Ideas

by Peter Watson

  In both cases, and this is crucial, says King, the current manifestations of these religions were seen as ‘degenerate’ versions of a classic original, and in great need of reform. This ‘mystification’ achieved three purposes. One, in viewing the East as ‘degenerate and backward,’ imperialism was justified. Two, insofar as the East was ancient, the West was by comparison ‘modern’ and progressive. Three, the ancient religions of the East satisfied Europe’s nostalgia for origins, very prevalent at the time. Friedrich Schlegel had voiced what many thought when he wrote ‘Everything, yes, everything without exception has its origins in India.’83

  Warren Hastings, whom we have already encountered, was appointed governor-general of Bengal in 1772. He was firmly of the view that British power in India, if it were to flourish, needed the agreement and support of the Indians themselves. The inherent implausibility of such an approach seems not to have detained or deterred anyone. Instead, he began a series of initiatives on the educational front designed to curry favour with a certain class of Indian. First, he proposed a professorship in Persian at Oxford. Drawing a blank there, his next move, with William Jones and others, was to found the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which was discussed in Chapter 29. More practical still was Hastings’ provision for officials of the East India Company to be taught Persian, which was the language of the Mughal court, and for Hindu pandits to be brought to Calcutta to teach these same men Sanskrit and at the same time translate ancient scriptures. One effect of this was to produce several generations of British officials who were familiar with the local languages and sympathetic to Hindu and Muslim culture. Here are some lines from Hastings’ preface to the translation he commissioned of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Every instance which brings [the Indians’] real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained by their writings; and these will survive, when the British dominion of India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.’84

  Hastings’ achievements were built on in 1800 when Marquess Wellesley, the new governor-general, created the College of Fort William, which later became known as the ‘university of the East’. Here, language tuition was expanded and, in addition to Persian and Sanskrit, Arabic and six Indian local languages were offered, together with Hindu, Muslim and Indian law, science and mathematics. Wellesley also saw to it that Western teaching techniques were introduced, in particular written examinations and public disputation. ‘For many years the ceremony at which the disputations were conducted was seen as the principal social event of the year.’ The college was an ambitious undertaking, at least in the early days. It had its own printing press which published textbooks, translations of Indian classics, studies of Indian history, culture and law, and a library was begun where a collection of rare manuscripts was formed.85

  This enlightened policy didn’t last. The first setback came when the ‘court’ of the East India Company proposed that the college, or at least that part of it which taught European subjects, be transferred to England. And then, in the wake of the massacre of British subjects at Vellore (in south-east India), policy was changed decisively and a decision was taken that British power in the subcontinent could be sustained only if there were a mass conversion of Hindus.86 This was such a fundamental change that it was never going to occur without a fight. In a celebrated pamphlet, entitled Vindications of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Officer, Colonel ‘Hindoo’ Stewart argued that any attempt at mass conversion was doomed to failure, one reason being that the Hindu religion was ‘in many respects superior…The numerous Hindu gods represented merely “types” of virtue, while the theory of the transmigration of souls was preferable to the Christian notion of heaven and hell.’87

  It did no good. After the renewal by Parliament of the charter of the East India Company in 1813, a bishopric of Calcutta was established, the College of Fort William was dismantled and its collection of books and manuscripts dispersed. In January 1854 it was officially dissolved.88 The Asiatic Society of Bengal was left to run down. The fate of the college, and the society, served as a barometer of wider changes. The Orientalist policies pursued by the British in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had at the least helped produce a major extension of Western knowledge about the East. The new attitude, the attempts at mass conversions, merely helped polarise India, into coloniser and colonised.

  What is the legacy of imperialism in terms of ideas? The answer is complex and cannot be divorced from the social, political and economic development of former colonies in the modern world. For many years, following the Second World War, when decolonisation accelerated, imperialism carried much negative baggage: it was a byword for racism, economic exploitation, cultural arrogance on the part of the colonisers at the expense of the ‘other’, the colonised. A large part of the post-modern movement had as its aim the rehabilitation of former colonised cultures. The Indian Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prizewinning economist who has held professorships at Harvard and at Cambridge, reported that India has had far fewer famines since the British left.

  Recently, however, a more textured picture has emerged. ‘Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies…India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models. Finally, there is the English language itself…the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements [what Lawrence James calls the “unseen empire of money”] and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a network of global communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.’ Niall Ferguson has shown that, in 1913, at the height of empire, 63 per cent of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1996 only 28 per cent did. In 1913 some 25 per cent of the world stock of capital was invested in countries with per capita incomes of 20 per cent or less of US per capita GDP; by 1997 that had fallen to 5 per cent. In 1955, near the end of the colonial period, Zambia had a GDP that was a seventh that of Great Britain; in 2003, after some forty years of independence, it was a twenty-eighth. A recent survey of forty-nine countries showed that ‘common-law countries have the strongest, and French civil-law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors’. The vast majority of the common-law counties were once under British rule. The American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset showed that countries which were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving ‘enduring democratization’ after independence than those ruled by other countries. On the other hand, the effects of colonisation were more negative where the imperialists took over countries that were already urbanised, with their own sophisticated civilisations (India, China), where the colonisers were more interested in plunder than in building new institutions. Ferguson thinks this may well explain the ‘great divergence’ by which these latter two countries were reduced from being leading civilisations–perhaps as late as the sixteenth century–to relative poverty.

  Imperialism, therefore, wasn’t just conquest. It was a form of international government, of globalisation, and it did not only benefit the ruling powers. The colonialists comprised not just Cecil Rhodes, but Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones.89

  The extent to which Orientalism developed as an aspect of imperialism has been the subject of much debate at the end of the twentieth century and on into the present one. The argument which has had most attention is that developed by the Palestinian critic and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, the late Edward Said. In two books, Said argued first that many nineteen
th-century works of art depicted an imaginary Orient, a stereotypical Orient full of caricature and simplification. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting Snake Charmer (1870), for example, shows a young boy, naked except for the snake wrapped around him, standing on a carpet and entertaining a group of men, dark-skinned Arabs festooned in rifles and swords, lounging against a wall of tiles decorated with arabesques and Arabic script. Said’s argument was that the intellectual history of Oriental studies, as practiced in the West, has been corrupted by political power, that the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as a single entity is absurd and belittling of a huge region that contains many cultures, many religions, many ethnic groupings. He showed for example, that the Frenchman Silvestre de Sacy, whose Chrestomathie arabe was published in 1806, was trying to put ‘Oriental studies’ on a par with Latin and Hellenistic studies, which helped produce the idea that the Orient was as homogeneous as classical Greece or Rome. In this way, he said, the world comes to be made up of two unequal halves, shaped by the unequal exchange rooted in political (imperial) power. There is, he says, an ‘imaginative demonology’ of the ‘mysterious Orient’ in which the ‘Orientals’ are invariably lazy, deceitful, and irrational.90

  Said took his argument further in Culture and Imperialism (1993). It was in the ‘great cultural archive,’ as Said put it, that the ‘intellectual and aesthetics in overseas dominion are made. If you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority…your sense of power scarcely imagined that those “natives” who appeared either subservient or sullenly cooperative were ever going to be capable of finally making you give up India or Algeria. Or of saying anything that might perhaps contradict, challenge…’91 At some basic level, Said insisted, ‘imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others…For citizens of nineteenth-century Britain and France, empire was a major topic of unembarrassed cultural attention. British India and French North Africa alone played inestimable roles in the imagination, economy, political life and social fabric of British and French society and, if we mention names like Delacroix, Edmund Burke, Ruskin, Carlyle, James and John Stuart Mill, Kipling, Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, or Conrad, we shall be mapping a tiny corner of a far vaster reality than even their immense collective talents cover.’ It was Said’s contention that one of the principal purposes of ‘the great European realistic novel’ was to sustain a society’s consent in overseas expansion.92

  Said focuses on the period around 1878, when ‘the scramble for Africa’ was beginning, and when, he says, the realistic novel form became pre-eminent. ‘By the 1840s the English novel had achieved eminence as the aesthetic form and as a major intellectual voice, so to speak, in English society.’93 All the major English novelists of the mid-nineteenth century accepted a globalised world-view, he said, and indeed could not ignore the vast overseas reach of British power.94 Said lists those books which, he argues, fit his theme: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Disraeli’s Tancred, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. The empire, he says, is everywhere a crucial setting. In many cases, Said says, ‘the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth century as a codified, if only marginally visible presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied or given density…’95

  The main narrative line of Mansfield Park (1814), for example, is to follow the fortunes of Fanny Price, who leaves the family home near Portsmouth, at the age of ten, to live as a poor relation/companion at Mansfield Park, the country estate of the Bertram family. In due course, Fanny acquires the respect of the family, in particular the various sisters, and the love of the eldest son, whom she marries at the end of the book, becoming mistress of the house. Said, however, concentrates on a few almost incidental remarks of Austen’s, to the effect that Sir Thomas Bertram is away, abroad, overseeing his property in Antigua in the West Indies. The incidental nature of these references, Said says, betrays the fact that so much at the time was taken for granted. But the fact remains, ‘What sustains life materially is the Bertram estate in Antigua, which is not doing well.’96 Austen sees clearly, he says, that to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it. ‘What assures the domestic tranquillity and attractive harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the other.’97

  It is this tranquillity and harmony that Fanny comes to adore so much. Just as she is herself an outsider brought inside Mansfield Park, a ‘transported commodity’ in effect, so too is the sugar which the Antigua estate produces and on which the serenity of Mansfield Park depends. Austen is therefore combining a social point–old blood needs new blood to rejuvenate it–with a political point: the empire may be invisible for most of the time, but it is economically all-important. Said’s underlying point is that Austen, for all her humanity and artistry, implicitly accepts slavery and the cruelty that went with it, and likewise accepted the complete subordination of colony to metropolis. He quotes John Stuart Mill on colonies in his Principles of Political Economy: ‘They are hardly to be looked upon as countries, but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community…All the capital employed is English capital; almost all the industry is carried on for English uses…The trade with the West Indies is hardly to be considered an external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country.’98 It is Said’s case that Mansfield Park–rich, intellectually complex, a shining constituent of the canon–is as important for what it conceals as for what it reveals, and in that was typical of its time.

  Both Kipling and Conrad represented the experience of empire as the main subject of their work, the former in Kim (1901), the latter in Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). Said pictures Kim as an ‘overwhelmingly male’ novel, with two very attractive men at the centre. Kim himself remains a boy (he ages from thirteen to seventeen in the book) and the important background to the story, the ‘great game’–politics, diplomacy, war–is, says Said, treated like a great prank. Edmund Wilson’s celebrated judgement of Kim had been that ‘We have been shown two entirely different worlds existing side by side, with neither really understanding the other…the parallel lines never meet…The fiction of Kipling, then, does not dramatise any fundamental conflict because Kipling would never face one.’99 On the contrary, says Said, ‘The conflict between Kim’s colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions is unresolved not because Kipling could not face it, but because for Kipling there was no conflict.’ (Italics in the original.) For Kipling, India’s best destiny was to be ruled by England.100 Kipling respected all divisions in Indian society, was untroubled by them, and neither he nor his characters ever interfered with them. By the late nineteenth century there were, he says, sixty-one levels of status in India and the love–hate relationship between British and Indians ‘derived from the complex hierarchical attitudes present in both peoples’.101 ‘We must read the novel,’ Said concludes, ‘as the realisation of a great cumulative process, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century is reaching its last major moment before Indian independence: on the one hand, surveillance and control over India; on the other, love for and fascinated attention to its every detail…In reading Kim today we can watch a great artist in a sense blinded by his own insights about India…an India that he loved but could not properly have.’102

  Of all the people who shared in the scramble for empire, Joseph Conrad became known for turning his back on the dark
continents of ‘overflowing riches’. After years as a sailor in different merchant navies, Conrad removed himself to the sedentary life of writing fiction. Conrad’s best-known books, Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (published in book form in 1902), Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche and Nordau to explore the great fault-line between scientific, liberal and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature. He is reported to have said to H. G. Wells on one occasion, ‘the difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!’103

  Christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he was born in 1857 in a part of Poland taken by the Russians in the 1793 partition of that often-dismembered country (his birthplace is now in the Ukraine). His father, Apollo, was an aristocrat without lands, for the family estates had been sequestered in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. Orphaned before he was twelve, Conrad depended very much on the generosity of his maternal uncle Tadeusz, who provided an annual allowance and, on his death in 1894, left about £1,600 to his nephew (well over £100,000 now). This event coincided with the acceptance of Conrad’s first book, Almayer’s Folly (begun in 1889), and the adoption of the pen name Joseph Conrad. He was from then on a man of letters, turning his experiences and the tales he heard at sea into fiction.104