Anthropologist among the Historians

Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, New delhi, (1987), 2012

Introduction, Ranajit Guha, pp. Vii—xxvi

It is my thesis [writes Cohn] that the present attitude of the Indian peasant was an inevitable consequence of the British decision to establish courts in India patterned on British procedural law.  The way a people settles disputes is part of its social structure and value system. In attempting to introduce British procedural law into their Indian courts, the British confronted the Indians with a situation in which there was a direct clash of the values of the two societies; and the Indians in response thought (p. xviii) only of manipulating the new situation and did not use the courts to settle disputes but only to further them.{Cohn ‘Some Notes on Law and Change in North India’, pp. 554 to 574, p. 569, in this volume, 26—pp. Xviii-xix.

…Thus, that important discussion of ‘value conflict’ in ‘Some Notes on Law and Change in North India’ (1959) was evidently based on a distinction between the ‘introduced’ and ‘indigenous’ elements in each aspect of that conflict, as shown below in the author’s own words:

Introduced                                                       Indigenous

‘Basic to British law is the idea                      ‘North Indian society operates

of equality of the individual               on the reverse value hypothesis:

before the law’                                                me are not born equal’

‘decisions of the court based              ‘Indian peasant society…largely dominated by values surrounding

on ideas of contract’                           the concept of status’

Central to British law is the                ‘the indigenous adjudication procedure of India is geared to

necessity of a decision’                                  postponing a clear-cut decision as long as possible’

‘The British court…can deal               ‘A specific case does not stand alone, but is usually part of a

only with the specific case                             string of disputes

presented by the contending

parties’

            These distinctions are summarized in almost identical terms some years later in ‘Anthropological Notes on Disputes and Law in North India.’²⁹  However, when he returns to the question of the relationship of law and state after the lapse of over a decade, it is by an altogether different route.  That relationship is now studied not so much in terms of the pragmatics of adjudication as in those of an epistemological intervention in the form of a cultural construct.  Knowledge of various kinds help in this construct, but Orientalism, which was hitherto regarded as only one of several idioms and associated, on the whole, with a set of ideas and attitudes …assumes now a central, indeed paradigmatic importance as the colonialist knowledge par excellence….—p. xxi

29. Cohn: See pp. 609ff. Of ‘Anthropological Notes on Disputes and Law in North India; pp. 575-631, in this volume.

In 1772 Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal … decided as part of a plan for the governance of this territory that the East India Company’s courts would administer Hindu law for Hindus and Muslim law for Muslims.  This decision had ramifying consequences which eventually led to the notion that Indian civilization was founded on particular Sanskrit texts.  By the middle of the nineteenth century these were conceived to be the very embodiment of an authentic India. The idea of the primacy of the sanskritic component in Indian civilization then became the determinant of action, policy and structure, not only for the rulers but for many of the ruled. What had been fluid, complex, even unstructured, became fixed, objective, tangible.—p. xxii

An Anthropologist among the Historians: A Field Study. Pp. 1-17

…Someone working on a closely allied subject rarely tells you his best finds.  You must wait until he publishes and you can trace his footnotes legitimately.  Similarly, you may wait until he publishes and you review his book to hit him with an important but little-known document or reference that you have found….—p. 3

            In loose terms, research in history is based on finding data; research in anthropology is based on creating data.  Obviously the historian has to find the sources on which to base his research. If he cannot find them, then no matter how good his ideas are or how well thought through the problem is on which he wants to work, he cannot do the research.  My suspicion is that most historical research is done because there is a known body of source material available. The anthropologist, on the other hand, often is interested in a problem, descriptive or theoretical, and the question is then one of deciding what types of materials he will need for pursuing the problem….—p. 6

…The general for the anthropologist is an abstraction built from many observations.  His field work is essentially a process of observing detail and mentally constructing an abstraction under which he can subsume the particular observed phenomena.  He then tests his abstraction with as many new particulars as he can, alters or rejects it in terms of more particulars, and so on until his patience or his grant run out.—p. 6

…Historians often think that anthropologists are bound by their methodology and their analytic models and that because of this they pay little attention to facts in their contexts.  On the other hand anthropologists think that historians have a firm grip on facts and have no analytic models….

            A historian starts with a model of what cultures and societies are and how they work. He continually fits his facts into this model, even though at a common-sense level. He finishes his research by presenting a monograph about a period, an event, a movement, or a personality, which leaves out any discussion of the model which he was using. The anthropologist writes as though the model were always there.  He tries to be as explicit as possible about what the model is, but tells us little about how he arrived at it.—p. 7

…An anthropologist usually tries to put his problem in a theoretical framework; when a historian speaks of a problem, he may mean a simple descriptive one….—p. 8

History and Anthropology: The State of Play, pp. 18-49

…Historians and anthropologists have a common subject matter, ‘otherness’; one field constructs and studies ‘otherness’ in space, the other in time.  Both fields have a concern with text and context. Both aim, whatever else they do, at explicating the meaning of actions of people rooted in one time and place, to persons in another.  Both forms of knowledge entail the act of translation….—p. 19

…We may have learned a great deal about how societies and cultures work, but we know little about how they are transformed.—p. 19

The anthropologist posits a place where the natives are authentic, untouched and aboriginal, and strives to deny the central historical fact that the people he or she studies are constituted in the historically significant colonial situation, affirming instead that they are somehow out of time and history.  This timelessness is reflected in the anthropologist’s basic model of change, what I would term the ‘missionary in the row boat’ model. In this model, the missionary, the trader, the labour recruiter or the government official arrives with the bible, the mumu, tobacco, steel axes or other items of Western domination on an island whose society and culture are rocking along in the never never land of structural-functionalism, and with the onslaught of the new, the social (p. 19) structure, values and lifeways of the ‘happy’ natives crumble.  The anthropologist follows in the wake of the impacts caused by the Western agents of change, and then tries to recover what might have been. The anthropologist searches for the elders with the richest memories of days gone by, assiduously records their ethnographic texts, and then puts together between the covers of their monographs a picture of the lives of the natives of Anthropologyland. The peoples of Anthropologyland, like all God’s children got shoes, got structure….—pp. 19-20

            Events in Anthropologyland are converted into ‘cases’, a word of many evocations in English, not the least of which are wooden boxes, or the way lawyers and doctors of organize the flow of individual instances by the application of some predetermined criteria by which they make meaningful to themselves incident and event.  Action cannot be taken by lawyers or doctors until they have a ‘case’, a box into which to cram the events. The anthropologist’s analysis cannot proceed until the events are converted into ‘cases’, extended or otherwise.—p. 20

…Pigs are not to think, or even to constitute relationship with; they are protein.  Marriage and the family are ‘really’ about biology and the production of enough bodies to fill the circles and squares of the anthropologist’s genealogical charts. The natives are really closet utilitarians with everyone in ‘Anthropologyland busily maximizing, either as sophisticated Marxists or crude bourgeois materialists.  To the reductionists, ideology and culture are mystifications or expressions of false consciousness, or they are expressions of the working out of predetermined biological needs or post hoc rationalizations growing out of the ‘actual’ behaviour of the actors.—p. 21

            To study Anthropologyland, anthropologists have a sacred method: fieldwork. There comes that moment when, equipped with tape recorder, camera, and notebook, the practitioner is going to learn about what is ‘one the ground’, what the natives are really like. No matter where on the current spectrum of structuralisms and reductionisms anthropologists locate themselves, they have to find the ‘out there’ by entering the land of anthropological ‘dreaming’, the field.

…If their fieldwork is successful, one more hole in the World Enthnographic Survey will be filled….will return from the field with ‘Their People’ in their notebooks and on tape and film.  They will have added to the growing record of the facts of life in Anthropologyland….not only must add to the record, they must contribute to whatever debate is currently exercising some subsection of the profession on which they want to make their mark after they have passed through the sacred rite of passage off fieldwork.—p. 21

There has been a wide acceptance among historians in the Western world of a common set of epistemological assumptions based on the idea that history is a factual study of what happened in the past. This past could be reconstructed, based upon original sources, through the hermeneutical method….—p. 23

…In the United States, largely under the influence of Franz Boas and his students, anthropology, was dominated by the study of American Indians and by the idea that there was an anthropological ‘sacred bundle’ of archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, ethnography and ethnology. The association of these five fields of anthropology was based on the epistemological assumption that anthropology was really a form of ‘history’….—p. 23

…Ethnography—historically the description of ‘primitives’….—p. 24

…Acculturation was the study of the transformation of ‘pattern’.  It was seen as changes in the knowledge, attitudes, habits and behaviour of the individuals who composed the society.  This conception of culture as pattern in acculturation studies had a contradiction in it. If acculturation was the alteration of lifeways through the passive process of ‘diffusion’ or ‘contact’, then the elements of culture were accidentally assembled. Yet if culture is a bounded, integral unit, something must determine the uniqueness, distinctiveness, and integrity of any one culture, and that was its ethos or dominating theme or themes. The contradiction in the idea of culture as pattern was mediated by the ideal of the individual as culture-bearer, hence the concern with the relationship between culture and personality.  What was authentically cultural was then psychological, rooted in personality; and means had to be developed to explore this personality: the use of psychoanalytic techniques and projective tests, the collection and study of biographies and autobiographies, and the study of the process whereby an infant becomes a Gichi Goomi, socialization.—p. 25

            The idea of a paradigm, which is based on the idea of community consensus and its acceptance in anthropology, has only led to politics, not to science. But paradigms in anthropology are in fact political rather than scientific. What are thought of as ‘schools’ in American anthropology are in actuality mere reifications of networks of people trained together, who then try to colonize other departments with their epigones, adherents and acolytes, any coherence assumed in such departments then being based not on a paradigm but on a power play. To avoid this packing, other departments developed the Noah’s Ark principle and tried to hire two of everything to cover some boundless anthropological chequerboard. Each new paradigm seems to call for yet another argument with the Dean to hire an ‘x’, as it may be the up-and-coming field in anthropology. Whether the packing principle or the Noah’s Ark principle was followed, the intellectual, philosophical and epistemological confusion of contemporary American anthropology was ignored and reduced to politics and the struggle for departmental survival.—p. 31

… ‘non-Western world’ (a neat ethnocentrism which defines nine-tenths of the people of the world in a single negative term).  As America became increasingly aware of its position as the world power, and was drawn into conflict with the Soviet Union and China, academics with financial encouragement from the foundations and federal government began to ‘attack’ the problem of the non-Western world….—p. 35

…Nineteenth-century evolutionists looked to the present of India, for example, as a means to understand the past of Europe. The Indian present was the European past, so that legal and economic structures and ideas, particularly relating to the village community, could elucidate European history.—p. 36

…In the elitist historical tradition, the lower orders became the background figures who among liberal historians were seen as the benefactors of the march toward civilization and among conservative historians as the unruly and unwashed, who posed a continuing threat to a fragile and hard-won civilizing process.  These groups, classes or categories—women, the lumpen proletariat, blacks, ethnics; in general, the dispossessed—are difficult in any society to study since the conventional organization of source materials, generally speaking, leave them out….—p. 39

…By focusing on conflict, repression and deprivation, I think unwittingly the proctological@ historians are bringing back as the problematic of social history not just history from the bottom up, but history from the top down as well….The dispossessed have to be put into the same contextual and analytical framework as the elites and ruling groups who are engaged in the maintenance and representation of social orders….—p. 40

@ …proctological history, the study of history from ‘the bottom up’…..—p. 39

…All of modern society seems to have been designed to keep objects and persons in ‘their place’.—p. 40

…The assumption behind the smallness of scale (temporal and/or spatial) of the research of contemporary historians is positivistic: that when we have studied the workers in enough industrializing English cities, we will have the building blocks for a new and scientific history. This is like the efforts of American historians of eighty years ago to study the constitutions of the thirteen American colonies, with the expectation that if there were enough monographs on specific political constitutions, we could then (p. 41) write the true history of American democracy.

…In substituting a theory of small group dynamics for an understanding of the macropolitical order we live in, it not only trivializes scholarship but denies the responsibility of scholars to make meaningful the political world in which they live.—pp. 41-42

…No matter how much the anthropologist may be committed to the idea of studying from the natives’ point of view, what he or she learns is always mediated by a subtle or not so subtle comparative method….—p. 43

…people everywhere live lives which are constituted out of the  past.  Culture is continually being invented or modified, without being totally transformed.  Men live in a world of intention and consequence. Intention and action are turned into culture by history.—p. 43

…All culture is constructed. It is the product of human thought. This product may over time become fixed ways of doing things.  It may also be changed.  Since culture is always being constituted and constructed, so it is also always being transformed.  Cultures and societies are not natural objects.  It is only through culture that we construct nature, not the other way around.—p. 43

            Conventionally historians are interested in chronology, the (p. 45) idea that events can be ordered and dated according to a fixed criterion external to the event itself. Time in our cultural system is measurable and finite, and analytically we divide the flow of events into chronological periods.  By period or age we imply some kind of wholeness and homogeneity—the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, the ‘Age of Revolution’—in which parts fit together in some kind of coherent pattern. Yet neither a social or cultural system is totally integrated—subsystems may change or transform at different rates—and temporal unities do not therefore necessarily demarcate analytic entities. The period or duration of an anthropological history can only be determined in relation to the questions being asked and the subject being studied.  Some events, some decisions are more crucial than others.  They have structural consequences which are apparent only after they have happened. The reason an anthropologist studies history is that it is only in retrospect, after observing the structure and its transformations, that it is possible to know the nature of the structure.

            In 1772, Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal (which only recently had come under British control) decided as part of a plan for the governance of this territory that the East India Company’s courts would administer Hindu law for Hindus and Muslim law for Muslims. This decision had ramifying consequences which eventually led to the notion that Indian civilization was founded on particular Sanskrit texts. By the middle of the nineteenth century these were conceived to be the very embodiment of an authentic India. The idea of the primacy of the Sanskritic component in Indian civilization then became the determinant of action, policy and structure, not only for the rulers but for many of the ruled. What had been fluid, complex, even unstructured, became fixed, objective and tangible.

            The establishment of such a cultural construct has a duration and chronology of its own, related to but often independent of other constructs.  What had been a decision taken at a particular time, for what the actors thought to be pragmatic reasons and which is therefore explicable in those terms, had a consequence which wholly transcended its origins.  What had been a dependent variable—the result of an action through time—became an independent variable and the (p.46) determinant of action….—pp.45-47

Anthropology and History in the 1980s: Towards a Rapprochement. Pp. 50-77

            Europeans believed that the world, animate and inanimate, had an absolute and datable origin. They had developed the idea of chronology in which time was conceived of in a linear fashion, which enabled them to order by date the reigns of kings, the lives of saints, and the events that affected polities.  They also developed a distinction between what they thought of as true history and fables, which were untrue or fictitious….Everything for Europeans has a history, and to discover the history of something is to explain it.—p. 51

            In the nineteenth century, Europeans tried to reconstruct the history of the Chinese, the Indians, and the Saracens in European terms as a reverse of the history that they constructed for themselves: as a history of peoples once powerful, creative, and progressive, who had lost direction and were now relegated to finding their history in a golden age of the once great.  Their past or their cleverness in inventing the concepts of zero, chess, and polo could be admired as one admires a piece of Greek statuary, but their civilizations were curiosities left to eccentrics and pedagogues to enjoy and ponder, and were relegated to the fossil bed of history.—p. 52

…What a document is to historians, fieldwork is to anthropologists.—p. 55

…When anthropologists study Hindu cosmologies, the account is drawn from shastric texts or discussions with pundits, and one never finds out how these concepts are reconciled with what is taught to many Indians in contemporary schools, where the students learn about a world which revolves on its axis every twenty-four hours.—p. 56

…Discourse amongst anthropologists is filled with terms of abuse; one can be accused of being a utilitarian, a mentalist, an idealist, a materialist, a reductionist, a reflexionist, an extentionalist, and, worst of all, an eclectic.  The challenge to ‘define one’s terms’ is the call to the field of battle.  In anthropology, old debates never die; they just become enshrined in graduate curricula and text books. Thompson was right to warn historians not to buy used concepts from old anthropologists.—p. 67

…Anthropological historians or historical anthropologists cannot deal with history only as the reconstruction of what has happened, and as the explication of the natives’ own understanding of the encounter with Europeans.  They must also deal with the fact that events have consequences for those people who are our ‘subjects’ up to and including their total destruction. Historical anthropology then will be the delineation of cultures, the location of these in historical time through the study of events which affect and transform structures, and the explanation of the consequences of these transformations.  This will not yield a ‘scientific’ theory of social change such as nineteenth-century scholars sought, but rather a history of change.—p. 73

Networks and Centres in the Integration of Indian Civilization. Pp. 78-87

            What is known of indigenous army units suggests that these extremely various organizations were often principally composed of men of one caste.{K. M. Panikkar, ‘Some Aspects of Nyar Life’, J. Royal Anthropological Institute, 48, pp. 254-93; Surendranath Sen. Military System of the Marathas (Calcutta, New Book Co.); J. D. Cunningham, A History of the Sikhs (1949).—16—p. 81

…Examining the relations of Indian civilizational centres to each other and to peasant culture is like studying a room whose walls are lined with mirrors, great and small. In each one sees reflected something of all the others.—p.85

…A priest from the region of Maharashtra who travels to Banaras for learning the Vedas resides in a Maharashtrian school and studies Sanskrit under Marathi-speaking teachers; he perceives but does not visit the school for Bengalis nearby, and the temple built by Tamil people around back. He also witnesses, but does not participate in the local festivals of the Banaras region, below his windows. By moving through the religious network and by residing in one of those microcosms which is the sacred city, he becomes aware of Indian civilization as multiple orderings of diversity.—p. 85

Regions Subjective and Objective: Their Relation to the Study of Modern Indian History and Society. Pp. 100-135

The Tamilian Scholar divided the country into five natural divisions according to their physical features.  In his poetical imagination he carried such ideas into his daily life.  It entered into the manners and customs of the people.  In the course of time such divisions and attributes became conventional.  If a poet dealt with a particular region in his poem, he always associated his thoughts to the particular sect of people who inhabited it, to (p. 120) the particular products growing in the tract, to the particular kind of song, amusement, festivity, food, dress, musical instruments and ideas connected with the region….The ancient scholar named such regions by the name f a particular flower or plant which grew extensively in that region.{Peasant Life in India: A Study in Indian Unity and Diversity’, Memoir No. 8, Anthropological Survey of India, 1961, Introduction. }—pp. 120-21

            In 1893 {B.G.} Tilak, along with Annasahib (an orthodox Brahman), organized as a public festival the worship over a ten-day period of the Hindu god Ganesh. The manifest reason for the celebrations was to prevent lower-caste Hindus from participating in the Mohurram festival of the Muslims as had been the custom up until this time. Ganesh was one of the favourite gods of Western India; the Ganapati festival had been celebrated as a household festival by the (p. 125) Peshwas but had largely become a minor domestic event. Annasahib’s and Tilak’s actions ‘catapulted the Ganapati celebration from a purely private religious functions to the most important and best attended publc festival of Western India within a few years.’{Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley, 1962), pp. 67-8}…—pp. 125-26

…As with many aspects of the regional and Hindu revivals of the nineteenth century, it was an Englishman who unwittingly provided the immediate stimulus for the establishment of the festival.  James Douglas in a guide book on Bombay pointed out that Shivaji’s Samadhi (memorial stone) was lying unhonoured and in a state of disrepair. {Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley, 1962), pp. P. 79}. The Shivaji celebrations manifestly glorified Maharashtra and the festival was made available to the whole population….

In his newspaper, Kesari, {B.G} Tilak made it clear that through hero worship of Shivaji the ideal of Maratha self-rule and the glorification of Maharashtra would be reborn.—p. 126

…In complex societies there are hierarchies—some people are at the top and some at the bottom.  Often those at the top, as a category or a group, exercise certain forms of leadership and have more control over or access to what is valued in the society, wealth, power, authority, and symbols of valued life styles, education, ritual purity—than do others.  In some societies an elite can appear to monopolize almost all of that which appears to have value; in other societies elites may be segmented around particular valued activities or symbols. We can talk of a political elite, a commercial elite, an educated elite, and so forth….—p. 127

Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture. Pp. 136-171

…Indian society and political development were recognized by Europeans in the eighteenth century as being at relatively the same level as European society. In India there was settled agriculture and a variety of craft production on a large scale, political institutions of kingship, a legal system based partially on written law, taxation based on regular assessment, with record-keeping, and military forces roughly organized along line similar to those of Europe. Many of the political and economic roles familiar to Europeans; clerks, judges, tax officials, generals, bankers and traders, existed. In addition, there was a multiple cultural-religious system based on sacred texts, both Hindu and Muslim, with a wide range of ritual specialists and scholars.

            Relatively speaking, British domination until the middle of the nineteenth century had little direct effect on Indian social, economic, and cultural life. As a result of British revenue arrangements, there was some circulation of personnel in the rural society as land became marketable and as new methods of acquisition of land through the use of British administrative procedures allowed non-military groups access to control of land. New groups who tended to take advantage of the conditions established by the British fitted into the traditional structure or were placed on top of the existing structure and took over life-styles well established by the eighteenth century.—p. 137

There have been recorded observations on Indian society since the third century B.C….—p. 137

For the period 327 B.C. to 1478, there are scattered accounts of Indian society written by foreigners. These travellers included Greeks, Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Jews, and Chinese, and increasingly from A.D. 1000 onward, Arabs, Turks, Afghans and Persians.  Most classical accounts of Indian society follow Magasthenes, who had the advantage of direct observation of parts of India….—p. 138

            Functionally, as can be seen in the lists of military and revenue obligations given in the A’in-i-Akbari, the Mughals clearly recognized that the operational level of the Hindu social system was not at the level of the varnas but at the level of kin-based social categories such as we are familiar with in twentieth-century literature on the Indian caste system….—p. 139

…{Charles} Grant’s view of Indian society and Indian character is summed up in the following quotation:

Upon the whole, then, we cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Hindostan, a race of men lamentably degenerate and base, (p.143) retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation, yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by great and general corruption of manners, and sunk in misery by their vices….{House of Commons, Great Britain, Report on East India Company Affairs (1833), no. 14, General Appendix 1, p. 41}

Grant felt that the caste system, government, and above all the despotic role of the Brahmans who control the society are the cause of the degraded state of the Hindus.  Since society and culture are based, directed, and maintained by the religious system, the only hope for the improvement of Hindus and Hindu society lies in the elimination of Hinduism. This can be accomplished by Christian missionaries to convert the Indian population to Christianity.—pp. 143-44

…As groups and individuals converted, the missionaries found themselves having to take on total economic and social responsibility for them as well as providing them with a different religion.{Kenneth Ingham, Reformers in India, 1793-1833 (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1956)—p. 145

…the orientalists admired in theory the civilization and religion embodied in the texts and saw the difficulties of Indian society as being a fall from a golden age. The missionaries saw the society and culture as always having been corrupt, pernicious, and filled with absurdities.—p. 146

…William Robertson, one of the Scottish moral philosophers, who, although not a Sanskrit or Persian scholar, was a disseminator of early studies of Indian tradition, argued:

…What now is in India, always was there, and is likely still to continue: neither the ferocious violence and illiberal fanaticism of its Mahomedan conquerors, nor the power of its European masters, have effected any considerable alteration. The same distinctions of condition take place, the same arrangements in civil and domestic society remain, the same maxims of religion are held in veneration, the same sciences and arts are cultivated.{William Robertson, An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients had of India (1791; rpt. London, Jones & Co., 1828), appendix, pp. 52-3}—p. 147

            Many of the orientalists in India were concerned with judicial affairs of the East India Company, as were Halhed, Jones, and Colebrooke. In their role as judges they were confronted with Indians who by the nature of court action appeared to be litigious, purveyors of false testimony, dishonest, and cheats.  On the other hand they were studying Sanskrit legal treatises with pundits and were impressed with the learning and sophistication of Hindu law…. (p. 147) The gap between the way Indians behaved in the courts and what the ‘orientalist’ judges believed was the law and the theory of the society was seen as a fall from an older and better state of society caused by the intervention of foreign rules, Muslim and European.—pp. 147-48

African Models and Indian Histories.  Pp. 200-223

…the British found themselves in conflict with the French over trading rights which they felt had been legally granted them by the Mughal empire. In the British recounting of events it was the French who forced them into intervening in the Indian political arena to protect themselves and their investment, which led step by step—1757, 1764, and 1799, to the conquest of Tipu Sultan, to 1803 with Lord Lake’s capture of Delhi and the defeat of the Marathas, which led them to become in their terms the ‘protector’ of the Mughal emperor and the de facto supreme power in India.—p. 210

            The theory of despotism and anarchy was a satisfying explanation as to why Britain was able to conquer India. It was not by the force of British arms.  J. R. Seely argued that India conquered herself.  ‘The English did not introduce foreign domination into India, for there was foreign, domination already.’{Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill’, 1 December 1783, in The Works of Edmund Burke, vol. II (London, Bell, 1894), p. 204)9  Seely went on:

Nothing like what is strictly called a conquest took place, but that certain traders inhabiting certain seaport towns in India, were induced, almost forced, in the anarchy caused by the fall of the Mughal Empire, to give themselves a military character and employ troops, that by means of those troops they acquired territory and at last almost all the territory of India, and that these traders happened to be Englishmen….{Ibid., p. 208}

The British were innocent bystanders; they were forced to protect their legitimate (natural) right to trade, forced to step in, and since they had defeated the French they became the rulers of India.  Their task was to restore order in a situation of chaos.  The theory of despotism then functioned effectively to explain and legitimize the British conquest to the officials to explain and legitimize the British conquest to the officials to explain and legitimize the British conquest to the officials and owners of the East India Company, and more importantly to parliament and the politically aware public in England.—p. 212

The next and to some extent simultaneous problem which the British faced in India was to develop a theory of rule. Their concern was not what their right to rule was based in, but what was to be the nature of their rule.  Here again the British developed a social and political theory about the ‘realities’ of India.

            As British concerns both at home and in India shifted from ‘explaining’ the conquest of India to themselves towards questions involved in developing a theory of rule, so the political and social theory of India as developed by the British (p. 212) changed as well. In the first half of the nineteenth century the British increasingly saw India and ‘traditional India’ not in despotic/anarchy terms but in terms of village communities and caste.  The transition from the emphasis on chaos and despotism to one of stability in the social and political order, can be seen in the formulation, which has been pervasive almost to the present, by Charles Metcalfe’s remark on the significance of the Indian village community:

The Village communities are little Republics, having nearly everything they want within themselves, and almost independent of foreign relations.  They seem to last where nothing else lasts.  Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds revolution; Hindu, Pathan, Mughal, Mahratta {Marattha} , Sikh, English are masters in turn; but the village communities remain the same

The chaos and anarchy existed at a higher level of the socio-political system; what was enduring and unchanging was an institution—‘the village’. This view had immediate usefulness and effect in the shaping of the policy of rule—in the framing of land tenure legislation in particular. It also was important in that it shifted the British view of India away from the rulers to the peasants; the real India was in the village and the real Indians were not the despotic rulers—Muslim or Hindu—Mughal or Maratha or Sikh; these could be deposed or controlled through indirect rule, without disturbing the mass of the Indian population. The social theory of the village republic which gave primacy in the society to the peasant as over against rulers had many uses in explaining to the British themselves their rule in India. In Clifford Geertz’s famous phrase about culture, it provided ‘a model of and for’ British rule.

            The British faced the following problem in the first half of the nineteenth century: developing an adequate bureaucracy to collect taxes, maintain law and order not only in the cities but in the countryside, and to appear to both the home constituency and the Indians that they were maintaining a reasonable and fair rule. If, as in the eighteenth century theory, there was only chaos and anarchy, the British would have had to develop institutions which reached from London down into every village.  Personnel would have to be re-(p.213)cruited along universalistic lines, honest and efficient and preferably European.  This was thought to be an impossibility, given the cost of such a system. Direct rule by Europeans, in the sense that Europeans would man all levels of the administrative system, would be much too expensive, both for the owners of the East India Company and for parliament.  Therefore some form of self-rule was desirable. It was to this end that the idea of the village republic turned out to be crucial….

            If the village was seen as the central institution and as being stable, then the British need not intervene in its institutions, they need not put police, tax collectors, managers into each village. All that was needed was supervision—supervision over Indians who could collect information about the constitution of the village, the ownership and assessment of land on a corporate or individual basis. A cheap administration employing relatively few high-salaried Europeans could rule India, and rule well.  What was needed most in the situation was peace—law and order to keep Indians, not just metaphorically, but actually ‘down on the farm.’

            Not only did the idea of the village republic and the basing of administrative policy on this idea function in providing the underpinning for a ‘cheap’ administrative overhead, it appeared to be fair to the Indians. The British could rule India in a natural fashion—natural for the Indians. The Indians would have their native institutions, and the British would not interfere with the lives of Indians except in those circumstances when Indians persisted in practising customs repugnant to the established British morality and completely counter to natural law. That which the British defined as unnatural, ‘baleful and immoral’ was such things as throwing children to turtles, having people crushed under temple carts, sati, female infanticide, ritual murder, head hunting, and gang robbery. Once these immoralities were stamped out the British could face both their home constituency and Indians (p. 214) to say, ‘our rule is not only fair and just, but it is keeping with the natural institutions of the Indians’—family, caste, and village.—pp. 212-215

Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, 1 November 1858

Our clemency will be extended to all offenders, save and except those who have been, or shall be, convicted of having directly taken part in the murder of British subjects. With regard to such the demands of justice forbid the exercise of mercy.—p. 217

…When there is a conflict between God and Caesar, it is Caesar who triumphs; mercy will not override justice; ancient rights must be balanced by the ‘equitable demands of the State’….—p. 217

…down to the strictly Indian order with segregated Hindu and Muslim ranks like Rai Bahadurs and Kahn Bahadurs….—p. 218

The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia. Pp. 224-254

…the concept ‘culture’ in its more recent meanings, to

Denote an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.{Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London, 1966). P. 3}—p. 224

…The idea of a ‘Renaissance’ is clearly Western in origin; it draws directly on Western historical experience as well as on the Western form of historical thinking, which is linear, in which it was possible for Humanists to see the past in relation to themselves and to think of a process by which the past is redefined, and purified and selected aspects of its utilized for models or prescriptions for behaviour in the present. Eighteenth and nineteenth century European scholars developed the idea of the Renaissance to denote a particular period in Western history and the development of a distinctive culture associated with that period….—p. 225

A third theme related to the need to “purity” Hinduism was to make it consonant with European ideas of rationality, empiricism, monotheism and individuality.  Many Bengalis by the middle of the nineteenth century saw the development of ambivalence, that they couldn’t totally integrate a purified Hinduism with Western rationality. On the one hand this led to what was perceived as hypocrisy—or as one writer put it—‘There are those who believe one way and practice in another, who celebrate the puja in the morning and dine of veal cutlet and sausage in the evening.’ {Kishori Chand Mitter as quoted in Lokanath Ghose, The Modern History of Chiefs, Rajas, Zamindars of Bengal (Calcutta, 1881), part I, p. 112)— P. 226

            The ambivalence, this view of the modern Indian between (p.226) East and West, becomes a central theme in the Renaisance view of its own culture and comes down to the recent past in the writings of men like Jawaharlal Nehru:

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. Perhaps my thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me, as she does to all her children, in innumerable ways; and behind me lie, somewhere in the subconscious, racial memories of a hundred, or whatever the number may  be, generations of Brahmans. I cannot get rid of either that past inheritance or my recent acquisitions. They are both part of me, and, though they help me in both the East and the West, they also create in me a feeling of spiritual loneliness not only in public activities but in life itself. I am a stranger and alien in the West.  I cannot be of it. But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling. {Jawaharlal Nehru, Towards Freedom, New York, 1941), p. 353}

This theme of ambivalence was put in even more stark and personal terms by Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious reform movement, in 1879, after he had heard Ramakrishna, a “traditional” rustic mystic and divine:

What is there common between him and me?  I, a Europeanized, cilivlized, self-centred, semi-sceptical, so-called educated reasoned, and he, a poor, illiterate, shrunken, unpolished, diseased, half-idolatrous friendless Hindu devotee?  I, who have listened to Disraeli and Fawcett, Stanley and Max Muller, and a whole host of European scholars and divines; I, who am an ardent disciple and follower of Christ, a friend and admirer of liberal-minded missionaries and preachers, a devoted adherent and worker of the rationalistic Brahmo Samaj—why should I be spellbound to her him?{As quoted in L. S. S. O’Malley, ;General Survey’, in L. S. S. O’Malley, ed., Modern India and the West (New York, 1941), p. 788}

            The ambivalence was tied with a discovery or rediscovery of the past. This would seem to be almost necessary in terms of the ambivalence created by a view of the culture of the present as being one that the intellectuals could not fully accept since they had incorporated an European view into their own. Following our Bengal example, if the intellectuals accepted the European based view of their present, which emphasized the aberrations of the society and its religious system, then (p. 227) they would have to reject their own culture or be hypocrites. However, if they could find in their past a “golden age” and time when their own religion and society were superior, then they could argue that Indian civilization at a point in the past was the equal of Western society and that the rebirth inherent in the idea of a Renaissance was a rebirth of their own traditions and not only a borrowing from the West. It became imperative for nineteenth and twentieth century Indians to develop a knowledge of their own past, the form of which might be couched in Western historical terms but the intent of which was often to provide a rationale to counter the pressure of Western cultural imperialism.—pp.226-228.

…The Indian intellectuals of (p.228) Bengal in the nineteenth century and then the whole Western educated class of Indians in the twentieth century have objectified their culture.  They in some sense have made it into a ‘thing’; they can stand back and look at themselves, their ideas, their symbols and culture and see it as an entity.  What had previously been embedded in a whole matrix of custom, ritual, religious symbol, a textually transmitted tradition, has now become something different.  What had been unconscious now to some extent becomes conscious.  Aspects of the tradition can be selected, polished and reformulated for conscious ends.  Gandhi saw ahimsa (non-violence) as quintessentially Indian and shaped it into an effective political weapon.  G. G. Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose, early nationalists, selected from Hindu traditions concepts and ideals which could be worked into a new kind of national religious ideology.  They reinterpreted the Bhagavad Gita into what has become for many modern Indians an authoritative expression of Hindu thought.  They argued it was the Hindu’s dharma to further nationalism; by implication they argued, on the basis of their interpretation of the Gita, that violence was justified in a righteous cause and that nationalism was a religiously given righteous cause.  Gandhi also contributed to the ‘objectification’ of the message of the Gita and the process by which the Gita is now looked upon as a kind of Hindu bible, as the single most authoritative expression of Hinduism.—pp. 228-29

The British in Benares: A Nineteenth Century Colonial Society. Pp. 422-462

…Many  of the English who established rule in the late eighteenth century in Benares had come to India in the (p.424) 1760s and 1770s, in the heyday of nabobism and the plunder and corruption of Bengal. India was not a career but a place to make a fortune.  During this period the British took part in the jobbery, corruption and extortion which characterized the political life of northern and eastern India.  Many of the Englishmen of this early period lived with Indian women and had families by their Indian wives and mistresses.  Some, like Ochterlony, completely adopted a Mughal-Indian style of life…..The majority in the early period, however, were mainly concerned with making money and retiring to England to enjoy it.—pp. 424-25

…In general those who concentrated on judicial work, at no matter what period of Indo-British history, have tended to see Indians as dishonest, superstitious, and lacking in moral character, humanity, and gratitude.⁷  Those who started their careers in what might be termed the diplomatic service—those who served as residents in the courts of Indian states—tended in the early nineteenth century to emphasize the courtly character, the (p.425) aristocratic bearing and the manliness of Indians.  Those who concentrated on the revenue side of administration later in the nineteenth century tended to glorify what they perceived as the virtues of the Indian peasantry—stolidness, straightforwardness, perserverance {perseverance?} and hard work. In these characterizations of India and Indians it is of course hard to separate the continuing myths of particular types of service and the direct reflection of the immediate situations in which the British had to carry on their work.—pp. 425-26

7. ‘Copy of the 15^th and 35^th Interrogations proposed by the Governor General in Council of Bengal to the judges of Circuit and Zillah judges in 1801: With the answers of said judges to these interrogatories’.  House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers (East India Co.), VIII, second part, Session 24 November to 22 July 1812-13.—p. 458

…more and more from the 1839s onwards the British came to view their ‘stay in India as a kind of moral exile’ and to regard Hindus ‘as an inferior race, totally different from ourselves in their moral character.’ {F. Max Muller, ‘On the Truthfulness of Indians’, in India: What it can Teach Us (1882; reprinted London 1892), pp. 34-5}  This idea of a racial gulf between Indians and British was confirmed and heightened by the Mutiny of 1857.—p. 426

…Many of the English missionaries of those two faiths were lower class, the children of artisans and traders in England.  Until 1883 they faced the problem of getting a license to go and work in India. As a result, the Danish and Dutch possessions in India were often their bases.—p. 427

            The extreme view of the backwardness, dishonesty and corrupt character of Indians which emerged after 1830 and which Muller describes so well in his essay ‘On the Truthfulness of Indians’, is partially a function of selection and training. The concept of society which the Britisher in India had was an idealized version of upper-middle-class British society at the time when he left England.  He was then confronted with the realities of Indian society as a junior judge or as an assistant to a collector.  He assumed that what he saw going on in his court or office represented the whole of Indian life, and not just a selected segment of it.  When he compared this picture to his adolescent idealized view of England he came to the conclusion that India and Indians were sunk in a hopeless morass of corruption, dishonesty and vice.  This attitude, which played such an important part in British life after the Mutiny, had its beginnings in the conditions of the early nineteenth century.—p. 437

            George Wyatt classified judges into two types: those who decided everything completely on the basis of their own whims, and those who ‘hear only through the ears of their Omlah (native staff).’{Panchkauree Khan (George Wyatt), The Revelations of an Orderly (Benares, 1848), pp. 94-5}48  Wyatt says the impartial judges made their decisions in court on the basis of counting flies on the punkah in the court-room-an even number being taken for a verdict of guilty and an odd number for a verdict of innocence.{Ibid., p. 74}…..—p. 443

…Up until this time the landlords and the more substantial peasants, who were generally Rajput, had been viewed as a contumacious and stubborn group which had to be controlled and suppressed.  When the younger British officers went out and spent a good portion of their working time in the field—touring, talking to the peasants, making maps, making assessments and settling petty local disputes—their attitudes changed.  They began to see the rural population as straightforward, honest, hardworking, quaint and respectful. It is one of the great ironies of British rule in India that the British officers discovered the peasantry just at the time that an urban class was beginning to develop.  The new urban class had much in common with the British officers, including a knowledge of English and some political and social values cherished by the English.  In the Educational Minute of 1835 Macaulay expressed the English aim: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’{Quoted in Source of Indian Tradition, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Stephen Hay, Royal Weiler and Andrew Yarrow (New York, 1958), p. 601}  The aim was to some extent realized, even in an up-country city like Benares, but the British were never comfortable with the class they had been instrumental in creating and continued from this period on to admire and favour the peasants.—p. 444

            The earliest mention I have found of a resident European in Benares is a note on a diamond merchant in Benares in 1773, Mr Motte, along with two officials at the court of the Raja of Benares, was the only European with the permission of both the Company and the Raja to reside in Benares.  Warren Hastings urged the Raja of Benares to eject any other Europeans who might try to live in Benares.{Warren Hastings, ‘The Benares Diary’, ed. C. C. Davies, Camden Miscellany (London, 1948), xviii, p. 31}—p. 450

            Gilchrist & Company, the indigo contractors in Ghazipur, were accused of using false weights in defrauding the ryots of their just income.{India Office Library, Bengal Civil Judicial Proceedings (18 March 1796) no. 6, Benares Court of Appeal to Secretary in Judicial Department.}….On occasion the indigo planters found themselves being exploited by Indians….—p. 452

…In the early nineteenth century the Company had done all it could to prevent mission activity; the stated Company policy was then one of complete tolerance of the Hindu and Muslim religions.  By the 1840s, however, the Company’s officials themselves were heavily committed to mission work.—p. 454

During the period from their establishment in Benares at the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, the British established a colonial society.  Except for restricted contact with the Indian population—with their servants, their Indian subordinates and a few ‘respectable natives’—they had little contact with the Indian population outside their work.  Those British in the judicial line had little perception of Indians other than litigants.  The British in the revenue line viewed Indians as peasants.  Missionaries, traders and planters had more extensive contacts with the Indian population.—p. 457

From Indian Status to British Contract. Pp. 463-482

            We in the middle of the twentieth century tend to forget that the British of the middle of the eighteenth century had little experience to draw on in solving the problems of legal administration with which they were faced in India.  A private trading company ruled the Indian territories: its motive was profit; even rudimentary supervision of the East India Company by parliament did not begin until 1773.  Vast ignorance about the actual nature of Indian society, indigenous law, economics and political structure characterized most of those in London and in India who made the decisions which shaped the ultimate nature of British rule in India….—p. 463

…The British assumed that there was a ‘Hindu Law’ which could be applied in matters of personal law to all Hindus.  It was not perceived until too late that Hindu law was a changing body of law. It was not a fixed, written code, but it was commentators’ interpretations of a prolix and ever changing living law.  Hindu law, the dharmashastra, was not like English case law in which precedent and a doctrine of stare decisis operated.  The pandit could interpret the law almost de novo in each instance, taking into consideration the changing conditions of the times.—p. 465

…Often people sought redress by performing dharna or hiring a Brahman to do so. Dharna (p. 465) consisted of sitting and fasting at the door of one’s adversary to force settlement of a dispute. If the person fasting died, the curse of the death fell on the person against whom the act of sitting dharna was directed.  A variation was koor or kaor, in which a funeral pyre was erected and a cow or old Brahman woman placed on it; if in a dispute those prepared to light the pyre did so, causing the death of the cow or woman, the curse would fall on the opposite party.  More simply Brahmans would threaten to take poison, cut open their stomachs, or dash out their children’s brain if they did not get their way in a dispute.{I. O.L. Home Miscellaneous Series, vol. 776, ‘Jaunpore Report,’ Wynee to Governor General, LS 15 August 1815, pp. 57-64. A. C. R. O. Resident’s Proceedings, Basta 20, vol. V, 16 April 1788. A Shakespear (ed.), Selections From Duncan Records (Banaras: Medical Hall Press, 1873), 1, p. 107}—pp. 465-66

…The effort in a panchayat was to find a solution which would not sever ties but maintain them; this was done through long talks and informal pressures on the contending parties.  Often what went on in private talks away from the actual discussions themselves formed the basis of the compromise, and the panchayat itself was merely the sounding board and public arena for venting feelings of injustice….—p. 467

…As with ideas of Hindu law, the British overgeneralized on what they knew and assumed uniformities where none existed.  In British conceptions of land tenure in India one can see one of the few principles of Indo-British history clearly in action.  The administrative frontier in India was a moving one for almost a hundred years.  The British always applied in their newer territories the principles which they had most recently developed in their older territories.  The administration of Banaras was based on twenty years of experience in Bengal; that of the Punjab owed most to work in the old North-West provinces (now Uttar Pradesh); and that of Bombay drew on experiences in Madras.  Often, as in the case of Banaras, this was disastrous, as social and historic circumstances were markedly different from region to region.—p. 468

            The higher courts and even the Privy Council in England constantly complained of the irregularities and loose proceedings of the district courts.  George Wyatt, a deputy collector in Banaras (1839-52), may not have been completely joking when he said that an impartial judge in India made his decisions in court on the basis of counting flies on the punkah (fan) in his courtroom—an even number being taken for a verdict of guilty and an odd number for a verdict of innocent.{Paunchkouree Khan (George Wyatt), The Revelations of an Orderly (Benares, E. J. Lazarus and Co., 1866), p. 74}—p. 476

Political Systems in Eighteenth-Century India: The Banaras Region. Pp. 483-499

…societies are segmentary in their structure, culturally there are often rituals, traditions, myths and histories through which the political order is legitimized and maintained….—p. 484

The Recruitment and Training of British Civil Servants in India, 1600-1860. Pp. 500-553

…The younger servants’ lives were almost completely governed by the rules of the settlement. There was a communal table, and attendance at Sunday services was compulsory. There were strict rules governing drinking and gambling.  Few of the English were married, and until the end of the seventeenth century those who were rarely had their wives with them….—p. 502

…Few English appear to have known any Indian language well. Conversely, there appears to have been little prejudice against Indians in the period from 1600 to 1750. The English ‘had developed no contempt for Indian social customs or political power.’{Percival Spear, The Nabobs (London, 1923), p. 22}—p. 503

            The Europeans discovered their commercial activities could be furthered through trade monopolies by intervening in Indian politics and military affairs. The servants of the European companies found Indian politics highly profitable in the receipts, bribes, prize money, and utilization of their employer’s commercial rights for their own private trade. By 1765 some British civil servants had made huge fortunes and the prospects seemed limitless.

            The most famous example of the ‘get rich’ technique of the time were the payments Robert Clive and other British officers, civil and military, received for their support of Mir Jaffar in replacing Siraj-ud-daula as Nawab of Bengal. Clive is reputed to have received ₤ 234, 000, and other payments to company officials raged from ₤ 117,000 to ₤ 12,000.25. It is in describing these payments that Clive made his famous defense of his actions before Parliament.

Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings?  Consider the situation in which I found myself after the victory at Plassey.  A great Prince was dependent upon my pleasure; an oppulant city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on each hand with gold and jewels!  Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.{A. Mervyn Davies, Clive of Plassey (London, 1939), p. 234}—p. 506

Representing Authority in Victorian India. Pp. 632-682

The {…on 8 November 1858.  In the proclamation Queen Victoria} proclamation was based on two main assumptions: firstly that there was an indigenous diversity in culture, society and religion in India, and secondly that the foreign rulers had a responsibility for the maintenance of an equitable form of government which would be directed not only to protecting the integrity inherent in this diversity, but also to social and material progress which would benefit the ruled.

The proclamation can be viewed as a cultural statement which encompasses two divergent or even contradictory theories of rule: one which sought to maintain India as a feudal order, and the other looking towards changes which would inevitably lead to the destruction of this feudal order….—p. 633

…The British rulers assumed that Indians had lost their right to self-rule through their own weakness which led to their subjugation by a succession of ‘foreign’ rulers, stretching back to the Aryan invasions, and, in the more recent past, to the British conquest of the preceding imperial rulers of India, the Mughals….—p. 634

…Sir John Kaye, whose History of the Indian Mutiny was and in many regards still is the standard work on the ‘causes’ of the Great Uprising, commented on the relationship between the East India Company and the Mughal from 1803 to 1857 that a ‘political paradox’ had been created as the Mughal was ‘to become a pensioner, a pageant, and a puppet.  He was to be a King, yet no King—a something and yet a nothing—a reality and a sham at the same time’.{John W. Kaye and George B. Malleson, Kaye’s and Maleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8, 2^nd ed. (London, 1892), II, p. 4}—pp. 638

            With this definition of ‘corruption, and with the maintenance of the Mughal emperor as the symbolic centre of the Indian political order, another political paradox was established.  The British crown was not the crown of India; the British in India were subjects of their own kings, but the Indians were not.  The Mughal continued to be the ‘fountain of honour’ for Indians.  The English could not be incorporated through symbolic acts to a foreign ruler, and perhaps more importantly they could not incorporate Indians into their rulership through symbolic means.—pp. 639

…Unlike the Indians, the British recycled presents which they received, either directly, by giving one (p. 639) Indian what had been received from another, or indirectly, by selling at auction in Calcutta what they received and then using the funds realized to buy objects to be given as presents.  The British always tried to equalize in economic terms what they gave and received by instructing Indians of the exact worth of objects or cash they would be allowed to give.  So if a person was to give Rs. 101 as nazar { gold coins}, he would receive a shawl or robe worth that much as his khelat.

….They created a mercenary army in which the contract was metaphorically expressed as ‘having eaten the Company’s salt’. Loyalty between Indian soldiers and their European officers was maintained on the basis of regular pay, ‘fair’ treatment and observation of the rule of non-interference with indigenous religious beliefs and customs.  When there was rebellion, it was based on the belief, on the part of the soldiers, that their ‘contract’, explicit or implicit, had been violated, by  being made to wear leather hats, or having to travel over ‘the black waters’, or having to ingest forbidden substances in the form of fat from pigs or bullocks….—pp. 640

…through the introduction of European ideas of property, rent and revenue.  Local lords who were the upholders of a social order based on cosmological concepts, and who maintained right order through ritual action, were converted into ‘landlords’.  Indian ‘kings’ who were allowed internal autonomy over their domains were reduced to the status of ‘chiefs and princes’…..—p. 640

… ‘A cultural symbolic constitution’, to quote Ronald Inden,

Embraces such things as classificatory schema, assumptions about how things are, cosmologies, world views, ethical systems, legal codes, definitions of governmental units and social groups, ideologies, religious doctrines, myths, rituals, procedures, and rules of etiquette.{Ronald Inden, ‘Cultural Symbolic Constitutions in Ancient India’, mimeograph (1976), pp. 6-8}—p. 641

…Hence the continuing significance of the Mughal emperor, even as a ‘pensioner’, as both Indian subjects of the East India Company and rulers of the allied states still bore titles of honour which he alone could grant.  The khutha in mosques, even in British India, continued to be read in his name, coins of the East India Company until 1853 bore his name, and many of the Indian states continued to min coins until 1859-60 with the regnal year of the Mughal emperor on them. Although the British referred to the Mughal emperor in English as the ‘King of Delhi’, they continued to use his full imperial titles when they addressed him in Persian.  As the monarch of Great Britain was not the monarch of India until 1858, the Governor-Generals had difficulty in honouring Indians with medals and titles….—p. 641

            Ellenborough became the Governor-General of India after the great defeat of the Company’s army by the Afghans in 1842, and was determined to restore the prestige of British rule in India. He directed an invasion of Afghanistan, which resulted in the sacks of Ghazni and Kabul as an act of retribution. Ellenborough conceived of symbolizing the defeat of the Muslim Afghans by having what were thought to be the Gates of Somanath, a famous Hindu temple in Gujarat (which had been plundered and desecrated six hundred years earlier by Muslims, and the gates carried off to Afghanistan), returned in triumph to India and placed in a newly built temple in Gujarat.  He issued instructions that the sandalwood gates be carried on a cart through the cities of Punjab and brought to Delhi, accompanied by a honour guard, and with due ceremony.  Ellenborough signalized his intention by issuing a proclamation ‘to all the Princes and Chiefs and the People of India’.  The return of the gates was to be, Ellenborough proclaimed, the ‘proudest record of your national glory; the proof of your superiority in arms over the nations beyond the Indus’.  He went on to identify himself with peoples and princes of India ‘in interest and feeling’, stated that the ‘heroic army’ reflected ‘immortal honour upon my native and adopted country’, and promised that he would preserve and improve ‘the happiness of our two countries.{John Wiliam Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan (London, 1851), II, pp. 646-7}….

…Ellenborough’s action and his proclamation concerning the return of the Gates of Somnath led to vicious criticism and ridicule amongst the British in India as well as in England.  Although Ellenborough’s concerns with symbolic representations of the imperial role for the British in India were not the cause of his recall (p.643) in 1844, they were taken as indicative of a view of the relationship between the India and England which found little support either in England or in India.—pp. 643-44

…The British in India followed a metonymical logic in their relations with their Indian subjects, and the wearing of shoes by Indians in the presence of the British was seen as an effort to establish relationships of equality between the ruled and their rulers.  Hence, Indians were always forced to remove their shoes or sandals when entering what the British defined as their space—their offices and homes.  On the other hand, the British always insisted on wearing shoes when entering Indian space, including mosques and temples.  The one significant exception that was allowed was if an Indian habitually wore European clothes in public, then he would be allowed to wear shoes in the presence of his English masters on such occasions of western-style rituals such as the Governor-General’s levee, a drawing room conversazione or a ball.—p. 644

…The British believed that Indian arts and crafts had entered a period of sharp decline in the face of western technology and machine-made products, hence their arts and crafts had to be collected, preserved and placed in museums….—p. 651

…Educated Indians increasingly were to learn ab-(p.651)out their own culture through the mediation of European ideas and scholarship.  The British rulers were increasingly defining what was Indian in an official and ‘objective, sense.  Indians had to look like Indians: before 1860 Indian soldiers as well as their European officers wore western-style uniforms; now the dress uniforms of Indians and English included turbans, sashes and tunics thought to be Mughal or Indian.—pp. 651-52

            In a speech on 17 February 1876 the Prime Minister, Disraeli, reviewed the discussions of 1858 concerning the declaration of Victoria as Empress of India…. Disraeli, in this speech, stressed the diversity of India, describing it as ‘an ancient country of many nations’, (p. 652) varying peoples and races, ‘differing in religion, in manners and in laws—some of them highly gifted and civilized, and many of them of rare antiquity’.  ‘And this vast community is governed’, he continued, ‘under the authority of the Queen, by many Sovereign Princes, some of whom occupy Thrones which were filled by their ancestors when England was a Roman Province’.{Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (3^rd ser., CCXXVII, 1876), p. 409}  The hyperbolic historical fantasy voiced by Disraeli was part of the myth later acted out in the Imperial Assemblage.  India was diversity—it had no coherent communality except that given by British rule under the integrating system of the imperial crown.—pp. 652-53

…The British, the Conservatives argued, were the successors of the Mughal; hence it was right and proper that India’s monarch, Queen Victoria, should be declared Empress.

            The Royal Titles Act was passed, and received the royal assent on 27 April 1876….—p. 653

            Many British in India, official and unofficial, and several influential British papers saw the assemblage {organized by  Lord Lytton, the Viceroy and Governor-General,  on 23 December 1876}as part of a policy of elevating the ‘blacks’, and paying too much attention to (p.657) the Indians, because most concessions and acts of grace were directed towards Indians. Lytton wrote that he faced ‘practical difficulties of satisfying the European element, which is disposed to be quarrelsome, and avoiding the difficult of favouring the conquered more than the conquering race’.{Lytton to Salisbury, 30 Oct. 1876., I.O.L.R E218/518/1}

            The opposition to the plans in London and India was so strong that Lytton wrote to Queen Victoria—

If the Crown of England should ever have the misfortune to lose the great and magnificent empire of India, it will not be through the disaffection of your Majesty’s native subjects, but through party spirit at home, and the disloyalty and insubordination of those members of Your Majesty’s Indian Service, whose duty it is to co-operate with the Government…in the disciplined and loyal execution of its orders.{Lytton to Queen Victoria, 15 Nov. 1876, I.O.L.R. E218/518/1}—pp. 657-58

…In the 1870s a contradiction in the British theory of Indian sociology had become apparent.  Some members of the British ruling group viewed India in historical terms as a feudal society consisting of lords, chiefs and peasants.  Other British people saw India as a changing society which was composed of communities.  These communities could be large and somewhat amorphous, such as Hindu/Muslim/Sikh/Christian/Animist; they could be vaguely regional, such as Bengali or Gujarati; they could be castes such as Brahmans, Rajputs, Baniyas; or communities could be based on educational and occupational criteria, that is, westernized Indians.  Those English rulers who saw India as made up of communities sought to control them through identifying the ‘representative men’, leaders who were thought to speak for, and who could shape responses from, their communities.—p. 658

…Indian titles had been a vexing question for the British rulers of India since the early nineteenth century.  There appeared to the English to be no fixed lineally ordered hierarchy or any common system of titles, such as the British were familiar with in their own society.  What were thought to be royal titles, such as Raja, Maharaja, Nawab or Bahadur, seemed to be used randomly by Indians, and were not attached to actual control of territory or office, or a hierarchical system of status distinctions.—p. 659

…of nazar (gold coins) and peshkash (precious possessions) for khelats (robes of honour)….—p. 660

…In the British conception of the relationship, Indian princes became English knights and should be obedient and offer fealty to the Empress.—p. 660

… ‘Politically speaking’, Lytton wrote, ‘The Indian peasantry is an inert mass.  If it ever moves at all it will move in obedience, not to its British benefactors, but to its native chiefs and princes, however tyrannical they may be’.{Lytton to Salisbury, 11 May 1876, I.O.L.R., E 218/518/1, p. 149}—p. 660

            The other possible political representative of ‘native opinion’ were what Lytton scornfully referred to as the ‘Baboos’, who had been taught to write ‘semi-seditious articles in the Native Press, and who represent nothing but the social anomaly of own position’. {Lytton to Salisbury, 11 May 1876, I.O.L.R., E 218/518/1, p. 149}  He felt that the Indian chiefs and princes were no mere noblesse, but ‘a powerful aristocracy’ whose complicity could be secured and efficiently utilized by the British in India.  In addition to their power over the masses, the Indian aristocracy could be easily directed, if appealed to properly, as ‘they are easily affected by sentiment and susceptible to the influence of symbols to which facts inade-(p.660)quately correspond’. {Lytton to Salisbury, 11 May 1876, I.O.L.R., E 218/518/1, p. 150}  The British, Lytton continued, could gain ‘their allegiance without giving up any of our power’.{Ibid.}  To buttress his argument, Lytton referred to the British position in Ireland and especially the recent experience with Ionian Greeks, who, notwithstanding the ‘good government’ which British rule gave them, enthusiastically surrendered all these advantages for what he termed ‘a bit of bunting with the Greek colours on it’.  He added, to underline his argument about the Indian aristocracy, ‘the further East you go, the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting’.{Ibid.}—pp. 660-61

            The colonial sociology of India was by no means fixed and rigidly ranked and ordered.  The classificatory system was based on multiple criteria, which varied through time and from region to region of India.  At the base of the classification were two kinds of criteria, one which the English rulers believed was ‘natural’, such as caste, race and religion, and the other, social criteria which could include achievement, education—both western and Indian, the financing of works of public utility, acts of loyalty performed on behalf of their English rulers and the family history seen as descent and genealogy….—p. 663

…The activities of the assemblage were to last for two weeks; the purpose being to mark Queen Victoria’s accession to her imperial title as ‘Kaiser-i-Hindi’.  The title was suggested by G. W. Leitner, Professor of Oriental Languages and Principal of the Government College in Lahore….Leitner argued that the term ‘Kaiser’ was well known to the natives of India, having been used by Muhammadan writers in relation to the Roman Caesar, and therefore the ruler of the Byzantine empire should be known as ‘Kaiser-i-Rum’.  In the present circumstances of the British ruler in India it was appropriate, Leitner thought, as it neatly combined the Roman ‘Caesar’, German ‘Kaiser’ and Russian ‘Czar’ imperial titles. In the Indian context it would be unique, and would not run the risk of being mispronounced by Indians as would the title Empress, nor would it associate British rule with such exhausted titles as ‘Shah’, ;Padishah’ or ‘Sultan’.  It avoided the overt association of the title with either Hindu or Muslim rirlwa.{G. W. Leitner, Kaiser-i-Hind: The Only Appropriate Translation of the Title of the Empress of India (Lahore, 1876), pp. 11-12}—p. 670

…Kashmir, a buffer state created by the British in 1854 by the installation of a Maharaja over territories held previously by a number of other rulers….—p. 672

…One British army officer, who was presenting the silver medallions to several of his Indian troopers in Urdu, was not up to the task of conveying their significance to his men.  He addressed his troops as follows ‘Suwars [pigs—he meant sowar, the Urdu word for trooper], your Empress has sent you a billi [cats—he meant billa, a medallion] for you to wear around your necks’…..{Burne, Memories, pp. 42-3}—p. 673

            Lytton made a speech in which, as was common in the speeches of Viceroys on major occasions, he stressed the fulfilment of their Empress’s promise in her proclamation of 1 November 1858 of the achievement of a ‘progressive prosperity’ combined with the undisturbed enjoyment, on the part of the princes and peoples of India, ‘of their hereditary honours’, and the protection ‘of their lawful interests’.

            The historic basis of British authority in India was created by ‘Providence’ which had called upon the crown ‘to replace and improve upon the rule of good and great Sovereigns’, but whose successors failed ‘to secure the internal peace of their dominations.  Strife became chronic and anarchy constantly recurrent.  The weak were the prey of the strong, and the strong the victims of their own passions.’  The rule of the successors of the House of Tamerlane, Lytton, continued, ‘had ceased to be conducive of the progress of the East’.  Now, under British, rule, all ‘creeds and races’ were protected and guided by ‘the strong hand of Imperial power’ which had led to rapid advance and ‘increasing prosperity’.—p. 674

…However, appointment to the higher public service should not only go to those with ‘intellectual qualifications’ but must also include those who are ‘natural leaders’, ‘by  birth, rank and hereditary influence’, this is, the feudal aristocracy, which was being ‘created’ at the assemblage.—p. 675

…When Indians, particularly in the first years of their national movement, came to develop a public political idiom of their own, through their own organizations, what idiom did they use?  I would suggest that in effect they used the same idiom that their British rulers employed.  The early meetings of the All India Congress Committees were much like durbars, with processions and the centrality of leading figures and their speeches, which became the vehicle through which they tried to participate in the achievement of the values of ‘progressive government’ and the obtainment of the happiness and welfare of the Indian peoples.  The British idiom was effective in that it set the terms of discourse of the nationalist movement in its beginning phases. In effect, the early nationalists were claiming that they were more loyal to the true goals of the Indian empire than were their English rules.—p. 678

            The First Non-Co-operation Movements of 1920-1 is taken as marking the final establishment of Gandhi as the crucial figure in the nationalist struggle. It was the first time a new idiom was tried out in the form of non-co-operation and passive resistance.  At base this was the first full-fledged and widespread rejection of British authority in India.  The movement began with Gandhi’s announcement that Indians should return all honours and emblems granted by the imperial government.  In doing this Gandhi attacked not the institutions of government, but the capacity of that government to make meaningful and binding its authority through the creation of honours.

            Most of Gandhi’s contributions to the nationalist movement were concerned with the creation and representation of new codes of conduct based on a radically different theory of authority.  These were represented in a series of markings.  No longer were Indians to wear either western clothes or the ‘native’ consumes decreed by their imperial rulers, but home-(p.678)spun simple peasant dress.  The communal prayer meeting, not the durbar-like atmosphere of the political rallies, was where his message was expounded.  The Indian pilgrimage was adapted to politics in the form of Gandhi’s marches, and the idea of the padyatra (the walking of the politician amongst the people) is still part of the political rituals of India.—pp. 678-69