By the end of his account, Nevinson stands in the reconfigured space between the liberal humanitarian framework with which he had arrived in India and the insights he has gleaned from his sojourn there, including the fact that the ‘difficult’ spirit and ‘the line of most resistance’ have made thoughts of imperial benevolence obsolete.169 While he can never quite relinquish the British colonial idea that the quests for liberty and equality are now deep-rooted ‘plants that we ourselves have generously set in India’, he also observes quite categorically that the Swadeshi movement had expanded into a ‘much wider movement in self-reliance … quite independently of our influence’.170 Gone is the absolute certainty that Britain is the sole fountainhead of political thought; Nevinson’s rhetoric on where aspirations to liberty derive from is now far more qualified: ‘Many things have combined to create a new spirit, and we have ourselves contributed much.’171 This means that the usual question posed by critics of empire – what should Britain do? – must now be inverted, with the agency of Indians at its centre: ‘The question immediately before India now is, which of two courses with regard to ourselves the new spirit as a whole will take.’172 To ask India to continue to acquiesce in the British presence for the common good is, he acknowledges, a long shot, requiring ‘a sweet reasonableness and a strength of character which few men in any nation possess’.173 It is not for Indians to cooperate; Britain must ask itself ‘whether we are to hold the new spirit fairly on our side, and to co-operate with it’.174 It is Britain, too, which must undertake Burkean remedial measures, and give up vulgar, extenuating relativism, particularly the ‘weary ineptitude that “East is East, and West is West” ’.175
Nevinson never became an anticolonial radical in the mould of Blunt, with whom he shared the combination of conservative aesthetic tastes and liberal political inclinations, but it would be churlish and dishonest not to recognize the extent to which his dissidence on the Indian questions was, like his friend Forster’s, at a considerable distance from the regnant notions of his time. Indeed, reviewing A Passage to India in 1924, Nevinson offered a strikingly trenchant takedown of colonial discourse:
It is unfortunate that the very name of India arouses despair or indifference in British hearts. Our average citizen thinks vaguely of a vast country inhabited by hordes of brown or blackish ‘natives’, who worship strange and improper gods, are given to atrocious mutinies and massacres, and would fight horribly among themselves if the controlling power of England were withdrawn … There have been stages in our knowledge or our ignorance. There was the stage of the ‘Nabobs,’ when India was a dream of diamonds and gold and pearls … the stage when India was to us the scene of widows burnt alive, madmen swinging themselves by hooks from poles as an act of sanctity, and worshippers flinging themselves beneath the bloody wheels of Juggernaut; from which abominations only English missionaries could save them.176
Adding to this list the ‘Kipling stage’ of the British Empire, in which he had been brought up and which he had had to think against, Nevinson deprecates the falseness of all of these conceptions, but notes that there have been some shifts in opinion since the ‘widespread horror’ generated by both the Amritsar massacre and ‘the growing insistence of Indians themselves’ on taking control of their destinies.177 He may have formally opted for gradualism, as both Owen and John note, but, along with that of Hardie, his work in the press also ‘helped inform the public from radically different perspectives from those generally promulgated by the British Raj’.178 Nevinson’s project, in the end, was really about fostering a degree of self-awareness and self-reflexivity among his fellow Britons when it came to the Empire. Modest as this achievement may have been, it helped create the ground for more far-reaching criticism.
The Brief Awakening of Ramsay MacDonald
Another fact-finding traveller who went to India two years after Hardie and Nevinson, in 1909, to examine the ‘unrest’ and report back on it was the former’s parliamentary colleague, the Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald, who in the 1920s would become Britain’s first Labour prime minister. Aurobindo, not hostile but sceptical, had this to say about him:
Mr Macdonald belongs to the new thought, but he is, we believe, one of those who would hasten slowly to the goal. He has not the rugged personality of Mr Keir Hardie, but combines in himself, in a way Mr Hardie scarcely does, the old culture and the new spirit. He has as broad a sympathy and as penetrating an intelligence as Mr Nevinson, but not the latter’s quick intensity. Nevertheless, behind the slow consideration and calm thoughtfulness of his manner, one detects hidden iron and the concealed roughness of the force that has come to destroy and to build, some hint of the rugged outlines of Demogorgon, the claws of Narasingha … So far as an Englishman can help India, and that under present circumstances is hardly at all, he certainly wishes to help. It is not his fault that the blindness of his countrymen and the conditions of the problem in India make men like him, perforce, little better than sympathetic spectators of the passionate struggle between established privilege and a nation in the making that the world watches now in India.179
Like Hardie, MacDonald had been born into a Scottish labouring milieu; his own engagement with imperialism began with debates around the Boer War (1899–1902), which he and many others of a liberal persuasion opposed. As Peter Cain has noted, MacDonald was critical of aspects of imperial policy, but was no anticolonialist; on the contrary, he had ‘some strong leanings towards what can be regarded as conventional imperial sentiments’.180 His narrative account, The Awakening of India, which is based on reports he wrote for the Daily Chronicle, was also the most conventional of the travelogues examined here in terms of its narrative structure, replete with the obligatory account of the sea voyage and short ethnographic portraits of various ‘types’ of Indians he encountered during his visits to princely courts, and so on. It is also perhaps the most literary of these otherwise political narratives. MacDonald’s expressed views on British rule in India, formed before he arrived there and not entirely dislodged by the time he left – his trip interrupted by a general election – are taken straight from the chapbook of liberal imperialism; ‘the historical fact remains that England saved India’, he notes, also trotting out the familiar claim that ‘the warring elements in Indian life need a unifying and controlling power’.181 Given so strident a view on the need for British rule, we must ask, what then led MacDonald to the conclusion that, in the end, ‘the house in which we are sheltering our official hopes is built on the sand’?182 What accounts for the sense of imperial doom invoked at the very beginning of a narrative which also insists on the British desire to do the right thing?
If any one reading these pages detects in them an unhappy suggestion that all is not well in India, that unsettlement is getting worse, that we have not yet found the way of peace, that the West might be more hesitating in asserting the superiority of its materialist civilisation, I confess he will only have detected what is actually my feeling.183
Read carefully, The Awakening of India is an account of how a liberal imperialist’s journey through India disrupted some of the cherished tenets of liberal imperialism. This is what makes the text less of ‘an easy afternoon’s work for a theorist of colonial discourse’ than might be expected, or at least one which requires more than either denunciation of colonial stereotypes or the familiar resort to claims of ambivalence as always already embedded in the colonial.184 If it is an account of the prototypical ‘awakening of India’, a much-favoured colonial trope at the turn of the century, MacDonald’s is also an awakening by India. Towards the end of his account, MacDonald would opine, perhaps surprising himself as much as anyone else: ‘On the whole I therefore regard the future as belonging to Nationalism.’185
Upon arrival in the country, MacDonald finds it less amenable to explanatory narration than he might have liked. About a third of the way through his account, after several lyrical passages that provide a tourist’s view of India – with evocative descriptions of mi
narets, temples, palaces and narrow lanes, and finding impenetrable ‘their mysteries of devotion and deceit, of holiness and blackguardliness’ – MacDonald suddenly announces: ‘I have written of India; but before one has been here a week, one doubts if India exists.’186 This is partly an admission of the difficulty of narrating the India of multitudinous singularity within a liberal paradigm of comprehension and equivalence. It is, to use Edward Said’s words, a familiar acknowledgement of the difficulties of codifying in writing India’s ‘vastness, incomprehensible creeds, secret motions, histories and social forms’.187 It is also, however, a comment on the complexities of Indian politics, which elude both British administrators and the well-meaning British supporter of Indian causes. Is there even such a thing as an Indian nation-in-waiting? ‘At first sight, and on the surface’, writes MacDonald, ‘India appears to be a land where people live side by side but do not form a national community. The hope of a united India, an India conscious of a national unity of purpose and destiny, seems to be the vainest of vain dreams.’188 Such observations were not unfamiliar, of course – they routinely underpinned arguments for the unifying importance of British rule. But MacDonald would use them as a point of departure to investigate both the diversity of aspirations he encountered and the challenges faced by those who sought to give those aspirations national form.
While, like Nevinson and Hardie before him, he believes that Britain has given Indians ‘the spirit which craves for nationality’ and ‘taught’ them the principles through which that craving can be translated into definite political demands, much of Macdonald’s argument is actually taken up with what he has learned from his encounters – that Indian nationalism in the wake of Swadeshi has found imaginative, spiritual and political resources of its own.189 Having studied a variety of Indian newspapers of different political shades, including the nationalist Swaraj and Karmayogin; having met a range of figures, from Aurobindo to Gokhale (both of whom he cites); having read novels like Anandamath and listened to Tagore’s poetry being sung, Macdonald is moved to recognize that there is a spirit abroad which ‘is living. It is independent. It is proud of itself. It challenges the foreigner and draws inspiration from its own past.’190 The issue is how the British in India deal with it, and here the blustering ‘I know’ of the colonial administrator will simply not suffice; this spirit, though ‘blurred by blackguardism, dulled by indifference, coarsened by deceit, is nevertheless in its purity the spirit which we have to understand’.191 It is too reductive of this narrative to suggest that ‘MacDonald has little time for the notion that India’s past provided any bases for building democratic institutions’, or that he came away from India convinced that only ‘gradualism and compromise would work’.192 He was undoubtedly critical of much that he saw, including the ways in which Hinduism relegated vast swathes of the population ‘to a life little removed from that of the beasts that perish’ – people whose lives were less sacred than that of a cow.193 The only one of the travellers of this moment to be pertinently and presciently critical of the ‘hard and bigoted’ Hindu chauvinist and upper-caste moorings of Hindu revivalism, MacDonald also asked pertinently whether a certain kind of nationalist was really seeking a united India or simply ‘the dominance of his own kind’.194 He points out trenchantly and with some acuity that, as far as many of the oppressed castes were concerned, ‘Indian Nationalism means Brahminism’.195
Even so, MacDonald argued, as Nevinson had, that it made no sense to insist that religion and politics be kept separate in a context where they never had been. The ‘significance of this deification of India’ in the ‘unconstitutional’ movement that rejected petitioning had to be grasped in its specificity in order to understand the present moment, but it was not entirely without a British parallel: ‘The Indian assassin quotes his Bhagavad Gita just as the Scottish covenanter quoted his Old Testament’, and inspires youths to ‘cast constitutionalism to the four winds’.196 Swadeshi – and its hold on the Bengali imagination and beyond – had to be understood for what it was because ‘on the shores of its enthusiasm it will throw up the bomb-thrower as a troubled sea throws up foam, and from it all will come India – if India does ever come’.197 His advice to his fellow Britons with an interest in India is simple: acknowledge that there is as much hostility to and ‘insane suspicion’ of British rule as there was before the Mutiny.198 To overlook this seething resentment is to be ‘like the inexperienced summer boatman who trusts himself to a sea subject to angry storms which arise without warning and apparently from all the quarters of heaven at the same time’.199 Making a point of visiting women’s clubs and reading papers and magazines edited by Indian women, MacDonald also observed, against the grain of stereotypes, that the strength of Swadeshi was due to Indian women who were active protesters, so that it was ‘sheer blindness to overlook the women’s influence as a factor in the unrest’.200 For all that he appreciated what Swadeshi means both for India and for British rule in India, Macdonald notes, not inaccurately, that its economics are in fact based on capitalist and Western thinking, and thus are ‘not going to carry India very far’, since Indian capitalists simply want to exploit India themselves.201 ‘Individual capitalism’, he notes, ‘is proving itself to be even more destructive of the best that is in India’ than it has been in the West, where it is ‘less alien’ in civilizational terms.202 Another pernicious aspect of colonial rule is the erosion of the agency of colonial subjects, the Pax Britannica in India having been ‘bought at the price of her own initiative … The governed are crushed down. They become subjects who obey, not citizens who act.’203 Colonial rule has undermined cultural resources, rendering Indians into copyists and ‘hewers of wood in their national industrial economy’.204
Towards the end of his narrative, MacDonald offers a more qualified assessment of Britain’s role in India, insisting, like Nevinson and Hardie before him, on its continued importance but acknowledging that its benevolent aspects might be a corollary to less edifying ones: ‘Under our protection India has enjoyed a recuperative quiet. If we cannot say that our rule has been a necessary factor in the development of Indian civilisation, we can say that in view of historical Indian conditions it has been a necessary evil.’205 Yet, MacDonald is beset by the sense that the India he witnesses in ‘living’ struggle will not yield to such liberal certainties and equivalences: ‘You feel insignificant before it, just as a decently minded prize-fighter would feel insignificant before a saint. The difference which separates you from it cannot be bridged.’206 At one level, this is close to what Benita Parry describes in her reading of A Passage to India as ‘the time-honored topos of a mysterious land’; as Forster would ask: ‘How can the mind take hold of such a country?’207 In MacDonald’s case, the insistence on ‘the difficulty of getting a mental grasp of what India is’ serves to undercut and leaven his own attempts – and those of the ‘Anglo-Indians’ he both sympathizes with and criticizes – to assimilate Indian nationalism to a ready-made explanatory framework in which it is simply the legatee of British pedagogy.208 And so, MacDonald’s narrative ends with a dual gesture: the first, like Nevinson’s, a normative call to British administrators to liberalize their rule and make it more consultative with the ruled, in order to secure ‘the fulfilment of our work in India’;209 and the second, a reiteration of the admission made in the narrative preface of India’s recalcitrance, of ‘something hidden in its heart which you will never know … Thus, your attempts to understand, thwarted, laughed at, denied every time, become maddening. India eludes you to the last.’210 He would go so far as to invert a familiar binary to suggest that India was communist and pantheistic, ‘centred in the universal’, while the West, ‘centred in the particular, is theistic and individualist’.211 Having offered a recipe for improving administration, MacDonald ends with a long, impassioned peroration on the temporariness of any rule; his assurances that the expulsion of the Raj, of ‘our good government’, from India is a long way off are also undercut by the contrapuntal insight
that ‘a revolution could bury it in its own dusty ruins’.212 Strikingly, for what is intended as an account of a political engagement between two nations, the last lines of the memoir ask much more fundamental and distinctly un-pragmatic questions of the imperial (and capitalist) project: ‘Are the pursuits we have taught India to follow anything but alluring shadows? Is the wealth that we are telling her to seek anything but dust and ashes?’213 The riddle, MacDonald says, is troublesome, while the last lines of his narrative are curiously redolent of the devotional Hindu rhetoric of Swadeshi as MacDonald calls for Britain to welcome India’s rise: ‘Her Destiny is fixed above our will, and we had better recognise it and bow to the Inevitable.’214 For a politician – indeed, a future prime minister – this is a formidable concession about the power of anticolonial agitation. Certainly he had come to a clear recognition of the existence of other historical experiences and trajectories which challenged the British assumption of exemplary status, placing themselves ‘on a pedestal as the one example for men’: ‘At the root of most of our mistakes is the assumption that India should copy us.’215 MacDonald would comment again on Swadeshi activists in a later work: ‘They believed in India and did not believe in Europe. They believed in their own civilization and not in ours. Their ideal was an India sitting on her own throne, mistress of her own destiny, doing homage to her own past. They shook the Government more than it has been shaken since the Mutiny.’216
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