consciousness of Muslim iconoclasm in Framing the Jina, 267−270. 85 Jain Dharm Vishayak Prashnottar, 97−99. 86 Dundas, The Jains, 71. 87 The Kalpa Sutra, which Jacobi had edited and then translated in the Sacred Books of the East, is accepted as authentic only by the Shvetambar Murtipujaks. 88 Folkert, Scripture and Community, 95−112, discusses the Mathura excavations and the subsequent publications. 89 Jain Dharm Vishayak Prashnottar, 144−161. 90 Samyaktva Shalyoddhar, 1886 edition, 103−105; 1996 edn, 66. 91 Jasvantray Jaini, “Prastavna” to Samyaktva Shalyoddhar, 1996 reprint of 1903 edition, 14−15. On the archeological evidence on Jain icons, see Cort, Framing the Jina, 25−32 (Mathura) and 39−41 (Hathigumpha). 92 Jaini, “Prastavna,” 15. 93 Cort, “In Defense of Icons,” 31−32. 94 Prakash, Another Reason, 3−5. 95 Prakash, Another Reason, 93−94. 96 See also van der Linden, Moral Languages, 122−133. 97 Uttamvijay, Dhundhak Mat Ras (1822); L. D. Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad, Ms 6727, copied 1832. 98 K. Joshi, ed., “Rangvijaykrit ‘Pandit Shri Virvijay Nirvan Ras,’” in K. B. Shah, ed., Pandit Virvijayji Svadhyay Granth (Ahmedabad: Shri Shrutjnan Prasarak Sabha, 1996), 3−22. 99 Uttamvijay, Dhundhak Mat Ras, folio 8a. 100 See M. Mehta, Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective, With Special Reference to Shroffs in Gujarat: 17th to 19th Centuries (Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1991), 115−134, on the shift from country-made to imported machine-made paper in the middle of the nineteenth century in western India. 101 Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati, 86−87, argues that Dayananda’s exposure in 1873 to the extensive use of the printing press by Calcutta intellectuals significantly changed his intellectual activity, and was partly responsible for his vast literary output in the last years of his life. However, the very process of printing a book proved difficult when Dayananda and Atmaram were first writing. Jordens discusses the technical problems faced by the printers of the first edition of Satyarth Prakash in 1875 (ibid., 101−102). 102 V. Dharwadker, “Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India” in J. Masten, P. Stallybrass and N. Vickers, eds., Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 1997), 108−133. 103 V. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 174 n49. See also her discussion on 314−322. 104 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006). Anderson derived his argument from L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450−1800, transl. D. Gerard (London: New Left Books, 1976). 105 Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati, 68; Dodson, Orientalism, 182. 106 On the ways that the colonial postal service revolutionized communication in nineteenth-century India, see C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780−1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 217−218; and B. D. Metcalf and T. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 94−99.

Part III

History and modernity

7

A conceptual history of the social Some reflections out of colonial Bengal Rochona Majumdar

The expressions “social” (samajik) and “society” (samaj) in their general modern uses came into Indian thinking in the colonial period, particularly from the second half of the nineteenth century.1 This is not to suggest that prior to its wide deployment in the late nineteenth century the word samaj did not appear in Indian texts. As noted by Klaus Karttunen: “ancient Indians were skilled analysts and classical texts of statecraft (arthashastra) and of moral and religious code (dharmashastra) contain penetrating studies of many aspects of society, but no term for the whole.” To ask for a word for “society,” he contends, is to “ask the wrong question” as “there was no need for it.”2 These observations may be juxtaposed with accounts of Buddhist thought where there is evidence of the appearance of the expression samaj to indicate an esoteric and secret community of tantric Buddhism.3 Yet these questions, while no doubt important and interesting, merit a separate discussion. My focus in this chapter is to inquire into the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of the concepts samaj and samajik, at a time when British colonial rule resulted in India’s inclusion in a shared global nexus of ideas and practices. In other words, the following inquiry rests on the assumption that the concept of the social in modern India was deeply embedded in the histories of colonial and nationalist thought. It was through the development of concepts such as samaj and other related categories over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that ideas about nationalism, modernity, and of a variety of new futures came to be imagined. This is a period akin to Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of the Sattelzeit, “metaphorically alluding to the horse saddle which is unified but nevertheless has two diametrical sides.”4 This was used by Koselleck to describe the period 1750–1850 in France, when there occurred rapid transformations in the semantic range of certain concepts as their meanings were altered and expanded from their bygone, older European usage to the “modern” ones that are generally understood today. In this sense the “social” (samajik) and “society” (samaj) can be designated as “key” concepts. Following the “historicoconceptual” process of their emergence in modern Bengali writings, samajik and samaj provide an axis upon which we can trace how ideals of a new order emerged through constant negotiation with, and interrogation and accommodation of, the old.5 To fully grasp the meanings encapsulated in the capacious categories samaj or samajik, I will focus on a group of intellectuals writing in Bengali—the language spoken in present-day West Bengal and Bangladesh.

166 Rochona Majumdar Methodologically, this chapter rests on three premises. First, it takes seriously Koselleck’s observation that, “both social and conceptual history have been explicit hypotheses since the Enlightenment … when the former social structures were breaking up and when linguistic reflection felt the pressure of change of a history which itself was newly experienced and articulated.”6 Our first task, therefore, is to outline what constituted a comparable moment of rupture in Indian history, when radical shifts in the social and cultural world made it imperative for Indian intellectuals to deploy new categories—or to refashion old ones into newness— that would be apposite for thinking through those changes.7 Second, given that the concept of the social circulated globally, it is important that we map its “semantic field” in the particular context of late colonial Bengal in order to perceive the “multiplicity of … connotations” inhering in the word(s). Finally, it follows directly from this last point that we take seriously the issue of translation. While it is true that conceptualizing the social can only proceed from the assumption that we all agree on some basic understanding of the word, the project can only become meaningful if we also acknowledge that the concept as it was used in different parts of the world exceeded this understanding. Thus, even as I use the expressions “social” and “society” almost interchangeably with “samajik” and “samaj,” I also maintain that the meanings encrusted in these categories were not identical across time and space. The complexity of the translation process is what makes this a project of a comparative, conceptual history of modernity in a local context. Indeed, the words samaj and samajik appeared in a variety of Bengali texts, encyclopedias, histories, essays, fiction, and newspaper reports at a time when Bengalis began to consciously articulate an anti-colonial project. I shall argue here, however, that it was during a particular crisis point in the economic and political life of that province, around the first partition of Bengal (1905–8), that there appear a concatenation of meanings that begin to inhere in the idea of samaj. The partition of Bengal was a measure deliberately undertaken by the British governor general, Lord Curzon, to weaken the force of the nationalist agitation in which Bengalis provided much of the political and ideological leadership. Curzon’s decree intensified a movement known as swadeshi (“indigeneity”), the political side of which involved an armed militant struggle to end British rule. In addition, swadeshi’s economic and cultural aspects involved a commitment to boycott British goods in favor of indigenous products, develop programs of national education, and rural reconstruction. Drawing attention to this moment is not to imply that changes in the concept of the social followed linearly from these events. Rather, by mapping the various layers of meaning that were encapsulated in the concept over the course of the long nineteenth century, climaxing in some ways during the swadeshi and postswadeshi years in the early twentieth, this chapter is a modest attempt to illustrate Koselleck’s observation, within the context of colonial Bengal, that: Language … changes at a different speed than do events, forms of government, or social structure, all of which language sometimes shapes and directs, and sometimes only registers. But even such linguistic recording indicates how

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significant political and social alterations were perceived by those experiencing them.8 In what follows, therefore, I will not only map the different meanings inhering in the concept of the social, but the burden of this chapter will be to demonstrate the expansiveness of the category. Thinking about samaj, in other words, as it crystallized in the nationalist, Bengali context, one can perceive that it encompassed ideas and ideals about family, history, politics, and religion in ways that makes difficult to posit easy equivalences with the European idea of society. If society was to be understood as an emblem of modernity, then in colonial Bengal that modernity was also “trans-colonial” in the sense of drawing from European norms while also essentially transcending them.

The early nineteenth-century background An idea of sociality in the model of civil-social organizations and a putative public sphere can be found in the early colonial period in Bengal. Bengali intellectuals and social reformers, sometimes with support from the colonial administration and Christian missionaries, established bodies such as the Calcutta School Society, the Calcutta School Book Society (1819), the Society for Translating European Sciences (1825), and the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge (1838). Likewise there were religious, reformist associations such as the Brahmo Samaj (1828) which grew out of a group, the Atmiya Sabha (“an association of related souls”) (1815), dedicated to promoting and championing the notion of monotheism found in the Upanishads. These “societies” devoted themselves in different ways to the promotion of Western, scientific knowledge among Indians, the dissemination of elementary education in vernacular languages and English, and to the promotion of a monotheistic, rational religion as distinct from an idolatrous, caste-ridden Hinduism. They were the direct result of the educated Bengali intelligentsia’s new-found discovery of Western science, religion, literature, politics, and philosophy. European Enlightenment-driven ideas of reason were not unrelated to the birth of new modes of sociality as expressed in these samaj(s) or societies.9 Even during this early period, there were intimations of the wide semantic field of the social. When they wrote about samajik unnati (“social improvement”), for example, Bengali intellectuals and social reformers such as Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) were referring to a range of issues pertaining to the economic and religious life of the people as well as to matters of the family and social relations more generally. Roy was among the first generation of Indians to seriously reflect upon the implications of European colonization held for Indian society. His endeavors to promote inheritance rights for women, and abolish the practice of sati—social reforms that would impact the condition of women in family and society—drew upon the classical liberal ideas of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Likewise, in founding the Brahmo Samaj he sought to promote a castefree, monotheistic rational religion as an antidote to the inequities that plagued contemporary Hinduism. Roy was well-read in Persian, and the new religion he

168 Rochona Majumdar founded drew upon both Christian and Quranic ideals to combat the divisiveness of Hindu caste society.10 During the early years of the nineteenth century, when he lived and worked, Roy was hardly in a position to critique Western industrial capitalist society, which his later-day successors would go on to develop. Instead, he expressed an “optimism” in a liberal imperial order. His ideal was a search for a modernized, but Indian, economy and polity with a viable rural base. This was reflected in his writings on the Permanent Settlement revenue system, which recognized a new class of zamindars (landowners) as the owners of the land, as opposed to the actual cultivator (ryot), and fixed the rent accruing from the land to the government in perpetuity. Roy, unlike the later writers I will discuss shortly, was not necessarily opposed to the government treating landlords as fixed proprietors, since it protected this class from “distress and difficulties originating from uncertainty of assessment.”11 However, echoing strains of Adam Smith, he was critical of the government’s neglect of the peasantry. He remarked, for example: I am at a loss to understand why the indulgence [shown to the landlords] was not extended to tenants, by requiring proprietors to follow the example of the Government, in fixing a definite rent to be received from each cultivator, according to the average sum collected from him during a given term of years.12 Roy felt that if the benefits of the Permanent Settlement were extended to the cultivators, it would win their eternal loyalty to British rule. This would ensure internal peace and security in the colony without having to expend huge sums on maintaining a large standing army. A reconstructed rural India of peasant proprietors, he believed, would further allow them “to shake off superstitions and prejudices” and lead them toward “useful exertions.” He also advocated “the diffusion of knowledge of European arts and sciences, in the interest of national improvement.” Commentators have remarked on the significance of the phrase “national improvement” here, since the idea of a nation during his time-period was “an alien idea.”13 Of particular note in Roy’s thought was his argument that the “modernization” of Indian society was inconceivable without the betterment of the “masses of the population, the impoverished tillers of the soil,” not simply “the new Indian middle class working in alliance with the new European middle class.”14 Roy was a pioneer who cast a long shadow upon successive generations of writers. His ideas about rejuvenating Bengal through rational religion, education, and rural reconstruction remained critical for all those who wrote about samajik unnati (social improvement) or samaj in general. Gone, however, was Roy’s faith in the providential nature of British rule.15 A conceptual history of the social in Bengal from the late nineteenth century registers this loss of faith. It can be plausibly argued, moreover, that conceptions of the social in late colonial Bengal were creative and critical responses to a series of problems perceived in multiple domains of life. In this way, there are certain resemblances with the manner in which ideas about society arose in post-Enlightenment Western Europe. “The Enlightenment conception of society was,” argues Keith Baker in his essay on

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the conceptual history of the social in Europe, “a creative response to the epistemological, moral, religious, and political dimension of the generalized crisis of values in the seventeenth century.”16 Baker understands this “generalized crisis” under the rubric of Augustinianism, and his outline of a history of the social in Europe draws attention to the fact that the idea of society arose as a general response to a wide swathe of concerns: religious, political, economic, and cultural. The case of colonial Bengal offers striking parallels. Following the revolt of 1857, India became a part of Britain’s formal empire. But it was clear that the system of free trade or the principle of liberty that were celebrated by classical liberal theorists were not applicable in a colonial setting. The later decades of the nineteenth century witnessed, on the one hand, a search for an “Indian” economics that would provide, on the lines of Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy, a conceptual frame for the rising spirit of economic nationalism developing in the wake of a burgeoning nationalist movement against British rule.17 On the other hand, there was an effort on the part of various writers to develop a concept of samaj that would be an organic unity undercutting the excesses of wealth and poverty, the fissures of caste—in other words the alienation between man and man and between town and country that many began to see as a product of Western civilization and capitalist culture. I will devote the analyses in this chapter to a discussion of the latter. Indian intellectuals during this period were as knowledgable about trends in European political and social thought as their early nineteenth-century predecessors. A wide range of figures feature in Bengali writings of the period, including Giuseppe Mazzini, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin, G. W. F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, and H. T. Buckle, to name just a few. Any attempt at doing a conceptual history of a “new” or “modern” Indian society (samaj) during this time needs to be cognizant of these influences, which were by no means systematic, so as to acknowledge that thinking about these concepts was part of a global historical development. At the same time, the specific chain of reasoning deployed by Indian writers and the details they furnish about the peculiarities of the Indian condition makes this history local and particular. European ideas, in other words, were engaged with, in large measure, to delineate an ideal-type of the social that would establish India’s history of difference with Europe. Finally, European notions of society in Baker’s analysis, or in more recent discussions by Charles Taylor, were deeply secular and marked a radical rupture with the past. European civil society, to quote Baker, was consecrated “as the new divinity on earth.” Such a statement presupposes the death of (or certainly a break from) an older notion of divinity and is related to that of a political order. By contrast, Indian ideas about the social were about resurrecting, or indeed crafting, a new history of society out of the past. The social was the ground on which Indians could distinguish themselves from the colonizer by establishing their long lineage in the past. The present was degenerate and this was a crisis brought upon by colonial conditions of life—political servitude, exposure to a new set of values, economic crisis, new professional structures, the pressures and lures of urban life,

170 Rochona Majumdar and new codes of familial behavior. The writers under consideration here sought to resolve these crises by looking back to the past (real or imagined), upon which they posited the ideal of an Indian civilization. To think about the concept of the social in India meant first to write a history of samaj out of this civilizational heritage. The next step was to seek ways of remodeling the present through an active dialogue with the past as part of an anti-colonial political ethics. Finally, the future of Bengali samaj was not in the city. It would be determined, argued most writers, by the plight of the impoverished majority in the countryside. Economic uplift and rejuvenation of the Bengali village in the model of an imagined idyll of rural community was constitutive of any idea about social rejuvenation.

A genealogy of the social in late colonial Bengal In volume 21 of the Bengali encyclopedia Vishvakosha (the English title was Encyclopedia Indica), the author and editor Nagendranath Basu (1866–1938) gave the following definition of samaj:18 [Samaj] is a grouping among Brahmans and other varnas. The most prominent members of the varna get together and form a samaj. Each member is bound by the rules and regulations of the samaj. Every varna is united by a samaj, such as Brahman samaj, Kayastha samaj etcetera. Brahmans carry out their adan pradaan (marital exchanges and other kinship related activities) according to the rules laid out by the Brahman samaj. Each samaj has one leader who is designated the samajpati or gosthipati (lord of the samaj or gosthi). On social ceremonies he is honored with sandalwood and garlands.19 Some pages later, in defining “samajik niyam,” or social rules, Basu noted that: The rules compiled by ten people together are social rules. All people residing within a samaj are bound by these rules. A samaj becomes unviable if there is unregulated behavior. … Nowadays the ties that bind society have come loose which is why we see all manner of anarchy.20 Basu developed on this idea of a samaj as a constellation of varnas and jatis in much greater detail in his later works. He was amongst a host of Bengali writers who dedicated their lives to writing a “history” of the Bengali samaj, perhaps as part of his responsibility to rescue society from the “anarchy” that he alluded to in his statement quoted above. His multi-volume Bangera Jatiya Itihasa (BJI, 1900–33) was a retelling of a Bengali “national” history as a history of jatis. The expression jatiya in the title was used to mean both national as well as that which related to jatis (castes) who made up the nation. Basu also distinguished jatiya itihasa from political history. The latter comprised of narratives about the struggle for state power. Bangera Jatiya Itihasa was about Bengali society and explained its tenacity and resilience in the face of foreign incursions.21

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Basu was not alone in the undertaking of projects such as this. Other writers, perhaps lesser known, also wrote histories of Bengali society with titles such as Banglar Samjik Itihasa (“a social history of Bengal,” 1910) or Sambandhyanirnaya (“determination of relationships,” five volumes). This period also witnessed an inspired surge in the writing of subregional histories of different localities and districts of Bengal. The latter were often told as the histories of particular families. These included K. Datta’s Datta Vamshavali, published as early as 1875; U. C. Gupta’s two-volume social history of the Baidya jati and the caste reforms instituted by the Sena king, Ballal Sena, entitled Jati-Tatta-Baridhi, published in 1905 and 1912 respectively; and Guha-Thakurta’s Kayastha Kulachandrika, an undated book published from Barisal in eastern Bengal. What is significant in these histories is that they were based entirely on genealogical sources (kulapanjikas, kulajis, kulagranthas). The latter were accounts of family fortunes from the earliest traceable ancestor until the present. They covered in minute detail the rise and fall of families based on the proper performance of caste rites and matrimonial liaisons. The time period covered by these books sometimes dated back to the advent of the Aryans. But at their core, the histories based on the kulaji literature (and the literature itself) referred to a period beginning in the seventh or eight century CE—when one King Adisur invited five Brahmans and five Kayasthas to Bengal to reform the caste system in that province, which had fallen into disrepute—until about the late fifteenth century. The main focus of the kulajis, and of the histories written in the early twentieth century that used them as primary sources, were the repeated reforms of the Bengali jati / varna system by various kulagurus and ghataks (social elders and genealogists) in the face of periodic onslaughts upon the social order by outsiders or rebellious elements such as Muslims, Buddhists, and Vaishnavas. The cast of historical characters included such names as King Adisur, Ballala Sena, and his son Lakshman Sena, Debibar Ghatak, Nula Panchanan, and Udayanacharya Bhaduri. Each of these personages instituted strict rules about marriage, inter-dining, and other familial practices that ended up making the operation of caste rules more stringent. The historicity of the kula literature—their purported dates of composition, the actuality of the characters they referred to—was debated ad nauseam in Bengal historical circles of the early twentieth century. Critics expressed deep skepticism about the “histories” written on the basis of family genealogies.22 But what is significant for the purposes of this chapter is the substantive content of this literature and the way in which these “facts” were rehearsed and deployed by twentieth-century historians such as Basu, Durgacharan Sanyal, and others. As recently argued by Kumkum Chatterjee, at their core the kulajis repeatedly emphasized, to the point of becoming a formula, a list of nine virtues or gunas that were essential for the attainment of kulin status (ritually the highest). According to Chatterjee, “these virtues included correct practice, modesty, scholarship, the act of installing/ establishing deities for the purpose of worship, dedication/ commitment, right livelihood, meditation, charity, and going on pilgrimage.”23 At the heart of these practices were certain injunctions about matrimony and, in particular, who could marry whom in Bengali society. The histories, using the kula

172 Rochona Majumdar literature, written in the twentieth century were basically narratives about the rise and decline of families on the basis of their proper performance of kula-karma, of which marriage remained central. As noted by Chatterjee: the regulation of marriage practices specifically came to represent the most typical attribute of high-status jatis and lineages in Bengal and these groups in effect constituted samajas or communities, which were held together by intricate kinship networks resulting from marriage within the group.24 Chatterjee also notes that the language used in the kulajis, which were extensively quoted by the authors who used them to write their modern-day histories, were Sanskrit and Bangla. Chatterjee’s explanation for the use of both languages is that these texts sought to uphold an ancient, shastric (scriptural) image while simultaneously ensuring a wide audience by their deployment of a language used colloquially.25 Why did a group of Bengali intellectuals so fervently dedicate themselves to writing “social histories” that were in effect a narrative of Bengal’s past seen through the lens of family, marriage, genealogy, and caste? Reading them today, are we to conclude that they represented a fringe element of the Bengali intellectual establishment? Or is it possible to link their works with those of other intellectuals whose writings, despite their considerable differences with Basu, Datta, Sanyal, and others like them, nonetheless bear traces of a similar understanding of society and the social? The usage of samaj that we witness in these family and clan-oriented works, I submit, was not a marginal strand in Bengali writings. In fact, Basu’s definition of “society” and “social rules” in the Vishvakosha, cited previously, mirrored opinions held by many at this time. If early nineteenth-century writers were concerned with developing sociality and social associations modeled on European types, later writers’ theorization about the social was grounded in articulating what was different about Indian society. For men (there were few women writing in the early nineteenth century) such as Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) or (especially in his early career) Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), ideas about social reform were to a large extent inspired by their reading of European thinkers (such as Spencer, J. S. Mill, Comte, Rousseau, Hegel and some utopian socialists) and their interaction with colonial administrators (although this was more true of Rammohan Roy than of Bankimchandra). By and large, they embraced European ideas about civil society and the public sphere, which they tried to develop in India through their writings and reformist endeavors. Bankimchandra, more than Rammohan, would then go on to recast his readings in light of the particulars of Indian society. Issues such as the status of women and the condition of the Hindu home occupied an important place in their works. Not only did the two intellectuals favor movements such as the abolition of sati, inheritance rights for widows and daughters, widow remarriage, and the banning of polygamy, they also made the dharmic (religious) aspect of social life a matter of debate in their imagination of the social. In many respects, they laid the groundwork for later Bengali attempts to think about the social by combining elements drawn from

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classical European liberal precepts with aspects of kula, vamsha, and related family values. Finally, for both Bankimchandra and Rammohan, the condition of the Bengali peasant had a centrality in any theorization about samaj.

Between social contract and bhakti: samaj in Bankimchandra By the 1880s the faith evinced by the likes of Rammohan Roy in the providential nature of British rule was being seriously questioned by Bengali writers. For such later writers, thinking and theorizing the social was informed by their nationalism. Colonial rule in India constituted the central problematic and society needed to be recast and rethought in order to battle the encroachments of the foreigner into the realm of everyday life and ideas. This change, however, did not happen suddenly. The intellectual who best epitomized this shift, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, indeed may be seen as something of a bridge between the earlier generations and the later ones. His essay Samya (“equality,” 1879) was a treatise based primarily on a close reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. Bankimchandra offered a radical critique of Indian society on the basis of his engagement with Rousseau and Mill, arguing that while no two human beings are born equal and identical, social inequality was a human artifice to assert worldly power. He did not advocate equality of income for one and all, but argued in favor of the idea of “for each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.” His reading of Mill’s The Subjection of Women convinced him of the need to change patterns of inheritance for Indian women, and to endow them with more rights in marriage and education. Inspired by Rousseau, he strongly favored a “social contract” that would hold rulers accountable to the people.26 It has been noted by Bankimchandra’s contemporaries that within a few years of Samya’s publication, the author disavowed his faith in Mill and declared that “Samya was all wrong and I will not re-publish it.”27 There were, however, two sections (chapters three and four) from Samya that Bankimchandra did republish in 1892 under the title Bangladesher Krishak (“the Bengali peasant”). Before discussing the implications of Bankimchandra’s declaration that he had lost faith in the theory of equality presented in Samya, let us turn to the essay on the Bengali peasant. Here, Bankimchandra’s continuities and breaks with Rammohan Roy are clear. While acknowledging that British rule had resulted in certain technological and medical advances in cities, he asked whether or not these advances were auspicious (mangal) for the nation (desh) as a whole. Like Rammohan, his response was negative. Bankimchandra put the bulk of the blame for the plight of the Bengali peasant upon the zamindar (landlord) and his underlings (the naib, gomasta), as well as upon the rural moneylender who entrapped the cultivator in an endless cycle of debt. Since the colonial state legislated the settlement that increased the zamindar’s stranglehold on the peasantry, Bankimchandra, unlike Rammohan, was much more forceful in his indictment of foreign rule. Yet, he also maintained that while legal changes instituted by the British were important in understanding the

174 Rochona Majumdar plight of the Bengali peasant, it was not the whole story. Bankimchandra argued that the basis of social inequality was a historical condition and could be mapped on to caste inequalities that existed in pre-colonial times, too. His analysis was a fascinating, if somewhat idiosyncratic, amalgamation of sociological theories of caste combined with a geographical determinism and his received knowledge of wages and profits. Bankimchandra noted that wealth in a nation was distributed as “wages” and “profits.”28 The former accrued to those who did manual labor, who were almost always lower-caste shudras. Profits (of which rents were a part) accrued to the brain workers: Vaishya traders, Kshatriya kings and princes, and Brahman priests. Wage-earners never received a share in the profits, and their conditions worsened as population rose. This condition of wage-workers (peasants and laborers were both included in this category) predated British rule as the laboring groups were vulnerable to the fertility of the soil and to the tropical conditions of the country. Their livelihood was entirely dependent on their ability to labor on a daily basis, and for centuries their wages have been low. This meant that in Bengal (as well as in the rest of India) there had not been any “social accumulation of wealth” (samajik dhanasanchay). The weakness of the lower orders of society had an effect on those above them in the hierarchy. As the condition of the laborers and farmers deteriorated, the disparity between them and other social classes increased. Disparity of wealth was followed by a disparity in rights and privileges. The Brahman’s powers were built on the lack of progress of the other three varnas. Inequality produced a vicious cycle of irreligion and superstition. As the lower varnas became more vulnerable, they were swayed by pseudo-religion or upa-dharma. Pseudo-religion, argued Bankimchandra, was the product of fear of the universe that was imagined as all-powerful and full of malignant deities. Every varna was enervated by the lack of rationality and education, and Hindu society as a whole was perceived to have weakened as a result. Bankimchandra noted, for example, that “both the aggressor and the oppressed reaped the same fruit. The Brahman lost his power, and the expanse of his intellect became a barren desert.”29 It was the deplorable condition of all social groups in Bengal that made the province an easy prey for colonial occupation which, in turn, made matters worse by enacting new legislation that further worsened the plight of the peasantry. In his writings from the late 1880s, Bankimchandra tried to put forward his views on how the Bengali society whose portrait he drew in his essays on the peasantry could be re-energized. Despite his abdication from the views aired in Samya, his later writings betray some lingering traces of that work. The later writings—of which his treatise on religion (Dharmattatva, “the principle of religion,” 1888) and his retelling of the story of the Bhagavad Gita from the Indian epic the Mahabharata (Krishnacharit, “the deeds of Krishna,” 1888) are the most important—present a completely different image of society. These works celebrate the ideal of bhakti (devotion), a much discussed concept in works by sixteenth-century figures such as Rupa and Jiva Goswami, as the main constituent of the social. But the contours of bhakti in Bankimchandra were radically redrawn to combat the effects of colonial rule. As he remarked:

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Look at the evils and disorders caused by the loss of bhakti in our country. Hindus were never wanting in bhakti. … But now bhakti has completely disappeared from the community of those who are educated or only halfeducated. They have failed to grasp the significance of the western doctrine of egalitarianism (samyabad) and perverted it to mean that people are equal everywhere in every sense and nobody owes bhakti to anyone else.30 Bhakti, the ethic of submission based on devotion, he argued , was the glue required for social cohesion. As such, Bankimchandra urged that bhakti be injected back into the social system. But, in line with his earlier arguments in Samya he made some modifications to the concept. First, he argued that both husband and wife equally deserved each other’s devotion and devotion from their children. Second, he made bhakti conditional upon the possession of certain virtues (gunas). Thus, “we should address our bhakti to a Shudra who has a Brahmin’s guna, that is, who is religious, learned, free of worldly desire, and educates others [by example].”31 Third, he made a distinction between bhakti shown to a figure of royalty versus that offered to a royal institution. It was the institution, argued Bankimchandra—the state or parliament— that embodied the idea of sovereignty, rather than the individual. The institution was therefore the proper object of bhakti. Finally, he designated samaj or society itself as the most deserving recipient of bhakti for “all the virtues of man are invested in the society which is our educator, law-giver, provider, and protector in one—our sovereign, our teacher.” As observed by Ranajit Guha, “there is nothing like this … in the Hindu tradition, and in making samaj hypostatize thus for … godhead the nineteenthcentury theoretician turns sharply away from the theology of Jiva Goswami towards that of August Comte.”32 Bankimchandra’s ideas of bhakti, with their Comtean imprint, by thus elevating humanity itself into an object of worship, differed radically from those of sixteenth-century theoreticians such as Rupa and Jiva Goswami, who celebrated the erotic and loving aspects of the ethic of submission. Sovereignty, therefore, in Bankimchandra was split between both state and society.

Samaj and nationalism in the writings of Bhudev Mukhopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore Bankimchandra prepared the ground for the late colonial Indian theorization of samaj. Due to constraints of space in this chapter, let me refer in some detail to just two key intellectuals: Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827–94) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1961). While Tagore’s works are well known to students of South Asian Studies, Bhudev’s writings have received relatively less attention.33 Often overshadowed by his contemporary Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bhudev nonetheless remains one of the most creative essayists and social thinkers of late nineteenth-century Bengal. An analysis of the social in the works of these two literary stalwarts will help to further contextualize the work of Nagendranath Basu and the other historians, discussed above, who regarded a social history of Bengal as a genealogical history of caste and family,

176 Rochona Majumdar as well as to help explain the departure from the model of civil society promoted by those earlier intellectuals. Throughout his Samajik Prabandha (“essays on society,” 1892), Bhudev expounded on the Bengali jati’s agonistic relationship with the British Empire. On the one hand, he extolled empire for creating a sense of an all-India entity by bringing together the entire Indian population with all its linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity under the sway of one political sovereign. On the other hand, he charged the colonial state with sowing the seeds of dissension among Hindus and Muslims, and among upper and lower castes, by skilfully exploiting new avenues for upward mobility. Colonial rulers played one community off another by bestowing them with unequal privileges for climbing the ranks of the administration.34 Bhudev did not advocate an all-out rebellion against British rule. Given the state’s selfish partisanship, however, he urged Hindus to seek the wellspring of unity within their own social body. At one point in the book, Bhudev declared his limited faith in the efficacy of meetings, associations, and learned societies in fostering this spirit of unity.35 The public sphere, in other words, was not the ideal model of the social that Bhudev wrote about. Instead he elaborated on various aspects of Hindu samaj in order to establish its distinctive character and appropriateness for a modern Indian model of the social. British rule in India, he argued, was in keeping with the social character of the English. It was critical for Hindus therefore to understand the nature of their own society in order to maintain a sense of sovereignty under conditions of political domination. European sociological theories that had inspired earlier generations of Indians were of not much help in such an undertaking. Bhudev’s main charge against European sociology was that it sought to understand Indian society through the yardsticks of the European social order. He reminded his readers that every society and its inhabitants were unique. Social analysis had to be conducted with an eye to local ethnographic realities and the particularity of historical evolution in each country. Methodologically, Bhudev has been described as a comparative sociologist who read and engaged European texts to figure out where they failed to provide an adequate description of Indian society.36 European sociological theories, he contended, treated societies like a living organism. Society was likened with the living body, which went through childhood, youth, illness, and death. It followed from here that reform was immanent to the social, because what was adequate for the health of a child would not do for adults or the elderly. Furthermore, society, like living creatures, took what it could from outside in order to nourish and sustain itself.37 Clearly, Bhudev was referring here to the works of Herbert Spencer (without explicitly naming him), who had a deep impact upon Bhudev’s most illustrious contemporary, Bankimchandra. Bhudev disagreed fundamentally with all these claims. Instead, he argued that there exist some basic distinctions between the corporeal make-up of animals and the human social body. Living organisms constantly battle against destructive forces and infections that seek to reduce their life course. Society, on the contrary, was not engaged in a continuous battle. Human selfishness can often stand as an impediment to the health of the social body. But this can, and often

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is, tempered by the collective strength of social bonds. Society was instead understood by Bhudev to stand above the power of individual human desire and selfishness. He also disputed the notion that society foraged for nourishment from outside—the explanation given for social reform—arguing instead that society’s nourishment came (or should be drawn) from within itself. Social reform brought upon by external forces was likened by Bhudev to cow-dung cakes (used as fuel in rural India), which are put to dry on the walls of mud huts. Reforms, which he regarded as influences from the outside, were merely add-ons to the social. True social reform was an organic process emanating from within each society.38 But what constituted the core of Indian society? Here Bhudev turned to history and argued that, since the Aryan invasions, Indian society demonstrated a tremendous ability to assimilate difference in its midst. The trend continued through the Muslim period, when there was considerable intermarriage among foreign groups and locals producing an “Indian” Muslim community that adapted many Hindu ways.39 Setting aside the sectarian implications of this statement, we may conclude that for writers such as Bhudev society was an ongoing phenomenon, the life course of which was much longer than any individual’s. It experienced periods of lull, but socially responsible persons could inject life and reform back into the social body. Seen from this perspective, society stood above the individual or a group of individuals. The consequences that followed from this last point were critical in distinguishing Bhudev not only from his European counterparts but also from Bankimchandra. It led Bhudev to produce a sustained critique of the idea of samya, or equality, of individuality, and of social-contract theory. In fashioning this critique, Bhudev’s central unit of analysis was the family. He argued that the particular religious trajectory of the West had given rise to individualism, where men projected human traits and attributes on to God. Bhudev described Christianity as a bhavmulak religion (an ecstatic or “mentalist”40 religion, where the universe and the divine were attributed with human emotions and sentiments), which supported the claim to equality of all men. For if God possessed human attributes, then all humans were mirror images of the divine. Social difference between people was a violation of this principle. Hinduism, however, was a naturalistic or prakritic religion that implied that for Hindus the universe was nirguna or formless. Reading Hinduism in such a manner led Bhudev to disapprove of the bhakti movement, as it was premised on an intimate emotional relationship between the devotee and God through the register of identification and devotion. Based on this distinction between religions, he argued that there was no natural principle of equality. By arguing in favor of social equality, the West had in fact imposed an artificial order of things on the world. It was beneficial up to a point, Bhudev felt, but one soon ran up to its limitations. The principle of equality did nothing to address, for example, the competitiveness innate in all humans. Furthermore, while the principle of equality removed the burden of discrimination from the oppressed sections of society, it also shrank the desire to be charitable and bestow kindness upon others. If all men are equal then what would be the point of

178 Rochona Majumdar these emotions? Instead, the principle of equality promoted self-interest without the corresponding desire for empathy.41 Naturalistic religions could be understood, in Bhudev’s thought, to generate a far more expansive notion of equality. Since the notion of the divine in these religions was formless, the entire universe was suffused with divine spirit. This notion of the world and of God led Hindus to treat the universe as a unity and make no distinction between humans and animals. Whatever distinctions there existed in the world were a result of work, practice, and usage (vyavahar). The bhavik (ecstatic) religions, unlike the naturalistic ones, failed to comprehend the fundamental oneness of being and, therefore, could only conceive of equality among human beings. This understanding of Hinduism allowed Bhudev to offer a defense of caste in the Indian social system. First, the main restriction in the caste system pertained to rules of marriage. Bhudev argued that since marriage only constituted one phase (the householder phase) in the life of human beings, then the restrictions imposed by this rule were limited. They were also necessary for purposes of social welfare and cohesion. Second, the caste system prevented dominance that arose out of economic might. Since social prestige depended upon the possession of certain gunas, and each caste had their designated social functions, there could be no question of one group dominating the other. Third, with the exception of Brahmans, Bhudev claimed that most caste groups could make claims to a ritually higher status. He cited the example of the Nabashaks of Bengal, Parias of Madras, and the Mareras of the Bombay Presidency as cases in point to demonstrate that, despite being in the lower rungs of the caste hierarchy, all these groups claimed the same status as Kayasthas and sometimes even Brahmans.42 Bhudev’s factual claims are open to argument, but his work is important because he erected an elaborate edifice to explain the fundamental basis of society in India: caste, family and religion. Fuelled by anti-colonial pride, Bhudev urged a look back at India’s past to appreciate the basis of society. His Samajik Prabandha was an immensely successful tract of its time, and taken together with Bankimchandra’s criticism of samya (equality), it is clear that both writers were propagating a concept of the social that did not depend upon any sort of explicit or implicit contract. Indeed, they both feared that contractual equality would loosen social bonds. Even the brief analysis offered above is suggestive of why the categories Bhudev offered for explaining the social in that book were taken up by future authors to compose Bengali social histories. His writings were inspired by a spirit of nationalism, but as observed by Sudipta Kaviraj, Bhudev was less interested in constructing an ideological or mythical base for anti-colonial sentiments than he was in thinking historically about conditions of servitude and ways of ending it. Indeed as Kaviraj argues, Bhudev “was not even a good revivalist, for his Hinduism was too intellectual to satisfy demagogic tastes.”43 I want to close this essay with a brief consideration of the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore. My reasons for doing this are threefold. First, his ideas about society found deep resonances with many outside of Bengal, and were constitutive of “Indian” thinking about the social. For example M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909)

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articulated similar ideas. Second, an analysis of Tagore’s work provides a contextual reference point for the writings of Basu and other more or less contemporary social historians, though interestingly, I submit, they marked a misunderstanding of many of Tagore’s conceptual categories. Finally, while acknowledging the plight of the peasant outlined by the likes of Rammohan, Bankimchandra, and younger writers of his own period, Tagore presented an idealized alternative to existing society, which would be held together on the basis of local self-reliance, cooperative solidarity, and the spirit of social service: what has been described as “a kind of parallel society setting its face against governmental indifference and exploitation and generating its own strength and vitality for common welfare.”44 It would be impossible to condense all of Tagore’s thoughts on samaj within the brief corpus of this chapter. Let me therefore turn to one essay, “Swadeshi Samaj” (“indigenous society”), which was first delivered as a lecture organized by the Chaitanya library on 19 July 1904 at the Minerva Theater in Calcutta. R. C. Dutt, Gurudas Bandyopadhyay, and Hirendranath Dutta were among the well-known personalities who attended the gathering. It is reported that nearly 1,000 people were turned away as there was no room in the auditorium to accommodate them.45 Under tremendous pressure from the Bengali public, Tagore had to present his lecture again nine days later at the Curzon Theater to an audience of 1,200 people.46 The lecture was then published, with some revisions, in the same year. Tagore repeated the lecture again on 2 August, clarifying some of his points in response to criticisms of the previous lecture. The swadeshi period, as mentioned earlier, may be considered a major moment when the ruptures and tensions constitutive of conceptual thinking in Bengali history became most clearly articulated. “Swadeshi Samaj” belongs to a collection of essays entitled Atmashakti (“strength of the self”). In it, Tagore rehearsed many of his previously stated ideas and beliefs, expressed in works such as Sadhana (“pursuit,” 1894). In the latter essays, Tagore expressed his conviction in the existence of a civilizational difference between the East and West. The main component of this difference, in his opinion, was that the state and political power constituted the epicenter of societies belonging to Western civilization. The core of Eastern civilizations lay in society. Elaborating on the nature of Indian society in his 1894 text, Tagore also noted that for a long time it was a domestic society made up of households (garhasthyapradhan samaj). In that samaj, the strongest social bonds depended on the authority of parents and other elders within the family. The specific forms of social regulation in India reflected this domestic character of traditional society.47 But, under colonial rule this pattern of society was changing: Recently there have been some changes in this society of households. A new flood has swept into its domain. Its name is the public. It is a new thing with a new name. It is impossible to translate it into Bengali. The word ‘public’ and its opposite ‘private’ have now come into use in Bengali … Now that our society consists not only of households but also of an emergent public, the growth of public responsibilities has become inevitable.48

180 Rochona Majumdar “Swadeshi Samaj,” written and presented on the eve of Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal, began from these same premises of positing a social formation that was primarily based on families and villages, but that had now been disrupted by British rule. In this essay, Tagore clarified that a commitment toward samaj did not mean that Bengalis abjure all relationship to the colonial state or to the fruits of Western education. Once a society has been exposed to outside influences, a complete inward turn was not only impossible but its result, if achieved, could only be retrograde. But preservation of the social demanded a commitment to channel all knowledge acquired through an exposure to the West to increasing the strength of indigenous society. Far from preparing to fulfill such a commitment, the last several decades were witness to the Bengal countryside being denuded of manpower and resources. Both upper and lower classes migrated to the city, leaving the soul of samaj—the village—deserted and at the mercy of the colonial state. It is significant that the immediate factor that spurred the speech later published as “Swadeshi Samaj” was the colonial government’s report on the water crisis in Bengal.49 Responding to the agitation by many in that province, the essay contained Tagore’s vision—both in terms of the immediate water crisis and the more longterm problem of partition and colonialism—of what constituted (or should constitute) the aforementioned “public responsibilities” that he had referred to in Sadhana. Unlike Bhudev, however, Tagore did not dismiss the importance of civil-social organizations, though the nature of these organizations should be linked to the hriday (heart) of India. He criticized the model of provincial conferences organized to protest the measures of the state, because they mimicked the model of English political associations. The speeches in these assemblies were delivered in English from atop a podium to an audience that had gathered specifically for that purpose. How could any protest against the British Raj be in the language of the state that so few Indians knew? And that, too, in a style that was alien to most? Ordinary people, in thousands of villages in India, could hardly ever identify with this style of campaigning. Indian civil society, he submitted, should resurrect the mela (fair) that had been in vogue in the country in earlier times. The form of the melas, with people thronging between stalls that offered entertainment, could also be deployed for social reform. He advocated talks in Bengali, magic lantern shows, and kirtans (devotional songs) to inform palli samaj (rural society) about the problems plaguing their lives.50 The main object of reform in “Swadeshi Samaj” was society, conceived as an agrarian, family-based group of people the majority of which resided in the thousands of Indian villages. Contrary to what we might expect, however, Tagore’s prescription for combating the might of the British on the eve of the partition of Bengal was not through a struggle for political power. Sovereignty, he argued instead, would be secured by returning our attention to society. This was because Tagore felt that “in our country, the government (sarkar-bahadur) is not a part of society.” Samaj should therefore not rely upon the government for the performance of public works. To do so was to compromise “our sovereignty.” Indian society had survived the political domination of many foreign forces over

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centuries, but never in Tagore’s view did samaj rely on the benevolence of outside forces.51 The present crisis, he noted, was caused by the fact that Bengalis had passively handed over their daily responsibilities—to bring food, water, and education to the populace—to an alien government. This resulted in a complete erosion of autonomy. To argue that autonomy would be restored upon the attainment of swaraj or political independence was akin to asserting that a son would acknowledge his mother once he comes into some money to support her. On the question of the immediate water crisis, Tagore noted that even if political groups managed to get 50 million rupees from the government exchequer, the real price would be one that was extracted from Indians—the sovereignty of samaj.52 The core of “Swadeshi Samaj” was to draw attention to the futility of attempts to resolve the problem of domination in terms of political sovereignty. Solutions to all problems associated with the loss of power should emanate from within the social body. Agitation and rallies organized to demand financial and other aid from an alien state could never lead to true sovereignty.53 Despite strife among political foes and repeated incursions by foreign powers, India retained a spirit of autonomy as every member of Indian society performed the labor designated to them. The monarch or parliament was the sovereign head of state-oriented countries in the West. These were the institutional embodiments of the nation. In the East, the nation embodied the spirit of the land that was diffused through samaj.54 Comparing the classical pasts of the East and West, Tagore noted that Greece and Rome were destroyed once state power was lost. But India and China survived manifold political changes, since their civilizational spirit saturated every pore of society. The Indian people needed to keep that spirit alive through ethical action and the performance of daily moral responsibilities. Only karmayoga (the pursuit of duty as moral action) would enable Indians to stake their ownership claims upon the country. Tagore thus expressed his idealized image about the functioning of Hindu samaj: The king was a part of samaj, ensuring social safety and security was his duty, the Brahmin was dedicated to upholding the samaj’s spiritual and rightful (dharmic) ideals .. through their scholarship, devotion and worship. … The householder was deemed the pillar of society and domestic responsibilities were held in the highest esteem.55 Samaj was the real owner and beneficiary of different human labors. Clearly, this was an idealization of the caste system, which, like Gandhi and Bhudev, Tagore saw as the central organizing principle of society. To those who would argue that this samaj was a frozen image of the past created by dead ancestors centuries ago, Tagore cautioned that it was precisely this attitude that led to India’s current crisis. To invoke an idealized image of Hindu samaj was not an act of mindless devotion.56 Nor was Hindu samaj an image of a society divided by impenetrable caste barriers. The caste system or the melas in contemporary India represented a perversion of their original form.

182 Rochona Majumdar Like many other turn-of-the-twentieth-century thinkers, Tagore argued that Indian society was characterized from time immemorial by its unity in diversity. Knowledge and duty rather than political power was the main point of pride in this society. True, this society had experienced waves of invasions by Buddhists, Muslims, and most recently the English. But the history of syncretistic cults (such as Nanakpanthis, Kabirpanthis, Vaishnavs) in Indian society were an indication of the ways in which samaj domesticated the “foreign” by absorbing the latter into its own body. Such “invasions” left a damaging legacy, however, as they produced an element of fear that grew over time and slowly corroded the greatest element of strength in Hindu society—its role as a purveyor of knowledge. It is worth citing Tagore’s own words at some length on this subject as it gives us a sense of the way he conceptualized the forces that constituted the core of Indian society: We have lost out on our role as teacher (to the world). The desire for monarchical might was never our biggest strength—never did it win over the hearts of people in our country. … The right of the Brahman, that is the right to knowledge (gyan), rightful conduct (dharma), and meditation (tapasya) were the basis of life in our society. The day that mere performance of rites came to occupy the place of meditation, when having lost all sense of history everyone with the exception of the Brahman started to call themselves shudras and nonAryans, when the Brahman who was in charge of disseminating the fruits of new knowledge became a mere gatekeeper, from that day we have been unable to offer anything to the world and to ourselves.57 Just as the Brahman had fallen from the lofty role assigned to him, so also had religious melas in different places of pilgrimage become sites of moral corruption and the senseless worship of sadhus (godmen). They were completely devoid of their original function of enforcing social cohesion.58 Tagore realized the challenge inherent in a situation when the state was completely outside of society. The British monarch was no longer a part of the Indian social. His proffered solution to this problem of leadership was to find a “samajpati” (social leader) who would unite the hearts of all countrymen. Only a person who successfully represented an organic unity between the new forms of knowledge that Indians had acquired from the West with the values and morality that were theirs from times immemorial could qualify as samajpati. (S)he would be an embodiment of the desires and aspirations of all members of society. Such a leader was not to be found from among the existing political groups, because these parties had partisan goals driven by special interests. They could never represent the social in its entirety. Lest we imagine Tagore as a proponent of some kind of dictatorial system, it is important to recall his cautionary words. It is possible, he wrote, that the: samajpati would sometimes be good, and at others bad. But if samaj retained its vitality then no individual can inflict lasting harm upon the totality. At the same time, the anointing of such a samajpati was one of the best ways to liven

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up society. If samaj could feel its unity through one such person then no outside force could declare victory over it.59 Tagore was acutely aware of the difficulties in the accomplishment of this task. He was also aware of how easily he could be misunderstood, and he anticipated many possible objections to his statements. He noted, for example, that many detractors might ask how such a leader was to be found or elected? Others would be invested in his community, lineage, and political background. Still others would be wary of someone abusing the powers vested upon him. Nonetheless, Tagore insisted that instead of getting mired in these debates, the gravity of the situation demanded that people choose someone from among themselves to the rank of a leader. Success in colonial India came in the form of awards and honors from the state. But it was time, Tagore argued, that society reward those who dedicated themselves to its cause. The new leader would be someone who emerged from the rank of social workers. He would combat the divisive tendencies sown by the colonial administration and restore Indian society’s capacity to live with unity in diversity. “Swadeshi Samaj” evoked strong criticism from many quarters in Bengal. Many found his emphasis on the “social” too lopsided and noted that Indians were now mobilizing against the alien rulers through different types of organizations. It was time to celebrate these different modes of agitation rather than fix all energies on the samajik or social question. Tagore’s response to this criticism summarized his main contention in this respect: I have tried to communicate that unlike in England, samaj in our country is not a limited entity. The ruling class can to some extent perform the task of maintaining security and dispensing justice. All other tasks were always in the hands of our samaj. This is our uniqueness. This was also why our humanity, our civilization depended on our social system and we worked hard to keep that system working. It is a mistake to imagine that samajik implied some limited arena of life.60 The notion of samaj that Tagore articulated during the swadeshi period remained with him all his life. In 1926, in a foreword written for Pramatha Chaudhuri’s Ryoter Katha (“the story of the peasant”) he reiterated his faith that village society could not be reformed through legal changes alone. Chaudhuri (1868–1946), a Bengali intellectual close to Tagore but also inspired by the economic arguments put forth earlier by Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra, argued forcefully against the Permanent Settlement. The latter, he argued, had destroyed the Bengali ryot (peasant). While conceding Chaudhuri’s criticism that zamindars could (and did) exploit the peasantry, Tagore maintained that legal-contractual solutions could never improve the plight of the peasant in lasting ways. Tagore’s critique of the creation of a free market in land, granting the peasant permanent tenure on his field, or even abolishing the Permanent Settlement (all of which happened in Bengal with the rise to power of the Communist party in the 1960s) forces us to confront an underlying truth in Tagore’s beliefs. Tagore was skeptical of juridical or

184 Rochona Majumdar market-oriented solutions to what were, in his opinion, problems arising from the spiritual bankruptcy of Bengal’s moral economy: No law can protect him who does not who does not know how to preserve himself. The strength of self-preservation came from a holistic life, not through piecemeal policy initiatives. Rights acquired through laws, the practice of khadi, spinning the charkha or becoming four anna Congress members cannot fulfill the goal of self-preservation. Only if our villages became alive again will the peasant also acquire shakti (strength).61 Tagore tried to set an example of this kind of samaj and an alternate moral economy through his educational and community enterprise in Shantiniketan and Sriniketan. Notwithstanding certain ideological differences between them, Bhudev, Bankimchandra, and Tagore all converged in their view of the inadequacy of the social contract to furnish the sentiments of psychic unity that nationalism, in their view, needed. Faced with the dominating apparatus of the colonial state, all the thinkers in question were engaged in a quest for principles that would unify the Bengali (Indian) people into one unit, despite the teeming differences of caste, community, wealth, and social status that fractured the social body. Liberalism and legal constitutionalism, in their opinions, fell short of fulfilling such an aspiration. This, one might say, was the anti-colonial twist that thinking about samaj received in Bengali.

Conclusion I hope to have demonstrated in the preceding pages the complex constitution of the concept of the social in colonial Bengal. The social, I have noted, could not be imagined without at the same time invoking ideas of colonialism, civilization, and nationalism. The semantic field of the social was made up of such categories as improvement, civilization, labor, peasant, caste, family, genealogy, religion, and leadership. Each of these ideas was differently articulated by different authors. Despite the differences however, it is clear that samaj was a category that was held apart from the state and was primarily conceived of as opposed to the latter. This is not the same thing as the state and civil society divide most famously articulated by G.W. F. Hegel. Rather, in their conception of society, many Bengali writers folded the function of politics into the social. Unlike the concept of civil society, samaj was presented as an entity that made up the being of India. In that sense it transcended the state as well as any notion of social contract. In conclusion, however, it must be observed that despite their best intentions, samaj, as it was theorized in late colonial India, remained distinctly Hindu. Men such as Rabindranath Tagore or Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (and the former more than the latter) emphasized the syncretic character of Indian society and the need for peaceful coexistence. But the categories they deployed to think about the social did not look to the conceptual repertoire of Islam. In the hands of social historians such as Basu and others, the “Muslim” became a figure that remained outside of the

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framework of the Indian social. Their conception of society was a Hindu entity made up of families that carried out their life functions through caste affiliations. For Tagore, however, Hindu samaj was not simply an ethnic community. Hinduism was a repository of values essential to the preservation of Indian unity. In the intense communal and class politics of twentieth-century India, words like “Hindu” and “Muslim” circulated more as ethnic tags—numbers returned in censuses—than as names for certain sets of values. Tagore’s (or Bhudev’s or even late-Bankim’s) critique of the idea of the social contract and the corresponding emphasis they placed on an organic unity engendered by bhakti could only be a marginal strand of patrician thinking. Despite their marginality, however, these visions of samaj, like Gandhi’s Ram Rajya, have remained sites that scholars have mined over generations to understand alternative forms of modern politics in the subcontinent.

Notes 1 This formulation is a slightly modified version of Raymond Williams’s opening lines in his book Culture and Society. For the purposes of the present exercise, I replace the word “culture” in Williams’s sentence with “social,” “English” with “Indian,” and the “industrial revolution” with “colonialism.” Williams’s original sentence was, “The organizing principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period which we commonly describe as the Industrial Revolution.” See R. Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), ix. 2 K. Karttunen, “Sabha-Samaj-Society,” unpublished draft paper presented at a conference on Conceptual Histories of the World and Global Translations, 25 March 2010, Damascus. 3 For example, Christian Wedemeyer’s recent translation of a Vajrayana Buddhist text, Lamp that Integrates the Practices shows the use of the word samaj in the history of Buddhist thought. The Lamp was a text about “the Noble Tradition” by a group of authors and their spiritual descendents who commented “in distinctive ways upon the literature and praxis of the Guhyasamaj Tantra or Esoteric Community Tantra—one of the most important scriptures of Indian esoteric Buddhism.” Samaj in this context implied something like a secret (guhya) community of Buddhists who practiced and deliberated upon esoteric (guhya), tantric practices as a way to salvation. See C. Wedemeyer, trans., Aryadeva’s Lamp that Integrates the Practices (Caryamelapakapradipa): The Gradual Path of Vajrayana Buddhism According To the Esoteric Community Noble Tradition (New York: American Association of Buddhist Studies and Columbia University’s Center for Buddhist Studies, 2007). 4 I draw here on Bo Strath’s reading of Sattelzeit in his review of Koselleck’s Future’s Past. See B. Strath, “Future’s Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, A review essay,” European Journal of Social Theory 8, 4 (2005): 527−532. 5 For an elaboration of the idea of a “key concept” and of Sattelzeit see “Translator’s Introduction” in R. Koselleck, Future’s Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, K. Tribe, transl., (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), xi. 6 R. Koselleck, “Social and Conceptual History,” Politics, Culture, and Society, 2, 3 (Spring 1989), 308. 7 It is important to underscore that similar projects of thinking about social / society in the context of newness and crisis emanating from the encounter with the British were underway in other parts of India at different times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For interesting differences and overlaps between the Bengal case and that of

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8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

the North Indian Muslim elite in the context of the 1857 mutiny (which for the latter constituted a moment of rupture) see C. M. Naim, “Individualism with Conformity: A Brief History of Wazdari in Delhi and Lucknow,” Indian Economic and Social History Review (forthcoming). See M. Richter and M. Richter, “Introduction: Translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘Krise’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, 2 (2006), 349. These types of societies and associations remained in vogue throughout the colonial period. They were to be found not just in Bengal but also in other parts of India. To name a few examples from the post-1858 period, that is after India came under crown rule, there was the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science established by Mahendra Lal Sircar in 1876. In North India there was the Benares Debating Club founded in 1861, the Aligarh Scientific Society founded in 1864 by the Muslim leader Syed Ahmed Khan, and the Bihar Scientific Society started in 1868. In the Madras presidency one can point to the Society for Social Reform started in 1878, supporting such endeavors as widow remarriage. Religious reform societies included the Prarthana Samaj (Prayer Society) founded in Bombay in 1867 and the Arya Samaj of 1875. A. Sen, Social and Religious Reform: The Hindus of British India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 14. B. N. Ganguli, Indian Economic Thought: Nineteenth Century Perspectives (New Delhi: Tata MacGraw-Hill Publishing Co. 1977), 49. Ibid. Ibid., 88−89. Ibid., 47. See B. N. Ganguli Concept of Equality: The Nineteenth Century Indian Debate (Simla: Institute of Advanced Study, 1975), 5. For Roy’s contributions in the development of “constitutional liberalism” in India see C. A. Bayly, “Rammohun Roy and the Advent of Liberal Constitutionalism in India, 1800−1830,” Modern Intellectual History 4, 1 (2007): 25−41. K. M. Baker, “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History” in S. Kaviraj and S. Khilnani, eds., Civil Society: Histories and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 104. For an analysis of German economic thought, particularly List’s impact on economic nationalism in India, see M. Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Basu provided a total of five definitions of samaj. The first four were as follows: A samaj is a “community of those other than animals.” Presumably Basu here meant only humans and did not include the plant or marine kingdom within the scope of samaj. He added in parenthesis that such a community was immortal (amar). The second meaning of the term was listed as a gathering (sabha), while the third expanded it to a limited group with a set of common interests (samuha, dal, gana). The fourth meaning of samaj was a place where Vaishnavas are laid to rest (Vaishnava samadhi). Nagendranath Basu, Viswakosa, vol. 21 (New Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1988), 238−239. Viswakosa was first published in 1887. Basu took over as editor from the second volume onward. Between 1916 and 1932 he also undertook to publish the Hindi edition of the encyclopedia, making it the first such work in Hindi. Ibid. Ibid., 453. To give the reader a sense of the enormous scope of the project, let me just cite a few titles of the series. During his lifetime, Basu could only get to writing a history of Brahmans and Kayasthas, the two principal upper castes in Bengal. He devoted a book to each of the subgroups of these castes. His goal was to write similar histories of all castes in Bengal. Needless to say, this ambition remained unfulfilled. Basu did not get to completing even

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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the history of Brahmans in all regions of Bengal. The Brahman jati was covered in two volumes BJI: The Brahman Episode—First Part—First Episode published in 1917 and BJI: A Description of the Brahmans of Barendra published in 1927. The Kayasthas had four titles devoted to their history, BJI: The Monarchical Episode—First Part of the Kayastha Story published in 1914; BJI : A Description of the Kayasthas of Barendra, Part Two of the Kayastha Episode published in 1927; BJI: The Kayasthas of the northern Rarh region, Part Three of the Kayastha Episode published in 1928; and BJI: The Kayasthas of southern Rarh published in 1933. For details on the historical controversy surrounding these texts and an analysis of the Kula literature, see K. Chatterjee, “The King of Controversy: History and Nation Making in Late Colonial India,” The American Historical Review, 110, 5 (Dec 2005): 1454−1475; and “Kings, Communities and Chronicles: The Kulagranthas of Bengal,” Studies in History 21, 2 (new series) (2005): 173−213. Chatterjee, “Kings, Communities and Chronicles,” 176. Ibid. Ibid. 177−178. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, “Samya” in J. C. Bagal, ed., Bankim Racanavali, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1969), 381−406. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, “Sahitya Prasanga,” in ibid., 23. Bankimchandra, “Samya,” 395. Ibid., 399. Bankimchandra cited in R. Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 51. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53. For a critical discussion of this aspect of Bhudev Mukhopdhyay’s writings see S. Kaviraj, “The Reversal of Orientalism: Bhudev Mukhopadhyay and the Project of Indigenist Social Theory,” in V. Dalmia and H. von Stietencron, eds., Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995). Tapan Raychaudhuri also has a detailed discussion of Bhudev’s works in his Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). Bhudev’s essays on the family (“paribarik prabandha,” 1882) have been the subject of academic discussions in recent years. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Samajik Prabandha, ed. J. K. Chakrabarty (Calcutta: Paschim Banga Rajya Pustak Parishad, 1981), 8−10. Ibid., 5. For a detailed discussion on Bhudev’s method and the reception of his work see Jahnabi Kumar Chakrabarty’s “Alochona” (“discussion”) in Samajik Prabandha, vii−cix. Mukhopadhyay, Samajik Prabandha, 47−52. Ibid. Ibid., 6−25. This expression is Kaviraj’s; see “The Reversal of Orientalism,” 269. For Bhudev’s discussion on equality see “Samya” in Samajik Prabandha, 83−89. Ibid. Kaviraj, “The Reversal of Orientalism,” 254. Ganguli, Indian Economic Thought, 99. Rabindranath Tagore, “Swadeshi Samaj Prabandha Paath” in Rabindraracanavali, vol. 12 (Calcutta: Vishwabharati, 1961), 768. Ibid., 771. This discussion draws on Partha Chatterjee’s analysis of some of Tagore’s ideas from an essay in Sadhana. See Chatterjee, “Post-Colonial Civil and Political Society,” 167. Cited in ibid.

188 Rochona Majumdar 49 The epigraph of the essay stated that it was “written after the publication of the government’s policies to cope with Bengal’s water crisis was announced.” Rabindranath Tagore, “Swadeshi Samaj” in Rabindraracanavali, vol. 12, 683. 50 Ibid., 688−689. 51 Ibid., 686. 52 Rabindranath Tagore, “Swadeshi Samajera Marmakatha” in Rabindraracanavali, vol. 12, 768. 53 With his signature poetic flourish, Tagore noted that over the long history of Indian civilization, society provided for education, it quenched the longing of the thirsty, gave food to the famished, temples to the devotee, punishment to the wrongdoer, and respect to the deserving. In every village it secured national character and established the country’s beneficence. See ibid., 767. 54 Rabindranath Tagore, “Swadeshi Samaj Prabandhera Parisista” in Rabindraracanavali, vol. 12, 703. 55 Rabindranath Tagore, “Bharatborshiyo Samaj” in Rabindraracanavali, vol. 12, 682. 56 Ibid., 680−681. 57 Rabindranath Tagore, “Swadeshi Samaj,” 700. 58 Ibid., 689. 59 Ibid., 694. 60 Ibid., 697. 61 Rabindranath Tagore, “Bhumika” (foreword) in Pramatha Chaudhuri, Ryoter Katha (Calcutta: Vishwabharati Granthalaya, 1947), 15. The foreword and Chaudhuri’s response to it were first published in the journal Sabujpatra in July 1926.

8

Three poets in search of history Calcutta, 1752–1859 Rosinka Chaudhuri

What will become now of art, now that the gods and even their absence are gone, and now that man’s presence offers no support?1

The departure of the gods In a well-known essay, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” Reinhart Koselleck begins his discussion on the relation of past and future in modern history with a meditation on a celebrated painting, Albrecht Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht, commissioned in 1528. The painting depicts the cosmic panorama of the battle of Issus, in 333 BC, in which Alexander defeated the Persians to inaugurate the epoch of Hellenism in European history. In this image, Koselleck says, Altdorfer delineates a history, “in the way that Historie at that time could mean both image and narrative (Geschichte).”2 Here, thousands of warriors make up armies of horse and foot soldiers, with Alexander at the head of the victorious line pressing in upon the confused and scattered Persians. In the painting, the exact number of combatants, dead and taken prisoner, are inscribed upon banners above the armies, and the dead remain on the canvas among the living, “perhaps even bearing the banner under which they are about to fall, mortally wounded.” Koselleck maintains that “Altdorfer made conscious use of anachronism so that he could faithfully represent the course of the completed battle.” He also points out another element of anachronism that is perhaps more apparent to us than to the original viewers. The Greeks in the painting resemble the knights of Maximilian, while the Persians are dressed from head to toe like the Turks who, in the same year the picture was painted, 1529, unsuccessfully laid siege to Vienna. In other words, for Altdorfer, the event depicted was both historical and contemporary, and the battle of Issus is shown as a current event, the present and the past enclosed within a common historical plane. By specifying the number of columns in the army, but not the year of the battle, the artist rendered it at once both contemporary and timeless. Two seminal theorists of the generation succeeding Koselleck would no doubt have taken exception to the Eurocentrism inherent in this narrative of the painting, particularly as viewed from a post-colonial perspective. Edward Said called special attention to the depictions of Persians in the project of Orientalism, arguing that in Aeschylus’s The Persians and Eurpides’s The Bacchae, Asia is given the “feelings

190 Rosinka Chaudhuri of loss and disaster that seem thereafter to reward Oriental challenges to the West.” “The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays,” Said says, “will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between the two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant. Aeschylus represents Asia, makes her speak in the person of the aged Persian queen, Xerxes’s mother. It is Europe that articulates the Orient.” The second aspect, according to Said, lies “in the motif of the Orient as insinuating danger.”3 Both aspects inhere in the painting by Altdorfer, in which, on the one hand, the Persian challenge to Alexander, like the Turkish threat to Vienna, clearly insinuated danger; on the other hand, Altdorfer represents Asia as defeated and subdued: Darius flees on his chariot, pursued by Alexander. Five years after the publication of Orientalism, Benedict Anderson, in thinking about the imagined communities of nations in modernity emphasized the changing apprehension of time that makes it possible to “think” the nation. Among the examples he provided of the earlier mode of apprehending time were paintings by early Italian or Flemish masters, showing the shepherds by the manger of Christ with the features of Burgundian peasants or the Virgin Mary figuring as a Tuscan merchant’s daughter. In some paintings, the commissioning patron appears in the full costume of nobility, kneeling alongside the shepherds. For medieval worshippers, just as for Altdorfer, the scene appears wholly natural. As Anderson writes, “the medieval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present.”4 If we were to transpose the task of representation in these paintings to the realm of eighteenth-century poetry written in Bengal, then the lack of radical separation between past and present in the historical time depicted in the paintings would be felt, in certain poetic narratives, in the coexistence of gods and men at a conjuncture in actual historical time, that of the eighteenth-century Maratha invasions in Bengal. Let us briefly consider two instances of such poetry: the Maharashta Purana and the Annadamangal, written within a few months of each other in 1752. The Maharashta Purana is an eighteenth-century Bengali manuscript first discovered in 1904 in the town of Mymensingh in erstwhile British India. A long narrative poem of 716 lines, it tells the early part of the story of the Maratha raids in Bengal, from the time when the Marathas first struck in 1742 under their leader Bhaskar Pant Kolhatkar. The manuscript gives the name of the poet as Gangaram, and the date of its composition as AD 1751–2. Notably, 1752 is also the year that a much more famous poet, Bharatchandra Ray, composed his masterpiece—the trilogy comprising Annadamangal (“Eulogy of the Food-giving Goddess”), Vidyasundar (“Knowledge and Beauty”) and Mansingha (which was the name of the Mughal general who fought Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore, Bengal). Both poets look upon the Maratha incursions as a divine punishment for human sins. Bharatchandra writes that the Maratha raids were brought about by the misconduct of Alivardi’s army at Bhubaneswar, a holy place of pilgrimage associated with the gods Siva and Durga: After the desecration of the holy place by the Nawab Alivardi’s troops, Siva’s attendant Nandi became violently angry, and was about to destroy the universe.

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He was prevented from doing so by Siva, who directed him to appear in a dream to the Maratha king Sahu at Satara, who would then set forth to punish the Nawab. Thus, the desecration of Bhubaneswar by the sinful Alivardi brought on the Maratha invasion, and life in Bengal and Bihar became like hell. Why should innocent people suffer because of the sins of Alivardi’s troops?5 Bharatchandra offers his own reply: “When the city burns, does the temple escape?” Gangaram, on the other hand, has a different interpretation for the depredations, saying: The people of the earth were filled with sin, and there was no worship of Radha and Krishna. Day and night the people took their pleasure with the wives of others. No one knew what might happen at any time. Day and night was spent in amorous sport, and in abusing others and doing injury to them. There was no thought of anything else. So great was the burden of this sin upon the Earth that Earth was unable to bear it. So Earth went to Brahma [who asked Shiva to] strike down these evil people, and rid Earth of her burden. [Shiva said] I shall send an agent and strike down the sinful people [sending Nandi then to enter the body of the Maratha king Shahuraja].6 The historical occurrence of time is dealt with in these texts explicitly and implicitly, standing as testimony in answering the problem of how, in a concrete situation, experiences come to terms with the past and are articulated into language. In asking the question about historical time, the two eighteenth-century poets do not understand the particular time of the writing of the narrative as a new temporality, as “modernity” as experienced as a succession of historical generations or as the finitude of personal life. In this connection, Partha Chatterjee has noted that there is no “historical narrative embedded within the most well-known literary work in Bengali of the early eighteenth century—the Annadamangal of Bharatchandra Ray.”7 Technically, the statement is not quite correct, as there is historical narrative in those passages that deal with real historical events, such as the battle between the Mughal general Man Singh and the rebel zamindar Pratapaditya of Jessore. What is missing is historicism, since the actual historical events recounted in the texts do not adhere to an understanding of history; the collective concept of history as a distinct ordering of narrative has not yet emerged. That the historical conception of time, in which past and future time are relocated with respect to one another, is not yet fully operative in these texts can be proved or disproved in a variety of ways. Do such texts allow themselves to be read as histories? Are the notions of historical time present in such texts open to historiographical interpretation at any level? A number of Indian historians have been preoccupied with notions of historiography in recent years. Thus we have Chatterjee’s investigation into the early modern and the colonial modern in vernacular history-writing in extension of the Rao-Shulman-Subrahmanyam thesis on early modern history-writing in India.8 Likewise we have C. A. Bayly’s earlier enquiry into the practices of Indo-Muslim

192 Rosinka Chaudhuri history-writing in the eighteenth century, within what he calls “an Indian ecumene,” characterized by a discrete information order and an indigenous public sphere.9 These approaches focus exclusively on the presence of historicality in texts that may be construed as histories in this period, irrespective of the genre to which they might formally belong. However, in those texts that continue to be read as literature rather than history, historicality may be excavated from many other perspectives, such as in the location of realism or the role of the mimetic in specific passages in the very same texts that are dismissed as “not history” because of the co-presence of various times within the body of the work. Bharatchandra and Gangaram, like Altdorfer, display a “conscious use of anachronism” in their epic scenes, but, crucially, this does not seem to have been done so that they, as Koselleck surmises Altdorfer did, “could faithfully represent the course of the completed battle” that actually took place in 333 BC, an assumption that is itself based on an unconscious faith in the intent of the medieval German artist. Gangaram’s depiction of events, by contrast, has no interest in promoting a particular understanding of the “real,” pointing to the fact that the exclusions of history as a discipline are ultimately epistemic. In this, Gangaram or Bharatchandra are not so very different from the participants of the Santal rebellion of 1855, who counted, among the actors in the theater of the revolt, the presence of supernatural beings. The Santals, a tribal group in Bengal and Bihar, explained their rebellion against the British, Ranajit Guha has shown, in terms of it being an act carried out at the behest of the Santal god Thakur, who had assured them that British bullets would not harm the believers as rebels.10 Thus, after their defeat, the leaders of the Santals told their British interrogators that it was not they who fought but the god Thakur himself; they rebelled because Thakur made an appearance and told them to rebel. At one level, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown, this throws light on notions of agency, of the subaltern himself refusing agency or subjecthood.11 But at another, what is spectacular in this rendition is the coexistence of gods and men—if Altdorfer had had to paint the scene, perhaps, just as he painted the dead men alongside the living at the battle of Issus, he might have also painted the Santal god Thakur, fighting beside the Santal tribesmen as they are about to fall to British bullets. Altdorfer’s confusion of the real and the supernatural in his epic painting had its equivalent in the field of theology in an event that has been identified as seminal for the repercussions it had upon the European mind. In 1529, the same year as the Battle of Issus was painted and hung up by the Duke of Bavaria in his newly built summer house, not far away in the ducal castle of Marburg, a dispute had erupted between Martin Luther and the humanist Huldrych Zwingli. The subject of the dispute was the nature of the Eucharist: were the bread and wine administered by the priest really the body and blood of Christ, as Luther (still a man of the Middle Ages in this respect) insisted, or were they, as Zwingli said, merely symbolic? Erich Heller points to this as the moment when the particular problems of modern poetry began. This may need some explanation. Heller was well aware that a theological controversy should not be conflated with an exercise in aesthetic theory, but he nevertheless suggested “that at the end of a period that we rather vaguely call the Middle Ages there occurred a radical change in man’s idea of reality, in that

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complex fabric of unconsciously held convictions about what is real and what is not.”12 After the Marburg disputations, there would be no going back for European man. The “disenchantment of the world” (the phrase is Schiller’s) had been set in motion. While the medieval world would continue to coexist with the modern—as at this moment Luther’s views coexisted with Zwingli’s—modernity could henceforth only move forward in time. To illustrate the onset of historical time, Koselleck, in the essay mentioned above, brings us to the moment when Friedrich Schlegel came across Altdorfer’s painting almost 300 years later. Schlegel was seized by complete “astonishment” upon “sighting this marvel,” calling it “the greatest feat of the age of chivalry.” He called it the Illiad of painting, thus giving rise to its popular characterization as: “An Epic Poem in Paint.”13 More time appears to have passed, Koselleck says, in the 300 years between “our two witnesses, Altdorfer and Schlegel” than in “the eighteen hundred years or so” between Altdorfer and the actual battle of Issus. What has happened, he asks, in the period from 1500 to 1800 in Europe to create this velocity and compression? “What new quality had historical time gained?” Koselleck’s thesis is that in these centuries in Europe there occurs “a temporalization (Verzeitlichung) of history, at the end of which there is a peculiar form of acceleration which characterises modernity.”14 Added to this, Christopher Coker has pointed out that apart from the awareness that in modernity more history is made and made differently than in the past—the temporalization of history—what Schlegel also realized from Altdorfer’s painting was “that the driving force of modernity was conflict, and that its prevailing idiom was war.”15 Coker claims that: “It was entirely fitting that Napoleon carried off Altdorfer’s painting to Paris in 1800 and hung it up in his personal chambers at St Cloud, for it was Napoleon whom G. F. W. Hegel saw riding past on the battlefield of Jena a few years later, the World Spirit on horseback, the embodiment of modernity or the modern age.”16 If the birth of the modern in Europe is to be dated, as it conventionally is, to 1789, or to the 15 years (1815–30) that followed Napoleon’s final defeat, then concomitant with this periodization is the perception that modernity is a problematic, if not crisis-ridden condition.17 The situation in Bengal in the late eighteenth century was associated with just such an understanding of the present as a time of crisis. In 1784, Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, a munshi in the employ of the East India Company (and like Bharatchandra also a native of Nadia), completed his Persian work, the Shigurf Nama-e-Vilayet. He wrote it upon his return from England, where, he said: “Fate took me some years back,” penning his memoirs only because “the unrest and anarchy all around makes me anxious, distressed and often so upset as to deprive me of reason.”18 Alongside and apart from the notion of crisis or conflict, then, which Coker maintains is the driving force of modernity, what characterizes modernity and history in a literary text is indubitably the historicist perspective of time that was so characteristically a part of European Enlightenment rationality from the seventeenth century onward. While the historian’s text in the public sphere today cannot incorporate a representation that allows the divine or supernatural a direct hand in the affairs of the world, the early modern poet’s or the artist’s text, as we have seen, is able to

194 Rosinka Chaudhuri represent supernatural agency in historical events quite “naturally.” Unlike the modern historian, in writing about the Maratha invasions Bharatchandra and Gangaram do not have to subject the eighteenth-century invasions to a treatment of historicism, but are able to collapse mythical time and historical time, time past and time present into the contemporary, just as Altdorfer did when he painted the Persians in Turkish costume, thereby dissolving the subject-object relationship that normally relates the historian to his material. The most striking metaphorical difference in the context of the two poems lies in the presence and activity of the gods. Partha Chatterjee mentions the gods but is blind to them, summarizing Bharatchandra’s poem, which at one point describes the power of the goddess Annapurna when she lays waste the city of Delhi to prove her miraculous powers to the emperor Jahangir. Here, as in the Maharashta-Puran, real historical characters coexist with the demons and ghosts let loose by Annapurna upon Delhi, and the emperor Jahangir is subdued by this display of godly wrath. The existence of historical time—the hallmark of modernity and history—is coterminous here with the time of eternity, inhering un-problematically side-by-side in the domain of poetry. The experience of history, in these poems, is not covered by what is usually referred to as historical consciousness; that specific activity of historicizing would make its presence felt in poetry in Calcutta, as I will attempt to show, only a century later. The progressive, teleological and historicist conception of time, allied to realism and mimeticism in the literary text—or to perspective in works of art—will commence in Bengal approximately a century later, between 1825 and 1859, in the first modern poets of British India, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Ishwar Gupta, who wrote in English and Bengali respectively. Its entry is concomitant with the departure of the gods from the narrative of historical events.

The ruins of history Two different notions of historicality coexist in the early part of the nineteenth century in Calcutta in literary texts that belong to two different practices of literature. One of these, in tune with the European understanding of poetry, lies in the Romantic understanding of time and history as these are played out in memory— specifically the memory of historical ruins—as I shall try to show through the examination of a single poem by Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–31). The other, which comes from the indigenous inheritance of local traditions, exists as historicity embedded in a poetry of the everyday in the Bengali poetry of Ishwar Gupta (1811–59), born within a couple of years of Derozio, but outliving him by almost three decades. In Gupta’s unique poetry, an understanding of history exists in the contemporary rather than in the past, leading to a reading of history in the materiality of things as they exist transiently in the corporeal world rather than in a narration of past events. In between these two poets lies another, a singular and strange figure who constitutes a sort of bridge between the two both in terms of history and proclivity, a poet of Portuguese descent popularly called Antony Firingi (d. 1836). This obscure character charts an anomalous correspondence between

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modernity and history in the diverse time of the coming into being of the Indian modern, with his life story complicating the linear development of historical time. He serves as a salutary reminder of the multidimensional provenance of the modernity that was taking shape in Calcutta in this period. In 1825, at about the age of 16, Derozio, whose mother was English and grandfather was variously described as “Native Protestant” and “Portuguese Merchant,” took up work at an English relative’s indigo plantation at Tarapur, near Bhagalpur in Bihar.19 It was here that he composed most of the poems that were to be published from Calcutta in 1827. If modernity is simply the knowledge that the present is discontinuous with the past, that it is now possible to look back on the past from one’s self-conscious habitation in the unique present, then one of the most interesting manifestations of this in Derozio’s work may be found in his poem “The Ruins of Rajmahal.” Here, memory and history flow together in a confluence construed by a self-conscious inhabitation of the present moment. The poem describes a dilapidated mosque in the gathering dusk, where: No serf has lighted yon kiosk, There’s no Muezzin in the Mosque, No vesper hymn, no morning prayer Shall be put up, or answered there; The sacred hall, the holy sod By unbelievers’ feet are trod, And ruthless hands have reft The marble that might mock decay!20 Here we have a site of memory that might serve as an instance of those “remains” that Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire, where memory crystallizes and secretes itself; this turning point, where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn, can occur only at a particular historical moment of self-consciousness, where history is perceived to be accelerating into the future, indicating a rupture of equilibrium.21 The ruins at Rajmahal pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites that enclose a memory that is besieged by history; where there is no spontaneous memory, these ruins would be made to constitute a bastion that, without the nostalgic reveries of the poet, would be swept away by history. “We buttress our identities upon such bastions,” Nora says, which are constituted of “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned.”22 Such a site is defended, by certain minorities, as “a privileged memory … that without commemorative vigilance” would be lost, and is turned then into a conventional memorial, monument, sanctuary, or museum. Ordinarily such sites of history are like boundary stones of another age, which may be lamented for the illusions of eternity they peddle, but here, oddly, the memory of the history these ruins evoke is something the poet would rather forget. The poem continues by describing how once many a faithful Muslim “chanted his creed” and many a “sage enthusiast” had worshipped here. “But,” the poet exclaims, “that day is past!” The place is in ruins. Just when the reader could be

196 Rosinka Chaudhuri forgiven for mistaking this litany for grief, however, Derozio evokes the sad condition of the ruins around him to say, surprisingly: I would not have the day return That saw these wrecks in all their pride— As he who weeps o’er Beauty’s urn Feels what he felt not by her side, A gloom that gives to sorrow zest! A pang that’s welcome to the breast!23 The feelings inspired by the sight of these Muslim ruins, therefore, are ambivalent. Melancholy at the present condition of once-magnificent architecture, reminiscent of the dislocation experienced by Shelley’s traveler confronting the inscription at Ozymandias, exists alongside an awareness that the ruin has a more powerful poetic existence than the original. Even if it amounts to a reworking of familiar Romantic themes of absence, deferral, and the creative fictions engendered by the imagination (as found in Wordsworth’s “Yarrow Unvisited” or Keats’s “Ode to A Grecian Urn”), Derozio’s poem is nonetheless remarkable for its unexpected assertion: “I would not have the day return.” The remark is especially odd coming as it does from one who has, in other poems, habitually mourned (and desired the resurrection of) the lost glories of ancient India. The site of memory made up of the ruins of Rajmahal is created by a play of memory and history that results in their representational overdetermination. However, the will to remember is here subverted, and the fundamental purpose of the object of memory, for the poet, is not the intention to remember—that is, to stop time—but the intention to forget. It is not clear that these ruins even deserve remembrance. “Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events,” Nora has commented, but the events of history conjured up by the site of memory here is one the poet would not valorize.24 The poem then reflects on the fact that the builder of these monuments—named in a note by Derozio as Shoojah Shah—could not have imagined such a “hapless fate” for them, nor imagined that they would one day be the subject of the poet’s theme. The lines that follow are, again, ambiguous and unresolved in their construction: Why should it not? My native land Is that which he did once command— And though her sons to fame are dead, Her spirit is not wholly fled …25 Is he positioning himself here in opposition to Shoojah, the Muslim ruler of Rajmahal, whose forces once “commanded” his “native land,” a land whose sons are not yet entirely destitute of patriotic feeling? Or is he saying that, although Shoojah might not have imagined it, this land that he once commanded still has enough “spirit” remaining to at least raise an elegy to these once-magnificent ruins? The very compression in the stanza works to elide a clear link between the question

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and the answer. Further, when set in the context of Derozio’s other works— especially the complex resonance of the word “command” in Derozio’s poetry— it becomes difficult to decide. For instance, in Derozio the “native land” is typically characterized somewhat vaguely by its “glory,” even though it is presently “in shackles,” imprisoned, or (in effect) commanded. Is the poet saying, then, that however amazing the Muslim achievements, they remain on the wrong side of history? On the one hand, the poet is emphatic that even though the ruins are tragic he would not want to, perhaps due to the compulsions of both poetic vocation and of history, see the monument in all its glory. On the other hand, we have the consciousness of the poet as he stands before this historical ruin in the early nineteenth century, speculating not only on the past and the future but on the present moment, which, after all, is the ultimate receptacle of history: To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered.26 Derozio goes on, in “Ruins of Rajmahal,” to suggest that while his country’s rivers glisten and its mountains stand tall, they shall always bring back the memory of the “glory that has long gone by.” As long as the fields flourish, “some trace shall be of what has been.” Here he repeats sentiments more famously captured in his sonnet, “My country! in thy days of glory past”: “My country! in thy day of glory past / A beauteous halo circled round thy brow …”27 It is possible for Derozio to look back on the past as “medieval,” to inhabit a space of modernity and to be conscious of so doing. In his repeated invocation of the lost glories of the country we recognize the triad of antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity, which has been available since the advent of humanism and the Enlightenment. Derozio himself became enamored of this modern historical scheme by reading the likes of David Hume and Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, Robert Burns and Romantic English literature. Finally, at the end of “Ruins of Rajmahal,” the poet bids adieu to the “haggard” wrecks before him—“Farewell! How fallen is your crest! / How sunk your pride!” This sentiment is then immediately followed by a matter-of-fact declaration, “but let that rest.” He is not unmoved, he professes; but he must bid farewell. When published in The India Gazette, beneath the poem we are given the date of composition, January 1826, and the nom de plume, “East Indian.” This strange poem, made all the more ambiguous by a thinly concealed conflict between its literary and political registers, is distinctive as one of the earliest literary expressions from an Indian author of a vision of the Indian nation as a historical entity. “The Ruins of Rajmahal” constructs a nationalist paradigm seemingly shaped by the early Orientalist preoccupation with India’s ancient (Hindu) heritage. Derozio, however, does not identify the nation in this poem as Hindu, preferring

198 Rosinka Chaudhuri rather to simply designate it (like Byron or Burns) as “my native land.”28 Nevertheless, like his contemporaries and predecessors such as Rammohan Roy and William Jones, Derozio’s involvement with the history of India was underpinned by a notion of Indianness. He, too, was a fundamental contributor to a historicist, teleological, and powerful vision of the “Hindu.” Following the Enlightenment propensity to create an “other” in the objectification of foreign cultures and peoples, a pervasive strain of nationalism in India created a Hindu identity premised upon the Muslim as “other.” Romantic conceptions of time and history, of the relation of the present to the past, permeate the poem, which speaks—through the figure of the ruins—of relations that are constantly being made and unmade, contested and reconfigured. Such ruins produce among witnesses such as the young poet a conviction of historical difference. The powerful aura of Romantic poetry that permeates this poem enacts a form of memory specific to the disinherited condition of Derozio (sourced equally in his hybrid colonial status and in his particular relation to the crisis of contemporary change all around him) and the transformative Indian modern coming radically into being around him in Calcutta at this time.

The heterogeneous time of history At the same time that Derozio was publishing his first book of verse in Calcutta in 1827, in a world inhabited by commercial establishments, clubs, offices, periodicals, newspapers, theater-going and literary endeavor, there existed in Bengal a Portuguese poet, Antony Firingi, whose life would have been approximately coterminous with Derozio’s own.29 Without slipping into a simplistic teleology, it is possible to emphasize the break Derozio represents from an earlier age by contrasting him with Antony.30 The son of a wealthy Portuguese merchant, Antony made a career for himself as an eighteenth-century poet and composer in Bengali, a kabial or a performing singer-songwriter. These were performers whose profession was spawned by the urban chaos of cosmopolitan Calcutta in the early nineteenth century, competing with each other in the houses of the nouveau-riche for prize money. Antony’s songs could be described as devotional lyrics with a secular message, capturing the humanist-universal-folk of the Bengali syncretistic tradition in lines that were uncannily reminiscent of the songs of Bauls such as Lalan Fakir or of the aphorisms of Ramkrishna. In one such song, Antony sang: “There is no difference between Christ and Krishna / That men should follow only a name—I have never heard of such a thing / My Khoda is the same as the Hindu’s Hari / Look there, see Hari is standing.” The short song ends with an exhortation to Durga: “Pity me mother, spare me a glance o mother Matangi / I do not know how to worship you / by race I am a firingee.”31 Shaped at the confluence of Western and Indian modes, without any signs of the disciplining mechanisms of colonial institutions, Firingi’s life clearly throws up complicated questions about the nature of Indian modernity. His career is representative of a space that questioned previously held beliefs and practices, embodying the sweeping reach of the new as it shook up the old order. It is a period that Partha

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Chatterjee has called the age of transition, a time that is “not teleologically predetermined by the ascendancy of the colonial modern.”32 Performing his devotional songs to “ma Kali” or Durga in secular performative spaces, Antony participated in a new, vulgarized vernacular public culture that would later be frowned upon by the students of Derozio. Discomfort with the world of Antony’s poetry can also be read from Rangalal Bandyopadhyay’s manifesto for a modern Bengali poetry, in which he spoke directly against the kabial tradition in an attempt to distinguish a high culture from the “low” indigenous traditions—an attempt that was bound, inevitably, for failure.33 While the romantic figure of Antony Firingi, it has to be conceded, is a twentiethcentury Bengali fabrication (propagated by a popular eponymous 1967 black and white film and its songs), the intention here is to examine his life as a contrast to that of Derozio.34 In the case of Antony, we have almost an inverse career path, featuring movement away from bourgeois Western respectability—wonderfully captured in the film by Antony’s cravat and tight trousers, carriage and furniture, language and mercantile activity—toward an increasingly “indigenous” or Indian identity, revealed by his gradual abandonment of the accoutrements of Western life for the village, the dhoti-kurta, the worship of the mother-goddess Durga and absorption in Sanskrit hymns and the Bengali kabi tradition. Quite remarkably, in this moment of modernity in which several times compete and coexist, Antony occupies an ambiguous space containing both the traditional and what we might call the new urban folk. This space subsequently became representative of the past, while on the other hand Derozio, as we have seen, was seen to signify the future direction in the complex inauguration of the Indian modern. Rajnarain Basu’s Se Kal Ar E Kal (“Then and Now,” 1874) contains exactly such a demarcation, with a section on Antony as part of the earlier amorphous culture. Basu locates Antony in the vanishing ruins of the latter’s mansion at Gariti and provides snatches of fastdisappearing songs. This portrait is followed by a discussion of Derozio standing at the helm of the new and the progressive.35 However powerful this construction of Antony as belonging to the past and Derozio as representative of the future might be, that binary is one that does not retain its validity in the face of the complex shape of the modern as it was coming into being at this time. So, while the two are a study in contrast, that contrast is based on a false dichotomy constructed in later Bengali discourse; this was a modernity that, in its totality, was comprised as much of one as of the other, the two coming together to formulate an identity that was arguably premised on both in equal measure. The space of the newly emerging modern in Calcutta around the time of Derozio’s and Antony’s death (c.mid-1830s) was a peculiarly amoral urban space (wonderfully delineated in the genre of the Kalighat painting, or pat), a space of bazaars and by-lanes and the prose of figures such as Bhavanicharan Bandyopadhyay (1787–1848).36 This was a new but already disappearing world, shot through with contradictions so acute that one Bengali literary historian has identified it as a distinct period (from roughly the death of Bharatchandra Ray in 1760 to the demise of Ishwar Gupta in 1859) that put up a sustained resistance to the “fierce flood of modernity.” Here:

200 Rosinka Chaudhuri On the one hand there was pride in holding down a salaried job, and on the other, Mill, Bentham, Spencer; on the one hand, Dashu Ray’s Panchali, and on the other, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron; on the one hand, the rath at Mahesh and the amusements organised in garden houses [bagan-bari], and on the other, prayer meetings at the Brahmo-mandir—all in all it seemed like a very strange joke.37 These were modern spaces, characterized by paradox and contradiction, which worked to displace the intensely devotional songs of Ramprasad Sen, Bharatchandra’s amoral Annadamangal, and Gangaram’s lesser-known Maharashta puran. Characterized by a short-lived convergence of the old and the new within such performative spheres as the Bengali tappa of Ramnidhi Gupta, this was a time described in detail just a few decades later by Kaliprasanna Singha, who captured the sense of turmoil in his inimitable style: Reader! The nawabi era set like the sun in winter. Like the light appearing from behind the clouds, the might of the English began to grow greater. The tallest bamboos were uprooted from the root. From their pith, new bamboo dynasties began to take birth, nouveau-munshi [Nabamunshi], mistermerchant [chhire bene], and small-fry oil-seller [punte teli] became kings. Sepoy guards, thick staffs and titled rajas began to go rolling down the roads, garbage dumps, and wastelands like India rubber shoes and Santipuri striped scarves. … Half-akhrai, full-akhrai, panchalis and jatra groups started up. The youth of the city were divided up in groups given to drug addiction and inexcusable follies. Money flooded out the pride of ancestry. ... The most important unemployed babus of Shyambazaar, Rambazaar, Chak and Shanko became the gang leaders of individual half-akhrai groups.38 The groups mentioned here all belong to the realm of the performative arts, of singers (kabial) in competition with one another, of local theater and recitation groups. Rambazaar and Shyambazaar are identifiable localities in Calcutta to this day, and Chak and Shanko here apparently refer to Bagbazaar (or Shobhabazaar) and Jorashanko, where the famous half-akhrai groups were based. It was to Jorashanko that Ishwarchandra Gupta first came as a child, while it was in Bagbazaar that he composed songs for his own half-akhrai group. Born in 1811, Ishwarchandra moved to Calcutta after his father died. Standard biographies take care to mention that he was never formally educated, emphasizing instead his natural abilities in versification and song-writing, his keen memory, and sharp intellect. His friendship with the influential Tagore family of Pathuriaghata, especially Jogendramohan Tagore, helped him to establish the newspaper Sambad Prabhakar in 1831, when he was only 19. From this date until his death in 1859 at the age of 47, Ishwar Gupta flourished as the preeminent poet and editor of Calcutta. On the one hand, he published poetry regularly in the columns of his newspaper. On the other, he composed songs for the kabial group of Bagbazaar, while also collecting the songs and poems of the preceding era to create an unprecedented archive of literary

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gleanings, as well as commenting, in verse and prose, on most aspects of the new life of the Bengali people in the mid-nineteenth century. An appreciation of the achievements of Ishwar Gupta is something that has receded with time—the further Bengal traveled along the road of the secular high modern, the further away it went from any understanding of, or sympathy for, the works of Ishwar Gupta. Shibnath Shastri’s comment, that Ishwar Gupta never had an English education and was self-taught in Bengali, might have reflected a commonly held view, but it remains the case that this “uneducated” man had, in 1832, translated a portion of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason into Bengali.39 He published his translation in the Sambad Prabhakar and challenged the missionaries, especially Alexander Duff, to reply to its charges. That Ishwar Gupta did this in the interests of the conservative camp, who were agitated at the time by the spreading influence of Christian missionaries in the city, is yet another indication of the self-division inherent in the poet and editor, song-writer and teacher, journalist and anthologist—a self-division based on the conflicted loyalties and contradictory impulses that were so much an insignia of the age.

History in the present In a short postscript to the most recent edition of Ishwar Gupta’s poems available to a Bengali reading public, Ishwar Gupta: chabi o chora (“Ishwar Gupta: Pictures and Rhymes”), Aniruddha Lahiri tries to put his finger on the pulse of the matter: what constitutes Ishwar Gupta’s enduring appeal for modern Bengal?40 The question is posed in relation to the illustrations around which the book is produced—the chabi of the title—a series of woodcuts by the writer Kamalkumar Majumdar, who created these to accompany his selection of Ishwar Gupta’s poems, which are featured in the book. Chora, the word used for “poem,” is associated with children’s rhymes, but basically indicates alliterative word use and prosody, for these are hardly children’s poems, ranging as they do in subject matter from war and ethics to the seasons and satire. The historical force of these poems, Lahiri suggests, lies in the fact that: as time went on, the impress of Gupta-kavi’s importance shifted from the circle of tradition to that which is accidental, suddenly put together, and therefore historical. In the Historical Novel Lukács said that the inclination towards historicality became strong in all of Europe after the French revolution; even if not put as forcefully, could not a similar inclination have accelerated in British India’s centre of power, at the nerve centre of the flow of events, Calcutta? Even if unknown to himself, Ishwar Gupta gave a shape to that historicality— in that sense probably is he not India’s first modern poet? … From the point of view of this spurt in the awareness of history, his claim will not be either easy or wise to reject.41 Taking the argument further, one might suggest that the shape Ishwar Gupta gave to the historicality of events in Calcutta rested on the emphasis his poems give to

202 Rosinka Chaudhuri the materiality of things as they are. The very titles of some of the poems indicate the realm of the present that these poem inhabit, from “The English New Year” (Ingraji nababarsha), “Widow Remarriage Law” (Bidhaba bibaha ain), “Babu Chandicharan Singha’s Love for the Christian Religion” (Babu Chandicharan Singhar Khristadharmanurakti), and “Status” (Kaulinya) to “The Topse Fish with Eggs” (Endawala topshe mach) and “The Pineapple” (Anaras). Many of these poems made it into Kamalkumar Majumdar’s selection, which also included Gupta’s famous eulogy to “The Goat” (Pantha), his poem on “The Disguised Missionary” (Chadmabeshi missionary), and one on “Christmas Day” (Borodin). The element of historicality that Lahiri identifies in the poems resides, as he says, in “that which is accidental, suddenly put together, and therefore historical,” elements that together remind us of the post-humanist provenance of the bricoleur, who exults in the random, the makeshift, and the impermanent rather than investing in any permanent project of “History.” The denial of history in these poems partly lies in their rejection of narrative. In this they are completely unlike the historical narratives of valour from Rajasthan, for instance, which were to spawn a whole genre of patriotic tales in Bengali prose and verse from Rangalal Bandyopadhyay to Rabindranath Tagore. What the poems militate against, then, is not merely the Enlightenment aesthetic that is found in Derozio’s English poetry, but also, crucially, the sensibility of the Bengali modern that developed in the following years. The materialism, almost commercialism, in the subject matter of the poems points toward a different kind of modern, urban sensibility that captures a specific element of historicity in the evocation of concrete presence—“whatever is there” (jaha ache). The latter is a phrase used by Bankim to explain Ishwar Gupta’s genius, when he said that Ishwar Gupta’s talent lay in the evocation of the everyday. This everyday domain Bankim named as the domain of the present, of the real—“Whatever is there, Ishwar Gupta is its poet” (Jaha ache, Ishwar Gupta tahar kabi). This element of materiality in Ishwar Gupta’s poetry exists in the tangible image, which is factored in two ways: it is both visual and aural in nature. Very differently from the modernist emphasis on the image, encapsulated in Ezra Pound’s concentration on concreteness in language, the image in Ishwar Gupta is present, in a sense, without perspective, like the flat paintings of the traditional Bengali pat, brightly colored, overemphasized, larger than life rather than true to it. Thus, the subject matter of the Kalighat pat is almost exactly the subject matter of Ishwar Gupta’s poems—the cat with the fish in its mouth in one instance, and the tapse fish with eggs in another; the babu being beaten by a woman with a broom (jhadu) in one case, or the babu in the boot and hat, scooting off with some urgency in another (“Hoot” bole uthi “Boot” paye chuti / Kemon amar bhab).42 Sometimes the image in the poetry springs up with such immediacy that one can almost visualize a painting some Kalighat artist might have created. Thus, when the disguised missionary is described as “the corpulent tiger in the Hendo woods, the one with the red face” (Hendo bone kendo bagh rangamukh jar), “the missionary child-eater who eats up kids” (Missionary chheledhora chhele dhore khay), one can just see the big traditional striped tiger painted in black and yellow with a small figure of a boy babu in its mouth.43

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If the visual element of the language allows a graphic pictorial imagery to spring up in the reader’s mind, then the other dimension that is indispensable to the success of the best of Ishwar Gupta’s poetry is that of sound. Traditionally, alliteration, punning and a clever jugglery with words was the norm among the kabials as well as court poets such as Bharatchandra. What is remarkable about such usage in Ishwar Gupta is the astonishing onomatopoeia of correspondence created between sound and image in the poem, resulting in something that can only be called, uniquely, a “sound image.” In a satirical poem called “The English New Year” (Ingraji nababarsha), for instance, written to commemorate the arrival of the English year 1852, Gupta records in astonishing detail the sights and sounds of the celebrations in the city. Beginning with a reference to the Bengali lunar year that has lost all relevance with the coming of the Christian calendar, the poem describes the white man as joyous and indulgent, well-dressed in his well-decorated home. At his side, his wife looks “fresh” in a “polka-dotted dress” (manmode bibi shab hoilen fresh / Feather-er folorish phutikata dress).44 There follows a detailed description of her appearance. However, there is a sting in the tail of the poem, for after describing the slippers (shilipar) on her white feet and the scarf around her neck, the decorative comb in her hair, and the spray of flowers that descend to her cheek, he concludes with a now notorious line, “cat-eyed, moon-faced, she has bad breath” (biralakhhi bidhumukhi mukhe gandha chute).45 The following lines contain an early use of sound effect in the service of an image: Ribin urichhe kata phar phar kori dhol dhol tol tol banka bhaab dhori bibijaan chole jan lobejaan kore.46 (So many ribbons fly fluttering away Leaning, reclining, poised at an angle The beloved bibi goes her way, and one feels like dying.) This repeated use of words such as phar phar to capture the sound of the ribbon flying in the wind or the repeated use of dhol dhol tol tol to indicate the delicious ease of attitude in the posturing bibi, is impossible to translate effectively. Such repetition, as well as the use of such sounding words for description is, in a subsequent section of the poem, taken to its logical extreme. In a hugely subversive and mischievous section, the poet imagines himself to be a fly accompanying the husband and wife as they ride in their carriage on the way to church. Sometimes the fly sips from their glass of sherry, sometimes he sits on the lady’s gown or on her face, where he happily rubs his wings. There then follows a section describing the scene at the sahib’s table, which is laden with “amazing food” (aparup khana). The scene is evoked entirely and exclusively through sound: Verybest sherrytaste merryrest jate Age bhage den giya shrimatir hate Kot kot kotakot tok tok tok Thun thun thun thun dhok dhok dhok

204 Rosinka Chaudhuri Chupu chupu chup chup chop chop chop Shupu shupu shup shup shop shop shop Thokash thokash thok phosh phosh phosh Kosh kosh tosh tosh ghosh ghosh ghosh Hip hip hurre dake whole class Dear madam you take this glass. This does not need translating, except for the framing couplets, the first of which indicates that the very best sherry that makes the rest merry is given to the missus before anybody else. The final couplet is entirely in English except for the word “dake” which means “calls.” Clearly Ishwar Gupta is fascinated by the very sounds uttered by the English; he records their difference in scrupulous detail. The scene at the table is followed by a rendition of the sounds of English music and dance: Shukher shakher khana hole samadhan Tara rara rara rara sumadhur gan (When the pleasurable and exotic food was finished Tara rara rara rara [went the] tuneful songs) Guru guru gum gum lafe lafe tal Tara rara rara rara lala lala lal (Guru guru gum gum goes the leaping rhythm Tara rara rara rara lala lala lal.) This emphasis on sound has its roots in a conception of poetry that is closely allied to the performative aspect of the lyrics Gupta wrote as a songwriter for the kabiwalas of Baghbazar; fundamentally, his conception of poetry was that of lines that were meant to be recited rather than read, as indeed they often were. The materiality of these sound images, or the physical effect upon the listener of these sounds, however, has never been held up to critical scrutiny. Yet what they bring to life with some vitality is the materiality of cultural difference, the obdurate strength of certain sounds to convey a tonality, mood, or atmosphere. They are a live playback of the changing shape of the everyday on New Year’s Day, 1852, bringing to the contemporary reader a real sense of lived experience. This is history in the process of being made, history happening without notice all around the colonial city, the “sound” of history. In Ishwar Gupta’s poems, then, literature approaches historicality along a path of everydayness, an everydayness that is necessarily informed by a sense of the past as well as the future. Heidegger’s notion that “Everydayness is a way to be—to which, of course, that which is publicly manifest belongs,” if applied to Ishwar Gupta’s poems on the topical, the everyday, and the historical, reveals that all of these poems manifestly belong to the realm of the public.47 There is, here, no interiority in the sense of the endlessly interiorized self of bourgeois subjectivity; rather, time and history work together in the poems to recuperate the living history of the banal. The attention to detail in such poems as “The Pineapple” or “The English New Year” has been configured in terms of the everyday as it is rooted in the domestic sphere of local social life. Just as importantly, this focus amounts to a politicized account of the traditional, the ordinary, and the domestic as sites of knowledge that

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are outside of the normative Western expectations of subjectivity and interiority on the one hand, and the drama of nation and history on the other. Ishwar Gupta’s poems belong, then, to a culture of irony grounded in the local and the ordinary—not in the grand manner of a nationalist high modern or in the sombre tones of a fraught modernity as they are perceived among his inheritors. He is not preoccupied with the polar conflicts of the colonizer versus the colonized, or the state versus the people, but with textures of life that circumvent those epic battles to concentrate insouciantly in the cracks of the edifices that henceforth serve to build Bengali modernity. The historicist imperative is conspicuous in its absence in Ishwar Gupta’s poems, which are based on a total involvement with the overwhelming rush of the present contained in a miscellany of items. In a sense, then, Ishwar Gupta’s oeuvre is like the gossip in Hutom’s Calcutta, which is formed, as Ranajit Guha describes it, of “the immediacy of presence” that, as a phenomenon, “lives only for the day, literally as an ephemoros or adyatana, in a state of utter transience.”48 Like the gossip of Hutom’s city, the poems of Ishwar Gupta, too, “create a sense of shared time out of the sum of short-lived sensations,” helping thereby, “together with other factors, to form the worldhood of a colonial public.” Further, as Guha notes, “this incessantly unsettled contemporaneity” contains “fragments of the past” that “show up in it from time to time as tradition, genealogy or plain nostalgia, but are burnt up at once.” Guha is right to contrast this “perpetual restlessness” of being in the colonial city with the Wordsworthian mode in “Westminster Bridge” or the Dickensian in Sketches of Boz, both of which subscribe to a historicizing tendency, thereby “adding depth to the ongoing historicisation of the great metropolitan city in English literature.”49 Their particular schematic lies within the Western aesthetic and epistemological traditions, where the masculine suspicion of the quotidian, of the ordinary, of minute detail, has been inherited in part from the organicist aesthetics of Hegel, and the “contempt he flaunts for ‘the little stories of everyday domestic existence’ and the ‘multiform particularities of everyday life’—in short, for all he lumps under the dismissive heading ‘the prose of the world …’”50 Irony, the local, and the ordinary are the sites inhabited by Ishwar Gupta’s poems, outside of the grand narrative of a developmental history that would be inaugurated after him in the epic poetry of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and the historical novels of Bankimchandra. The subjectivity in Gupta’s poems cannot, however, be denied self-reflexivity. If the colonial everyday was “irreparably split in the middle, with one part assimilated to official time and alienated from the civil society”—and the question Guha asked is, “How, then, could everyday life and everyday people be inscribed in the discourse of the colonial city?”—the answer must lie not only in parody (as Guha finds with Kaliprasanna’s Naksha) but in a divided self-reflexivity that was both despairing and hopeful in turn.51 Once we acknowledge Ishwar Gupta’s emphasis on the ordinary and trivial details of life to be itself a site of critical knowledge production, it might be possible to read in them an indication of a self-reflexive worldview that refuses to take part in the valorized and selfimportant anti-colonial modernity that was beginning to take shape in Bengal, providing in its place an overlooked alternative of self inscription in the unacclaimed, the unnoticed, the comic—in whatever was there.

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Notes 1 M. Blanchot, “Characteristics of the Work of Art,” in The Space of Literature, A. Smock, transl. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 233. 2 R. Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, K. Tribe, transl. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 3. In German, Geschichte designates lived history, while Historie is the intellectual operation that renders it intelligible. 3 E. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), 57. 4 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2006), 22. 5 E. C. Dimock and P. C. Gupta, eds., The Maharashta Purana: An Eighteenth Century Bengali Historical Text, 2nd rev. edn (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1985), 7. 6 Ibid., 15–16. As for the people of Bengal, they remember the Maratha invasions to this day in the form of a popular nursery lullaby [“My son has gone to sleep / The neighbourhood rests / The bargi is in town / The bulbul bird has eaten up my grain / With what shall I pay my tax?”] and by the remnants of the Maratha Ditch, built to fortify the city of Calcutta against impending attacks, and filled up a few years later by Lord Wellesley when the British became confident that no such threat remained. 7 R. Aquil and P. Chatterjee, eds., History in the Vernacular (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008), 5. 8 See V. N. Rao, D. Shulman, and S. Subrahmanyam, eds., Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600−1800 (New York: Other Press, 2003). 9 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 10 R. Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in R. Guha and G. C. Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46−47. 11 See D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 12 E. Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1961), 228− 230. 13 J. H. Dobrzynski, “‘An Epic Poem in Paint’: The Story of The Battle of Issus and Albrecht Altdorfer,” The Wall Street Journal, 8 January 2010. 14 Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” 5. 15 C. Coker, “War and Modernity,” Society 33, 5 (1996): 1. 16 Ibid. 17 P. Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815−30 (London: Harper Perennial, 1991). 18 K. Haq, transl., The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, originally in Persian, of a visit to France and Britain by Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, an Eighteenth Century Indian Gentleman (New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2008), 2. 19 See R. Chaudhuri, Derozio, Poet of India: A Definitive Edition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), Introduction. 20 H. Derozio, “The Ruins of Rajmahal,” in Derozio, Poet of India, 139−142. 21 P. Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7. 22 Ibid., 12. 23 Derozio, “The Ruins of Rajmahal,” 140. 24 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 22. 25 Derozio, “The Ruins of Rajmahal,” 141. 26 T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 16. 27 Henry Derozio, ‘My country! In thy days of glory past’, in Rosinka Chaudhuri, ed., Derozio, Poet of India: The Definitive Edition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 173. 28 In the Giaour Byron wrote of “The mountains of thy native land!” and again—“Yet died he by a stranger’s hand / And stranger in his native land.” See The Works of Lord Byron (Paris: 1828), 113, 138. Burns wrote in “It was a’ for our Rightfu’ King”: “Now a’ is done

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that men can do / And a’ is done in vain / My Love and Native Land fareweel / For I maun cross the main, my dear / For I maun cross the main.” See T. F. Henderson, ed. Robert Burns’ Poems (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1906), 122. S. Sengupta, ed., Sansad Bangali Charitabhidhan (Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 2002), 73. The appellation “Firingi” denoted a foreigner, usually of Portuguese origin, in Bengal. As the standard practice in Bengali is to refer to writers by their first names, that is the convention followed here as well. Further, the name is spelt, when written in English, as Antony rather than Anthony in all the standard histories. See for example, J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 87. D. Lahiri, ed. Bangalir Gan (Calcutta: Paschimbanga Bangla Academy, 2001 [1905]), 196. Aquil and Chatterjee, History in the Vernacular, 5 (emphasis in the original). Rangalal Bandyopadhyay, Preface to Padmini Upakhyan (Calcutta: 1858). Antony Firingi (Bengali film), 1967, starring Uttam Kumar and Tanuja. Rajnarain Basu, Se Kal Ar E Kal: An Essay on the Effects of Western Civilisation on Hindu Society (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 1998 [1885]), 17−18, 24−26. Bhavanicharan Bandyopadhyay, Kalikata Kamalalay [Kolkata Abode of Wealth] (Calcutta: 1823); Nabababubilas [The Pleasures of a New Babu] (Calcutta: 1825); Nababibibilas [The Pleasures of a New Bibi] (Calcutta: 1831). Mohitlal Majumdar, Banglar Nabajug, cited in A. Bandyopadhyay, who makes the periodization in his Bangla Sahityer Itibritta, vol. 4 (Calcutta: Modern Book Agency, 1985), 32. The panchali is a class of traditional Bengali narrative poem set to music; the amusements organized at the bagan-bari were generally in the company of prostitutes; the rath of Mahesh refers to the festival of the god Jagannath’s chariot being pulled by devotees at Mahesh. Kaliprasanna Singha, Satik Hutom Penchar Naksha, ed. A. Nag (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1991), 75. The phrase “Naba munshi” means “new” munshi (a teacher of Arabic and Persian) but also refers to Nabakrishna Deb, the munshi to Warren Hastings who became a raja. Two people who belonged to the “bene” and “teli” communities respectively and who were made “rajas” by the British at this time were Naku Dhar and Kanta Nandy. See Singha, Satik Hutom Penchar Naksha, 77−79 n204. Sibnath Sastri, Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Bangasamaj (Calcutta: New Age Publishers, 2003 [1904]), 223. For the reference to Ishwarchandra’s translation of a part of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason into Bengali, see Bhabatosh Datta, ed. Ishwarchandra Gupta Rachita Kavijivani (Calcutta: Paschim Banga Akademi, 1998 [1958]), 46. A. Lahiri, ed., Ishwar Gupta: chabi o chora, (Calcutta: Kahini, 2007 [1954]). Ibid., preface. From the poem “Ishwarer Karuna,” in ibid., 8. From the poem “Chadmabeshi Missionary” in ibid., 15. The “Hendo” woods could refer to the water tank and the area called Hendua in north Calcutta where Duff set up what became Scottish Church College and John Eliot Drinkwater Bethune established the Bethune Collegiate School. Ishwarchandra Gupta, “Ingraji nababarsha,” in A. Ray, ed., Ishwarchandra Gupter Sreshtha Kabita [Ishwarchandra Gupta’s Best Poems] (Calcutta: Bharabi, 2009), 83. Ibid. Ibid., 84. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, transl. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 422. Ranajit Guha, “A Colonial City and Its Time(s),” in Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri, eds., The Indian Postcolonial (London: Routledge, 2010), 343 Ibid., 344, 342. N. Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1989), 7 Guha, “A Colonial City and Its Time(s),” 346.

9

A “well-traveled” theory Mughals, Maine and modernity in the historical fiction of Romesh Chunder Dutt Alex Padamsee

It is safe to say that until March 1866 Henry Sumner Maine and the Bengali novel had little to do with each other. How they met must remain a matter of speculation since it is not clear that Maine either read or spoke Bengali. As the pioneer of a new British school of “historical criticism,” however, the subject of narrative fiction proved somewhat unexpectedly to be of some interest to him. “The Natives of India,” he complained to his audience in the Senate of the University of Calcutta: have caught from us Europeans our modern trick of constructing, by means of works of fiction, an imaginary past out of the Present, taking from the Past its externals, its outward furniture, but building in the sympathies, the susceptibilities and even (for it sometimes comes to that), the knowledge of the present time. Now this is all very well for us Europeans […] But, here, the effect of such fictions, and of theories built from such fictions, is unmixedly deleterious.1 In his capacity as vice-chancellor of the university, Maine had spoken to his students once before about the “precocious display” of the Bengali intellect and the correlative need for the “rigid” discipline of the new “physical science.”2 Now he deplored the re-enslavement of that embryonic intellect to an “imagination” that had always tended to “run riot” and usurp “the place of reason.”3 The “educated Native,” he warned them, required a “stricter criteria of truth” to resist the new fictions of “the Past.”4 Maine’s concern stemmed in part from the unprecedented success of Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s first historical novel, Durgeshanandini, published just a year earlier in 1865. The rhetoric of catastrophe and prohibition used by Maine was unusual for such a reserved counsellor in Indian affairs, and indeed stands out among the three published addresses he gave to the Senate during his time in India (1862–9). Since his own nascent comparatist project centered on charting the “relation of modern thought” to the past, and had been plotted in part through the “knowledge” of India’s “present time,” the notion of a Bengali historical novel must have appeared as a troubling reversal of the appropriate protocols.5 Certainly, the explicit reference to “theories built from such fictions” indicates that, in the historian’s mind at least, the practice if not the form of historiography was at stake—and with it, an important and embattled liberal conception of time. For

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while European writers might be allowed safely to play with the “furniture” of history, to allow the “educated Native” to (as he put it) “palter” with “the Past” was to see them turn away from the “tutelage” in progress that “lay in Europe and the Future.”6 This was a potential path of self-estrangement, Maine argued, a perversion of their “marvellous destiny.” They were stepping outside the bounds of what he called “the greatest family of mankind,” just as the “youngest of its branches” had rushed from “the uttermost ends of the earth” to bring them together again.7 To hear Maine tell it, then, the Bengali historical novel struck at the newly re-sutured roots of the “Indo-European” family, and in doing so risked loosening the natural evolutionary bonds of history. There is something unexpected in this apparent readiness on the part of one of the earliest British adherents of positivism to cede the sovereignty of the colonial pedagogical mission to the power of narrative.8 For Maine, it would seem, this was not merely an “escape into imaginary history,” as Sudipta Kaviraj has described the emergence of the historical novel in Bengal.9 Rather, it had a material effect. Maine concedes that the developmentalist framework of liberal history itself was open to the processes of fiction: its positivist narrative of progress—or to use Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, its particular “allegory of temporality”—could accidentally be rewritten.10 Maine’s admission opens up an often overlooked dimension of the late colonial encounter, one that centers on the question of time and narrative evoked in and by his own writing. In Maine’s first and most important book, Ancient Law (1861), he had posited the Indo-Aryan connection as the grounds from which European history could be mapped, predicating his model for comparison on separate but related structures (or narratives) of temporality. India was not so much a place without history, as a space in which a relatively static ancient past was still a living presence, testifying thereby to the origins of modernity in Europe and to the potential future evolution of India. For Maine, time was a fragile balancing act. Eventually the evolutionary course of some (indeed, only a few) non-progressive societies might eclipse the role of patriarchal law as the central institution of society, replacing it in India—as it had done in Europe—with the model of contract based on the rights of the individual.11 As law member to the Governor-General’s Council, much of Maine’s official work in the 1860s was given over to negotiating, even restraining, the pace at which this “evolution” might take place.12 But if an interdependent model of temporality gave Maine’s influential brand of liberal imperialism its structure and authority, the suggestion of its constructedness as narrative represented the most vulnerable point in his engagement with India. As he wrote soon after his return to England, in seeking the “Comparative” view there is always the danger that “the distinction between the present and the past disappears,” that from the viewer’s new global perspective the distance between them “cannot be estimated or expressed chronologically.”13 It was here, I want to suggest, that the Indian historical novel sought grounds for renegotiating the paths of modernity. Recent studies have underscored the decisive effect that Maine’s ideas had on the course of colonial policymaking in the late nineteenth century. While these have mostly demonstrated the paradox of liberal imperialism and its essentially

210 Alex Padamsee conservative orientation, little sustained consideration has been given to Maine’s influence on contemporary Indian writers and intellectuals. Christopher Bayly is unusual in this regard in suggesting the affinities that connected Maine’s ideas to certain strands of conservative Indian nationalism.14 The appeal for these Indian intellectuals, as Bayly points out, lay in the tendency toward separatism and difference inherent in Maine’s reading of the distinct evolutionary paths of the Indo-Aryan family. Its influence on conservative figures such as Raja Shivaprasad of Banaras and its later reconfiguration in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) testify to the dialogic nature of the exchange.15 It is important to recall, however, that the premise of Maine’s evolutionary history, with its paradoxical and insistent rhetoric of temporality, evoked an even more complex response in late nineteenth-century Indian liberalism, a discourse that (in Bayly’s resonant phrase) was always already “on edge with itself.” Indeed, limiting Maine’s influence to a lexis of separatism and difference within nationalist discourse risks eliding the crucial, if elusive, ideal of transnational affiliation with which those ideas were simultaneously articulated. For it was in the temporal dislocations that were sutured into its global family narrative that Indian liberalism, and particularly its emerging “moderate nationalist” spokesmen, engaged with its imperial liberal interlocutors from the 1860s onward.16 Despite the paternal declarations of prohibition in the Senate hall, Maine was clearly aware of a troubled dialogue with those who should have been his most attentive, most liberal audience. At least among the young writers and readers of historical fiction, the narrative of liberalism and its structures of temporality had not been properly spelt out. As it turns out there was, in particular, one student among his audience who soon began to construct a series of responses to the vice-chancellor’s anxious sense of evolutionary “destiny.” Romesh Chunder Dutt graduated that year from Presidency College, one of the University’s affiliated colleges. Maine’s praise in his speech for the exacting examination system at Presidency College would no doubt have pleased Dutt in particular, since he stood second in his graduating class.17 A hopeful colonial observer might have been tempted to think that Dutt’s secret nightime departure for London not long after graduation in 1868 (he was one of only a handful of Bengali students to take up the opportunity to sit the recently instituted Indian Civil Service [ICS] open competition examinations in Britain) was clear evidence that he had heeded the vice-chancellor’s advice about European tutelage. Dutt’s trip to London was enormously successful; he became the second Indian ever to pass the ICS examination.18 He then went on to make seminal interventions in the liberal nationalist historiography of India, fuelled in part by the positivist and comparatist methodologies encouraged by Maine. However, these accomplishments were preceded by another somewhat less predictable and all but forgotten violation of Maine’s paternal prohibition. For Romesh Dutt, the first Indian liberal historian, actually began his career as one of the most popular writers of historical novels in nineteenth-century Bengal. And the first piece of historical “furniture” he laid his hands on was the very idea of “progress” that underwrote not just Maine’s

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evolutionary route to modernity, but the moderate liberal nationalism with which R. C. Dutt, the historian and politician, later came to be associated.

Indo-Aryanism as a “travelling theory” In March 1875, while stationed in the isolated Bengal district of Bongong, Dutt wrote anxiously to his brother in Calcutta to request Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, published in London only weeks before.19 The urgency of the request appears at first glance incommensurable with the temporal remoteness of Maine’s subject and the rather more pressing concerns of Dutt’s career. He had been back in Bengal for just four years, spending much of that time as a junior ICS officer moving through various rural district appointments. These included posts in Nadia and Pabna, where a major organized revolt against the local landlords had commenced in 1873. Dutt became directly entangled in the immediate ensuing struggle for agrarian reforms.20 Publishing a series of articles and then a book, The Peasantry of Bengal (1874), he had called the government to account for its mishandling of the fundamental relationship between the zamindars (landlords) and their tenantry.21 Although his line of argument drew heavily on Maine’s Village-Communities in the East and West (1871), a text that had already been taken up as a form of orthodox faith among the ICS, his interference in a contentious public issue had been poorly received among his immediate superiors.22 Dutt felt himself to be quite unfairly in disgrace. In this context, Maine’s most recent account of ancient European and Indian societies was not so much a retreat from the politics of the day, as a reminder for Dutt of the larger liberal promise of the empire he served. “England,” Dutt wrote at the time to his brother, following a favorable review from there: is indeed a free country and every one is free to give his opinions; in India all free thought is strangled by red-tapeism, officialism, party feeling, class interests, the tyranny of the high officials, and the corresponding servility of the officers of the lower grade. “Such servility,” he added, “will never be mine, let the bigwigs say what they like and do what they like.”23 The romantic self-dramatization on display illustrates the high literary style of Dutt’s transnational affiliations, as well as its republican strain of liberal individualism. But it also testifies to an element of crisis besetting the global claims of Indian liberalism by the 1870s. The disjuncture between the felt universality of liberal values and their Indian colonial context had been exacerbated by the rise of a new and more conservative form of liberal imperialism. This had first been articulated in 1873 by James Fitzjames Stephen in his work Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and was accompanied by a series of more intrusive codified legislation that Stephen had helped push through.24 Dutt’s reference to the “tyranny of high officials” expresses his frustration at the paternalist, and even despotic, mode of these reforms, as much as it does his exasperation with the racialist hierarchy of the Service.25 The turn to “ancient institutions” at such a moment is

212 Alex Padamsee therefore doubly arresting. An invocation of a lost Indian patriarchal heritage to answer the new paternalism of Anglo-Indian governance, Dutt’s request might also suggest that the future evolution of Indian liberalism was on his mind. If, like so many among his generation, Dutt had always favored the liberal individualism of John Stuart Mill, his peculiar educational trajectory had also brought him into an unusually early and close association with the more conservative emphasis of Maine’s Indo-Aryan racial theories.26 At the time he began his studies for the open competition examinations for the ICS, Maine’s comparatist method and sociological orientation had become an important presence in the curriculum.27 Dutt would have further encountered Maine’s Ancient Law, his seminal contribution to jurisprudence, when he underwent additional studies for the Middle Temple bar examination. Shortly after his return from England, in his first published book, Three Years in Europe, Dutt had drawn an elaborate portrait of what he saw as England’s most advanced, most “radical” class: “the town gentry.” Closely monitoring and guiding the political process, these educated and landed elite, were “in many cases, liberals”: They perceive that their own progress and the progress of the country in general have always been due to radical changes in opinions and institutions, and they feel that changes must always be the only means of future progress.28 Patriotism and political reform were naturally joined in this class, and were naturally directed at institutional evolution: to this extent, the elite paternalism of Dutt’s later “moderate nationalism” had found its first public expression through a cosmopolitan English aristocracy.29 But also at work here, it should be noted, is a faint but implicit echo of Maine’s separate temporal paths, and a hint of its subversive potential for Indian narrative.30 That potential emerges in the Indian traveler’s wider investigation of the English countryside. The distinctive “denial of coevalness” that enables comparison in Ancient Law, along with its immanent schedule of progress, finds an unexpected redeployment in Dutt’s presentation of the English aristocracy. Reversing the optic of Maine’s sociological enquiries, Dutt draws a comparative portrait of the “town gentry” as a progressive, mobile class at home in the metropolis as well as the English countryside. In contrast, the English “country Squire” is viewed as “conservative,” poorly educated and “idle,” “incapable of thinking out any alterations in laws which will better the state of the country.”31 This division works neatly along the lines of tradition and modernity, the timeless and the evolutionary. Thus the “town gentry,” with their day-to-day involvement with politics and “the welfare of his country,” are “active and industrious” and caught up (in 1868) in “an electoral process” that, as Dutt breathlessly relates, changes “hourly” as the newspapers publish the voting tallies.32 In contradistinction, the conservative “Squire,” “cooped up in his country residence,” plays no part in the “changes in thought and opinion.” The Squire “points to the quiet rural church and the peace and contentment of his tenants.”33 And despite the poverty around him, the Squire notes that it “is a pleasant sight on Sundays to see neatly-dressed villagers and

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blooming village-girls, and, now and then the landlord too and his family assembled together under the roof of the quiet village church.”34 Town and country thus stand in the same temporal relation to modernity as Maine’s British Empire and India, with the distant possibility that eventually the country Squire will have to yield to “these days of swift locomotion and wide diffusion of knowledge, when news travels so fast and education is reaching the remotest corners of England.”35 This is the subtle aspect of “counter-preaching” that Dutt later manifested to such good effect.36 A mildly critical early sketch of a derelict English aristocracy divided in time from its more industrious and capable counterpart, it also contains a more serious message to Dutt’s landed bhadralok readership in Bengal about active liberal self-governance.37 The industrious time-bound landlord poses the critique of a timeless—although here relatively benign—despotic realm. Maine’s Indo-Aryan division becomes in Dutt’s narrative a “traveling theory” in the Saidean sense, which then returns again to India as a gentle reminder of the progressive rationale of Indian liberalism. Said later reconsidered the process by which a theory loses its initial bite as it travels outward to other contexts, toying with the possibility that in a return journey it regains some of the energy and power of the original.38 Dutt’s version of the evolution of patriarchal institutions would appear to interrupt this possibility. The initial displacement of the Indo-Aryan evolutionary time lag to England leaves intact a countryside idyll that was, over the next two years, thoroughly belied by Dutt’s more shocking experiences of collusive absentee landlords and rural ruin in and around the district of Nadia. Bayly speaks of the “critical,” as well as the “benign,” dimension to the nineteenth-century liberal Indian “sociological imagination.”39 Dutt’s critical orientation, so central to his later economic historiography, emerged in his writing through the lived sense of crisis in the mid- to late 1870s over the terms, and indeed the possibility, of Indian self-governance. For Dutt, at least, a particular cosmopolitan and elite-centered narrative of Indian liberalism had come apart in Nadia. Some of that shock is registered in the aporetic shape of the narrative in The Peasantry of Bengal. Dutt appended to the text Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s famous analysis of the oppression of the Bengali cultivator from his journal Bangadharshan. Bankimchandra, an uncovenanted and less traveled Indian civil servant, had notably stopped short in his denunciation of “the zemindar,” by repeating several times toward the end of the piece that the bhadralok absentee landlords in Calcutta had no idea of what was going on in their name.40 In the main body of the text, Dutt delivers an unglossed, unreconciled and thorough contradiction. The picture is reworked from Three Years in Europe, the concept of “town gentry” turned inside out. If modernity threatens the timeless order of the English countryside, in Bengal its presence overthrows the neat elitist binaries of conservative and liberal, “country” and “town” gentry. Dutt now frames his description through the impossibility of a distinction between the two. In this portrait, the institutions of liberalism are themselves complicit in the oppression of the Indian peasant. “In towns,” he wrote: “the most influential of the Bhadralok,—the aristocracy,—the millionaires,—the enlightened,—those who create opinion and not receive it from others, are almost all zemindars.”41 Not only were these modern

214 Alex Padamsee Bengali “town gentry” “nine times of ten” responsible for the oppression of the “ryot” (meaning here a “cultivator”), but “public opinion” was effectively “blinded” through the very liberal organs—the newspapers and “associations”—that their English counterparts used for “progress.”42 Indian modernity, it would seem, was an equally extensive and rapid affair, but one that had reversed the temporal poles of progress. The English-educated bhadralok, the vanguard of Indian liberalism, stood at the heart of the problem. One stunning illustration of the problem can be seen from the fact that the Tagore family of Calcutta owned much of the Pabna landscape.43

Fiction and the reinvention of the Indian countryside At the time Dutt published the articles that indicted the bhadralok and the myopic responses of the British government, he was busy at work on a second, and more cherished, mode of response.44 It is too-often forgotten by recent historians that Romesh Dutt was one of the most popular novelists of his day; and yet each of his novels focused, in one way or another, on issues of governance. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, his reputation as a Bengali novelist rivaled that of Bankimchandra, though Dutt’s output was more limited.45 Dutt’s success was rooted in a quartet of historical novels, written in Bengali and published between 1874 and 1879. In these he explored the period of India’s history marked by the consolidation of the Mughal Empire, a subject that was only ever dealt with in his English-language historiography in the most cursory fashion. The political nexus of governance, community, and nation is therefore a significantly more complicated issue in some of these texts than in his later critiques of the “Vedic,” or in certain respects even the “British,” phases of Indian history. It was while mired in the politics of Nadia that he wrote and published the first of the quartet, Banga Vijeta (“The Conqueror of Bengal,” 1874). It is in Banga Vijeta, I would suggest, that an Indian liberal counterconception of evolutionary time is reconstructed in detail out of the ruins of modern governance. The novel marks a significant intervention in the institutional evolution of the Bengali landed gentry. But it is significant on another level as well. At the very moment when “the Muslim” was beginning to be constructed as “Other” to the embryonic Indian nation, Dutt’s novel posits an unusual alternative to the troubled transnational affiliation of Indian liberalism, in the form of the trans-colonial Mughal officer. Banga Vijeta closes with one of the most extraordinary scenes of nineteenthcentury Bengali fiction. Following his preference for Mountstuart Elphinstone’s canonical history of the period, Dutt chose to set his first novel during Akbar’s reign. But he also chose to focus it—in the title, at least—on the Emperor Akbar’s most successful general, “Todar Mull.” The novel closes with Todar Mull’s successful reconquest of Bengal for the Mughal Empire. At this point, the much valorized Hindu general features as the deputizing figure of royalty at a durbar held by a local zamindar to celebrate his own recuperation of his father’s estate. It is a set-piece affair in an “open field” replete with a pageantry reminiscent of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and, as with Scott, the celebrations are accompanied by royal judgments.46

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In this case, however, the judgments are not summarily handed out by royal prerogative. Instead, they are described at length as the outcome of a recognizably colonial legal process. The charge is read out as a “complaint on behalf” of a widow whose husband’s execution was “obtained on a false charge framed and concocted by” the accused.47 “Ample evidence,” in the form of falsified documents, are given to Todar Mull, acting here in an officiating capacity that the Deputy Magistrate Dutt would have known all too well. The accused, the “Brahmin” adviser to the usurping zamindar, and the principal villain of the novel, is allowed to defend himself. His recourse is to a defense “under Hindu law,” which he claims states that a Brahmin cannot be lawfully “sentenced to death”; to do so would be to commit “a grave illegal act.”48 The specific reference to the dharmashastra as the last word in law (colonial, as much as Hindu) can be contextualized within the further consolidation of digests of classical Hindu texts under Stephen’s colonial legislation. Had Maine still been following the career of the Indian historical novel, he might have identified yet another absurd instance of an “educated Native” misguidedly substituting the “furniture” of the past with the “knowledge of the present time.” Dutt’s teleology, however, involves an altogether more nuanced and revisionary intervention. In placing a colonial-style trial at the climax of his novel, he overtly signals an important temporal conceit. Todar Mull’s mobile court represents Akbar’s India, much as Elphinstone had done, as a modern imperial age of Enlightenment—but here it is not one that predicts so much as it preempts its “evolved” British successors. The extension of progress into the Bengali countryside is thus troped through fiction as a reversal of the contemporary corruption of landlords; the progressive colonialism of the Mughal Empire succeeds where its liberal descendants had so spectacularly failed. Crucially, though, the Mughal Empire succeed in a way that more than reconstitutes Maine’s evolutionary path in another continent and time. To read Banga Vijeta as a simple form of nativist anachronism would be fundamentally to misunderstand the nature of the liberalism that is being reconstructed in the wake of Nadia. In Dutt’s novel, the trial of the treasonous “Brahmin,” Shakuni, appears at first to signal the necessity for a neutral colonial form of governance as a safeguard against the iniquities of caste. The wily Brahmin was, of course, a fixture of colonial ethnography that had long since manifested its counterpart within elite and popular cultures in late nineteenth-century Calcutta.49 But Shakuni’s Brahmin defense works toward another purpose or, to use Gyan Prakash’s phrase, “another reason”: it momentarily causes the colonial machinery to pause. One of the few times the Mughals are referred to as “foreigners” (mlecchas) occurs here, as Shakuni reminds the colonial intruders of their own “impartial” judicial history. As foreigners administrating a Hindu polity according to its own laws, “for nearly four hundred years […] no Brahmin has ever been sentenced to death.”50 This reference to a selfdefeating impartiality literally silences the court. Three times, we are told, “Todar Mull made no reply.”51 The paralysis of the judiciary is then interrupted by what can only be seen as a species of divine justice. A sudden and fortuitous piece of testimony reveals that Shakuni’s claim to Brahmin status is fraudulent; he is in reality the “bastard” son of a herdsman’s wife. A moment later, in full view of the

216 Alex Padamsee court, judgment is rendered unnecessary: having “played his trump card and lost,” Shakuni fatally stabs himself.52 In effect, dharma first exposes the insufficiency, and only then fulfills the promise, of colonial law. The early British colonial conception behind the translation of the dharmashastra had been to fashion a tool suited to a race as yet unprepared for the more mature reason of enlightened modernity. Stephen’s later intervention was intended to refine and reinforce the instrumental purposes of this conception, to make it a more effective tool of governmentality.53 In Dutt’s novel, then, this seemingly improvised moment of fission and fusion between dharma and colonial reason, religion and modernity, is far from accidental. It is rather only one among a series of similar paradoxes that, crossing the temporal boundaries of modernity, lend the narrative a second temporal structure. Since Todar Mull is himself more of a background presence than an actor within the drama, Dutt’s choice of him as the subject of the novel’s title is gradually shown to be the ruling metaphor. While the opening pages suggest the importance of the Hindu general as a familiar paradigm of syncretism (having married into the Mughal dynasty), the novel quickly redefines him in terms of what might be described as colonial dharma. Although the Bhagavad-Gita is not directly mentioned, a conversation halfway through the novel allows the general to meditate on the necessity of duty, a virtue central to late nineteenth-century appropriations of the text.54 Todar Mull tells the hero of the novel, Inder Nath, that there can be nothing “nobler than self-dedication in the service of the Emperor […]. We shall have no regret if we die while doing our duty.”55 Duty, he reminds Inder Nath, can mean going against the closest possible ties or allegiances, including the familial. Thus, as he explains, the Rajput rebel Rana Pratap, who has fought with “courage, grit and patriotism” for “Bharatvarsha” (the Indian nation), is also the son of Todar Mull’s most “intimate” friend. And yet, Todar Mull remarks: “If I am sent to Mewar I shall not for a moment hesitate to fight against the son of my dearest friend.”56 The passage consciously identifies the Mughal general with Arjuna’s divine charioteer, Krishna, who urges the Pandava hero in the Bhagavad-Gita to fight against his own kin. As the son of a local zamindar, Inder Nath is likewise urged to consider service with the foreign “Mahomedan” Mughals against local Hindu Bengali zamindars as a form of dharmic duty. The general seems to imply that Inder Nath, too, will be performing a service for “Bharatvarsha.” Colonial dharma, then, seeks to mediate not only the instrumentality of colonial reason, but also the fissures among the local, the national, and the global (or “foreign”). It thus stands as an unusual intervention from a member of the late nineteenth-century madyashreni (“middle class”), demonstrating the author’s willingness to marry sarkar (“government”) and the Hindu cultural norms of samaj (“society”).57 Todar Mull reinterprets the workings of dharma as a specifically national ethic of duty, revealed rather than contradicted by empire. Inder Nath’s counterintuitive affiliation to the Mughal Empire, as well as Shakuni’s unsanctioned death, is encompassed by this wider narrative logic.58 To emphasize its multiple sense of historical progression, Dutt weaves into the narrative the lineaments of another important text from his childhood, the Ramayana.59 Alongside

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the historical context of invasion, he gives us the exile of a pair of royal siblings, a lengthy sojourn in forest villages and ashrams, a sexually predatory villain abducting and then threatening the chastity of the heroine, and finally their return in honour to reclaim their inheritance.60 Inder Nath’s recuperation of his father’s kingdom, enabled and presided over by the Mughal general, is in this way also a scene of mythic return, one that reconciles the distant empire with local and national patriotisms: [Imperial] flags wave and flap in the morning breeze; those that waved in a hundred victorious battlefields now fill the hearts of peaceful villagers with joy, and the soldiers with spirit and exultation […] a prolonged roar floated through the surrounding villages, and like the rumble of thunder, woke the echoes of distant hills and caverns.61 Echoing Rama’s royal return to Ayodhya, Dutt’s narrative shows us how Mughal history has brought about the apotheosis of the Bengali countryside. The villagers Dutt sought to defend in the colonial courts are here offered up as the largely anonymous emblems of the return of ethical justice, the subjects and beneficiaries of colonial dharma. Indeed, since they are hardly otherwise present in the narrative, Inder Nath’s journey from exile to the kingdom effectively annexes them to the moral rehabilitation of the zamindari; the villains of Nadia are now “resplendent in bright uniforms embroidered with gold and silver designs” and loyally stationed with him around the imperial pandal.62 In Maine’s Ancient Law, the singular notion of progress had contained its own dual time lines, English and Indian—linked but differently valued. For Dutt, that global duality is collapsed into a more productive reading of the colonial encounter. In the globalized space of colonial Bengal, and in the workings of colonial dharma, temporal contradictions are reconciled and hierarchies are reversed. Against the split evolutionary narrative of a progressive metropolis and its dependent colony, Banga Vijeta proposes a prior global union based on the temporal coevalness of empire. There is, moreover, an important sense in which that renewed global imperative challenges the colonial valuation of Indian historical time as being either Hindu or Muslim. For although the novel primarily focuses on and rehabilitates the Hindu zamindari, it also questions the British historical narrative of the retarding effects of “Muslim rule.” The triumph of colonial dharma, recuperating and transfiguring the countryside, represents instead a subtle, if partial, negotiation of the way in which the expulsion of “the particularistic foreign body of the Muslim” tended to secure the temporal and spatial boundaries of the nation in other texts of this period.63 Praised for its comparatively mild representations of Muslim Otherness, Dutt’s historical fiction has nevertheless in the past been an object of censure for its narrowly communal interpretation of history; similarly, his political thought is still often criticized for making concessions to empire.64 However, at a time when the production of the Indian nation entailed the demonization of Mughal (commonly read as Muslim) rule, Dutt’s complex refusal of either position is striking.65 The narrative of Banga Vijeta does not allow us to make the

218 Alex Padamsee mistake of reading the Mughal Empire as a version of the British Empire. And this is made clear precisely in relation to the issue of religion. Akbar is not praised for his neutrality, but because he: was a great friend of the Hindus […] he was interested in the Hindu religion; a Hindu princess was his queen; he had adopted certain forms of Hindu life; he has sent a Hindu to Bengal as military commander and Governor; the Goddess Lakshmi herself was his constant attendant.66 The Mughal emperor is thus waved through ascending stages of conversion, and it is this very partiality that converts the Bengal zamindars in the novel to the Mughal standard. Yet even as Akbar is identified as “the ruler of Bharatvarsha” and the empire placed at the center of a Hindu apotheosis in the form of Rama’s return, the trial scene confirms it is comprised of “foreigners” to the soil and the religion.67 It is in this confusion of categories that colonial dharma contrasts with the more homogenous religious ethic that animates Bankimchandra’s later historical fiction. For Dutt, colonial dharma operates through non-Hindu institutions, just as it achieves local ends through transnational bodies. Far from being an anomaly, that latent sense of “foreignness” is integral to its appeal. Inder Nath’s transnational affiliation, his uprooting from a local context, is the very act that brings him home. Moreover, if the individualist, voluntary nature of the act marks it out as an aspect of liberalism, the broader arc that he traces suggests a specific Indian alternative to Maine’s route to modernity. For the counterconception of heroic time here, the pathway for his journey, charts a precise progress from contract to status.

Family values and the ends of empire Henry Maine’s later writings consisted of energetic, not to say increasingly conservative, defenses against the very implications that his own theories had helped articulate.68 Like so many Victorian intellectual projects, patriarchal theory had primarily been an attempt to bolster faith in liberalism against the perceived onset of relativism and social anomie, to anchor individualism within a communal narrative and a social mission.69 Contemporary India was by no means incidental to that sense of social mission: indeed, it had always played a key role in Maine’s sense of the morality inherent in European modernity. Parts of the speech in Calcutta in 1866 thus drew directly on one of his earliest essays, published in The Saturday Review in 1858. In the latter essay, Maine reminded a readership who might be apt to forget their moral mission in the heat of the “Mutiny” of the “wonderful succession of events which has brought the youngest civilisation of the world to instruct and correct the oldest, which has reunited those wings of the Indo-European race which separated in the far infancy of time to work out their strangely different missions.” If the language of moral crusade is familiar, coupled to it was a reminder of the key prefacing moment of “crusade,” a moment that had “avenged the miscarriage of the Crusades by placing the foot of the most fervently believing of Christian nations on the neck of the mightiest of Mahometan dynasties.”70 This is a dimension of

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Maine’s historical narrative that has been underplayed in the assessment of his work on Indian institutions.71 For the counter-ballast to British meddling in Maine’s conception of the Indian “village-communities” had always been the precedent of the Mughal—and decidedly Muslim—Empire. That perceived precedent contained useful lessons in land-revenue management, since the “Mahometan theory” and the “practice” of it had always been less absolute in its claims to a share of the produce “than any Western ruler has ever claimed.”72 However, the broader lesson the Mughals offered on the question of sovereignty was that of transience and mobility, encapsulated above all in the evanescent city. Maine’s emphasis on the comparative stability of the village built upon the prior observations of Charles Metcalf, who had insisted that the Indian villagecommunity had endured and survived successive Muslim depredations.73 But Maine’s insistent characterization of a Mughal ethic of mobility was also an outgrowth of his own theories of modernity. In this wider framework, the deeper instability that potentially lay in the separation of the individual from their original kinship unit played itself out in Indian history, and specifically in the “modernity” of the Mughal city, which stripped bare the countryside. In Mughal India, Maine wrote in Village-Communities, “[n]early all the movable capital of the empire or kingdom was at once swept away to its temporary centre.”74 In contrast to other Indian cities, which grew naturally out of clusters of villages, these cities literally embodied the unstable nature of Mughal sovereignty. Because that sovereignty never properly rooted itself in the countryside, it left behind for the British observer uncanny scenes of a ruined modernity: “Great deserted cities,” Maine noted, “often in close proximity to one another are among the most striking and at first sight inexplicable of Indian spectacles.”75 In this reading of the Indian landscape, it is as if the dangers of modernity, its fluid relations to capital, locality, and kinship, and above all the mobility that underwrote its contractual relations, had already been prefigured in the rootless, temporary urbanity of the Mughal Empire. Maine’s phantom ruins of Mughal modernity, elaborated in his VillageCommunities of 1871, coincided with Dutt’s own vision of the depredations of colonial modernity in rural Nadia. In its final pages at least, Banga Vijeta appears to reappropriate Maine’s fantasy of the Indian village as a uniquely preserved atemporal idyll. But this more common species of nativist separatism needs to be figured against the novel’s narrative as a whole. Here, the pastoral scene is forestalled; within it are placed from the outset the unmistakable traces of modernity, the specters of ruination that evoke the countryside of Nadia. The keynote of such ruination is another form of the “desertion” that Maine found in the wake of the Mughal Empire; but rather than circumscribe a self-destructive urban and imperial modernity against a perdurable native pastoralism, in Dutt’s novel it is the village itself that is figured as a scene of social anomie. Relegated to its outskirts, the novel’s three main characters are unmistakably figures of estrangement. We are introduced to their pastoral location by the arrival of yet another “stranger” with news from the world beyond the village, as well as a discussion of the disturbing changes that in the preceding years have overcome the family of the local zamindar. Class and caste mobility in the village shadow all of these events.76 Before long, the

220 Alex Padamsee reader discovers that what appears to be a timeless village idyll conceals a relatively recent form of “desertion” or homelessness for these characters—strangers to agricultural life, to the lowly class they cling to, but nevertheless native to this particular region and intimately bound up in its recent history. We meet two women, a mother and daughter, who have lived on the very edge of the village for the past seven years and have held themselves “aloof” from, and unknown to, their neighbours.77 It turns out that the hero, Inder Nath, has renamed himself, exchanging the iniquitous life of a zamindar’s son for that of a village labourer. As for the women, they have been forcibly exiled from their family home. Thus, all three of the protagonists have lost contact with their families. So complete is this sense of familial alienation that Inder Nath and his brother, although they parted company only seven years earlier, meeting as strangers one night fail to recognize each other, even though they spend a night in intimate conversation. A similar sense of estrangement means that, until the very end of the novel, Inder Nath’s brother fails to recognize as his former wife the woman who lovingly tends him back to health. Perhaps the most eerie scene of desolation, however, occurs when the young heroine, Sarala, returns to the fortress in which she grew up, in a state of what appears to be amnesia. Slowly waking to her past, she asks a mynah bird in the fortress grounds: “Is Sarala a stranger or is this her home?” It is only when the bird repeats, “This her home,” that a glimmer of the ruined past returns.78 The narrative reveals that it was in fact the intrusion of empire years before, combined with a new national spirit of reform, which had broken up each of these families. The anomie of modernity is thus located as a disturbance in the past, an exile from the kind of familial structures that Maine had identified as the surviving pre-modern institution of Indian patriarchy. The narrative then works its way back to the reconstitution of each family and the restitution of their patriarchal inheritance. In other words, modernity is set within a deeper temporal cycle of disturbance, one in which a further Mughal revolution of the wheel eventually repairs the damage done. If that revolution, set going again by the return of the Mughal Empire, replaces and rehabilitates the lost patriarchal institutions, it does so primarily through the industrious resolve of the individual. Todar Mal’s advice to Inder Nath in this way reconstitutes the Bhagavad-Gita as a manual for self-reliant liberal individualism.79 Moreover, it proposes that the contract between the hero and the Mughal general is the only solid ground for a return to the inherited status of the past. The solution to the depredations of modernity, the method for its supersession, is the path of modernity itself. Put simply, evolutions, not Evolution, are what constitute Indian history. And the ethic of mobility these evolutions have so ruinously set in motion provides the means to a reconstructed Indian liberal sense of kinship, patriarchy, and status.80 In combining colonial dharma with the liberal path back to status, Dutt moves on from the “traveled theory” of Mainean evolution—and the mimetic demand of European liberalism—to the more “transgressive theory” of vernacular evolutions. There is a correspondence here with the “double-valued time” that Sudipta Kaviraj has identified in Bankimchandra’s historical fiction, “a mixture of the past and the future, a time that is grammatically indescribable.” But as Kaviraj points out,

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Bankimchandra consistently settled on a form of plot that, for all the fictional “counterfactuals” it posed to historical narrative, remained “clearly linear.”81 In contrast, Dutt constructs a plot that works its way from the present through to the rediscovery and eventual transformation of the past, an attempted synthesis of history that in Bankimchandra’s fiction is always denied by “the unhappy consciousness” of colonial subjection. This was a direction of travel that would come to inform Dutt’s most radical historiographical critiques. Indeed, it is this “grammatically indescribable” sense of time that Gyan Prakash has identified as the essential structure of the later work. In Dutt’s most important project, The Economic History of India Under British Rule (1903–7), the Indian village community was resurrected as a metonym for the modern Indian nation, a reproduction in miniature of the self-governing state that nevertheless manifested the nation’s “timeless and organic existence.”82 Though Prakash rightly reminds us of the transgressive nature of this temporally hybrid metonym, he overlooks its crucial implication in an evolutionist critique that was simultaneously inverted to include the British Empire, not only as a modern deformation of the Indian past but of its own progressive future. Drawing in part on prevalent late Victorian discourses of degeneration, Dutt warned his British readers that their novel and peculiarly modern form of colonial despotism would work its way back across the empire to ensure “England’s decline.”83 Time and progress were not on their side. “Such was not the past in India,” Dutt writes in the high style of Bayly’s counter-preacher: To make the present administration more centralised, and at the same time to exclude from it all popular element, is to preserve the despotism of the Middle Ages without the advantages of self-government which that despotism left to the people.84 Reversing the journey he had first made 30 years earlier in Three Years in Europe, Dutt notes that, in the end, the evolution of British modernity becomes a perverted aspect of India’s liberal patriarchal past. In a sense, the full force of Dutt’s mature “statistical liberalism” has been directed cumulatively at this estrangement of British Empire as a singular Mainean form of progress, exposing the fallacy of an irreversible evolution circumscribed by the denial of coevalness. In the process, as Prakash points out, the modern Indian nation was revealed, caught, and drained in the global web of empire, simultaneously visible in terms of relation and estrangement.85

Trans-colonial strangers What began with Dutt’s reinvention of the figure of the stranger as the abysmal subject of modernity, ends with the revelation of an estranged nation awaiting its moment of recognition and the restitution of a lost sovereignty. The appropriation of estrangement as a narrative for the Bildung of the nation is not only a transformation of the anomic effects of modernity witnessed in Nadia; it is also an attempt

222 Alex Padamsee to transform the potential for modernity that Maine had specifically identified in the “village-community” as far back as 1861. For in Maine’s theory, “the stranger” had always been the pivotal figure enabling the transition from ancient to modern polities. Maine argued that the shift between ancient and modern societies, the transition from status to contract, had been presaged by the social practice of the adoption of “the stranger” into the ancient patriarchal family as a means of preserving property and social cohesion. “It is this patriarchal aggregate,” he insisted, “which meets us on the threshold of primitive jurisprudence.”86 The filiation of “the stranger” through fictive legal ties pointed directly to the future dissolution of the patriarchal family into “separate households,” until they too are “supplanted by the individual” and the rule of contract.87 This was the sole route into modernity. And it was just that form of filiation, he explained to his future ICS audience, that remained the principal feature of the contemporary Indian “village-community,” the observable evidence without which the story of modernity might still have remained obscure.88 The single most important seed of modernity thus lay in an Indian village structure that was already home to strangers. In this context, Inder Nath’s journey from village to empire enacted the evolutionary logic upon which Maine’s comparatist project depended. Dutt had in a sense exchanged the dynamic that Maine had confined to the Indian village for a global liberal freedom. For to bring the contemporary Indian village community into conjunction with a “foreign” power was to act out the potential of Inder Nath’s filiation as a “stranger” absorbed within it. But it was also, in Maine’s terms, to begin the process of dissolution that attends each household on the threshold of transition from its ancient location to its dispersal in a modernity structured by contract. Maine had already attributed this process—the rationale for modernity— to a form of fiction. Specifically, he identified the jurisprudential mechanism of adoption as a “legal fiction,” veiling the fact of a substantial “alteration” in the law with the fictitious appearance of its continuity.89 In effect, the entire movement from status to contract had always been accomplished covertly through the veil of a fictional transformation. As Karuna Mantena has recently argued, the function of that veil in Maine’s thought was ultimately to mask “the slow transition to largescale territorially based political communities.”90 This, then, was the concealed road to the modern nation state. As though mimicking that very progression, in the three novels that followed Banga Vijeta, Dutt moved ever outward from Bengal and into the Indian nation state. In the process, he placed the artificiality of kinship, its fictive bonds and the dissolution of the patriarchal household, at the center of his plots. The side effects of this conjunction, however, precipitate perhaps the most surprising aspect of Dutt’s career as a novelist and liberal: that is, his increasing recourse to the language of communalism. Though most critics concede that the Mughal Empire, and indeed Muslims in general, fare better in Dutt’s hands than in the majority of contemporary Indian novels, few have commented on the crucial distinction that separates Banga Vijeta from the rest of the quartet.91 The succeeding novels are almost all exact negatives of the first. In place of an affiliation with the Mughal Empire, the hero becomes its adversary; instead of a

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local countryside reclaimed from estrangement, Dutt deploys the stranger as an irreducible, adversarial identity circulating through alien Indian lands. In the third and most popular novel in the quartet, Maharashtra Jivanprabhat (“The Dawn of Maratha Life,” 1878), the stranger is not only the Rajput warrior who has strayed into the Maratha domains, but the warrior-king Shivaji himself, a homeless itinerant who, in one of the set-pieces of the narrative, invades the very house in which he was born, tearing down its walls to reveal the wife of the Muslim general cowering in what had once been his mother’s kitchen. The language of a militant Hindu nation may have overtaken the possibilities of colonial dharma, but the sense of an uncanny reciprocity between self and “foreign” empire remains. It is one of the ironies of Dutt’s evolution as a novelist that, in his quest for the wider nation, his progression outward from Bengal—moving with each new narrative from Agra to Maharashtra to Rajasthan—increasingly comes to feature “the negative feelings that go with a lack of recognition.”92 If this represents the “conflictual style” characteristic of the Hegelian pursuit of “affective, juridical and social recognition” within the realms of politics, it also entails a familiar form of trans-colonial identification, based on the affiliation of strangers.93 The model that had found its first political expression in Inder Nath’s voluntary contract with the invading Mughal officer, has here become the basis for a transregional web of such contractual affiliations to those who oppose the empire. In effect, a trans-colonial nation of strangers is born. The belated rhetoric of religious filiation that comes to saturate the narrative of Maharashtra Jivanprabhat thus masks a peculiarly Mainean liberal conception of a modern, contractually based polity.94 Unlike other historicized Hindu-centric constructions of the nation at this time, the novel is not a re-signification of earlier “Puranic-itihas” spatiotemporal schemas and symbols of sovereignty.95 Instead, the novel supplies Dutt with a superficial lexis rather than a fully achieved rationale. Thus, the “Puranic readings” that soothe the “maddened” hero of Maharashtra Jivanprabhat are those that have been: “sung in beautiful Bengal, in the snow-clad mountainous province of Kashmir, in the hero-producing country of the Rajputs, and in Maharashtra, in the ocean-washed Karnatic and Dravid.”96 These textual markers of the nation are introduced just as the hero Raghunath’s mind is threatened with “losing the power of rational thinking.”97 But the Puranas do not guide him toward an irrational pledging of his “very life-blood for the sake of protecting their old religion.”98 Instead, Raghunath pledges himself to efface the “disgrace which has darkened” his “own fair name”—and to do so by affiliating himself to the very “Maharaja” (Shivaji) whose betrayal had caused it. His mode of recuperation, like Inder Nath’s before him, is to prove himself to the sovereign “by deeds” alone.99 The strictly contractual nature of the affiliation is thus strengthened and, like Inder Nath before him, he does it all in the literal guise of a stranger. Jon Wilson has described the Indian technocracy and intelligentsia of late nineteenth-century Bengal in terms of “strangers” to the contemporary, managing “the rupture between abstract general categories and the concrete particularity of life,” between a degenerate present and a utopian past.100 Dutt’s historical fiction suggests instead that as early as the 1870s such a rupture had become part of a more

224 Alex Padamsee self-conscious interrogation of the roots of modern Bengali society, a process that had already recognized those roots as extra-territorial. In her groundbreaking discussion of the limits and possibilities of trans-colonial fiction, Katie Trumpener notes that: “On one level empires function by fixing a hierarchy of place and by instituting laws that keep colonized subjects in their respective places; on another level they function only by perpetual motion.”101 The very mobility of empire, she suggests, engenders an unrestrainable traffic between its locations, and with it “the emergence of a transperipheral view that bypasses or actively opposes the empire’s nominal centre.”102 Dutt’s own transnational liberal affiliations, I have been arguing, were transferred in his first novel to the person of the Mughal officer, an imperial figure of mobility that had reference to, but effectively bypassed, the “nominal centre” of England. In the narratives that followed, the affiliations are more oppositionally trans-colonial, reaching across the boundaries that separate place and peoples in India, while hardening the “nominal centre” in contradistinction. Mughal rule appears to become British rule, while its modernity is returned to the anomic and draining city through which Maine had defined it; thus Delhi is both “ruins” and “broken traces,” and an exorbitant capital “where the best talent of the country was focussed.”103 In Banga Vijeta, Dutt had described the Brahmin villain, Shakuni, exclusively in terms of the mise-en-abyme of modern capitalism, a thoroughgoing caricature of Ricardian man: All the movements of his heart were well under the control of a calm, resolute mind. His actions derived their power from pure self-interest. Like a spider, that spreads its web among the foliage after a selection of the most suitable spot, this man laid his trap with perfect knowledge of the impulses and actions of his victims. It was an invisible net, so fine and yet so firmly woven, that it could never be pierced or broken. Love, friendship, sympathy, gratitude, the virtues of the human heart that hold mankind together—these did not fetter his course. He was free from desire for fame or renown which furnishes the motive power of human action. Thus, he never failed in gaining his selfish end by his keen wit and deep cunning.104 Just four years later, in Maharashtra Jivanprabhat, the instrumental reason and self-interest of modernity have been transferred almost intact to the emperor Aurangzeb in his urban lair: Sometimes his bright eyes showed the signs of anger, and pride, or of determination and sometimes his lips and features manifested a dim outline of a self-satisfied smile at the success of some deep-laid plan. […] To move all the rest like puppets, through the instrumentality of his own subtle genius, to administer perfectly the whole continent alone was his sole object. Like the mythic dragon [sic] Vasuki, bearing alone the burden of the whole world upon his head, wishing for no respite, soliciting no one’s assistance, Aurangzeb aspired to carry the whole burden of the government of the

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Empire, alone, unaided: he therefore solicited no one’s advice, asked for no one’s counsel.105 The treatment of Aurangzeb as a figure of Hindu myth only further points out the secularized terms of this indictment. It is not simply “Muslim rule” that is being castigated here, still less the historical persona of the emperor. Translated into several Indian languages by the early twentieth century, this influential portrait is shaped most of all by the figure of “the stranger,” shuttling ambivalently between ancient and modern identifications. It should be no surprise, then, that his only true rival, “the past grand master so to speak of the same craft, he who was as wily as [Aurangzeb] was near-sighted,” is the exiled and fatherless Shivaji himself.106 For who else but a perfect stranger could lead the nation through the latest fictions of kinship? In recent reassessments of Dutt’s intellectual contribution to the emerging nationalist movement, his ethical stance toward the once and future nation has been treated as above all organicist. Thus, in terms of cultural history, his earliest work defied epochal rupture and underscored the synthetic, absorptive powers of India. And in economic historiography, he revealed the self-governing, selfsufficient community of the modern Indian nation state, a holistic organism that, like the image of the village community, survives its global martyrdom intact.107 Henry Schwarz sums up this view when he says that, for Dutt, “dialectics is ultimately a narrative of redemption […] inimical to conflict.”108 Yet, what emerges from Dutt’s imaginative dialectic with Maine’s comparatively closed economy of modernity is an overriding sense of the constructed, unstable nature of spatiotemporal boundaries, and not simply their redemptive resolution. Dutt’s fictional reworking of Mughal history therefore offers less a nativist repossession of territory, genealogy, and community, than what Paul Ricoeur has described as the “pleasure of recognition […] a prospective concept of truth, according to which to invent is to rediscover.”109 The history Dutt “rediscovers” time and again in his quartet of novels is neither purely organic nor transcendent of its trans-colonial context. Instead it is a history premised on the open-ended ethics of mobility, affiliation, and estrangement that must, for the moment, stand in for the nation. For the student stealing away from his home in 1868, literally at night and under a veil of secrecy from his disapproving family, this was a form of narrative he would have to invent, if only to recognize within it his own more intimate history.

Notes 1 H. S. Maine, “Address to University of Calcutta (March 1866),” in VillageCommunities in the East and West: Six Lectures Delivered at Oxford with Additional Addresses (London: John Murray, 1907 [orig.1871]), 290–291. Maine’s involvement in drafting the “Act for the Regulation of Printing Presses and the Preservation of Books Printed in India” (1866−7) may have further drawn his attention to the new Bengali genre; see G. Duff, Sir Henry Maine: A Brief Memoir of His Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1892), 24. On Maine’s linguistic competence, see Maine’s own comments in his “Minute on Indian Universities” (1868), reproduced in Duff, Maine, 385. 2 Maine, “Address to University of Calcutta,” 241.

226 Alex Padamsee 3 Ibid., 276. 4 Ibid., 291. 5 H. Maine, “Preface to the First Edition,” Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: John Murray, 1891 [1861 orig.]). Maine’s use of India as part of his comparatist project has recently been reassessed in Karuna Mantena’s Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). See also J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [orig. 1966]); A. Diamond, ed., The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and A. Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: The Transformation of an Illusion (London: Routledge, 1988). 6 Maine, “Address to University of Calcutta,” 291. 7 Ibid., 294. 8 On the positivist basis of Maine’s method, see Burrow, Evolution, 164. 9 S. Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 10 For a discussion of Ricoeur’s understanding of allegory see H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 [orig. 1987]), 180−181. 11 See B. Smith, “Maine’s Concept of Progress,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24, 3 (July−Sept 1963): 407−412. 12 E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963 [orig.1959]), 312−313. 13 H. Maine, Village-Communities in the East and West: Six Lectures Delivered at Oxford with Additional Addresses (London: John Murray, 1871), 7. 14 C. A. Bayly, “Maine and Change in Nineteenth-Century India” in Diamond, ed., Maine, 389−397. See also C. Dewey, “The Influence of Sir Henry Maine on Agrarian Policy in India,” in ibid., 353−375. 15 On Gandhi’s use of Maine, see G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 217−218. 16 See M. Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004) for a nuanced account of the dislocations attendant on the emergence of the idea of an Indian “nation” between the 1860s−90s. For a recent critique of the early “moderate nationalists” see S. Seth, “Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: the Politics of ‘Moderate Nationalism’ in India 1870−1905,” American Historical Review 104, 1 (Feb 1999): 95−116. 17 J. N. Gupta, Life and Work of Romesh Chunder Dutt C.I.E. (Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1986 [orig. 1911]), 15. 18 P. Rule, The Pursuit of Progress: A Study in the Intellectual Development of Romesh Chunder Dutt 1848−1888 (Calcutta: Editions Indian, 1977), 24. On the uneven development of Indian participation in open competition examinations, see J. M. Compton, “Indians and the Indian Civil Service, 1853−1879: A Study in National Agitation and Imperial Embarrassment,” Royal Asiatic Society Journal, Parts 3 and 4 (1967). 19 Gupta, Life, 203. 20 The organization and aims of the movement are set out in K. K. Sen Gupta, “The Agrarian Leagues of Pabna, 1873,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 7, 1 (March 1970): 253−269. 21 The fullest discussion of Dutt’s role can be found in Rule, Pursuit, 53−69. 22 Rule, Pursuit, 73−74. It should be noted, however, that to some extent Dutt’s views resonated with those of the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, Sir George Campbell, and helped secure him a position of authority when land policies came to be more thoroughly reviewed in the 1880s (ibid. 54−55).

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23 Quoted in Gupta, Life, 203. 24 On the evolution of nineteenth-century liberal imperialism, see J. Pitt, A Turn to Empire: the Rise of Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); U. Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); T. R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For Indian liberal responses, see in particular, C. A. Bayly, “South Asians and Victorian Thought 1870−1900,” Basil Wiles Lecture, delivered at Queens University Belfast 15−18 May 2007. 25 On Dutt’s stalled progress to promotion at this time, see Gupta, Life, 39−49. For a useful summary of the similarly mortifying experiences faced by Bankimchandra as a deputy magistrate in the ICS in the 1870s, see A. Sen, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay: An Intellectual Biography (New Delhi: University of Oxford Press, 2008), 30−37. 26 See Dutt, “Literary Preferences” (1905), reproduced in Gupta, Life, 383−389. On the eclecticism of the nineteenth-century Bengali intellectual context, see for instance: Kaviraj, Unhappy Consciousness; B. A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996) and his Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); H. Harder, “The Modern Babu and the Metropolis: Reassessing Early Bengali Narrative Prose (1821−62)” in S. Blackburn and V. Dalmia, eds., India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 358−393. 27 Dewey, “Influence,” 358−361. 28 R. C. Dutt, Three Years in Europe, 1868 to 1871 (Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri & Co., 1896 [orig. 1871]), 37. 29 For an emphatic reminder of the elitism of “moderate nationalism” see Seth, “Rewriting Histories.” 30 The transgressive dimensions of representation in nineteenth-century Indian travel narratives are discussed in J. Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 31 Dutt, Three Years in Europe, 35−36. 32 Ibid., 12−13. 33 Ibid., 36. 34 Ibid., 29. 35 Ibid., 36. 36 A discussion of “counterpreaching” as a late nineteenth-century Indian liberal discursive form can be found in C. A. Bayly, “South Asians and Victorian Thought 1870−1900.” 37 It should be noted that the bhadralok, the madhyabitta (or “middling classes”) of Calcutta from which Dutt himself originated, were often themselves caught up in sub-infeudatory relations with the countryside. See Sen, Bankim, 11. 38 Edward Said reconsiders the transgressive potential of his “traveling theory,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 436−452. See also, Said, “Travelling Theory,” in The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991 [orig. 1983]), 226−247. 39 C. A. Bayly, “Imagining a Sociology of South Asia 1870−1900.” In this essay, Bayly also emphasizes the importance of the “lived experience of ideas” to the history of Indian liberalism in this period, an idea I attempt to illustrate in this paragraph. 40 R. C. Dutt “Appendix B,” The Peasantry of Bengal, Being a View of their Condition under the Hindu, the Mahomedan and the English Rule, and a Consideration of the Means Calculated to Improve their Future Prospects (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1874), 227−228. 41 Dutt, The Peasantry in Bengal, 76. 42 Ibid.

228 Alex Padamsee 43 Dwijendranath Tagore, a leading figure in the so-called “Bengal renaissance,” denounced the tactics of the Pabna Agrarian League to the lieutenant-governor of Bengal as wanton violence committed upon “the inoffensive people.” The Tagores were one of the five families who purchased the Pabna estate from the Raja of Natore at the turn of the century (Sen Gupta, “Agrarian,” 254, 264). For the changing role of the Bengal zamindari in the colonial period, see S. Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 44 Letters from Dutt to his brother and reproduced in his biography testify to the high hopes he had for his fiction (see Gupta, Life, 203−207). 45 See Gupta, Life, 74−75; S. Chandra, The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994 [orig. 1992]), 63; and Kaviraj, Unhappy Consciousness, 113−114. 46 Scott was an important early influence for Dutt (“Literary Preferences,” 383). But see, for instance, his critical comments on the influence of Ivanhoe on Bankimchandra’s Durgesanandini in R. C. Dutt, The Literature of Bengal: Being an Attempt to Trace the Progress of the National Mind in its Various Aspects (Calcutta: I. C. Bose & Co., 1877), 200. 47 R. C. Dutt, Todar Mull, The Conqueror of Bengal, trans. Ajoy Dutt (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1947 [orig. 1874]) 158. 48 Ibid., 159. 49 S. Bannerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in NineteenthCentury Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull, 1998 [orig. 1989]), 130−132. On the wider evolution of this stereotype in colonial India, see N. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 50 Dutt, Todar Mull, 159. 51 Ibid., 160. 52 Ibid., 161. 53 For a summary of the initial interaction between pandits and the British in negotiating a code of law for British India, see M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770−1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 152−153; B. S. Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997 [orig. 1996]), 57−75; and S. Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), 22−31. For an influential early nineteenth-century Bengali mediation of Hindu law that drew on the instrumental reason of colonial codification, see J. E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780−1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010; [orig. 2008]), 168−170. 54 V. Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010 [orig. 2003]), 62. Reappropriations of the BhagavadGita during the colonial period are discussed in the essays featured in Modern Intellectual History 7, 2 (2010). 55 Dutt, Todar Mull, 76. 56 Ibid., 79. 57 To compare other contemporary Bengali liberal responses in these spheres, see Wilson, Domination of Strangers, 174−181. 58 Inder Nath’s affiliation is comparable here to Said’s sense of “a new system” of belonging. See Said, World, 16−20. 59 Dutt, “Literary Preferences,” 387. The adaptation may have been suggested by Michael Madhusadhan Dutt’s earlier example in fashioning what Romesh Dutt considered the greatest modern Bengali poem, Meghanadavadha Kavya (1861). See the extended eulogy on this epic poem in Dutt, Literature, 176−185. 60 For a discussion of the similarly revisionist interpretation of the villain by Madhusudan Dutt, see C. Seely, “The Raja’s New Clothes: Redressing Ravana in Meghanadavadha

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72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

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Kavya,” in P. Richman, ed., Many Ramayanas: the Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991) 137−155. Dutt, Todar Mull, 156. Ibid., 156. Goswami, Producing India, 167. For the former see for instance, Chandra, Oppressive Present, 127−128; and for a more nuanced reminder of the latter, see H. Schwarz, Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 47. On the cultural production of the Muslim as the nation’s Other, see Goswami, Producing India, 165−208. For the conflation of Mughal rule with Muslims as a whole at this time, see also Chandra, Oppressive Present, 121. Dutt, Todar Mull, 141−142. Ibid., 130. Smith, “Progress,” 412. Burrow, Evolution, 98−99. Grant Duff, Maine, 16. See, for instance, Dewey, “Influence,” as well as C. Dewey, “Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology,” Modern Asian Studies 6, 3 (1972): 291−328. It should be noted that Maine’s heightened belligerence here also reflects British perceptions of the “Mutiny” as partly the result of the machinations of a resurgent Indian Muslim Empire. In this context, see A. Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Maine, Village-Communities, 104. Dewey, “Images,” 296−297. Maine, Village-Communities, 119. Maine, Village-Communities, 119. Dutt, Todar Mull, 5. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 111. Dutt builds here on an eclectic Hindu reformist discourse in Bengal that dates back to the late 1830s, emphasizing “a theology of hard work and moral restraint” within a colonial bourgeois worldview. See Brian Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, or Faith of the Modern Vedantists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9−10. A similar ethic of “intense willing and praxis” can be found in Bankimchandra’s historical novels (Kaviraj, Unhappy Consciousness, 132). A similarly cyclical view of history shapes Dutt’s The Literature of Bengal (Schwarz, Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 42−48). Kaviraj, Unhappy Consciousness, 133. Prakash, Another Reason, 181−187. R. C. Dutt, The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule, From the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837, Volume One (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, n.d. [orig. 1907]), 617. For a discussion of the contemporary discursive connections between empire and metropolis on the question of degeneration, see J. Marriott, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 160−186, 227−229. Dutt, Economic History of India, 615−616. Prakash, Another Reason, 182. Maine, Ancient Law, 133−134. Ibid., 270. Ibid., 265, 268. The idea is further elaborated in his Village-Communities, 127−128. Maine, Ancient Law, 26−27, 31. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 78−79.

230 Alex Padamsee 91 On Dutt’s comparative restraint in stereotyping Muslims see Chandra, Oppressive Present, 127. 92 P. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. D. Pellauer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 218. 93 Ibid. 94 For a discussion of the unstable traffic between filiative and affiliative ties see Said, World, 20−21. 95 On earlier nineteenth-century Puranic-itihas, as well as their re-readings in the 1860s and 1870s, see Goswami, Producing India, 154−208. 96 R. C. Dutt, Shivaji, or the Morning of a Maratha Life, trans. K. M. Jhaveri, (Ahmedabad: M. N. Nanavatty, 1899 [orig. 1878]), 184−185. 97 Ibid., 183. 98 Ibid., 185. 99 Ibid., 195. 100 Wilson, Domination of Strangers, 193. 101 K. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 244. 102 Ibid., 245. 103 Dutt, Shivaji, 220, 227. 104 Dutt, Todar Mull, 50. 105 Dutt, Shivaji, 252. 106 Ibid., 252. 107 See, respectively, Schwarz, Writing Cultural, 39−48; and Prakash, Another Reason, 185. 108 Schwarz, Writing Cultural, 43−44. 109 P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. K. McCaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 42.

Afterword Bombay’s “intertwined modernities,” 1780–1880 C. A. Bayly

Gyan Prakash’s book, Mumbai Fables (2010), presents a picture of the city as a “spectacle of modernity, as an ideal of modern life,” projected transnationally through Bollywood.1 It details not only the glory of the contemporary as reflected along the length of Marine Drive, but also the sleaze of political corruption and murder that was its dark underside in the era of Mrs Gandhi and after. Prakash, growing up in Bihar, records that he was entranced from afar by the image of the city’s shining modernity. A review of his book in Outlook India fastened on the story of the largely unsuccessful attempts to photograph the Parsi “Towers of Silence” from the air some years before, a journalistic project that was interdicted for fear of offending the Parsi community.2 Was this story one of modernity or a reflection of “tradition” within modernity as theorized by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph in the 1960s?3 In parallel, the images of Bombay that appear in the work of Arjun Appadurai present a picture of the local appropriations of the transnational and modern, with one, in his celebrated phrase “cannibalizing the other.”4 But what was the origin and nature of this modernity? The present collection of essays provides us with historical examples of individual or groups of political and cultural leaders appropriating and “cannibalizing” the transnational in the context of the neo-traditional indigenous cultures of colonial India. Thus, for instance, Raja Shivaprasad attempted to promote an idea of modern education through the medium of Hindustani, while he was rebutted by a different type of project associated with the “modern” (adhunik) language of Hindi championed by the Nagari Pracharini Sabha.5 Was that brilliant eighteenth-century globalized language Urdu-Hindustani any less “modern” than the newly nationalized Hindi? Equally, the Banaras pandits understood the scripture as timeless and hence undeniably modern in their debates with the self-styled scientific modernity of theosophy.6 Then again, Raja Serfoji of Tanjore had, at an earlier period, tried to adapt the teaching methods of the Tranquebar missionaries to promote a new style of South Indian polity.7 Yet Danish evangelical Protestantism and the new-style Maratha state of which Tanjore was a southern representative were coterminous. So was modernity a series of projects, a sensibility, or the concurrence of political and sociocultural changes at a transnational level? And what should we make of the recent assaults on the notion of modernity by Bruno Latour, who argues that “we have never been modern,”8 or the attack by the anthropologists Harri Englund and

232 C. A. Bayly James Leach on the notion of “multiple modernities,” which seemed to be a way out of this empirical and theoretical impasse? Englund and Leach accuse sociologists, and by extension many historians, of compressing time and place into an overriding teleology that strips the subject of agency and at the same time promotes an intellectually shallow relativism.9 In fact, several historians have proposed a more robust conjunctional approach to modernity, as Brian Hatcher notes in Chapter 2 of this volume.10 But this, in turn, requires close attention to the practices or ideologies that converged to create this modern imaginary and the field of power within which it occurred. If the issue of individual modernizing projects—such as those of Serfojee, Shivaprasad, or the pandits of Bengal or Banaras in the nineteenth century— throws up such problems, what we might mean when we call a city such as Bombay “modern” in a given period of historical time is even more problematic. In the case of Bombay and its hinterland, which form the case study of this chapter, the problem is compounded by an imbalance in the historiography.11 Bombay has benefited from excellent scholarly studies of its commercial and industrial development, notably by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar.12 In a recently published essay, Chandavarkar writes of Bombay’s “perennial modernities,” its eclectic and “cosmopolitan” character, which he understood to be a consequence of a modus vivendi established between its various communities through economic competition and reciprocity.13 Bombay’s colonial politics has also been studied by James Masselos and Christine Dobbin (in the 1970s), among others.14 Equally, Appadurai’s and Prakash’s visions of the city’s present and future as a cosmopolis have been arresting. Yet, somehow, Bombay’s social and intellectual history, especially before the twentieth century, has been much less prominent in international South Asian historiography than that of Bengal or even North India, where the emerging Hindu and Muslim community leaders have absorbed great attention.15 I use the term “international South Asian historiography” because Bombay and its hinterland has thrown up many able local interpreters, from the “Goa school” through historians of the Parsi community to a scholar such as J. P. Naik, who has written insightfully on early Bombay political thought, and whose work will be discussed below.16 Yet the study of Indian modernity, whether it is seen as derivative, a form of “mimicry,” distorted, or, conversely, anti-colonial and progressive in character, has been heavily weighted toward northern India in particular. This relative underdevelopment of Bombay’s historiography in the realm of culture and political ideas is a product, in part, of the international importance of Bengali writers and political leaders from the nineteenth century, ranging from Rammohan Roy through Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and Subhas Bose to today’s Subaltern Studies historians, all of whom are disproportionately grouped in Bengal and have powerful cachet in Europe and North America. Bengali “culturalism”17 coexisted and struggled with “colonial modernity,” as Rochona Majumdar elaborates in Chapter 7 of this volume, creating an “unhappy consciousness” and deep ambivalence toward the West, which is, moreover, attractive to contemporary post-colonial studies. Bombay, by contrast, seems to have

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made an easier transition into capitalist modernity. Western Indian “culturalism” seems to have been relegated to Pune and the Deccan, and even when Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an “arch-culturalist,” appeared in Bombay it was in the guise of a working-class leader rather than as an avatar of the glories of the Maratha icon Shivaji. Equally, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, another scourge of the Bombay “moderates,” was himself a liberal in many respects. In his struggle for Dalit rights, he proposed thoroughly “modern” remedies: the creation of property rights, and electoral and employment reservations. Bombay’s relatively muted appearance in debates on colonial modernity perhaps results, then, from a sense that in Bombay “it’s the economy, stupid!” and that what we really want to know about Bombay is the importance of its industry and international trade rather than its intellectual, political, or social life. This is a prejudice complemented by the assumption that, since Indian independence, Bombay University and the city’s research institutes have been overwhelmingly directed to the hard sciences, or at best sociology, while history, the humanities, and the social sciences are to be found in Calcutta or Delhi. But who would downplay the cultural and intellectual life of, say, nineteenth-century Manchester, home of the Manchester Guardian, suffrage reform, and anti-slavery, and later, one of Britain’s major history departments? At any rate, it may be time to “provincialize” Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, or at least to see these regions within a wider Indian context rather than as representative of it. Certainly, citizens of Bombay and the west coast in the nineteenth century saw themselves as the most advanced people in India. It may be that Calcutta had more literary clout but, to them that city was socially quite conservative, even backward. This was especially so in regard to gender roles: in Bengal women were confined to the home and their education was minimal, supposedly a reflection of Muslim obscurantism. In Bombay, publicists claimed that they were decades ahead of Calcutta in the promotion of women’s rights and public visibility. The “poor Bengalis” had not yet emerged from this “characteristic feature” of “Mohammedan thralldom.”18 Even that supreme Bengali patriot, Keshub Chunder Sen, endorsed this view, though he hit back at his Bombay hosts by denouncing the Towers of Silence as “brahminical” and “barbaric.”19 Yet, again, what was this modernity and where did it come from? I take seriously the critique of Englund and Leach of the idea of an encompassing modernity, or even the rather bland retreat from this into the idea of “multiple modernities.” But historians might be able to find a middle path here, by considering new ideologies and forms of state-formation as they emerged in what is now called the “early modern period.”20 They could show how these aspects of modernity became intertwined and were later forged together yet more firmly by the impact of colonial rule after 1750. In early modern western India, well before formal British rule was established (even in Bombay, let alone the Konkan and Deccan) we can see a number of powerful transformations occurring, which groups thrown up by these changes later came to rehearse as aspects of “their” modernity. Far from being “medieval,” South Asia between 1500 and 1800, and especially its coastal regions, was in the throes of significant social and economic change. In

234 C. A. Bayly other words, historical analysis should be able to combine a sense of epochal social change with a proper attention to agency and power, as demanded by Englund and Leach. Further, it does not seem to me either that the discourse of cultural and political modernity in Bombay was simply an outcome of economic growth within a global capitalist economy. An essentialized concept of “economy” should not be treated as analytically prior to culture and ideas. Rather, a conjuncture of ideas and social practices constantly interacted with, and helped create, this commercial (or later) industrial growth. One important contributing factor to the modernities of what became Bombay and its hinterland was the emergence of a Portuguese Christian polity on the west coast of India after about 1510.21 This saw the implanting of new religious and social forms on a Hindu and Muslim littoral. It led on to intellectual conflicts between the Padroado and the Jesuits, the latter promoting the view that Goan Christian Indians could be spiritually the equal of Europeans. But this was not simply a theological dispute between Europeans. It was entangled with the assertion by Luso Descendentes, that is, creoles, and Portuguese Indians of their right to office in church and state in the Portuguese Indian colonies. These conflicts were in turn confounded with issues of caste status. The issue of rights to office also implied rights to political representation.22 Even in the early days of British rule, there already existed in Bombay a limited system of representation on urban bodies. This had been established much earlier by the Portuguese, who had blended the medieval European form of the corporation (conselho) with the indigenous concept of the panchayat. Equally, the Portuguese commitment to conversion, compared with the English East India Company’s hostility to it, promoted a large expansion of education along the length of the west coast, with schools teaching technical subjects as well as language, religion, and culture in Diu, Daman, Bassein, Mahim, and Bombay itself. Later, British and American Protestant missionaries moved into the area, while Parsi initiatives underpinned the work of the Bombay Native Education Society. In this way, doctrinal competition through education created a particularly large concentration of secular and avowedly modern skills in the region.23 The second critical form of ideological and social change on the coast arose more directly from Asian early modernity itself. This was represented, above all, by the Parsi diaspora across western India, especially at Surat and later Bombay. The Parsis, as heterodox exiles and later commercial co-actors with the Portuguese and British in the burgeoning Indian Ocean and China trades, developed social and religious institutions that marked them out as a “chosen people.” As well, they adapted their form of local assemblies and created their own modernized form of the Indian panchayat. Above all, they promoted a local commercial knowledge economy through bulletins of intelligence, which later became newspapers. There is a well-developed history of the Parsis in western India,24 but it tends to form a stand-alone community history by comparison with the universalizing history of the Bengali bhadralok. In the case of the Parsis, an inherited sense of their Persian origins and cultural difference may have contributed to their feeling of uniqueness and their embrace of the new.25 They were, of course, relative latecomers to the world of Indian Ocean commerce, compared with the Bohras and Memons. Many

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of the most influential Parsis of the nineteenth century, notably Dadabhai Naoroji, came from relatively poor rural families, often priestly ones rather than from an old mercantile aristocracy. Nevertheless, Parsi aspiration and their early compacts with the Portuguese and the British, when both these powers remained endangered bitplayers on the west coast, propelled them rapidly to prominence. By the early eighteenth century, quite apart from their subtle networks of relations of power and money across the Indian Ocean and Middle East, Parsis had fostered a robust sense of self-representation to their come-lately British rulers, which meshed with vigorous debates within their panchayats and religious trusts. For instance, Nowroji Manek voyaged to London to protest to the East India Company directors about the “arbitrary” acts of Sir Nicholas Waite, governor of Bombay, against his family as early as the 1720s.26 What one might call a culture of cosmopolitan commercial sociability arose very early, with Parsis, and later Gujarati Banias, meeting the British and Portuguese on equal terms in maritime insurance societies that operated across the whole area between East Africa and along the China coast.27 The Parsis’ emphasis on community knowledge, and their separateness—yet location within a cosmopolitan space—created a range of commercial opportunities, as much as commercial opportunity reinforced this sense of identity. Related to the case of the Parsis were the various overlapping Shi’a sects of Bombay and the coast: Ismailis, Bohras, Khojas, and Memons. Again, these were in origin wide-ranging commercial communities that had maintained strong links with Iran, the Persian Gulf, and even East Africa well before the onset of colonial domination. For instance, the word “Bohra” seems to have been a corruption of the Gujarati vewahar or “trading.” The Shi’a sects had long been part of what Gagan Sood terms the “Islamicate ecumene,” a network of seaborne entrepreneurship and knowledge that arose pari passu with the great Islamic empires of the early modern period.28 Here again, an emphasis on community knowledge and ingenuity provided the basis for their particular modernism. It is often thought that the high rationalistic form of orthodox Sunni Islam provided Muslims with the entrée into modern religious movements in India, whether in the Aligarh or Deobandi variety. Yet the west coast Shi’a, particularly the Ismailis, conserved a mystical tradition that emphasized the unity of God and promoted a kind of religious and ethnic cosmopolitanism, whereby all races and religious forms should ideally add their different characters to a common humanity. A key Ismaili text, known in nineteenth-century Bombay, described the ideal human as: “Persian by breeding, Arabian by faith…Iraqi in culture, Hebrew in law, Christian in manner, Syrian in devotion, Greek in science, Indian in discernment, Sufi in intimations.”29 This type of doctrine made it possible for later liberal reformers to promote cosmopolitanism, reform, and nationalism all at the same time. Badruddin Tyabji’s father, Tyab Ali, traveled to Liverpool as early as 1853. He became the first Indian solicitor and also spent time in France. A liberal in political beliefs, Tyab Ali was a social reformer who argued for women’s education and sought to purge his community of social evils.30 He emphasized the Bohras’ Islamic character and sought to promulgate Arabic, Persian, and Urdu rather than Gujarati. For his part, Badruddin

236 C. A. Bayly Tyabji adopted a more complete liberal position, arguing that many Muslim practices, such as purdah and niqab, or even Muslim male dress, were simply “customs” and not an essential part of their faith. It was this inclusiveness that made it possible for many Western Indian Shi’a to relate to the Indian National Congress as an organ of a wider Indian nationalism. In the meantime, this entangled competitiveness, and dependence on information and multilingualism, brought together the leaders of all these various groups in a series of educational initiatives that created an early and well-developed “knowledge economy.” Juggurnath Shankarsett, a leading Konkani Brahman magnate of the 1820s and 1830s joined with Parsis and others in the creation of bodies that would promote “the arts and sciences of Europe, yet retaining all that we consider sacred in the religious peculiarities of our various tribes.”31 A final element in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century transformation of western India was the emergence of powerful, streamlined forms of governmentality within the Maratha dynasties. This gave the hinterland of Bombay a distinctly new establishment of statistically skilled agrarian analysts in the form of the Maratha and Konkani Brahman elite.32 Later commentators, both British officials and late-Mughal historians, have perpetuated the myth that the Maratha polity was a kind of free-booting reversion to anarchy following the decline of the Mughals in North India. In fact, the combination of strong but regular and economically rationalized taxation systems at the political centers, with “free-booting” on the fringes, which was characteristic of the Maratha polities at least up to the reign of Baji Rao II, marks them out precisely as forms of what is commonly called “early modernity” by historians of Europe. Meanwhile, on the Konkan coast, Brahmans were developing new and complex systems of self-organization and adjudication, as Rosalind O’Hanlon has recently shown.33 These new and more flexible polities were characterized by a high degree of social mobility among the non-Brahman elites, as Dadabhai Naoroji and subsequent historians have pointed out. Village patels and pastoralist clans became rulers, retaining some degree of simple democracy. The Brahman elites also achieved both an occupational and social mobility, culminating in the iconic figure of Nana Fadnavis, the supreme Machiavellian politician of early modern India. Naoroji and the Bombay liberals were deeply impressed by the flexible social system they saw in the hinterland. Complaining in the 1850s that Maratha society had been much more equal and supportive of talent than the one the British had created, M. G. Ranade was once summoned before the Bombay governor to be scolded for his skepticism of Britain’s unique claim to have established modernity.34 This mix of developing social and intellectual forms, drawn from a conflict over rights and identity in Portuguese India, the exclusivist cosmopolitanism of the Parsis, and the statistical mercenariness of the Maratha operatives, was then bundled together in colonial Bombay and its hinterland by a combination of Scottish Enlightenment mavericks in the British administration, on the one hand, and British and Indian beneficiaries of the massive expansion of the opium trade (the one remaining lucrative Indian trade), on the other. Mountstuart Elphinstone,

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governor of Bombay, was lauded by Kenneth Ballhatchet in the 1950s as a liberal administrator, a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, and founder of British power in western India.35 His expansionist drive against the Maratha powers was typical of any Tory imperialist in the train of Richard Wellesley. But, in three areas, Elphinstone did indeed foster the existing sense of civilizational progress in the region, which set it apart from zamindar-dominated Bengal and North India. First, he founded what would become Elphinstone College, which operated as an arena of communication where Bombay Parsis and Gujarati and Maratha Brahmans came together in the context of Anglo-Scottish ideas of counting and mapping. Having once conventionally regarded the Maratha Brahmans as narrow and “bigoted,” Elphinstone was surprised by the rapid take-up of educational opportunities by this group and their Konkani peers.36 Indeed, the first Indian professor of Elphinstone’s own foundation was a Konkani Brahman liberal intellectual, Bal Shastri Jambhekar. A later incumbent was Dadabhai Naoroji himself. This merging of different administrative and intellectual traditions created a series of sensibilities that might be called “statistical liberalism,” and this was to become typical of Bombay public life. Of course, it would simply be “post-colonial cringe” to deny that a certain style of British progressive, or even a conservative Whig such as Elphinstone, was not critical in unleashing this sense of the new in Bombay. Yet their audience was already attuned to the notion of criticism, reform, and aspiration by long-standing debates within their own communities, cultures of travel, and the acquisition of knowledge. Colonial modernities thus found “ecological niches” in which to embed themselves. Second, by protecting and perpetuating the Maratha Brahman administrative elite (admittedly for pragmatic financial purposes and suspicion of the military aristocracy), Elphinstone brought to bear on the intellectual life of western India residues of the type of streamlined, information-rich and statistically laden revenue systems that had been the main strength of the Maratha polities. An admirer of Bentham, the governor was still acutely aware of the need to temper “abstract principle” and the construction of codes with local custom. He wrote to John Malcolm that his hovering between modernization and existing practice was driven by a need to “reconcile efficiency with economy.”37 Third, in his determination to preserve something of the complex and effective panchayat system of the region, Elphinstone provided a practical and discursive space for the discourse of representation, which gave a minimal sense of empowerment to communities as different as Maratha Kunbis and Bombay Parsis.38 Mountstuart Elphinstone represented an arresting blend of conservative and liberal. While he favored a positive role for the panchayat, he was hostile to the type of free press that had emerged in Calcutta, promoted by Rammohan Roy and James Silk Buckingham. But this did little to facilitate government control of the emerging print capitalism. Journalistic critiques of both the British government and local princely rulers rapidly emerged in both English-language and Marathi or Gujarati media. The need for commercial and political intelligence overrode fears of the destabilizing influence of the press. Conflicts over trade and shipping led rapidly to the growth of a litigious, well-informed public, ready to pack the British

238 C. A. Bayly courts, demand representation on grand juries, and rapidly assemble in large public meetings.39 A set of collected essays edited by Thomas Trautmann has recently shown how British and later Indian oriental scholarship in Madras differed from that in Calcutta.40 The same can be said of Bombay. The Bombay Literary Society (BLS) established in 1804 by British military and civil officers in western India became a forcing house for colonial ethnography.41 But its tone was distinctly different from comparable institutions in Bengal. Most of its publications were distinctly more favorable to Indian institutions and aspirations. Several of its members lambasted James Mill’s History of British India, one even denouncing him as a liar and fraudster. Equally, the publication of an early census of Bombay and the work of W. H. Sykes, statistical reporter to the government of Bombay, illustrated the application of the ethnographic methods of the Scottish (and English) Enlightenment to an existing dense body of statistics amassed by Maratha government and its patels, down to the level of the individually and personally named peasant landholder.42 The publications by members of the BLS also showed acute awareness of the maritime and littoral contexts of the Presidency. The Society’s publications included articles on Bushire, discussions of Persian language, and investigations into transregional Sufi sects. The Bombay Indian elite immediately responded to this environment. The rapidly rising Parsi commercial community, along with Gujarati merchants, founded scholarships and educational institutions. A Native Bombay Literary Society had emerged by the 1830s and the vernacular press rapidly developed. A whole generation of Elphinstone College graduates, who had worked with Jambhekar, emerged into the evolving Bombay public sphere. Jambhekar himself led an assault on backward practices such as child-marriage and nautch dancing, which he regarded as tantamount to “slavery and prostitution.”43 Dadabhai Naoroji and Narayan Chandavarkar emerged from this group. Yet one of the most striking figures here was Naoroji’s early co-worker, Furdoonjee Nowrozjee, who will be discussed below. In this way, statistical liberalism was complemented with a social liberalism marked by the emergence of reforming connections within the Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi communities. These pressed for education, local political representation, and the purging of “corrupt” religious and social customs. Jambhekar was, indeed, a western Indian Rammohan Roy, or rather he stands as representative of one skein of Bombay liberalism that emerged quite independently of events in Calcutta. This Parsi modernity, the creole inheritance of Portuguese India, and Maratha Brahman statistical awareness together created a context for what many saw as progressive social politics within a relatively loose, but intellectually provocative, colonial hegemony. In addition to this, the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed several shocks that further galvanized these changes. Perhaps the most striking was the arrival of the European revolutions on the west coast of India in the form of unrest at Goa, Diu, and Daman. This directly affected the Bombay elites and redoubled their call for political representation and education. Indeed, the impact of the Iberian revolutions on Portuguese India, and by extension, British

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India, brought the west coast directly in contact with the most radical consequences of global modernity. Goa itself experienced armed revolution and reaction, and the impact of this was clear in Bombay, where news from Rio de Janeiro was eagerly awaited. Major Bombay merchants, Portuguese Indians, Parsi and Gujarati Bania, like their Calcutta contemporaries, all believed that a constitutional government in the Portuguese empire would benefit the cause of free trade in opium from Malwa, and British and Portuguese ports to China, while at the same time giving locally born citizens a role in government. As Claude Markovits has observed, the British in Bombay surreptitiously supported Portuguese liberals both for reasons of international strategy directed against “reactionary” European powers and also because of their direct financial interest in the opium trade.44 One individual whom the British supported was Bernardo Perez da Silva, a Goan Brahman and leader of the liberal faction, who was exiled first to London, like Bolivar before him, and then to Rio. Perez da Silva returned to India in the mid1830s and took part in a further coup against monarchist conservatives. Da Silva wrote a pamphlet that was finally published in 1832 in Rio under the title “A dialogue between a doctor of law and a ‘Portuguese of India’ on a constitution for the Portuguese empire.”45 This pamphlet, arising from discussions at the Liberal Cortes of 1826 in Lisbon, gave a striking picture of the march of modernity from a global perspective, but also in a decidedly Indian mode. Notably, it was dedicated by da Silva to “The Youth of India” (mocidade da India), perhaps signaling the birth of the idea of “Young India” some time before it emerged in Calcutta. Da Silva lauded the balanced constitution of the United States that had promoted its success, resulting in an enormous growth in population and the number of states in the Union.46 Equally, British constitutional government had avoided the civil strife and bloodshed that had occurred across the rest of the world and facilitated a huge growth in British exports. If Portugal followed suit and established a true constitutional monarchy, it would also become a world polity of the same sort. Implicit here was also the idea that the “natives” of the Portuguese Empire should also participate in constitutional representation through a newly formed Cortes in Lisbon, as da Silva himself had done when a representative of the states of India (eleito as Cortes, pelos Estados da India).47 This, of course, was an aspirational analogy to the United States of America. A second global political shock to the Bombay progressives was the re-emergence of a forward imperial policy in Britain in the later 1830s, somewhat dimming da Silva’s vision of an irenic British imperial polity, which he had also promoted in his pamphlet. This new imperial demarche was accompanied by a harder policy toward princely states in western India, leading ultimately to the revolt in Satara in 1848, and distantly contributing to the Great Rebellion of 1857. Coinciding as it did with the last stages of the trade depression of the 1830s—the sight of the empire pouring out blood and treasure in wars in China, Afghanistan, and later the Punjab, the Crimea, and Burma—Indian and British liberals in Bombay began to move toward a political stance that could be described as fully anti-colonial and not simply anticolonization, as had been the tenor of the critiques of the Company and the British

240 C. A. Bayly government mounted by Rammohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore, or Jambhekar, for instance. An intriguing figure here is Bhaskar Pandurang Tarkhadkar, a Maratha Brahman who in 1841 initiated a ferocious attack on the British in India, which was hardly replicated before Tilak’s diatribes at the end of the century. The series of letters was published in the Bombay Gazette (and others joined the fray) and was clearly part of one of the last attempts by British free traders in Bombay to rid themselves of the Company’s monopoly. In this light, it is not surprising that Tarkhadkar himself worked for the great commercial magnate, educationist, and social reformer Sir Jamsetjee Jheejheebhoy, a convinced free-trader, particularly as it related to the opium trade. What is striking, however, was the “rhetoric of English India” that Tarkhadkar’s attack revealed. For he drew on the radical British tract of the 1770s, the “Letters of Junius.” More distantly, he drew on Tacitus’s Agricola in his denunciation of British rule. The British were equivalent to the ravaging Danes in Dark Ages Britain and the early Muslim invaders in India. The British were “a horde of foreign usurpers whose sole aim is to enrich themselves”; the Muslims had despised Hindus “only for their religion.”48 But under the British, all Indians were excluded from offices, and even under the corrupt Portuguese “India had never been so degraded and impoverished.” Tarkhadkar went on to denounce the hypocrisy of British writers who claimed India had been made free by colonialism. Yet all the railways, all the laws promulgated were mere “conveniences for your own sake” as India was “rendered every day poorer and poorer.” J. P. Naik has examined this arresting strain of early anti-colonialism in Bombay in the context of several other writers of the 1840s and 1850s in articles that deserve to be better known outside India.49 In particular, Indian statistical liberalism had clearly now fixed on “the drain of wealth” as a key trope in its transnational analysis. There is no question, of course, that some earlier British writers, such as the part-radical Montgomery Martin, had already broached the issue. But we can also glimpse Indian complaints about the decline of the Mughal moral economy and the extraction of wealth from India in the late-eighteenth century. This, then, was a transnational theme in political economy that was perfected by Bombay liberals and reached its apogee in Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and un-British Rule in India. However, it is to Naoroji’s earlier co-worker who was later overshadowed by the MP for Finsbury that we now turn. For Furdoonjee Nowrozjee, another Parsi product of Elphinstone College, was typical of the Parsi/Bania cosmopolitan strain of Bombay’s converging modernity that this Afterword is concerned with. Furdoonjee has never received a scholarly biography in English, however. Furdoonjee embodied several of the features of the transnational sensibility and aspiration that contributed to the modernities of Bombay. Perhaps most importantly he was an accomplished multilinguist, holding the office of native translator to the Bombay Supreme Court during the middle years of his career. The Bengali and Madras reformers were, of course, multilinguists as well, commanding Sanskrit, Bengali, and English—or Tamil/Telugu, Sanskrit, and English—respectively, but Furdoonjee and some of his contemporaries were able to work in English, old and modern Persian, Gujarati, Marathi, and Sanskrit. He compiled one of the earliest

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and most authoritative Gujarati dictionaries, for example. Furdoonjee’s early contact with the British, his linguistic ability, and transnational sensibility resulted in his participation in Alexander Burnes’s journey to Afghanistan and Central Asia during the 1830s. Equally, his inherited statistical knowledge was enlisted in his “Report on the weights, measures and coins of Cabool and Bokhara,” which commented on, among other matters, the number of Russian goods in the Kabul market.50 Back in India, Furdoonjee was increasingly struck by the discrepancy between British legalistic rhetoric and the supposed desire of the British to advance the status of Indians, on the one hand, and the reality of colonial rule, on the other. His On the Civil Administration of the Bombay Presidency was one of the most authoritative attacks on the British government of Bombay in the last days of the Company, calling for Indian representation and above all enlistment of “educated natives” in the civil service instead of Haileybury-educated British youngsters who understood little or nothing of Indian reality.51 Later, he extended the attack on British rule with a pamphlet on The Personal Bearing of Europeans in India Toward Natives.52 During the 1860s, before he and Dadabhai Naoroji went to Britain to argue for the fiscal reform of the Government of India, Furdoonjee and Naoroji carried out a number of surveys of population, nutrition, and mortality statistics in Gujarat and the Deccan.53 These drew both on British census and assessment methods, and the deep local knowledge accumulated by the earlier Maratha administrations, to paint a depressing picture of what Dadabhai later termed “poverty and un-British rule.” These early attempts to enlist statistical and ethnographic analysis into projects of improvement and national self-assertion directly influenced bodies such as the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (the “public service association” of Poona), which by the 1880s became a significant and widely spread civil society organization. Also taking part in many of the Parsi reform movements and attacks on hereditary authorities within the community, Furdoonjee was typical of the tradition of Bombay statistical liberalism that persisted through to Gopal Krishna Gokhale before 1916, and provided the fundamental critique of British rule from the perspective of political economy. It is important to not subsume developments such as this simply within the frame of early nationalism, as has been the tendency in so much of the historiography of South Asia. This is why I use the term “liberal” to describe these men. Their remit ran more deeply and also more widely than early nationalism. An important aspect of Bombay and its hinterland was the emergence of the “public man,” to employ Richard Sennett’s phrase.54 The “public man” was an icon of the modern, lauded and garlanded for public works and philanthropy. Some were great merchant barons, such as the Jheejheebhoys, while others such as Naoroji were avowed politicians. But some were middle-class heroes, doctors, and town-planners. The newspapers were keen to point out how such men had made the new Bombay a city of boulevards “like Paris,” its harbor crammed with shipping, its “magnificent factories with their minaret like chimneys,” and its piped water and dispensaries set up by native gentlemen.55 Chandavarkar’s emphasis on the need for urban reform in a context of rapid industrial growth and pervasive disease, particularly in his

242 C. A. Bayly essay on “Sewers,” is well taken.56 But the improvements took place against the background of a growing imaginary of what a city should look and feel like, formed by newspapers and books from the proliferating public libraries. This imaginary was enhanced by Bombay travelers returning not just from Paris or London, but from the new Alexandria or Singapore—cities where Asians aspired to work on equal terms with Europeans. Public men such as the Saraswat Brahman, doctor, and philanthropist Bhau Daji helped beautify the new city and make it healthy and safe, for idealistic as much as economic reasons.57 According to urban legend, Bhau Daji had his education at Elphinstone College and Grant Medical College, paid for by a British resident of the city who noticed his skill at chess (which is, of course, a modernized version of an ancient Indian game). Along with European medical techniques, Bhau Daji also pressed into medical service the ancient Sanskrit Ayurvedic medical texts.58 Pherozeshah Mehta later came to emphasize education, too, although his model was not the British public school but the Lycée Louis Blanc in Paris, which provided a more rounded education and was often held up as the model for Parsi educational philanthropists.59 Such a vision of cumulative improvement spilled up-country and, as in political discourse, a link was often made with the progressive Maratha rulers. So in Pune, Jamsethjee Jheejheebhoy constructed a bund (a dam or levee) and made further improvements to the drainage system, the centerpiece of which was the aqueduct built by Nana Fadnavis in 1798.60 Bombay’s modern gaze turned outward as well. The local press kept up a continuous discourse on developments in Europe and Japan in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the Meiji Restoration. Cosmopolitan ties of community were also invoked. Organized by their Bombay co-religionists, Parsis in London presented a petition about the rights of Zoroastrians in Persia when the shah visited London in 1873.61 There was a political edge to this as the issue of Indian representation continued to provoke debate. Despite all the pressure from the liberals, Bombay municipality’s franchise remained very limited up to the First World War. But constant pressure kept the authorities on the defensive. We have seen that the relative independence of women was a key claim regarding the city’s modernity. One such battle occurred in 1873, when the local government refused to change the election rules for the municipality and make exceptions for 333 registered female voters when it transpired that these women could not appear in person and be verified physically at polling stations. This was presumably because they were pardah nashin. The municipal authorities argued that secluded women would have no knowledge of the outside world, and thus should not vote.62 The press denounced this as a falsehood. Despite seclusion, women, especially under the Marathas, did not suffer such ignorance, journalists said. They could hold and pass on property in their own right and independently of their husbands, unlike the case in Britain. They could even be watandars, or carry on business. Parsi women in Bombay “are known to conduct large business dealings.” Indeed, municipal elections were only new “in a certain sense” in India, and thus it can be said that Bombay was more advanced than its governors.

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Yet the image of the city’s intertwined modernities could produce a dark and menacing imaginary as well. This was sometimes political fear, as in 1870 and 1871 when Pherozeshah Mehta was arguing vigorously with John Crawfurd, the local administrator, for an extension of municipal representation. Mehta pointed to what had happened to Paris when the monarchy and later the empire had suppressed local representation. The horrific results, he claimed, were the storming of the Bastille and the Paris Commune, the second of which had been bloodily suppressed just before Mehta rose to speak in the Bombay council chamber.63 Sometimes the dark vision was of unorganized social revolt. A vision of the lumpen proletariat wandering the city looting its neighborhoods during festivals such as Holi and Mohurrum was constantly invoked by the city’s progressive press. The city was always at risk, it was said, from the ravages of “Persian ruffians” and village boys indulging in unseemly practices.64 Even the much lauded community modus vivendi broke down from time to time, especially in periods of economic distress—as when, at a vast meeting of 8,000 Parsi gentlemen in 1873, the activities of “Muslim badmashes” were denounced.65 These proponents of intertwined modernities, therefore, were attempting to exclude and suppress challenges to what they regarded as a proper lifestyle, both because they feared general economic disturbance and because they were offended by popular forms of cultural life both in their own and other communities. For many late nineteenth-century elites, whether in Europe, Japan, or even Bombay, liberal imperialism itself was also a critical dimension of the modern world—an aspect downplayed by the “modernization theorists” of the 1960s. The Bengali Brahmo Samaj reformer, Keshub Chander Sen, viewing Bombay with his usual ethnographic superciliousness, noted that the British there were less “nigger-hating” than their compatriots in Calcutta and this meant relations between the “races” were much better. But the downside was the fact that the big merchant princes such as the Parsis were absurdly deferential and subservient to the British.66 Certainly, the rulers tried to enlist the local elites into various projects of liberal imperialism that provided them with a vicarious sense of modernity, and that stood at odds with the polemics of Tarkhadkar and, later, Tilak. In 1873, for instance, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, governor of Bombay, lectured on the East African slave trade and African empire to a group of Khojas and Memons and local British judges.67 He asserted that no Indian merchants were directly involved in the trade, though some lesser ones were indirectly complicit. All civilized nations were now freeing themselves from “the taint of slavery” and in a few years no one “who calls themselves a Hindu or a Muslim will be able to be connected with it.” This was to be an example of the joint “civilizing” of Africa by Indians and Europeans through legitimate trade. Indeed, “one of the great causes of the advancement and general prosperity of Bombay has been the mixture of race here.” Frere hoped that all of Bombay’s races would be present in East Africa. There were no Parsis there yet, but “let us hope this vigorous race ends up there and does what it has been doing in India for many centuries.” A sign of this future was the opening of a new postal service to Africa via Aden, he added.

244 C. A. Bayly Finally, in the second half of the century, the political dimension of Bombay’s statistical liberalism turned its attention increasingly to its hinterland, where some of its techniques and sensibilities had originated in Maratha governmentality. As mentioned above, Naoroji and Furdoonjee carried out their own statistical surveys in the desh during the 1860s. These provided some of their ammunition when they appeared in front of the House of Commons Finance Committee in London in 1873. The foundation of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha created a constant flow of economic information between Bombay and the Deccan over the next generation. The statistical onslaught was only heightened by revenue re-settlements68 and distress in areas such as Khandesh and Nasik, and notably increased in the aftermath of the anti-moneylender riots of 1878. While early Dalit activists denounced the Poona Sabha as an organization for the propertied upper castes, it is striking how many local branches it had developed by the 1880s. Putting together the numerous associations of Bombay itself with the political stirring of the Konkan and Deccan, it is clear that western India had produced the most complex public sphere in any part of the subcontinent by the end of the nineteenth century.

Concluding thoughts All the essays in this volume have considered the complex relationship between what has been called “colonial modernity” and Indian understandings of what they regarded as their own modernity. Colonial constructions of the modern were often coercive, depending on the “othering” of a variety of Indian practices that Europeans saw as backward or non-modern. But so, indeed, were many Indian discourses of modernity and, even where these were responses to Western tropes, they often transcended European ideas, announcing their own superior modernity and “counterpreaching” against the backwardness and corruption of Europeans who were seen to have substituted the march of money for the march of soul. Again, while it should not be doubted that many aspects of the modernity that came to characterize the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had their proximate origin in Western modes of thought and economic practice, they could not have discovered their power to change without settling into “ecological niches,” which had been created by dynamic changes within Asian and Middle Eastern cultures over the previous 300 years, whether these were Islamic reformism, Hindu bhakti movements or the emergence of new common languages, such as Urdu and, later, Hindi. Consequently, the societies in the subcontinent that were (and were seen to be) the most “modern” were those where long-term changes emerging from the IndoIslamic ecumene coincided with particular interests of colonial governance and economic exploitation. One further such locus in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now marginalized as a scene of modernism, was the Punjab. Here the conflict and accommodation between new forms of Hinduism and Islam, Sikhism and the Arya Samaj became entangled with British military governance and developmentalism to create a vibrant form of modernity that was only smashed by the events of Partition.

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Another was Bombay and its hinterland. Of course, Bombay’s modernity has long been recognized, but it has usually been interpreted in starkly economistic terms. This Afterword has suggested how we might account for this modernity as a social and intellectual phenomenon and one with quite deep roots in the western Indian littoral. Bombay’s modernity has been advertised by Bollywood and newly historicized for the period after 1947. The Bombay press of the second half of the nineteenth century makes it quite clear, however, that the elite citizens of that era believed that their city was already hyper-modern. This was an imaginary often pitted against the “imperfect” modernity of Calcutta, a city verbose and hubristic, yet steeped in backwardness by a history of obscurantist Muslim rule and a present bedeviled by brutish and racist British settlers. As for Madras, it was too provincial to matter. The echelon of cities to which the Bombay elites aspired was not even that of Singapore, Hong Kong, Alexandria, or Manchester. It was Paris, where the Eiffel Tour was soon to rise, or New York, where the first skyscrapers were being envisioned. This imaginary was partly physical. It was the great sweep of Marine Drive and the neo-Gothic palaces, museums, and hotels soaring above Chandavarkar’s egregious sewers. Yet Bombay’s was also a vision of social modernity and “responsible” freedom, even within the constraints of colonialism. Public meetings and public spaces were open. Women moved freely in these spaces, but participation did not lead to the “painted promiscuity” of the “girl of the period.” It could be that this vision was a “mis-recognition” of the capitalist exploitation of the cotton mills. Certainly, Bombay could not have continued to modernize without its mills and its armies of jobbers as it made the change from being an oceanic entrepreneur to an industrial city. Yet the city’s imaginary was excessive and cannot simply be reduced to capitalist political economy alone. Bombay’s modernity arose in the longue duree from the slow accumulation and intertwining of visions and dispositions toward the outside, which were empowered by the connections and practices of its extraordinarily varied communities. Leach and Englund can resolve their problems with the flat concept of “multiple modernities” quite easily. The solution is history itself, which reveals the complex interaction between agency, power, and the imagination of the modern over time. This chapter has isolated several of these varied visions and dispositions. There was the constitutional liberalism of the west coast Indo-Portuguese elites, the commercial and cultural sonderweg of the Parsis, and the “local cosmopolitanism” of the Muslim Shi’ite trading communities. These merged with the statistical liberalism of the Bombay and Maratha hinterland elites. It was forged into new patterns by a powerful strand of Scottish Enlightenment rationality planted on the west coast. This conjunctural modernity did not represent an “easy ride,” however. Modernity is a time of crises when the clash of cultures is constantly deepened by the crash of globalized booms. The end of the US Civil War saw the destruction of numerous fortunes in Bombay and its hinterland as well as renewed fears of the running wild of “Persian ruffians” and “tom-tom boys” in its streets. But, equally, the rollercoaster experience of Bombay and the scarcities in its hinterland produced the first reasoned critiques of colonial government and global capitalism in the work of

246 C. A. Bayly Furdoonjee, Naoroji, Ranade, Mehta, and Malabari. Of all India’s nineteenth-century intellectuals, these Bombay liberals were the most cogent writers on issues of regional economic development, the location of cultural capital, and the rise of the “new imperialism.” Naoroji’s concept of swaraj and industrialization has clearly outlived Gandhi’s version with its hopeless anti-industrialism. The ideas of the rationalist statistical liberals of Bombay and its hinterland retain their potency as this present generation seeks to address new crises arising from the imbalances of global modernity.

Notes 1 G. Prakash, Mumbai Fables (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 77. 2 D. D’Monte, “No Tears for Sylvia” [a review of Mumbai Fables], Outlook India, 8 Nov 2010. 3 L. I. Rudolph and S. H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 4 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); G. Tindall, City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (London: Temple Smith, 1982). 5 Ulrike Stark, Chapter 3 of this volume. 6 Michael Dodson, unpublished essay. 7 Indira Peterson, Chapter 1 of this volume. 8 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, C. Porter, transl. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 9 H. Englund and J. Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity,” Current Anthropology 41, 2 (April 2000): 225−248. 10 Hatcher, this volume, citing K. P. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 43. This is also the position I adopt at a very broad level in C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780−1914 (London: Blackwell, 2004). For recent reconsiderations of “modernization theory” see, for example, S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, 1 (2000): 1−29; and B. Wittrock, “Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition,” Daedalus 129, 1 (2000): 31−60. 11 This chapter is an exercise in comparative historiographical reading. I claim no specialist knowledge of Bombay, but have been alerted to these issues through my forthcoming study of Indian liberalism, C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, c. 1800−1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 12 R. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Class in Bombay, 1900−1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850−1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 13 R. Chandavarkar, “Bombay’s perennial modernities” in History, Culture and the Indian City: Essays by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 14 J. Masselos, Toward Nationalism: Group Affiliations and the Politics of Public Associations in Nineteenth Century Western India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974); C. E. Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India: Politics and Communities in Bombay City, 1840–1885 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 15 Even by comparison with Surat, see, for example, D. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852−1928 (Berkeley:

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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University of California Press, 1991); or for Ahmedabad, see K. Gillion, Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). But see also, M. Naito, I Shima, and H. Kotani, Marga: Ways of Liberation, Empowerment and Social Change in Maharashtra (Delhi: Manohar, 2008), for sign of new developments. A. Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Comment on a lecture by the Rev. Dr Murray Mitchell on “Young Bengal,” Native Opinion, 2 Jan 1870. The Proceedings of the Bethune Society (Calcutta: 1865), “summary of proceedings,” lxx. Sanjay Subrahmanyam has been at the forefront of attempts to demonstrate the salience of vibrant change in the Asian world before 1750. M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (New Cambridge History of India vol. 1, 1) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). P. Kamat, Farar Far (Crossfire): Local Resistance to Colonial Hegemony in Goa 1510−1912 (Panaji, Goa: Institute Menezes Braganza, 1999). V. V. Gupchup, Bombay: Social Change 1813−77 (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1993), 23−32. See, for example, R. B. Paymaster, Early History of the Parsees in India: from their Landing in Sanjan to 1700 A.D. (Bombay: 1954), 122−125. E. Kulke, The Parsees in India: A Minority as Agent of Social Change (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978). P. Nanavutty, The Parsis (Delhi: National Book Trust, 1977), 51. Adrian Leonard of the University of Cambridge is working on this issue. G. D. S. Sood, “Circulation and Exchange in Islamicate Eurasia: A Regional Approach to the Early Modern World,” Past and Present, 212 (August 2011): 113–162. G. J. van Gelder, review of L. E. Goodman and R. McGregor, eds. and transl., Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), in Times Literary Supplement, 27 November 2010. H. B. Tyabji, Badruddin Tyabji: A Biography (Bombay: Thacker and Co., 1952), 5−9 Ibid., 69. S. Gordon, The Marathas, 1600−1800 (New Cambridge History of India vol. 2, 4) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). R. O’Hanlon, “Letters Home: Banaras Pandits and the Maratha Regions in Early Modern India,” Modern Asian Studies 44, 2 (2010): 201−240. Recounted to Gokhale; see his Speeches of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, 4th edn (Madras: G. A. Nateson, 1920), 771. K. Ballhatchet, Social Policy and Social Change in Western India, 1817−1830 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). S. Varma, Mountstuart Elphinstone in Maharashtra, 1801−1827: A Study of the Territories Conquered from the Peshwaas (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1981), 240. M. Elphinstone to J. Malcolm, 27 January 1819, cited in Ballhatchet, Social Policy and Social Change, 36. Varma, Mountstuart Elphinstone, 200−203. See, for example, Bombay Gazette, 5 March 1817. T. R. Trautmann, ed., The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay (London: 1819 [reprinted 1877]. See also T. Coates, “An account of the township of Lony,” in ibid., 229−264. G. G. Jambhekar, ed., Memoirs and Writings of Acharya Bal Shastri Jambhekar (1812−1846), vol. 2 (Pune: 1950), 64. C. Markovits, “British Perceptions of the Portuguese Role in the Malwa Opium Trade, c. 1800−1840,” unpublished paper in possession of the author.

248 C. A. Bayly 45 Dialogo entre um dotour em filosofia e um Portugez da India … sobre a constituicao politia do reino de Portugal (Rio de Janeiro: Na Typographia National, 1832). Copy deposited in Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University. I am grateful to the National Library of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, for making a copy of this work available. 46 Ibid., 7−8. 47 Ibid., title page. 48 “A Hindoo” to Bombay Gazette, 10 August 1841. 49 J. P. Naik, “Foreunners of Dadabhai Naoroji’s drain theory,” Economic and Political Weekly 36, 44/47 (24−30 Nov 2001): 4428−4430. 50 N. Furdoonjee, “The trade of Cabul,” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register (Sep 1838): 73−77. 51 N. Furdoonjee, On the Civil Administration of the Bombay Presidency (London: 1853). See also M. Ramanna, “Nineteenth Century Writings in English on Western India: Pre1867,” Indian Historical Review 36, 2 (Dec 2009): 257−271. 52 N. Furdoonjee, The Personal Bearing of Europeans in India Toward Natives (London: Trubner & Co., 1874). 53 Amrita Baazar Patrika, 16 Feb 1873. 54 R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977). 55 Native Opinion, 16 August 1874. 56 R. Chandavarkar, ‘Sewers” in History, Culture and the Indian City. 57 Native Opinion, 16 August 1874. 58 See D. Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (New Cambridge History of India 3, 5) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70; and M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770−1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 177−178. 59 C. Y. Chintamani, ed., Speeches and Writings of the Hon Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, KCIE, with an introduction by Dinsha Edulji Wacha (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1905), 35, 38−39. 60 Native Opinion, 13 April 1873. 61 Native Opinion, 10 August 1873. 62 Native Opinion, 20 July 1873. 63 Speeches and Writings of the Honbl Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, 106. 64 Native Opinion, 5 May 1872. 65 Times of India, cited Native Opinion, 12 June 1873. 66 Keshub Chunder Sen, The Book of Pilgrimages. Diaries and Reports of Missionary Expeditions (Calcutta: Navavidhan Publication Committee, 1940 [reprint]); Proceedings of the Bethune Society, lxx. 67 Native Opinion, 4 May 1873. 68 Native Opinion, 8 June 1873.

Index

Aceh, 120 acts, legislative, 19, 49 Addison, Joseph, 35 Adisur, King, 171 administrators; British or European, 8, 19, 34, 49, 59; colonial, 15, 19, 84, 172; Company, 18–19; early, 62; in princely states, 24 adoption, 30, 222 Aesop, 29, 31–5 Afghanistan, 239, 241 Africa, 72, 235, 243 agency, 3, 16, 98, 106–7, 110, 138–9, 148, 156, 232, 234, 245 Agha Sayyid Muhsin, 125 ahimsa, 137, 143 Ahmedabad, 149–50, 154 Akbar, Emperor, 214–15, 218 Alexander I, Czar, 118, 129 Alexander, James, 126 Aligarh, 235 Alivardi, Nawab, 190–1 Allahabad, 77 Allender, Tim, 76–7 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 9, 189–90, 192–4 Amarakosha, 30, 32 Ambedkar, Bhim Rao, 233 Amirkhanz, Abraham, 129 anachronism, 189, 192, 215 Anandamath, 49 Anandsuri, Acharya Vijay (aka Atmaram), 139–41, 145–56 Anaras (“The Pineapple”), 202, 205 Anderson, Benedict, 155, 190 Annadamangal, 9, 190–1, 200 Annambhatta, 32 Annapurna (goddess), 194 Appadurai, Arjun, 231–2

Arabic, 8, 21, 69, 101–3, 119, 121–2, 126, 128–9, 155, 236 Archaeological Survey of India, 71, 152 archeology, 57, 71, 150, 152, 154 Arinori, Mori, 96 Armenian, 117, 121, 127–8, 130 Arnold, Matthew, 78 Arnold, Thomas, 83 arthashastra, 165 Arya Samaj, 9, 75–6, 138, 140–1, 145–6, 244 Aryans, 85 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 57, 73, 140, 148 associations, voluntary, 71, 176, 180 Astrakhan, 118, 124–9 astronomy, 28–30, 146 atheism, 140–2 Athenaeum, The, 76 Atmaram, 9, 139–41, 145–56 Atmashakti, 179 Atmiya Sabha, 167 Aurangabad, 150 Aurangzeb, Emperor, 224–5 Aurobindo, 1 authority; local cultural, x; print, 79; textual or scriptural, 45, 47, 53, 55, 74–5, 146, 154 ayurveda, see medicine Azerbaijan, 130 Babu Chandicharan Singhar Khristadharmanurakti, 202 Baevskii, S. I., 103–4, 108 Baji Rao II, 236 Baker, Keith, 168–9 Baku, 128 Balabodhamuktavali, 32–5 Balashastriji, 75 Balbi, Gasparo, 80

250 Index Ballal Sena, 171 Ballantyne, James Robert, 86 Ballantyne, Tony, 5 Ballhatchet, Kenneth, 237 Banaras, see Benares Bandyopadhyay, Bhavanicharan, 59, 199 Bandyopadhyay, Gurudas, 179 Bandyopadhyay, Rangalal, 199, 201 Banga Vijeta, 214–17, 219, 222, 224 Bangadharshan, 213 Bangera Jatiya Itihasa, 170 Bangla, see Bengali Bangladesh, 165–6 Bangladesher Krishak,173 Banglar Samajik Itihasa, 171 Bankimchandra Chatterjee or Chattopadhyay, see Chatterjee, Bankimchandra Baptists, 18–19, 55 Barahin al-Sabatiyya dar Radd ‘Aqa’id Nasara, 120–1 Bareilly College, 84 Barisal, 171 Baroda, 16 Basel (Evangelical) Missionary Society, 124, 127, 129 Basel, 116 Bassein, 234 Basu, Nagendranath, 170–2, 175, 179, 184 Basu, Rajnarain, 199 Bauls, 198 Bauman, Zygmunt, 97 Bayley, W. H., 101 Bayly, C. A., 3, 191, 210, 213, 221 Bell, Andrew, 20, 28 Benares Agency, 70 Benares English Seminary, 69 Benares Institute, 71 Benares Sanskrit College, 19, 29, 34, 69, 71–5, 83 Benares, 2, 7, 17, 29, 33, 68–9, 138, 148, 155; as educational or cultural center, 70–1, 140 Benfey, Theodor, 73 Bengal Magazine, 82 Bengal, 9, 86, 123, 145, 165–74, 232, see also Calcutta, see also pandits; colonial, 7, 9, 48, 166–9, 184, 217; economy of, 69, 173–4, 183, 213; literary and cultural life in, 7, 19–20, 48, 73, 97, 183, 190, 194, 198, 210; military or political situation, 18, 166, 180, 190–2, 194, 211, 214; religious life in, 18, 32, 118–19, 145

Bengali or Bangla, 51, 55, 68–9, 165, 170, 172, 180, 194, 198–200, 208, 214, 232, 240 Bentham, Jeremy, 167, 200, 237 Bethune, John Elliot Drinkwater, 49, 51 bhadralok, 7, 51, 59, 213–14 Bhaduri, Udayanacharya, 171 Bhagalpur, 195 Bhagavad-Gita, 83, 174, 216, 220 Bhagavan, Manu, 16 bhakti, 85, 173–75, 177, 185, 200, 244 Bharatpur, 70 Bharatvarshiya Arya Dharma Pracharini Sabha, 62 Bhasa (literary Hindustani), 25 Bhashyabhumika, 75 Bhatta, Kuppa,24 Bhattacarya, Raghunandan, 56, 59 Bhattacharya, Vishvanath Panchanan, 32 Bhau Daji, 242 Bhavartha-ramayana, 32 Bhramocchedan, 75 Bhubaneswar, 190–1 Bhugol hastamalak, 80–2, 86 bias, anti-Muslim, 82–3, 86 Bible, 8, 10, 28, 32, see also translation Bidhaba bibaha ain, 202 Bihar, 191–2, 195, 231 Bikaner, 150 Bissett, John, 121 Blackburne, William, 21 boarding houses, 83–4 Bohras, 234–5 Bombay, 10, 15, 123, 144, 149, 156, 231–45; Calcutta and, 233, 238–9, 243, 245; education in, 32–33, 234–8, 240, 242; Portuguese and, 234–6, 238–9, 245; religion in, 123, 138, 140–1, 234–6, 238, 242; society in, 178, 232–6, 238, 241–3, 245 Bombay Literary Society, 238 Bombay Native Education Society, 234 Bombay Presidency, 15, 32–3, 144, 178, 238, 241 Bombay University, 233 Bongong, 211 books, 31–2, 34, 71, 79, 96–7, 110–11, 118, 120, 123–4, 138, 141, 149–50, 155–56, see also textbooks Borodin, 202 Bose, Subhas, 232 Brahmans, 53, 140, 151, 236–40, see also pandits; education and, 21–4, 26, 29, 80,

Index 144, 236; criticism of, 73, 75, 174, 182, 215, 224, 237; in princely courts, 23–4, 29–30, 34; in colonial administration, 24, 30, 237; printing industry and, 31, 33–4; status, hegemony, or intercaste relations of, 46, 47, 52, 61, 70, 74, 170–71, 174, 178, 181–2, 215 Brahmo Samaj, 51–2, 55–6, 58, 61–2, 145, 167, 200, 243 British and Foreign Bible Society, 118, 120–2, 125–6 British East India Company, see East India Company Brunton, Henry, 124 Buckingham, James Silk, 237 Buckle, H. T., 169 Buddha, Gautama, 143 Buddhism, 76, 140–5, 151–2, 165, 171, 182 Bühler, Georg, 143, 152–3 Burnes,Alexander, 241 Burns, Robert, 197 Bushire, 120 Calcutta Madrasa, 19, 148 Calcutta Sanskrit College, 56–7, 59, 140 Calcutta School Book Society, 167 Calcutta School Society, 167 Calcutta, 8–9, 46,198, 211, 242–4; politics or economics in, 138, 201, 213–15, 239; education in, 15, 19–20, 25, 56–7, 77, 79, 148; pandits or intellectuals in, 7, 34, 45, 53, 59, 72, 83, 119–20, 140; literary or cultural life in, 9, 32, 34–5, 56–7, 116, 119–20, 123–4, 167, 179, 194–5, 198–201, 233, 237–8; religion in, 19, 238 Cambay, 143 capital; intellectual or cultural, 2, 246; economic, 99, 116–18; social or political, 27; symbolic, 17 capitalism, 96, 99, 106, 110, 168–9, 224, 234, 237, 245 Carey, William, 18, 32, 55–7 Carson, Alexander, 118 Caspian Sea, 116–17, 124–8, 130 caste, 71, 138, 171–2, 174–5, 178, 181, 184–5, 219, 234; critiques of, 167–9, 178; elite or upper, 22–3, 50, 61, see also Brahmans; jati; low, 61, 174; restrictions based on, 84, 88, 178; and varna categories, 6, 8, 46, 56, 138, 147, 165–6, 178–9, 184, 218, 223 Caucasus Mountains, 127–30

251

Chadmabeshi missionary, 202 chaitya, 137 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 3–4 Chambers, William, 143 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, 232, 238, 241, 245 Charvaka, 140, 142, 145 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra, 49, 51, 172–9, 183–5, 202, 205, 208, 213–14, 218, 220–1, 232; on Bengali peasant, 173–4, 179, 213; bhakti and, 174–5; on samaj(ik), 172–5 Chatterjee, Kumkum, 171–2 Chatterjee, Partha, 50, 63, 191, 194, 199 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, see Chatterjee, Bankimchandra chattrams, 22–3, 26–7, 29–30 chatushpathis, 57 Chaudhuri, Pramatha, 183 Chennai, see Madras China, 181, 234–5, 239 Chitnis, Baburao, 24, 26 Christianity or Christians, 7, 18, 24, 141, 176, 192, 202–3, 218; see also missionaries; Catholic, 122; Goan, 234; Prostestant, 20, 69, 121, 124, 127, 129, 195, 231, 234; Russian Orthodox, 124 Church Missionary Society, 68, 129 climate, 81 Coker, Christopher, 193 collaboration, literary, 34 colleges; Bareilly, 84; Benares Sanskrit, 19, 29, 34, 69, 71–5, 83; Calcutta Sanskrit, 56–7, 59, 140; Delhi, 108; Elphinstone, 149, 237–8, 240, 242; Fort St George, 20, 30; Fort William, 19–20, 30–2, 55–7, 86, 120; Haileybury, 122–4, 126; Hindu, 19, 97; Madras, 31–32, 34, 36; Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental, 83–4; Presidency, 210 colonialism, 2–3, 9, 156, 169, 183; discourse or ideology of, 1, 6, 16, 78–9, 82, 88, 100, 102–3, 106, 110, 139, 184, 209, 216–18, 220, 223, 241; education and, 76–85, 88, 143, 209; impact of, 2–3, 7, 54, 76, 96, 138–9, 154, 165, 173–4, 176, 180, 184, 205, 215, 221, 232–33, 236, 240, 245; modernity and, x, 1, 3, 77, 106, 110–11, 139, 167, 191, 199, 219, 232–3, 237, 244 communalism, 8, 81, 86–87, 95, 176, 185 Company, East India, see East India Company comparison, 6, 208–10, 212, 222

252 Index Comte, Auguste, 169, 172, 175 Cooke, C. R., 108 cosmology or cosmography, 28–9, 80, 146 cosmopolitanism, 3, 6, 48–9, 235–6, 245 courts, judicial, 10, 30, 46, 56–7, 62, 107, 149, 154, 215–17, 238, 240 courts, princely, 10, 18, 70, 87, 203, 215; as disseminators of modernity, 23–4, 27, 30, 36–37; educational initiatives of, 78, see also Serfoji II, Raja; Maratha, 18, 21–3, 26–7; Persian, 125; Tanjore, 18, 21–2, 24, 27, 29–3ff Cowell, E. B., 141 Crawfurd, John, 243 cricket (sport), 84 Croxall, Samuel, 33–34 Cunningham, Alexander, 71, 152 Curzon, Lord, 166, 180 Daghistan, 130 Dalits, 233, 244 Dalmia, Vasudha, 155 Daman, 234, 238 Darband, 126 D’Arcy, Joseph, 121 da Silva, Bernardo Perez, 239 Datta Vamshavali, 171 Datta, K., 171 Dayabhaga, 56 Dayatattva, 56 De Veritate Religionis Christianae, 122 Deb, Radhakant, 52 deities, 28, 31, 171, 174, 189–90, 192, 194 Delhi College, 108 Delhi, 194, 224 demons, 194 Denmark, 19, 118 Deobandi movement, 235 Der Bekehrte Negersklave, 129 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian, 9, 194–9, 202 Desikar, Shivakolundu, 30–1, 36 Devendra Kuravanji, 28 Dharma Mandali, 62 Dharma Sabha, 52, 60 dharma, 29, 35, 74, 78, 172, 181, 182, 216–18, 223 Dharmashastras, 51, 53, 59, 74, 165, 215–16 Dharwadker, Vinay, 155 Dhundhakmat Khandan Ras, 154 Dhundhiyas, 137, 139, 145, 149–50 dictionaries, 32, 56, 61, 99, 106–9, 116, 241, see also Hobson-Jobson; Khāliq Bārī Digambars, 151

Dipika, 32 discourse; Bengali, 199; colonial, 6, 45, 59, 62, 205, see also colonialism; of decline or degeneracy, 2, 74–5, 169, 175, 183, 221, 223; educational, 78, 88; historical, 80, 139, 210; of modernity, 9, 16, 52, 82, 234, 244; nationalist, 7, 48–9, 85, 87, 165, 210, see also imaginary, nationalist; political, 242; public, 52, 68; of reform or progress, 52, 84; religious or moral, 7, 35, 50, 52–3, 81 Diu, 234, 238 Dobbin, Christine, 232 Dodson, Michael, 53, 70, 119, 138, 148 Drummond, Henry, 122 Duff, Alexander, 201 Duff, M. E. Grant, 82 Dundas, Paul, 147 Durga, 190, 198–9 Durgeshanandini, 208 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 202 Dutt, Romesh Chunder, 63, 179, 210–17, 219–25; Banga Vijeta, 214–17, 219, 222, 224; Bankimchandra and, 213–14; colonialism or nationalism and, 211–13, 217–19, 221, 225; Economic History of India, 221; H. S. Maine and, 10, 211–13, 219–20, 225; history or historiography and, 9–10, 210, 213, 217, 221, 225; importance or influence of, 210, 214, 225; life or career of, 210–11, 222; Maharashtra Jivanprabhat, 223; Muslims and, 217, 221, 225; on or in England, 210–13, 221; Peasantry of Bengal, 211, 213; Three Years in Europe, 212, 221 East India Company; administrators, 18–19; in South India, 15, 17–20, 25–6; in North India, 18–19, 50, 118–19, 235, 239–41; in Iran, 119–20; missionaries and, 18–20, 118, 234; Orientalists or native scholars and, 19, 29, 119, 122, 193; in princely states, 16, 29 Edinburgh Missionary Society, 124, 129 education; caste and, 22, 26–7, 84, see also Brahmans; colonial, 76–85, 88, 143, 209; debates about, 15, 19, 52, 77; of disabled, 26; elementary, 19, 21–2, 25–6, 34–5, 78, 80, 82, 87, 167; of elites, 19–20, 22–3, 25, 35, 76, 80, 84; English or Western, 2, 7, 15, 17, 19–22, 25, 27, 52, 69, 88, 167, 180, 201, 210, 214, 236, 242; female, 51,

Index 84–5, 173, 233, 235, 242; higher, 22, 78, 83, 85; ideology or policies of, 35, 76–9, 83; linguistic medium of, 15, 19, 22–3, 25; modernity and, 15–16, 18–19, 25, 76, 78–79, 82, 85, 88; moral improvement and, 15, 19, 27–28, 33–36, 77–80, 83–5, 88; public or popular, 15, 18, 20–21, 76–8, 82–3, 86, 97, 166; religion and, 78, 84; rhetoric about, 19, 77–78; Sanskrit, 2, 20–3, 25–6, 29–30, 34, 68–71, 242; secondary, 22, 26, 78, 87; vernacular, 15, 19–21, 68–9, 77, 81, 87, 167 Education Dispatch of 1854, 77 Egypt, 75 Ekanatha, 32 Eliot, T. S., 197 elites, see also Brahmans; competition between, 85; education of, 15, 19–20, 22–3, 25, 27, 29, 35, 69, 76, 79–80, 82, 84; Indian, 1, 19, 69, 76, 213, 215, 237–8, 243, 245; intellectual, ix, 7, 49, 52; Iranian, 130; modernization of, 23, 25; Persianate, 87; urban, 79 Elliot, H. M., 70, 81 Elliot, Walter, 102 Ellis, F. W., 17 Elphinstone College, 149, 237–8, 240, 242 Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 20, 81, 143, 214–15, 237 Encyclopedia Indica, 170 Endawala topshe mach, 202 English language or literature, 95–6, 107, 109–10, 119, 121, 126, 144, 147, 150, 167, 180, 195, 237, 240 Englund, Harri, 231–4, 245 Enlightenment; European, 1, 17, 165, 167–68, 193, 197–8, 202; Scottish, 236–38, 245 epigraphy, 57, 71 equality, 70, 83, 173–4, 177–8, 236 ethnography, 121, 176, 215, 238, 241, 243 Eurocentrism, 3, 189 Ewing, Katherine Pratt, 45 Fadnavis, Nana, 236, 242 Fallon, S. W., 107 Farahi, Abu Nasr, 103 farhangs, 104 Fath ‘Ali Khan, 126 fiction, 10, 166, 208–10, 214–15, 217–25, see also novels Firingi, Antony, 9, 194, 198–99 Firishta, 81

253

Folkert, Kendall, 149 footnotes, 60, 75, 82, 142–4, 150, 152, 155–6 Forbes, Duncan, 72 Fort St. George, College of, 20, 30 Fort William, College of, 19–20, 30–2, 55–7, 86, 120 Francke, August Hermann, 20 free trade, 168, 239–40 Frere, Sir Henry Bartle, 243 Gandhi, M. K., 1, 87, 178, 181, 185, 210, 246 Gandhi, Virchand, 148 Gangaram, 9, 190–2, 194, 200 genealogies, 26, 171–2, 175, 184 geography, 28–9, 78, 80 Georgia (Russia), 125, 130 Geray, Sultan Kırım, 117 Gericke, C. W., 17, 20, 31 German Missionary Society, 124 Ghaffur, Abdul, 107 Ghalib, Mirza Asadullah, 103 Ghatak, Debibar, 171 Gilchrist, J. B., 96–8, 105 Ginzburg, Carlo, 88 Glen, William, 124–7 globalization, 6, 217 glossaries, 95, 103–11 Goa, 232, 234, 238–39 gods and goddesses, 28, 31, 189–90, 192, 194 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 241 Golitsyn, Prince Aleksandr, 118 Goswami, Jiva,174–5 Goswami,Rupa,174–5 Gough, A. E., 141 Greece, 75, 171 Grierson, G. A., 71 Griffith, R. T. H., 77 Grotius, Hugo, 122 Growse, F. S., 82 Guha, Ranajit, 175, 205 Guha-Thakurta, Tapati,171 Gujarat, 138–9, 145, 150–1 Gujarati, 138, 147, 150, 152–4, 236, 240–41 Gujranwala, 139–41, 145 Gulistan, 107 Gupta,Ishwarchandra, 9–10, 194, 199–205 Gupta, Ramnidhi, 200 Gupta, U. C., 171 Haileybury College, 122–4, 126 Hajji Mirza Abu Talib, 125 Halayudha, 56

254 Index Hare, David, 49 Harishchandra, Bharatendu,68 Harkness, Henry, 30 Hatcher, Brian, 78–80, 232 Haynes, Douglas, 139 Heber, Reginald, 36 Hegel, G. W. F., 6, 169, 172, 184, 193 hegemony; colonial or European, 3, 9–10, 45, 62, 103, 139, 238; Sanskrit or Brahmanical, 47 Heller, Erich, 192–93 Henderson, Ebenezer, 118 Hind Swaraj, 178–9, 210 Hindi, 25, 68–9, 71, 80–2, 85–7, 101, 103, 138, 140, 147, 155, 231, 244; Sanskrit and, 74–5, 85–7; translations into, 73–76, 143, 145, 152 Hindi-Urdu, 68, 85, 103–5, 107–10, 231 Hindu College (Calcutta), 19, 97 Hindu Widow Marriage, 47, 60 Hinduism, 49–50, 55, 62, 74, 78, 85, 138, 140, 142, 145, 152, 175–8, 185, 197–98, 218, 244 Hindustani, 23, 25, 87, 126, 231 Hindvi, 103–5 historiography, 4–5, 7, 9–10, 191, 208, 213–14, 232; nationalist, 81, 210 history, 139, 142–3, 146, 150, 153–6, 191–7, 201–2, 208–10, 217, 245; periodization of, 6, 81, 193, 214; scientific, 9, 82, 137, 139, 142, 144, 146–7, 150, 153–4, 156; teaching of, 78, 80–2, 233 Hitopadesha, 34–5, 56 Hobson-Jobson, 99, 106 Hoernle, A. F. Rudolf, 148, 151–2 Hoshiarpur, 145 Humboldt, Alexander von, 80 Hume, David, 197 Hunter, William, 31 Hyderabad, 22 iconoclasm, 137, 141, 145 icons, see image worship identity; hybrid or multiple, 3; Indian national, 1, 85, 199; formation of, x, 3, 85; language and, 25, 85, 106, 110; religious, 8, 76, 85, 137, 198, 235 Ilbert Bill, 70 image worship, 8, 55, 58, 61, 137–41, 143, 145–6, 149–50, 155–6, 167; Arya Samaj or Dayananda on, 140; Jain critiques of, 137, 149; Murtipujak Jains on, 139, 141, 146, 152–3

imaginary; liberal or cosmopolitan, 48–9; modern, 232; modern shastric, 7, 47–54, 57–61; nationalist, 48–51, 63 Imperial University at Kazan, 127 imperialism, 6, 70, 83, 118, 209, 211, 237, 243, 246 Inden, Ronald, 137–38 Indian Antiquary, 144, 148 Indian National Congress, 68, 70, 236 Indo-Europeans or Aryans, 85, 209–213 Indology, 137–41, 144, 147–56 Indra, 28 Indraji, Bhagwanlal, 153 industrialization or industry, 1, 118, 121, 168, 232–4, 241, 245–6 inequality, see equality Ingraji nababarsha (“The English New Year”), 202–5 Inoue, Miyako, 96 intellectuals; Bengali, 7, 19, 30, 36, 49, 69, 72, 165, 167, 172, 175–6, 183, 223; Brahman, 52, 237; Hindu, 49, 55, 141; hybrid, 68–73, 139, 154, 156; Indian, 7, 18, 25, 36, 51, 59–62, 74, 78, 88, 138–9, 147–8, 154–5, 166, 169, 210, 246; Jain, 9, 139, 151, 156; reformist, 51, 74, 172; Sanskrit, 7, 45, 47, 51–4, 57, 61 Iran, 116–31 Iraq, 119, 123 irony, 205 Islam, see Muslims Ismailis, 235 Itihas timir nashak, 81, 88, 142–3, see also Shivaprasad, Raja: history of India by itihasa, 139, 153, 170 Ja‘far ‘Ali Khan, 120 Jacobi, Hermann, 76, 144–5, 152 Jahangir, Emperor, 194 Jain Dharm Vishayak Prashnottar, 151 Jain Tattvadarsh, 140–1, 145–9, 155 Jaini, Jasvantray, 152–3 Jainism, 8–9, 69, 71, 76, 137–47, see also names of individual sects; Buddhism and, 140–7, 151–52; canon or scriptures of, 137, 144, 146–48, 151–54; Dayananda Saraswati on, 140–5, 147; icons in, 137–41, 143, 145–6, 149–50, 152–3, 155–6; sects of, 137 Jaisalmer, 143, 151 Jambhekar, Bal Shastri, 237–8, 240 Japan, 96, 242–3 jati, 36, 170–2, 176

Index Jati-Tatta-Baridhi, 171 Jawad ibn Sabat, 119–21, 126 Jessore, 190–91 Jethmal Svami, 149–50, 154 Jews, 123 Jheejheebhoy, Sir Jamsetjee, 240–1 Jimutavahana, 56 Jin Pratima Sthapan Stavan, 153 Jivshri, 155 John, C. S., 17, 24–5 Johnston, Sir Alexander, 17, 27, 30, 33 Jones, Kenneth, 147 Jones, Sir William, 36, 62, 72, 75, 96–9, 102, 143, 198 Jordens, J. T. F., 141 Jowett, Joseph, 126 Judt, Johann, 128 kabials, 198–201, 203 Kabirpanthis, 182 Kalidasa, 32 Kalpa Sutra, 76, 144–5, 152 Kannada, 23 Kannandangudi, 26 Karass, 124, 127, 129 Karikavali, 32 karma, 145 karmayoga, 181 Karttunen, Klaus, 165 Kashi Dharma Sabha, 75 Kashi, see Benares Kastursagar, 155 Kaulinya (“Status”), 202 Kavi, Chokkana, 32 Kavirahasyam, 56 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 2, 178, 209, 220 Kaviratna, Nandakumar, 56, 60 Kayastha Kulachandrika, 171 Kayasthas, 170–1, 178 Keene, Henry, 122 Khāliq Bārī, 103–9, 111 Khan, Syed Ahmed, 68, 82–3, 86 Khojas, 235, 243 Khusrau, Amir, 103 kingship, 17, 26, 29 Knill, Richard, 118 knowledge; scientific, 26–9, 34–5, 71, 77–82, 86, 88, 98, 121, 143–4, 146–7, 154, 167–8, 208, 233, 236; useful, 15, 18–19, 23, 26–8, 34, 69, 77, 80, 84 Kolhatkar, Bhaskar Pant,190 Konkan, the, 244 Kosambi (Pala capital), 71

255

Koselleck, Reinhart, 9, 165–6, 189, 192–3 Kothari, Nemchand Hirachand, 149 Krishna, 174, 191, 198, 216 Krishnacharit, 174 Kshamashramana, Devarddhigani, 151–2 Kshatriyas, 22, 174 Kuka, 146 kula literature, 171–3 Kumar, K., 78 Kumarasambhava, 32 Kumarasambhavachampu, 32 Kumbakonam, 25 Lahiri, Aniruddha, 201–2 Lahore, 152 Lal, Piyare, 108 Lalan Fakir,198 Lambton, William, 24 Langlois, Alexandre, 73 languages; arguments over, 8, 23, 68–9, 85–86, see also education, linguistic medium of; Dravidian, 101, 110; Indo-European or Aryan, 101–2, 110; modernity and, 3, 5, 25, 32, 85; national, 69, 85–86; Sanskrit vs. other, 2, 74; scripts and, 8, 72, 95–8, 100–1; Semitic, 101–2, 110; society and, 23, 25, 166–7 Lassen, Christian, 73 Latour, Bruno, 231 Leach, James, 232–4, 245 Lee, Samuel, 121–2 liberalism, 10, 49, 70, 77–8, 167–9, 173, 184, 208–15, 218, 220–4, 237–8, 240–1, 244–5 libraries, 17–18, 29–30, 141, 144, 149, 151, 156, 242 List, Friedrich, 169 lithographs, 36, 103, 107–8, 110 London Tract Society, 129 Long, James, 68 Lonka, 137, 149 Lucknow, 129 Ludhiana, 123, 146 Luther, Martin, 192–3 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 68, 77 Macbride, John, 121 Mackenzie, Colin, 24, 123 Madhava, 140 Madras, 16–18, 20–21, 31–33, 118, 120, 178, 238, 245 Madras College, 31–32, 34, 36

256 Index Madras system of education, 20 Magha, 32 magic, 79 Mahabharata, 61 Maharaja of Burdwan, 61 Maharashta Purana, 9, 190, 194, 200 Maharashtra, 223 Maharashtra Jivanprabhat, 223–4 Mahavira, Vardhamana, 143, 147, 150–2 Mahim, 234 Maine, Henry Sumner, 6, 9–10, 208–13, 215, 217–25; Ancient Law, 209, 212, 217; Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, 211; Village-Communities, 211, 219 Maitra, Kalidas, 60 Majumdar, Kamalkumar, 201–2 Majumdar, Rochona, 232 Malcolm, John, 120, 237 Malwa, 239 Man Singh, 191 Manavdharmsar, 74–5 Mansingha, 190 Mantena, Karuna, 222 Manu Smriti, 74–5 manuscripts; Bengali, 190; Iranian, 121; Jain, 140–1, 144, 149, 151, 154–5; Persian, 103; Sanskrit, 18, 29–31, 59, 149 Marathas, 15–16, 21, 190–1, 194, 223, 233, 236–8, 241, 244 Marathi, 21–23, 25–6, 28–32, 34, 129, 240 Marburg, 192–93 Markovits, Claude, 239 marriage, 171–73, 177–78, see also polygamy; of children, 84, 238; of widows, 47, 49–50, 56, 59–60, 172, 202 Marshman, Joshua, 18 Martin, Montgomery, 240 Martyn, Henry, 118–21, 126 Masselos, James, 232 Mather, R. C., 97 Mathura, 152–53, 156 Maulvi Ahmedshah, 146 Mazandaran, 125 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 169 medicine, 2, 17–18, 24, 28, 31, 242 Mehsana, 151 Mehta, Pherozeshah, 242–3, 246 Memons, 235, 243 Memorandum: Court Characters…, 85–6 memory, 108, 194–8, 200

middle class, 21, 70–1, 80, 216, 241 migration, 7, 123–4, 129–31 Mill, John Stuart, 6, 78, 167, 169, 172–3, 200, 212, 238 mimamsa, 32 Mirza ‘Abbas, 130 Mirza ‘Abdullah, 125–6 Mirza (Alexander) Kazim Beg, 125–7 Mirza Farukh Amirkhanz, 127–29 Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzadah, 123 Mirza Jamal Javanshir, 123 Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim, 122–3, 125–7 Mirza Salih Shirazi, 121–2, 130 Mirza Sayyid ‘Ali Khan, 119–21, 123 Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, 193 misconceptions; about binaries or categories, 6, 46, 56, 69; about change, 139; about pandits, 2–3, 46, 52 missionaries, 7–8, 10, 98, 137, 234; American, 98, 234; British, 18–19, 122, 234; education and, 15, 17–18, 21, 25, 28, 167, 231, 234; German, 17, 20, 28, 31–2, 118, 124–5, 128–9; in Iran, 117–18; proselytizing by, 18, 25, 201, 234; Scottish, 118, 124, 126–7, 129; transcolonial, 118, 129 Mitakshara, 56 Mitchell, Lisa, 24 Mitra, Rajendralal,72, 83 Mitra, Tarinicharan, 69 Mizan al-Haqq, 128–9 modernities, alternate or multiple, 3–4, 8–9, 45, 232–3, 245 modernity; anomie of, 219–21, 224; anti-colonial, 206, 232; arrival or path of, ix, 199, 209, 211, 218, 220–2; articulation of, ix; authority and, x, 2, 76; cities and, 199, 202, 213, 219, 224, 231–2, 242, 244–5; colonial, 1–3, 15–16, 37, 46, 48, 69, 106, 110–11, 191, 199, 216, 219, 232–3, 237, 244; colonialism and, x, 1, 3, 77, 106, 110–11, 139, 167, 191, 199, 219, 232–3, 237, 244; conflict or crisis and, 193, 200; definition or features of, 3–5, 33, 88, 192–3, 195, 231; early, 191, 233–36; education and, 15, 18–19, 25, 27, 76, 78–9, 82, 95, 213; enacted or established, 1, 236; European or Western, ix, 1–3, 9, 17, 45, 48, 107, 193, 218, 221, 244; global, 239, 246; as heuristic tool, 3–5; Hindu, 74, 76, 87; history and, 189–191, 193–7; identity formation and, x; imposed, 1–2, 236; industrialization

Index and, 1; language or script and, 1, 8, 25, 33, 73, 85, 95–99, 101–3, 109–11, 231; localized, ix, 4, 7, 45, 53, 166, 205, 213, 219, 233–4, 242; narratives or discourse of, 48, 52, 244; nationalism and, 6, 16, 48, 70, 190; negotiated, 2, 6, 47, 209; origins of, 3–4, 209, 233, 244; princely, 16–18, 23, 31, 36; print culture and, 32–3, 52, 55, 79, 96–97, 111, 150; religion and, 1, 9, 76, 216, 238; rhetoric about, 4; scholarship or theories about, 1, 3, 88, 97–98, 193, 219, 232; science or technology and, 1, 76, 82, 98; shastric, 54, 62; social norms of, 2, 167, 218; society and, 167–8, 220, 222, 245; South Asian or Indian, 5–6, 9, 15, 27, 37, 47–8, 51, 62, 76, 82, 88, 198, 214, 218, 232, 239, 244; speed and, 97–8, 213; Tanjorean, 31; tradition and, ix, 2, 16, 30, 46–7, 52, 69, 76, 106, 191, 199, 212; trans-colonial, ix, 5–6, 10, 45, 167; transnationalism and, x, 1, 5, 240; transregional, 4–5 Modi script (Maratha), 32–33 Mohamudgara, 75 Moir, Martin, 15, 20 monotheism, 55, 58, 74, 167 morality, 15, 19, 27–8, 33–6, 53–4, 58, 62, 74, 77–81, 83–5, 88, 165, 169, 181–2, 217–18 More, Hannah, 121 Müller, Friedrich Max, 72–74, 76, 102, 143, 151 Muf īd ul-at fāl, 103, 108, 110 Mughals, 10, 214–20, 222–5, 236, 240 Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, 83–4 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 106 Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev,175–78, 181, 184–85 Muktambal Chattram School, 22, 26, 29 Muktavali, 32 Mulla Ibrahim Nathan, 123 Mulla Riza, 127 Mulraj, Thakurdas,141, 145 multilingualism, 95, 104–7, 111, 240, see also panchabhasha Mumbai, see Bombay Munro, Thomas, 20–21, 25 munshis, 68–70, 107, 119–20, 193, 200 Murtipujaks, 137, 139, 141, 144, 146, 148–9, 151–4, 156 music, 24, 28–9, 180, 198–201, 204

257

Muslims, 8, 145, 195–97, 219, 233, 243; as ethnic not religious category, 185; bias against, 8, 82–83, 86, 102–3, 198, 217; in Indian society, 171, 176–7, 184–5, 236; Indian history and, 81–2, 177, 191–2, 214, 217; invasions by, 151, 182, 219, 240; Iranian, 124, 128–9; language and, 85, 236; reform and, 68, 82, 244; scholars or intellectuals, 86, 119–21, 123, 128, 141; Shi’as, 235–6, 245 Mymensingh, 190 Mysore, 16, 27 Nadia, 61, 193, 211, 213–15, 217, 219, 221 Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 231 Naik, J. P., 232, 240 Nanakpanthis, 182 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 235–8, 240–1, 244, 246 Napoleon, 193 narratives; Bengali, 9, 170, 172; fictional, 9, 208, 219; genealogical, 26; historical, 10, 34, 150, 154, 191, 194, 202, 205, 217, 219, 221; nationalist, 48, 197; of decline or corruption, 2, 74–5, 169, 175, 183, 221, 223, 240; of liberalism, 210, 213; of modernity, 48, 52; of progress, modernity, or success, 48, 78, 209–10; poetic, 9, 190–91, 202; pre-novel traditions of, 106; teleological, 81; translated, 129 Nasir al-Din Shah, 123 nationalism, 1, 48–50, 70, 85, 166, 169, 178, 184, 198, 210; Hindu, 54, 70, 85, 87–88, 223; linguistic, 95, 231 nationalist movement, Indian, 16, 70, 80, 138, 166, 169, 181, 210, 225, 236, 241 navavidya (new learning), 15, 23–6, 28–32, 33, 36 Navshri, 155 Nayakas, 16 networks; missionary, 118, 120, 122–3, 131; social, 116–17, 121, 131; trade, 235; trans-colonial, 117–18, 129–30, 214, 223; Parsi, 235 newspapers, 121–2, 130, 145, 156, 166, 198, 200–1, 212, 214, 234, 241–2 Nibandhas, 51, 60 Nicholas I, Czar, 124, 127 Niṣāb uṣ-ṣabīyān, 103 niti, 34–35 Nityadharmanuranjika, 56 Nivedan, 75 Nora, Pierre, 195–6

258 Index North-Western Provinces, 70, 77, 80, 84, 86, 142, see also Uttar Pradesh novels, 106, 208–10, 214, see also fiction Nowrozjee, Furdoonjee, 238, 240–1, 244, 246 Nula Panchanan, 171 nyaya, 32 Nyayalankar, Lakshminarayan, 56–8 Nyayaratna, Dinabandhu, 51, 60 Nyayaratna, Padmalochan, 60–1 O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 236 Ong, W. J., 97, 109 Orenberg, 124 Orientalism, 70, 102, 137–40, 148, 154, 189–90, 197, see also Indology Orientalists, 17–19, 29–31, 35, 59, 121, 127, 138–9, 197, 238; pandits and, 62, 69–75, 138, 144, 148 orphans, 19–20, 22, 26–7 Other, the, 1, 8, 102–3, 198, 214, 217, 244 Ottomans, 119, 124 Ouseley, Gore, 120–1 Pabna, 211, 214 Paine, Thomas, 197, 201 pamphlets, 60, 75, 83, 145, 239, 241 panchayats, 234–5, 237 panchabhasha, 23, 25, 29 Panchatantra, 34–6 Pandit Virvijay Nirvan Ras, 154 Pandit, The, 72–73 Pandita, Sakkhanna, 31, 33 pandits, 45–63; in Benares, 2, 53, 70, 72, 75, 140, 156, 231–2; in Calcutta or Bengal, 2, 7, 45–6, 53, 56–7, 59, 72, 232; misconceptions about, 2–3, 46, 52, 57, 62; modernity and, 2, 9, 30, 36, 45, 53; Orientalists and, 34, 57, 62, 69–75, 138, 144, 148; reforms and,7, 47, 49, 51–2, 54–6, 71, 74, 149; education of, 29–30, 71 Panini, 102, 110, 144 panopticism, 3 Pantha (“The Goat”), 202 Parsis, 231–2, 234–3, 245 Partition, 166, 180, 244 Patan, 143, 151 Paterson, John, 118, 120 pathashalas, 21–3, 26, 29–30 pativrata, 85 Peabody, Norbert, 46, 48, 60 peasants, 78–9, 117, 168, 173–4, 179, 183–4, 190, 211, 213, 238

Penang, 120 Permanent Settlement, 168, 183 Persian, 22–3, 25, 69, 81, 85, 95, 102–8, 123, 127–9, 155, 167, 236, 240 Persianate culture, 8, 108 Persianate language workers, 118–19, 124, 127, 130–1 Peterson, Peter, 149 Pfander, Karl Gottlieb, 118, 127–9 philology, 17, 20, 30, 71–2 Pietists, German, 17, 20, 29 pilgrimage, 17, 22, 26, 29, 33, 53, 150, 153, 171, 182, 190 Pillai, David, 24 poetry, 25–6, 28, 32, 34, 104, 106, 108, 192–4, 199–205; modern, 192–4, 201–2; narrative, 9 poets, 9, 24, 30, 46 polemics, 9–10, 46, 50, 52, 73, 75–6, 85, 120, 122, 128 Pollock, Sheldon, 2, 137 polygamy, 47, 50–2, 61, 172 Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, 241, 244 Poona, see Pune Pope, Alexander, 83 Portuguese, 23, 25, 194–5, 198, 234–6, 238–40, 245 post-colonial studies or theories, 3–4, 6, 46, 137, 139, 232 poverty, 78, 84, 169, 212, 240–1 Prakash, Gyan, 76–7, 154, 215, 221, 231–32 Prasad, Leela, 53–54 Pratapaditya, Raja, 190–1 Presidency College (Calcutta), 210 Price, William, 121 Prinsep, James, 57, 143 print culture, industry, or publishing; economic aspects, 32, 36, 68, 96–7, 99, 111, 120–1; education and, 19, 23, 30, 32–3, 36, 79; fonts and, 31–3, 96, 101, 119; free speech and, 237; manuscripts or lithographs and, 31, 36, 97, 103, 107, 111, 141, 155–6; missionaries and, 19–20, 31–2, 118; modernity and, 32–33, 52, 55, 79, 96–7, 111, 150, 155–6; Ong on, 97, 109; orality and, 111; pandits and, 24, 30–1, 34, 36, 51–2, 55–6, 59–61; reform and, 50, 60, 68, 74; revolutions in, 36, 155; vernaculars and, 19, 30–2, 76, 238 progress, 1, 16, 18, 46, 88, 98, 110, 212, 214–15 pronunciation, 72, 95, 100, 102, 108–11

Index prose, 34–35, 55, 149, 155 public sphere, 8, 16, 18, 23, 37, 46, 56, 59–61, 85–6, 167, 172, 176, 179, 193, 244–5 Pune, 20, 232, 242 Punjab, 123, 138–40, 145, 150, 239, 244 Puranas, 55, 80, 223 Purva Mimamsa, 75 Qajars, 122–3, 128, 130 Quran, 119, 121, 127, 168 race or racism, 70, 81, 83, 85, 101, 211–12, 216, 218, 243, 245 Radha, 191 Raghuvamsha, 32 Rajasthan, 202, 223 Rajatarangini, 60 Rajkot, 149 Rajmahal, 195–7 Rajputana Agency, 70 Rajputs, 216, 223 Ram Rajya, 185 Rama, 217–18 Ramakrishna, 198 Ramasamayya, Dharmayya, 24 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 50, 63 Ramayana, 33, 216–17 Ramchandra, Master (Delhi College), 83 Rameshvaram, 22, 26 Ramnad, kingdom of, 20 Rana Pratap, 216 Ranade, M. G., 236, 246 Rangvijay, 154 Rao,V. N.,191 ras (vernacular genre), 154–5 Rasht, 126 rationality or rationalism, 15, 28, 53, 60, 69, 76, 78, 80, 143, 167, 193, 223 Ray, Bharatchandra,9, 190–4, 199 reason, see rationality rebellions, see revolutions, revolts, or rebellions reforms; agrarian or economic, 211, 241; discourse or debates about, 52, 75, 88; pandits or intellectuals and, 7, 47, 49, 51–2, 54–6, 71, 74, 149; political, 212; print media and, 50, 52; religion and, 9, 54, 58, 75, 128, 140, 149, 167, 238, 241, 244; revivalism and, 50; social, 2, 15, 47, 49–60, 167, 171–2, 176–7, 180, 183, 235, 238, 240; urban, 241 Reid, Thomas, 197

259

resistance, 4, 6, 16, 45–7, 62, 84–5, 139, 200 revivalism, Hindu, 50, 74, 87,178 revolutions, revolts, or rebellions; European, 238–39; French, 201; Goan, 239; in printing, 36, 155; Indian (1857), 1, 48, 50, 69, 169, 218, 239; Mughal, 220; against landlords (1873), 211; Santal (1855), 192; Satara (1848), 239; scientific, 1; social, 243 Rgveda, see Vedas rhyming, 95, 103–4, 107–10 Ricoeur, Paul, 209, 225 Rigveda, see Vedas Ripon, Lord, 70 Romanticism, 194, 196–8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 169, 172–3 Roy, Rammohan,10, 167, 232, 237, 240; Bankimchandra and, 172–3; Derozio and, 198; as intellectual, 30, 36, 51, 54–6, 58–9, 63; Mrityunjay Vidyalankara and, 55; Ramchandra Vidyavagish and, 58; as religious reformer, 51–2, 54–5; Sahamarana vishaya, 55; on samaj(ik), 167–8, 172–3; as social reformer, 49, 54–5, 117, 172–3, 179, 183; Vedanta Grantha, 54; on widow-burning, 49, 55 Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 152 Royal Asiatic Society, 17, 27, 30, 127 Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne, 231 ruins, 151, 194–8, 219, 224 rupture; epistemological, 2–3, 165, 223–4; in history or with past, 6, 166, 169, 179, 195, 225 Ruskin, John, 169 Russia, 117–20, 123–31 Russian Bible Society, 118, 120 Russo-Persian Wars, 125–7, 130 Ryoter Katha, 183 ryots (cultivators), 168, 214 Sabat, “Nathaniel” Jawad ibn, 119–21, 126 Sadhana (Tagore essay), 179–80 Sa‘di’, 107 Sahamarana vishaya … samvad, 55 Sahu, King, 191 Sakkhanna Pandita, 31, 33 Said, Edward, 137–8, 189–90, 213 Samachar Chandrika, 59, 61 samaj(ik), 9, 165–86, 216; Bankimchandra on, 172–5; Bengali histories of, 171–2; Bhudev Mukhopadhyay on, 175–8, 180; English translation of, 166–7; European theories and, 168, 172–3, 176, 184;

260 Index meaning, history, and use of term, 9, 165–6, 172, 184–5; Nagendranath Basu on, 170, 172; nationalism and, 173; Rammohan Roy on, 167–8, 172–3; religion and, 174–6, 181, 184–5; Tagore on, 179–85; urban vs. rural, 169–70, 173; voluntary associations and, 167 Samajik Prabandha, 176–8 samajik unnati (social improvement), 167–68 Samakitsar, 149–50, 154 Sambad Prabhakar, 200–1 Sambandhyanirnaya, 171 Samya, 173–5 Samyaktva Shalyoddhar, 150, 152 Sandeha Nirasana, 56 Sanskrit, 172, 199; authority or status of, 49–50, 63, 76; calendrical systems, 30; colonial-period decline of, 2; education, see education; intellectuals, see intellectuals; other languages and, 2, 15, 23, 25–6, 31, 35, 71–4, 85–6, 101–2, 110, 139, 240; manuscripts, see manuscripts; Orientalists and, 102, 110, 119, 149; printing of books in, 23, 30–3, 35, 59, 61, 140, 148; pronunciation of, 72; prose, 155; vocabulary, see vocabulary Santals, 192 Sanyal, Durgacharan, 171 Sarasvati Mahal Library, 29, 32 Saraswati, Dayananda, 9, 75–76, 140–8, 153–6 Sarva-darshana-samgraha, 140–1 Sasho, Subbaji, 31, 33, 35–6 sati, 49, 52, 55, 167, 172 Satyarth Prakash, 76, 140–5, 153 Saurashtra, 23, 140, 150 Sayyid Muhsin, 125 Schlegel, Friedrich, 193 schools, see also education; census of, 20–21; charity, 19–20, 27, 34, see also chattrams; elementary, see education; names for, 22; public or popular, see education; secondary, see education Schwartz, C. F., 17, 20, 24–5 Schwarz, Henry, 225 sciences, 26–9, 34–5, 71, 77–82, 86, 88, 98, 121, 143–4, 146–7, 154, 167–8, 208, 236; European domination and, 15, 28; hard, physical, or natural, 17, 144, 208, 233; social, 233; teaching of, 79–80; vernacularization of, 80, 82 Scott, David, 3

Scottish Missionary Society, 124 scribes, 8, 155 scripts, 8, 31, 86, see also transliteration; Arabic, 101, 110, 119; Devanagari, 31–3, 85, 87, 102, 110; modernity and, 95–7, 110; Modi, 32–3; Persian, 105; Perso-Arabic, 85, 103; Roman or Latin, 95–100, 106–7, 110–11; Urdu, 105, 107, 236 Se Kal Ar E Kal, 199 Sen, Asok, 49 Sen, Keshub Chunder, 233, 243 Sen, Lakshman, 171 Sen, Ramprasad, 200 Sennett, Richard, 241 Serampore, 19, 29–30, 32–3, 55, 59 Serfoji II, Raja, 7, 10, 15–37, 232; as patron, 15, 17; as pious Hindu, 17; as scholar, 17; education of, 15, 17–18, 231; educational projects of, 18, 21–7; innovations of, 22–5, 27, 33; print publishing and, 7, 23–4, 30–6 Seth, Sanjay, 108 Sevaklal, Krishnadas, 141 Shahnāma, 104 Shamakhi, 128 Shankaracharya, 75 Shankarsett, Juggurnath, 236 Shantiniketan, 184 Sharma, Adityaram, 74 Shastra-prakash, 56 shastras, 29–30, 32–3, 35–6, 47–62, 73–4 Shastri, Bapudeva, 2, 83 Shastri, Haraprasad, 62–3 Shastri, Shibnath, 201 Shastri, Shivarama, 33–4 Shastri, Vedanayaka, 24, 29 Sherring, M. A., 71 Shi’as, 235–36, 245 Shigurf Nama-e-Vilayet, 193 Shiraz, 116, 120 Shiromani, Bharatchandra, 60–1 Shishupalavadha, 32 Shiva, 31, 190–1 Shivaganga, kingdom of, 20 Shivaji Bhonsle, 26, 223, 225, 233 Shivaprasad, Raja, 7, 9–10, 68–88, 145, 150, 154, 156, 235; biography of, 69–70, 142; Dayananda Saraswati and, 75–6, 143, 145; as educator, 68–9, 76–88, 231; on Hindi/ Urdu, 68, 71, 74, 85–7, 231; history of India by, 68, 76, 81–82, 88, 142–4, 147; as hybrid intellectual, 68–73; loyalism and, 70, 83, 88; praise of, 68, 71; Syed Ahmed Khan and, 82–3, 86; on Vedas, 73–6

Index shudras, 174, 182 Shulman, David, 191 Shusha, 118, 124–5, 127–9 Shvetambars, 137–9, 142, 148–52 Sikhism, 145, 244 Simla Agency, 70 Singh, Munshi Wazir, 103, 108 Singha, Kaliprasanna, 200, 205 Smith, Adam, 168, 197 Smritiratna, Madhusudan, 51 Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge, 167 Society for Translating European Sciences, 167 society, 165–85, see also samaj(ik); civil, 169, 172, 176, 180, 184, 205, 241; colonial, 25, 167, 173, 179; family and, 167, 172, 175, 177–80, 184; fragmented or divided, 84, 168, 170, 173–4, 181–2; Indian vs. European concepts of, 167–9, 172, 176, 179, 181, 236; individual and, 177, 183; Maine on, 209; modernity and, 9, 111, 167–8; multilingual, 23; reform of, 49, 52, 177, 180; rural or village, 180, 183, see also urban-rural dichotomy; state and, 16, 175–6, 180–2, 184, 216; Western view of, 168–9 Soob Row, 24 Sood, Gagan, 235 Spencer, Herbert, 78, 169, 172, 176, 200 Sringeri, 53–54 Sriniketan, 184 St Petersburg, 116, 120, 124, 127, 131 Stark, Ulrike, 139, 143 Starling, E., 84 statistics, 21–2, 29, 238, 241, 244, 246 Stein, Aurel, 152 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 211, 215–16 Stewart, Dugald, 197 Sthanakvasis, 137, 151, 153 Strange, Thomas, 30 strangers, 26, 102, 219–23, 225 subaltern studies, 1, 6, 232 Subba Rao, 24 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 191 Sufis, 69, 238 Sullivan, John, 20 supernatural, the, 192–4 Surat, 139, 234 Swadeshi Samaj, 179–83 swadeshi, 166, 179 Swami, Sahajananda (aka Swaminarayan), 145

261

Sykes, W. H., 238 syncretism, 117, 182, 184, 198, 216 Ta‘līm-e angrezī, 107–10 Tagore, Debendranath, 51 Tagore, Dwarkanath, 240 Tagore, Jogendramohan, 200 Tagore, Rabindranath, 88, 175, 178–85, 202, 232 Tamil, 21–2, 25, 29–32, 36, 100, 102, 110, 240 Tanjore; city, district, or court of, 7, 10, 15–18, 20–7, 231; as cultural or educational center, 17, 24, 27, 30; languages spoken in, 23, 26 Tantra(s), 51, 165 Tarkachudamani, Shashadhar, 62–3 Tarkalankar, Madanmohan, 51 Tarkalankar, Shrikrishna, 56 Tarkapanchanan, Kashinath, 57–8 Tarkavachaspati, Taranath, 60–1 Tarkavagish, Gadadhar, 56 Tarkasamgraha, 32 Tarkhadkar, Bhaskar Pandurang, 240 Tatar (Turkish), 124, 127–8 Tattvabodhini Sabha, 58–9 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 80 Taylor, Charles, 47–8, 169 Tehran, 116, 118, 121, 123 Teignmouth, Lord, 118 Telugu, 21–2, 25, 30, 32, 240 terminology, see also vocabulary; for schools, 22; modernity, 4–5; premodern vs. medieval, 3; samaj and samajik, see samaj(ik); trans-colonial, 5–6 textbooks, 23, 28, 30–4, 78–82, 142–4 Thakur, 192 Thanjavur, see Tanjore Thibaut, George, 75 Thomas, Nicholas, 125 Thomason, James, 80 Thompson, George, 49 Tiflis, 129 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 233, 240 Tiruvarur, 21 Todar Mull, 214–16 Tolstoy, Leo, 127 Torin, Benjamin, 26 trade; free, 168, 239–40; international, 124, 233–4, 239–40, 243; opium, 236, 239; slave, 127, 243 Tranquebar, 20, 24–5, 31, 231

262 Index translation, 6–7, 166; of Bible, 8, 32, 116–27, 130–1; into English, 63, 73–76, 82; as metaphor, 8, 23; practice of, 8–9, 33–4, 116–17, 131; into vernaculars, 26, 31, 33–34, 74–5, 201 transliteration, 8, 72, 95–102, 105–11; of letter ‘ain, 8, 101–2, 110; report on rules of, 99–101 transnationalism, x, 4–6, 76, 210–11, 214, 218, 224, 231, 240–1 Trautmann, Thomas, 148, 238 Travancore, 24 travel, 88, 148, 224, 237, 242 Trevelyan, C. E., 8, 96–102, 106–7, 111 Trumpener, Katie, 224 Tucker, Henry Carre, 68 Tulajaji II, King, 17 Turkey, 95 Tyab Ali, 235 Tyabji, Badruddin, 235–6 typology, see categories University of Calcutta, 208 Upanishads, 51, 58, 61, 75, 167 Upanishadsar, 75 urban-rural dichotomy, 69, 79, 85, 169–70, 180, 212–13, 219 Urdu, 68, 71, 82, 85–7, 95, 103–4, 107–8, 110, 119, 129, 138, 231, 244 utilitarianism, 19, 78 Uttamvijay, 154 Uttar Pradesh, 233 Uvasagadasao, 148, 152 Vachaspatyam, 60 Vaishnavism, 62, 171, 182 Vaishyas, 174 Valabhi, 151 Vamamanranjan, 84–5 Varanasi, see Benares varna, 170–1, 174 Vedanta, 75 Vedanta Grantha, 54 Vedanta Sutras, 55 Vedas, 29, 63, 73–5, 140, 146–7, 154 Vellalas, 24 vernacular(s), 8, 10, 17, 71; education in, 15, 19–21, 23, 28, 30, 33–4, 52, 68–69, 77–8, 80–2, 86–8, 167; modernity or modernization, 34, 73, 111; printing of books or periodicals in, 19, 30, 32–5, 74, 76, 138, 141, 149, 155, 238; sciences and, 78, 80, 82, 86, 98

Vidyabhusan, Dwarkanath, 51 Vidyalankar, Kamalakanta, 57 Vidyalankara, Mrityunjay, 51, 55, 58 Vidyankur, 80, 143 Vidyaratna, Vrajanath,61 Vidyasagar, Ishvarchandra, 2, 7, 47, 49–52, 56–7, 59–61, 63, 79–80, 140 Vidyasundar, 190 Vidyavachaspati, Madhsudan, 61 Vidyavagish, Ramchandra, 51, 58–9 Vijnaneshvar, 56 Virvijay, 154 Vishuddhanand, Swami, 75–6 Vishvakosha, 170, 172 Viswanathan, Gauri, 76 Vivadabhangarnava, 56 vocabulary; Arabic, 82, 86–7, 103; English, 82, 95, 103, 109–11; Hindi, 86, 103; Persian, 56, 82, 86–7, 103–4; Sanskrit, 55, 82, 86–87; scientific or technological, 82, 86, 97; South Asian vernacular, 99 Vyavaharatattva, 56 Vyavahara-vichara-shabdabhidhan, 56 Vyavastha Sarvasva, 56 Wagoner, Philip, 148 Waite, Sir Nicholas, 235 Warren, John, 30 Watts, Richard, 121 Wellesley, Richard, 237 widow-burning, see sati widows, 47, 49–50, 52, 55–6, 59–60, 172, 202, 215, see also sati, see also marriage Wilkins, Charles, 31 Willock, Henry, 122 Wilson, H. H., 10, 30, 72, 143 Wilson, Jon, 223 Wolff, Joseph, 118, 122–3 women, 50–1, 55, 75, 84–5, 87, 127, 167, 172–3, 233, 235, 242, 245 World Parliament of Religions, 148 Yashovijaya, 153 Yogi-samskar-vyavastha, 61 zamindars, 61, 168, 173, 183, 191, 211, 213–20, 237 Zaremba, Felix, 128 Zastoupil, Lynn, 15, 20 Zwingli, Huldrych, 192–3