After Colonialism

After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements.  Edited by Gyan Prakash. New Jersy, Princeon Universtiy Press.  1995.

Introduction: After Colonialism. Gyan Prakash.

…if the colonial rulers enacted their authority by constituting the “native” as their inverse image, then surely the “native” exercised a pressure on the identification of the colonizer….—p.3

…Unlike other nationalists, who spoke of the “Un-British rule” in India and demanded, in Gandhi’s words, “English rule without the Englishman,” [Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule; Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1938] he sees colonization as the alienated local image of the modern English nation: “Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.”  After offering this biting criticism of the modern civilization and parliamentary government (which is compared to a sterile woman and a prostitute), Gandhi turns to India’s ancient “village communities” as an alternative model, but he does not do so as a nativist.  Indeed, this (p. 6) notion of premodern India as a collection of village communities was derived from colonial sociology, most notably from Henry Maine (who is cited as an authority in the text).  Gandhi’s concept of a nonmodern civilization drew on Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Ruskin, who are also cited as authorities.  Again, the content of his vision is not the issue here, but the fact that it emerged from a rereading of the colonial archive. It was by rescuing the premodern from its assigned space as history, from its designation as colonialism’s self-confirming other, and by inserting it in the same time as the modern that Gandhi was able to formulate his concept of the nonmodern. By such a reinterpretation of the premodern as the nonmodern, by realigning categories aligned by colonialism, Gandhi was able to produce a postcolonial text that made the violent critique of the colonial discourse speak with nonviolent meanings.—p. 6-7

            Even anticolonial nationalism was compelled to transgress colonial polarities as it sought to articulate an essentialized nation.  The nationalists, to be sure, believed that the colonized formed a unity; that they constituted a national essence opposed to that of the colonizers.  But the production of this unity required the invocation of difference.  The nationalist intellectuals spoke of “unity in diversity”; they claimed that the colonized formed a nation in spite of social, regional, and ethnic differences. Such assertions were not merely polemical responses to the colonial rulers who resisted the nationalist demands; instead, they underscored the necessity of the stage of difference for the performance of the nation’s unity.  Thus, the demand for a modern nationhood was anchored in appeals to a “lost” ancient belonging, and the unity of the national subject was forged in the space of difference and conflicts.—p. 9

…Salman Rushdies’ Satanic Verses [New York: Viking, 1988, p. 337]: “The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.”—p. 11

Ch. 1. Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, and the Methodology of Imperialism.  Edward Said.

            Academic work in comparative literature carried with it the notion that Europe and the United States together were the center of the world, not simply by virtue of their political positions, but also because their literatures were the ones most worth studying.  When Europe succumbed to fascism and when the United States benefited so richly from the many émigré scholars who came to it, understandably little of their sense of crisis took root with them….—p. 24

            Western cultural forms can be taken out of the autonomous enclosures in which they have been protected, and placed instead in the dynamic global environment created by imperialism, itself revised as an ongoing contest between north and south, metropolis and periphery, white and native.  We may thus consider imperialism as a process occurring as part of the metropolitan culture, which at times acknowledges, at other times obscures the sustained business of the empire itself.  The important point—a very Gramscian one—is how the national British, French, and American cultures maintain hegemony over the peripheries.  How within them was consent gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native peoples and territories?—p.28

            Looked at honestly, the record is not a good one.  United States military interventions since World War Two have occurred (and are still occurring) on nearly every continent, many of great complexity and extent, with tremendous national investment, as we are now only beginning to understand. All of this is, in William Appleman Williams’s phrase, empire as a way of life.  The continuing disclosures about the war in Vietnam, about the United States’ support of “contras” in Nicaragua, about the crisis in the Persian Gulf, are only part of the story of this complex of interventions.  Insufficient attention is paid to the fact that United States Middle Eastern and Central American policies—whether exploiting a geo-political opening among Iranian so-called moderates, (p. 32) or aiding the so-called Contra Freedom Fighters in overthrowing the elected, legal government of Nicaragua, or coming to the aid of the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families—can only be described as imperialist.

            Even if we were to allow, as many have, that United States foreign policy is principally altruistic and dedicated to such unimpeachable goals as freedom and democracy, there is considerable room for skepticism… Are we not as a nation repeating what France and Britain, Spain and Portugal, Holland and Germany, did before us?  And yet d we not tend to regard ourselves as somehow exempt from the more sordid imperial adventures that preceded ours?  Besides, is there not an unquestioned assumption on our part that our destiny is to rule and lead the world, a destiny that we have assigned ourselves as part of our errand into the wilderness?—pp. 32-33

…In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within American culture (with a whole history of exterminism and incorporation behind it) without also apprehending the imperial contest itself.  This, I would say, is a cultural fact of extraordinary political as well as interpretive importance, yet it has not been recognized as such in cultural and literary theory, and is routinely circumvented or occluded in cultural discourses….—p. 34

Ch. 2. Africa in History: The End of Universal Narratives.  Steven Feierman

…McNeill, who wrote that “civilized society had much to impart and relatively little to learn from peoples not yet civilized.” Defined civilization as “a style of human life characterized by a complexity, wealth, and general impressiveness that justify the epithet ‘civilized.’” [William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 65, 32]

            “Civilization” in its usage over the centuries in the English language has carried connotations of self and other, or of the proper and improper ordering of society.  To “civilize,” in the Oxford English Dictionary (1933), is “to polish what is rude or uncouth… to domesticate, tame (wild animals) … to make ‘civil’” in the sense of “having proper public or social order.”  “Civilization” is a civilized condition or state in these senses, but then also “a developed or advanced state of human society.”

            Braudel makes a distinction between “civilizations” and “cultures,” with the societies of black Africa counted among the cultures.  In The Structures of Everyday Life he writes that “a culture is a civilization that has not yet achieved maturity,” [Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Passible, vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th-18^th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1981, p. 101) but then in Grammaire des civilizations he borrows from Levi-Strauss’s division of societies between clocks and steam-engines, to argue that

The societies which correspond to cultures are those … which have a tendency to maintain themselves indefinitely in their initial state, which explains furthermore why they appear to us as societies without history and without progress …. In brief primitive cultures will be the fruit of egalitarian societies, for whom relations between groups are regulated once and for all and repeat themselves, whereas civilizations are founded on hierarchical (p. 45) societies, with … changing tensions, social conflicts, political struggle, and perpetual evolution. [Fernand Braudel, Grammaire des civilizations (Paris: Arthaud-Flammarion, 1987) p. 48]

African cultures, according to this argument, are egalitarian and static; European civilizations, hierarchical and dynamic. –pp.45-46

…Many different kinds of ritual functionaries coexisted in Igboland [of Africa], each preserving one or another form of knowledge, to be transmitted orally to the next generation….—p. 46

            The point of this is important: the historical experience of southeastern Nigeria followed a pattern for which the historians’ category of “civilization” was largely irrelevant.  The region had high population densities in the absence of hierarchical states, commerce without literacy, and productive agriculture without plows.  “Civilization’s” characteristics—high population density, commerce, hierarchy, and so on—are meaningful only insofar as the separate elements have relational significance for one another: to the extent that the plow, political hierarchy, and mercantile activity are interrelated, for example.  The elements have no explanatory significance if treated simply as a check list. In this part of Nigeria, it is clear, a different set of interrelations was at work.  Taking account of them makes it impossible for historians to write in their accustomed way about the history of “civilizations.”—p.47

…Bennassar, for example, explored the principles of African social organization in his search for an answer to the central question asked also by Braudel: Why was Africa not the place where economic change took off?  Why was it not Africa where the great breakthrough to capitalism occurred?  In order to answer this question, Bennassar began from an understanding of the social factors that led to the breakthrough in Europe. The central factor, in his view, was the partial freedom of merchants from political control and their capacity to accumulate wealth in their own right. He looked for the same factors in Africa, beginning with what seem to him the most advanced of the African kingdoms.  In the kingdom of Kongo, he argued, merchants, were closely controlled by the king. Land reverted to the king at the owner’s death, thus cutting off the possibility of accumulation.  The king was the source of poverty and prosperity, merchants lacked autonomy, and economic growth was restricted. [Bennassar and Chaunu, L’Ouverture du monde,  pp. 85-87.

The analysis falls down, however, not only because of the wide diversity of state structures in Africa, but also because of the incorrectness of its more basic assumption that autonomous merchants require a state (p.47) structure in order to carry on their business….—pp.47-48

The problem here is that the categories of historical analysis, even though ostensibly value-neutral, are drawn from Europe, and therefore the historian looks in Africa for a familiar constellation of king, nobles, church, and merchants…If what is European is defined as normal, then the non-European appears to be disordered, abnormal, primitive.—p. 48

Nuer [of the southern Sudan] sell cattle for money, but they may not exchange the money thus earned in all the ways they might have exchanged cattle.  The crucial difference between money and cattle is that “cattle have blood,” which people equate with procreative force; “money has no blood.”  For this reason money cannot be used in contexts in which the blood of cattle is relevant: for bloodwealth, or sacrifice, or (except to a limited extent) for bridewealth.  Even when cattle are used in social transactions, distinctions are made between the uses of animals bought with money (“cattle of money”) and animals that came as bridewealth (“cattle of girls”).

Money itself is not a homogeneous medium of exchange for people in Nuerland.  Money earned emptying latrines or doing domestic work is called “money of shit,” and it cannot be used to purchase cows.  “Cattle bought with the money of shit cannot live.” [Sharon Hutchinson, “The Nuer in Crisis: Coping with Money, War, and the State: (Ph. D. diss., University of Chicago, 1988), p. 152.] Other wages are called “money of sweat,” and earnings from the sale of livestock are “money of cattle.”  For the Nuer, money is not universally fluid.  There are several kinds of it, with several uses.—p. 50

            The sense that we can no longer tell history as a single story, from a single consistent point of view or from a unified perspective, strikes deep resonances in recent social and cultural thought….—p. 50

            In the decades after 1945 the politics of race turned in a decisively new direction in the European colonial empires and in the United States.  The struggles that led to decolonization—wars in Indochina, Algeria, and Kenya, and less violent independence movements in innumerable other territories—led to a reconsideration among European intellectuals of the qualities and values that had been defined as European. The loss of empire happened at a time when some thinkers were questioning whether historians and others in the human sciences were at all capable of describing the Other, or whether by doing so they were engaging in what Emmanuel Levinas called “ontological imperialism,” in which otherness vanishes and becomes part of the same.—p. 51

…Without the native, without the slave, the bondsman, or the barbarian, the central values of the West are difficult to imagine The slave and the barbarian were not incidental to civilization, aberrant conditions at the margins; they were constitutive of civilization, a way civilization defined itself. With the civil rights movement in the United States similar perceptions began to emerge, that slavery and later forms of racial oppression were not errors at the margins of American society; they had, in some fundamental way, defined American society. The relationship between race and America’s central egalitarian values was, in Gunnar Myrdal’s term, “An American Dilemma.”—p. 51

…The historian, whether African or outsider, must struggle to understand the place of the historical actor within a complex web of local cultural understandings and at the same time avoid seeing that action only in local terms. Local actors were, at one and the same time, orienting their actions to the local context and playing on a world stage, influencing worldwide historical process. (p.52)…. The problem for the historian is how to capture all different levels at the same time, how to do justice to the local, the regional, and the international in a single description or a single framework of analysis.—pp. 52-53

The problem of interpretation, in this palimpsest of social forms, is evident from the many meanings of the word “slave.”  A man who was sold to traders in Central Africa and who ultimately crossed the Atlantic to work on a plantation in Jamaica was clearly a slave. But it is doubtful that his original owner in Africa knew the English word “slave,” and doubtful also that the local term defining the person’s form of dependency was the precise equivalent of “slave.”  The major associations of “slavery” in English are with the plantation slavery of the American south, the Caribbean, and Latin America.  Yet \historians also use the word for statuses within Africa that seem very much unlike plantation slavery.—p. 53

Ch. 5. The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in Diderot and Herder.  Anthony Pagden.

…in the terms Diderot uses again and again in his political writings, all humankind is governed by three codes: the natural, the civil, and the religious.11  Only when these are in harmony with one another is a life of virtue possible.  For Diderot, conflict among his three codes amounts to a disharmony within the constitution of the person.12  But the inescapable human communities are constructed by customs (moeurs) and custom is the unreflective obedience (“un soumission generale et un conduite consequente”)13 to the second and third of these laws, frequently in violation of the first.  The brief history of nearly all our customs, says the figure called “B” in the dialogue that occupies much of the Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, can be reduced to one exemplary tale: “there is a natural man, and on top of this natural man an artificial one has been placed.  And a civil war has broken out in the cave which will last all his life.”14—p. 131

11. Guillaume Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781). 10, 285 (XIX), 14).  For the significance of the fact that these are codes, see Donald Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990), p. 223.

12. Histoire, 10, 285 (XIX, 14).

13. Diderot, Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, ed. Herbert Dieckmann (Geneva-Lille, 1955), p. 52

14. Ibid., pp. 59-60.

…And pilgrims, of course, put themselves, in Michel de Certeau’s words, to “the test of travel,” only in order that they may return home purified.  Their objective is the return itself, not the journey.

            Because of this, said Diderot, all travelers are suspect, but there is “no state more immoral than that of the continual traveler (voyageur par etat).”  He who travels constantly, he wrote in the Histoire, “resembles a man who owns a huge house and who, instead of remaining by the side of his family, wanders constantly from room to room.”  What he carries with him from room to room is a catalogue of human vices: “tyranny, crime, ambition, misery, curiosity, I know not what restlessness of spirit, the desire to know and the desire to see, boredom, the dislike of familiar pleasures—these things men from all ages have carried abroad (expatrie) with them, and will continue to do so.”23.—p. 133

…Just as the savage who never experiences any desire to leave his patrie is always content with his lot precisely because it is his lot, so these travelers are forever discontented with theirs because they are theirs.  Such men, Diderot believed, carry with them “in the bottom of their hearts the germs of depredation” that under another sky and far from the public gaze grows “with inconceivable fury.”26—p. 133

26. Guillaume Thomas Raynal,  Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781).5, 138 (X, 1).

…The principles and prejudices that the mask of civility inevitably leaves behind clutters the mind of the new savage quite as much as it did that of the old civil man.  For what lies hidden beneath civil man is no longer natural man.  Time and the civilizing process have changed the whole person. This decomposed civil being is what Diderot nicely calls the “domestic tiger who has returned to the jungle.”29—p. 134

29. Guillaume Thomas Raynal,  Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781). 5, 2 (IX, 1).

…For uniquely the English had been driven overseas not by greed, the “soifd’or” that inevitably brings with it the thirst for blood.30  They had not even gone with the desire to impose their beliefs upon others.  They had gone, instead, in pursuit of liberty.  Whereas the rest of Europe had exported its worst, the English had driven out the best.  Whereas the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Creoles in America had now become “more or less degenerate,”31 the English-Americans had sustained and developed their concern for liberty. It was even possible for Diderot to ignore the Indian massacres and the expropriation of Indian lands which, as others less friendly to the Thirteen Colonies could point out, were every bit as bad as those committed by other Europeans in other parts of America.  The new United States was clearly not Utopia.  But then Diderot had little time for utopias, and if it was not the ideal society, it was, at least, an attainable optimal society.—p. 134

30. See “Sur les cruautes exercess par les espagnols en Amerique, “ in Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Paul Verniere (Paris, 1956), 1:9.

31. Guillaume Thomas Raynal,  Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781). 10, 107-9 (XIX, 3)

            All other Europeans, however, “have … shown themselves, indistinguishable, throughout all the countries of the New World.”32  They had, in effect, become not savages, but what Diderot had defined elsewhere as “barbarians,” those who have been cursed by “that somber disposition which makes man inaccessible to the delights of nature or art and the sweetness of society.”33  “Savages” exist only in a particular cultural (p.134) milieu, but “barbarians” are with us always, no matter how civilized we may appear to have become. These new barbarians have destroyed, or have attempted to destroy, as do all barbarians, the cultures of the peoples among whom they settled.  But the “Feroces Europeens” in America have added to this crime one that has, possibly, been still more tragic in its consequences; slavery.—pp. 134-35

32. [Guillaume Thomas Raynal,  Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781). 5, 2 (IX, 1)

33. 33. In the Discours preliminaire to his translation of Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit (1745), in Oeuvres completes, ed. Jules Assevat and Maurice Tourneaux (Paris, 1875-77), 1:9.

…As Condorcet pointed out in his Reflexions sur l’esclavage des negres in 1781, slavery since it was governed by the laws of property, constituted a purely private relationship.  Even the indentured servant who had in some sense sold himself into slavery had, in fact, only sold the right to the use of his labor and in his relationship to his masters was bound by public not private law. The slave, by contrast, was merely a legal thing (a res), precisely as he had been under Roman law, and thus wholly dependent upon “the caprice of his master.”39

            Slavery as it was practiced in the Americas, however, involved not merely servitude, but, more far-reaching in its destructive effects on human society in general, mass migration….—p. 135

…In the brief history of slavery that Diderot provides at the beginning of chapter 24 to Book XI of the Histoire, modern slavery comes about not, as its ancient counterpart had done, in response to internal domestic need and from the unfortunate but natural human tendency for the strong to exploit the weak. It comes about solely as a consequence of colonization.  For Diderot, modern slavery is possibly the worst of the deleterious consequences of modern travel….—p. 136

…For the first time instead of taking slaves in so-called just wars, instead of, as the Roman law of slavery had insisted, “saving” (one of the etymologies given for the term servus) a captive from the death his captor was entitled to inflict on him, men began to buy slaves who were innocent of any act of aggression toward their captors, and having bought them to transport them from one side of the world to another.—p. 137

…no state can sell what it cannot own….—p. 137

…Furthermore, unlike ancient slavery which, however evil, was a function of the kind of society that it sustained, modern slavery, said Diderot, “is a trade which is based upon injustice and has only luxury as its object”—the twin evils that menaced the well-ordered society of Diderot’s imagination.46  Paradoxically, it is this traffic that yokes together the two main themes of the Histoire: travel or migration and commerce.  For with the discovery of America, slavery, which had hitherto been a product of warfare became instead a species of commerce.  The final outcome of this new and deadly combination had been to generate a form of mass involuntary migration.  “In order to people one part of the world which you have devastated,” Diderot accused the “Feroces Europeens,” “you have (p.137) corrupted and depopulated another.”48….—pp. 137-38

46. Guillaume Thomas Raynal,  Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781). 6, 135 (XI, 24).

48.Guillaume Thomas Raynal,  Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781). 4, 215-16 (VIII,22).

…Because Africa was being emptied of its native populations to meet the “insatiable greed” of the European settlers in America, because the once populous Native Americans, now decimated by disease and conquest had proved unwilling and unable to bring their population levels up to anything like their preconquest numbers; because the degenerate colonists in America were seemingly unable to breed, and the African slaves would rather destroy their offspring than see them born into slavery, Diderot believed that humanity was faced with the prospect of a rapidly emptying world…..—p. 138

            Freeing the slaves in America, would also, Diderot argued, be economically advantageous.  “Give them a homeland, a shared set of interests, lands to work, and a form of production in accordance with their tastes, and your colonies will not lack arms. Freed of their chains, they will be both more active and more robust.”52

            In the end, as he had always insisted, modern slavery was not only a violation of all human rights, an insult to human decency; it was also “prejudicial to the interests” of the “cruel oppressors” themselves.53.—p.138

52. Guillaume Thomas Raynal,  Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781).6, 136-37 (XI, 24)

53. ibid., 6, 117 (XI, 24).

…Colonies in the ancient world had been, to use Turgot’s metaphor, “like fruit,”54 which had had clung to the tree only until mature.  But modern colonies, created not to ease population pressure, but for the purposes of trade, remain attached to their mother countries long after they have reached their maturity.  What took place in Miletus or Ephesus could have had no significant moral effect on what happened in Athens.  But the behavior of the American colonists, and in particular the laws that had been made in the metropolis, had a constant and frequently devastating impact on what took place in Europe.  The vision of a safe, sanitized haven for the potentially destructive forces within European society ignored the fact that, remote though the “Two Indies” were, the European colonies there were still socially, culturally, and politically linked to Europe.  The European overseas empires had not merely spawned a new breed of criminals; because of their dependence on their mother countries, they had also hugely multiplied the possibilities (p.138) for corruption.  The same routes that had carried the colonist out would also allow his vices, his “tyrannies and his cruelties,” to seep back into the motherland. You cannot, as Montesquieu had observed, practice tyranny abroad while remaining free at home; of this, as he had demonstrated, the Spanish Empire in America was the paradigmatic example.  Neither can you hope to lead a civilized or enlightened life in a world in which slavery still flourishes….—p. 139

54. “Tableau philosophique des progress successifs de l’esprit humain,” in Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Paul Verniere (Paris, 1956), 1:222.

…Condorect claimed, a society such as his own, which tolerated slavery anywhere in the world over which it had some authority, “would not be a society of men but a band of brigands.”58

• Reflexions sur l’esclavage des negres (Neufchatel, 1781) p. 14

…the difference between the color of their skins was a greater barrier between the slaves and his master than the fact of servitude itself. Discrimination by color had, Diderot argued, as with so many of the other ills that afflicted Europe, been a creation of the church.  “Theology,” he explained, “which has attempted to make everything seem marvelous and mysterious so as to reserve the right of explanation to itself” had invented this “atrocious extravaganza” which is the story of the descendant of Cain.61  Only Christianity was capable of constructing a genealogy for man that divided the human family into two distinct groups and distinguished between those two groups by the mere color of their skins.

            Modern slavery, which was entirely a product of the commercial features of modern colonization, had appropriated a primitive Judaic myth to create a race of subhumans whose moral identity had been crudely assimilated to the color of their skin….—p. 139

61. Guillaume Thomas Raynal,  Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dans les dues Indes (Geneva, 1781). 6, 105 (XI, 22)

…in Diderot’s view, malign argument that slavery had introduced the African to the true religion, was the inescapable outcome of the steady loss of identity that colonization had inflicted not merely on the colonists themselves, but also on the metropolitan culture.—p. 140

…Europeans in America, he [Kant’s pupil, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)] claimed, quoting the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm’s Natural and Political History of Pennsylvania (1768), mature more rapidly and die (p.141) younger than they do in Europe….—pp. 141-42

…Exactly what the mechanism is by which nature produces such effects Kalm [in his Natural and Political History of Pennsylvania (1768)] does not say.  But it clearly follows from its very existence that not only can no people hope to transport its own culture intact to another world; it cannot mate with an autochthonous one to produce a new hybrid culture.  The only possible mode of transplantation, is for the traveler himself to go native.  “But how few,” Herder lamented, “such people are there.”  All those who fail to assimilate in this way find themselves, sooner or later, the victims of a superior nature. “And does not Nature revenge every insult offered her?” he asked.

Where are the conquests, the factories, the invasions of former times, when distant foreign lands were visited by a different race, for the sake of devastation and plunder!  The still breath of climate has dissipated and consumed them, and it was not difficult for the natives to give the finishing strokes to the rotten tree.72

            The extravagance of this claim, in the aftermath of the creation of the United States and on the eve of the independence wars in the Caribbean and South America (the Ideen was written between 1784 and 1791), may now seem absurd.  But Herder’s image of the degenerate colonist finally succumbing to the influence of nature is a function less of any observation about the real world than it is of his belief in the utter impenetrability of all cultural forms.  “The idea of every indigenous culture,” he claimed, “is confined to its own region,” so confined, that the possibility of communicating just what it is becomes seemingly impossible.  “For the European has no idea of the boiling passions and imagination which glow in the negro’s breast; and the Hindu has no conception of the restless desires that chase the European from one end of the world to the other.”73

            We are all, Herder believed, in the same position as the “king of Siam” who, on being told about ice and snow, declared them to be nonexistent.  The Siamese, who had no possible access to extremes of cold, could only dismiss such things as the ravings of foreign travelers.  Literally nothing that does not come within the range of our own cultural experience—and hence within the range of our own language—can have any meaningful existence for us.

            Herder’s claim for both incommensurability and incomprehensibility went far further than any previous argument in favor of cultural integrity.  Such extensive claims had also to be grounded in an entirely new vision of social development….—p.142

72. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man [Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit] trans. T. Churchill (London, 1800), p. 189

73. Ibid. p. 221.

…[Johann Gottfried] Herder accepted that at some deep level, there might be such a thing as “human nature,” which would allow us instinctively to recognize the “other” as one of “us”; but this did nothing to help us understand human beings as they are currently constituted, and nothing at all to make the particular life-ways of the other commensurable with our own.  Herder was one of the earliest, and remains perhaps the fiercest, opponent of the comforting argument that in order to understand “others” we have to accredit them with not only the beliefs and desires but also the values that we all, as human beings, supposedly share.—p. 145

Ch. 6 Retribution and Remorse: The Interaction between the Administration and the Protestant Mission in Early Colonial Formosa. Leonard Blusse.

The organic relationship between the mission and colonial administration in the historical process of European expansion overseas and its encounter with non-Western cultures has been singled out as a very controversial one in the Christian church….—p. 155

…in the Dutch … Clergymen were not sent by their own church organization in the same way that Roman Catholic priests were dispatched for the overseas mission, but they were hired by the company and made directly responsible to the administration of the company rather than to the classis in Holland that had selected them.—p. 156

[Robertus]Junius [Dutch Missionaries in Formosa near China] believed that the [Hans Putmans]governor’s indecision in the punishment of Mattau ridiculed the Dutch: if Sinkandians took revenge for the theft of one pig, as they frequently did, how could the Dutch leave the murder of seventy of their compatriots unavenged?  “Our nation is subject to ridicule.  In Mattau the skulls of the victims are displayed on the stage for abuse and play.  During their banquets they amuse themselves by mimicking the cries of agony of the victims in the river; our nation has become a byword, and object of mockery, a laughing stock.”44—p. 171

44. Letter from [Georguis] Candidus [Dutch Missionaries in Formosa near China] to Putmans, Noverber 25, 1633, in Teding van Berkhout Collection.

            The wide range of activities of the two clergymen and their staff is singularly striking.  Apart from spreading the true gospel, they acted as agricultural developers and tax officials (an initial tax on deerhunting was imposed and collected by [Georguis] Candidius and[Robertus] Junius[Dutch Missionaries in Formosa near China]).  They wrote ABC primers in the Siraya language, prepared expeditions with the aim of conquest, and thought out a formula for colonial administration.—p. 172

….[Robertus] Junius [Dutch Missionaries in Formosa near China] now proposed that the company delegate three or four prominent persons who could represent the village with the colonial administration after the transfer of sovereignty and act as “native chiefs.”  As tokens of authority these dignitaries were to be provided with a hat, a red cape, and a baton with a silver grip.  Authority within the village, once flexible and loosely stretched, was thus institutionalized in the hands of a few leaders imposed by an outside ruler, the inevitable result of the colonial interference….—p. 173

Protestant missionaries played a decisive role in the territorial expansion of the Dutch East India Company on Formosa.  They put their stamp on this process in various ways: they manipulated the policy-making of the governor and skillfully exploited the dynamics of intervillage violence while introducing the concept of centralized power to native Formonsan society. The establishment of colonial rule had indeed been brought about by the synergy of church and state with judicious timing of when to strike while the iron was hot.—p. 178

…Trapped in this colonial paradox [Robertus] Junius [Dutch Missionaries in Formosa near China] Junius failed to draw the ultimate conclusion that empire and Christian mission were incompatible.—p. 178

Ch. 7 Coping with (Civil) Death: The Christian Convert’s Rights of Passage in Colonial India.  Gauri Viswanathan.

IMPASSES OF IDENTITY

While colonial Indians were relatively complacent about the effects of missionary activities (the numbers of Christian conversions never coming close to the efforts and labors expended by missionaries), the event that triggered widespread panic about mass conversions had less to do with missionaries than with the publication, in 1845, of the draft of the new “law of the land,” the Lex Loci Act, which would be enacted in 1850 as the Caste Disabilities Removal Act.¹  Among other things, this act (referred to in the British records as the “Emancipation Act” ²) sought to revive an inactive clause in the 1832 Bengal Code aimed at protecting the inheritance rights of converts from what British administrators considered some of the most punitive features of Hindu and Muslim personal law, including the forfeiture of rights to ancestral property by individuals who declared allegiance to another religion.  The logical justification for depriving converts of their rights to property rested on what legal scholars today term a “legal fiction,” that is, the fiction of civil death—the construction of the convert as deracinated and, as an outcaste, no longer recognizable by scriptural law as a functioning member of his or her former community.  Given the explanatory appeal of caste as a category of analysis in official British discourse, it is not surprising that British legislation showed more than unusual interest in interpreting changes of religion in terms of the loss of caste by converts and the pronouncement of civil death by Hindu law.  On the question of conjugal rights, the resulting uncertainty in the status of converts married earlier under a different personal law exercised no less fascination for the British….—p. 183

1.. Among the most vehement protests was a memorial to Dalhousie by a group of Bengali Hindus, whose combined solidarity against the proposed measure to protect converts’ rights to property succeeded in preventing the act from becoming law. For a short while the clause to protect converts’ inheritance rights, which had already been introduced in the 1832 Bengal Regulations but remained inactive, became a dead letter again. But in 1850.the act was revived and passed into law. Act XXI of 1850 henceforth became known as the Caste (p.206) Disabilities Removal Act.  Another memorial was presented to the government to make a plea similar to the earlier one in 1845, but this time it made no dent on the government (India Office Library and Records, Board’s Collections, Legislative Department, No. 12 of 1851, draft 875 [F/2436]: Memorial from the Hindoo inhabitants of Bengal praying for the repeat of Act XXI of 1850).—pp. 206-07

2.. Standish G. Grady, A Treatise on the Hindoo Law of Inheritance, Comprising the Doctrines of the Various Schools with the Decisions of the High Courts of the Several Presidencies of India, and the Judgments of the Privy Council on Appeal (London: Wildy and Sons, 1868), 26.—p. 207

… While seeming to protect the rights of converts, British judicial decisions, responding to the fiction of civil death as the central problem in applying liberal principles on English lines, dissociated Christian converts from a broad based community of Christians to which converts may have believed they had gained admittance and recast their religious identity in the form of the religion they had renounced, the rationale for this move being the judgment that customs and usages (often deferred to in civil suits as a last resort) were slower to change than beliefs.  The way out of the impasse created by the offending clause in the Lex Loci Act was to declare that converts to Christianity, however divergent their doctrinal inclinations from the original faith, could still remain Hindus for purposes of law, especially if their habits and manners remained essentially undifferentiated from so-called Hindu customs. The rationale for this discursive move is fairly obvious.  If Christian converts were really Hindus, they could not be treated as civilly dead and their civil rights could not justifiably be revoked under Hindu law.

            But while this tactic may have served the immediate end of ensuring that converts were not discriminated against by Hindu or Muslim personal law, in the long run the British legislation of religious identity that rewrote conversion from a spiritual to a material act complicated the self-definitions of converts and reduced existing heterogeneous and fluid populations of India to two fixed categories—Hindu and Muslim.  In the name of protecting the civil rights of Christian converts, British legislation characteristically endorsed a homogeneous, essentially Hindu, social identity, rejecting both the assertions of converts about real differences in the content of their past and present religious convictions and a parallel move by communities to enforce those differences on the grounds that loss of caste was irreversible.  Legislation that was ostensibly designed to protect converts’ inheritance rights often led to an even greater in infringement of rights, especially in the case of female converts who, seeking redress against the trammels of either Hindu or Muslim personal law, found their pleas unheeded, with the British government, in a gesture of placid indifference, washing its hands of involvement in the internal workings of indigenous caste society.  What was at stake for British administrators was not amelioration of the socially alienating features of conversion, or of the exilic condition of civil death to which converts were doomed, but an abstract concept of inalienable rights (p.184) vested in such things as inheritance and succession to private property (but, significantly, not extending to marriage and divorce).  The defense of that concept was so impassioned that it created the illusion that its true subject was the personal and historical experience of exclusion suffered by hose who had exchanged one religion for another.  But rulings that confirmed Christian converts as Hindus (or Muslims, as the case might be) for purposes of law were by and large indifferent to the conditions of liminal existence that converts were forced to cope with, and “Native Christians” were left floating in a nebulous space, neither Hindus nor Christians in their social existence.

            For Christian converts, the experience of colonial history is thus one of contradictory and disingenuous moves.  While native converts were treated as dead by their former religious community, the lease of life they were given by civil courts was founded on an equally unreal fiction, a perverse denial of their adopted religious identity.  Though British officials could claim that they took legal measures to protect the rights of converts, the fact that they chose to do so by reaffiliating them to the religion they had repudiated further alienated native converts from both the old and the adopted religion.  Moreover, the increasing numbers of cases that involved converts or their families as plaintiffs³ reveal that changes of religion of any kind (which, under other circumstances, might be taken as positive signs of a society’s fluid, adaptable nature) posed insuperable problems for British rulers, who were more inclined to deal with stable, fixed categories.  Rulings in favor of an undifferentiated social identity, conflating Hindu and Christian, Christian and Muslim, were conservative and fearful reactions to change, inasmuch as they were also defenses, at the same time, of what the British categorically adjudged to be certain inalienable rights.

            The court decisions reveal with astonishing clarity how not only Hindus and Muslims but also the British regarded conversion as a disruptive act, complicating the smooth functioning of compartmentalized laws in Indian society—laws that were historically differentiated to reflect the customs and practices particularly of its two major communities, Hindus and Muslims.  The prerogative of the courts to determine the laws by which a convert was to be governed brought conversion—which theologians and historians of religion might view as an act of religious conscience and will—squarely within the province of the British legislative and judicial system.

            The political concerns extended to a devaluation of the status of belief and religious conviction itself. Virtually marginalized in judicial rulings was how converts perceived and experienced their new religion—the degree of their commitment to and investment in it, the strength of their faith in its doctrines and teachings. Indeed, the devaluation of belief (p.185) followed from a cynical assessment of conversion as no more than ample testimony to the efficacy of Christian ideology.  Often anticlerical in bias and deeply suspicious of evangelical fervor, the British judges characteristically dismissed the converts’ repeated assertions of Christian sentiments as having less to do with belief or conviction than with the power and forcefulness of missionary instruction; therefore, if a convert chose to embrace Christianity or any other religion, such a choice could not be taken as proof of personal commitment to the beliefs embodied in that religion, but more likely represented the successful realization of proselytizing intentions for which missionary institutions were set up in the first place.

            In short, this essay is concerned with tracing the calculated mediation of religious conversion, through the instrumentality of the British law courts, from its potential aspect as catalyst of social and cultural change to a more conservative function as preserver of the status quo, regardless of the changes in the content of religious beliefs experienced by converts.  That is to say, this essay seeks to document the privileging of a legislated religious (translated as social) identity over private or subjective religious experience.—pp. 184-86

3. For example, the British had great difficulty in arriving at a decision to determine the rightful heirs to the property of a Hindu woman converted to Roman Catholicism, who died intestate in Cochin. Two nephew claimed the property, but because it was uncertain whether the property was acquired before the conversion (in which case, according to Hindu law, the nephews were sole heirs) or after (in which case the property could devolve only on those who professed Christianity—being Hindus, the nephews were not then entitled to inherit), the case dragged on for years.  Even when, on the advice of the pundits who were employed to interpret Hindu law for British judges, the Sadr Diwani Adalat (or appeals court) decided to rule in favor of the nephews, the government at Madras hesitated to take final action until it could obtain information from the governor-general in Calcutta whether any rule or precedent existed in Bengal that determined the succession to property in cases of conversion from Hinduism (India Office Library and Records, Board’s Collections, Legislative Department, November 4, 1843, no. 21 of 1844, para. 43; Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras Judicial Consultations, vol. 472, March 21, 1843, no. 40; vol. 502a, March 10, 1846, no. 41; vol. 515, September 1, 1846, No.45.—p. 207

…The hierarchic reordering of religious identifications with community and caste is achieved in at least two closely related ways: first, the positing of the unstable and indefinable category of “private religious experience” as a separable, essentialized, and even inconsequential reality falling outside historical affiliations of caste or community; and second, the isolation of belief as wholly extraneous, indeed even irrelevant, to determining an individual’s membership in community.  In proportion to the marginalization of religious conversion as an active agent of cultural change, religious identity is fixed both conceptually and historically as a construct of the institutional discourses of law, among other social systems.  If belief is a disengagable aspect of community or caste affiliation and made separate and antithetical to socially determined identities, the erasure of the convert’s subjectivity is the logical outcome of this process, for even as liberal discourse upholds a notion of individual subjectivity as the emergence of the free, private self under bourgeois capitalism, the colonial context denies that such a notion can be accommodated by the logic of institutionalized social practices. Indeed, the suppression of converts’ self-definitions in the official British records runs parallel to the relegation of religious experience to the realm of religious ideology—to the (p.186) self-delusions of errant individuals presuming a naïve transcendence of the inclusive hold of community.

            But a new form of agency and subjectivity emerges from the denial of the individual, private self, which transcends the simple polarity of legislative will and free, autonomous selfhood. It is true that in suppressing converts’ self-definitions, colonial discourse may have trivialized spiritual experience as inconsequential to how communities were to be defined, but it merely succeeded in banishing religious experience to the realm of uncolonized space from where new forms of resistance could be asserted. In other words, agency in religious experience, specifically in the colonial situation, is defined in terms outside those provided by liberal humanism, which describes the emergence of the bourgeois idea of the private self as autonomous from the coercive machinery of legislative definitions. In the colonial situation, on the other hand, resistance to the law takes the form of a spiritual struggle for converts—a struggle that remains outside doctrinal content.  The emergence of spiritual agency as a form of resistance to legal definitions suggests an alternative form of conversion, subjectivity, and will that produces another knowledge of the liberal norms of conversion understood as subjective transformation—a form of conversion that unsettles colonial discourse even as it is produced precisely at the moment when colonial rule establishes itself over its subjects in specifiable ways.  While liberal discourse may have had its own trajectory within the confines of English intellectual history, the emergence of the colonial context irrevocably displaces and disturbs its prevailing categories, and seriously qualifies the liberal notion of individual subjectivity.  Though colonial discourse contains the ambivalence produced by the disavowal of the free, private self by invoking legislative reason, the need for order, and the like, it could not but render problematic the notion of conversion as a private, subjective experience.—pp. 186-87

                        BELIEF, MEANING, AND COMMUNITY

In the conflicting messages that converts received about their religious identity—how were they to reconcile themselves to their legal status as “Hindus” or “Muslims” when they had adopted Christianity?—native Christians had little recourse to anything like a language of religious experience, a language of subjectivity that would offer them the means to express their relation either to doctrine or community.  Indeed, with rules of law establishing the terms for self-definition, to the point that it could be said that the identity of Christian converts was legislated rather (p.187) than self-determined or self-determining, the very concept of “a language of religious experience” is necessarily reduced to an abstraction….—pp. 187-88.

… What interests me is the fictionalization of (p.188) religious experience as self-engendered and separable from the authority of law and other institutions….pp. 188-89

…The appeal of the conversion topos rests on the fact that it makes the experience of conversion the central, self-authenticating moment in cultural development, which competes with, but never actually challenges, the power of law and other social and political institutions to confer their own brand of legitimacy on individual identity and legislate the forms in which that identity is socially serviceable and politically meaningful….—p. 190

…The “self-appropriation of interiority” ⁶ by which theologians and psychologists of religion explain the heightened self-differentiation produced by the conversion experience is not a purely inward or subject-centered process, but an activity of objectification aligning the subjective state with structures of thought, laws, and beliefs that remain at a latent level of consciousness until they are activated by a transformed subjectivity.  To suggest that the advance of culture influences (and is influenced by) an ever-differentiated consciousness is to say that the culture in which the conversion experience occurs lends its own structural features to the content of the new religious consciousness, which is turn activates an elaboration of the full range of meanings of cultural forms and institutions to which the developing religious sensibility now gains unmediated access.—p. 90

6. See Robert Doran, Psychic Conversion and Theological Foundations: Towards a Reorientation of the Human Sciences, American Academy of Religion Studies in Religion 25 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Scholar Press, 1981), 24.

… [Willaim] James’ [Varieties of Religious Experience] confidence in the transformative power of religious experience stems from his conviction that however worldly certain Western secular institutions such as law might be, no institution that is part of Christian culture can remain untouched by its pervasive influence.  If both law and religion (as [p.190] understood in Christian society) are said to be joined in a common purpose to achieve an undivided community of regenerate persons, it is easy to see why the recovery of an authentic self becomes a necessary fiction for sustaining the symmetry between civil society and Christian religious experience.—pp. 190-91

            The underlying tension between the transgressive and the assimilative aspects of conversion erupts most obviously and dramatically in situations of asymmetry between civil society and religion, where the adopted identity of the convert is at variance with the cultural meanings sanctioned by that society.  The radical displacements of meaning brought about by religious change are unquestionably major political disruptions and treated as such in the discourse of the dominant community.  By vitally affecting the numerical strength of one group or the other and rendering the relation between “majority” and “minority,” “dominant” and “subordinate” groups forever uncertain, unstable, and unpredictable, the material impact of conversion on patterns of demography undermines—and renders illusory—what the dominant community would like to regard as the self-perpetuating strength of its cultural norms.

            The colonial context exacerbates these tensions, not least because of competing claims to the status of “dominant community” based on numerical as well as political criteria. It might be expected that every act of transgression against the native community(ies) is an act of assimilation into another—an act that is encouraged and indeed even promoted by colonial authorities….—p. 191

… It may be true that, politically, British colonial power in nineteenth-century India represented an ultimate point of authoritative and legal reference, but when indigenous elite groups, occupying positions of power and privilege in that society, still continued to function according to their own laws, customs, and usages in civil matters, as was the case in colonial India,⁷ assimilation into the colonizer’s religion often meant legal excommunication from Hinduism or Islam for converts from either religion.  The power of these laws to enforce complete forfeiture of rights on converts (often confirmed by the British courts, despite legislation supposedly to the contrary) casts dubious light on the extent to which conversion-as-assimilation was truly desired by the colonizer himself.  Indeed, when placed in the context of the structure of laws enacted under British colonialism, Christian conversion is less identifiable with an assimilative practice, (p.191) designed to induce colonial subjects into a community affiliated with the governing class, than with permanent dislocation and exile from a sense of community at large.—pp. 191-92

7. While a uniform criminal code was developed for British India, the personal laws of the two major religious communities, Hindus and Muslims, continued to be administered in British courts where issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, and the like, were involved, the assumption being that these were too closely intertwined with Hinduism or Islam to be amenable to a common civil code derived from English law.  For all practical purposes, Buddhist, Jains, Parsis, and Sikhs all came under Hindu law.  See J. Duncan Derrett, Religion, Law, and the State in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1968); A. C. Banerjee, English Law in India (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984); and Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), for useful historical background to the administering of personal laws in British India.  Derrett and Galanter are especially informative in (p.207) showing how the application of personal laws reflects assumptions about the structure of Indian society that still guide modern Indian law.—pp. 206-07

…Because of civil laws governing such things as inheritance rights, conjugal rights, succession to property, and so forth, religious conversion is the political context of British colonialism is reduced to being an expression of the individual’s shifting allegiance to community. The laws that regulate the daily activities of individuals from birth to death are not easily shed with a change of religion: these laws track converts into their new identity, their new selfhood, to mock their self-willed renunciation of the old faith and the adoption of the new….—p. 192

…the recapturing of authenticity, the shattering of metaphysical illusions that the great conversionary moment is expected to bring about—formulations that indeed have long been the mainstay of missionary ideology—vanish in the constructed identity legislated by the colonial law courts, which wipes out in an instant the epiphany of transcendence putatively marking the inner experience of conversion. Indeed, it is more true to say that the private, subjective changes that occur in colonial societies are progressively regulated by the laws that manage and define self, even when that self moves away from a natal community and religion.—p. 192

…The Gorham judgment of 1850 marked the irrevocable break between church and state in England, when the determination of doctrinal meaning was declared outside the function of a secular body like the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which incidentally was originally intended primarily to hear appeals from the colonies, even though later as a secular body it came to exercise jurisdiction as a court of final appeal in ecclesiastical cases.—p. 193

…As long as a dissenter’s belief were basically compatible with the doctrines laid down in the Church’s Articles, the question of heresy did not arise: what might have been an opinion contrary to accepted doctrinal meanings was declared nonheretical by the Privy Council by the standards of compatibility….—p. 193

…As long as allegiance to the articles of faith was a prerequisite to such things as a seat in Parliament and education at Oxford or (p.193) Cambridge, an Englishman was defined as a member of the Anglican Church.  The new tolerance toward dissenting groups, Catholics, and Jews now dispensed with the concept of “heretic” as defining what an English was not.  With criteria of doctrinal allegiance no longer determining Englishness, national identity increasingly required a differentiation between political and civil society, the latter emerging as the privatized domain onto which are displaced a variety of religious distinctions that have no place in political society, or in what is now construed as the more transcendent plane of the secular. Secularization not only polarizes national and religious identity; it also privatizes belief and renders it subordinate to the claims of reason, logic, and evidence, all of which are hence identified with the administrative rationality of the state and its institutions.—pp. 193-94

            Juxtaposing the relations among the heretic individual, Episcopal authority, and the secular court (the Privy Council) of mid-nineteenth-century England on the one hand and the relations among the convert, Hindu scriptural authority, and English civil law on the other produces a distinctive cultural reading of the changing status of belief. In protecting a heretic’s rights to titles and property, the civil courts in England efface not only his or her heresy but paradoxically also the subjectivism of religious belief.  Similarly, in protecting the convert’s rights to inherit property as if he or she were still a Hindu or a Muslim, English law in colonial India virtually nullified both the fact and the subjective experience of conversion.—p. 194

                        RECLAIMING THE RENOUNCER

What is the minimum condition for removing someone permanently from a religious community?  For some religions such as Hinduism, neither agnosticism nor blasphemy alone can remove a person from the community in which he or she is born; however, complete adherence to a foreign religion automatically signals excommunication for that individual.¹⁰  A plausible inference is that, in Hinduism at least, community outweighs personal belief: regardless of the extent to which beliefs may undergo transformations, or be subject to individual caprice and variations of mood or disposition, membership in community is not severed even for a blaspheming agnostic. The other, far-reaching inference, following from the first, is that a change of religion is less a change of beliefs than a change of community.  The antagonism between the individual and the community inherent in this description would seem to overtake the compulsions of private conviction: precisely this impression is fostered both by British colonial authority and the dominant community from which the apostate Hindu escapes.—p.194

10. Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, 120.

…some missionaries made an ambitious but ultimately futile effort (p.196) to amend the Native Christian Marriage Act of 1864 to lower the legal age at which native converts could marry without their parents’ or guardians’ consent to age fourteen. In the original act, the legal age for marriage was set at twenty-one.  But as one missionary, Reverend Thomas Boaz, pointed out, the act was made to apply generally to all Christians, including Europeans and East Indians, as well as native Christians, whereas native Christians “have until the passing of this Act always been dealt with by the Government of India as Hindus and have been ruled and judged by Hindu law.”¹⁴  If, under Hindu law, the legal age for marriage was sixteen years “for all purposes,” then the 1864 marriage act placed the legal age for native Christians five years beyond that recognized by Hindu law, and three years beyond that sanctioned by the company’s regulations for the inheritance of property. The act put native converts in an anomalous position, for as Boaz pointedly argued, Indians tended to marry earlier in life than Europeans did.  To maintain the same age of consent as the one prevailing in England was to work against the cause of conversion, since young Christian converts—who were civilly dead under Hindu law—could not expect to secure their Hindu (or Muslim) parents’ consent to their marriage and were essentially discouraged from converting if they wished to marry. In seeking an amendment to the marriage act, Boaz emphasized that “the legal age for marriage ought not to be regulated by the practice of western nations, but from the habits, feelings and practices of the people of India.”¹⁵ The motivation for seeking this differentiation of native Christians from European Christians was, of course, to remove barriers to conversion that were sure to prevail if young Indian converts still had to secure the consent of their parents to marry.

            Thus, the missionaries, no less than British administrators, participated in the dissociation of Indian Christians from a larger community of Christians and continued to identify the customs, practices, and usages of native converts with those of Hindus.  In this case the government declined to amend the legislation but the fact that it was unyielding about lowering the legal age for converts to marry threw a pall of gloom over minors, whose parents’ authority was undoubtedly strengthened by its provisions. Despite the evidence of maturity, intelligence, conviction, and self-conscious judgment displayed by young converts, acknowledged even by judges in certain cases, chronological age rather than maturity or discretion was used as the basis for determining whether young people were free to exercise their options. The effect of bringing English law to bear on the prevalent customs and practices of Indian Christians was an attempt to standardize the community of “Christians,” but it simultaneously worked against a recognition of the individual will and religious conscience of its members.—pp.196-97

14. IOLR, Board’s Collections, Legislative Department, no. 10 of 1852, draft 859,4.

15. ibid. 5.

…The paradox, of course, is that the regulation of Christian conversion takes the form of civil legislation to protect converts from the forfeiture of rights to property and life. Rather than banning conversion or treating it as a crime, the solution to the problem of divisions within indigenous communities brought on by incidents of conversion is to treat the convert as still a member of the community in which he or she was born, and therefore entitled to all its rights….—p. 198

…To castigate Islam as a historical agent of violent and ruthless change, British commentators commiserate with Muslim converts from Hinduism for their loss of rights and isolation from their former community, and treat their plight with almost heavy-handed concern.¹⁸  On the other hand, not Christianity but Christian converts are blamed by British administrators as the cause of a community’s disruption, disorientation in the rules of caste, and reckless challenges to parental authority….—p. 198

18. Section 9, Regulation 7, Bengal Code, 1832; India Office Library and Records (IOLR), Board’s Collections, Judicial Department, July 8, 1844, 65.

…The background of Islamic proselytism and the perceived threat of communal violence induced by Hindu resistance to Muslim “fanaticism” partly explains the reactive edge of legislative enactments that appeared (p.198) determined to protect and preserve Hindu society.  In the final analysis, the British government’s position is to concur with the Hindu family in deciding that conversion has “ruined the caste of the boy”²⁰ and produced estrangement of family connections, domestic misery, disturbance of the peace, and dangerous communal tension among Muslims, Christians, and Hindus.—pp. 198-99

20. Section 9, Regulation 7, Bengal Code, 1832; India Office Library and Records (IOLR), Board’s Collections, Judicial Department, July 8, 1844, 52.

            Yet while the British were anxious to preserve intact the main structures of traditional Hindu society—even if that meant ignoring the right to self-determination by Indian youth who were of an age to act for themselves—they were not willing to impose civil disabilities on converts as requested by some Hindu families.  Such legislation, it was argued, would be “at variance with a just regard to the rights of civil and personal liberty, with the principles sanctioned by the British Parliament, and with the express precedents of past legislation in India.”²¹ This statement points to a major irreconcilable contradiction in the British position—to maintain the status quo in the Hindu community, even if that meant denying the self-willed actions of would-be rebels and apostates, while at the same time defending the civil rights of converts to property and life wherever those rights were revoked by Hindu society….—p. 199

21. Section 9, Regulation 7, Bengal Code, 1832; India Office Library and Records (IOLR), Board’s Collections, Judicial Department, July 8, 1844,148.

…Clearly abstract concepts of rights lend themselves (p.199) more readily to political expression outside the self-perceptions of the convert whose rights are presumably being defended, especially when legal protection of those rights requires converts to be considered as members of the community they have renounced, not of the one they have chosen to embrace. For British administrators to heed the self-definitions of converts was invariably to expose the attempted erasure of their self-proclaimed identity through civil legislation.  It is, therefore, not surprising that in the British records converts become abstractions for the articulation of a notion of rights based on English liberal doctrine, designed to ensure “civil and personal liberty.”²⁴—pp. 199-200

24. Julian Saldanha is surely right to point out that the Caste Disabilities Removal Act only preserved the natural rights of converts and left untouched the question of succession applicable after conversion.  Such legislation was intended less to favor converts than to “prejudice the fundamental peculiar social and religious rights of the caste and family from which the apostate is cut off” (Saldanha, Civil and Ecclesiastical Law in India [Trichy: Catholic Truth Society, n.d.], 22).—p. 209

… the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 … was intended to mitigate the severance of community and restore to converts the civil rights they had before conversion.  Continuity with (p.202) community, in short, is what the act hoped to ensure rather than disruption.  Contrary to the impression generated by the string of legislative acts in the 1850s and 1860s designed to protect converts’ rights, converts were no better of in having their new religious identity acknowledged in law. Indeed, the Caste Disabilities Removal Act was so framed to ensure the rights of converts to inherit property as if they had not converted at all and still remained Hindus in terms of the law.  Similarly, the Native Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Act of 1866 allowed a marriage to be dissolved if the unconverted spouse refused to cohabit with his or her partner following conversion; the act was not intended to help converts seek release from a marriage on the grounds of religious incompatibility if their unconverted spouse refused to assent to its termination….—pp. 202-03

…a fact cannot be altered by a hundred texts.” ³² ….—p. 204

32. National Archives of India, Home Department—Public Proceedings, September 1876, 760

… The brilliance of the British discursive strategy of substituting chronological age for discretion as the basis of agency lay in the fact that the judges at no point could be accused of going against the norms of English liberal rhetoric by claiming that Huchi had no right to act on her own, while at the same time they were able to maintain that her actions would be recognizable in law only if they conformed to the pattern of grading established by “natural” human development (i.e., when she would be in a position to act as a free human being).  In placing autonomy within a temporal scheme, the British were successful in accommodating regulation of errant Indian youth to English principles of self-determination.—p. 204

            Free to be neither Christian nor Hindu, Huchi was thus caught in an impossible double bind, the religion that she now declared her own not allowing her to remarry as long as her Hindu husband still claimed her as his wife (or rather his prostitute), and the religion that she had renounced refusing to accept her as a member of that community.  On the question of releasing Huchi from this intolerable condition of liminality, the British government maintained a position of outright hostility that (p.204) belied its avowed espousal of converts’ rights….—pp. 204-05

…In a conflation of Hindu patriarchal and British colonial interests, British legal opinion weighed heavily in the direction of the authority of Hindu social structure: “Huchi’s parents have succeeded in forcing her against her will into a binding marriage; but if the marriage is void, it will follow that changes in the religious opinion of children of tender years have the legal effect of taking away a right which Hindus value above all others—the right of disposing of their daughters in marriage.³⁸—p. 205

38. National Archives of India, Home Department—Public Proceedings, September 1876, 712.

Ch. 9. The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of “Colonialism,” “Postcolonialism,” and “Mestizaje”. J. Jorge Klor De Alva

….Spanish Americans who wished to distinguished mongrels from themselves, denigrated most things considered “Indian” by identifying them with whatever was considered base, deviant, menacing, or powerless….—p. 243

…Subaltern, a term popularized in the 1980s by a community of South Asian scholars, is used here—as it is among them—“as a name for the general attribute of subordination in … society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way …. [All the while recognizing] that subordination cannot be understood except as one of the constitutive terms in a binary relationship of which the other is dominance, for ‘subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up.’”8—p.245

8. Ranajit Guha, Preface in Selected Subaltern Studies ed.  Ranajit Guha and Gayatri C. Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 35.

…For instance, unlike independent India after the loss of Pakistan in 1947, the United States after the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Canada after the forming of the Confederation in 1867, and Brazil after it declared its independence in 1822, the postindependence Spanish overseas provinces in the Americas failed to create a feeling of nationalism that could override the distinct senses of ethnicity and regional micropatriotism that constituted them. Fragmented culturally and politically at both the interregional and local level, the former imperial holdings fractured into new states, each of which was unable to conflate the sense of nationhood and that of statehood. Once more, hybridity and pluralism, fueled by self-interested prejudice, discrimination, and racialist forms of exclusion, stood in the way of unity.—p. 251

…For the most part, European rule was driven by economic interests and the ideology of liberty and equality was, especially under Protestant monarchs, little concerned with Europeanizing, Christianizing, or, except rhetorically, civilizing.  Only marginal official effort was expended on these latter concerns while much went into the (p. 254) systematic exploitation of overseas natives and resources….—pp. 254-55

…By the late nineteenth century … the language of colonialism and imperialism became current.  And, logically, the anticolonial struggles, by the colonized who, regardless of ethnicity, traced their sense of place only to the local areas they inhabited, were replete with the rhetoric of colonialism and liberation—the very rhetoric that would dominate post-colonial discourses.—pp. 254-55

…And although the Americas provided the Old World with important foods and great quantities of precious metals, which greatly transformed the economies and demographies of Europe and its subsequent colonies, the indigenes, first, and the castas, later, were the voluntary or involuntary recipients of even more widespread and penetrating European-introduced forces, such as new technologies, languages, religions, ideologies, diseases, and genes, which had the effect of irreversibly altering their cultures, bodies, and personal lives.—p. 255

…Within fifty years after the arrival of the Europeans the islands of the Caribbean lost nearly all of their original inhabitants; and most scholars agree that by the beginning of the seventeenth century the indigenous population of central Mexico, for instance, had declined to just over a million….—p. 256

…since the nineteenth century, that took official pronouncements as evidence that colonialism was the deployment of European political (rather than ethnoracial) control over non-Europeans.  It was founded on the idea—very fashionable today—that colonialism was about the maintenance of distinctions through the creation of differences, the propagation of exclusions, and the exercise of cultural controls….—p. 260

…In the absence of precious metals and large pools of available native workers the Americas of the early sixteenth century would have been irrelevant to most Europeans except for truly zealous missionaries. Later in the century, however, the resettlement—“colonization”—of the Americas by Spaniards began in earnest….—p. 261

…The Latin word colonia (from colonus. Tiller, farmer, cultivator, and later settler in a new [formerly uncultivated] country),54 originally meant “farm,” “landed estate,” or “settlement” (the latter meaning is still common in present-day Spanish).  This sense expanded with the Roman Empire to include “a public settlement of Roman citizens [especially veteran soldiers] in a hostile or newly conquered country, where they, retaining their Roman citizenship, received lands, and acted as a garrison.”…. However, near the end of the nineteenth century (1883), reflecting the then current predicaments imperial Britain faced, especially in South Asia and South Africa, “colony” began to be defined in England as “a community which is not merely derivative, but which remains politically connected in a relation of dependence with the parent community.”56  I take this definition—an excellent example of the self-interested nature of the changing meanings of these terms—and those that follow, from the Oxford English Dictionary because its genealogies of the terms in question evince the history of British colonial/imperial involvement with Ireland, India, and South Africa—the very spaces that I claim provided the conceptual examples for the (mis)labeling of the so-called colonial American situation….—p. 264

54. This brief survey of terms relies primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition, 1971.  See OED for bibliographic details.

            It is significant for my thesis that the word “colonial” does not appear in a written source in English until the late 700s, and “colonialism” (p.264) must await the middle of the following century….—pp. 264-65

Ch. 10. Becoming Indian in the Central Andes of Seventeenth-Century Peru.  Irene Silverblatt

            Indianists would worship their huacas under the cover of saints, and any Christian holiday became a time to celebrate the ancestors. Indianists kept vigilant eyes on the ritual practices that suffused day-to-day Andean life.  Whenever huacas were commemorated or ancestors honored, they would ban the use of Spanish artifacts, keeping Andean purity by avoiding pork and mutton; or, even more dangerously, by refusing to attend church services and catechism classes.34—p. 288

34. Archivo Arzobispal de Lima: Leg. 6, Exp. XI, f. 33v, f. 37, f. 39.

Ch. 12 In a Spirit of Calm Violence.  Homi K. Bhabha.

… “A void may be empty but it is not a vacuum.”  Toni Morrison writes…..[Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 28, no.  (Winter 1989): 11-12.—p.331

            After the reorganization of the Madras army in 1796, all the traditional accoutrements of the native soldier’s appearance were effaced.  Ear-rings and caste-marks were obliterated, the turban forbidden.  The sipahi was shaved and dressed “in a stiff round hat, like a pariah drummer’s with a flat top, a leather cockade and a standing feather.”37  In the eyes of his countrymen the soldier became a topiwalla, a hat-wearer, synonymous with being a feringhi or Christian.  Rumors began to circulate about an imminent conversion of Hindus and Muslims to Christianity through the contagion of the leather hat….

            As the soldiers in their new firinhi topis and uniforms mingled with the palace servants and retainers of the Mysore princes, their traditional protectors, they were jeered and humiliated:

The different parts of their uniform were curiously examined amidst shrugs and other expressive gestures, and significant “Wah wahs!” and vague hints that everything about them in some way portended Christianity.  They looked at the Sipahi’s stock and said, “What is this?  It is leather  Well”  Then they would look at his belt and tell him that it made a cross upon his person.  But it was the round hat that most of all was the object of taunts and warnings of the people of the palace.  “It only needed this to make you altogether a Faringhi.  Take care or we shall soon be made Christians … and then the whole country will be ruined.”38—p. 34

37. J. W. Kaye and G. B. Malleson, History of the Indian Mutinty of 1857-58 (London: W. H. Allen, 1888), vol. 5

38. Ibid., p. 164

…Europeans in America, he [Kant’s pupil, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)] claimed, quoting the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm’s Natural and Political History of Pennsylvania (1768), mature more rapidly and die (p.141) younger than they do in Europe….—Anthony Pagden, ‘The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in  Diderot and Herder’, in ibid. pp. 141-42