5

Lessons of History

And so they who listened with rapture to the songs of the bards overran the provinces of those who were charmed with the fairy tale.

—Asiatic Journal (1831), 32:142

THE ORIENTATION of literary study to the cultural heritage contained in a national past is a fairly new phenomenon, displacing an older rhetorical tradition. The inaugural lecture of A. J. Scott at University College, London, in 1848 is said to be the earliest instance of a formal academic plea for the study of literature as an expression of the culture of an age and as a reflection of society. By 1852 the historical study of English literature was firmly established in University College. In 1875 the alliance between literature and history was given institutional expression with the merging of the chair of English literature with that of history. Never very stable or clear on the point of the relationship between language and literature, English as a discipline became even more blurred and confused when a separate chair was created for English language in that same year.

The transition from the rhetorical tradition of belles lettres to the historical study of literature is explained as a displacement of Renaissance conceptions of language that “removed attention from the situation of utterance and located all significance in the logic of language, which was detennined by nonlinguistic considerations.”¹ With the passing of the old rhetorical traditions, the study of literary genres gradually became oriented in literary history. Present-oriented and context-bound, the formal method of disputation gave way to the authority of preexisting structures of mind and society as the prime catalyst of knowledge. The choice was against a kind of intellectual inquiry directed toward the present in favor of one based on the authority of established usage, historical precedent, and social convention. The object of literary training is understood as twofold: first, to develop a historical awareness of the cultural moments in which those usages, precedents, and conventions are especially strong; and second, to reclaim those moments as exemplary instances of truth, coherence, and value.

Linking “this new historical and organic awareness of society” to the Romantic reaction against the Industrial Revolution and its impoverishment of cultural life, D. J. Palmer describes the emphasis on order, continuity, sequence, and moral purpose as an internal shift within English studies, “the immediate condition alike of a revivified approach to classical studies, and of a social philosophy such as Coleridge’s to bind the present with the past.”²

Described thus, the shift within English studies appears to have an inner logic and consistency, but the description is marked by a curious reticence to account for those external conditions that produce or require any such shift from present to past, from rhetoric to history. It is not dear how exactly the “logic of language” is determined by “nonlinguistic considerations” (at best an ambiguous phrase); it is even less clear why that should cause an alliance of literature with history. To explain this development solely in terms of widened conceptions of language, with the rhetorical study of argumentation giving way to the appreciation of style as cultural expression, is to confine discussion of the development of English studies to changes merely at the level of form.

To study the institutionalization of these shifts it is impossible to evade the political context of expanding territorial control and power in which the merging of literature and history was first seriously considered and then actively urged as a principle of study and criticism. Though the influence of the Western encounter with alien cultural and literary forms on the formation of nineteenth-century English studies is not the subject of this book or this chapter, it is still necessary to signal the partial history that results from the persistent disregard of Britain’s colonial involvement in producing new articulations of literary functions, unless of course such study is somehow construed to be threatening to the integrity of the British intellectual, cultural, and social tradition as a source of literary judgments.³

I am aware that one of the problems involved in pursuing this line of inquiry, where connections between confrontation with different cultures and societies and redefinitions of literary value are not that readily established empirically, is that of confusing the logical with the historical. That is to say, in an effort to understand the relations between English studies and colonialism there is always the danger of claiming an overriding determinism in the relation. To proceed from this assumption and draw conclusions from it is to ignore entirely that the relations may be largely historical; that is, that they occur in the form that they do, not because they are locked in a mutuality of cause-effect determination, but because the situations with which they were complicit produced such particular, detailed effects on subsequent action and policy that they render the history of English studies incomplete by itself, as is the study of colonial expansion, without reference to the mutually supportive role that each played in response to Britain’s confrontation with peoples and cultures different from its own.

THE READING of literature as an expression of culture and society has an opaque, textured history in British India. It dates back to the early Anglicist-Orientalist debates out of which emerged redefinitions of truth as the discovery of error. As described in the preceding chapter, the relativization of cultures necessitated by the dialectical progression toward truth through error promoted literary study as intellectual exercise. English studies established itself in direct dialectical interplay with the Eastern tradition, taking the totality of Indian society and culture, its contradictions and anomalies, as a reference point for critical formulations that eventually fed into pedagogical practice. Given the fact that the British ruling in India were administrators and not literary critics, it is not surprising that the multiple realities of India with which they had to deal would force an expansion of the traditional framework within which literature was normally discussed to include other levels of India represented by its laws, religion, government, and social institutions.

Warren Hastings unwittingly opened the door to historical approaches to literature when he sought to popularize the translation of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins, who had presented him with a copy of it in 1784, when he was governor-general of Bengal. Hastings had a difficult time reconciling the literati of the West to a poem so wholly different in structure, style, and substance from the classical models of Greece and Rome that centuries of study and imitation had consecrated. He attempted to win acceptance for the work by persuading Western literati to suspend for a while the “imperishable standards” of classical criticism:

Might I, an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from the ancient or modem literature of Europe, all references to such sentiments or manners as are become the standards of propriety for opinion and action in our own modes of life, and equally all appeals to our revealed tenets of religion and moral duty. I should exclude them, as by no means applicable to the language, sentiments, manners, or morality appertaining to a system of society with which we have for ages been unconnected…. I would exact from every reader the allowance of obscurity, absurdity, barbarous habits, and a perverted morality. Where the reverse appears, I would have him receive it as much clear gain, and allow it a merit proportioned to the disappointment of a different expectation.⁴

Though Hastings’ motive was to have the Gita read without undue comparisons to Western literature, his argument had the effect of referring critics to that “system of society with which we have for ages been unconnected” to derive those principles empirically.

In the hands of a critic like James Mill, the derivation of standards of art by empirical methods became a devastating rationale for evaluating art not in relation to intrinsic properties, but in relation to a doctrine of utility that approached works in terms of the social and religious practice they threw open for examination.⁵ To deploy his theory of historicist readings in practical criticism, Mill turned to William Jones as his foil. Jones’ admiration for Indian literature and the favorable comparisons with Western literature that he made on its behalf are witheringly dismissed by Mill as naive responses made solely at the level of form. Jones had proclaimed Kalidas the Shakespeare of India and had himself undertaken the translation of Shakuntala. Admittedly, Mill’s quarrel was not with the lyricism of the play; he even grudgingly conceded Shakuntala to be a perfect example of pastoral. His main objections were to Jones’ belief that the features of pastoral, marked by “courtesy and urbanity, a love of poetry and eloquence, and the practice of exalted virtues,”⁶ were an adequate measure of a perfect society. For Mill, this was a woefully uncritical stance, evidence that Jones had succumbed to the seductive pleasures of a literary genre that obscured consciousness of the evil social practices prevalent at the time. Using Jones as a perfect example of an ahistorical reader, Mill set out to show that only a historicist reading truly revealed the meaning of pastoral: namely, that it is a literary form produced by nations in their infancy, when individuals remained so fettered by the tyranny of despotic government that social criticism of any kind had to give way to indulgence in light romances. Mill’s real message, of course, is that the more responsibility in government a people are given, the more occupied they will be with the business of state and the less prone, therefore, to pure fiction or poetry.

Mill read the lyricism and sentiment in Indian drama as a mark of a self-indulgent society and that in turn as the product of a despotic state. Developing his theory of art simultaneously with his theory of civilization, he maintained that the quality of government is largely responsible for channeling the energies of the individual to work for the common good. In the ancient despotic states, the individual primarily strove for self-gratification, which became the value by which he lived. Everything that he did and produced, even his art, was a reflection of his incapacity to perceive a higher good or duty.

The social values that Shakuntala celebrates—superstition, extravagant belief, and arbitrary will—appeared to prove Mill’s point. He interpreted exaggeration in art as a reflection of inconsistencies in the laws and institutions of the society from which it springs and for which it is intended. A social practice that he found irreconcilable with the notions of a “refined” people is the marriage that takes place in the forest between the hero and heroine in Shakuntala or, in his words, “that kind of marriage which two lovers contract from the desire of amorous embraces.”⁷ Another custom sanctioned by Hindu society that figures in the plot of the play is the obeisance traditionally given the Brahmins. The cause of the heroine’s misfortune is a Brahmin who lays a curse on her because she had neglected to receive him at the hermitage with the expected honors. Far from showing the Brahmin as an evil force whose power is to be resisted, the play merely uses his curse as a device to add a twist to the plot: “Surely no contrivance for such a purpose was ever less entitled to admiration than the curse of a Brahmen.”⁸ That is to say, the narrative contrivances in Sanskrit literature are not merely reflective of a childish imagination but have more sinister overtones, for they deliberately thwart reflection upon those same practices that are the source of the Indians’ “degradation.”

Oddly, Mill offered the kind of reading that, almost a century and a half later, Lévi-Strauss was to give in his studies of myth and culture. In much the same way that Mill interpreted the narrative structure of Indian drama as perpetuating the beliefs and practices of Hindu society, Lévi-Strauss read the structure of myth as a coded message by means of which a culture offers models of belief and action to its individual members.⁹ In order to decode the message and probe the sources that give it form, the critical observer had first to break that form and recast the myth in a non-narrative mode. It is precisely in such an act that Leévi Strauss believed the inherent contradictions of the social system are exposed.

Lévi-Strauss explains the power of myth in terms of a concept—that of mediation—that is useful in explaining the British disapproval of Indian literature on moral grounds. Essentially, mediation refers to the contrived resolution, by means of a tale or legend, of self-contradictions within a morality; for example, a society’s practice of incest is mediated in the Oedipus myth by oracular prophecies and divine agencies. Shakuntala is replete with comparable instances of mediation, one of which is the aforementioned transformation of the Brahmin’s curse from an ugly social fact to a narrative device that invokes religious mystery and awe. Other instances involve the attitude that the reader is expected to have toward King Dushyanta, who promises to send for his new bride, Shakuntala, and not only fails to do so, but rejects her when she appears at his court with his child. Were it not for yet another narrative contrivance, the lost ring, Dushyanta’s callousness would have quite possibly been seen by the contemporary audience as a fairly accurate representation of the way royal personages treated women—a theme that a court dramatist like Kalidas could have pursued only with grave consequences to himself. The ring is brought into the story to offset this impression. Dushyanta is doomed by the Brahmin’s curse to forget Shakuntala when it is lost. When it is found and the memory of her comes back to him, he is smitten by remorse for having rejected her. But such moments of awareness of personal guilt are not permitted to last long, and in mediating between actions and individual responsibility there is always the suggestion of external agency. The cause of her current misfortunes, Shakuntala explains to Dushyanta, is not the king or even the Brahmin who cursed her, but the sins of her past life.

The concept of mediation is also useful in explaining why the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were regarded as problematic works and not readily assimilable as texts for instruction in Indian schools and colleges in British India. The contradictions in these two epics could not be explained away other than as the superimposition of Brahminical readings on what presumably originated as the heroic songs of the Kshatriyas (the second order in the caste hierarchy). A case in point is the polyandry of the heroine Draupadi in the Mahabharata, a practice that evidently existed in pre-Brahminical times but could not possibly have continued into the Brahminical era. British commentators explained the continuing presence of polyandry in the later versions as an attempt by the Brahmins to allegorize events in order to justify the epic as divine truth. The moral repugnance that would normally have been aroused in the reader by the literal fact of Draupadi marrying five men is mediated by a Brahminic interpretation that considers the marriage a symbolic union of the goddess Lakshmi with her consort Vishnu, of whom the five Pandavas are merely manifestations.

Ironically, it is the internal process of moralization in Indian literature—of assigning a deeper significance through allegory to a social custom that is otherwise distasteful—that struck the most discordant chords for British commentators, far more perhaps then the custom itself, for undesirable social practices, if understood as historical fact bound to a certain time and place, did not have the power to influence behavior and action in the same way that their transformation into abstract universal principles did. When allegorized, these social customs received a sanctity that prevented the reader from distinguishing a moral act from an immoral one. The Indian’s insufficient sense of decency was directly attributed to the texts they read from their own tradition, which blurred distinctions between decency and indecency.¹⁰ Morality became urgently linked to the development of a historical consciousness through which alone the reader would learn to sift fact from legend, for if it was true that “wild symbolic form and mysterious allegory formed a hieratic character in which events of the past were recorded,”¹¹ it was imperative to undo that form and recast it in another where the signs would be easily interpretable.

Accurate interpretation of signs therefore acquired a moral significance far surpassing any utilitarian function that might have otherwise been assigned. A great deal of research undertaken by Europeans on the historical basis of the two epics was motivated in large part by an urge to demystify and de-Brahminize them. Of the historians who were engaged in this task, J. Talboys Wheeler, who taught for some time at Presidency College, Madras, and in 1862 became assistant secretary to the government, most clearly and consciously aimed at separating fact from legend in the act of reconstructing India’s past from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In telling the history of India from its literature, he deliberately set out to de-allegorize and to focus attention on the social practices themselves: “Every legend and tradition has been systematically Brahmanized for the purpose of bringing all the religious laws and usages of the different races of India into conformity with Brahmanical ideas. When stripped of these Brahmanical grafts and overgrowth, the legends and traditions will be found to furnish large illustrations of old Hindu civilization.”¹² The large number of histories written by Englishmen that were part of the literature curriculum in Indian schools and colleges no doubt performed the same function, which was essentially analytic in nature. Among the histories of India prescribed for study were Marshman’s History of Bengal and History of India, Murray’s History of India, with Readings from Mill and Other Authors, and Henry Morris’ History of India.¹³ A point that British critics returned to with remarkable consistency was that as long as Indian youth were without a historical consciousness, they would remain shackled to the tyranny of forms. The curricular juxtaposition of historical texts with native literature was part of an effort to break through those forms; as a study in contrasting modes of explanation, the juxtaposition offered the means to developing an analytical cast of mind required for dismantling inherited structures and myths. If the genius of Sanskrit literature synthesized and harmonized disparate elements to fit a Brahminical conception, the whole thrust of historical instruction during the period of British rule was to break them down and force a steady gaze on each element in isolation. History was transformed into nothing less than the recasting of myth in a non-literary mode by means of which the discordancies of Hindu society were forced into the open.

Incidentally, one of the ways that nationalism sought to express itself in the 1870s and 1880s was by restoring allegorical readings to legends that were denounced by the British for their licentiousness. Often the inspiration for such readings came from commentaries produced in the Orientalist period, which defiantly transformed what Anglicists attacked as sensual images in Hindu art into representations of spirit:

Whenever I look around me, in the vast region of Hindoo mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory: and I see Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and as far as I can rely on my own judgment, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory that the world has ever produced…. We satisfactorily learn from the Geeta that it is not mere images, but the invisible spirit, that they thus worship.¹⁴

The theosophist and nationalist leader Annie Besant, for example, took the cue from her Orientalist predecessors by reading the tale of Lord Krishna (the “philanderer-god”) stealing the clothes of maidens while they were bathing as an allegory about the nakedness of the soul approaching Supreme Being.¹⁵ Such readings were a conscious revolt against a narrow British historicism threatening to break the continuity of a popular Hindu consciousness, whose strength lay in the ability to transcend the immediate and the particular and to bring together various segments of society through an appeal to the universal and the timeless.

Gandhi, however, went a little further back than Annie Besant, to the British representations themselves, and claimed that Europeans tended to look for deeper significances in Hindu customs and practices, which were then invariably equated with the obscene:

It has remained for our Western visitors to acquaint us with the obscenity of many practices which we have hitherto innocently indulged in. It was in a missionary book that I first learnt that Shivalingam [a Hindu phallic symbol] had any obscene significance at all and even now when I see a Shivalingam neither the shape nor the association in which I see it suggests any obscenity. It was again in a missionary book that I learnt that the temples in Orissa were disfigured with obscenities. When I went to Puri, it was not without an effort that I was able to see those things. But I do know that the thousands who flock to the temple know nothing about the obscenity surrounding these figures.¹⁶

An important aspect of Gandhi’s observation is that in the name of separating fact from legend, British readings had introduced a literalism that was paradoxically allegorical in effect, for it assumed that every sign had to have a meaning, whereas for Hindus this was not necessarily true. Instead, a sign could easily do no more than suggest another sign, which in turn might suggest yet another, and so on. The process could continue ad infinitum without ever getting beyond the act of signifying, which is perfectly consistent with the Hindu belief that all phenomena are multiple manifestations of a single entity that alone has meaning but is at the same time unknowable.

But the British argument was that there was no clearer proof of the childishness of the Indian mind than its inability to pierce through the outer layers of form. If Indians failed to perceive meanings, the argument went, it was not because the signs did not contain any, but because the Indians lacked the mental capacity to see that a concrete reality lay behind these signs that was both a cause and an explanation for them. The act of forcing meanings into the open comprised an important aspect of the British ideology of literary education, owing much to critical readings of the kind produced by James Mill.

IN EVERY respect, the historical orientation to literary study reverses the assumptions and rationale of Christian instruction or, at the very least, provides a new set of terms. One such inversion is concerned with conceptions of human nature. If, according to the doctrinal basis of Christianity, man is inherently depraved and in a state of original sin, the object of an education on Christian principles is to raise individuals from the state of bestial nature in which they are born, toward the spiritual good that is their eternal promise. Whatever distinguishes man from beasts becomes the instrument of his regeneration. As Lionel Gossman points out, given the fact that there is no greater distinguishing feature than the uniquely human ability to manipulate symbolic systems, language and literature acquire an importance exceeding that of even science and technology.¹⁷ Early British arguments for literary instruction assumed a condition of innate depravity, and the rhetoric of dualism ensuing from that assumption demarcated a “cultivated” self formed by learning, language, and literature from a “natural” self still burdened by sin, willful pride, and vileness of temperament. Clerical attacks on Utilitarian principles in education emphasized the Christian progress toward the ideal self through literature, as in the following remarks, made to the commencement audience at Cambridge in 1826 by the Rev. Hugh James Rose, later to be principal of King’s College, London: “[Literature] is not partial in its cultivation of the intellect, but tends at once to correct the taste, to strengthen the judgement, to instruct us in the wisdom of men better and wiser than ourselves, to exercise the reasoning faculties on subjects which demand and deserve their attention, and to show them the boundaries imposed on them by Providence” (emphasis mine).¹⁸ Rose’s remark assumes a gap between the reader and the text: the reader’s deficiencies are understood as the result of an innately vile and depraved nature, while the text is designated as the superior agency to lead the malformed individual to a plane of superior moral being.

It is not necessary to limit ourselves to the most obvious instances where such distinctions were routinely made, such as in the missionary curriculum in literature, to gain some sense of the widespread prevalence of such characterizations of literary functions, presupposing a dualism of man’s base self and his higher nature. Significantly, much the same characterization informed Adam Smith’s understanding of the uses of literature to offset the ill-effects of a crass materialism produced by laissez-faire individualism. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) remained a central text in the Indian curriculum throughout the nineteenth century, both in government and missionary institutions—the Calcutta University Commission Report of 1919, for instance, st111listed it as part of the prescribed course of studies. Though it was well over a century before his proposals were implemented, Adam Smith was evidently among the earliest thinkers to propose the study of selections from the works of English prose writers as a social and moral corrective for dangers that he believed were inherent in laissez-faire capitalism, particularly dangers associated with the potential for a morally corrupted concept of individualism.¹⁹

In Moral Sentiments Adam Smith argued the need for a broad academic program that would encourage and direct a process of self-evaluation and self-enlightenment. His work can be read as a systematic argument for the education of the man of intellect who is also a man of good conduct and virtue. Smith began by noting a principle inherent in man’s nature, which he called the impartial spectator, that makes him responsive to how others think and behave. Those who are able to direct our sentiments are models of intellectual virtue: the “man of taste,” for instance, “who distinguishes the minute and scarce perceptible differences of beauty and deformity” or the “experienced mathematician who unravels with ease the most intricate and perplexed proportions.”²⁰ Smith believed that through the admiration of the sentiments of these “others,” these learning models, we come to realize the existence of intellectual virtues. The impartial spectator, the spectator within us, as Smith referred to him, “enters by sympathy into the sentiments of the master” and “views the object under the same agreeable aspect.”²¹ The task before us, Smith claimed, if we truly wish to realize the intellectual virtues, is to cultivate the impartial spectator within us, to develop the ability to place ourselves in the context of those sentiments. The study of literature, Smith argued, provides the formative structures that will determine the development of this spectator within. Through literature, he wrote, “we endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it. If, upon placing ourselves in his situation, we thoroughly enter into all the passions and motives which influenced it, we approve of it, by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable judge. If otherwise, we enter into his disapprobation, and condemn it.”²²

Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator was embedded in the rationale of literary instruction, which presupposed a divided self-consciousness. Working strictly from within the Protestant tradition, Smith had written that “when I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it … either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself as it were into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represents a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is examined and judged of.”²³ The first I becomes the half he called the “spectator”; the second person is the person whose conduct, “under the character of a spectator, I was endeavouring to form some opinion [of].”²⁴ This concept is of instrumental value in disengaging the individual from his natural self, in order that he might observe it critically from the viewpoint of the other, the impartial I.

But the historical emphasis, which comes uncannily close to reinforcing a conception of human nature antithetical to Protestant premises, negates the dualism of nature (base)/spirit (elevated) and claims an innate goodness of Indian character that is thwarted from realizing itself by a despotic, corrupt political society. In what appears to be an abrupt reversal of the customary Western denigration of Oriental character, the basic difference between European and Oriental is claimed to be a feature not of character but of government. In an unprecedented affirmation of unity between the Eastern and the Western temperament, Indians are described in one assessment as ideally having the capacity for every virtue, having “great natural sagacity, quickness of apprehension, sound intellect, sound reasoning and eloquence of expression.”²⁵ What prevented the Indian from realizing the potential for a common identity with Europeans, however, was the tendency toward despotic government in Oriental society, which had spread anarchy through internal administration, driving people to habits that degraded them and paralyzed “every principle intended by nature to promote the improvement of man.”²⁶

The ancient feudal system of Europe, on the other hand, was characterized in the same assessment as a society driven by antidespotic principles unknown in the East. “The forms of their government, the wisdom of their Statesmen, the brilliant deeds of their heroes and patriots, the effusion of their poets, and the principles of their philosophers” were purportedly built into the literary system of British schools, strengthening and stimulating the intellectual faculties to higher attainments.²⁷ For training in polity the youth of England had no better instructor than the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which contained enough themes to inspire them to heights of enthusiasm, heroic action, and noble passion. In contrast to the heroic fictions of the Europeans that provided an impulse to the habits and pursuits accounting for their elevated political order, the romances of the Indians, it was maintained, only encouraged indulgence and luxury. The contrast between the two strengthened the British conviction that the more dedicated to the celebration of high adventure and high exploits is an art form, the more roused the people would become to action and virtue and so to installing a form of government befitting such values. A circular definition prevailed. If strength was a prerequisite for fortification against the wild exercise of imagination, then imagination acquired a moral value when it was harnessed to the service of political organization. Unlike the inhabitants of India, the Europeans “did not convert the luxury of their imaginations into a means of weakening and effeminating their minds; but they used it as a prompter to activity and a stimulant to high enterprise.”²⁸

In British administrative discussions of Indian education, “right” motives for reading were vitally connected with the restructuring of society. The tradition of reading for pleasure was held responsible for preventing Oriental people from recognizing the extent to which the evils of their society were valorized in their literature, whose gorgeous texture and rich imagery were a seductive distraction from plot and theme.²⁹ Europeans, on the other hand, presumably read from other motives, which sprang from active engagement with the world. A mere glance at the art forms that had evolved in different societies of the West and the East was deemed sufficient to reveal the basic difference. While Eastern literature still continued to be dominated by the romance, which fed the mind on sensuous pleasure, Western literature had outgrown it, the European tradition of “restless ambition” never quite being congenial to its sustained expression. Not only did the epic spirit that was ushered in brace the mind and lift it to high thoughts, but the conflict the bards recorded provided the inspiring source of the Europeans’ impulse to action and ambition and, ultimately, to conquest itself. And thus it could be said, as a writer for the Asiatic Journal candidly did, that “they who listened with rapture to the songs of the bards, overran the provinces of those who were charmed with the fairy tale.”³⁰

Such critical statements were paralleled by the judgment of those on the General Council of Public Instruction in Calcutta that the more politically enlightened a society, the more its laws could be expected to harmonize with and be reflected in literary form. One of the most forceful statements of this idea came from Charles Trevelyan, who argued that recognition of the standards of excellence in literature was one step toward establishment of “the Law” in the minds of Indians. In English literature he saw the merging of the aesthetic, the intellectual, and the moral, the means by which intellectual discernment of the rules of composition would lead the mind to an understanding and appreciation of the highest laws of the state or the moral principles that regulate and guide conduct.

The great harm done by Oriental literatures, Trevelyan implied, was that the laws represented therein were arbitrary and whimsical and the rules of composition equally so. By not allowing for prior individual reflection or understanding, they failed to give human actions a solid base and taught that man has no choice but to act arbitrarily. For Trevelyan, the cultural power of English literary study lay in its confirming that “knowledge and thought must precede action” and intellect and Christian morality act in concert in shaping man as a public being. By inducing colonial subjects to read literature as an expression of the culture of an age, the historical approach served the twin objectives of rousing Indians to a consciousness of the inconsistencies in the native system of society while simultaneously leading them to a recognition of the principles of order and justice in the Western.

In the presumed absence of comparable objects of admiration in their own history and literature, Indian youth were seen as pitiably doomed to a perpetual state of degradation. But it was a degradation that was portrayed as decidedly not intrinsic to their character but the result of despotic rule. If the Indian was made aware of the cause of his debasement, there was every likelihood that he would seek release from the bonds of a tyrannical system. As a warning lesson for Indians, C. E. Trevelyan pointed to the negative example of Arabs as a people who were so “confident in the riches of their native tongue, [they] disdained the study of any foreign idiom. If they had made themselves familiar with Greek and Roman literature, they might have suspected that their caliph was a traitor, and their prophet an impostor.”³¹ In the same breath, Trevelyan linked the awakening of the intellectual faculties through literary study to awareness of despotism: “The sword of the Saracens became less formidable when their youth was drawn away from the camp to the college, where the armies of the faithful presumed to read and reflect.”³² By arousing the dormant young Indian from the deep slumber of a tyrannical past to a full sense of the evils of his native political society, historical training acquired deeper, more refined, more exalted motives, reconstituting the object of instruction as the restoration of the Indian student to his original state of goodness.

The self-righteous justification for government intervention in this formulation is too obvious to require comment, but what is especially striking is the insistent reassurance that British education was not seeking to assimilate Indians to the European model by urging them to cast aside their Indian identity (and thus removing them from their native, “base” state, as Christian instruction attempted). Rather, the suggestion is that English education was designed, in a Platonist sense, to awaken the colonial subjects to a memory of their innate character, corrupted as it had become, again in a Platonist sense, through the feudalistic character of Oriental society. In this universalizing narrative, rescripted from a scenario furnished earlier by missionaries, the British government was refashioned as the ideal republic to which Indians must naturally aspire as a spontaneous expression of self, a state in which the British rulers won a figurative place as Platonic Guardians. The secular rewriting of the Christian account of sinful, fallen man identified natural self with an original, uncorrupted political order. As the British scenario envisioned it, through the catalytic agency of British intervention, specifically its laws and institutions, the educated Indian was taken back to a true self, not away from an (inherently corrupt) self toward an external, transcendental ideal such as implied in the missionary scheme of instruction.

By this logic, the good that England represented for India constituted the only valid content of instruction for its youth. But to perceive that good, as John Murdoch realized—with profound implications for curricular selection—Indian students required an active intellectual disposition capable of comparative distinctions. Murdoch, an official in the Madras Presidency who was commissioned to assess the importance of vernacular literature in relation to other school subjects, was baffled by the resentment to English rule by the mass of Indians he encountered. He was equally puzzled by the fact that there were no comparable records of popular hostility to earlier, more despotic governments. As he continued his project on Indian vernacular literature, he stumbled on a possible answer in an issue of the Imperial Review edited by William Hunter, later chairman of the Indian Education Commission. The British inability to understand native tolerance to earlier despotic rule, the article stated,

overlooked the fact that the present generation of our Eastern subjects has not the means of instituting such a comparison. The greater part of them have had no experience of any dynasty but our own, and are not possessed of any historical information, wherewith to supply this lack of knowledge…. [The author then goes on to examine how British officials should respond.] All desire to falsify history or to present one-sided views is disclaimed. The amplest credit should be given to the various dynasties that have preceded us. At the same time, it seems practicable to show that, notwithstanding all our faults we have been a blessing to India. The History of India would be the best vehicle for such teaching, though it might also find a place, to some extent, in the general Reading Books.³³

But as Murdoch further realized, mere comparison was not enough if it was not also accompanied by a constant reinforcement of British ideals to which Indian youth were expected to aspire. The political pitfalls of partial enlightenment are described by Murdoch in quasi-religious terms, and he concludes by urging instruction in the advantages of stable government not as an option but as public duty:

We place in a boy’s hands the histories of Greece and Rome, and hold up to his admiration the examples of those ancient patriots who have freed their country from domestic tyranny or a foreign yoke. The knowledge which we impart to him destroys the reverence which he would naturally feel for his own religion and its precepts. In its stead, we implant no other of a holier and purer kind. Can we wonder, then, at the harvest which we too frequently reap—disloyalty untempered by gratitude, a spurious and selfish patriotism, unchecked by religion and an overweening conceit of literary attainment supported by no corresponding dignity of character.³⁴

The Indian Education Commission of 1882 took up the theme introduced by Murdoch of maintaining an appropriate balance between affirming British norms and preserving Indian self-respect. But it disagreed in the main with Murdoch’s approbation of Morris’ History of India as a suitable text for Indian schools and colleges, denouncing it as too overbearing and “denationalizing, the tenor of which went to magnity British power and to lower and degrade Indian men and manners.”³⁵ Morris’ History was replaced by William Hunter’s Indian People as a text that was better geared to promoting loyalty to the government without coercing Indian students to believe they were only members of a great nation with certain duties toward it, thus robbing them of a sense of national character.³⁶

English education, fighting to stave off the appearance of imposing an alien culture on native society, gained subtle redefinition as an instrument of authenticity. A historical consciousness was intended to bring the Indian in touch with himself, recovering his true essence and identity from the degradation to which it had become subject through native despotism. Far from alienating the Indian from his own culture, background, and traditions, English education gained the image of being an agency for restoring Indian youth to an essential self and, in turn, reinserting him into the course of Western civilization.

THE EXAMINATION questions following lessons in literature suggest a direction in British Indian classroom pedagogy closely paralleling the historical emphasis of critical readings such as those of James Mill. While the topics themselves may not seem extraordinary or innovative in the intellectual demands made on students to compare, analyze, and demonstrate with historical proof, they are quite distinctive when juxtaposed to the type of examination questions being asked in England, which tended by and large to consist of paraphrase, parsing, and direct explication. As D. J. Palmer points out in his history of English studies in England, the questions for students of an English class were constructed in the style of a catechism, consisting of four sections: History of the English Language, Principles and Practice of English Composition, Translations from Classical Authors into English, and Rhetoric. The focus on language, style, and rhetoric in the English curriculum is replicated in the examination questions. The compulsory question on Shakespeare, for example, was sometimes directed at his bad grammar: “Derive and conjugate the irregular verb to break, and state whether there is any grammatical error in the following: ‘I have broke with her father, and his good will obtained’—Shakespeare.” In general, the examination questions required short, descriptive, factual answers assessing appropriateness of style and language, as for example with these questions: “Who is the first distinguished writer of English prose: Point out the characteristic features of his style, and say in what respect it differs from that of Lord Clarendon”; “When is the translation of an idiomatic expression perfect?” “Why is D a perfect letter?”³⁷

By contrast, the examination questions in the Indian curriculum are less oriented toward mechanical points of grammar and less frequently ask for direct explication of specific texts. They are also less confined to single texts and appear to encompass a broader perspective on intellectual and social history, demanding an overall critical assessment of literature as an expression of culture and society. Warnings were sounded constantly about the dangers of allowing Indian examination questions to drift in the direction of essay topics in British schools and colleges mechanically testing rote recall without critical understanding. Hodgson Pratt, an Inspector of Schools, irately asked in the Bengal Public Instruction Report Of 1856–1857:

… why should Greeschunder Chuckerbutty be expected to know “what circumstances enabled Shakespeare to exhibit an accurate knowledge of Greek Mythology,” or “in what respect the Dramatic compositions called ‘Mysteries’ differ from those called ‘Moralities,’ “and other facts of a like nature? On the other hand, it is of very great importance, that he should see clearly the dangers of living with an open sewer running under the lower floor of his house, or the cruelty of marrying his children at an immamre age, or the impolicy of exhausting the soil of his fields by the disregard of important principles in Chemistry: and it is very important that his mind should comprehend the sublimity and beauty of the laws by which his own body and everything around him are governed; and that his heart should if possible, be awakened to the great facts and conclusions of Natural Theology.³⁸

The comparative emphasis in the Indian curriculum is reflected in questions requiring students to commit themselves to critical judgment of the contradictory values to which their own societies adhered. In many instances the topics on which students were asked to write were worded in such a way as to predetermine the response. Missionary institutions in general posed more direct, less subtle questions than government schools did, as with the following: “On the disadvantages of Caste, and the benefits of its abolition”; “On the internal marks of Falsehood in the Hindu Shastras”; “On the Physical Errors of Hinduism”; “The best Contrast between Christianity and Hinduism, morally considered”; “Essay, illustrative of the manner in which the Law of the Hindu Caste is opposed to the Principles of Political Economy”; “The Evidences of the Antiquity of the New Testament, and the bearing of this question on the General Argument for the Truth of Christianity”; “On the Merits of Christianity, and the Demerits of Hinduism”; “On the inquiry, Whether the Savage State be the original state of Man, or not?”; “On the Exposure of the Sick on the Banks of the Ganges”; “On the Causes of Opposition to Christianity in India”; “On the History of the British Constitution”; “On the History of Bengal during the Muhanunedan Period”; and “The Influence exerted on the Nations of Europe by the Maritime Discoveries of the Fifteenth Century.”³⁹

The questions in the government institutions shied away from direct reference to religion, but they were no less oriented toward making Indian youth conscious of the benefits of British rule, as with these topics: “The Effects upon India of the New Communication with Europe by means of Steam,” “The Advantages India derives in regard to commerce, security of property, and the diffusion of knowledge, from its Connexion with England,” and “The Diffusion of Knowledge through the Medium of the English Language in India.”⁴⁰

The answers that students wrote to these questions cannot be taken, of course, as indicative of their actual responses to the content of instruction. The nature of institutionalized education, with the pressure to compete for promotion and awards and prizes, is obviously too complex to permit us to read student essays categorically as personally felt, intellectually committed responses. Selections from student essays are not reproduced below as proof of either success or failure of the British ideology, but to indicate the degree of correspondence between the objectives of instruction and the internalization of what students clearly sensed as desirable responses to the content of instruction.

Rajnarain Bose, a student at Hindu College in Calcutta in 1843, was asked along with other classmates to gloss the following passage by Bacon:

He thought also, there was found in the mind of man an affection naturally bred and fortified, and furthered by discourse and doctrine, which did pervert the true proceeding towards active and operative knowledge.

This was a false estimation, that it should be as a diminution to the mind of man to be much conversant in experiences and particulars, subject to sense, and bound in matter, and which are laborious to search, ignoble to meditate, harsh to deliver, illiberal to practise, infinite as is supposed in number, and no ways accommodated to the glory of arts.

This opinion or state of mind received much credit and strength, by the school of Plato, who, thinking that particulars rather revived the notions, or excited the faculties of the mind, than merely informed; and having mingled his philosophy with superstition, which never favoureth the sense, extolleth too much the understanding of man in the inward light thereof; and again Aristotle’s school, which giveth the due to the sense in assertion, denieth it in practice much more than that of Plato.

For we see the schoolmen, Aristotle’s successors, which were utterly ignorant of history, rested only upon agitation of wit; whereas Plato giveth good example of inquiry by induction and view of particulars; though in such a wandering manner as if of no force or fruit. So that he saw well that the supposition of the sufficiency of man’s mind hath lost the means thereof.⁴¹

The passage was followed by several specific questions, including this one: “In what sense are the schoolmen here said to have been ‘utterly ignorant of history’?” Though Bose’s response did not specifically compare European medieval schoolmen with the classical scholars of India, the movement in his essay between specific descriptions of a historical past and generalizations with application to the present left a nebulous space where such identifications could be forged:

The schoolmen were utterly ignorant of history; i.e. the history of material nature. Men who were enamoured of theological and metaphysical inquiries, and pursued those inquiries with the greatest alacrity and application, cannot be expected to have much knowledge of natural science, and to pay much attention to its investigation. Their minds rested only upon “agitation of wit,” i.e. upon wrangling and controversy on the subjects above-mentioned. Theological controversy was the chief employment of the learned in the middle ages. Any University who could puzzle and confound a rival one with their subtleties was declared victorious, and its renown was spread far and abroad. There were prizes given to the parties victorious in metaphysical disputations. These incitements had due effect upon the minds of students, and they devoted their whole attention and time to the study of theology and metaphysics, to the perusal of the huge volumes of St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. The sense in which the term “history” is used in this passage by Bacon, is countenanced by his division of the intellectual faculties of man and of human knowledge, in the second book of his advancement of learning. He there divides history into civil and natural history…. Plato saw well that if we suppose man’s mind to be all-sufficient, and that it can pronounce with decision upon subjects beyond its reach, we must acknowledge on the other hand that it has not the means of doing so; for, as far as induction and view of particulars go, so far can man proceed with firm steps in his inquiries and speculation.⁴²

Incidentally, Bacon was widely read in both government and missionary schools. His importance in the literary education of Indian students was so great that it was not uncommon to have students matriculating from schools possessing no knowledge other than that of Bacon’s works, which were well represented in the curriculum. It was reported that James Ballantyne, a great Sanskrit scholar who had himself also translated Bacon into Sanskrit, taught English to his Brahmin students, not in the usual elementary spelling-book style followed in England, but by putting Bacon’s Novum Organon into their hands as soon as they learned the letters of the English alphabet.⁴³ The selection of Bacon was particularly apt in light of the criticism that Indian literature was devoid of experimental science or natural philosophy. Condemning Hindu philosophers for being poets rather than experimental investigators with the will to submit phenomena to rigid analysis, a writer for the Calcutta Christian Observer dismissively characterized Hindus as half-witted mystics who “thought much and deeply, but were ever fonder of chasing the phantoms of a speculative fancy than of following the indications of nature.”⁴⁴ No one was more critical of this aspect of the Hindu mind than the Indian social reformer Rammohun Roy, whose Baconian intellect rebelled against the establishment of Sanskrit seminaries “similar in character to those which existed in Europe before the time of Lord Bacon,” which could only be expected to “load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practical use to the possessor or to society.”⁴⁵

From the British standpoint Bacon’s relevance for India lay in the command over nature exerted by philosophy to deliver substantial material benefits. Through such command, philosophy was endowed with a pragmatic dimension that enabled it to be put to the service of mankind, with the alleviation of human suffering and the increase of human happiness being as much its province as the search for truth. The application to India is self-evident in the context of critiques of the Hindu spirit of philosophy, denounced as incapable of nurturing any but “ascetic gymnosophists,” mystical casuists who prevented the advancement of man’s physical well-being by teaching that all matter is delusion.⁴⁶

Fondness for Baconian ideas of material progress appears periodically in essays Indian students were assigned to write. Nobinchunder Dass, a student at Hooghly College, Calcutta, was asked to respond to the topic “The Effects upon India of the new Communication with Europe by means of Steam.” His essay universalizes the myth of progress through analogies of the British presence in India and the Roman conquest of Britain. The result, a tour de force of sustained moral earnestness, IS nothing short of an apology for imperialism.

Nothing tends so much to advance society, to humanize the manners, and to elevate men in the scale of civilization, as intercourse with different nations. It encourages commerce, by supplying the wants of one country with the superfluities of another; the knowledge of one people may be made the common property of all by its means, what the people of the remotest regions discover or invent, can be communicated everywhere. In short, intercourse renders the earth, separated as it is into continents, islands, &c., by vast oceans, sometimes by insurmountable mountains, into one entire whole; and all mankind, as the members of one and the same family.

It was by carrying on an intercourse with the Greeks, that the Romans were enabled to improve in the liberal and mechanic arts. It was Greek philosophy that softened and polished the rough military manners of the Romans, and soothed them when misfortune compelled them to look for the opening of a communication between Asia and Europe, the people of the latter continent who, sunk in barbarism and ignorance, were then groaning under the pressure of tyranny and oppression, received from the hands of the Asiatics, who were their superiors in civilization, the blessings of social life and happiness. But those short days of Asiatic glory and superiority are gone, the stream of civilization has taken an opposite course; before, it flowed from Asia to Europe, now, but with more than its pristine vigour and rapidity, it flows from Europe into Asia.

The blessings that Europe now showers upon us are numerous and useful. Both in ancient and modem times Europe has been the seat of philosophy and civilization, but in consequence of there being no safe intercourse in ancient times, that civilization was confined to where it grew. But now that that obstacle is removed, an entire change has taken place in the circumstances of countries; whatever is now or has been gathered in Europe or in any part of the earth, receives an universal circulation.

England which is of all the countries of Europe nearest related to India by her present position in Asia, is particularly engaged in the cause of Indian improvement. She not only carries on commerce with India, but she is ardently employed in instructing the natives in the arts and sciences, in history and political economy, and, in fact, in every thing that is calculated to elevate their understanding, meliorate their condition, and increase their resources….

The English are to us what the Romans were to the English; and as the English are the children of modern times, and command more resources and power than the Romans, we derive the greater advantage. The facility afforded to communication by the use of steam has enabled the English to govern our country with great prudence and vigilance, they do not appear to be at any time at the risk of forbearing in the glorious work which they have commenced, of improving the native mind and condition, but prosecute it with honour to themselves and favour to their subjects, till they are styled the regenerators of India.⁴⁷

This essay strikingly demonstrates the extent to which the objectives of British instruction have been internalized by this student, regardless of whether the statements themselves provide an index to personal conviction. What specifically matters is the successful transference, from ruler to subject, of the view that India will not witness progress unless channels of communication are opened with the West. And the intellectual strategy that enables it is the conjoining of commercial expansion with culture and knowledge to suggest a reciprocal, symbiotic relationship. Without commerce, without territorial expansion, without intercourse between nations, writes Nobinchunder Dass, knowledge will remain frozen. The material classification of knowledge as property, which is alternatively possessed, appropriated, received, distributed, and redistributed, further strengthens the justificatory claims of commercial expansion: “… whatever is now or has been gathered in Europe or in any part of the earth, receives a universal circulation.”

So complete is the identification of the subject with the ruler, so precisely realigned is his divided self-consciousness, that Nobinchunder Dass can refer to his fellow Indians distantly, even contemputously, as “the natives.” It is “their” understanding that must be improved; it is “their” condition and “their” resources that require remedy. In Nobinchunder Dass, Adam Smith’s impartial spectator has found a congenial home: “The English are to us what the Romans were to the English.” In this one sentence are redeemed years of lessons in history leading to this culminating moment of affirmation, the endorsement of the Macaulayan dream.

In yet another essay, Mahendra Lal Basak, a student at the General Assembly Institution in Calcutta, takes upon himself the Platonist project of awakening Indian youth to a memory of their innate character, corrupted by a retrograde indigenous society. His is as much of a universalizing narrative as Nobinchunder Dass’:

But alas! alas! our countrymen are still asleep—still sleeping the sleep of death. Rise up, ye sons of India, arise, see the glory of the Sun of Righteousness! Beauty is around you; life blooms before you; why, why will ye sleep the sleep of death? And shall we who have drunk in that beauty—shall we not awake our poor countrymen? Come what will, ours will be the part, the happy part of arousing the slumber of slumbering India.⁴⁸

The British government is set up as the ideal republic to which Mahendra wants his countrymen to aspire for realization of their true selves, and it is through the catalytic agency of British intervention, specifically its laws and institutions, that Mahendra truly believes his fellow Indians will be returned to a true self.

In essays by students such as Mahendra Lal and Nobinchunder Dass, English education gains subtle redefinition as an instrument of authenticity. English literary instruction, with its pedagogical imperative of nurturing a historically minded youth, places the Indian reader in a position where he renews contact with himself, recovering his true essence and identity from the degradation to which it had become subject through native despotism. Far from alienating the reader from his own culture, background, and traditions, English literature, taught less as a branch of rhetoric than of history, sought to return him to an essential unity with himself and reinsert him into the course of development of civilized man. At the same time the removal of “false thinking” through English education cleared the path to a perception of the British government as a fair one promoting national prosperity and justice.⁴⁹