The genius of literature … clearly sees … that she has found the men who are to extend her empire to the ends of the earth, and give her throne a stability that will be lasting as the sun.
—Madras Christian Instructor and Missionary Record (1844), 2(4):185.
FINALLY, THE emergence of the discipline of English in colonial India, its rootedness in strategies of sociopolitical control, opens up fresh inquiry into possible implications of empire for current debates on curriculum in general. When, in our own times, students and faculty clamor for a broadening of curriculum to include submerged texts of minority and third world cultures, the knowledge that the discipline of English developed in colonial times would appear likely to strengthen their claims and force their opponents to reconsider the premises of the traditional Eurocentric curriculum. And to an extent a major objective of this book has been to point the direction to reconceptualizations of curriculum along these lines, for it should be amply clear by now that the Eurocentric literary curriculum of the nineteenth century was less a statement of the superiority of the Western tradition than a vital, active instrument of Western hegemony in concert with commercial expansionism and military action.
It goes without saying that the degree to which knowledge of imperialism’s shaping hand in the formation of English studies affects the concept of canon formation depends on our own willingness to historicize any given curriculum. Of The many possible positions on the curriculum, two modern positions correspond roughly, in their extremity, to the ideological standpoints of the Anglicists and Orientalists of nineteenth-century British India. Celebrating the dominant culture as the arbiter of standards, morals, and religious values, the first position insists on the universality of a single set of works, primarily those of its own culture, in an effort to assimilate individuals to a single identity. The other position, which is more relativistic in intent, claims to broaden the curriculum to include the literature of other cultures. But the relative tolerance of the latter position does not negate the possibility that even the most inclusionary curriculum can itself be part of the processes of control. As the history of Orientalist education demonstrates, a curriculum may incorporate the systems of learning of a subordinate population and still be an instrument of hegemonic activity. Indeed the point of departure of this book is its argument that both the Anglicist and the Orientalist factions were equally complicit with the project of domination, British Indian education having been conceived in India as part and parcel of the act of securing and consolidating power. The acceptance or rejection of other cultures becomes a moot point in the face of the more encompassing motives of discipline and management.
The role of empire in the history of English studies demonstrates conclusively that the main issues in curriculum will remain unaddressed as long as the debate continues to be engaged by appeals to either universalist or relativist value, religious identity or secular pluralism. Until curriculum is studied less as a receptacle of texts than as activity, that is to say, as a vehicle of acquiring and exercising power, descriptions of curricular content in terms of their expression of universal values on the one hand or pluralistic, secular identities on the other are insufficient signifiers of their historical realities. The nineteenth-century Anglicist curriculum of British India is not reducible simply to an expression of cultural power; rather, it served to confer power as well as to fortify British rule against real or imagined threats from a potentially rebellious subject population.
With few exceptions, wherever the Eurocentric curriculum is de scribed in the scholarly literature in terms of Western cultural superiority, there is an underlying assumption that superiority is a measure of dominance. But it is incorrect to assume that the canon is necessarily expressive of the unquestioned political supremacy of a group, for if we refer to the history of conflict between various groups in India—the East India Company and the missionaries, the Parliament and the East India Company, the Anglicists and the Orientalists—we perceive that the Western literary canon evolved out of a position of vulnerability, not of strength. Only through historicization is it possible to determine the degree to which a culturally homogeneous curriculum is the result of the relative strength or weakness of a governing class; to assess the extent to which educational measures are either an assertion of uncontested authority or a mediated response to situational imperatives, camouflaging acute vulnerability to assaults upon the intention to rule.
In these pages I have attempted to document British educational enterprise in nineteenth-century India as an activity, the stratified conferring of cultural power on a dominated society designed to transmute even the faintest traces of mobilized, unified sentiment against British rule into internal schisms. The attendant limitations of such maneuvers are visible in the incessant pressure on the British to unsettle the objectives of English instruction at regular intervals and modulate the tone of Indian education to achieve an ideal balance between secular and religious policy which, being unattainable in the long run or a least promising only very limited duration, opened the way for native interrogation of British ideology. The checkered history of English studies in India points to the inherent contradictions of the British sociocultural project that allowed it to fail in its own (heterogeneous) terms.
A consideration of English studies in decolonized India is regrettably beyond the scope of this book and I will not presume to offer substantive comment on the current status of English in these concluding pages. But the fact that English continues to be taught and studied in today’s India obliges me to sound a final, cautionary note against reading the history of nineteenth-century English studies as continuous with contemporary educational practice in India. The danger of reading the history of modem English studies as uninterrupted narrative is so obvious that I fear I may be insulting the intelligence of my readers by warning against certain possible inferences, the two most treacherous being that assaults on the Western canon are virtually precluded in the land where the discipline of English was shaped and that an unquestioning acceptance of Western literary values is now firmly institutionalized there. This book would have been written to very little purpose if such conclusions were drawn. Conceptions of the British literary curriculum as unmediated assertion of cultural power, which I have argued against throughout, are partly responsible for promoting the illusion of historical continuity in that they systematically ignore the continual modifications of British educational goals and the strategic maneuvering that produced English studies in India.
The relation between past and present Indian education is no more straightforward than the one between educational developments in nineteenth-century England and India or, for that matter, between the British empire and the practice of the humanities today. This is not to say that there is no connection at all—of course there is—but that connection is no more readily understood through cause-effect explanations than by a global theory that presumes to account for the features of one in terms of the other. There are no simple lessons to be derived from this history, least of all the lesson that imperialism can be swiftly undone merely by hurling away the texts it institutionalized. Though T. S. Eliot’s moving statement, “after such knowledge, what forgiveness?” has understandable appeal, I am not advocating that today’s students must close their English books without further ado because those works were instrumental in holding others in subjugation or, if that is too extreme, that at least Shakespeare and Milton must be dropped from the English curriculum because their texts were used at one time to supply religious values that could be introduced into the British control of India in no other way.
What I am suggesting, however, is that we can no longer afford to regard the uses to which literary works were put in the service of British imperialism as extraneous to the way these texts are to be read. The involvement of colonialism with literary culture is too deep, too pervasive for the disciplinary development of English literary pedagogy to be studied with Britain as its only or primary focus. Large areas of discussion have yet to be fully mapped out, but I am hopeful that with sustained cross-referencing between the histories of England and its colonies the relations between Western culture and imperialism will be progressively illuminated.