Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  The text accompanying the photographs is obvious colonial prejudice dressed up as science and scholarship. Of the ‘Dyers’ (those engaged in the profession of dyeing cloth) the editors write: ‘They have in many localities a reputation for intemperance, and it is certain that the use of ardent spirits is not forbidden to them; and they have, too, an indifferent character for morality.’ The ‘Bunneas’ are ‘very illiterate, and care to know only what they must know’ and ‘being by reputation, and in fact, arrant cowards, they resort to the coward’s only protection—submission—until opportunity comes for retaliation’. But the banias find some good words, too, for being loyal to the British: ‘In native states they were often plundered, by exactions, and are still … In our own territory some of them have become millionaires … and are one at least, of the classes of India, who gratefully acknowledge the protection they receive.’ The ‘Baories’ or bird catchers—‘no doubt remnants of aboriginal tribes’ who ‘do good service to English sportsmen’—are described as ‘very poor, and though they occasionally get a good deal of money, they spend it in drink, or in feasts to their caste fellows, which are sad orgies of gluttony and drunkenness’. Writing of the Sansi tribe as one of the ‘wandering classes of India [that] continue to prey upon its population as they have ever done … unless they are forcibly restrained by our Government’, the editors note that ‘the Sanseeas [are] totally ignorant of everything but their hereditary crime … When they are not engaged in acts of crime they are beggars, assuming various religious forms, or affecting the most abject poverty. Their women and children have the true whine of the professional mendicant as they frequent thronged bazaars, receiving charity and stealing what they can … They have not the slightest compunction in committing murder, but they do not commit it from motives of revenge, only in the exercise of their hereditary calling … They are, as a class, in a condition of miserable poverty, living from hand to mouth, idle, disreputable, restless, without any settled homes, and … no distinct language of their own.’

  Most revealing, in this work commissioned and produced shortly after the 1857 ‘mutiny’, are the contrasting descriptions of the Jats and the Gujjars. The former are very favourably, if condescendingly, assessed, and it soon becomes clear why:

  All records of the Jats describe them as a fine, manly race of men, frank and true in all their relations … They enter into the regular military service of our Government, and make good steady soldiers, both in the infantry and the cavalry. In the rebellion of the year 1857, the Jat population did not join in local excesses like the Goojurs, the Wattees, and other tribes; but were loyal, and decidedly on the side of order. The 14th Bengal cavalry is composed solely of Jats, and did excellent service throughout that eventful period, without the faintest suspicion of disloyalty; and, if they had been needed, the tribe in general were ready to assist the British Government to the utmost of its power.

  While commending the Jats for their virile and loyal ways, the editors also write approvingly of them because they ‘marry only one wife, for the most part’ and are the ‘best agriculturists in Northern India’ who ‘plough and clean their fields efficiently; they understand the rotation of crops; and their agricultural implements, if rude in form, are efficient for all purposes’. They are also ‘excellent cart drivers’.

  In contrast, of the Gujjars Watson and Kaye write:

  They are dishonest, untrustworthy, and lawless in a high degree; and require constant and unremitting supervision. They are notorious and successful cattle lifters … The notorious conduct of the Goojurs about Meerut and Delhi, in 1857, has been before noticed. They suffered sharply for it, many of their worst leaders having been tried and hanged, or transported for life; but it is questionable whether this has had any permanent effect upon the class in general, who would be ready to resort to plunder on any favourable occasion.

  Comparing the Jats and the Gujjars, Watson and Kaye note:

  In many respects the Goojurs resemble the Jats. They are indeed a handsome tribe, and both men and women are remarkable for powerful figures and fair complexions … [but] while the Jats are honest, frank, and trustworthy in all respects, the Goojurs are lawless, mulish, revengeful, and wrong-headed, professing no loyalty to any one. Thus, by the relative character of the tribe, one has reached the dignity of an independent state for the largest proportion of its members … while the other has remained in its original condition, distracted by small feuds, man against man, and village against village, thus preventing any cohesion for a common purpose … Like the Jats they eat all flesh, except that of cows or bullocks, and are particularly fond of wild hog. They drink spirits also, and smoke tobacco and ganja, or hemp leaves, and their women use opium as well for themselves as their children. The Goojurs are by no means so thrifty or so rich as the Jats, which may be accounted for by their differences in character, nor are they by any means so industrious. They live in a poorer class of dwellings, and the clothes and ornaments of their women and children are of an inferior character, nor do they take employment like the Jats; they probably cannot obtain it on account of their indifferent character.

  Every single tribe and ‘race’ was presented, in this catalogue, as primitive—if not savage, then simple. Naturally, they could only have ‘hereditary’ faults, habits, addictions, modest talents (if any) and ‘rude implements’ but certainly no culture, no refinement. Lord and Lady Canning, to whom the eight volumes of The People of India were ceremonially presented, were appreciative of this vast ‘anthropological’ enterprise, but the discerning Indians who saw the volumes were aghast. Inevitably, though, some of them, especially of the elite, despite their outrage at the ethnographic insult, became defensive about their society and culture. Syed Mahmud Khan, son of the prominent nineteenth-century reformer and educationist Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, was researching Islamic history at the India Office Library in London when he saw the first two volumes of The People of India. These contained photographs of tribal people, the lower castes and the so-called ‘criminal tribes’. The decontextualized, exhibit-like images shocked him and he felt deeply insulted. When an Englishman asked him if he was ‘Hindustani’, he replied proudly and defiantly that he was, but in a low voice added that he was ‘not an aborigine’, that his ancestors had come to India from a foreign country.3 Later, his father, the great Sir Syed Ahmed, reacting to the same photographs and text, wrote that unless ‘Hindustanis remove this blot [Indians as naked savages] they shall never be held in honour by any civilized race’.4

  The project of documenting and dehumanizing the natives continued into the twentieth century. The British ethnographer and civil servant Herbert Risley, in charge of the 1901 Indian census, came up with the amazing theory that castes could be distinguished in accordance with the average nasal index—‘those with the finest nose will be at the top, and those with the coarsest at the bottom’. Risley’s essential thesis was that ‘the genius of Empire in India has come to her from the West’, and that as foreign conquerors (read Greeks and Scythians, in particular) made the mistake of mixing with the indigenous people, there occurred a racial degeneration that was irreversible, and ‘India’s people, even though Aryan in origin, had now to remain forever distinct, different, and inevitably inferior’.5

  This racial prejudice was particularly marked in the areas of creative expression. In the beginning the disdain was based on the sheer difference between the two cultures. Ralph Fitch, Queen Elizabeth’s envoy to Akbar in 1584, was appalled to see Hindu idols, describing them as ‘blacke and evell favoured, their mouths monstrous, their eares gilded and full of jewels’. Later, a definitive theory was built to support this animosity. Indian aesthetics, it was argued, had no claim to distinction or greatness except for those elements that had come to India from outside. In particular, Greek influence, the consequence of Alexander’s brief invasion of the Punjab in 326 BC, and represented by the art of Gandhara, was touted to be far superior to anything produced in India itself. Alexander Cunningham, the first
British Director of Archaeology, wrote extensively about the pivotal role of Greece in inspiring the best in Indian art; the historian Vincent Smith, whose books I studied in school, argued that Gandhara was vastly superior to the Mathura school; and Lord Curzon, in his speech at the Asiatic Society in February 1900, pronounced that the majority of Indian antiquities were ‘exotics, imported into the country in the train of conquerors, who had learnt their architectural lessons in Persia, in Central Asia, in Arabia, in Afghanistan’.6

  The interesting fact is that such sweeping denunciations were also based on supposedly widespread field studies and research. For instance, W. Erskine published a scholarly treatise on the cave temples at Ellora, and acquired sufficient knowledge of Hindu iconography to correctly identify the three faces of Shiva in the statue of Maheshamurthi. But he still felt that ‘the execution and finishing of the figures in general … are often very defective, in no instance being possessed of striking excellence. The figures have something of rudeness and want of finish, the proportions are sometimes lost, the attitudes forced, and everything indicates the infancy of art.’7 Such ‘scholarly’ denunciations emboldened later critics to be bluntly dismissive. George Birdwood, widely regarded as one of the most influential art critics in late nineteenth-century Britain, once compared an exquisite Gupta period image of the Buddha to a ‘boiled svet pudding’, and came to the conclusion that in seventy-eight years of study of art he had not come across anything in India that gave expression to ‘the good, the beautiful and the true’.8

  Birdwood also wrote in 1910 that ‘sculpture and painting are unknown as fine arts in India’. Such an astounding statement, rubbishing centuries of achievement as seen, for instance, in the exquisite Chola bronzes, had the backing of historians like Vincent Smith, who wrote condescendingly in 1889 that the Ajanta murals did not compare favourably ‘with the world’s masterpieces—no Indian art work does—but they are entitled to a respectable place among the second or third class’.9 Other art forms, like music and dance, came under hostile scrutiny too. Most British observers mistook all forms of classical dance to be a variation either of the ‘nautch’ or an extension of the devadasi system, ‘depraved’ and barely distinguishable from prostitution. Indian classical music represented such a stark contrast to western musical traditions that it provoked hardly any appreciation or patronage, and the soulful elaboration of the raga was curtly dismissed by one Englishman as little better than a ‘sleepy lullaby’. Apart from the colonial imperative to show that the people they ruled were undeveloped in their creative expressions, there was, as the historian Partha Mitter writes, a genuine gap in comprehension between two alien cultures: ‘Nowhere can this clash of the two essentially different, even antithetical, cultural and aesthetic values be better studied than in European interpretations of Hindu sculpture, painting and architecture.’10

  The reason why colonialism was such a deeply dislocating event was that its sustained critique was internalized by its victims. Since the denigration came from the rulers, it found effortless projection and no organized opposition; the entire paraphernalia of the state—including the educational institutions and curriculum and English as the officially sponsored and imposed medium of instruction—was available to disseminate it and give it sanctity. Moreover, the denunciation came with the tag of scholarship, wherein obvious colonial bias was camouflaged with extensive field studies and tomes of data. The colonial historians and arbiters of art did not purport to give off-the-cuff opinions, they did not pronounce their verdict as one-line imperial dictates; their dismissal wore the garb of study and research and ‘comparative’ analysis. The tragedy was that the local populace, more often than not, accepted this denigration; books on Indian art and architecture authored by British historians were standard texts in Indian schools till many years after 1947. This entire body of one-sided criticism and dismissal seeped into the mentality of educated Indians and, in particular, the elite.

  The degree to which this unrelenting critique succeeded in influencing Indians can be gauged from the writings of a foreign observer, a remarkably observant Englishman. Ernest Beinfield Havell was the principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta. He had worked with Abanindranath Tagore and written books on Indian sculpture and painting, on Benares and on the principles of Indian art. In 1912, he penned a strongly worded polemic on how British rule had subverted the artistic traditions of India, severing the Indian educated classes from their cultural roots and reducing them to little more than mindless mimics of Western fashions and mores.11 His observations need careful study, and are cited here in some detail because they have the objectivity and clarity of someone who was knowledgeable about Indian art but, as a sympathetic observer, could see the havoc wrought to Indian sensibilities. ‘It is because the Anglo-Indian educational system has no ideal beyond that of imparting to Indian students the intellectual impressions of Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen and London, that it has failed to stimulate a real intellectual life in Indian Universities,’ he protested. In the process, ‘India has lost self-respect and self-reliance; pride in her own artistic culture and faith in her spiritual mission. She … barters her birthright for a mess of pottage. Her young men, trained in Anglo-Indian schools and colleges, go to Europe with their artistic powers totally undeveloped … They come back to India … unable to understand either European art or Indian, and their only anxiety is to be considered fashionable and up-to-date.’

  Havell noticed ‘a curious want of discrimination in wealthy and aristocratic Indians, who in the intimate domestic life still kept up more or less Indian artistic traditions, but kept one part of their home in a quasi-European fashion’. ‘It is this want of pride and want of faith in their own traditional culture on the part of the upper classes of India,’ he noticed, ‘which has been much more destructive to Indian art than the ignorance or indifference of Europeans.’ Nothing, he argued, was more intellectually depressing than the sense of ‘constitutional inferiority’ that seemed to have possessed Indians. ‘The surrender of all their artistic traditions, which so many educated Indians have been content to make is an intellectual and moral loss for which all European science and literature cannot compensate them, nor will the fullest measure of political liberty … restore to them what they lose by that surrender.’ The great scourge eating into the creative faculties of educated Indians was the inclination to mimic European artistic traditions. This imitative faculty, Havell argued, was encouraged by the British educational system. ‘Anglo-Indian education being imitative cannot be of any use to Indian art. The fact that Indian art has been totally ignored in the Anglo-Indian scheme of education has tended to hasten its decay only because it has on that account led English educated Indians to regard it with indifference.’

  There was a genuine sense of outrage in Havell’s remarks, and his overriding motivation was to jolt the Indian elite out of their colonized sensibilities. ‘Let your homes,’ he argued, ‘be built by Indian master builders schooled in the Shilpa-Shastras; let the furniture in your houses be of Indian design; let the teachings of the epics be taught to children and painted, as in the past, on the walls of schools and buildings; let the old chitrashalas be revived and patronized by the rich and the powerful.’ He was exasperated by the proclivity of English-educated Indians to present to their European guests ‘no higher domestic ideal than that of a London boarding house, and speak of their fellow countrymen who keep to the Indian tradition of domestic life as “jungly” folk’. Being at the helm of a leading educational institution, he interacted with those who were the principal beneficiaries of British education, and could see—with the objectivity that only a foreign observer could have—how far they were adrift from the animating spirit of their own cultural ethos. ‘Indians will certainly gain immensely, not only morally and intellectually but also politically,’ he stressed, ‘by ceasing to imitate European fashions indiscriminately, for this very lack of discrimination which educated Indians have shown discredits them in the eyes of
Europe … As long as their chief ambition is to become successful imitators of what Europe does, they will remain in a state of political inferiority—and rightly so, for indiscriminate imitation is an admission of inferiority which inevitably depreciates the power of initiative and prevents the development of all the creative faculties.’

  Havell’s observations show emphatically how a culture which for over two millennia had evolved a comprehensive paradigm encompassing all aspects of creative expression, and which, after the tenth century AD, was part of a remarkably successful synthesis with elements of Islamic culture, was now systematically rubbished by the colonial rulers and, as a consequence, devalued by its own legatees. A foundational distortion then crept in, wherein culture was no longer harnessed to the present as part of normal evolution, but was viewed through the prism of the colonizing power. Often it was used to reinforce an image of India in conformity with what the ‘superior’ colonizer said. Sometimes, as part of nationalist discourse, it was overglorified to generate esteem and as compensation for what had been lost during subjugation. In such situations, historical memory becomes episodic, the intervening periods blanketed in a haze of collective amnesia. For the colonized, the past does not have a benevolent, easily accessible continuum with the present. It becomes a template for either denial or rejection or overemphasis, and this disequilibrium continues much after the rulers have left.