Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  ‘We may learn much from them as well as teach’: John Bruce Norton and the Illuminated Text of Rebellion

  Among those Britons of a liberal disposition who did not take ‘the fact of resistance … as evidence of a derisive and perverse rejection by Indians of the civilizational benefits proffered by imperial rule’, but sought instead to engage with its implications for the Empire as a whole, was the Madras lawyer and jurist John Bruce Norton.45 Norton is important for our purposes not only because he dissented from government policy and practice – well before the insurgency, which, he tells us, he predicted – but because his own conflicted view about the continuance of British rule in India begins to indicate the emergence of an attitude towards the colonized that was neither just paternalist nor simply relativist. What Norton’s lengthy account of causation does make clear, however, is the need for a certain kind of reverse tutelage, whereby it would be the British who learned from the Indians.46 Here, the actions of the rebels – rather than ‘an explicit intellectual discourse’, to use Trouillot’s phrase – would be the primer.47 In a resonant metaphor, Norton describes the rebellion as a text – indeed, an illuminated manuscript, wherein ‘the same truth is thrust forward in a more startling and authoritative form … written in the blood of our murdered countrymen in India, illustrated by rebellion, and illuminated by the conflagrations at Meerut and Delhi, and Lucknow, and Allahabad’.48 The reversal of textual authority is not insignificant: it is the rebellion that puts flesh and blood, so to speak, on the Englishman’s words. Norton himself might not have been heeded when he warned of impending trouble but ignoring the claims ‘written’ in blood by the rebels would be catastrophic. ‘We’ have something to learn from ‘them’, and here Norton’s drawing on the voices of rebels mouthing profanities is telling. He recounts an exemplary incident, ‘a glimmering of the truth’ relayed in the Bombay Times: ‘At the slaughter of Neemuch, when the officers said to their native troops … “You have eaten the Company’s salt, why are you not faithful to it?” The answer, as the sepoys shot down and bayonetted them, was, “You Banchats! have you been faithful to the King of Oude?” ’49 This moment of moral dialogism – where the sepoy, in turn, poses a question to the colonizer, asking him to examine his own betrayals and ethical violations – has pedagogic value; but for the British, not the natives. It is the British who need to learn to be consistent and loyal:

  Peruse the dying speech of the traitor at Sattara, as we call him – hero and martyr as the people regard him, and as we should ourselves regard him, were the fable narrated of ourselves and invading Russians – and reflect, whether his brief address to his country-men does not throw light upon the feelings which prompted the rising at Sattara.50

  Norton – a known critic of the East India Company’s courts who would become advocate-general for Madras in 1863 and who had served on the famous Torture Commission of 1855, which investigated claims that agents of the Company had tortured persons in the process of revenue extraction – begins his pointedly titled work The Rebellion in India: How to Prevent Another by noting that the gag orders preventing the press, both ‘Native’ and ‘European’, from covering most aspects of the uprising were ‘intended to screen the cowardice and incapacity of the real authors of the revolution’.51 Writing hot on the heels of the uprising – the book was published in London in the autumn of 1857 – Norton posed one central question: ‘Shall we throw away or shall we preserve our Indian Empire?’52 Norton was very clear that it would be a calamitous mistake to hold to the belief that ‘the origin of the present crisis is purely military disaffection’, and that ‘the masses took no share in it’.53 The widespread existence of negative feelings towards the British in India has to be taken on board as a central issue: ‘There is indisputably a very large and influential population who hate us cordially.’54 What is of real significance in Norton’s sense of grim vindication is his emphasis on engagement with the ruled – on listening to those who, contrary to dominant assumptions, had a clear sense of their own needs. His own unheeded prognostications of trouble had been based on conversations with those he encountered in the course of his administrative work. Simply observing matters with ‘ordinary intelligence’ had shown that ‘there was disaffection enough in the land for half-a-dozen rebellions’, and that any failures these might meet with were due less to Britain’s popularity and strength than to diversity and discordance among its inhabitants.55 Given the overwhelming emphasis within the British community in India on severe retribution, repression and separation of communities, Norton’s call for active engagement and listening was remarkable.

  Norton had another valuable insight: the widespread Indian antipathy was to a system of rule, not simply to a few rotten apples, for it was ‘a hatred not of obnoxious individuals who have given offence to their immediate inferiors; not a class feeling of the soldiery against their officers; but a general antipathy to the European race’.56 Listing district after district which had become scenes of hostile outbreaks, Norton also denied that it was possible ‘to limit the cause of outbreak to the offended religious prejudices of any particular caste … I believe there is no one so weak as to fancy, that had there been no greased cartridges there would have been no rebellion’.57 Religion and cultural differences would not suffice as an explanation of causation, and any consideration of the ‘feelings of the Natives’ would have to be less facile.58

  It is worth pausing on the ‘actual feelings of the people’, variations of which phrase Norton repeatedly uses.59 His interest in that affective realm – and the recently manifested agency of those who act upon their emotions – enables his own criticisms of the self-serving discourse deployed by colonial administrators: ‘They are so puffed up with an overweening idea of their own excellence, that they cannot believe the people disaffected under their superintendence; they are so wedded to the perfections of the Indian Government, that they cannot conceive it distasteful to the people’.60 Equally significant is Norton’s insistence that these negative feelings ought to be entirely legible in their specificity, rather than mechanically dismissed as fanaticism: ‘They make no allowance for the existence among the Natives of those feelings which actuate themselves. They cannot believe that the Natives look with reverence, or affection, or respect to old institutions, old associations, old names, old dynasties. They look only to what they conclude their system ought to produce.’61 Norton contended that this denial of parity was a significant part of the problem underlying the rebellion.

  Since, taken to its logical conclusion, respect for the feelings of the governed might enjoin the withdrawal of a resented external power, Norton admits to a sense of his own contradictions: ‘It may seem paradoxical, and I confess, I feel it difficult how to reconcile my statement of belief in discontent on the part of the masses with the admission that our Government is an improvement on any form which has preceded it.’62 (He does, however, note that the previous form of government being ‘worse’ does not make this one ‘good’.) This admitted paradox is important, as it is one that would continue to dog British critics of empire into the next century: the clash between acknowledging the wishes of the ruled and an inability to relinquish fully the liberal principle that it was possible to govern benevolently and responsively. Norton is conscious that his disquisition on the deep-rooted and widespread causes of disaffection here fails to follow through on its own conclusions about widespread disaffection, with a call for the withdrawal of Britain from the colony. Norton’s declaration sits at odds with his analysis: ‘It is not possible to conceive a greater calamity to the people of India, than the present dissolution of the bands between them and us.’63 But, even so, Norton’s conception of a reconfigured rule is radical in its insistent inversion of the direction of assimilation. If, on the one hand, the familiar liberal trio of ‘justice, prudence, and benevolence’ must be deployed to ‘reconcile the Natives to our rule’ until, on the other, they are ‘fitted to take their own government peacefully and powerfully into their
own hands’, the very definition of benefaction had changed.64 It was important for the British in India to change their behaviour to the point where the natives would come to regard them less as benefactors than ‘as a portion of themselves’.65 This seemingly throwaway exegetical phrase is important, for here is neither a radical othering nor a simple assimilation of native lives and cultures to European mores. It is the British outsider who must strive to become part of the Indian self; and, for this to happen, the wishes of those whom Britain rules had to be foundational: ‘We have governed too much for ourselves, too little for the people.’66 Rather than calling for Indians to be ‘lifted to the heights of Victorian liberalism’, Norton was calling for the ruling British to bend their ear low to their subjects – to listen and integrate.67 They would, of course, do the opposite, withdrawing into the enclaves of power from which rule would be undertaken carefully, but enacted upon an inferior people who did not know what was good for them.

  Norton’s sudden shift – and it is self-consciously, even sheepishly, sudden – from articulating a trenchant attack on the failings of British rule, including charging it with being primarily concerned with revenue extraction, to producing an equally impassioned entreaty for a reformed continuance of it, is contradictory. Yet it also embodies a wider truth: calls for reforms, especially in colonial contexts, were generally responses to pressures from below rather than initiatives from above. ‘Any government of ours in India must be one of opinion,’ Norton insisted, meaning not only that it must be responsive but that it must be seen to be responsive to native opinion.68 Rather than waiting to bestow self-government once Indians were deemed ready for it, British rule in India must become immediately accountable to the ruled. Norton was explicitly refusing authoritarian liberalism and benevolent colonial despotism as the answer to 1857. His counter-discourse – which is based, as he repeatedly stresses, on an attention to the spoken words of the subjects of British rule – points towards the possibility of a relationship between the inhabitants of India and the British that could be dialogical. At one level, Norton’s reformism may be simply pragmatic; physical force might prevail now but will not suffice in the long run: ‘When once combination among them becomes feasible, and a determination to combine is persevered in, the greater force must prevail over the lesser. When a hundred million combine, writes Sir Charles Napier, the game is up.’69 But that would be to miss Norton’s repeated emphasis on the ethical centrality of the views of the ruled and the way in which he insisted on treating the ‘Mutiny’ as a text that invited reading and dialogical engagement. Norton was raising the startling possibility that the ruled could be the authors of their own futures, agents of change rather than wedded to ‘Oriental stagnation’, and that the rulers might benefit from working collaboratively with them.70 We should note here the acknowledgement that the greater power ultimately resides with the ruled and not the occupiers, and renders all projects of ‘improvement’ fraught with danger: ‘May it not all end in the contempt of Caliban for Trinculo!’71 Norton is not quite suggesting that it is the British who have taught Indians self-assertion, but rather that English education has afforded natives a means, by giving them knowledge of their rulers, of assessing and puncturing British imperial mythologies: ‘Those whom they mistook for gods, they discover to be mere men.’72

  Much of the remainder of Norton’s text is a damning list of annexations (‘thefts’), especially of the kingdom of Oude, treaty violations, and revenue extraction that ‘have had no small share in causing the suspicion with which we are now universally regarded’.73 Indians are capable of speaking up – and Norton stresses both the existence of these voices and their elision in colonial discourse – against those crimes, and it is to Britain’s disadvantage that they are not heeded when they do. The state in which Lord Dalhousie left India is evidenced by ‘the crowds of Indians now to be seen in London on every side, who have come to petition the throne of England against his acts’.74 Norton anticipates and dismisses the apologetics that will inevitably be trotted out: ‘No doubt we shall have the brilliancy of the electric telegraph and the railway flashed across our eyes; but I say these measures … were forced upon him by the pressure of public opinion; and both were measures calculated immeasurably to increase the centralizing power of government, as well as to benefit the people.’75 It is Britain’s double standards which have been shown the mirror by the 1857 uprising, for ‘we do in India precisely what we will not allow Russia to do in Europe … our palpable, transparent violation in the East of principles by which we profess to be guided in the West’.76 Seizing lands by doctrine of escheat, ‘this vast universal effort to make ourselves the sole landlords of the soil … is ample cause for the general disaffection of the people’.77 Norton emphasizes the salience of native voices – relaying accounts of conversations with Indians full of ‘vehemence and passion’ and the ability to speak up in self-interest. This is why, ‘if we retain India, a representative form of Government must sooner or later be introduced’.78 The spirit of such reforms, in Norton’s mind, applies as much to the British as to the ruled: ‘We must drop the habit of regarding ourselves as mere exiles, whose first object should be to escape from a disagreeable climate with the greatest possible amount of the people’s money in the shortest possible time.’79 Norton again goes against the grain of the ascendant insistence on radical separateness in asking whether ‘it is worthy of consideration whether the era has not arrived for striving to establish friendships between ourselves and the educated Natives? There are few people, however repulsive their natural antipathies, who do not come to esteem each other when familiarity has been established between them. We may learn much from them as well as teach.’80 He notes, moreover, that the ‘native mind’ is not stationary and both parties can change in response to each other:

  But we must go further; we must admit them socially to our conversational circles. They are not to be regarded as an inferior race, unworthy of, and unfitted for, polite society. They have, of course, their peculiarities and mauvaise honte; perhaps we also have our peculiarities in their eyes; but it is by the constant collision of friendly intercommunications that the angles of difference are broken off and polished down.81

  In a later book, Topics for Indian Statesmen, Norton would return to the theme of the British needing to be educated by India a year into the rebellion: ‘But one of the gravest lessons ever read in history lies open before us, and it behoves us to read it right.’82

  How, though, was it available to read? Norton wrote his warning narrative in his capacity as a ‘man on the spot’, but one with a very different sense of what was unfolding ‘on the ground’ than those who were formulating post-1857 policies of rule. Back in Britain, news was of course only available through dispatches, letters and the published accounts of those, like Norton, who had witnessed the rebellion. These made the text of the rebellion – and the rebellion as text – available for metropolitan reading and had provided the basis for the widespread outrage at Indian atrocities. Certainly, in the first several months after the outbreak of violence, these dispatches were heavily official in character, of the sort Guha describes as written ‘by those who had the most to fear’ from rebellion.83 In due course, there were also accounts by administrators and historians (or administrators-turned-historians, as Guha puts it) who also wrote from the perspective of counterinsurgency. But these were also read – and differently interpreted – by those Britons who were inclined to be more critical of the British establishment and its ‘organs’, such as The Times. In Ernest Jones’s readings of news dispatches and accounts of the rebellion, we see once again a sense that the Indian revolt was a primer from which a reverse tutelage was possible, and from which lessons could be learned not only about the limits of imperial rule but also about the relationship between the universal and the particular. In his engagement with the 1857 uprising, as also Richard Congreve’s, there was an effort to ‘break away from the code of counter-insurgency’ and understand, even ado
pt, ‘the insurgent’s point of view’.84 Where Jones’s reading anticipated a reframing of domestic politics in terms made visible by the situation in India alongside calls for identity of purpose, in Congreve’s case it prompted both a call for the immediate abandonment of the imperial project – astonishing, given his quintessentially liberal preference for gradual change – and an exploration of how common ground might be forged, rather than assumed in the face of manifest cultural differences.

  ‘The spirit of the sepoy host’: Ernest Jones and Revolutionary Contagion

  In a useful article referencing the 1857 uprising, Tim Pratt has argued rightly that while historians have acknowledged that the episode elicited criticism of aspects of imperial policy and administration in the imperial metropole, ‘the possibility that the rebels were actively supported in their struggle has been almost completely ignored’.85 He notes that one of the people to conspicuously offer such support was the Chartist leader, Ernest Jones: ‘Rather than joining the chorus of horrified condemnation of the Indian insurgents, Jones actively sought to identify the causes of the rebels and Chartism by attempting to elide the political, racial and cultural differences between the British and Indians being highlighted in parliament and the mainstream press, instead stressing the linkages between their respective causes.’86 Chartism – the movement which emerged from the publication of the People’s Charter in 1838 – was itself headed for decline by the late 1840s, when Jones entered it, and working-class radicalism in general was an increasingly marginalized force in mid Victorian Britain.87 As Miles Taylor, drawing on John Saville, notes: ‘Ernest Jones and Chartism became synonymous in the mid-1850s.’88 Already a reasonably well-regarded poet and a journalist of some note, Jones would give Chartism one last lease of life, lecturing widely, and editing as well as writing large portions of the weekly People’s Paper.89 The latter fact is important, because ‘it was at precisely this juncture that the press assumed an overriding significance in the annals of the Chartist movement’.90 Jones’s engagement with – and championing of – the cause of India through that period would, apart from anything else, bring a non-European and more strenuously anticolonial dimension to Chartist internationalism, which, while it had sympathies with Polish nationalism and the Irish struggle, had been largely focused on domestic matters.91 By the time Jones came out of prison, where he had been serving a sentence for ‘sedition’ until 1851, Chartism as a mass movement was over, though its influence would be felt in other reform initiatives and movements. Jones would try valiantly after his release to resurrect it, and as he did so, he found inspiration from an unexpected quarter. Framed as a stimulus to action in England, the Indian revolt allowed Jones to try to expand the language of a movement in decline.