Confrontational Histories
Speaking of confrontational histories means to deliberately put histories into contrastive positions; an approach that aims at a disputatious method of narration, not at an ontological quality.
To illustrate the deep divide between Indian and British cultures in the period in question it may be advisable to first take a short look at the British homeland. Politically Britain became a republic at a rather early date, i. e. roughly spoken, in the second half of the 17th century, which was a period of world–crisis and in Britain a revolutionary time. The state then was temporarily called »the Commonwealth«. Interesting enough, that 17th century designation »Commonwealth« was, as we all know, transferred to the vast global empire the British later succeeded to establish within a time-span of less than 100 years. There was not a big difference in being treated as a subject of the Empire or as a subject of the »Commonwealth of nations«. Yet, »Commonwealth of nations« did not mean much, it more or less was and remained a void formula, maybe useful for propagandistic ventures. To quote from Hannah Arendt’s chapter on Imperialism: »The British Commonwealth was never a ›Commonwealth of Nations‹ but the heir of the United Kingdom, one nation dispersed throughout the world. [...] Instead of conquering and imposing their own law upon foreign peoples, the English colonists settled on newly won territory in the four corners of the world and remained members of the same British nation.« (Arendt 1951, 127/128) I would like to add, that to call India under colonial rule a ›nation‹ would have been a grotesque misunderstanding. Looking at the territorial and cultural multifariousness of the subcontinent, it is quite plausible to fall into line with Immanuel Wallerstein and read the label »India« as an indexical sign indicating an invention made up of Asian and European ingredients (Wallerstein 1991, 130-134).
One of the advantages of the British political system in competing with other European nations for the domination over non-European countries was the centralisation of power including monetary and taxation matters. The big, in those times newly founded, soon globally acting capitalist investment companies – the Bank of England and the East India Company as well as the South Sea Company – conferred for some time their capital-stocks as non-repayable credits on the government. In exchange they got, besides the payment of interest, first-rate privileges comprising, as in the case of the East India Company, the monopoly of free trade and of warfare in the territories chosen for conquest. It was only a question of time that out of the fusion between the imperial colonialism and a clever financial policy emerged that dubious system of world-capitalism, the historian Niall Ferguson recently deemed worthy to justify as one of the great British achievements.
The success of British empire-building was to a large part due to those early established structures of a »fiscal-military state« (J. Brewer), that were accepted, sustained and promoted by a large majority of the English society. By this consent the society fostered a model of political organisation that owed its infrastructural strength to the absence of such despotic powerplays which are the hallmark of an absolute or an autocratic kingship. At the same time power distance (G. Hofstede) was gradually reduced and participation of citizens in the process of political decision-making enhanced. And another, not to be underestimated advantage was provided by the fact that value-orientation was endorsed by a homogenous religious belief: Anglican Evangelicalism, protestant ethics added as a free bonus.
The situation on the Indian subcontinent of that time was quite the reverse. Here the British struggle for hegemony was confronted with an almost unimaginable diversity of languages, poly-ethnic lifestyles, heterogenous belief systems, power structures and traditional green economies. In encountering each other, both sides must have experienced the particular foreignness of the other. A passage out of a recently published Indian history book may illustrate that: »Concepts like state, sovereignty, society, nationality and nationhood conveyed in the English language«, the author notes, »were quite new to the Indian mind. More appealing to it, were the ideas of human rights and dignity which had no place in the caste system. The personal feudal authority that prevailed in the country was replaced by the impersonal authority of law, a radical change that restored to the individual his legal personality, irrespective of his religion and caste. The rule of law which the British introduced, implied both sanctity and supremacy of law and legal equality between individual and individual. It has prohibited arbitrary exercise of authority. The British [...] in their administrative behaviour and social belief, were essentially secular.« (Sadasivan 2000, 472)
This is certainly a well fitting statement with the exception of the last sentence – the British, were they really »essentially secular«? To put that straight, it needs some laborious arguments, but it is worth to run that path because it will lead us into the core of that conflict which finally escalated into a bloody religious war, that shattered all what had been attained during the longstanding Anglo-Indian commerce: I mean the Great Rebellion or Great Mutiny, that started in Delhi exactly 150 years ago, in the Indian summer of 1857.
Regarding the religious dimension of the British-Indian tensions it is important to know, that the Mughals in general were good Muslims, but secular-minded rulers. The emperor Akbar (1542–1605), a great seeker of truth like Gandhi, had set the pattern for his successors in the Timurid lineage. In his courtly bureaucracy he included Indian elites of differing religions, but was at the same time anxious to enhance the authority of the king's charismatic rule by sacralizing his person. So he established a ritual cult around his person and was venerated as an incarnation of Divine Faith (Dīn-i Ilāhī), without, however, forcing an exclusive religious doctrine upon his subjects. What is more, he invited the leading figures of different confessions of his time (Sikhs, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians etc.) including representatives of the Portuguese Jesuits to engage in a cross-cultural religious dialogue taking place in the beautiful audience hall in his newly built capital Fatehpur Sikri (City of Victory) near Agra. Having a greatly tolerant attitude toward religion, Akbar even preserved Hindu temples.
Since Akbars days most Mughal kings were venerated as the legitimate rulers furnished with a divine authority that made them acceptable for Muslims, Hindu and other people alike. The title of the last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775–1862), who died as a British state-prisoner in Rangoon, might give a clue to the imaginary transcendency of the emperor's cultural as well as political position. It reads: »His Divine Highness, Caliph of the Age, Padsha as Glorious as Jamshed, He who is surrounded by Hosts of Angels, Shadow of God, Refuge of Islam, Protector of the Mohammedan Religion, Offspring of the House of Timur, Greatest Emperor, Mightiest Kind of Kings, Emperor son of Emperor, Sultan son of Sultan« (Dalrymple 2006, 21). It goes without saying that such a highly charged charismatic authority was determined to emphasize hierarchy and to sustain a good deal of power distance.
Perhaps the most important factor of success at least in the early times of the British dominion in India was the existence of an initially private enterprise and its competent and, often enough, ruthless way of economic and political decision-making: the East India Company. Established in 1600 as a joint-stock association of English merchants, the Company was transformed during the second half of the eighteenth century from a commercial body with scattered trading interests into an almost invincible territorial power. As a headquarter she had founded the settlement of Calcutta in Bengal, from where the Company’s armies subjugated in unparalleled efforts step by step the whole sub-continent. Despite being a private entrepreneur, the Company was by official privilege allowed to recruit her own mercenary army; and she did so well that her chief militaries soon had command over the biggest army in the world of that time, a stunning war-machine useful to expand British interests into vast parts of Central Asia. To finance subsequent expenses the Company extracted considerable, progressively rising revenues from the Indian peasantry, in such a way spreading poverty and impeding what in the British homeland formed part of the economic progress, the intensification of agrarian productivity. One of the quasi-philosophical convictions behind this economy of exploitation was a contemporary mixture of physiocratic and utilitarian ideas, which to a staedily rising degree during the 19th century were unfortunately joined by racism and cultural arrogance. »All the capital employed is English capital;« wrote John Stuart Mill in the early years of the Victorian era, »almost all the industry is carried on for English uses« (quote Said 1993, 90). And Lord Macaulay, who had to deal with the reform of public education in India, assisted with his infamous verdict »that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.«
The East India Company was active in India more than 250 years. In 1858, one year after the Great Rebellion – or as Indian historians call the incident: after the First War of Independence – she was nationalised, and thus became the property of the British Government, her duties being reduced to administrative tasks. The seizure of power by the Government initiated a policy of rigid control and opression in the colony, organized directly by the newly established governmental India Office in London.
In the long history of her existence the Company underwent a lot of drastic changes. That was, to a large part, due to the almost impossible task to occupy and pacify a continent so vast in geographical size and so abundant in cultural differences. The Company was certainly not from the beginning involved in the task of empire-building, but steadily channeled the expertise of her Anglo-Indian personal in this direction, with increasing enforcement since the second half of the 18th century, when the Parliament in London tightened control by conveying power to the figure of a Governor-General; a commitment that raises a set of questions. Again and again the Company, like the colonial policy altogether, was accused, to have pursued nothing else but the naked exploitation of the foreign cultures and societies. However, to criticise that policy with Hannah Arendt for a type of imperialism characterised by the strict separation between ›ius‹ and ›imperium‹, does not hit the point correctly. No question, the primary interest of the Company was directed at economic success. But to secure this purpose she first and foremost had to take care to keep up stability in the already colonised parts of the continent. To attain her goals she not only boosted police and military measures, she also assumed tasks that were, strictly speaking, of the politico-cultural sort. It is impossible to describe and hardly possible to generalise the efforts of the Company as a cultural agent in India. Too wide apart were the regional pecularities and too various the attempts to intervene without ravaging the cultural memories of Hindus and Muslims. If we would venture on a rough summary of what is reported about the Company’s goals we could perhaps reduce these to a broad prospect of those achievements which represent the basics of modernity in the British society of that time: I mean
- the culture of capitalism, since long a highlight of British entrepreneurship;
- the culture of industrialism, gaining speed and innovative impulse;
- the culture of surveillance, enhanced by new algorhythmic technologies and statistics;
- and last not least the culture of reflexivity with its tendency to deconstruct traditions and leave their normative contents to be scrutinized, interpreted and brought into distance by academic experts of European origin; experts, who, for instance, in variance with the autochtonous guardians of heritage, declared Sanskrit a holy language with affinities to classical Greek and Latin.
Imperialist colonialism exerted a tremendous impact upon those media of communication and symbolic world-making: language and writing. The rather late introduction of printing in India at the end of the 18th century had a profound standardizing effect on the development of languages and literatures. Until then a multitude of co-existing languages and writing systems was in use. But now there emerged the ambition to conquer the imaginations and reasonings of the few literate by establishing the leadership of at least two main literary languages: Urdu, using the Arabic script, and Hindi, using like Sanskrit, Marathi and others the Devanāgarī alphabet.
Traces of all this can be found in many of the Company’s activities. They include not only the establishment of schools and colleges under British supremacy, but also the more academic attainments like territorialisation by map-making, philological and historical reconstruction of languages, myths and chronicles, also – especially in the early decades of the 19th century – extensive surveillance through census and population-statistics and, not to forget, the heavy European investments into those enterprises which were thought to speed up the mechanisms of commerce and communication throughout the whole subcontinent: installment of roads, railways, canals and the electric telegraph. »In purely agricultaral pursuits,« wrote in 1900 the Indian historian Romesh Dutt in his retrospect on India’s economic development, »England had little to teach; but in cleaning and husking the food grains, in spinning and weaving, in the manufacture of indigo, tobacco and sugar, in the growing of coffee and tea, in the forging of iron, in coal-mining and gold-mining, in all industries which were dependant on machinery, Europe had adopted more perfect methods than India in 1830.« Dutt, like so many other Indians, would have been happy if their own people would have had the opportunity to partake in and hence to learn from the technological advancements. Instead, Dutt comments, »it was hardly possible that foreign merchants and rival manufacturers, working for their own profit, would have this object in view [...]. A policy the reverse was pursued with the object of replacing the manufactures of India, as far as possible, by British manufactures.« (Dutt 1956, 288)
The ambivalence of this radical, enduring scheme of transforming the sub-continent by keeping investment in one’s own labor-forces and the collected taxes on the domestic side, soon became only too obvious. On the one hand the interventions initiated a process of modernisation which in the long run nurtured especially in the British educated Indian elite a longing for self-determination that culminated in the struggle for independance; out of this the Indian nationalist movement was born, whose members invented, as docile disciples of the European historians, their own nationally tainted cultural memory, only to use it as a weapon against their former ›masters‹. On the other hand the colonialist process of transformation went along with the destruction not only of holy sites (temples and mosques) and the basic structures of the traditional village economy, disrupting the local ecological balances, but it also affected the normative impact of those cultural memories that in the manifold empires and kingdoms of that wide-stretched subcontinent had established for generations a readily comprehensible set of life-orienting traditions. Not to forget the influence of other cultural heritages embodied in different religious beliefs, e.g. Buddhism, Jainism and Islam.
To call the various Hindu-religious observances and rituals »Hinduism« was a typical Western attitude meant to simplify a complex phenomenon and to reduce a disturbing heterogeneity. Apart from the Trinity Brahma – Vishnu – Shiva, the rich polytheistic pantheon of Hindu-deities is almost inexhaustible, what mirrors the possibilities of manifold forms of adoration and worship. Accordingly confusing is, therefore, the teeming crowd of the holy imagery. Another big difference to the monotheistic confessions lies in the major importance of oral interpretations and teachings, something that cut across the Protestant estimation of the written word, a guiding principle also in the Anglican Church. All in all, enough reasons for many British functionaries who had to do in some form or other with the affairs of colonizing or, as they saw it, civilizing the Indians, to qualify the Hindu-religions as a gross form of superstition.
The greatest danger for a sustainable mutual understanding between Europeans and Indians pertaining to the interchangeable uses of their cultures was brought about by the awakening of religious fundamentalism about the middle of the 19th century. There was a growing estrangement between both sides, stimulating a general negative development that was to a good deal pressed ahead by the coincidence of a crisis-ridden and therefore weak government in the British homeland on the one hand and successful imperialist policies in the colony on the other hand. The latter encouraged a boisterous attitude towards the »natives« as the Indians were then disdainfully called. »For the first time«, resumes William Dalrymple in his recent book about that time, »there was a feeling that technologically, economically and politically, as well as culturally, the British had nothing to learn from India and much to teach; it did not take long for imperial arrogance to set in. This arrogance, when combined with the rise of Evangelical Christianity, slowly came to affect all aspects of relations between the British and the Indians.« (Dalrymple 2006, 70) The militant strategies of the Evangelical missionaries strengthened the resistance of their Hindu and Islamic antagonists. And it was a question of time when the first ›mujahedin‹ conspiracies were uncovered and a ›jihad‹ against the ›Kafirs‹, the infidels, was invoked. Consequence was one of the bloodiest upheavals in the history of British colonialism, the 1857 war, that once and for all destroyed the rich Mughal culture and shattered for a long time all hopes for fair dealings between India and Europe.
