Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India

Introduction

THIS BOOK is about the institution, practice, and ideology of English studies introduced in India under British colonial rule. It does not seek to be a comprehensive record of the history of English, nor does it even attempt to catalog, in minute historical fashion, the various educational decisions, acts, and resolutions that led to the institutionalization of English. The work draws upon the illuminating insight of Antonio Gramsci, writing on the relations of culture and power, that cultural domination works by consent and can (and often does) precede conquest by force. Power, operating concurrendy at two clearly distinguishable levels, produces a situation where, Gramsci writes, “the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’…. It seems clear … that there can, and indeed must be hegemonic activity even before the rise to power, and that one should not count only on the material force which power gives in order to exercise an effective leadership.”¹

The importance of moral and intellectual suasion in matters of governance is readily conceded on theoretical grounds as an implicit tactical maneuver in the consolidation of power. There is an almost bland consensus in post-Arnoldian cultural criticism that the age of ideology begins when force gives way to ideas. But the precise mode and process by which cultural domination is ensured is less open to scrutiny. The general approach is to treat “ideology” as a form of masking, and the license given to speculative analyses as a result is sometimes great enough to suspend, at least temporarily, the search for actual intentions.

Admittedly, detailed records of self-incrimination are not routinely preserved in state archives. But where such records do exist the evidence is often compelling enough to suggest that the Gramscian notion is not merely a theoretical construct, but an uncannily accurate description of historical process, subject to the vagaries of particular circumstances. A case in point is British India, whose checkered history of cultural confrontation conferred a sense of urgency to voluntary cultural assimilation as the most effective form of political action. The political choices are spelled out in the most chilling terms by J. Farish in a minute issued in the Bombay Presidency: “The Natives must either be kept down by a sense of our power, or they must willingly submit from a conviction that we are more wise, more just, more humane, and more anxious to improve their condition than any other rulers they could possibly have.”²

This book sets out to demonstrate in part that the discipline of English came into its own in an age of colonialism, as well as to argue that no serious account of its growth and development can afford to ignore the imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England, a mission that in the long run served to strengthen Western cultural hegemony in enormously complex ways. It is not enough, as D. J. Palmer, Terry Eagleton, Chris Baldick, Peter Widdowson, and Brian Doyle, among others, seem to believe, to provide token acknowledgment of the role of empire by linking the Indian Civil Service examinations, in which English literature was a major subject, to the promotion of English studies in British schools and universities.³ Important as these examinations were, they do not indicate the full extent of imperialism’s involvement with literary culture. The amazingly young history of English literature as a subject of study (it is less than a hundred and fifty years old) is frequently noted, but less appreciated is the irony that English literature appeared as a subject in the curriculum of the colonies long before it was institutionalized in the home country.⁴ As early as the 1820s, when the classical curriculum still reigned supreme in England despite the strenuous efforts of some concerned critics to loosen its hold, English as the study of culture and not simply the study of language had already found a secure place in the British Indian curriculum. The circumstances of its ascendancy are what this book is immediately concerned with, though it also seeks simultaneously to draw attention to the subsequent institutionalization and ideological content of the discipline in England as it developed in the colonial context.

I have two general aims in writing this book: the first is to study the adaptation of the content of English literary education to the administrative and political imperatives of British rule; and the other is to examine the ways in which these imperatives in turn charged that content with a radically altered significance, enabling the humanistic ideals of enlightenment to coexist with and indeed even support education for social and political control. As a description of process, this study is specifically directed at elucidating the relationship between the institutionalization of English in India and the exercise of colonial power, between the processes of curricular selection and the impulse to dominate and control. The curriculum is conceived here not in the perennialist sense of an objective, essentialized entity but rather as discourse, activity, process—as one of the mechanisms through which knowledge is socially distributed and culturally validated.

The history of education in British India shows that certain humanistic functions traditionally associated with literature—for example, the shaping of character or the development of the aesthetic sense or the disciplines of ethical thinking—were considered essential to the processes of sociopolitical control by the guardians of the same tradition. Despite occasional murmurs to the contrary, the notion that these functions are unique to English literature still persists in modern curricular pronouncements, with a consequent blurring of the distinction between “English literature” and “English studies”—a blurring that Richard Poirier noted as a by now more general characteristic of contemporary culture. “English studies,” he argues in an essay that still remains timely, has been allowed to appropriate literature in ways “not unarguably belonging to it.”⁵ The distinction proposed in Poirier’s title—“What Is English Studies, and If You Know What That Is, What Is English Literature?”—is a useful one to bear in mind in connection with British Indian educational history, insofar as it draws attention to literary education, as opposed to literature, as a major institutional support system of colonial administration. The transformation of literature from its ambivalent “original” state into an instrument of ideology is elsewhere described by another critic, Terry Eagleton, as

a vital instrument for the insertion of individuals into the perceptual and symbolic forms of the dominant ideological formation…. What is finally at stake is not literary texts but Literature—the ideological significance of that process whereby certain historical texts are severed from their social formations, defined as “literature,” and bound and ranked together to constitute a series of “literary traditions” and interrogated to yield a set of ideological presupposed responses.⁶

Indeed, once such importance is conceded to the educational function, it is easier to see that values assigned to literature—such as the proper development of character or the shaping of critical thought or the formation of aesthetic judgment—are only problematically located there and are more obviously serviceable to the dynamic of power relations between the educator and those who are to be educated. A vital if subtle connection exists between a discourse in which those who are to be educated are represented as morally and intellectually deficient and the attribution of moral and intellectual values to the literary works they are assigned to read.

Critical consciousness in matters of education is entirely dependent on perceiving and illuminating the unique role of such representations in producing and sustaining structures of domination. In specific terms, it involves determining the degree to which representation of moral and intellectual ideals forms the substratum of educational discourse and then linking such representation to the changing structure of relationships between those for whom educational prescriptions are made and those who arrogate to themselves the status of “prescriber.” Unfortunately histories of modem Indian education abound in a mass of detail of event and place that often obscures the expressive context within which those events occurred.

Of course, it will be argued that any verbal act is a representation and that no analysis of reality can ever be devoid of ideological content as long as it is encoded in language. Therefore, the suggestion that modem Indian education grew out of a body of utterances that embodied the collective attitudes of a hegemonic class will not appear to many to merit further examination to the degree that it is suggested here as necessary. But the point of my argument is that language functions at different levels of mediation and the language of educational discourse is itself part of a larger representational system that provides the superstructure for what Edward Said has called “methodological attitudes.” It is hoped illumination of the embedding of educational discourse in that system will check the propensity of formerly colonized societies to employ upon themselves the structures of cultural domination inherent in the language of educational discourse.

AMONG THE several broad areas of emphases in this book the first and perhaps most important is that the history of English and that of Indian developments in the same areas are related but at the same time quite separate. I stress the word separate to indicate the gap between functions and uses of literary education in England and in India, despite the comparability of content at various points. I refer specifically to such instances as differing uses of the same curricula, the different status of various literary genres like romantic narrative, lyric poetry, and pastoral drama, and different conceptions of mind and character that marginalized the work of such Orientalist scholars as William Jones in the context of Indian educational policy while simultaneously elevating to a new status in British literary and educational culture those same “Oriental” tales denounced for their deleterious effects on Indian morals and character.

One of the great contradictions in early nineteenth-century developments is uncovered at the level of comparison of the educational histories of England and India. With the educational context, one runs headon into the central paradox of British deliberations on the curriculum as prescribed for both England and India: while Englishmen of all ages could enjoy and appreciate exotic tales, romantic narrative, adventure stories, and mythological literature for their charm and even derive instruction from them,⁷ their colonial subjects were believed incapable of doing so because they lacked the prior mental and moral cultivation required for literature—especially their own—to have any instructive value for them.⁸ A play like Kalidas’ Shakuntala, which delighted Europeans for its pastoral beauty and lyric charm and led Horace Wilson, a major nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholar, to call it the jewel of Indian literature, was disapproved of as a text for study in Indian schools and colleges, and the judgment that “the more popular forms of [Oriental literature] are marked with the greatest immorality and impurity” held sway.⁹ The inability to discriminate between decency and indecency was deemed to be a fixed characteristic of the native mind, a symptom of the “dulness of their comprehension.”¹⁰ Clearly such a statement suggests that it is not the morality of literature that is at issue, but the mental capabilities of the reader. Raising Indians to the intellectual level of their Western counterparts constituted a necessary prerequisite to literary instruction, especially in texts from the native culture, and consequently to forestalling the danger of having unfortified minds falsely seduced by the “impurities” of the traditional literature of the East.

But far from resulting in a markedly different curriculum from the English, this view of Indian character produced almost an identical one, though qualified by stipulated prerequisites. The claim that literature can be read meaningfully only when a high degree of morality and understanding is present in the reader implied that certain controlled measures were necessary to bring the reader up to the desired level. But paradoxically, those measures took the form of instruction in that same literature for which preparation was deemed necessary. To raise the reader to a level of morality that would better prepare him to read literature effectively, the method that was struck on was instruction in Western aesthetic principles; by giving young Indians a taste for the arts and literature of England, “we might insensibly wean their affections from the Persian muse, teach them to despise the barbarous splendour of their ancient princes, and, totally supplanting the tastes which flourished under the Mogul reign, make them look to this country with that veneration, which the youthful student feels for the classical soil of Greece.”¹¹ At the same time the self-justification of the literature curriculum—its use as both method and object of moral and intellectual study—remained the central problematic of British ideology, its authority necessarily requiring external support and validation to be more than merely self-confirming.

The heterogeneity of the colonial population and its quite different relation to institutional structures as understood and practiced in England prompted a series of experiments that could not readily be tried out in England because of well-defined church-state relations and firmly entrenched orthodoxies and traditions prevailing there. Well before any other group, missionaries perceived the East India Company’s secularist policy to be a calculated response to a cultural situation in England in which the secular practice of education had virtually been driven underground by the aristocratic and clerical orders. Protesting what they saw as governmental arrogance in severing Indian education from the influence of religious culture, missionaries were led to suspect that the official policy of secularism in India had been instituted in a spirit of experimentation and that India was merely being used as a “fair and open field for testing the non-religion theory of education.”¹² On the evidence of communications between the Court of Directors and the governor-general-in-council in Calcutta, there is strong support for the view that India had become an experimental laboratory for testing educational ideas that had either been abandoned in England or fallen victim to insuperable opposition from entrenched traditions and orthodoxies. Because the East India Company perceived the colonized culture as lacking in counteractive influences (by which was meant direct church control) it considered India fertile ground for experimentation with untested ideas and observing and recording their effects under controlled conditions. The classical study of English as language, without the cultural, social, and religious associations it had in England, was enabled by a secular approach to fields of knowledge that were considered objects of study in and for themselves. If secularism in the British control of India eventually faced the kind of opposition it experienced in England and English studies abandoned its secular character to acquire overtly religious and cultural functions, it was largely due to the fierce resistance put up by missionaries who unequivocally denounced secular education as an expression of British middle-class, laissez-faire interests.

The relation between the educational histories of England and India is best understood as structured on the principle of complementarity. By complementarity I mean a dynamic interaction of interests whose resolution is not necessarily confined to the context in which any given concern originates but extends actively to those contexts that provide the soil for such resolution. Practically speaking, the point of reference for a dilemma encountered in India may conceivably be a comparable situation in England that demonstrably yielded effective solutions, and vice versa. Complementarity does not imply that one precedes or causes the other, nor that both are parallel, arbitrarily related developments with few or no points of contact. Its defining characteristic is the capacity for transference, in criss-cross fashion, of anyone or more of these factors—subject, agent, event, intention, purpose—not in the sense of wholesale borrowing, but of readaptation. The degree to which transference is enabled or alternatively thwarted by elements in the society for which solution is sought provides the outlines for demarcation of each new block of history.¹³

The interactive dynamism, the fluidity of movement between social contexts, at once promoting and resisting change, is effectively captured in the model proposed by Raymond Williams in his brief critique of Lukacs in “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Analysis.” Williams persuasively argues that while it is accurate to define society as a set of practices that allow it to function as a society, such an exercise cannot be undertaken without also showing that it has a specific organization and structure directly related to certain social intentions, “intentions by which we define the society, intentions which have been the rule of a particular class.”¹⁴

As Williams goes on to argue, to subscribe to a notion of totality that presents society monolithically as “composed of a large number of social practices which form a concrete social whole that interact, relate, and combine in very complicated ways” is to advance a static model that systematically closes off the possibility of an inner dynamics at work, both in the thrust toward and the resistance to historical change. Williams quite clearly wishes to see culture and society studied in terms of process and has therefore little use for a static or highly determined, rule-governed model in which the rules of society are highlighted to the exclusion of the processual and the historical.

But though intentionality as Williams uses it may seem merely another term for determination, it would be a mistake to infer that by this he means unmediated control. Rather, he sees the determinative principle in intention as more closely allied with the notion of “setting of limits” and “exertion of pressure.” Williams’ reading of intention as a “setting of limits” allows for the possibility of conflict, for the crucial nodes where constraints are placed are more readily identifiable as the places where resistance may occur against the gross “exertion of pressure.” Indeed, Williams’ main contribution is in offering a dynamic model that will permit one to study culture and society in terms of how social will or intention (the terms are interchangeable) is engaged in an unceasing activity of circumscribing human behavior on the one hand and diluting resistance to the authority it represents on the other. To know the “social intentions” by which a society is defined is thus to identify not only the potential places where the collective will seeks to assert itself, but also where it is most subject to the fracturing and dissipation caused by extreme pressure.

THE FACT that English literary study had its beginnings as a strategy of containment raises the question, Why literature? If indeed the British were the unchallenged military power of India, why was the exercise of direct force discarded as a means of maintaining social control? What accounts for the British readiness to turn to a disciplinary branch of knowledge to perform the task of administering their colonial subjects? What was the assurance that a disguised form of authority would be more successful in quelling potential rebellion among the natives than a direct show of force? By what reasoning did literary texts come to signify religious faith, empirically verifiable truth, and social duty? Why introduce English in the first place only to work at strategies to balance its secular tendencies with moral and religious ones?

These questions suggest a vulnerability in the British position that is most sharply felt when the history of British rule is read in light of the construction of ideology. There is little doubt that a great deal of strategic maneuvering went into the creation of a blueprint for social control in the guise of a humanistic program of enlightenment. But merely acknowledging this fact is not enough, for there is yet a further need to distinguish between strategy as unmediated assertion of authority and strategy as mediated response to situational imperatives. That is to say, it is important to determine whether British educational measures were elaborated from an uncontested position of superiority and strength and as such are to be read as unalloyed expressions of ethnocentric sentiment or whether that position itself was a fragile one that it was the role of educational decisions to fortify, given the challenge posed by historical contingency and confrontation.

The argument of this book leans toward the second proposition, specifically, that the introduction of English represented an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the East India Company and the English Parliament, between Parliament and missionaries, between the East India Company and the Indian elite classes. The vulnerability of the British, the sense of beleaguerment and paranoid dread, is reflected in defensive mechanisms of control that were devised in anticipation of what British administrators considered almost certain rebellion by natives against actions and decisions taken by the British themselves. The inordinate attention paid by parliamentary discussions and debates and correspondence between the Court of Directors and the governor-general to anticipated reactions by the native population to, for example, the teaching of the Bible or the termination of funds for the support of Oriental learning is often in excess of accounts of actual response.

This leads one to surmise that a scenario unfolded in British policymaking that did not necessarily correspond with what was in reality occurring in the subjugated population. At one level, representation of Indians as morally and intellectually deficient provided the ameliorative motive and self-righteous justification for colonial intervention. But at another level that same system of representation, depicting the natives as irrational, inscrutable, unstable, and volatile, doomed British rulers to inhabiting an imagined, dreaded world of imminent rebellion and resistance. British disorientation and disengagement from an immediate Indian social and political reality can be dated back to the Cornwallis period (1786–1793). The reorganization of administrative machinery set in motion by Lord Cornwallis, whose ambition was to achieve an impersonal government of law, produced greater distance between rulers and ruled as a result of the gradual removal of Indians from offices of responsibility. In the absence of the direct interaction with the indigenous population that characterized earlier administrations, the colonial subject was reduced to a conceptual category, an object emptied of all personal identity to accommodate the knowledge already established and being circulated about the “native Indian.” The strategies of British administrators, the reversals, the disavowals, the imagined successes, and the imagined failures are all part of an unstable foundation of knowledge, and the experiment in control that was born of it-the introduction of English education-was as much an effort, however feeble, at strengthening that foundation as an instrument of discipline and management.

For this reason it is entirely possible to study the ideology of British education quite independently of an account of how Indians actually received, reacted to, imbibed, manipulated, reinterpreted, or resisted the ideological content of British literary education. In the first place, the question of the success or efficacy of the British ideology is better reserved for studies employing a mode of analysis that is not restricted to the literary, textual analysis with which this book is mainly concerned. But methodological considerations aside, not only is an account of why Indians might want to believe the British ideology given their own intentions and of how they manipulated it and selectively reinterpreted it for their own purposes outside the scope of this book; it is in fact irrelevant to it. To be sure, the charge of conspiring to erase the voice of the colonized and blot out his identity will remain to some extent and must be contended with at the outset. Yet it is not generally realized how infinitely more binding the tyranny of representation can be on the colonizer than it is on the colonized, for if the colonial subject is a construct emanating from the colonizer’s head, and therefore removed from history, the history to which the British administrator responds—the impending “event” to which his measures are so crucially attached—is real only to the extent that it provides the rationale for his actions. How the native actually responds is so removed from the colonizer’s representational system, his understanding of the meaning of events, that it enters into the realm of another history of which the latter has no comprehension or even awareness. That history can, and perhaps must, be told separately for its immensely rich and complex quality to be fully revealed.

Indeed, to record the Indian response to ideology is no more an act of restoring the native’s voice as not recording it is to render him mute. As Benita Parry points out in a penetrating essay, neither the critical positions against universalizing narratives nor the “self-righteous rhetoric of resistance” that is limited to “devices circumventing and interrogating colonial authority” sufficiently recognizes the colonized as possessor of another knowledge and history and as producer of alternative traditions.¹⁵ Edward Said illuminatingly describes the process of negation initiated in the mind of the colonizer thus:

The journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation … are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West…. Something patently foreign and distant acquires, for one reason or another, a status more rather than less familiar. One tends to stop judging things either as completely novel or as completely wellknown; a new median category emerges, a category that allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time, as versions of a previously known thing. In essence such a category is not so much a way of receiving new information as it is a method of controlling what seems to be a threat to some established view of things. … The threat is muted, familiar values impose themselves, and in the end the mind reduces the pressure upon it by accommodating things to itself as either “original” or “repetitious.”¹⁶

To illustrate with a relevant episode from British Indian history, out of deference to Indian religious sentiment the Bible was proscribed in Indian schools and colleges. But teaching of the Bible was a sensitive issue more from the point of view of the British than the Indians. It was often remarked that fear of the Bible was really an English, not a Hindu one and had its origins in the objections of Roman Catholics. Those objections, which came out of a bitter European religious history of acrimony and dissent, were transposed onto a contrived, culturally homogenized Indian situation, strengthening the conviction that instruction in the Bible was sure to meet with violent hostility from Hindus and Muslims. The fact that reports to the contrary (“The Hindus despise our Bible; they do not believe it is the power of God to upset their whole system…. They care as little for the Bible in its religious character as we do for Homer”)¹⁷ were little heeded indicates the degree to which the heterogeneity of Indian tradition, society, and culture was glided over in the rush to appropriate it to the pattern of European religious history.

But that heterogeneity remained to enable the writing of an altogether different history of response from the one being fashioned by the rulers. Autobiographies, journals, and memoirs of nineteenth-century Indians reveal quite a different perspective on the issue of Bible instruction: far from attaching the absolutist values to it that their rulers thought was the case, they were indisputably guided more by instrumental motives. Lal Behari Day, biographer and former student of the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff, records that his father had worked out an elaborate plan to give his son a good English education without exposing him to the dangers of proselytism in a mission school: he would wait for the moment when his son had learned enough English to obtain a decent situation outside, but was not yet intellectually advanced to understand lectures on Christianity—as soon as that moment arrived, he would instantly be withdrawn from school and placed in an office.

YET ANOTHER reason for not establishing the effects of English education as a point of reference for studying British ideology is the methodological tyranny that such an orientation is heir to. Histories of Indian education, particularly of the British period, typically fall into a fairly predictable pattern. They are in quite a number of instances written as a history of acts and resolutions whose interest lies in their presumed effect on the existing social and cultural system. The broad questions addressed are frequently not dissimilar to these: What political and social relationships are altered, modified, redefined, or at the other extreme perhaps maintained or perpetuated? What new behaviors or modes of thought are promoted? What institutions are brought into existence, and what impression do they leave upon the social fabric? From this sample of questions it is apparent that such histories tend to be written in terms of the transformative influence of educational decisions on the pattern of behavior and action in that society. Therefore, though the starting point may be a specific resolution, educational historians have chosen to concern themselves less with what goes into its making—the discourse that led to its formulation, the expressive context in which the event occurred—than with the outcome it had with regard to the targeted population.

The consequence of this methodological choice is that the changes wrought upon the society and its individual members then become the basis for qualitative descriptions of the historical function of any given educational decision. On the surface Bruce McCully’s English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism does not seem particularly insidious in that it takes as its subject the reversal of colonialism through the very agency of its dissemination. The book is a documentation of the thesis that the growth of Indian nationalism was spurred by the formal training of Indians in the liberal doctrines of Western thought. That thesis is supported by descriptions of the educated Indian class—their backgrounds, their reading, their engagement in political and literary activities, their involvement in matters relating to social reform. By focusing so minutely on the activities of this class of Indians, McCully’s ostensible purpose is to show how the education they received provided them with the tools for questioning colonial authority and eventually subverting it. But on the subject of precisely how English education worked toward this end or how it was so specially constituted as to produce the reaction that it did McCully is remarkably silent. He is equally taciturn about what British administrators set out to do by introducing an education based on English principles or what changes that purpose underwent in the course of its institutional development—changes that, I shall contend here, were more in the nature of attempts to mediate the secularized, dehistoricized, and therefore potentially disruptive brand of literary instruction that the British themselves had introduced to Indians.

The other study that I single out for contributing to the same sort of tacit valorization of British educational policies is David Kopf’s British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance. Kopf’s thesis, put quite simply, is that the dynamics of Indian modernization were set in motion by British Orientalism, or the cultural policy of promoting Oriental learning in India. Like McCully, Kopf proceeds from an observation that there developed during the late eighteenth century an Indian national consciousness vigorously directed to a renaissance of the arts and sciences. From this observation he infers that Orientalism, far from being the moribund policy that it was thought to be, was in fact the instrument for achieving a transformation of Indian society along modern lines. His message is substantially not very different from McCully’s: were it not for British mediation, the Indians would have never been acquainted with their own culture or recognized the possibilities of national growth on indigenous foundations. Though Kopf claims to use this understanding to show that modernization need not necessarily mean Westernization, the terms of his descriptions indicate otherwise:

The Orientalists served as avenues linking the regional elite with the dynamic civilization of contemporary Europe. They contributed to the formation of a new Indian middle class and assisted in the professionalization of the Bengali intelligentsia. They started schools, systematized languages, brought printing and publishing to India, and encouraged the proliferation of books, journals, newspapers, and other media of communication. Their impact was urban and secular. They built the first modern scientific labs in India, and taught European medicine. They were neither static classicists nor averse to the idea of progress; and they both historicized the Indian past and stimulated a consciousness of history in the Indian intellectual. It was they who transmitted a new sense of identity to Bengalis that enlarged what Robert Bellah has called “the capacity for rational goal setting,” an instrumental process in the development of a modern outlook.¹⁸

What clearly makes it possible for Kopf to credit the Orientalists with the appearance of a cohesive native population is the unquestioned assumption that the latter had neither a sense of national history nor a historical consciousness from which a distinct identity could be shaped. If a heightened national consciousness emerged in the late eighteenth century among the Bengali elite, the only possible explanation for it in Kopf’s analysis is the introduction of institutions and ideas developed in the West. It is a premise that encourages him to focus almost exclusively on these institutions as the cause of an enlightened Bengali intelligentsia.

By reading Indian educational history in terms of the impact of policy on individuals and on the native society at large, both McCully and Kopf leave unresolved the relationship of effect and intention, with the result that motive is either subordinated to effect or effect made an arbitrary outcome of intention. In both cases, effect takes on a separate existence of its own, empirically distinct and historically independent of its generating principle. For the same reason, a quasi-innocence is imputed to intention: by perceiving effect as an incidental rather than willed outcome, McCully frees himself from the obligation of having to determine the motive force of English education, as does Kopf from that of British Orientalism. What lies beneath the event—the shaping discourse or informing idea—is either treated as too indeterminate for analysis or made synonymous with cause. In studying Indian nationalism as a by-product of English education, McCully implicitly draws upon a causal model to suggest that the only grounds on which it can be meaningfully understood are those that demand our submitting to a sense of randomness and unpredictability of event—in other words, to see Indian nationalism as a complete and unexpected reversal of the aims of British education by virtue of being an all too faithful application of its lessons.

This mode of explanation compels an ironic reading of the history of Indian nationalism, instilling an exaggerated sense of contrast between the assimilation into the rulers’ culture that Western education could be expected to ensure and the subversion it instead helped to promote. Far from allowing the ideological contradictions of the situation to emerge, a forced antithesis of this kind causes the phenomenon of Indian nationalism to be interpreted as the product of an unmediated form of English thought, with the ideas of the Western liberal tradition seeming to seep into the Indian mind in a benignly osmotic fashion. Implicit in this model of incidental causality is a certain political innocence in the British decision to introduce English education of the kind best exemplified in Macaulay’s speech before the House of Commons:

What is power worth if it is founded on vice, on ignorance, and on misery; if we can hold it only by violating the most sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed and which, as a people blessed with far more than ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light, we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft. We are free, we are civilized to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilization.¹⁹

The view represented in this passage is that British colonialism knowingly put the tools of enlightenment into the hands of the subjects at the risk of endangering its own position. From it further springs the general historical judgment that the Western commitment to the ideals of liberal thought was so unqualified that it took complete precedence over whatever political apprehensions were bound to prevail.

This sort of description demands that we subscribe to two notions: first, that the functions of education remain constant regardless of context or circumstance, so that a humanistic education would have the same meanings and serve the same purposes for both colonizer and colonized, the ruling class and the class it rules; and second, that the curricular elaboration of a given body of knowledge or thought is a faithful representation of that content as it occurs in its free, unbounded, non-institutional form. Both notions construe the reading experience as a direct and open source of attitudes, beliefs, and ideas whose transmission is entirely unmediated by the political and historical realities that in fact affect and influence the processes of education. Indeed, to take account of these realities is inevitably to see reading as a situated activity whose ideas undergo some degree of transformation when filtered through the educational apparatus. In this connection it is well to recall Pierre Bourdieu’s admonition that it would be “naive to disregard the fact that the school modifies the content and the spirit of the culture it transmits and above all, that its express function is to transform the collective heritage into a common individual unconscious.”²⁰

These two notions work together to reinforce the idea that English education had a salutary, emancipatory influence because it released Indians from false consciousness and replaced outmoded styles of thought with enlightened concepts of justice and liberty. If that enlightenment extended to an awareness of British rule as unjust, then it was all the more to be taken as a measure of the success of English education, not its failure.

When converted into methodological axioms, these assumptions contribute to a distinctly colonialist bias in the literature on British Indian education, producing the kinds of formulations seen earlier in the work of McCully and Kopf. If these formulations have persisted over time, it is largely because the curriculum has been perceived as a given and the selection of content understood to be based on well-established canonical principles transcending the immediate realities of time, place, and circumstance. Presumably, the principles of curricular selection are drawn from the principles by which literary knowledge itself is organized—for example, according to genres, periods, and movements. No discrimination is apparently made here between the curriculum and its content; an education in literature is unreservedly identified with the program of perception, thought, and action that is culture.

The effect of such identification is an exclusion of extraliterary considerations, such as the exigencies of the political and historical situation, the power relations between educator and educated, and the relations of curricular content to social structure and modes of social organization. Recent work in educational sociology, particularly that of Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, Michael Young, Michael Apple, and Ioann Davies, has attempted to correct this imbalance by reorienting the task of historical inquiry to treating the received categories of the curriculum not as absolutes, but as constructed realities realized in particular institutional contexts. With reference to the literature curriculum the argument can be extended to the dogmas of reason and morality, their problematization being a necessary preliminary to conceiving of non-manipulative, non-coercive alternatives.

A FINAL area of emphasis in this book is concerned with a set of assumptions about human nature that emerges from British parliamentary debates on the political uses of literature in India. These are specifically related on one hand to a transcendental ideal and on the other to a tangible political and social order. An approach to civilization as the humanization of man through various influences, including literature and the arts, raises questions about whether it is at all possible to respond to literature at the level of who we are, in all our “naturalness” and “ordinariness,”²¹ or whether the ameliorative project is so indelibly built into the nature of literary instruction as to endorse an implicit dualism of actual and ideal selves. Lionel Gossman points to early British arguments for literary instruction, intensely Calvinist in their formulation, that assumed a condition of innate depravity; 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. The religious import of the dualism persists into the Arnoldian notion of culture as man’s “better self,” offering him the promise of perfection. In Culture and Anarchy Arnold writes:

The aim of culture [is to set] ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail; but also, in determining generally, in what perfection consists, religion comes to a conclusion identical with that which culture—culture seeking the determination of this question through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon it, of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion, in order to give a greater fullness and certainty to its solution—likewise reaches. Religion says: The Kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality…. Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; and here, too, it coincides with religion.²²

Though Arnold does not dismiss the improvement of material conditions as part of the work of culture, there is no question in his mind that social or political amelioration can only follow upon moral reformation. Indeed, Arnold opens himself up to considerable criticism in his accommodation of existing material conditions to a religious interpretation of culture. Elsewhere, in an essay on the French poet Maurice de Guerin, Arnold defines poetry as a form of art that “reconciles him with himself and his universe,”²³ carefully excluding criticism of society from poetry’s “criticism of life.” Therefore, though culture may be concerned with making the individual better, that is not necessarily to say that it is concerned with the restructuring of society.

If, in the context of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism, an innately depraved self could hope for regeneration through the transformative, moral action of literary instruction, Utilitarian formulations attached a different value to Western literary education as providing the means for the exercise of reason, moral will, and critical understanding. The secular revision of the notion of innate depravity reconceives moral law as part of the innate knowledge from which man has been led astray as a result of tyranny, despotism, and false rule and to which he is to be restored through a fortified intellect. From the viewpoint of Utilitarian philosophy, the action of bad government was responsible for the corruption of individuals, thwarting their capacity for good. But before that process could be reversed, the individual had to have sufficient critical understanding of the causes of his abasement and be adequately detached from his immediate situation to be able to analyze both its logic and its contradictions. A sharpened critical sense therefore was held to be an absolutely essential prerequisite to the restoration of the individual to his original condition of moral virtue and, by extension, of a wellordered political society. In secular formulations literature is less a branch of religion than a department of knowledge that includes, among other disciplines, science, history, and philosophy.

But the assumptions of human nature that allow literature to usurp functions not necessarily intrinsic to it, such as those of religion in one instance or of empirical disciplines like history in another, also enable the suppression of material relations. The affirmation of an ideal self and an ideal political state through a specific national literature—English literature—is in essence an affirmation of English identity. But that identity is equally split along the lines of actual and ideal selves, and the Englishman actively participating in the cruder realities of conquest, commercial aggrandizement, and disciplinary management of natives blends into the rarefied, more exalted image of the Englishman as producer of the knowledge that empowers him to conquer, appropriate, and manage in the first place. The self-presentation of the Englishman to native Indians through the products of his mental labor removes him from the place of ongoing colonialist activity—of commercial operations, military expansion, and administration of territories—and deactualizes and diffuses his material reality in the process. In a parodic reworking of the Cartesian axiom, the Englishman’s true essence is defined by the thought he produces, overriding all other aspects of his identity—his personality, actions, and behavior. His material reality as subjugator and alien ruler is dissolved in his mental output; the blurring of the man and his works effectively removes him from history.

The introduction of English literature marks the effacement of a sordid history of colonialist expropriation, material exploitation, and class and race oppression behind European world dominance. The English literary text, functioning as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state, becomes a mask for economic exploitation, so successfully camouflaging the material activities of the colonizer that one unusually self-conscious British colonial official, Charles Trevelyan, was prompted to remark, “[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.”²⁴ The split between the material and the cultural practices of colonialism is nowhere sharper than in the progressive refinement of the rapacious, exploitative, and ruthless actor of history into the reflective subject of literature.

THIS BOOK does not attempt to be a “definitive” study of English studies in India. It leaves aside many questions apart from those concerning the effects of literary instruction on individual Indians and the readings that educated Indians gave to the English texts they were taught. The book is necessarily selective and partial, concentrating on major themes and developments rather than aiming to show the available material in all its variety. Still less does it aim to provide a chronological narrative of British Indian educational history. I have taken considerable license with Edward Said’s formulation of “beginnings” as a moment that “includes everything that develops out of it, no matter how eccentric the development or inconsistent the result,”²⁵ to write a history of English studies as if it were entirely contained by its political and historical beginnings.

This book is simple in conception and design. The first chapter, outlining the early history of British involvement in Indian education, locates the beginnings of English literary studies in the Charter Act of 1813, an act born of the tensions between Parliament and the East India Company and between Company officials and missionaries and whose wording was so ambiguous as to encourage an unexpected prominence to English studies. The two chapters that follow describe the missionary influence in precipitating a new role and function for literary study, infusing English studies with cultural and religious meanings: chapter 2 outlines the efforts of one missionary, Alexander Duff, to adapt the existing English curriculum to religious ends; chapter 3 examines the British government’s appropriation of the religious uses of literature to appease the missionaries on the one hand and to quell native insubordination on the other.

The second half of the book details the reverse movement away from religious functions toward a return to secular uses of literature, but now with a strengthened cultural base to give literature a new political authority: chapter 4 describes the dramatic disavowal of English literature’s association with Christianity, signaling a shift from universal Christian truths to the legitimacy of British authority—from forms of religious to intellectual control; chapter 5 examines the gradual emphasis on literary study as a branch of historical analysis in its relation to the consolidation of British cultural hegemony; chapter 6 analyzes the gradual breakdown of the success of English literary education, tracing native disenchantment with colonial rule to erratic, unstable changes in the functions of English education, exposing the growing disjunction between the seemingly unlimited possibilities for self-elevation promised by literary training and the restrictive conditions of British rule under which “moral and intellectual” growth was actually promoted.