Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  The interesting thing about British colonialism was that while its goal was unalterably focussed, its practice was remarkably nuanced, conveying the impression that every decision had a deliberative side which allowed for debate, discussion and even dissent. Macaulay had his opponents among the British. The Orientalist lobby, opposed to his contemptuous dismissal of everything Indian and his arrogant espousal of English, was both vocal and powerful in the early years of British conquest. In 1781 William Hastings had founded the Calcutta Madrasa or Arabic College to enable Muslims to learn the principles and practices of Islamic law. A decade later, Jonathan Duncan, a scholar-administrator, set up the Sanskrit College at Benares for the preservation and learning of the laws, literature and religion of the Hindus. In 1800 Lord Wellesley established the Fort William College in Calcutta. Here the servants of the East India Company were required to learn Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit and six Indian vernacular languages. Interestingly, while they learnt English law and European history, they also had to study Hindu and Muslim law and Indian history. In fact, Fort William College was financed in part by small deductions from the salaries of all Company servants in India. In 1824 Lord Amherst inaugurated the Sanskrit College in Calcutta, and a year later the Delhi College came up in Shahjahanabad where, though English made its debut, the medium of instruction remained either Arabic, Persian or Sanskrit.

  The Company’s goal was to rule India, and this would not be possible unless its employees learnt a little more about who they were going to rule. But in addition to this utilitarian logic, there was, in the initial phase, a genuine respect for, and curiosity about, the culture of the natives. Sir William Jones (1746–94), who arrived in Calcutta in September 1783 to take up his assignment as a judge of the Supreme Court, was the most important figure of this scholarly interaction. Born in Westminster, he went to Harrow and Oxford, and was a linguistic genius who had learnt Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian and a smattering of Chinese by the age of twenty-two. Unlike Macaulay, who purposefully reread Gibbon, Dante and Voltaire on his voyage to India, Jones used his time journeying to Calcutta on board the frigate Crocodile to write a memorandum on what needed to be studied about Indian culture and civilization. His list included Hindu and Muslim law, ancient scriptures, the modern politics and geography of Hindustan, and its medicine, chemistry, surgery, anatomy, poetry, rhetoric and music. Within four months of his arrival, on 15 January 1784, he had founded the Asiatic Society, which survives to this day and was in its time the most vibrant institution on Indian heritage and antiquity.

  In the Grand Jury Room of the Calcutta Supreme Court, thirty gentlemen of British and European descent met for the first meeting of the Society. They included Justice John Hyde, John Carnac, Henry Vansittart, John Shore, Charles Wilkins, Francis Gladwin, Jonathan Duncan and others. William Jones spoke to them about how Asia was the ‘nurse of sciences’ and the ‘inventress of delightful and useful art’. Governor General Warren Hastings was elected the first president of the Society and Jones the vice-president. For the next several decades, the members of the Society did pioneering work in studying various aspects of Indian culture and translating its important treatises. William Jones learnt Sanskrit himself and translated Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam, Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda and the Manusamhita into English, and edited Kalidasa’s Ritusamhara. He was also the first westerner to analyse and write a paper on Indian classical music. It was his intention to bring out a compendium of Hindu and Muslim law, and although he could not complete it, his Institute of Hindu Law was published in 1794 and his Muhammedan Law of Inheritance in 1792. In 1786, at the third meeting of the Asiatic Society, he made his famous observation that Sanskrit had perhaps common roots with Greek and Latin. ‘The Sansckrit language,’ he said, ‘whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philosopher could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.’ 4

  Jones’s attempt to link Sanskrit to Greek and Latin was undoubtedly motivated by a desire to somehow assimilate a language he so greatly admired within a European framework, for he was never in doubt about the primacy of Western culture. It must be remembered that he and his band of enthusiastic Indophiles were not questioning the superiority of British civilization, or the right of the British to ‘civilize’ the natives; they were only more open to the notion that the people they were ordained to govern had a cultural legacy which could not be dismissed, and, indeed, in many areas, was worthy of respect. Their aim was to ‘rediscover’ India’s glorious heritage for the Indians themselves, and their output towards this end was nothing short of astonishing. Sir Charles Wilkins (1750–1833) translated the Bhagavadgita into English in 1785, and also published a translation of the Hitopadesha. H.T. Colebrooke, who was the president of the Society from 1806 to 1815, published a critical edition of the Sanskrit lexicon Amarakosha. H.H. Wilson, secretary of the Society during roughly the same period, translated the Puranas into English and published an edition of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini. He also brought out the three-volume Theatre of the Hindus, which was translated into German and French. Sir John Shore, who succeeded Jones as president of the Society in 1794, published an abridged English version of the Yoga Vasistha. The Society was given permanent premises when in 1805 the government gifted it land at the corner of Park Street and Chowringhee, where it is housed even today. It built up an excellent library and also started a public museum in 1814.

  This curiosity, even respect, for Indian culture was not confined to Calcutta. When in 1805 the Mission of William Carey in nearby Serampore asked for monetary assistance to translate the Sanskrit Ramayana, it was given Rs 5,500. A branch of the Asiatic Society was opened in Bombay in 1803. A clutch of Orientalists were active in Madras too. Reading Persian classics was a favourite pastime for Charles Metcalfe, the British Resident in Delhi. William Fraser, who succeeded him, knew Urdu and Persian like a native and had an excellent library of Persian and Arabic books. Many among the British composed Persian and Urdu couplets; some even adopted a takhallus or pen-name of their own: Joseph Bensley ‘Fana’, George Puech ‘Shor’, and Alexander Heatherley ‘Azad’.

  The difference of opinion between the Anglicists and the Orientalists was, therefore, real and prolonged. H.H. Wilson wrote to a Bengali friend in 1835 that ‘it is a visionary absurdity to think of making English the language of India’. 5 He had his supporters in London as well. Charles William Wynn, president of the Board of Control of the East India Company from 1822 to 1828, was quite appalled at the attempt to force Indians to adopt English. John Cam Hobhouse, who assumed the presidency later, wrote to Lord Auckland in the spring of 1836 that ‘there is a strong party here who think that the rights of conquest do not extend to the destruction of language, and who believe it would be extremely impolitic to withhold all support from the propagation of Oriental learning’. 6 James Prinsep, who was the secretary of the Asiatic Society in 1833, and who would in 1837 make the landmark breakthrough of deciphering the Brahmi script, enabling the Ashokan edicts to be read for the first time, protested the ‘ultra radical subversion of all that now exists’.

  Also perfect foils to Macaulay were Britishers like Sir Alexander Johnston. Born in India in 1775, Johnston learnt Tamil, Telugu and Hindustani, and as president of the Council in Ceylon (1811) helped found a branch of the Asiatic Society there. Later he became a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In one of his reports from Ceylon he made the point that the Indians ‘had made the same progress in logic and metaphysics by 1500 BC as the Greeks, possessed, centuries before the Greeks, laws equal to, and in some areas superior to theirs, possessed early knowledge of the numeral system which had proved to be essential for the achievements of Ke
pler, Newton, La Place and Napier, and devised astronomical tables of great scientific worth around 3000 BC.’ 7 Even after Macaulay’s infamous minute became policy, there were those who disagreed. In 1853, H.H. Wilson tried to analyse why Macaulay went wrong. ‘I have great respect for Mr Macaulay’s talents,’ he told the House of Lords Select Committee, ‘but he was new in India, and knew nothing of the people; he spoke only from what he saw immediately around him, which has been the great source of the mistakes committed by the advocates of English exclusively. They have known nothing of the country: they have not known what the people want; they only know the people of the large towns, where English is of use and is effectively cultivated.’ 8

  Macaulay’s will prevailed in spite of such opposition because his attitude was in sync with the newly consolidated political ascendancy of the East India Company. The assertion of cultural supremacy is always related to political power. In the tentative phase of the Company’s military forays in India, its employees were less bigoted and more flexible in their cultural interactions. By the time Macaulay arrived, the Company’s paramountcy was near complete. Siraj-ud-Daula had been defeated at Plassey in 1757; Mir Qasim had capitulated at Buxar in 1764; and soon thereafter the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, had granted to Clive in perpetuity diwani, or suzerainty, over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Tipu Sultan of Mysore had been routed in 1799, and the Marathas in 1803 and again in 1819. With the defeat of the French in 1761, there was no outside power to challenge British supremacy in India. It is to the credit of the Orientalists that they retained a considerable degree of cultural eclecticism in spite of these British victories on the battlefield. But even they were never in doubt that they represented a civilization meant to rule. The earnest and high-minded members of the Asiatic Society investigating Indian culture did not allow a non-European to join the Society until 1829, forty-five years after it was founded, even though the translations and compilations they turned out were greatly dependent upon an army of Indian experts in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. On arrival in Calcutta in 1814, around the same time that Colebrooke’s critical edition of the Amarakosha was published, Lord Hastings noted in his journal: ‘The Hindu appears a being nearly limited to mere animal functions, and even in them indifferent [possessing] no higher intellect than a dog, an elephant or a monkey.’ 9

  The dichotomy between the diligent appreciation of Indian antiquity and comments such as these can only be understood in the context of the swagger that political power gives even to cultural appreciation. The Company had material wealth and military might. Even its minor functionaries were surrounded by a battery of native servants: khidmatgars, durbans, syces, dhobis, bhistis (water carriers), hircarras (messengers), pankha-wallahs, palanquin bearers, doreahs (dog keepers and walkers), malis, khansamas, ayahs and sweepers. Such a milieu was a natural incubator for notions of cultural, even moral, superiority and racial arrogance. Indians were always referred to as blacks (Clive had noted with wry satisfaction that of the seventy or so casualties the Company had suffered at Plassey, most were ‘blacks’), but now the word nigger came into vogue. Lieutenant Colonel H.B. Henderson, who served in India in the first half of the nineteenth century, and published his recollections in 1829, summed up the attitude of many Company officials: ‘No native, however high his rank, ought to approach within a yard of an Englishman; and every time an English shakes hands with a Babu he shakes the basis on which our ascendancy stands.’ 10

  To get a sense of the link between power and culture, it is instructive to note how dramatically different was the behaviour of the first British envoy when he met, some two hundred years earlier, Prince Khurram and Emperor Jahangir. The Mughal empire was then at its zenith, and although Britain was emerging as a naval power of some consequence, India at that time accounted for almost one-fourth of global trade. The resplendence of the Mughal court was fabled, and its cultural refinements and patronage of the arts legendary. In 1614, James I sent Sir Thomas Roe as his envoy to the court of Jahangir at Agra with the object of obtaining protection for an English factory in the port town of Surat. Roe was an influential diplomat. He was appointed esquire to the body of Queen Elizabeth I, was knighted by James I in 1605, and was very close to Henry, the Prince of Wales, and his sister Elizabeth. In his journal of the mission to the Mughal empire, he describes how he was received by the Indian royals. His first meeting was not with Jahangir, but with his son, Prince Khurram (later Emperor Shah Jahan), who was then the Governor of Surat.

  The British envoy was received by the kotwal at the gate of the outer court, where a hundred men on horseback stood guard. In the inner court, to which he was escorted, Roe saw the prince seated on a raised platform under a royal canopy with rich carpets spread all around him. The press of noble personages and officers was so great that he could not come close to the throne. He was asked to take off his hat and instructed ‘how to touch the Ground with my bare Head’. He complied with the first but refused to do the second. He did manage, however, to extend to him ‘that Reverence that I judged agreeable’ from a distance, which the prince acknowledged by a mere gesture of his body. He would have liked to get a chair, but was told that no man could sit in court in the royal presence. He was allowed, though, to ‘ease my self, by leaning on one of the Pillars that supported his Canopy’, and he felt that on the whole he was treated in a manner ‘sufficiently courteous and obliging’. ‘The State and Pride of the Indian Princes,’ he noted, ‘[is] intolerable, and they will hardly upon any account whatsoever, abate the least Punctilio of Ceremony and Respect.’

  A little later Roe called upon Jahangir himself at Ajmer, where the emperor was on camp. The ceremony was much the same, if a little more elaborate, with even more of the nobility standing reverently below the throne. ‘When I came into the presence, and had made my several reverences to him, he was pleased to prevent my dull Interpreter and begin himself, bidding me heartily welcome; welcome to him who was the Friend and Brother of my Master the King of England. He curiously viewed his Majesty’s Letters, my own Commission as Ambassador, and the Presents I brought him in my King’s name.’ Jahangir could hardly conceal his contempt for the presents offered, but the other Europeans later told Roe that this notwithstanding he was received by the Mughal emperor with ‘more Expressions of Grace and Good Will than any Ambassador had been before’.

  It is obvious that in his own account of how he was received Roe would seek to salvage his self-respect as the British King’s envoy, but it is very clear that he was both genuinely deferential and quite overawed by the ceremonials of the Mughal court. About Jahangir’s royal processions he recorded that ‘the Elephants, Horses and all sorts of carriages [were] present in such full abundance, that one would have fancied it almost the remove of a whole Nation’. The royal camps were equally a marvel: an open plain would be transformed at great speed into a city, ‘divided into Streets, adorned and covered over with the splendid Pavilions of Princes and Courtiers, and all this Glory rise up in a few moments’. Roe was greatly impressed too by the skill and mastery of Indian artists. ‘I could not have thought,’ he wrote, ‘that India had produced artists so skillful and ingenious, as I have seen by some Pieces which His Majesty shewd me.’ As Jahangir got to know Roe better, a friendship of sorts developed between them. Roe was invited to the emperor’s birthday, and drank to ‘his Health in a Noble Cup of Gold, set with Emeralds, Turquoises and Rubies’, which Jahangir casually offered as a present to him. The only things that Roe records Jahangir expressing his interest in were ‘the tall Irish Grey Hounds, which he seemed most passionately to desire, and … some of our English Embroideries …’

  The letter of King James which Roe carried referred to Jahangir as ‘the high and mighty Monarch the Great Mogol, King of the Oriental Indies, of Candahar, of Chismer and Corazon, &c.’, and acknowledged the ‘great Favour towards Us and Our Subjects’ by allowing the English to carry on ‘quiet Trade and Commerce without any kind of hindrance and molestation’. Jahangir’s reply wa
s in the extravagant Oriental tradition; while James spoke of ‘Utility and Profit’, the emperor emphasized how he had been satisfied by the English sovereign’s ‘tender Love towards me’, and was assured that this love ‘shall never be forgotten, but as the Smell of Amber, or as a Garden of fragrant Flowers, whose Beauty and Odour is still increasing … shall grow and increase with yours’. 11

  Power gives to human interactions across cultural divides a very recognizable body language. Around a hundred and fifty years later, on 12 August 1865, a vanquished Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, met another British representative, Lord Clive, in very different circumstances. The meeting took place at Allahabad Fort where Shah Alam was to sign away Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the Company. A large oil canvas by a contemporary artist Benjamin West, now a prized display at the Victoria Memorial Museum in Kolkata, graphically depicts the scene. Clive is dressed in a long redcoat and white stockings, with a royal blue sash around his waist. The Mughal emperor is seated on a throne, wearing a white angarkha and a bejewelled turban. Three steps lead up to the throne, and servants with whisks of peacock feathers fan the beleaguered monarch. But nothing can hide the triumphant and superior stance of Clive, as standing nearby he looks down at Shah Alam, who has no other option but to give away annual revenues estimated at £33 million for a yearly stipend of £272,000. That look encapsulates in an instant everything that would change in the next two centuries: a once proud and refined culture accepting its inferiority before a rising alien power.