Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India

The aristocracy maintained a monopoly over access to church-dominated education and instituted a classical course of studies that it shared with the clergy but from which the middle and working classes were systematically excluded. The classical curriculum under church patronage became identified as a prerequisite for social leadership and, more subtly, the means by which social privilege was protected. This alliance between church and culture consecrated the concept of station in life and directly supported the existing system of social stratification; while the classical curriculum served to confirm the upper orders in their superior social status, religious instruction was given to the lower orders to fit them for the various duties of life and to secure them in their appropriate station. Thus the alliance between church and culture is equally an alliance between ideas of formative education and of social control.

Two educational movements of eighteenth-century England illustrate the powerful influence of the church in institutionalizing certain kinds of texts and excluding others. Both the Charity School movement and the Sunday School movement grew out of concern over the alarming rise of urban squalor and crime and out of a conviction that unless the poor were brought back into the Christian orbit, the relatively harmonious order that had been carefully laid would be shattered. Only instruction in sound Christian principles, it was maintained, would prevent such a catastrophe, and “such little portions of Holy Scripture as recommend industry, gratitude, submission and the like vertues” were duly prescribed. Hannah More summed up the educational philosophy of social control adopted by these institutions when she declared, “Principles, not opinions, are what I labour to give them.”²

Apart from the Bible, required reading in these institutions consisted of religious tracts, textbooks, parables, sermons, homilies, and prayers, many of which were specially written for inclusion in the curriculum. Because of the huge demand for such works, the two movements stimulated the production of a great number of religious texts. M. G. Jones’ illuminating study, The Charity School Movement, makes a comprehensive listing of the works produced and studied, and I mention a few titles to give an idea of their ideological bias: R. Nelson’s The Whole Duty of a Christian Designed for the Use of the Charity Schools in and about London (1704); T. Green’s Principles of Religion for Charity Children; Ellesby’s A Caution against Ill-company: The Dignity and Duty of a Christian and the Great Duty of Submission to the Will of God; White Kennett’s The Christian Scholar; or) Rules and Directions for Children and Youths sent to English Schools, more especially designed for the Poor Buys Taught and Cloathed by Charity in the Parish of St. Botolph’s, Aldgate (1710); Dean Nowell’s Elements of Christian Piety, designed particularly for the Charity Children (1715); and J. Hanway’s A Comprehensive Sentimental Book for Scholars learning in Sunday Schools, containing the Alphabet, Numbers, Spelling, Moral and Religious Letters, Stories and Prayers suited to the growing powers of Children for the advancement in Happiness of the Rising Generation (1786).³

These works were part of what was labeled the “literary curriculum.” The religious bias of a course of studies restricted to the Bible and catechism meant that secular writing of any kind, by which was generally meant works of the imagination, was kept out of the institutional mainstream. As late as the 1860s, the “literary curriculum” in British educational establishments remained polarized around classical studies for the upper classes and religious studies for the lower. As for what is now known as the subject of English literature, the British educational system had no firm place for it until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the challenge posed by the middle classes to the existing structure resulted in the creation of alternative institutions devoted to “modern studies.”

It is quite conceivable that educational development in British India might have run the same course as it did in England, were it not for one crucial difference: the strict controls on Christianizing activities. Clearly the religious texts that were standard fare for the lower classes in England could not legitimately be incorporated into the Indian curriculum without inviting violent reactions from the native population, particularly the learned classes. The educational experiments in social control that had been conducted on the English poor had only limited application in India. Yet the fear lingered that without submission of the colonial subject to moral law or the authority of God, the control England was able to secure over the lower classes back home would be eluded in India.

The experience with the English working classes prompted at least one British official, the Marquess of Tweeddale, governor and commander in chief of Madras from 1842 to 1848, to seek out the same distinguishing characteristics in the Hindus and Muslims (assuming them to be a unified group): immorality, sensuality, self-indulgence, corruption, and depravity—all of which were identified as inimical to society and therefore to be combatted and controlled. Tweeddale had issued a minute in 1846 seeking introduction of the Bible as a class book. The proposal was defeated, but the fact that it was made at all suggests an ambivalence and indecision in the government’s position on religion. Not only did the minute officially endorse the value of religion and a practical education, but it also insisted on its importance in making the English nation fit for the various duties of life. The substance of Tweeddale’s minute included extensive comparisons between the situation at home and in India, between the “rescue” of the lower classes in England, “those living in the dark recesses of our great cities at home, from the state of degradation consequent on their vicious and depraved habits, the offspring of ignorance and sensual indulgence,” and the elevation of the Hindus and Muslims, whose “ignorance and degradation” required a remedy not adequately supplied by their respective faiths.⁴ In building up that foundation through Christian principles, claimed Tweeddale, the British government would not simply be teaching Christianity; it would be giving instruction “useful to the State.”

The comparability of the English working classes to the Indian colonial subjects intensified the search for other social institutions to take over from religious instruction the task of communicating the laws of the social order. The uneasiness generated by a strictly secular policy in teaching English served to resurrect Charles Grant in administrative discussions. An officer of the East India Company, Grant was one of the first Englishmen to urge the promotion of both Western literature and Christianity in India. In 1792 he had written a scathing denunciation of Indian religion and society titled Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain. The tract was as much prescriptive of British policy as descriptive of Hindu practice and custom, for Grant’s proposals went far beyond the eradication of practices offensive to British sensibility to include an enunciation of strategies for ensuring British hegemony. Grant reacted contemptuously to measures or policies based on principles of mere expediency and sought to make British connections with India “permanent and … indissoluble.”⁵ Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had little faith in the power of legal and political actions to yield long-term benefits. He was convinced that if Indians were ever to find the British government better than their own, it would have to be because of “the superior personal conduct of Britons” and not the superiority of the system.⁶ He fervently maintained that for England to gain a more lasting foothold in India, the situation required a demonstration of the religious and moral principles that alone validated its position. Ideally, there were two means by which this could be accomplished. The first was placing the people at close proximity to their rulers, to provide reassurance that their destinies were guided by men of principle, not rapacious vultures, for “without an uniting principle, a conjoining tie of this nature, we can suppose the country to be, in fact, retained only by mere power.”⁷

But the not so exemplary conduct of Englishmen in India vitiated this objective (“by them the worst part of our manners will be exhibited”). British misconduct gave Grant the opportunity he needed to attack the deistic and rationalistic tendencies of his age:

Complementary to the restoration of Christian principles was a derogation of Hindu society and religion. Grant’s critique is not remarkably original in the ground that it covers. The caste system, idol worship, polytheism, and propitiatory rites are all condemned in the most conventional terms. But in mapping out his strategy for British supremacy in India, morality, monotheism, and monorule all become linked in his thought as part of a single constellation of meaning. Grant’s objections to caste, for instance, are as much the basis of an argument conjoining religion and state as a criticism of Hindu religion. Quite ignoring the symbiotic relationship of caste groups within the hierarchy, Grant held a fragmented view of caste, which formed the basis for his conclusion that the norms and rules of the particular caste group to which a Hindu belonged, rather than society as a whole, gave legitimacy to his actions, however contrary to the external interests of the body politic. He gave the example that what might be considered criminal acts in other societies are less readily defined so in a caste society where each caste group has its own system of rules and ethics. How, argued Grant, could any sense of right and wrong develop in the members of a caste society where no single moral code is upheld to enforce positive social behavior and where a universal definition of crime is virtually impossible?

Grant’s intense revulsion from Hindu society was at the same time laced with a morbid paranoia. For an Evangelical writing out of Anglican England there could be no worse thought than the horrors unleashed by a disjunction between religion and state, spelling the decay of morality and law. Symptomatic of that break was the failure of religion to provide the laws by which crime is recognized as an offense against the state and against God, from which ensue corruption and depravity of character.¹¹ In proportion to Grant’s revulsion from the polytheistic, caste society of Hinduism grew a conviction that there must be one single moral code—“one Power, one Mind”—governing society.

The idea of “one Power, one Mind” had both theological and political resonances for Grant. His objections to polytheism illustrate the fusion of these two levels, with a hidden appeal for integration of religion and state. Grant’s argument is as follows: On the moral level, the existence of many gods implies choice in whom to worship, the consequence being that “he who makes a god for himself will certainly contrive to receive from him an indulgence for his corrupt propensities.”¹² The multiplicity of gods in the Hindu pantheon blurred any sense of a single, universal cosmic law upon whose recognition Grant believed all social harmony rests. Instead of creating a vision of divine principles acting in uniform concert, the Hindu scheme fragmented cosmic unity and encouraged a system of multiple deities working at variance with each other. Barriers between worshipers of different deities are reinforced and a unitary code replaced by a relativistic one.

Grant continues that the unsettling fact about a polytheistic society, where kings and rulers keep company with other gods, is its resistance to a central authority:

In a society where multiple worship was complementary to multiple allegiances, Grant was not confident that brute assertion of authority was likely to overwhelm resistance to assimilation. Nor did he believe that the ameliorative project could be carried out effectively in a society that was not driven by ethical absolutes, a society where the propitiation of deities was sufficient to satisfying immediate needs and larger social objectives were consequently reduced to irrelevance. Grant considered the introduction of Western knowledge without prior changes in the structure of native religion a self-defeating enterprise. He was not optimistic that the truths of Western civilization were so self-evident as to cause an immediate transformation of archaic social structure. But at the same time he intuitively recognized that a unitary concept of God was the key to the assimilative project of British colonialism. His idea of “one Power, one Mind” encapsulated related ideas of cultural hegemony, ethical absolutism, centralized authority, and submission to an overarching law governing all individuals, without which Western knowledge was deprived of all transformative effect.

In stronger terms, he called the government’s decision to exclude religion “politically mischievous,” an incitement to radicals, who were bound to interpret British deference toward local feelings as a mark of political weakness. Keane’s contempt for British policy was equally a contempt of emasculated authority and excessive delicacy of sentiment. Pragmatic considerations had so blurred British political sense, he charged, that only an appeal to absolute, uncontested principles could restore it. “Whatever is morally wrong can never be politically right” became a rallying cry for religious instruction. Keane’s somber testimony concluded with a stirring call to duty that became the credo of the missionaries: “God is hastening us on the glorious work for which alone he sent us to India, which is to make the Gospel known to the poor heathen.”¹⁵

The missionaries got further support from an unexpected quarter. The military officers who testified in the parlimentary sessions on Indian education joined hands with them in arguing that a secular education in English would increase the Indians’ capacity for evil because it would elevate their intellects without providing the moral principles to keep them in check. Major-General Rowlandson of the British army warned, “I have seen native students who had obtained an insight into European literature and history, in whose minds there seemed to be engendered a spirit of disaffection towards the British Government.”¹⁶ While obviously the missionaries and the military had different interests at stake, with the latter perhaps not quite as interested in the souls of the “heathen” as the former, they were both clearly aiming at the same goal: the prevention of situations leading to political disunity or lawlessness. The alliance between the two undoubtedly proved fruitful insofar as it loosened the British resistance to the idea of religious instruction and made them more conscious of the need to find alternate modes of social control.

In the years following the actual introduction of English in India there was occasion to recall Grant’s shrewd observation that an emphasis on the moral aspect would facilitate the introduction of Western education without throwing open the doors of English liberal thought to Indians; that moral improvement of the subjects was possible without opening up the possible danger of inculcating radical ideas that would upset the British presence in India. Moral good and happiness, Grant had argued, “views politics through the safe medium of morals, and subjects them to the laws of universal rectitude.”¹⁷ The most appealing part of his argument, from the point of view of a government now sensing the truth of the missionaries’ criticism of secularism, was that historically Christianity had never been associated with bringing down governments, for its concern was with the internal rather than the external condition of man.

Complaints against the anarchical threat of English studies taught as a secular branch of knowledge were so common that a questionnaire sent out by the Baptist Missionary Society evoked little surprise when it devoted a major part of its survey to soliciting observations from various kinds of institutions on the attitudes of English-speaking Indians to matters of religion and morals. More often than not, the general response was that “the new ideas obtained by the study of English literature will undoubtedly weaken, if not destroy, superstitious prejudices; but, on the other hand, the knowledge thus attained tends to produce a supercilious pride and skepticism unless leavened with a large amount of Christian teaching, and this, in the present state of things, it is impossible to give.”¹⁸ The “present state of things” was a reference not only to the policy of religious neutrality, but also to inadequate facilities for training native preachers, insufficient funds, and native resistance to direct Christian instruction.

The controversy surrounding the instruction offered at Hindu College, Calcutta, marked increasing dissonance in the British position on education for Indians. While the cultivation of the rational faculties remained the chief aim of instruction, the climate of skepticism prevailing at Hindu College was a dismal reminder that the goal required continual modification to meet the equally important objective of nurturing socially responsible individuals. Criticism of Hinduism was matched by an equal contempt for Christianity by the college youth so that the managers of the college had to issue an order “to check as far as possible all disquisitions tending to unsettle the belief of the boys in the great principles of natural religion.”¹⁹ Some parents were sufficiently alarmed by the college’s reputation for skeptical inquiry to withdraw their sons, complaining that “boys are taught to learn the higher branches of literature and science, but are not instructed in any book of morals.”²⁰ One Hindu parent went so far as to urge that the precepts of Christ be made a class book in government and aided schools.

The principal object of the missionary attack was Utilitarianism, particularly its extreme intellectualism and scientific rationalism. For many missionaries the merging of literature and science in Utilitarian thought falsely reduced the two disciplines to comparable branches issuing from the same trunk of knowledge and engaging the same intellectual faculties. The first step toward a reconstitution of lirerature’s role in society, therefore, was the disengagement of literature from science and a reclaiming for it of functions associated with faculties of mind other than the purely intellectual. Convinced that the secularization of literature had cut people off from the past and introduced discontinuity into their lives, many missionaries foresaw an England heading toward a crisis of mammoth proportions if the government continued to discourage influences to “replenish the soul, nurse diseased spirits to health, touch the conscience, and refine the intellect.” The disastrous effect that the blurring of literary and scientific knowledge had produced on the morals of Indian youth, with its attendant substitution of reason for divine will, pointed to a causal relation between secular study of literature on one hand and moral decay and subversion of moral law on the other.

The long-term effect of the missionary clamor was a redefinition of reason in alignment with notions of duty and social obligation. Missionaries hostile to the basic premises of secular education unleashed every available weapon in their arsenal to prove that the equation of reason with individually realized truths unwittingly fortified the position of Hinduism. Through extensive references to Hindu scriptures, Alexander Duff set out to demonstrate that the central value of self-reliance affirmed by Hinduism placed the worshiper in a false relationship of oneness with the Absolute, transforming God from a being external to man, demanding submission to his righteousness, to a being internal to man. By the terms of this analysis, the Hindu form of worship was no more than intellectual self-adoration, producing not morality—the complete submission of man to the righteousness of God—but the illusion of self-sufficiency.

Duff’s reading ironically challenged the conventional British derogation of Hinduism as a religion that subordinated self to caste and community. While denouncing Hinduism as a religion that promoted intellectual rather than moral worship, Duff negotiated the conflict between individual conscience and submission to God to accommodate Utilitarian ideas of social cohesion and obligation. The Hindu concept of God struck at the root of all morality through a peculiar syllogism that Duff saw as characteristic of Eastern religions: Whatever man does, God does; every man is God, but God is not responsible to any. Therefore, man, who is God in the Hindu scheme of things, cannot be responsible to any. In short, because there is only one being—Man/God—who is absolved of all responsibility, there is neither right nor wrong in human actions.²¹

Though a body of opinion in England still advocated minimum interference in Indian religious faiths, in the hope that education and knowledge would ultimately guide the Indians to Christianity, the group of missionaries who had argued for more unambiguous, direct means began to make a dent on the government’s thinking. The British government officially remained committed to a policy of religious neutrality, but indirectly gave tacit encouragement to the missionaries through their own example. For instance, government schools prescribed spelling-books for teaching English, but often, such as in the school at Banares, these books contained passages at variance with polytheism. In the name of teaching the mechanics of the English language, the British government saw no violation of its own injunction against religious interference by providing religious instruction indirectly.²² The paranoia that normally dictated colonial policy alternated with a familiar smugness about the Indian character, for “upon that principle of acquiescence in whatever the State does, which seems to regulate the minds of the natives, there would have been very little opposition raised to it.”²³ Indeed, as long as Indians remained unaware of the connection between the diffusion of knowledge and instruction in Christian principles, the government was content to turn a blind eye to religious instruction. But if they were ever to become suspicious, as one cautious observer remarked, “all efforts on their ignorance would be as vigorously resisted as if they were on their own religion. The only effect of introducing Christianity into the schools would be to sound the alarm and to warn the Brahmins of the approaching danger.”²⁴ The safest solution was to keep Indians at the level of children, innocent and unsuspecting of the meaning of their instruction, for once enlightened, there was no predicting how hostile they would turn toward those who were educating them.

Maintaining a delicate balance between “pagan” ignorance and subversive enlightenment put enormous pressure on the British, often leading to disastrous results. In 1818 British troops moved into Rajputana (now called Rajasthan), a province in the western part of India. Confident that the presence of new schools would wean Indian youth away from the ill habits of their parents, the Marquess of Hastings sent the formidable Serampore missionary William Carey to Ajmere for this purpose. But there Carey made the mistake of introducing the Bible as a schoolbook. Instantly the parents were up in arms and refused to send their children to school until it was withdrawn. But generally the experience of the missionary societies was somewhat different, as in the case of the Calcutta Diocesan Committee of the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge. When it introduced some of the less “controversial” Scriptures as lessons, it initially encountered considerable distrust from the parents, but suspicion gradually faded into acceptance when the parents perceived that the choice was a grim one: either this education for their children or none at all. From such experiences, not a few missionaries delighted in painting a picture of the Indians as a people who were quite ready to sacrifice their prejudices and offer themselves to the worship of Christ if it meant they coὐld get a school for their children in the bargain.²⁵

The gingerliness with which colonial administrators approached the issue of instruction in the Bible led to what some missionaries felt were practices of only secondary and perhaps even unsound value, such as treating the life of Christ as biography or teaching the Scriptures in colleges for purely secular reasons like preparing students for the law.²⁶ The government schools would not even risk teaching the Bible as a historical work. The proscription of the Bible in schools and colleges was a sensitive issue, but much more for the British, apparently, than the Indians. As was often remarked, fear of the Bible was really an English, not a Hindu, one and had its origins in the objections of Roman Catholics. If Indians had any fear of the Bible at all, it was primarily in its political rather than its theological character. The Rev. Keane tried to reassure Parliament, to no avail, that “the Hindus despise our Bible; they do not believe it is the power of God to upset their whole system; when they do, then I believe they will try to keep it out of the schools if they can.”²⁷ The Hindu indifference to the Bible was in fact urged as an excuse to include it in government-aided schools, for “they … cared as little for the Bible in its religious character as we do for Homer” or “as we in our school-boy days cared for the mythology of Ancient Greece and Rome.”²⁸

STRUCTURAL CONGRUENCES established between Christianity and English literature fortified a sense of shared history and tradition. Missionaries ably cleared the way for the realization that as “the grand repository of the book of God” England had produced a literature that was immediately marked off from all non-European literatures, being “animated, vivified, hallowed, and baptized” by a religion to which Western man owed his material and moral progress. The difference was rendered as a contrast between “the literature of a world embalmed with the Spirit of Him who died to redeem it, and that which is the growth of ages that have gloomily rolled on in the rejection of that Spirit, as between the sweet bloom of creation in the open light of heaven, and the rough, dark recesses of submarine forests of sponges.”²⁹ This other literature was likened to Plato’s cave, whose darkened inhabitants are “chained men … counting the shadows of subterranean fires.”

If not in quite the same colorful terms, other missionaries pointed out that though the government claimed it taught no Christianity, a great deal was actually taught, for English education was so replete with Christian references that much more of scriptural teaching was imparted than generally admitted. The Rev. William Keane attempted to persuade officials that

Shakespeare, though by no means a good standard, is full of religion; it is full of the common sense principles which none but Christian men can recognize. Sound Protestant Bible principles, though not actually told in words, are there set out to advantage, and the opposite often condemned. So with Goldsmith, Abercrombie on the Mental Powers, and many other books which are taught in the schools; though the natives hear they are not to be proselytized, yet such books have undoubtedly sometimes a favourable effect in actually bringing them to us missionaries.³⁰

The literary enterprise off amiliarizing the Bible amongst “benighted” peoples was at various points framed in the imagery of empire building. The Madras Christian Instructor and Missionary Record asserted that

the genius of literature … clearly sees that in the missionary brotherhood she has found the men who are to extend her empire to the ends of the earth, and give her throne a stability that will be lasting as the sun. She beholds them subduing language after language, reducing them to the laws of grammar, and fixing them in the columns of the lexicon. She sees, with grateful wonder, the schoolhouse rising in the desert, and hears in the depths of its solitude, the creative crash of the printing-press, as it pours forth its intellectual bounties.³³

Yet while appearing to represent the end-point of comparative analysis it is worth noting that the structural correspondence between English literature and Christianity did not immediately develop from a sense of shared history between religion and literature or from a belief in a common culture of values, attitudes, and norms. To recall, the relationship between literature and religion was often perceived in antithetical terms by both Company officials and missionaries in the initial period of England’s commitment to Indian education. The meager faith missionaries vested in literary texts to enhance the moral tone of society sprang in part from the conviction that an unusually high level of mental and moral excellence was first required before English works could truly be enjoined to the moral enterprise. Given the fact that the majority of people were believed to fall below that level, literary instruction did not present itself as an effective instrument for inculcating morality. On the contrary, for readers ignorant of moral law literature seemed to provide no direction toward understanding or obeying its dictates. Many missionaries feared that far from cultivating moral feelings, untutored and unregulated reading would conceivably cause a closer questioning of moral law, stimulating readers to act against accepted norms.

The hostility to certain literary forms, particularly poetry, accentuated the lines of opposition between literature and religion. The essence of poetry is deception, insisted one writer for the Asiatic Journal, adding that the cultivation of an art form that is so contrary to truth could only create a nation of deceptive people. He based his claim on the observation that what would be considered lies in plain prose are acceptable in poetry, because such lies go under the guise of poetic conventions like hyperbole and conceit: “To assert one thing and mean another is not termed deceit, but ‘hypostasis’: where a person really does what he declares he will not do, it is only an ‘aposiopesis’ in a poet, but is considered a most dishonourable act in any other person.”³⁴

But this is not to say that all poetry was unconditionally dismissed as deceptive, and the critic for the Asiatic Journal cited above was quick to draw attention to the example of the Bible, where the directness of the language and the close correspondence between word and concept eliminated all possibilities of equivocation and ambiguity. If a given term is understood to denote one object before it is used figuratively to signify another, its proneness to deception is correspondingly reduced.³⁵ As a higher-level activity, figuration was deemed acceptable when preceded by the stage of exact signification. The figuration in Oriental literature, bypassing an earlier stage of precise signification and thwarting and even reversing the normal development of a culture, was held responsible for the flawed moral growth of Indians. The emergence of poetry at a later stage in both the individual’s and the culture’s growth ideally provided the conditions for a truly significant moral impact, at a point when morality and imagination were so finely attuned that they constituted a perfect equilibrium.³⁶

Nonetheless, even when literature had gained considerable importance and was enlisted as an auxiliary to religious instruction, as was true in Duff’s General Assembly Institution and later Free Church Institution, literary understanding was still held secondary to the goal of conversion by many missionary societies, which would not accept literary education as a complete substitute for religious instruction. Though grand, extravagant claims may have been made in missionary publications about Christian influence in English literature (primarily to influence government policy on neutrality), the inclusion of literature in the missionary curriculum was made in many instances for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons. Limitations in resources to disseminate Christianity required missionaries to fall back on alternative methods. The training of native preachers to carry the Christian message to the native population was an enormously difficult task, and adequate facilities simply did not exist for a huge undertaking of that kind. The preachers who were trained under the existing conditions were frequently criticized for being intellectually weak. Native deficiences were explained in terms of an insufficiently developed indigenous literature capable of providing support for elucidating moral concepts.³⁷ In its absence, Indians depended on oral instruction given by missionaries, who in turn lacked enough knowledge of native languages and of native modes of thought to convey the exact theological nuances. English literary study acquired the status of an institution in place of the one that the missionaries would have preferred to have available, but failed to secure because of insufficient funds and manpower, for training Indian preachers. To offset the financial constraints, one report recommended that native preachers be educated in English first so that “by this means they would have access to a wholesome literature, and independently of the aid of a missionary, might continue to improve their morals.”³⁸

At the same time, however, though prospective Indian preachers were educated in English literature to prepare them for participation in missionary activity, they were not considered choice candidates as future teachers of English.

Those schoolmasters feel an utter abhorrence to all liberal notions of science and religion; and although their employers may insist on the introduction of books having a moralizing tendency and leading to correct notions of God and his works, yet when their conduct is not narrowly watched, they avail themselves of every opportunity (and a schoolmaster has many) to throw ridicule upon the new instruction [emphasis in the original].³⁹

But perhaps the argument most persuasive for missionaries for the provision of literary training in their schools was the one that demonstrated that Christian instruction tinged with a literary emphasis invariably produced favorable effects. A report commissioned by the Baptist Missionary Society observed that “[the Indians] are more susceptible to religious impressions, through a skilful use of the frequent allusions to Christian truth found in the prescribed course, and an indirect reference to the Scriptures, than in the time specially devoted to Christian teaching.”⁴⁰ The stereotypical representation of Indians as children is implicit in this characterization, which attributes missionary success in arousing Indian curiosity in Christianity to the literary mode of parables and storytelling in the Bible. Narrative, plot, event, and character were pinpointed as literary techniques that immediately arrested the students’ attention, conveying theological messages more effectively than a strictly doctrinal approach. The style of preaching also tended to follow a literary structure and took on literary characteristics both of the Western tradition (with “lightning flash of metaphor,” “convictive parallelism of analogy,” and “instructive imagery of parabolic illustration”⁴¹) and the native modes of storytelling, recitation, and singing. Furthermore, the successful adaptation of preaching style to literary modes encouraged similar explorations in a “lighter and freer style of tract literature.”⁴²

In the final analysis, however, the missionary interest in literary instruction eludes explanation in terms of strategy alone. Indeed, the missionary use of literature is equally a measure of the defeatism that increasingly characterized the evangelizing enterprise. Large-scale conversion of Indians had been reduced to a myth and an illusion, acquiring the force of a painful reality to devoted missionaries who had consecrated their entire lives to mission work in India. Many were disheartened by the disparity between the culture of the school and that of the home, where “Moses and Matthew have to give way to Krishna and Doorga [Hindu deities], and the prayer to the Pooja.” “What do you do,” wrote a writer for the Oriental Herald, “when the tender plant, after suffering during the day the Christian manipulation of the Missionary, goes home at night to be twisted in another direction by the prejudices of a Hindoo family?”⁴³ Severed from faith in their truth, the facts of Christianity were stripped of all sacred instruction, and it was no wonder that “such instruction did no more to convert Hindu children to Christianity than the study of Greek and Roman classics at English schools and universities to convert British youth into pagans.”⁴⁴ Christianity to the Hindu remained merely an assemblage of facts to be learned and memorized, not to be experienced or made his own.

The number of those actually converting (that is, adopting the Christian faith through baptism) was woefully disproportionate to the efforts expended. And though some, like the bishop of Calcutta, did insist that conversion was still a viable goal and that “giving [the Indians] access to our literature and habits of thinking and the familiar use of it would tend very much to dissipate the prejudices and the indifference which now stand in the way of conversion,”⁴⁵ more realistic missionaries recognized the futility of setting conversion as the goal of literary instruction. Rather, they urged that the goal be remodified to aim for the adoption of Christian sentiment if not of Christian doctrine.⁴⁶ The result of such compromise was the increased importance of the educational function of English literature, which, once freed of the obligation to convey doctrinal truths, took on more moralistic, humanistic functions. English literature may have acquired the status of an independent institution serving the functions of religious instruction, but it never quite replaced it altogether. The end point of constant negotiation and accommodation, the interlocking of secular and religious knowledge signaled an acceptance of intellectual Anglicization as a legitimate goal of conversionary attempts.

PROVOKED BY outspoken missionaries like Alexander Duff, William Keane, and William Carey on the one hand and fears of native insubordination on the other, increasing numbers of British administrators, including Charles Trevelyan, Holt Mackenzie, and William McNaughten, discovered a wholly unexpected ally in English literature to maintain control of their subjects under the guise of a liberal education. The discovery came about almost fortuitously. Though literature continued to be taught “classically,” with the emphasis on the history and structure of the language, its potential usefulness in leading Indian youth to a knowledge and acceptance of Christianity quickly became apparent. For example, without once referring to the Bible, government institutions officially committed to secularism realized they were in effect teaching Christianity through Milton, a “standard” in the literary curriculum whose scriptural allusions regularly sent students scurrying to the Bible for their elucidation. (The Bible was in every library and was easily accessible to any student who cared to read it.) Bacon, Addison, and Johnson, also full of scriptural illustrations, had the same effect.

Several steps were initiated to incorporate selected English literary texts into the Indian curriculum, on the claim that these works were supported in their morality by a body of evidence that also upheld the Christian faith. In their official capacity as members of the Council on Education, Macaulay and his brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan, were among those engaged in a minute analysis of English texts to prove what they called the “diffusive benevolence of Christianity” in them. The process of curricular selection was marked by weighty pronouncements on the “sound Protestant Bible principles” in Shakespeare, the “strain of serious piety” in Addison’s Speaator papers, the “scriptural morality” of Bacon and Locke, the “devout sentiment” of Abercrombie, and the “noble Christian sentiments” in Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments (which was hailed as “the best authority for the true science of morals which English literature could supply”). The cataloging of shared features had the effect of convincing detractors that the government could effectively cause voluntary reading of the Bible and at the same time disclaim any intentions of proselytizing.

A self-appointed committee comprising Alexander Duff, Charles Trevelyan, and W. H. Pearce (who was then superintendent of the Baptist Mission Press) proposed to publish on the first of every month a select list of books recommended for general introduction into schools and libraries. In making the selection the committee was supposedly guided by the principle of practical utility, considering the works in every field of knowledge, including the religious, the literary, and the scientific. Nothing was to be rejected unless it had a corrupting influence on morals.⁴⁷ As can be imagined, the Calcutta educated public reacted with indignation to the arrogance of this self-installed group (which was contemptuously labeled the “triumverate of the spelling-book”) in presuming to direct public taste and regulate public morals, to stamp one work with the mark of error and another with the brand of immorality according to the measure of its own infallible judgement, and to reestablish, upon its own private authority, the antiquated office of licenser.

Implicitly, the Duff-Trevelyan-Pearce team set out to counteract what it perceived as the lethargy of the Calcutta School Book Society in publishing a sufficient number of English books. The School Book Society, on the other hand, confessed helplessness in selecting English books according to stipulated regulations set by the governor-generalin-council—that selected books should contain no religious references—for “much the largest proportion of our English literature, from the speller to the most abstruse works on moral and political philosophy, contains repeated admission of divine authority of Christian faith.”⁴⁸

This fortuitous insight into the infusion of English literary texts with Christian references, literally stumbled upon by unsuspecting British officials, provided the solution to the dilemma first raised by Charles Grant. Charles Trevelyan revived that theme to argue that literature was supported in its morality by a body of evidence that also upheld the Christian faith.⁴⁹ With both secularism and religion appearing as political liabilities, English literature appeared to him to represent a perfect synthesis of these two opposing positions, inclining the reader’s thoughts toward religion while maintaining its secular character. The Duff Trevelyan-Pearce committee magisterially interlocked the strength of English literature with the superiority of Christianity. The insistence of these shared features with the elevating religion of Western man had the effect of winning for English literature a higher cultural status and indeed even a greater pragmatic value.

Given the conviction that it was of comparatively little use to teach the people reading if their studies were confined to the legends of Hindu gods, the British task was to supersede these tales with the moral texts of Christian England, “a literature so full of all qualities of loveliness and purity, such new regions of high thought and feeling … that to the dwellers in past days it should have seemed rather the production of angels than men.”⁵⁰ That Indian defects of character could be traced to ancient Indian literature was the thrust of the British assessment of Indian literature, which taught that “revenge is to be cherished, and truth is not to be rewarded as a virtue, or falsehood as a crime.”⁵¹ In fact, it was claimed that the chief reason for the Indians’ opposition to the education of females before the nineteenth century was that Hindu literature was basically immoral and sensuous and that no Hindu woman who acquired learning could later make claims to respectability. In South India for example, the only girls who were literate were the nautch, or dancing girls. It was also widely reported that Hindu society prevented its women from reading by convincing them that they would become widows if they did so.⁵² Charles Trevelyan argued eloquendy for bringing women into the fold of education by providing them with literature of a less corrupt and immoral nature; hence, if only for the socially worthwhile cause of female education, the supplanting of Oriental literature by the purer, cleaner literature of England was all the more imperative.

But if reform of character was the larger objective, neither the missionaries nor the officers of government committed to secular education could reach an agreement about which texts in English literature supplied the best values. The government may have enthusiastically supported the teaching of English literature for the purpose of Christian enlightenment, but the practice in missionary schools did not give the impression that there was undiscriminating acceptance of this view. There was, for instance, some objection to the teaching of Shakespeare and other dramatists in missionary schools, and it came from a view that Shakespeare’s language (which contains words like fortune, fate, muse, and nature, reflected a pagan rather than a Protestant morality and would therefore exert an unhealthy influence on the natives.⁵³

To be sure, the missionary description of Christianity’s affiliation with literature was appropriated in its entirety by government officers. But while the missionaries made such claims in order to force the government to sponsor teaching of the Bible, the administrators used the same argument to prove that English literature made such direct instruction redundant. The successful communication of Christian truths through English literature was affirmed by the observations of clergymen and missionary visitors to the government schools, who frequently were heard to express astonishment at the accuracy and extent of a literature student’s knowledge of Christianity. Judging by the enthusiastic accounts of those appearing before Parliament’s Select Committee on Indian education, there was little exaggeration in the statement that “there is more knowledge of the Bible in the Hindoo College of Calcutta than there is in any public school in England.”⁵⁴ Charles Trevelyan went so far as to claim that there were as many converts from the Hindu College as from missionary schools; in addition, he insisted, they remained more lasting believers of Christianity precisely because their literary education had served to develop their critical understanding more sharply than a purely religious education would have done.

DESPITE THEIR success in forcing government to recognize the need for a religious emphasis in education, many missionaries had reservations about the analytical, intellectual approach to Christian themes adopted in government institutions, sensing that conviction was not equivalent to conversion. Not a few responded with skepticism to the government claim that their subjects displayed new interest in the Bible and other Christian literature, cynically interpreting such gestures by Indians not as a show of reverence for the sacredness of the Scriptures but respect for their rulers.⁵⁵

But unlike the Evangelicals, government administrators were less interested in the conversion of their subjects or the reform of Hindu society than in the possibilities offered by Christian instruction for strengthening commercial pursuits, increasing productivity, and streamlining the administration of government. Francis Warden, succinctly expressing the administration’s willingness to renegotiate the absolutist objective of conversion to Christianity set by missionaries, settled for the more pragmatic objective of producing reliable, industrious servants of empire: “If education should not produce a rapid change in their opinions on the fallacy of their own religion, it will at least render them more honest and industrious subjects.”⁵⁶ If the moral and religious content of literary instruction happened to support the needs of bureaucracy and increase industrial productivity, there was nothing to prevent its appropriation by secular administrators, despite the avowedly strict adherence to religious neutrality. The recruitment of a morally upright, honest, and trustworthy native population was increasingly recognized for its usefulness in lowering the expenses of administration, then largely run by officers specially recruited from England, who often required intensive training for the Indian situation.

In 1844 Lord Hardinge, governor-general from 1844 to 1848, passed a resolution assuring preference in the selection for public office to Indians who had distinguished themselves in European literaturem.⁵⁷ With this act he gave literary study a material and worldly motive that set the general aim of the “intellectual and moral improvement” of the subject population in a wholly new perspective. Not only did he draw upon a common body of assumptions about literature as a repository of certain moral and religious values to argue that they provided the most suitable basis of a public servant’s education; he also made explicit the hitherto tacit belief that literary study regulates public behavior and provides social control.

In teaching natives to place social duty above self-interest, religious and moral values were established as prerequisites for admitting Indians to public office. “Can he be trusted with money?” was inevitably the first question asked before appointing a native Indian to a responsible office, and countless examples were drawn from Indian literature to show that the native culture was deficient in fostering the qualities necessary for public service.⁵⁸

Two complementary arguments directly linked public employment with moral and religious education. On the one hand, if Indians of integrity and honesty were to occupy public office, the moral base of Indian education first had to be suitably developed to provide the appropriate training. But at the same time, the only real way of improving the colonial subjects was not simply by providing education, but by employing them in duties of trust and responsibility. In short, public employment offered reinforcement of the theoretical instruction in morality given in school. If a theory of education was to be a theory of government in the making, the application of abstract principles acquired in schooling was indispensable in order that they not merely remained a “mixed mass of ideas” floating in the mind, but were selectively acted upon by the learner in his response to the demands of state.⁵⁹

James Mill made one of the first systematic arguments linking the employment of Indians with prior instruction in English literature, even if through translations. Seeking to reorganize the legislative functioning of the presidencies, he established two criteria for recruitment into the legislature: first, that the recruits have the “requisite knowledge” to do their job well, and second, that they have “adequate motives for fidelity,” by which he meant not only honesty but also diligence in the execution of any task requiring trust. While conceding that it was impossible to secure in one man all the different kinds of knowledge needed for legislating in India, he suggested that the legislative organ should consist of as small a number of persons as possible possessing the requisite capacities and skills among them. For this purpose he believed that one of them should be a person well acquainted with the laws of England. A professional person from England was the most suitable for that purpose. Along with this official he proposed that there should be another official, the most experienced of the Company’s servants, who would not only be conversant with the details and business of the government but also have a thorough knowledge of the native character and the local situation.

Finally, to maintain close contact with the colonial population Mill urged (over and above the objections of the chief justice in Bengal) that a native “of the highest character and qualifications” be drafted into the legislative work of the government.⁶⁰ By selectively giving Indians a position in the legislative council, Mill wished to enjoin their accountability to public opinion, which he believed to be a more useful method of teaching “responsibility of character’ than conventional forms of punishment and, therefore, a more powerful instrument of social control.

But on the question of English for public employment Mill was ambivalent. When asked whether he thought that the dissemination of the English language would promote the induction of Indians into public service, he answered, “I am not sure that natives would become one whit better adapted for the greater part of the employments in which we should place them, by having the English language, excepting in this, that by becoming acquainted with English literature) they would have a chance of having their understandings better enlightened” (emphasis mine).⁶¹ But even that advantage was better served by the translation of European books into Indian languages:

I do not see for example how, for the administration of justice to his countrymen as a moonsiff, a native would be better qualified, caeteris paribus, by knowing the English language. The other great branch of the local administration is collecting the revenue; acting under the English collector in dealing with the natives; fixing their assessments and realising the demand. In this, also, it does not appear to me that there would be any peculiar advantage to the native in his knowing the English language, provided only the Englishman knows the language of the native.⁶²

Mill’s emphasis on the literature rather than the language of England is consistent with his conviction that the chief priority of British rule was not assimilation of the natives, as many of his colleagues argued, but control. An Indian who thought and behaved like a European instead of merely speaking like one was deemed better suited to fulfill public duties, for “without his being found troublesome by pertinacity in his own opinions, compliance, I think, would be more likely to be the general habit of any native so chosen.”⁶³

While Mill believed that giving Indians positions of responsibility had a reinforcing effect on their sense of duty to society, Charles Trevelyan maintained that the same objective could be achieved by a professional training in law.⁶⁴ After a course of study in English literature, the study of law would allow Indians to see that the abstract moral ideas they had acquired could be put to practical use. Trevelyan, who had on various occasions expressed great concern about the intellectual decline of educated Indians after leaving school, noted that “the main thing is to open to them a proper field of mental and moral activity in after-life.” In professional training in law after a school education he saw the best means of achieving this objective, which in turn would make them “good servants of the State and useful members of society.”

In 1826 a committee on examinations met to give a proposal to the government that literary attainments should be made “conditions of appointment to the law stations in the courts and of permission to practice as law officers in those COurts.”⁶⁵ Though at this point there was no official recognition of English as a qualification for service, the priority given to “literary attainments” (by which even Sanskrit and Arabic could qualify) reinforced James Mill’s argument about the importance of English literature (even in translation) over the English language. The connection between literature and the profession of law is an old and powerful one in Indian education. The Hunter Commission of 1882 noted that law was in many ways eminently suited to the bent of the Indian mind and that the first marks of progress along European lines were made by Indians who occupied judicial roles. Apart from the obvious contribution of literature in providing the required training in eloquence and the power of debate, it imparted a sense of “moral rectitude” and “earnestness of purpose.”⁶⁶

Law was frequently referred to as the most important subject in the Indian curriculum, the preparation for which required familiarity with the works of European authors and “with the results of thought and labour of Europeans on the subjects of every description upon which knowledge is to be imparted to them.”⁶⁷ The alliance between literature and law brought in a greater number of native judges into the civil courts who commanded the respect of Europeans and Indians alike. Praise from Europeans was mixed with some amount of self-congratulation, for native successes were attributed to the progress of education and to “their adoption along with it of that high moral tone which pervades the general literature of Europe.”⁶⁸ Ironically, the first concessions of India’s creative development were made not in reference to its poets or artists, but to its English-educated lawyers and judges: “Modem India has proved by examples that are known to and honoured by all, in this assembly, that her sons can qualify themselves to hold their own with the best of European talent in the Council Chamber, on the Bench, at the Bar, and in the mart. The time cannot be far distant when she will produce her philosopher, her moralist, her reformer.”⁶⁹