4

Rewriting English

[The Indians] daily converse with the best and wisest Englishmen through the medium of their works, and form ideas, perhaps higher ideas of our nation than if their intercourse with it were of a more personal kind.

—C. E. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India (1838), p. 152.

WHILE IDENTIFICATIONS between English literature and Christianity were occurring at one level, at another level the asserted unity of religion and literature was simultaneously disavowed, as evidenced in a series of contradictory statements. The most directly conflicting of these maintained, on the one hand, that English literature is “imbued with the spirit of Christianity” and “interwoven with the words of the Bible to a great degree” so that “without ever looking into the Bible one of those Natives must come to a considerable knowledge of it merely from reading English literature.”¹ But in the same breath a counterclaim was made that English literature “is not interwoven to the same extent with the Christian religion as the Hindoo religion is with the Sanskrit language and literature.”² Charles Cameron, who succeeded Macaulay as president of the Council on Education, provided an illustration for the latter position by arguing that though Milton assumes the truth of Christianity, his works do not bear the same relation to the doctrines of Christianity as does Oriental literature to the tenets of the native religious systems. But when pressed by his examiners to explain the point further, Cameron refused to elaborate, admitting only “a difference in degree.”³

Although it is possible to read the dissociation of English literature from religion as the reactionary response of a cautious British administration, intent on avoiding all imputations of interference in native religions, the explanation does not quite capture the internal maneuverings and realignments that were occurring parallel to the enlistment of literary education in religious instruction. Nor does it adequately acknowledge continuities in the British ideology. For the same reason, to attribute the shift solely to differences between the Evangelicals and the Utilitarians and to increasing Utilitarian influence in educational policy is to assume that there was no coherent or organic relationship between the religious and the secular motives. Rather, the return to secularism is less a rejection of an earlier pedagogical approach stressing the identification of literature with religious value than a secular reinscription of ideas of truth, knowledge, and law derived from the sacred plane. The effect is the gradual removal of religion and traditional religious explanations from one sphere of knowledge after another; the setting up, within each of these spheres, of a secular orientation and autonomous explanatory laws; and ultimately the confinement of religion to matters of religious faith alone, excluding even morals.

With the disavowal of Christianity occurs a subtle but palpable shift in emphasis from the centrality of universal Christian truths to the legitimacy and value of British institutions, laws, and government. It is pertinent to question why affirmation of British institutions required denial of Christian influences in literature, particularly when movement between the theological and the political levels was possible without such repudiation as demonstrated by Charles Grant in his argument for the introduction of Western literature and Christianity into India. Grant’s formulaic “one Power, one Mind” appealed to two interchangeable levels of meaning, the case for monotheism applying equally to that of centralized rule. Offensive to British religious sensibility on one level, Hindu polytheism threatened British political interests on another in its dispersal of authority in multiple figures and in its opposition to centralization in any form. Grant’s plea for instruction in Christian doctrine to render subjects better disposed to British political authority indicates how subversive of that authority a polytheistic society appeared to him.

But given the claims of Christianity, no real purpose seems to be served by Charles Cameron’s denial of the relation between English literature and religion at the very moment of his affirming it. In the absence of further explanation by Cameron himself, what is one to make of the alleged “difference in degree” between that relation and the one obtaining between Indian literature and Indian religion? What possible connection exists between disavowal of Christian influence and affirmation of British institutions, values, and laws?

The answer to these questions is partly the subject of Homi Bhabha’s “Signs Taken for Wonders,” which addresses the problematics of colonial representations of authority. Bhabha provides a compelling philosophical framework for analyzing native interrogation of British authority in relation to the hybridization of power and discourse, the term Bhabha uses to describe the effects of the relative transparency of colonial presence on the acknowledgment of its authority. A double vision inheres in a text recognized for its status in culture (which Bhabha would call a “transparent” text). For every truth expressed in that text there is a falsehood displaced and regulated. Metaphors drawn from photography best illustrate the gradual emergence of the image through a process of reversal, enlargement, and projection. If the acknowledgment of authority depends exclusively on the “immediate, unmediated” visibility of the rules of recognition, then the Christian text unequivocally and tautologically conveys the presence of authority through being a Christian text, displacing all non-Christian texts as a source of value. In other words, Christianity provides at once the frame of reference and the rules of recognition for the acceptance of its own authority.

But paradoxically, the more strongly felt the presence—the more transparent the authority—the more resistance is engendered. Bhabha illuminatingly points out that resistance to authority is

not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention, nor is it the simple negation or exclusion of the “content” of another culture…. It is the effect of an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial power—hierarchy, normalization, marginalization, and so forth. For domination is achieved through a process of disavowal that denies the differance of colonialist power—the chaos of its intervention as Entstellung, its dislocatory presence—in order to preserve the authority of its identity in the universalist narrative of nineteenth-century historical and political evolutionism [emphasis mine].⁴

The culturally unambiguous text, the transparent text that draws attention to itself as the voice of authority, expresses its truths by displacing others, which are then designated as falsehoods. The culturally ambiguous or unassertive text, on the other hand, makes no claims for authority or truth. Its contents are not presented as assertions of truth but as ideas developed in the crucible of history. The validity of one idea over another is not established by arbitrary truth claims but by the progress of history, which alone has the power to test the relative applicability of ideas to contexts other than those from which they derived. Christianity and Hinduism are opposed religions only in an a historical perspective. Historically considered, they are part of a single continuum of development, their apparent differences the effect of historical change and movement. Concepts like absolute truth have no place in the relativized domain of history, where there is only formation, process, and flux.

But the moment texts express “truth,” they cease to be part of history. At that moment they become transparent. Ambivalence characterizes the text caught in the nexus between process and state, observation and assertion, identity and difference. Paradoxically, it is the text’s instability on the issue of its identity—is it historical process or cultural artifact?—that generates resistance to itself. The effect of uncertainty estranges the symbols of a Christian nation enshrined in its literature, and the possibility of routinized responses to them is consequently problematized.

Disavowal is at once an effort at resolution between these two contrary states and a justification of two mutually exclusive effects, one seeking identity within history and the other seeking differentiations outside it, transcending history. With disavowal, the conditions for recognition of authority in the text are changed, even though the text still remains the same. The equation between the English nation and the Christian God is rewritten as (but emphatically not supplanted by) an equation between the English nation and new forms of knowledge produced by historical development and material progress.

The religious imperative inexorably commanded Indian education toward a situation where, unless another frame of reference for recognition of the authoritative structure of instruction was established, the transparency of motive and intention treacherously threatened to destroy the whole edifice of British political control from within. The conflict of truth claims visibly marked the intention of conversion, overlying the content of instruction to render its truth value immaterial. The Serampore missionary William Carey often exasperatingly exclaimed that Christianity in India had of necessity to build into itself the activity of ratiocination, as those who were the object of conversion refused to accept Christian doctrines without rigorous proof. Christian instruction in India, he pointed out, required a different strategy than would normally have been followed in England, resorting more regularly to validations and proofs to overwhelm native resistance to Christianity.⁵

Disavowal, validating belief by the techniques of modern knowledge, deflects from the Christian text’s self-referential, self-confirming aspects. The strategic value of disavowal confers upon modern knowledge, as a product of historical development and increased human capacities for reason, the status of independence from systems of belief based on pure faith. Proving what faith only proposes confirms far more than the mere truthfulness of religious belief. More important, the progress of knowledge provides the groundwork for demonstrating the increased capacity of the human mind to penetrate mysteries understood only otherwise as hieratic phenomena.

The dissociation performed by Charles Cameron is therefore less a denial of Christian influence in European literature than a rewriting of Christianity as empirical knowledge. This is quite different from the enlistment of Christianity in an intellectual revolution in the expectation that the act of thinking and reasoning from the force of evidence would culminate in a universalism of belief (“we must all come to one religion,” wrote Charles Grant) destroying the gigantic edifice of Hinduism. However strongly Charles Grant and other Evangelicals may have invoked reason as a means of attenuating the hold of Hinduism, their Christianity was firmly rooted in the tenets of revealed religion. While embracing the rigor, discipline, and precision of empiricism’s most exemplary disciplines, science and history, Evangelicalism vigorously resisted their explanatory frameworks. Thus, even though it was said that liberal education could not be imparted without unshackling Hinduism, this was not to confer an autonomous status on modern knowledge, to which Christianity was merely a support. On the contrary, in the eyes of missionaries Western empiricism was invested with extraordinary religious power as an effect of its defying “any man to state a single proposition relating to math, physics, metaphysics, or morals that does not infringe upon Hinduism” and as an effect of its affirming that “there is no truth or reality in the universe of which Hinduism is not a direct contradiction,” making it “impossible to enunciate a single truth without contradicting and controverting Hinduism.”⁶

The dual tension in the content of Christian instruction did not go unnoticed by colonial subjects. Though educated young Indians had few objections to studying the life of Christ, they were violently hostile to particular doctrines of Christianity, especially revelation and grace. On the evidence of college debates, essays, and literary contests at Hindu College, for instance, it is apparent that students were quite adept in querying the conflicting purposes of the instruction given them. If Christianity were truly a religion based on reason, evidence and history as projected, many asked, why did confirmation in that religion depend entirely on accepting two central doctrines that demanded faith rather than the exercise of reason? Many of the debates held at Hindu College revolved around the paradox of Christianity being structured on the twin principles of revelation and reason, setting it off markedly from other religions that were informed by either one or the other principle.

The forced distinctions between religions that doctrine imposed impelled questioning students toward postures of ecumenism. The growing fascination of English-educated Bengalis, such as Rammohun Roy, with Unitarianism, for instance, is a measure of their intense dissatisfaction with the doctrinal aspects of Christianity and their ambition to intellectualize it in much the same way that they sought to refine Hinduism.⁷ The manifesto of the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, formed in September 1821, included the following response by Rammohun to the question asked of all who joined: “Why do you frequent a Unitarian Place of Worship, instead of numerously attended established Churches?” Answered Rammohun: “Because Unitarians believe, profess, and inculcate the doctrine of the divine unity—a doctrine which I find firmly maintained both by the Christian Scriptures and by most of our ancient writings commonly called the Vedas.”⁸

The British disavowal of doctrinal influence reflects a perception of the relation of Christianity to the empirical branches of science and history as having to exist in more than neutral or passive ways. The representation of Christianity as inherently predisposing individuals to rational scrutiny ascribes an ambiguous, even fortuitous relation between belief and evidence. More important, such representation inevitably reestablishes that same frame of self-reference to account for the truthfulness of its belief system. Secularization, of which disavowal is its expressive vehicle, confers a new value and importance on literary study as the medium through which religious truth is reinscribed as a form of intellectual production: the Christian text is desacralized in proportion to the presentation of its “truths,” not as immanent or constitutive of an immutable system of objective reality, but as produced by mind, itself a product of the evolution of history, society, and culture. The history of human intelligence being inseparable from human history, the shift from the text to the mind producing it necessarily establishes texts in relation to other human institutions. The determination of truth cannot now be confined to the text but requires an expansion of its boundaries to include a larger, more relativized view of history—of the text evolving with other institutions, language, norms, and laws.

So even as the religious motive introduced a new tone and direction to Indian education, there occurred a subtle shift in purpose from an assertion of Christian truths to an endorsement of British laws, institutions, and government. Religious influences are carefully screened out in the process, culminating in a revivified, albeit homogenized conception of literature as entirely constituted by language to which new cultural values are then attached.

The secularization of Christian truths in the literary education of Indians moves through three distinct but overlapping stages: its direction is set by the relativization of cultural absolutes, producing a heightened emphasis on the intellectual motive in literary instruction, as well as an alignment of the functions of literature with those of history. The argument that Allan Bloom has recently advanced in The Closing of the American Mind, that cultural relativism anesthetizes critical judgment in the act of equalizing all value, resists considering that, historically, cultural relativism has had more than the meaning he ascribes to it. In any event, the view that discrimination is possible only when absolute standards are available assumes an individual mind emptied of all personal identity, culture, and history, a mind reduced to passivity and acquiescence. British colonial administrators were more astute in recognizing the absurdity of such assumptions, at least for the purposes of achieving success in their educational goals of political control and assimilation. The British perception of the relativization of moral value as a powerful means of ensuring intellectual control over the native population is the subject of this chapter. The next chapter will deal with the British pedagogical use of historical analysis as a method of teaching colonial subjects to identify error in their own systems of thought and, simultaneously, confirm Western principles of law, order, justice, and truth.

IN UNEXPECTED ways, affirmation of British secular institutions and laws gained fresh momentum as a result of the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy immediately preceding Macaulay’s minute of 1835. Among the Orientalists, those who were most directly drawn into the debate were James Harington, J. P. Larkins, W. W. Martin, John C. Sutherland, Henry Shakes pear, Holt Mackenzie, Horace Wilson, Andrew Stirling, William B. Bayley, Henry Prinsep, Nathaniel Halhed, and John Tytler. What united these men, disparate in temperaments and interests, was their intense involvement with Indian political and cultural life, all at about roughly the same time, from 1805 to 1820. Wilson was undoubtedly the most renowned of the group. Originally attached to the medical service of the East India Company, he arrived in Calcutta in 1808. His translations of Kalidas and the Rig-Vedas and his editions of Sanskrit grammar and the Hindu law earned him a wide reputation, whereupon he became secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1811-1833). From his position as secretary to the Committee of Public Instruction he advocated numerous reforms of the Indian curriculum, including the introduction of European science and English literature alongside the teaching of Oriental languages. Henry Prinsep and Nathaniel Halhed were second only to Wilson in dedication to public service combined with scholarship in Sanskrit grammar.⁹

An indirect and somewhat ironic outcome of the debate between Orientalists and Anglicists, among whom the most prominent were Macaulay, Charles Trevelyan, and Alexander Duff, was a reformulation of the objectives of educational policy. The Anglicist-Orientalist controversy grew out of a proposal, mooted by the General Council of Public Instruction in Calcutta, to withdraw funds from the support of Oriental learning in favor of the promotion of the English language and literature. The conflict was not simply over language or literature, but the status of knowledge itself. The debate was conducted in terms that transformed the choice between languages into a choice between the promotion of truth and the propagation of error. The Orientalists continued to insist that European learning should make its own way instead of being forced on the people through the single channel of English instruction. The relative success of missionaries in providing modern instruction through the vernaculars encouraged Orientalists to believe that the truths of European or English literature and science would be better received “by the effect of conviction alone” than by withdrawing all support to the Oriental systems of learning in order to make way for the European.

But the Orientalists had to contend with the Christian framework within which their opponents’ argument resolutely operated, regardless of whether the Anglicists themselves were by inclination secularists or not. The Anglicists identified their position so completely with the Christian and drew upon Christian principles to sanction their arguments so consistently that supporting Oriental literatures without invoking the Christian framework was tantamount to endorsing the non-Christian view of life they conveyed. Thus in supporting the Indian languages the Orientalists were placed in the unenviable position of appearing not only to wish to promote error but to reject Christianity itself. It was an argument the Anglicists had little hesitation in using at the slightest opportunity to discredit their opponents.

William Wilberforce, shrewdly discerning the Achilles’ heel of the Orientalists, translated their ambivalence toward Christianity into a benevolent view of Hinduism, which he then traced to a (at least for many of his fellow Englishmen) wholly contemptible origin—French Enlightenment skeptics like Voltaire, who deliberately cultivated the myth that “the principles of the Hindoos are so good, their morals are so pure, better than our own,” in order to discredit Christianity.¹⁰ An appeal to the horrors unleashed by political anarchy in France was sufficient to alert the English Parliament to an Orientalist project of subverting Christianity. Unless the Orientalists were prepared to admit that they were indeed denying Christianity, they found themselves in a situation where they had no other choice but to appropriate the techniques and strategies of the Anglicists to promote their case.

Caught in a hopelessly untenable position, the Orientalists were pressured into the realization that the only justifiable grounds for the teaching of Oriental literature were the political. Sensing the possibilities of maneuvering around their opponents by appealing to their strategic interests, a group of Orientalists responding to James Mill’s 1824 dispatch,¹¹ refocused the issue by questioning the political wisdom of an educational policy that directed the learner to truth by blocking out error. Anglicism was especially vulnerable to the charge of depriving Indians of familiarity with their own system of learning. Not a few Anglicists were acutely aware of the liability of a policy that lulled colonial subjects into passive acceptance of their rulers’ culture without adequately fortitying them against the “errors” in their own tradition. The Anglicists might have found themselves on sturdier ground had the indigenous tradition already been reduced to irrelevance in Indian cultural life. But as long as the traditional learning continued to flourish in other types of institutions and was indelibly woven into the fabric of Indian society, barring Indians from knowledge of it merely encouraged two independent, parallel systems. As a result, the Anglicists had enormous difficulty contesting the Orientalists’ main criticism that without significant interaction between the two systems, the impact of Anglicism on the indigenous tradition was virtually negligible.

The failings of Anglicism to produce effective change constituted the basic thrust of the 1824 letter. Persistently it remonstrated against the omission of Oriental learning as jeopardizing British rule because, in the absence of a native population trained to be critically aware of its own traditions, the authority of the priestly classes was left virtually intact. By this logic, removing Indians from familiarity with the tenets of that system was analogous to removing physicians from a knowledge of the very disease they were expected to cure. In conclusion, the letter advised that if a class of enlightened teachers and translators was indeed the object of British policy, it was imperative “to quality the same individuals highly in their own system as well as ours, in order that they may be as competent to refute errors as to impart truth, if we would wish them to exercise any influence upon the minds of their countrymen.”¹²

In sum, the Orientalist defense rested on the argument that if the educated Indian was to be enlisted in the cause of overwhelming priestly authority, the official educational policy had to reflect this political goal more clearly than was then the case. The exclusiveness of a policy that favored English and eliminated the native languages deprived it of any real political force, for by locating truth in a single cultural tradition to be apprehended solely through direct instruction in it, the Anglicist doctrine effectively suspended all confrontation with error, disabling serious, critical questioning of the native tradition. The reversal of this situation entailed a conception of truth not as a priori but as a process involving active dialectical effort. Such a conception necessarily demanded a broadening of the content of education and the inclusion of error as an object of instruction.

Indeed, as the Orientalist John Tytler wrote to Macaulay in response to his Anglicist doctrine, the disinterested love of knowledge demanded that the study of indigenous language, history, and culture be promoted in tandem with European learning:

If we destroy it [Oriental studies] we shall degrade both ourselves and the people we undertake to improve. A history of the successive systems of Science and philosophy though it may not teach the true nature of things will yet afford much valuable information of another kind. It will teach what mankind have thought and how they have reasoned about these things and the successive steps by which they have arrived at Truth. It is in short the history of human opinions and this is at least as important as that of human actions.¹³

Dismissing die Anglicist view that Western systems of learning inherently possessed a self-evident power to demolish Hindu error, Tytler redirected attention to the analysis of the properties of truth as a prerequisite to the task of distinguishing error. His project of cultural decontextualization contested the imperative of presenting truths in absolute form in order to persuade disbelievers of their validity. Though Tytler scrupulously avoided going so far as to suggest that Oriental learning had claims to “state of the art” knowledge, he conceded a vital place to it as a stage in the development of human knowledge or the “history of opinions.” The historical sense crucially redefined truth in more relativistic terms as knowledge that developed not independently of man’s intellectual development and history, but rather as a product of human development. From this standpoint Oriental studies acquired legitimacy as a necessary stage in the growth of knowledge. At the same time, of course, accommodation of two radically different versions of reality did not necessarily endorse Eastern learning in any way or render it comparable to Western thought. Nor did it imply approval of the patently false premises upon which Oriental studies were supposed to rest.

To be sure, missionaries, particularly those working out of Serampore, had long made an argument for error as the basis of instruction in Christian truth and thus unwittingly participated in a shift encouraged by the Orientalists in the direction of a relativistic secularism. The missionary practice, of which Alexander Duff’s catechetical instruction is a good example, suggested a conception of truth understood not as predetermined goal to which the learner moved in an undeviating, unerring path, but as dynamic activity forcing the learner to sift out error from all that he encountered. Far from being an annoying nuisance, the native languages were regarded by missionaries as absolutely crucial to the determination of truth. As Kenneth Ingham’s study clearly shows, missionaries played a vital role in setting up printing presses, undertaking the publication of schoolbooks, translating the Bible into the various Indian languages, standardizing the indigenous languages, and encoding the literatures in script form.¹⁴ The Serampore missionaries had not for a moment believed that the mere substitution of the Indian languages and literature by English would automatically lead to the sharpening of the Indians’ intellectual faculties. Rather, they felt an intermediate step was required before the Indians whom they wished to see trained would be in a position to perceive the truths embedded in English literature. That step was defined as submitting the Indians to a rigorous examination of their own literature. To criticisms that this manner of instruction would only encourage them to continue in their own beliefs the arch response was that “truth need fear nothing from inquiry—ignorance alone perpetuates error.”¹⁵

The “difference in degree” between Western and Eastern literatures, which Charles Cameron hesitated to specify when interrogated in the parliamentary sessions on education, had long been intuited and, in fact, had already been named by missionaries. Western literature is often described in missionary publications as a form of intellectual production, in contrast to Oriental literature, which allegedly set itself up as a source of divine authority. The Serampore Baptist missionary William Carey best expressed the missionary viewpoint when he lamented, in comparing the Hindu epic the Mahabharata to Homer, that “[were] it, like his Iliad, only considered as a great effort of human genius, I should think it is one of the first productions in the world, but alas! it is the ground of Faith to Millions of men; and as such must be held in the utmost abhorrence.”¹⁶

Carey’s distinction emphasized an arbitrariness in Oriental conceptions of truth, whose claims were supposed to derive from the power of the explicator (the class learned in Arabic and Sanskrit) to mediate between the popular mind and sacred knowledge. But though Carey made a sincere effort to understand the power of the sacred in Indian society, by and large he shared the failings of many of his fellow missionaries in their blindness toward the immense cultural position of the learned classes, particularly the Muslim learned men (maulvis). The failures were often related to problems of interpretation, of gross misunderstanding of the cultural functions of the maulvis as interpreters and not simply teachers of the sacred texts. In a scathing critique of missionary ignorance of the symbols of native cultural power and the great harm caused thereby to British rule in India, a writer for the Asiatic Journal cautioned his readers that knowledge of Oriental literature involved far more than mere reading and translating of the texts.

Being ill-acquainted with the language of the people, and unable to read the Alcoran in the original, [the missionaries] often attack imaginary doctrines and creeds which the Mahommedans do not profess. The Alcoran, it is admitted, includes absurd, puerile and immoral dogmas, but the teachers of Islamism, in their glosses and commentaries, contrive to palliate these ridiculous passages and render them plausible by some explanation. These explications the missionaries ought carefully to study, that he may direct his refutation to them. This requires a profound acquaintance with the Arabic tongue, which the majority of these travellers despise.¹⁷

The writer of this article was shrewd enough to see that significant shifts in cultural power would come about only through a confrontation with the interpretations and not simply the texts alone and that to challenge the explications was to challenge the explicator and loosen his power over the people. Harold Bloom’s reminder in A Map of Misreading that “all interpretation depends upon the antithetical relationship between meanings, and not on the supposed relation between a text and its meaning” (p. 76) has as much relevance in this context as in any other. The Protestant orientation to texts as the sole source of authority frequently blinded missionaries to the basic fact that the sacred texts of the East are not finite but cumulative, consisting of interpretations layered one on top of the other through successive readings. In failing to see, for example, that the Koran is more than a single text, that it is in fact a complex unit that includes the text and its interpretations or explications, their efforts at conversion through an appeal to reason completely missed the mark.

Carey’s distinction, linking the authority wielded by the native learned classes to the literature they superintended, contained the outlines of a strategy for undermining their role as sole explicators of texts construed as divine knowledge. If by blurring the lines between literature and religion the Indian learned classes had arrogated all power to decipher texts, an erosion of that power base—a relocation of authority away from the explicator—had undoubtedly to come from the action of texts, understood as independently verifiable by human reason.

That process is brilliantly summarized as willed strategy in a report filed by the president of the Board of Education at Bombay in April 1853:

For my own part, I believe that Providence dictated this policy [of religious neutrality] as the means of riveting the power of England over this country; but it is clear that we cannot expect a blessing to rest upon a violation of the public faith, solemnly pledged by conquerors to those submitting to their authority.

And what, I would ask, is the course to be followed by a great and generous country under such circumstances? Its faith is pledged, and the opinion of its scrupulous good faith is the keystone of the arch which supports its mighty power over these lands. Surely, surely there is but one course open.

We have the subtle Brahmin, the ardent Mahomedan, the meek, though zealous, Christian missionary, each and all relying on this promise of noninterference, and pressing the evidence of his respective faith on the attention of the people of India; and when this people look up to the Government and say, “You tolerate all religions; all cannot be true; show us what is truth,” the government can only answer, “Our own belief is known to you; we are ready to give a reason for the faith that is in us; and we will place you in a situation by which you may judge whether those reasons are convincing or not. We will teach you History by the light of its two eyes, Chronology and Geography; you will therein discover the history and system of every religion. We will expand your intellectual powers to distinguish truth from falsehood by the aid of Logic and Mathematics; and we will, in the sciences of Astronomy, Geology, Chemistry and Botany, lay open to you all we know of the firmament above, of the nature of the earth on which we live, and the organization of the flowers which enamel its surface; and with your perceptions of the power and wisdom of your God and ours, thus cleared and enlarged, we may safely leave you to distinguish truth for yourselves … Each member of the Board of Education, be he Christian, Mahomedan, Hindoo or Parsee, is engaged in one common object; viz., the advancement of truth. We differ only as to that which is truth, and, like other discreet men, we never talk on that respecting which we are sure to differ.¹⁸

Though a policy of non-interference may have been originally adopted for reasons of expediency, in this report it is rapidly transformed into a medium of self-presentation. As a symbol of free intellectual inquiry, religious non-interference generated an image of the Englishman as benign, disinterested, detached, impartial, and judicious. Indeed, British authority depended vitally on the stability of the image and on the consistency with which it was preserved and relayed to the native mind. From this standpoint, violations of the policy of religious neutrality were of more than military consequence: in more far-reaching ways, by breaching the “good faith” through which the British exercised their authority over the natives, they threatened to unmask the illusions that British rule in India required for its legitimation—illusions of trust, honor, and obligation.

Yet in a land where, as the missionary Joshua Marshman said, both Hindus and Muslims were known to attach high religious feeling even to secular education, it was political folly to leave British noninterference to be interpreted by the Indians in their own way, such that it might be construed “not as liberty of conscience but as carelessness about any religion.”¹⁹ Interpreted so, religious toleration had the potential of earning for the British not the image of benevolence and noncoerciveness but its very converse—an image of irresponsibility, indifference, and disdain of duty. If the rulers’ faith was perceived to be shallow, much the same could be expected of their oaths.²⁰ British pledges of respect for the beliefs of others had no content, no value, if the inference to be drawn from neutrality was that no discernible belief system lay behind them.

The only escape from this predicament, albeit one fraught with risks, was to convince the Indians, as the report advised, “that the government cultivate their own religion.”²¹ Doing this without seeming to coerce it on their subjects took England back to the position outlined by Charles Grant. As with Grant, here too beyond the crossroads of the dilemma stood English literature, offering itself as both subject of study and method of analysis—the means through which the claims of Western belief were at once asserted and the grounds of its truthfulness vindicated. What made this twofold activity possible, as the president’s report implied, is English literature’s double stance toward reason and faith, utility and tradition, and empiricism and revelation—a stance obscuring its affiliations with institutional religion (and the entire system of social and political formation of which it was a part) through its appeal to an objective, empirical reality apprehended solely by mind.

Charles Cameron’s reticence before his examiners takes on more meaning in this context, for his reluctance to affirm unambiguously literature’s relation to Christianity undoubtedly stemmed from an awareness of the operational value of English literature’s double stance in reinforcing the validity of the knowledge to be imparted and, by extension, of the authority of those imparting it. Further, literature’s doubleness enabled the validation of Christian belief by the disciplinary techniques of European learning while at the same time deflecting attention from its self-referential, self-confirming aspects. Its power rested on the idea that European disciplines, being products of human reason, were independent of systems of belief based on pure faith. Therefore, by proving what faith merely proposed, they confirmed far more than the mere truthfulness of Christian belief; more important, they demonstrated the power and authority of the Western mind to penetrate the mysteries of the natural and phenomenal world.

The Protestant Reformation provided a historical model for the relocation of authority in the body of knowledge represented by English literary texts. The characterization of English literature as intellectual production implicated a different process of reading, requiring the exercise of reason rather than unquestioning faith. On the point of literary truth there is no fiercer testimony than Alexander Duff’s rebuttals to early Orientalist claims that Indian literature was no different than English literature in its predilection for the absurd and the incredible. (One Orientalist, for example, cited Milton’s description of Satan in Hell as “too gross and ludicrous … a conceit truly diabolical.”)²² Duff categorically dismissed any comparison of the study of Indian literature with the study of Western literature on the grounds that classical literature was read in Europe as literary production and not as divine authority, as it was in India. Duff persistently discriminated between mental capabilities as proof that the Western orientation to literary study permitted myth to be read as fable without any practical influence, whereas in India the principles and facts of myth were taught and believed in as truth. While conceding that English literature had its “foul spots,” works that defied the norms of propriety and decorum, Duff maintained that it was preposterous to compare the literature of England, which he characterized as a “complete course of sound knowledge free of error in every branch of inquiry, literary, scientific, and theological,” with the literature of India, which could not produce “a single volume on any one subject that is not studded with error, far less a series of volumes that would furnish anything bearing the most distant resemblance to a complete range of information in any conceivable department of useful knowledge.”²³

But Duff’s moral emphasis gave way to other concerns that were more pragmatic and empirical in nature, and these can be seen in the British critiques of the Indian propensity to confer upon myth the status of a historical genre. The British objection to the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata rested on the claim that they pretended to do the work of history, whereas Western literature had no such pretension and made a clear distinction between works of the imagination and records of history. The supposed blurring of historical and mythical consciousness in Indian literature, contributing to its falsehoods and inaccuracies, was the chief point of attack by two of the most celebrated critics of Oriental art, James Mill and Hegel. Mill refused to accept the Ramayana and the Mababharata as history as some Orientalist scholars did; he refused even to accept them as allegory and argued that efforts to do so were only ways of softening their deformities.²⁴ Both Mill and Hegel equated historical composition with intellectual maturity and pointed to the absence of historical records in certain societies as proof of their low position in the scale of civilization.²⁵ Mill maintained that societies reach stability, coherence, and identity when they are able to make use of “permanent signs” and to preserve their understanding of events through historical records. In his view the use of arts and letters to record events coincided with the advance of culture, which he defined as the ability to observe with accuracy. On the basis of this definition, he argued that epic poetry forestalled such advance by replacing precision of observation with a sense of mythic wonder and by celebrating events solely for the pleasure of the emotions, thus encouraging exaggeration above accuracy.

Mill’s disdain for poets who assume the role of historians was not idiosyncratic. Leading nineteenth-century periodicals such as the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh Review, the Asiatic Journal, the Oriental Herald, and the Calcutta Review regularly published articles and reviews condemning the historical inaccuracies of Indian literature. In a review of Tod’s famous historical work on the antiquities of Rajasthan, for instance, the Quarterly Review lamented that the annals of earlier cultures were lost in the mists of a mythic or fabulous period peopled by dimly humanized forms of gods or men magnified to superhuman stature. The same critic claimed that genuine historical records (defined as being “less imaginative”) were to be found only among the heterodox systems of Buddhism or Jainism. Distinctly echoing Mill, who held that the inflated, metaphorical style of describing events failed to convey any real sense of what actually occurred, the reviewer condemned the poetic imagination for throwing a veil over events and characters: “Until history has condescended to the sober march of prose, it does not restrain itself from the license offiction, or assume the authority of truth.”²⁶ The alignment of poetry with falsehood and prose with truth and accuracy successfully dismissed Oriental epic narratives as nothing more than illusion and error. Furthermore, the Utilitarian premises upon which this judgment rested—that what is good is “useful” and what is bad is imaginative—provided literary criticism not only with a principle for setting one genre above another but for also totally excluding certain genres from consideration as serious art.

The imprecision of Indian literature was not only represented as aesthetically repugnant to human sensibility, but also deemed to be politically treacherous. A history of perfidy and calumny was painted as the legacy of Oriental historical accounts and their exaggerations seen as a devious strategy of early writers to falsify, obscure, and mystify events in order to conceal their own violence, injustice, and usurpation of power.²⁷ Indian historical literature was depicted as entirely constituted by narratives of royal personages and royal pastimes that deliberately avoided showing the operations of power or the bearing of political and other events on the condition of the people.²⁸ Elliott and Dowson’s History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (1867) employed a unique method to expose Indian “pretensions” to literary or historical truth. As the title suggests, the authors deliberately present historical narratives written by Indians in order to show that in Indian histories “there is little enabling us to observe the practical operation of a despotic government and rigorous and sanguinary laws, and the effect upon the great body of the nation of these injurious influences and agencies.”²⁹ The act of reading and writing true history and true literature was, in effect, identified with an act of demystification to dislodge those who, under the cover of misty romances and allegories, had installed and perpetuated their rule over the people.

The Elliot and Dowson rewriting of the “despotic Orient” typically provided ballast for the view that a literature claiming to provide divine revelation diluted the capacity of the individual mind to resist the manipulations of a priestly caste. By the terms of this argument, not only did Oriental literature lull the individual into passive acceptance of the most fabulous incidents as actual occurrences; more alarmingly, the acceptance of mythological events as factual description stymied the mind’s capacity to extrapolate a range of meanings for analysis and verification in the real world.

Reason is thus made synonymous with the moral imagination and the moral imagination, in turn, with the ability to make discriminations and choose judiciously from a wide spectrum of possible meanings. The association of reason with an approach to literary texts as types of human activity reinforces the logic of Protestantism: the products of human consciousness are required to submit to interpretation because their creating subject is man, not God, man in all his imperfection and fallibility. Because interpretation by definition entails a plurality of response, the receiving mind is pressured all the more to weigh the truth value of each possibility, thereby activating rational processes of discrimination and judgment—intellectual skills held by the British to be utterly alien to a literature conceived as divine agency.

Furthermore, once established as an example of human invention drawing its material from a rationally perceived world, English literature lent itself more readily to representations of intellectual rigor and of disciplined reasoning from the force of evidence. The elevation of individual and closely observed experience over received tradition provided an empirical basis objectifying the knowledge contained in its body of texts. The Cartesian influence is especially strong in the argument that the element of doubt attending upon the senses sets the mind in a state of intellectual ferment, forcing it to do battle with error until a full knowledge of the truth is reached. An individually realized truth, being neither a priori nor predetermined, defies the arbitrary definitions laid down by class or caste. Since it would have proceeded through the stages of rational investigation—of detached observation, analysis, verification, and application—its claims to universal, objective knowledge are presumably greater than the claims to truth of received tradition.

NOT ALL Orientalists assented to the project of destabilization of the learned classes. Though supportive of the plan to include both Western and Oriental systems of learning, Horace Wilson was skeptical about the wisdom of undermining the position of the maulvis and pundits, an action that he felt adversely affected the traditional respect for learning in India and in turn prevented young Indians from deriving tangible benefits from Western education. The dangers of creating a separate class of English scholars and excluding the learned men from the political system of India were for him too real to be minimized. An arch foe of Macaulay, Horace Wilson continued to insist that the learned classes’ hostility had been aroused less by the introduction of English than by the termination of funds supporting Arabic and Sanskrit. His reluctance to antagonize the learned classes took the form of a vigorous defense of the cultural value and importance of the Indian classical languages, the “congenial imagery and sentiments” from which the Indians would never be weaned away, no matter how strongly the claims of the superiority of Western culture were advanced.³⁰

Wilson proposed a compromise, advising that the maulvis and pundits be employed as teachers and translators of Western texts. Agreeing in the main with Mill’s letter of 1824 that the most effective agents for change are those educated in the very errors that are to be reformed, Wilson refined the “Trojan horse” strategy of destruction from within, to urge that the traditional men of learning of India also be co-opted as “additional instruments in our power.”³¹

Up to a point Wilson’s argument was acceptable to the General Council of Public Instruction. But he drew much sharper reactions when he advised that England interest itself in the intellectual and literary efforts that were traditionally venerated by India’s learned men and, through them, lead the Indians to “chaster models of taste.” The vehemence with which Wilson was denounced by even his fellow Orientalists, leave alone the Anglicists, exposes the fundamental ambiguity underlying the support of Oriental learning. Oriental studies were allowed a place in the curriculum on the understanding that language pursued as a means to an end (for instance, conducting legal business) was less likely to exert a disruptive influence than when pursued as an end in itself. The encouragement of Oriental learning was tolerated only to the extent that it remained a field of legal research, Arabic and Sanskrit being closely tied to Muslim and Hindu law respectively. And when the laws were made intelligible to the people, there was every likelihood that even these languages would cease to be cultivated except for philological or antiquarian purposes. But under no circumstances was the Bentinck administration or any other administration following his willing to support Oriental learning if it meant the perpetuation of Oriental languages and literature as the source of intellectual values, morals, and religion.

The same thinking underscored the argument made in the proposal for the establishment of the universities of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in 1857 along the pattern of London University. Charles Cameron, who succeeded Macaulay as president of the Council on Education and campaigned vigorously for a centralized university system, went so far as to call for the total exclusion of the classical languages of India—Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian—on the grounds that they were inextricably bound with systems of “pagan theology.”³² Any course of study in these languages, he insisted, would only perpetuate the errors that were the cause of the intellectual degradation of the Indian people. Instead, he proposed that students be examined in the vernacular languages, which did not yet have a literary tradition comparable to that of the classical languages and through which Western knowledge could be more directly disseminated without having to pass through what he considered the filters of prejudice, ignorance, and error. Such a scheme, which is nothing short of an attempt to separate language from literature, was advanced as the primary means of developing a new national literature from which the disruptive elements of religion are screened out.³³

The distinctions drawn between English and Indian literature in their relation to religion culminate in a purified, even sterilized conception of literature as constituted entirely by language. Disavowal of religious influence on literature acquires its most severe form in a plan that virtually endorses a classical approach to literary studies, establishing language rather than belief and tradition as a source of value and culture. By 1855 statements such as the following, analyzing the spread of English education to other provinces of British India, were increasingly common:

If [Indian students] are to be imbued with the spirit of English Literature, which all in government colleges seem to have in view, they should learn something of that source from which it draws so much of its glorious inspiration. It is in this respect that all English studies have been imperfectly carried on in India, the native students being utterly ignorant of the spirit of antiquity and all classical references, and what is worse, knowing nothing of those elements which enter so largely into the structure and history of the language.³⁴

The drift toward a classical emphasis in English studies in India is especially remarkable considering that the classical curriculum that still held full sway in England as late as the 1860s remained the center of a raging controversy on whether “training of the mind” was compatible with “useful knowledge.”³⁵ At a time when utility was a rallying cry for reform of Oriental learning, English studies took a surprising direction in India, veering toward the same practices that were under fire in the homeland. Wherever new schools were established and a course in Oriental literature set up alongside a course in English literature, a classical approach invariably marked the teaching of English.³⁶

THE REVIVAL of a classical pedagogy of English literary instruction in India coincided with the declining status of polite language and literature in England.³⁷ The growth of a mass British reading public had created what many alarmed critics saw as a distaste for fine reading and, more seriously, threatened the survival of all intellectual greatness and refinement. In proportion to the decline of “refined” reading there occurred an increase in works of amusement; the revolution in literary production, both in the number and nature of its publications, was brought about by the increased wealth of the higher classes and the increased literacy of the lower classes. Half a century earlier, only well-educated people constituted a significant reading population; by the 1820s the rate of literacy ensured a wider reading public. The changing constitution of the English readership, influencing the type of literature that was being consumed, produced, and taught, augmented the fear of the established classes that other nations, particularly France and Germany, were advancing on England with more “useful” and “ennobling” productions. Amusement had become almost the exclusive business of life in England, threatening the extinction of all intellectual greatness and refinement. In an age of mass readership, literature seemed to have become a mere reflection of current sentiments and to have abandoned almost entirely its mission as an “enlightener” and “improver” of men.

The lack of literary culture in the middle-class environment from which a typical secondary school boy came was replicated in the schools.³⁸ Contemporary periodicals deplored the neglect of English classics in the schools and demanded reform in the pattern of English studies if English youth were not to be lost forever to declining tastes.³⁹ Partly to offset the antiintellectualism of the English public schools, book societies were established in the hope that the taste for works of a “more instructive and scientific nature” would be inculcated again, “for the diffusion of knowledge and science invariably creates a numerous class of intelligent readers, whose minds can be gratified only with the works of a superior order.”⁴⁰ The Cheap Book Society in Ireland provided an encouraging example of the success that book societies were able to achieve in combatting lowbrow vulgarity and enhancing taste.

A grafting of English literary achievements onto the cultural system of the colonies further assured the survival of British culture, leaving a “monument more imperishable than the pyramids of Egypt.”⁴¹ The grafting had already begun to bear the fruits of success in the linguistic habits of Indians. Charles Trevelyan, brother-in-law of Macaulay and one-time president of the General Council of Public Instruction, proudly exclaimed that the educated Indians “speak purer English than we speak ourselves, for they take it from the purest models, they speak the language of the Spectator, such English as is never spoken in England.”⁴² If Calcutta citizens spoke the language of the Spectator, it was by no means accidental, for editors of Calcutta journals and newspapers deliberately wrote in an Addisonian style under names like “Candidus,” “Verax,” “Oneiropolos,” and “Flaccus” and on subjects not having the remotest bearing on Indian life, such as the fashions of the day in England, and on imagination, etiquette, and morality.⁴³ Such discussions, they admitted, would be considered tedious and archaic in a modern newspaper in England, but in the Calcutta papers they served to give the Indians a taste for “polite” literature that Englishmen were fast losing.

As a time capsule for English culture, India provided an ideal setting. The structure of Indian society, its multiple languages and multiple religions, eliminated some of the chief difficulties encountered in England in the preservation of a pure national culture. For the differentiated education that the Indian social structure encouraged—vernaculars for the lower castes and the classical languages of Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian for the upper classes of Hindus and Muslims—minimized the possibilities of one language ever achieving the status of a common language for all the population. Linguistic stratification of classes permitted English high culture to be maintained in all its purity without the erosion that was occurring to polite literature’ in England. The resistance of the English language to standardization of use in England is a measure of the problematic control of linguistic and literary forms wherever English, as a living language of daily speech and communication shared by a wide public, is used and produced outside institutional controls such as, for example, formal education.

The Filtration Theory of Macaulay and John Stuart Mill, promoting a small elite group through education in English, contributed to the linguistic stratification of Indian society. The theory ostensibly had its origins in a set of practical realities: a complete education that began with a thorough study of English was within the reach of only a very small proportion of Indians. What distinguished this group of people from the masses was the amount of leisure time they possessed. Apart from the limited resources available for the wholesale education of the masses in English, the leisure time at the disposal of any group of people was a major criterion in determining who was to receive English instruction. The history of England indicates that those who studied the classical languages were men of the learned professions, men of leisure who had the time to devote themselves to a study inaccessible to the greatbulk of the country. If this was true in England, it was even more so in India, which already had a class of learned men set apart from the masses. No great results were foreseen by working on the lower classes, whose circumstances did not permit them to acquire more than the basic elements of knowledge and who were in subjection to the higher classes. The cultivation of a small elite group of Indians was perceived as the foundation for a stability that “even a political revolution will not destroy and upon which after ages may erect a vast superstructure.”⁴⁴

Linguistic and social stratification constituted a necessary precondition for the preservation of a pure, frozen form of English culture, unadulterated by subsequent appropriations by other classes in any form, except perhaps in the relatively non-threatening form of translations. The English language and literature would remain confined to the class designated to receive instruction in it. The control exerted through the formal institution of education further exploited the structure of Indian society to prevent English from degenerating into sheer vulgarity as in England. Thus while the official stance was on the side of utility and modernization, the kinds of curricular decisions that were being made gave the impression that the real goal was acculturation. Consequently, it was not uncommon for failings in government institutions to be measured against the yardstick of acculturation rather than that of utility, as in the 1855 report cited earlier.

The return to a secular conception of literature, then, is not reducible to a mere repudiation of religious identity. More accurately, it is a relocation of cultural value from belief and dogma to language, experience, and history. The discriminations between English and Indian literature in their relation to Christianity and Hinduism respectively yielded a pure, almost severe understanding of English literature as intellectual and linguistic production. As a parallel process to the survival of English culture, secularization reintroduced a classical emphasis in English studies, strengthening and endorsing the legitimacy and authority of British institutions, laws, and government.