Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  Roy was both the creation and the victim of colonial policy. To be successful, such a policy must create the illusion of choice before the native, and give to its brute military power a softer tone of deliberation, fairness and liberality. It must be able to co-opt the native into perpetuating its designs, often without his knowing it. And it must be able to both sense, and engage with, his aspirations and dissatisfactions in a manner that actually furthers the rulers’ objectives but convinces the ruled that this is in his interest. It is most unlikely that a man as learned and intelligent as Roy would have become such an articulate acolyte of the British if the latter had aggressively and simplistically dismissed everything Indian and forced the native elite at the point of a gun to learn English.

  In the end, this is very nearly what they did, but the decision was preceded by a vigorous debate among the rulers on what should be the correct course to take. The Orientalists too were for the introduction of English but wished to retain the teaching of the vernacular languages so that the fruits of western science and learning could be grafted on to the achievements of Indian civilization and not replace them entirely. The Anglicists had no time for such nuances; they were fired by a newfound evangelical zeal, convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that English and Christianity were the two keys to the uplift of their primitive subjects. Theoretically, there was a choice before Roy: to go with the Orientalists, or support the Anglicists. The former option would have certainly been less humiliating, but impatient for reform in his own society and religion, he opted for the insensitive radicalism of the Anglicists. A critically important reason, no doubt, was that by the 1820s the Anglicist lobby was politically ascendant. For Roy, who sought the approbation of the British, this factor could not be overlooked, although—and this is a tribute to the British as colonizers—the course of action he pursued never appeared to him as anything less than the most high-minded idealism in the best interests of his countrymen.

  Cultural imperialism, when backed by political power, can penetrate even the most improbable human citadels. The example of the great Urdu poet at Delhi, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, comes to mind, not the least because he was in many ways very much like Macaulay. Ghalib and Macaulay were contemporaries. Ghalib was born in 1797, three years before Macaulay, and lived for a decade after him, until 1869. For almost six decades both these individuals, vastly separated in background and circumstance, lived, unknown to each other, overlapping lives against the backdrop of the British conquest of India.

  Like Macaulay, Ghalib was inordinately proud of his culture and language. If Macaulay had mastered Latin as the key to understanding the Graeco-Roman heritage of his Anglo-Saxon culture, Ghalib was obstinately devoted to Persian as the link to his Persian–Turkish inheritance. Persian was fast being replaced by Urdu as the lingua franca in his time, but although he himself wrote exquisitely in the new language, and was a key figure in the literary efflorescence that accompanied its rise, Ghalib publicly belittled his Urdu verse and declared his loyalty to Persian and the resplendent feudal–monarchic order it represented. If Macaulay did not tire of recalling the virtues of western civilization, Ghalib was equally adamant in invoking the refinements of the House of Timur and the legendary kings of Persia. While Macaulay recalled the glories of ancient Rome (The Lays of Ancient Rome), Ghalib wrote about the sacred dust of Turan, the glorious line of Pashang and Afrasiyab and the legacy of the Jamshid dynasty. Macaulay wrote a two-volume History of England; Ghalib worked on Mihr-i-Nimroz, an ambitious history of the Mughal dynasty. Macaulay was happiest poring over the works of Voltaire and Virgil; Ghalib could spend hours extolling the writings of Saadi and Hafiz. Both men were patrician, even arrogant, by temperament, extremely proud of their scholarly achievements and similar in their disinclination to suffer fools gladly. They went through life immersed in their own idiom to the exclusion of almost everything else: Macaulay, unlike many of his British peers, made no attempt to learn any of the Indian languages, or for that matter anything about Indian civilization; and Ghalib believed that there was very little else left to pursue if one could craft a masterly piece of verse in Persian or Urdu. Ghalib claimed to belong to the feudal aristocracy, although his ancestors were mercenaries who had prospered just about enough to allow such a claim. Macaulay’s origins were also humbler than he was prepared to admit. Yet, both men considered themselves to be cultural aristocrats, and certainly the most knowledgeable and eloquent spokesmen of their language and history.

  With so much that was common, there was one overwhelming difference. Ghalib was an indigent pensioner of a declining political order, while Macaulay was the imperious harbinger of ascendant British power. With this one difference, everything about them became different. The proud poet at Delhi tried to cling on to some semblance of feudal dignity on a monthly hereditary pension of 66 rupees per month, paid by the British for military services rendered by his grandfather. Macaulay lived in Calcutta on a salary of £10,000 a year, with scores of servants and subordinates to do his every bidding. Ghalib spent the best part of his life petitioning the British for what he believed was a legitimate claim for an increase in his share of the pension, getting his petitions translated—perhaps reluctantly—into English. Macaulay sat at the apex of the system where countless such petitions were heard and often disposed of without sufficient application of mind, and he of course had little patience for those who wrote petitions in any language other than English.

  Macaulay was the spokesman of an emerging superpower, whose armadas were conquering new territories across the world. Pride and confidence came naturally to him as he deliberated in Calcutta on how to uplift the natives. But for Ghalib, it was a struggle to hold on to his pride in the changing times, especially when he was treated dismissively by the British. When this happened blatantly, he protested. Francis Hawkins, the officiating Resident at Delhi, was particularly offensive, and Ghalib was compelled to complain to the chief secretary at Calcutta that he was ‘received in a manner totally unsuited to my Rank and Standing in the Scale of Asiatic Society and extremely ungratifying to my Feelings’. To the British the feelings of such remnants of a pensionary nobility were no longer of any great consequence.

  Ghalib wrote sublime poetry, but the mushairas, the poetry readings, that were now held in the Mughal court were tawdry affairs—not for the quality of the poetry, but because the emperor himself was living in penury under stringent British tutelage. The once mighty Mughal empire had shrunk to the crowded area within the ramparts of the Red Fort. The renaissance in the Urdu language, of which Ghalib was such an important figure, was tainted by a decaying and impotent polity. Bahadur Shah Zafar, emperor only in name, was himself a poet and a patron of poetry, but his court’s meagre largesse could hardly award good poetry as in the old days. On occasion Ghalib reminded Zafar of the time of the great Mughals when poets were frequently weighed against silver and gold and rubies. In an ode in honour of Queen Victoria, Ghalib pointedly indicated what his expectations were by mentioning that the emperors of Persia had customarily granted great wealth to their poets, giving them villages and showering them with pearls and gold.

  When Macaulay spent his afternoons in his huge mansion in Calcutta marvelling over the refinements of English poetry and Latin prose, his demeanour had the swagger of the ruler. When Ghalib read the Persian classics and composed his verses in his decrepit haveli in Gali Qasim Jaan in the walled city of Delhi, his bearing, in spite of his intrinsic pride, was one of defeat. No wonder then that Macaulay could say that the reading of just one book in English, Robinson Crusoe, could provide all that a child needed to know about grammar and rhetoric. And Ghalib, recovering from the destruction of Delhi after the defeat of the Revolt of 1857, wrote to his disciple Tufta: ‘I find both [the learning of] Avicenna and [the poetry of] Naziri to be futile. To live one’s life requires just a little happiness; philosophy, empires, poetry are all nonsense … Both you and I are fairly good poets. Agreed that some day we might become renowned like S
aadi and Hafiz. But what did they gain that we wouldn’t?’ 22 For Macaulay the future was replete with possibilities for the consolidation of his language and culture. For Ghalib, the future was so bleak that the achievements of the past now mattered very little. In this fundamental gap between the perspectives of two not very dissimilar people, arose the notion of doubt—the complete absence of it in one, and the growing shadow of it on the other.

  Assailed by this sense of doubt, Ghalib wrote to Sir Syed Ahmed Khan questioning the very purpose of trying to resurrect their common heritage, and arguing for the need for both of them to open themselves to what the colonizing power had to offer. He was keenly aware not only of the political decline of the Mughals but also of the slow but sure displacement of Mughal culture and learning in academic institutions. In 1827, English classes had been introduced in Delhi College with a syllabus that included Goldsmith’s Traveller and Deserted Village, Pope’s Essay on Man, Milton’s Paradise Lost and—in the highest grades—Shakespeare’s plays, Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and Burke’s Essays and Speeches. When in the early 1850s Syed Ahmed Khan, who was working on an edited version of Ain-i-Akbari—Abul Fazl’s classic on Mughal administration in Akbar’s time—wrote to Ghalib asking him to contribute an introduction, the poet replied that expending energy on Ain-i-Akbari was a futile wallowing in the past. ‘Look at the Sahibs of England,’ he admonished Sir Syed Ahmed, ‘they have gone far ahead of our oriental forebears. Wind and wave they have rendered useless. They are sailing their ships under fire and steam. They are creating music without the help of the mizrab [plucker]. With their magic, words fly through the air like birds. Air has been set on fire … Cities are being lighted without oil lamps. This new law makes all other laws obsolete. Why must you pick up straws out of old, time-swept barns while a treasure trove of pearls lies at your feet?’ 23

  The shadow of self-doubt had banished all hope. For Ghalib, his heritage, of which he used to be so proud, was finally reduced to little more than straws, while the British, who now controlled his destiny, became the repositories of a ‘treasure trove of pearls’. This link—between devaluing one’s own past and embracing what the ruler seeks to impose—is a recurring theme of colonialism.

  The developments of western science in the nineteenth century, and their application in everyday life, was something that many educated Indians admired and wanted to emulate. The learning of English was seen as a means to acquiring this new scientific learning. But the British administrators had their own, very different, reasons for imposing their language on the people of India. Their basic purpose was not to nurture Indian Einsteins of the future but to create a bank of English-knowing clerks for the immediate present. After all, had the objective been to expose the natives to scientific learning, this could have been done as easily—and more effectively—by translating Euclid and others into Sanskrit or Arabic or the vernacular languages. The projection of English as the only linguistic vehicle to science and technology had a far more pragmatic subtext. A handful of Britishers may have conquered most of India by superior arms and chicanery, but they could not administer and control it without an inferior regiment of babus who could understand and speak their language. Lord Bentinck said so openly: he needed Indians in judicial and administrative posts in order to cut costs, because the numbers of his compatriots was limited and the salaries they demanded were higher. The Anglicists, who claimed that English alone could ‘uplift’ the natives, were his ideological allies, but both they and he were quite happy if the language skills of their new students remained at perfunctory levels, functional but nowhere near literary fluency. It was enough if the natives learned sufficient English to get by, so that they could, to recall again Macaulay’s famous phrase, play the role of intermediaries. The policy was to wean them away from their own languages while equipping them inadequately in the colonizer’s; to ‘improve’ them through a familiarity with a ‘civilized’ tongue, but to ensure that familiarity did not equal ownership or empowerment.

  The success of this policy lay in gradually restricting higher job opportunities to only those who knew English. Two years after Macaulay’s minute, Viceroy Auckland noted that Indians were responding well to this bait, and the realization was sinking in that without English ‘success in commerce and advancement in private and in public shall become more difficult’. At the pinnacle of the colonial administrative structure were the civil services. Macaulay thought that ultimately some Indians might qualify for it, although at present there were none ‘whom it would be a kindness to the Native population to place’.

  Macaulay also believed that the introduction of English would dilute the religious loyalties of the natives. In a letter to his father dated 12 October 1836, he wrote: ‘No Hindoo, who has received an English education, ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as a matter of policy; but many profess themselves as pure Deists; and some embrace Christianity. It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence.’ 24 This was perhaps the only aspect where Macaulay was off the mark. ‘Hindoos’ were far more complex and clever than he thought. They were not beyond giving the impression that they held their religion in lesser esteem in order to get a job or a promotion or admission to an English teaching institution. But very few of them actually converted to Christianity. However, there is little doubt that they became less attached to their language and less confident about their own culture and lifestyle, and this was quite in conformity with expectation. In 1825, the Oriental Herald had, in a piece ponderously titled ‘On the Inefficiency of the Means Now in Use for the Propagation of Christianity’, argued that the need of the hour was to ‘wean their affections from the Persian muse, teach them to despise the barbarous splendour of their ancient princes, and totally supplanting the tastes which flourished under the Moghul reign, make them look to this country with that veneration which the youthful student feels for the classical soil of Greece’ 25 .

  Language, thus, became a strategic tool to achieve a variety of ends, none of which had anything to do with making the natives speak English of a literary standard. In an essay he wrote in 1838—‘On the Education of the People of India’—George Trevelyan was both frank and remarkably prescient. With the teaching of English, he argued, the ruled would themselves have a stake in English protection and instruction. ‘The natives will not rise against us because we shall stoop to raise them,’ he wrote, and if British rule ever ended, the introduction of English would enable the rulers to ‘exchange profitable subjects for still more profitable allies’. 26 Not surprisingly, those who had reached the greatest proficiency in English remained the most loyal to the British in the uprising of 1857. George Campbell, a young official in India, wrote in 1853: ‘The classes most advanced in English education, and who talk like newspapers, are not yet those from whom we have anything to fear.’ 27

  Campbell’s assessment was not wishful thinking but based on careful observation. The young, eager recruits to English-medium schools were the most easily persuaded about the superiority of western civilization. Nobinchunder Das, a student of Hooghly College at Calcutta in the 1850s, wrote in an essay:

  Those short days of Asiatic glory and superiority are gone, the stream of civilization has taken an opposite course; before it flowed from Asia to Europe, now, but with more than its pristine vigour and rapidity, it flows from Europe into Asia … Both in ancient and modern times Europe has been the seat of philosophy and civilization. England … is particularly engaged in the cause of Indian improvement. She not only carries on commerce with India, but she is ardently employed in instructing the natives in the arts and sciences, in history and political economy, and, in fact, in everything that is cultivated to elevate their understanding, ameliorate their condition, and increase their resources … The English are to us what the Romans were to the English. 28

  Nobinchunder Das must have, no
doubt, gone on to do well in his studies and probably succeeded against stiff competition to become a clerk in the British administration. Although his knowledge of English was good, to the British he must have still appeared as someone who ‘talk[s] like newspapers’. People speak like newspapers when they are not speaking their own language. They learn the big words, but can rarely acquire the fluency and effortlessness of the connecting spaces, and this is noticed by those to whom the language belongs. Speaking before a Select Committee of the House of Lords in 1853, George Trevelyan exulted that the Hindus spoke purer English ‘than we speak ourselves for they take it from the purest models; they speak the language of the Spectator, such English as is never spoken in England’. 29 Trevelyan was paying tribute less to the kind of English the Indians spoke, and more to their ability to perform like programmed fleas to the linguistic music set by the rulers. His comment reflected a sense of genuine pride in the outcome of the policy of the British that had created caricatures who spoke the language not as it was spoken in England, but in its ‘purest’ form, like newspapers, like the Spectator. It was a tribute too to the seriousness with which their subjects set themselves to learn the alien language. Macaulay was surprised to note that the students of Hindu College had learnt ‘by heart the names of all the dramatists of the time of Elizabeth and James the First, dramatists of whose works they in all probability will never see a copy’. 30 More than a century later, when Nirad Choudhuri made his first trip to England in the 1950s, he was surprised that a group of Englishmen had to be told who Thomas Beckett was and what The Black Prince was, when he himself had ‘learned about both in a jungle of East Bengal before I was twelve.’ 31 The natives were nothing if not diligent, and the British were delighted that the most diligent among them had picked up more of bookish English than they were strictly required to in order to fulfill their role as clerical intermediaries. But for all their dedication and diligence, they remained for the rulers linguistic curiosities, adept students whose incongruity was least apparent to themselves.