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Chapter 2
THE EARLY TO MID NINETEENTH CENTURY
DEBATES OVER REFORM AND CHALLENGE TO EMPIRE
This chapter charts the themes and controversies galvanizing British and Indian elites from the late 1700s until the 1860s, and emphasizes early Indian (often Bengali, since Calcutta remained the center of cultural exchange in this early period) reactions and challenges to British education, religion, and political aggrandizement. The period is framed by the somewhat tolerant attitudes of early British Orientalists, men like Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society in 1784, and by the Rebellion of 1857, when sepoys of the East India Company turned against their officers, after which other segments of north Indian society defied the British in a threat to foreign rule. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, then, one finds increasing alienation among Indians, as they were forced to adjust to a European power that was expanding in terms of territory and was enunciating, justifying, and enforcing what it considered a maximally efficient style of governance. Throughout the same decades, however, many Indians learned English, some proclaimed the virtues of British presence in India, and some even converted to Christianity.
Ideologically, the first three decades of the century saw a transition in English political opinion from the Orientalists’ relatively open, acculturative attitudes toward Indian customs, to the evangelical, utilitarian approach of missionaries and Anglicists. The triumph of the latter in the English Parliament had several results in India: the ban on missionary activity in India was lifted in 1813; Hindu College was founded in 1816 in Calcutta to impart Western education to Indian youth; in 1835 English was substituted for Persian as the official language of government; and Fort William College, founded in 1800 to train Company recruits in Indian languages and customs, was closed.
Initial enthusiasm for English, especially among educated Hindus, is evidenced by the great popularity of Hindu College professor Henry V. Derozio, who taught a Western-style secular rationalism. But already the relation of Western to Indian learning was becoming a vexed issue. Rammohan Roy, active in Calcutta in the 1820s—just when the British were overcoming their earlier reluctance to interfere with established cultural patterns, and shortly before they took the decisive step, under the leadership of Thomas Babington Macaulay, of introducing English education—was in many ways a staunch Anglicist: he championed English law, literature, and reformist ideas. Yet he also resisted British hypocrisy, criticized Christian preachers, and turned to Hindu scriptures for wisdom and guidance. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, most Indians, even if educated in English, were also engaged in recovering their own traditions; Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar, the writer and reformist champion of women’s rights, strove all his life to wed the insights of Brahmanical and post-Enlightenment thought. Roy and Vidyasagar also shared with other contemporaries a reliance on scripture to justify their assertions—an indigenous debating strategy strengthened by the Orientalists’ emphasis on textual authority.
For Hindus and Muslims, British interference in temple and mosque administration and in religious custom, such as the 1829 criminalization of sati (a practice in which a widow burned herself on her husband’s funeral pyre) through the efforts of Rammohan Roy, and the passing of the Widow Remarriage Bill in 1856 through the efforts of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar, caused intense debate. Should such meddling, enabled by liberal reformers, be tolerated? Could reforms, especially as concerned women, be adopted without compromise to the core of the tradition? To what extent could one find inspiration in the figure of Jesus without assenting to the particular teachings and activities of the missionaries? For all their differences, the views on Christianity represented below by Rammohan Roy and Nilakantha Goreh have much in common. Roy finds the ethical Jesus attractive, while to Goreh Christian teaching makes little sense. But both undercut missionary teaching by citing the Bible directly and using common sense; moreover, both came under intense pressure from Christian preachers.
For Muslim intellectuals the dominant questions of this period concerned the Mughal past, the status of the British-governed present, and the desired vision for the future. Some ulema or religious leaders argued with each other as to whether the replacement of the Mughals by the British meant that India could no longer be considered a land of peace, or Dār ul-Islām. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the greatest early Westernizing Muslim spokesman, while wanting to bring the richness of Western education to India, also desired to arouse in his Indo-Muslim contemporaries a pride in the Mughal period. But the response of Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib,” the greatest Urdu poet of the nineteenth century, to Sir Sayyid’s invitation to write a preface to a new edition of the Ain-i Akbari, demonstrates that not all Muslims wished to idealize an irretrievable past.
While reformists of this period, chiefly Hindu but also Muslim, were attentive to what Partha Chatterjee has called “the woman question” (that is, legal controversies over the appropriateness of child marriage, polygamy, and widow remarriage), women themselves seem to have been more concerned with the domestic freedoms that would allow them the opportunity to learn to read and write. Rassundari Devi (b. 1810) and Bibi Ashraf (b. 1840) both wrote firsthand accounts of their struggles to read and write within the confines of traditional households in which literacy was a right reserved for boys and men; their early attempts at self-education pave the way for women such as those we encounter in chapter 3, who produce sophisticated literature and contribute to regional and national culture.
At the end of our period, tensions inherent in increasingly strained relations of inequality found expression in the Rebellion of 1857, a bloody and vengeful chapter in Indo-British relations that greatly altered mutual perceptions. One can get a sense of the hopes, motivations, and experiences of the sepoys, the Emperor to whom they turned, and the intellectuals who watched from the sidelines, from various historic documents: the so-called Azamgarh Proclamation; an eyewitness account of the heroism of the Rani of Jhansi; the writings of the defeated Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah; Ghalib’s descriptions of British rapacity; Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858; and Sir Sayyid’s ruminations on the causes of the Rebellion, chief among which were the ignorance, neglect, and even willful disregard by the government of the customs, practices, and conditions of “Hindustan.” One final source—debates among Muslim ulema as to the religious status of India after the demise of the Mughal Empire—gives voice to the immediate ideological afterlife of the Rebellion.
The first sixty years of the nineteenth century are noteworthy both for what they do portend, and for what they do not. The effects of Western education were more far-reaching than anyone could have clearly imagined by 1857: they provided Indian thinkers with the tools and the motivation with which, much later, to work for independence. Some farsighted individuals had glimpses of this possibility, as can be seen in Derozio’s odes on India, Rammohan Roy’s comments on the future of his country, and even Macaulay’s hopes for India’s eventual freedom. By contrast, in these early decades we see little communal antagonism. Although the substitution of English for Persian had the effect of making Muslim elites less forward-looking than their Hindu counterparts, there was not yet any overt Hindu–Muslim sparring. The “father of the Hindu renaissance,” Rammohan Roy, was more influenced by his Persian training and Muslim theological exposure than he was by the Hindu tradition of his parents. Most tellingly, the mainly Hindu army of sepoys who mutinied against their British officers in May 1857 rushed to Delhi to beg Bahadur Shah to lead them. That the Mughal Empire before 1857 had legitimacy as a symbol of authority and status, for Hindus as well as Muslims, is, in a post-1947 world, hard—but important—to believe.
HENRY DEROZIO: POET AND EDUCATOR
One of the most brilliant figures in the intellectual world of Calcutta in the early nineteenth century was the poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831). His father, a successful merchant, was probably of mixed Portuguese and Indian descent, while both his mother and the stepmother who brought him up were English. He thus belonged to a tiny Eurasian racial group accepted neither by the British ruling class nor by Hindu and Muslim society.
Derozio was raised as a Protestant and received the best English education then available in Calcutta. Nevertheless, his part-Indian ancestry meant that he could not hold a responsible government post. Finding office work for his father distasteful, he turned for a living to his uncle’s indigo factory in the country. There, on the banks of the Ganges, he composed romantic poems, the publication of which made him the talk of Calcutta at the age of seventeen. Two years later, in 1828, he was appointed to a faculty position in English literature at the newly established Hindu College. Here he found his true calling, and in two years achieved an ascendancy over the minds and hearts of his students that lasted long after his premature death. He encouraged free thinking; employed secular rationalism to question orthodox Hindu customs and beliefs, including the existence of God; and urged a trust in human perfectibility and universal progress.
Derozio thus represented a different reaction to Western ideas than was being explored by contemporaries like Rammohan Roy and the Brahmo Sabha (later known as the “Brahmo Samaj”). Both criticized certain aspects of Indian religion. But while Roy urged a reconstruction of the Hindu tradition, searching in the ancient scriptures for precedents and justifications for modern thought, Derozio encouraged a rejection of that heritage. As is evident below in his romantic poem on India’s future, Derozio’s vision for India was a forward-looking hope of progress, not an idealization of, or a wish to return to, a Golden Past.
Hindu College had been founded by the Calcutta elite with the hope that it would inculcate in their sons the best of the new pragmatic knowledge coming from the West; there was no fear in the first decade of its existence that its teachers would Anglicize the youth or induce them to change their religion. But Derozio’s influence caused concern; parents complained that their sons were cutting their hair, wearing European shoes, eating without bathing, and treating with condescension those of their elders who were ignorant of English. After some students were kept from attending the College out of protest, the board of managers demanded Derozio’s resignation. Shortly thereafter, he died of cholera at the age of twenty-two, leaving a generation of “Derozians,” who called themselves “Young Bengal,” to carry on his work.
Derozio has had a mixed legacy. His tremendous popularity with the youth of his time, despite his linguistic, racial, and religious affinity with the foreign rulers of the land, reflected the growing influence of Western thought among his peers. And yet he finds no mention in the works of Rammohan Roy, Michael Madhusudan Datta, Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar, Rabindranath Tagore, or Swami Vivekananda; his insistence on free-thinking must have proven more noteworthy than the rest of his ideas—especially at a time when his Eurasian ancestry would have been embarrassing to nationalist honor.
LETTER PROTESTING HIS DISMISSAL
In 1831 the resistance of orthodox Hindus to Derozio’s criticisms of their religious tradition culminated in his ouster from Hindu College. One of the charges against Derozio was that he did not believe in the existence of God. To this he replied:
I have never denied the existence of a God in the hearing of any human being. If it be wrong to speak at all upon such a subject, I am guilty, but I am neither afraid, nor ashamed to confess having stated the doubts of philosophers upon this head, because I have also stated the solution of these doubts. Is it forbidden anywhere to argue upon such a question? If so it must be equally wrong to adduce an argument upon either side. Or is it consistent with an enlightened notion of truth to wed ourselves to only one view of so important a subject, resolving to close our eyes and ears against all impressions that oppose themselves to it?
How is any opinion to be strengthened but by completely comprehending the objections that are offered to it, and exposing their futility? And what have I done more than this? Entrusted as I was for some time with the education of youth peculiarly circumstanced, was it for me to have made them pert and ignorant dogmatists, by permitting them to know what could be said upon only one side of grave questions? … If the religious opinions of the students have become unhinged in consequence of the course I have pursued, the fault is not mine. To produce convictions was not within my power; and if I am to be condemned for the Atheism of some, let me receive credit for the Theism of others. Believe me, my dear Sir, I am too thoroughly imbued with a deep sense of human ignorance, and of the perpetual vicissitudes of opinion, to speak with confidence even of the most unimportant matters. Doubt and uncertainty besiege us too closely to admit the boldness of dogmatism to enter an enquiring mind; and far be it from me to say “this is” and “that is not,” when after the most extensive acquaintance with the researches of science, and after the most daring flights of genius we must confess with sorrow and disappointment that humility becomes the highest wisdom, for the highest wisdom assures man of his ignorance.
[From Poems of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio: A Forgotten Anglo-Indian Poet, introduced by F. B. Bradley-Birt, with a new foreword by R. K. Das Gupta, 2nd ed. (1923; Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1980), xlv–xlvi, xlvii.]
POEM TO INDIA
Taking his cue from the patriotism of the Irish and English Romantic poets, Derozio dedicated two sonnets to India. These poems are virtually the first expression of the sentiment of Indian nationalism that in the twentieth century was to force the British to grant independence to India and Pakistan. We reproduce one of them here.
TO INDIAMY NATIVE LAND
My country! in thy day of glory past
A beauteous halo circled round thy brow,
And worshiped as a deity thou wast.
Where is that glory, where that reverence now?
Thy eagle pinion is chained down at last,
And groveling in the lowly dust art thou:
Thy minstrel hath no wreath to weave for thee
Save the sad story of thy misery!
Well—let me dive into the depths of time,
And bring from out the ages that have rolled
A few small fragments of those wrecks sublime,
Which human eye may never more behold;
And let the guerdon of my labor be
My fallen country! one kind wish from thee!
[From Poems of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, 2.]
THE DECISION TO INTRODUCE ENGLISH EDUCATION
No single act of British policy has had a more lasting influence on the evolution of modern Indian thought than the decision in 1835 to use government funds to support education in the English language, and to adopt the curriculum prevalent in English schools. The East India Company, in its initial cautious desire to leave undamaged the traditional bases of Indian society, had decided as early as the 1770s to sponsor Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit studies. Later, when the Company became the paramount power in India, many Indians realized that to get jobs with the new government they would have to learn English, even though Persian continued to be used for official purposes well into the nineteenth century. The more farsighted among them, men like Rammohan Roy, saw that tremendous advantages could be gained by direct contact with the whole corpus of Western learning, and they therefore raised their voices against the antiquarian Company policy.
Indeed, Indians on their own initiative had been learning English since the mid-eighteenth century, if not earlier, in order to deal with these new rulers who were also formidable traders. The establishment of Hindu College in 1816 by leaders in the Indian community, including Roy, to teach modern subjects using English, was a testament to Indian recognition of the value of an English education, a full two decades before the arrival of Macaulay.
The British Committee on Public Instruction was slow to react to the growing demand for a new educational system. When Thomas Babington Macaulay, fresh from England and thirty-four years old, was made its president in 1834, the committee was hopelessly divided between the “Anglicists,” who favored Anglicizing the education and government of India as much as possible, and the “Orientalists,” who believed that there was much wisdom to be gained from so-called Oriental, or Indian, texts and customs, and who thus tried to stem the tide of Anglicist change. Macaulay ended the stalemate by supporting the Anglicists.
The introduction of English education in India had profound social and political effects. The older elites were gradually replaced by a new class of Indians able to act as intermediaries between the British and those Indians with whom, for mercantile, taxation, or ruling purposes, they came into contact. English education also provided, for the privileged handful who could take advantage of it, specialized scientific knowledge, such as that offered in Calcutta from 1835 at the first British medical college of India; it also offered a common language and cultural background. Such conditions of all-India unity gave birth to political self-consciousness and eventually contributed to the rise of Indian nationalism.
A more ominous result was the effect of the new system on the relations between Hindus and Muslims. The substitution of English for Persian as the paramount language of government, diplomacy, and culture had unfortunate repercussions for the old elite of the Mughal Empire, who resented the intrusion of English and tended not to learn it. Available membership lists of elite, British–Indian educational and voluntary societies, as well as of government and missionary schools in mid-nineteenth century Calcutta, show an overwhelming preponderance of Hindu over Muslim names. As time passed, the cultural gap between the two communities widened, until some Muslim intellectuals realized that English-educated Hindus were dominating the scene both politically and economically. One consequence of the more long-standing Hindu attempt to evaluate age-old beliefs and customs in the light of European learning was a more publicly articulated sense of pride in the Hindu heritage and culture, which rendered eventual attempts at reconciliation with Muslim elites increasingly difficult.
SIR WILLIAM JONES: THE ORIENTALIST VIEWPOINT
The suspension of government support for the study of Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit was resisted by members of the Committee on Public Instruction who had studied these languages and discovered the riches contained in their literatures. The Orientalists owed much to the example of Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a brilliant pioneer of Asian studies whose arrival in Calcutta in 1784 gave the decisive impulse to the founding of the Asiatick Society (now the Asiatic Society of Bengal).
PREFACE TO THE GRAMMAR OF THE PERSIAN LANGUAGE
Jones’s preface to his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771) eloquently states the cultural and practical reasons Englishmen should master Persian. Note that the comparison of “East” and “West,” here, and also in the writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay and Rammohan Roy below, marks a set of politically, not scientifically, defined colonial categories. Although the Orientalists were defeated on the question of educational policy, their high evaluation of India’s classical heritage helped eventually to foster in English-educated Indians a pride in their own past that was of cardinal importance in the nineteenth-century “renaissance” of Hinduism and the rise of Hindu nationalism.
The Persian language is rich, melodious, and elegant; it has been spoken for many ages by the greatest princes in the politest courts of Asia; and a number of admirable works have been written in it by historians, philosophers, and poets, who found it capable of expressing with equal advantage the most beautiful and the most elevated sentiments.
It must seem strange, therefore, that the study of this language should be so little cultivated at a time when a taste for general and diffusive learning seems universally to prevail; and that the fine productions of a celebrated nation should remain in manuscript upon the shelves of our public libraries, without a single admirer who might open their treasures to his countrymen, and display their beauties to the light; but if we consider the subject with a proper attention, we shall discover a variety of causes which have concurred to obstruct the progress of Eastern literature.
Some men never heard of the Asiatick writings, and others will not be convinced that there is any thing valuable in them; some pretend to be busy, and others are really idle; some detest the Persians, because they believe in Mahomed, and others despise their language, because they do not understand it: we all love to excuse, or to conceal, our ignorance, and are seldom willing to allow any excellence beyond the limits of our own attainments: like the savages, who thought that the sun rose and set for them alone, and could not imagine that the waves, which surrounded their island, left coral and pearls upon any other shore. …
Since the literature of Asia was so much neglected, and the causes of that neglect were so various, we could not have expected that any slight power would rouse the nations of Europe from their inattention to it; and they would, perhaps, have persisted in despising it, if they had not been animated by the most powerful incentive that can influence the mind of man: … India; that rich and celebrated empire, which, by the flourishing state of our commerce, has been the source of incredible wealth to the merchants of Europe. … Our India Company began to take under their protection the princes of the country, by whose protection they gained their first settlement; a number of important affairs were to be transacted in peace and war between nations equally jealous of one another, who had not the common instruments of conveying their sentiments; the servants of the company received letters which they could not read, and were ambitious of gaining titles of which they could not comprehend the meaning; it was found highly dangerous to employ the natives as interpreters, upon whose fidelity they could not depend; and it was at last discovered, that they must apply themselves to the study of the Persian language, in which all the letters from the Indian princes were written. A few men of parts and taste, who resided in Bengal, have since amused themselves with the literature of the East, and have spent their leisure in reading the poems and histories of Persia. …
The languages of Asia will now, perhaps, be studied with uncommon ardor; they are known to be useful, and will soon be found instructive and entertaining; the valuable manuscripts that enrich our publick libraries will be in a few years elegantly printed; the manners and sentiments of the Eastern nations will be perfectly known; and the limits of our knowledge will be no less extended than the bounds of our empire.
[From Sir William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language, 9th ed. updated by the Rev. Samuel Lee (London: W. Nicol, 1828), i–ii, vi–vii.]
RAMMOHAN ROY AND THE USELESSNESS OF ORIENTALIST POLICIES
Rammohan Roy, although he became almost friendless among Hindus in his own time, has since come to be seen as one of twentieth-century India’s founding fathers because of his pioneering reforms in education, religion, morals, journalism, the status of women, and legal and political thought.
He was born (ca. 1774) into a Bengali Brahman family of the highest rank, but the foundations of his mature thought were laid down by his Persian studies at home and probably also in Patna. Persian was then the language not only of government service but also of humane letters, in most of northern India. Through Persian young Rammohan became familiar with Sufiideas; through Persian and Arabic he absorbed Aristotelian logic and rhetoric, as well as the Greco-Islamic spirit of scholarly inquiry. His mother’s family, who were Shaktas devoted to Goddess-worship, insisted that he steep himself in Sanskrit learning as well. Rammohan apparently preferred Persian to Sanskrit culture, and with it came to share the Islamic rejection of the use of image worship.
From 1815 to 1830 Rammohan engaged in numerous projects meant to enlighten the minds and improve the lot of his countrymen. He campaigned against the worship of gods and goddesses and their images, believing such worship to be the root of all superstitious and inhumane Hindu practices. To add weight to this thesis, he rendered into Bengali and English the Kena, Īshā, Katha, and Mundaka Upanishads, along with other, Vedantic texts, so wording them as to emphasize the unity and power of God—a monotheistic emphasis quite different from the monism in the original Sanskrit texts. Possibly Rammohan’s transcreations were influenced by the Persian versions of the Upanishads prepared at the behest of the unfortunate Mughal prince Dara Shikoh. Calcutta’s orthodox Brahmans were outraged at Rammohan’s attacks on their ways of worship, and virtually ostracized him. In 1820 he published The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness, a compilation of the nontheological teachings of Jesus, because he found these teachings “more conducive to moral principles, and better adapted for the use of rational beings, than any others which have come to my knowledge.”1 British Protestant ministers denounced his omission of references to the divinity or miraculous powers of Jesus, and he spent three further years of research and writing in defending his approach. So cogent were his arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity that he converted to Unitarianism a Baptist missionary with whom he was translating the New Testament into Bengali.
In the 1820s Rammohan became increasingly active in efforts to improve the educational, social, and political conditions of Calcutta and its environs. He founded schools, wrote textbooks, published weekly newspapers in Bengali, English, and Persian, and vigorously opposed both British plans to support Sanskrit studies, and the Hindu custom of sati (Anglicized in Rammohan’s time as suttee). On behalf of Calcutta’s leading citizens, he wrote petitions protesting the 1823 restrictions of the freedom of the press, and the 1827 Jury Act excluding Hindus and Muslims from juries in cases where Christians were the accused. (Both measures were eventually withdrawn.) He also founded in 1828, with a group of like-minded Hindu monotheists, the Brahmo Sabha (later, the Brahmo Samaj)—the “society of the worshipers of the one true God.”
In the last years of his life Rammohan made the five-month sea voyage to England, despite the taboo against crossing “the black waters.” 2 In London, he presented to a committee of Parliament recommendations on ways to improve the government of India, inquired about the possibility of becoming a Member of Parliament himself, was honored with a dinner by the directors of the East India Company, and was presented to the king. Finally, ill and bankrupt, he died in Bristol in 1833 in the company of his English Unitarian friends. His epitaph, chosen by himself from the works of the Persian poet Saadi, reads: “The true way of serving God is to do good to man.”
For his strategic reinterpretation of Hindu religious thought, and for his many efforts to enlighten his society and improve its customs, Rammohan Roy has been termed by later generations “the father of modern India.” Although recent scholarship has undercut the primacy of liberal Bengali intellectuals in the reconstruction of colonial history, has found fault with Roy’s reading of the Upanishads, and has questioned the assumption of a continuous link between Roy and the shape of the later Brahmo Samaj, Rammohan was without a doubt one of the first Indian scholars to probe deeply into the religious and political foundations of British culture and society. In doing so, he was able to choose what struck him as beneficial (the ethical teachings of Jesus, governmental guarantees of civil and religious liberty, and modern secular knowledge), and to reject those that did not (Christian theology, and British autocratic government in India).
A LETTER ON EDUCATION
Having established at his own expense schools where young men could acquire through both English and Bengali the best and most modern education available, Rammohan was shocked when the government decided in 1823 to found and support a new college for Sanskrit studies. These excerpts from his letter of protest show how highly he valued the knowledge and ways of thinking developed in Europe since the time of Francis Bacon.
The establishment of a new Sanscrit School in Calcutta evinces the laudable desire of government to improve the Natives of India by Education—a blessing for which they must ever be grateful; and every well-wisher of the human race must be desirous that the efforts made to promote it should be guided by the most enlightened principles, so that the stream of intelligence may flow in the most useful channels.
When this Seminary of learning was proposed, we understood that the Government in England had ordered a considerable sum of money to be annually devoted to the instruction of its Indian Subjects. We were filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European Gentlemen of talent and education to instruct the Natives of India in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, and other useful Sciences, which the Natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world. …
We find that the Government are establishing a Sanscrit school under Hindoo pandits to impart such knowledge as is already current in India. This seminary (similar in character to those which existed in Europe before the time of Lord Bacon) can only be expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practicable use to the possessors or to society. The pupils will there acquire what was known two thousand years ago, with the addition of vain and empty subtleties since then produced by speculative men, such as is already commonly taught in all parts of India. …
Neither can much improvement arise from such speculations as the following, which are the themes suggested by the Vedant: In what manner is the soul absorbed in the Deity? What relation does it bear to the Divine Essence? Nor will youths be fitted to be better members of society by the Vedantic doctrines which teach them to believe that all visible things have no real existence; that as father, brother, etc., have no actual entity, they consequently deserve no real affection, and therefore the sooner we escape from them and leave the world the better. Again, … the student of the Nyaya Shastra cannot be said to have improved his mind after he has learned from it into how many ideal classes the objects in the Universe are divided, and what speculative relation the soul bears to the body, the body to the soul, the eye to the ear, etc. …
In presenting this subject to your Lordship, I conceive myself discharging a solemn duty which I owe to my countrymen, and also to that enlightened Sovereign and Legislature which have extended their benevolent cares to this distant land, actuated by a desire to improve the inhabitants, and I therefore humbly trust you will excuse the liberty I have taken in thus expressing my sentiments to your Lordship.
I have the honor, etc.
Rammohun Roy
[From The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 4 vols., ed. Jogendra Chunder Ghose, with an English translation of Tuhfatul Muwahhidin (New Delhi: Cosmo, 1982), 2:471–472, 473, 474.]
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY AND THE CASE FOR ENGLISH EDUCATION
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), British essayist, historian, politician, and public official, was a precocious poet, educated at Cambridge, called to the bar in 1826, and elected to Parliament in 1830. He distinguished himself as a Whig orator. Macaulay first took an interest in British policy toward India in 1833, when the Government of India Bill was under discussion. Shortly thereafter he accepted an opportunity to serve on the Supreme Council of the East India Company in Calcutta, then capital of India, from 1834 to 1838. Asked to settle the question of the most appropriate medium of instruction or language for higher education in India, he wrote his famous “Minute on Education.”
Macaulay also helped to codify Indian law, before returning to his political and literary career in Great Britain. He held several high offices and was reelected to Parliament several times. He wrote poetry and many essays, including notable ones on Warren Hastings and Lord Clive. Though in ill health, he completed five volumes of his History of England from the Accession of James II before he died in 1859.
SPEECH TO PARLIAMENT ON THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA BILL
This first selection comes from Macaulay’s speech on the Government of India Bill of 1833, and expresses his view of the achievements and goals of the British Empire in India. Given Macaulay’s reputation as an Anglicist and ardent critic of Indian learning, it is fascinating to read of his hopes that eventually Britain would set India free.
I feel that, for the good of India itself, the admission of natives to high office must be effected by slow degrees. But that, when the fulness of time is come, when the interest of India requires the change, we ought to refuse to make that change lest we should endanger our own power, this is a doctrine of which I cannot think without indignation. Governments, like men, may buy existence too dear. “Propter vitam vivendi perdere causas,” [“To lose the reason for living, for the sake of staying alive”] is a despicable policy both in individuals and in states. In the present case, such a policy would be not only despicable, but absurd. The mere extent of empire is not necessarily an advantage. To many governments it has been cumbersome; to some it has been fatal. It will be allowed by every statesman of our time that the prosperity of a community is made up of the prosperity of those who compose the community, and that it is the most childish ambition to covet dominion which adds to no man’s comfort or security. To the great trading nation, to the great manufacturing nation, no progress which any portion of the human race can make in knowledge, in taste for the conveniences of life, or in the wealth by which those conveniences are produced, can be matter of indifference. It is scarcely possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion of European civilisation among the vast population of the East. It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves.
Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may keep them submissive? Or do we think that we can give them knowledge without awakening ambition? Or do we mean to awaken ambition and to provide it with no legitimate vent? Who will answer any of these questions in the affirmative? Yet one of them must be answered in the affirmative, by every person who maintains that we ought permanently to exclude the natives from high office. I have no fears. The path of duty is plain before us: and it is also the path of wisdom, of national prosperity, of national honor.
[Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Speech in Parliament on the Government of India Bill, 10 July 1833,” in Prose and Poetry, by Macaulay, selected by G. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 716–717, 718.]
THE MINUTE ON EDUCATION
In the following “Minute,” Macaulay argues that the learned languages of India are not up to the task of education in modern subjects and have little to offer even in literature and philosophy. That he knew little of these languages did not stop him from deriding them and declaring that English was the most important modern language and would be best for higher studies in India. Colleges receiving government funds would use English, if Macaulay’s plans were followed. In fact, both government colleges and others started by European missionaries and English-speaking natives also began to use English. His “Minute” also touches on several broader issues, including the relation of Western and Asian cultures and the ways in which a small number of Europeans were to rule in a vast alien land peopled by millions of Asians. His decision for English was accepted—English education was formally institutionalized, with a comprehensive scheme for its implementation, with Wood’s Education Despatch of 1854—and Indians have lived with the consequences for generations since.
We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.
What then shall that language be? One-half of the committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the Oriental plan of education.
It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same. …
The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter. …
[Answering the claims of the Orientalists, he asserted:] But there is yet another argument which seems even more untenable. It is said that the Sanscrit and Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written, and that they are, on that account, entitled to peculiar encouragement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British government in India to be not only tolerant, but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is confessed that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably and decently bribe men out of the revenues of the state to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?
It is taken for granted by the advocates of Oriental learning that no native of this country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They do not attempt to prove this; but they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education which their opponents recommend as a mere spelling book education. They assume it as undeniable, that the question is between a profound knowledge of Hindoo and Arabian literature and science on the one side, and a superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the other. This is not merely an assumption, but an assumption contrary to all reason and experience. We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our language sufficiently to have access to all the most abstruse knowledge which it contains, sufficiently to relish even the more delicate graces of our most idiomatic writers. There are in this very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the very question on which I am now writing discussed by native gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos. Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to a Hindoo as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth, in a much smaller number of years than our unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanscrit College, becomes able to read, to enjoy, and even to imitate, not unhappily, the compositions of the best Greek authors. Less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.
To sum up what I have said, I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813; that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied; that we are free to employ our funds as we choose; that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing; that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic; that the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic; that neither as the languages of law, nor as the languages of religion, have the Sanscrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our engagement; that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars; and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed.
In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
[Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, 721–722, 723, 728–729.]
RAMMOHAN ROY: PIONEER IN EAST–WEST EXCHANGE
As has been indicated in the introduction to Roy above, in addition to his views on education he is remembered for a wide range of opinions, writings, and activities, all of which indicate his impressive mastery of Indian and Western learning.
HOW THE BRITISH TOOK CONTROL OF INDIA
Rammohan’s statements on the decline of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British reflected the attitudes of those in the coastal provinces (Bengal, Bombay, and Madras) who welcomed what they perceived to be the peace, civil and religious liberties, and commerce introduced by their new rulers. The influence on Roy by the colo nialist discourse of his day, in relation to descriptions of Indian character, is evident in his portrayal of oppressive Muslim rulers and debilitated Bengali natives.
The greater part of Hindustan having been for several centuries subject to Muhammadan Rule, the civil and religious rights of its original inhabitants were constantly trampled upon, and from the habitual oppression of the conquerors, a great body of the subjects in the Southern Peninsula (Dukhin [or Deccan]), afterwards called Marhattahs [Marathas], and another body in the western parts now styled Sikhs, were at last driven to revolt; and when the Mussalman power became feeble, they ultimately succeeded in establishing their independence; but the natives of Bengal wanting vigor of body, and adverse to active exertion, remained during the whole period of the Muhammadan conquest, faithful to the existing Government, although their property was often plundered, their religion insulted, and their blood wantonly shed. Divine providence at last, in its abundant mercy, stirred up the English nation to break the yoke of those tyrants, and to receive the oppressed Natives of Bengal under its protection. Having made Calcutta the capital of their dominions, the English distinguished this city by such peculiar marks of favour, as a free people would be expected to bestow, in establishing an English court of judicature, and granting to all within its jurisdiction, the same civil rights as every Briton enjoys in his native country; thus putting the Natives of India in possession of such privileges as their forefathers never expected to attain, even under Hindu Rulers. … Under the cheering influence of equitable and indulgent treatment, and stimulated by the example of a people famed for their wisdom and liberality, the Natives of India, with the means of amelioration set before them, have been gradually advancing in social and intellectual improvement.
[From Roy, “Appeal to the King in Council” (1823), in The English Works, 4:11–12.]
THE NEED FOR A MORE HUMANE MORALITY AND A PURER MODE OF WORSHIP
The theological basis of the organization that Rammohan Ray founded in 1828, the Brahmo Sabha (later to be Brahmo Samaj), was his theistic reading of the Upanishads, which he interpreted as promulgating a nonritualistic, interior worship of the One True Being. In introducing his rendering of the Katha Upanishad into English and Bengali, Rammohan stated the principle he was later to put to the Christian missionaries: worship the one true God, and out of a purified heart treat others justly and kindly.
The advocates of idolatry and their misguided followers, over whose opinions prejudice and obstinacy prevail more than good sense and judgment, prefer custom and fashion to the authorities of their scriptures, and therefore continue, under the form of religious devotion, to practise a system which destroys, to the utmost degree, the natural texture of society, and prescribes crimes of the most heinous nature, which even the most savage nations would blush to commit, unless compelled by the most urgent necessity. I am, however, not without a sanguine hope that, through Divine Providence and human exertions, they will sooner or later avail themselves of that true system of religion which leads its observers to a knowledge and love of God, and to a friendly inclination towards their fellow-creatures, impressing their hearts at the same time with humility and charity, accompanied by independence of mind and pure sincerity. Contrary to the code of idolatry, this system defines sin as evil thoughts proceeding from the heart, quite unconnected with observances as to diet and other matters of form. At any rate, it seems to me that I cannot better employ my time than in an endeavour to illustrate and maintain truth, and to render service to my fellow-labourers, confiding in the mercy of that Being to whom the motives of our actions and secrets of our hearts are well known.
[From Roy, The English Works, 1:45–46.]
HINDUISM IS NOT INFERIOR TO CHRISTIANITY
Although he urged his countrymen to feel no resentment toward the missionaries, but only “compassion, on account of their blindness to the errors in which they themselves have fallen,” Rammohan Roy was less than compassionate in his reply to a public letter charging him with having insulted, through his Precepts of Jesus, the Christian religion. In this, his most extreme statement in defense of Hindu culture and religion, he advanced views that are still widely held in India today. The Bengali Hurkaru was an English-language newspaper.
If, by the “ray of intelligence” for which the Christian says we are indebted to the English, he means the introduction of useful mechanical arts, I am ready to express my assent and also my gratitude; but with respect to science, literature, or religion, I do not acknowledge that we are placed under any obligation. For by a reference to History it may be proved that the world was indebted to our ancestors for the first dawn of knowledge, which sprang up in the East, and thanks to the Goddess of Wisdom, we have still a philosophical and copious language of our own which distinguishes us from other nations who cannot express scientific or abstract ideas without borrowing the language of foreigners. …
Before “A Christian” indulged in a tirade about persons being “degraded by Asiatic effeminacy” he should have recollected that almost all of the ancient prophets and patriarchs venerated by Christians, nay even Jesus Christ himself, a Divine incarnation and the founder of the Christian faith, were Asiatics. So that if a Christian thinks it degrading to be born or reside in Asia, he directly reflects upon them. …
It is unjust in the Christian to quarrel with Hindoos because (he says) they cannot comprehend the sublime mystery of his religion [the Doctrine of the Trinity]; since he is equally unable to comprehend the sublime mysteries of ours, and since both these mysteries equally transcend the human understanding, one cannot be preferred to the other.
[From a letter to the editor of the Bengali Hurkaru (May 23, 1823), in The English Works, 4:906, 908.]
IN DEFENSE OF HINDU WOMEN
In a letter to an American friend, Rammohan Roy stated his willingness to support the moral principles preached by Jesus “even at the risk of my own life.” Roy actually did risk his life during his arduous campaign against the practice of sati. The threats of conservative Hindus notwithstanding, Rammohan helped the British to overcome their doubts about proscribing the custom. Having devastated his imaginary opponent by references to the highest Sanskrit authorities, he concluded his Second Conference Between an Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive with an appeal to justice and mercy and a passionate defense of the rights of women.
Advocate: I alluded … to the real reason for our anxiety to persuade widows to follow their husbands, and for our endeavors to burn them pressed down with ropes: viz., that women are by nature of inferior understanding, without resolution, unworthy of trust, subject to passions, and void of virtuous knowledge; they, according to the precepts of the Sastra, are not allowed to marry again after the demise of their husbands, and consequently despair at once of all worldly pleasure; hence it is evident, that death to these unfortunate widows is preferable to existence, for the great difficulty which a widow may experience by living a purely ascetic life as prescribed by the Sastras is obvious; therefore if she do not perform Con-cremation [being burnt alive at her husband’s cremation], it is probable that she may be guilty of such acts as may bring disgrace upon her paternal and maternal relations, and those that may be connected with her husband. Under these circumstances, we instruct them from their early life in the idea of Con-cremation, holding out to them heavenly enjoyments in company with their husbands, as well as the beatitude of their relations, both by birth and marriage, and their reputation in this world. From this many of them, on the death of their husbands, become desirous of accompanying them; but to remove every chance of their trying to escape from the blazing fire, in burning them we first tie them down to the pile.
Opponent: The reason you have now assigned for burning widows alive is indeed your true motive, as we are well aware; but the faults which you have imputed to women are not planted in their constitution by nature; it would be, therefore, grossly criminal to condemn that sex to death merely from precaution. By ascribing to them all sorts of improper conduct, you have indeed successfully persuaded the Hindoo community to look down upon them as contemptible and mischievous creatures, whence they have been subjected to constant miseries. I have, therefore, to offer a few remarks on this head.
Women are in general inferior to men in bodily strength and energy; consequently the male part of the community, taking advantage of their corporeal weakness, have denied to them those excellent merits that they are entitled to by nature, and afterwards they are apt to say that women are naturally incapable of acquiring those merits. But if we give the subject consideration, we may easily ascertain whether or not your accusation against them is consistent with justice. As to their inferiority in point of understanding, when did you ever afford them a fair opportunity of exhibiting their natural capacity? How then can you accuse them of want of understanding? …
Secondly. You charge them with want of resolution, at which I feel exceedingly surprised. For we constantly perceive, in a country where the name of death makes the male shudder, that the female, from her firmness of mind, offers to burn with the corpse of her deceased husband. …
Thirdly. With regard to their trustworthiness, let us look minutely into the conduct of both sexes, and we may be enabled to ascertain which of them is the most frequently guilty of betraying friends. If we enumerate such women in each village or town as have been deceived by men, and such men as have been betrayed by women, I presume that the number of the deceived women would be found ten times greater than that of the betrayed men. …
In the fourth place, with respect to their subjection to the passions, this may be judged of by the custom of marriage as to the respective sexes; for one man may marry two or three, sometimes even ten wives and upwards; while a woman, who marries but one husband, desires at his death to follow him, forsaking all worldly enjoyments, or to remain leading the austere life of an ascetic.
Fifthly. The accusation of their want of virtuous knowledge is an injustice. Observe what pain, what slighting, what contempt, and what afflictions their virtue enables them to support! How many Kulin3 Brahmans are there who marry ten or fifteen wives for the sake of money, that never see the greater number of them after the day of marriage, and visit others only three or four times in the course of their life? Still amongst those women, most, even without seeing or receiving any support from their husbands, living dependent on their fathers or brothers, and suffering much distress, continue to preserve their virtue. And when Brahmans, or those of other tribes, bring their wives to live with them, what misery do the women not suffer? At marriage the wife is recognized as half of her husband, but in after-conduct they are treated worse than inferior animals. … If, unable to bear such cruel usage, a wife leaves her husband’s house to live separately from him, then the influence of the husband with the magisterial authority is generally sufficient to place her again in his hands; when, in revenge for her quitting him, he seizes every pretext to torment her in various ways, and sometimes even puts her privately to death. These are facts occurring every day, and not to be denied. What I lament is, that, seeing the women thus dependent and exposed to every misery, you feel for them no compassion that might exempt them from being tied down and burnt to death.
[From Roy, The English Works, 2:359–360, 361–362, 363.]
FOR FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
In 1823 the East India Company promulgated an ordinance restricting the freedom of the press by requiring all newspapers to be licensed under terms laid down by the government. Rammohan Roy responded by drawing up a memorial to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Indian community, in which he argued that their loyalty depended on the continuing enjoyment of those civil liberties that had reconciled them to British rule—an argument echoed later by many an Indian nationalist.
After this Rule and Ordinance shall have been carried into execution, your Memorialists are therefore extremely sorry to observe, that a complete stop will be put to the diffusion of knowledge and the consequent mental improvement now going on, either by translations into the popular dialect of this country from the learned languages of the East, or by the circulation of literary intelligence drawn from foreign publications. And the same cause will also prevent those Natives who are better versed in the laws and customs of the British Nation, from communicating to their fellow-subjects a knowledge of the admirable system of Government established by the British, and the peculiar excellencies of the means they have adopted for the strict and impartial administration of justice. Another evil of equal importance in the eyes of a just Ruler; is, that it will also preclude the Natives from making the Government readily acquainted with the errors and injustice that may be committed by its executive officers in the various parts of this extensive country; and it will also preclude the Natives from communicating frankly and honestly to their Gracious Sovereign in England and his Council, the real condition of His Majesty’s faithful subjects in this distant part of his dominions and the treatment they experience from the local government; since such information cannot in future be conveyed to England, as it has heretofore been, either by the translations from the Native publications inserted in the English Newspapers printed here and sent to Europe, or by the English publications which the Natives themselves had in contemplation to establish, before this Rule and Ordinance was proposed.
After this sudden deprivation of one of the most precious of their rights, which has been freely allowed them since the establishment of the British power, a right which they are not, and cannot, be charged with having ever abused, the inhabitants of Calcutta would be no longer justified in boasting, that they are fortunately placed by Providence under the protection of the whole British Nation, or that the king of England and his Lords and Commons are their legislators, and that they are secured in the enjoyment of the same civil and religious privileges that every Briton is entitled to in England. …
[From Roy, The English Works, 2:441–442.]
THE FUTURE OF INDIA
In a letter of 1828 to an English friend Roy predicted with remarkable accuracy the rise of Indian nationalism. But he also indicated that enlightened and democratic government might prolong the connection between India and Britain to their mutual advantage.
Supposing that one hundred years hence the Native character becomes elevated from constant intercourse with Europeans and the acquirement of general and political knowledge as well as of modern arts and sciences, is it possible that they will not have the spirit as well as the inclination to resist effectually any unjust and oppressive measures serving to degrade them in the scale of society? It should not be lost sight of that the position of India is very different from that of Ireland, to any quarter of which an English fleet may suddenly convey a body of troops that may force its way in the requisite direction and succeed in suppressing every effort of a refractory spirit. Were India to share one fourth of the knowledge and energy of that country, she would prove from her remote situation, her riches and her vast population, either useful and profitable as a willing province, an ally of the British Empire, or troublesome and annoying as a determined enemy.
In common with those who seem partial to the British rule from the expectation of future benefits, arising out of the connection, I necessarily feel extremely grieved in often witnessing Acts and Regulations passed by Government without consulting or seeming to understand the feelings of its Indian subjects and without considering that this people have had for more than half a century the advantage of being ruled by and associated with an enlightened nation, advocates of liberty and promoters of knowledge.
[From Roy, The English Works, 1:xxiii.]
ISHVARCHANDRA VIDYASAGAR: SOCIAL REFORMER AND CHAMPION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS
Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891) was a multifaceted individual who made signal contributions in many areas of Bengali intellectual life in the mid-nineteenth century: he was a Sanskrit pandit, an educator, the author of famous children’s alphabet teaching books, a publisher, a philanthropist, and a social reformer noted for his interventions on behalf of girl children, widows, and women trapped in polygamous marriages to Kulin Brahmans. Born in rural western Bengal to an orthodox Brahman family (his given last name was Bandyopadhyay; Vidyasagar, or “Ocean of Learning,” was an honorific title bestowed upon him in college when he was nineteen), Vidyasagar spent much of his early adult life affiliated with Sanskrit College, where he studied as a student and then later returned to serve as principal until 1858. Sanskrit College had been established under the patronage of Orientalist Britons: all its teachers were pandits, and the education they offered was modeled on traditional Sanskrit learning. However, Vidyasagar was open to the riches of both English and Bengali, and he tried to create what a recent scholar has called “an enlightened vernacular,” through which teachers could expose students to English and Sanskrit learning, while also grounding them in the Bengali literary tradition.4 Indeed, Vidyasagar was always looking for meeting points between the worldviews of Brahmanical and post-Enlightenment thought.
Not just an educator, Vidyasagar was also a writer; his first prose work, The Twenty-Five Tales of a Betāl, appeared in 1846, Shakuntalā in 1855, and then his greatest work, The Exile of Sītā, in 1862. Together with Rammohan Roy and Akshaykumar Datta (1820–1886), Vidyasagar is considered one of the pioneers of Bengali prose, departing from the poetic traditions of pre-nineteenth-century Bengali composition. Fairly wealthy from the sales of his school books, he engaged in numerous acts of charity and philanthropy: he funded the education of many needy young men, and donated money for the upkeep of impecunious widows.
Like Rammohan Roy, whose name is forever associated with the criminalization of sati in 1829, Vidyasagar is perhaps best known for his untiring efforts to ameliorate the lot of Bengali widows. Although he had written on the subject of social injustice to women as early as the late 1840s, in 1853 he began to work in earnest to persuade the British formally to legalize the remarriage of Hindu widows and to accord the sons of such remarried widows legitimacy as heirs. In this he was following the lead of the Derozians, who suggested as early as 1842 in their organ The Bengal Spectator that at least some Hindu texts on dharma contained no bar to widow remarriage. In his Remarriage of Hindu Widows (1855), he agreed, arguing that perpetual widowhood was not, in fact, enjoined in the Dharmashastras (he found an approving discussion of widow remarriage in the Parasāra Samhitā, one of the twenty well-known Dharmashastras). The result was a storm of protest in Hindu intellectual circles; but in spite of vociferous attacks he managed to convince the British to pass Act XV of 1856, which accorded to widows the right to remarry. In later life, in the mid-1860s, he attempted to repeat his earlier success by campaigning against Kulinism (the Hindu custom that allows men from certain Brahman lineages to take multiple wives), but this ended in failure.
In his own time Vidyasagar was both vilified and adored. Like Rammohan Roy, he used the authority of Hindu scriptures to buttress his rational arguments for social reform, and he found exposure to Western thought helpful in the formulation of his own Indian identity. But partly because he lived several decades after Roy, in a time when British Orientalist policies had given way to a hardening imperialist and Westernizing vision, he was less of an Anglicist.
It is important to note that in spite of the liberal social agendas of elite Hindus like Roy and Vidyasagar, they were not challenging obligatory marriage, arranged marriage, compulsory heterosexuality, or the patriarchal family system.
ARGUMENTS FOR THE COMPASSIONATE TREATMENT OF GIRLS AND WOMEN
Juxtaposed here are selections from two essays written about the plight of women: “The Evils of Child Marriage,” his first essay on reform from 1849; and “Remarriage of Hindu Widows,” from 1855. The two styles of argumentation are strikingly different: the first essay relies only upon rational argument and the evocation of a humanist compassion, whereas the second bases its conclusions on scriptural authority. Note that Vidyasagar’s presumed interlocutors are the “civilized gentlemen” of Bengali society and that he does not blame women for moral lapses resulting from their callous confinement.
THE EVILS OF CHILD MARRIAGE
If they give away a daughter of eight in marriage, a mother and father win merit as if they had bestowed the Goddess Gauri herself; if they give away a daughter of nine, their reward is like that of one who has bestowed the earth; if they find a suitable groom for a daughter of ten, they win the pure realms of the other world. Such are the imaginary fruits promised by the legal treatises, mirages that entice our countrymen into practicing the custom of child marriage without any thought to its consequences.
Has it not heretofore occurred to anyone how much grievous harm this practice has caused? In their efforts to promote child marriage and to prohibit marriage among adolescents, the authors of the treatises have cleverly illustrated the awful punishments awaiting the unrighteous. Thus, if a young girl experiences her first menses while still a virgin in her father’s house, she becomes a source of shame for her father and mother alike. Not only will she cause seven generations of ancestors to fall into Hell, but the rest of society will scorn and ostracize her father and mother as impure for as long as they live. …
When a couple are married as children they have no chance to taste the sweet fruit of love for one another. Instead, at every step of the way the demands of married life place obstacles in the way of mutual affection, while there is every chance that further misfortune will follow from the unpleasant challenges placed on a relationship by the having of children. Furthermore, a newly married boy and girl are eager to please one another; they will be careful to develop and display their ability at jokes, witticisms, eloquence, and the arts of love. In fact, they will be so concerned to master the necessary skills of such things that their education will be seriously compromised. And once they abandon learning—which is the very essence of life—they will be human beings in form alone; there will be no grounds for counting them as true human beings. …
O lord, how long must we wait before you rescue us from this peril? And when will that blessed day arrive? At least we are fortunate that now a movement has started to address this problem. … I have begun to write what I can on the subject of child marriage because I have weighed these several concerns in my heart. …
While the custom of educating women is practiced in this region, it remains the case that even at a young age the boys and girls of our region acquire important lessons from their mothers. In their youth, children are more devoted to their mothers than they are to their fathers or other elders. The delight experienced by a child who hears soft and loving words is not to be elicited by the edifying words of a teacher. This is why children are much less happy and content in the company of menfolk than they are around women. This being so, even after a child has been weaned, they should continue to savor the rich, ambrosial teachings that flow from their mother’s heavenly lips. If so, they will easily develop a steadfast taste for learning while still young. The mother’s teaching is implanted firmly in the child’s heart and quickly yields its benefit; we could expect not even one hundredth the result from some other teacher. The Europeans are wise and civilized at a young age because they have recognized the capacity mothers have as teachers. We will not reap this benefit until we succeed in abolishing the law of child-marriage in this land. We are aware that some young gentlemen are educating their daughters like sons, but the marriage day arrives for these girls regardless of their education. And on that very day their studies come to an end. From then on they take up residence in another’s house, under another’s rule. There, following the will of their mother- and father-in-law, they learn the methods of house-cleaning, bed-making, cooking, serving, and other chores. The few letters that they learned in their father’s place are entirely forgotten in their introduction to the earthen pot, frying pan, and ladle. Thus if the mothers and fathers of these young girls challenge this region’s laws of marriage and delay marriage in favor of providing some introduction to learning, then after just a short period of education their daughters will gain the power of teaching their children. This would fulfill the fondest dream of their mothers and fathers. …
Can anyone overlook the grueling vows undertaken by our widows in accordance with the legal treatises and the insufferable pains they must endure—all because in our country the marriage of widows is so forcefully prohibited? The widow’s life is nothing but misery. … If, on her fast day, she should become thirsty or fall prey to some mortal illness, the heartless law forbids her to receive even a drop of water or medicine on the tip of her parched tongue. Just consider the dire straits faced by a young girl who has been required to marry as a child and who later loses her husband. … Who can describe the all-consuming sorrow visited upon a tender young girl who must take this arduous vow in childhood, an arduous vow that transforms her very body through the grueling observance of ascetic discipline (brahmacarya)? We have all seen hundreds of such unfortunate young girls for ourselves, fasting through the nights, hungry and thirsty, emaciated and pale, as good as dead. And yet not even the compassionate among us has the courage to defy the cruel laws of the treatises and customs of the land to show mercy on them in their pitiable condition. What’s more, these unfortunate women have developed such firmness of character that even if they can see they are at the point of dying they will not allow even a drop of water to pass their lips. … What’s more, with a little reflection, everyone will recognize that for a widow who lives in a respectable home there will be all sorts of anxiety lest she fall victim to sin. Through ignorance it sometimes happens that a widow forgets her duties as a chaste wife and wanders onto evil paths; fearing public condemnation she might even take to the most reprehensible practices, like abortion. In the end, all the sorrows faced by the young widow have their origin in the custom of child marriage. This being the case, it is utterly heartless and cruel to give away daughters in marriage while children. I therefore make this humble appeal to the civilized gentlemen of my country: let us all devote ourselves with single-mindedness and diligence to banishing from our land the cruel custom of child marriage.
[From “Balyavivaher Dosh,” trans. B. Hatcher, Critical Asian Studies 35.3 (2003): 479, 480, 482, 483–484.]
It clearly appears, then, that the people of the Kali Yuga are unable to practice the Dharma of the past Yugas; and the question arises: what are those Dharmas which the people of the Kali Yuga are to observe? In the Dharma Sastra of Manu it is merely stated that there are different Dharmas for the different Yugas; but the Dharmas peculiar to the different Yugas have not been specified. Neither in the Dharma Sastras of Atri, Vishnu, Harita and others is mention made of these different Dharmas. … It is in the Parasara Sanhita only that there is an assignment of the Dharma peculiar to the different Yugas. … On observing how Parasara Sanhita opens there will not remain the shadow of a doubt that its sole object is to promulgate the Dharma of the Kali Yuga. …
Now, it should be enquired, what Dharmas have been enjoined in the Parasara Sanhita for widows? We find in the 4th chapter of this work the following passage [the Sanskrit is quoted]:
“On receiving no tidings of a husband, on his demise, on his turning an ascetic, on his being found impotent, or on his degradation—under any one of these five calamities, it is canonical for women to take another husband. That woman who, on the decease of her husband, observes the Brahmacharya (leads a life of austerities and privations) attains heaven after death. She who burns herself with her deceased husband resides in heaven for as many Kalas or thousands of years as there are hairs on the human body or thirty-five millions.”
Thus it appears that Parasara prescribes three rules for the conduct of a widow: marriage, the observance of the Brahmacharya, and burning with the deceased husband. Among these, the custom of concremation has been abolished by order of the ruling authorities; only two ways, therefore, have now been left for the widows; they have the option of marrying or of observing the Brahmacharya. But in the Kali Yuga, it has become extremely difficult for widows to pass their lives in the observance of the Brahmacharya, and it is for this reason that the Philanthropic Parasara has, in the first instance, prescribed remarriage. Be that as it may, what I wish to be clearly understood is this—that as Parasara plainly prescribes marriage as one of the duties of women in the Kali Yuga under any one of the five above-enumerated calamities, the marriage of widows in the Kali Yuga is consonant to the Sastras.
[From Ishvarachandra Vidyasagara, Marriage of Hindu Widows, with an introduction by Arabinda Podder, 2nd ed. (1855; Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1976), 3–5, 7–8. Slightly emended for grammar by R. F. McDermott.]
NILAKANTHA GOREH: A TRADITIONAL PANDIT TAKES ON THE MISSIONARIES
Nilakantha Goreh (1825–1895) is an excellent example of the fact that not all Hindu intellectuals found Christianity appealing. Born to a Chitpavan Brahman family from Maharashtra who had settled in Banaras, as a young man Goreh was full of religious and intellectual scruples: he refused to attend the Benares Sanskrit College because he was afraid of coming into contact with European knowledge; and he changed his personal loyalty from Shiva, the family deity, to Vishnu, because he felt that the worship of the latter was older, better attested in the scriptures, and modeled by the great nondualist philosopher Shankara. Before he was even twenty he had decided that the Christian missionaries whom he encountered proselytizing in the streets and bazaars of the city were a threat, and he decided to engage and vanquish them with his pen.
An opportunity came in the form of a tract written by an East India Company employee, John Muir (1810–1882), who in his extra-official time was an avid Sanskritist and very committed to the spread of the Gospel. Muir’s Mataparīkshā [Examination of Religions]: A Sketch of the Argument for Christianity and Hinduism (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1839) was styled as a conversation between a teacher and student, in which Sanskrit verses, as well as historical information being proposed and unearthed by contemporary Orientalist scholars, were quoted by the teacher in order to prove his allegations against Hinduism. The teacher criticized Hinduism for its lack of miracle-wielding founders, the contradictions internal to its scriptures, the fact the no one really understands the Vedas, even though they are mumbled by rote, the reprehensible behavior of the major deities (Brahmā, Vishnu, Krishna, and Shiva), the addiction to image worship, the lack of equality between men as authorized by the holy texts, and the facile understanding of sin, which to Hindus is easily washed off by a splash of Ganges water.
This text produced three apologetic responses, each by a traditional Hindu pandit who wrote to contradict claims made on behalf of the so-called Satya Dharma, or Religion of Truth, Christianity. Goreh was the third; his Sanskrit Shāstratattvanirnāya [A Verdict on the Truth of the Scriptures] (1844–1845) not only defends Hindu practice and ideology but criticizes Christianity for various beliefs that he finds foolish and lacking in intellectual depth: among them predestination, the claim that the merit of one man can save all others from condemnation, and the callous denial that animals have souls.
It is ironic and interesting, however, that four years after he wrote the Shāstratattvanirnāya Goreh did, in fact, convert. The catalyst was William Smith (1806–1875) of the British evangelical Church Missionary Society, who was one of the street missionaries of Banaras whom he had engaged so heatedly in his anti-Christian fervor. Baptized as “Nehemiah,” Goreh was eventually (1870) ordained in the Anglican Church, and it was he who was responsible for the conversion, in 1883, of Pandita Ramabai. In his later years, after 1867, he entered into a protracted dialogue with the Brahmo Samaj, and especially with the branch led by Keshab Chandra Sen, who was simultaneously evolving his own unique interpretation of Christianity. Goreh critiqued Sen for minimizing sin, for being too Westernized, and for not accepting Christianity wholeheartedly. But he shared Sen’s pride in the fact that Jesus was an “Asiatic,” not a European.
DOUBTS CONCERNING CHRISTIANITY
The extracts to follow come from a pamphlet authored during Goreh’s pre-conversion days, when he was fighting the missionaries. “Doubts Concerning Christianity” (1845) offers a concise synopsis of the arguments of Shāstratattvanirnāya.
First Doubt: According to Christianity none can be saved but those who believe in Christ, and yet scarcely anyone has heard of Christ! What? Has God created many nations and innumerable generations for Hell, and though he had provided the remedy by which they might have been saved, never sent it to them?
Second Doubt: According to the Gospel, Christ is your mediator, and through him … pardon of sin and every other blessing is to be obtained. What! Is the sea of God’s love and mercy dried up, that the blood and the water of Christ’s death and intercession are required to replenish it? But you say, God is just, and therefore Christ died. I ask, is this justice that the innocent should suffer for the guilty, and the guilty escape? Again, where is the use of an atonement, as you state it? Repentance and amendment are what God requires.
Third Doubt: Christ and his Apostles, you say, performed many miracles. This I doubt. Such wonders one hears of everywhere, and learned men have decided that such tales are not worthy of credit. Moreover, wonderful works, which wise men amongst us have related and believed, you won’t believe; why, then, should we believe yours?
Fourth Doubt: All religions according with the Ved teach that souls are eternal, and that the nature, or dispensation, of God is so essentially just, that from it, as from the kulpbriksh [a wishing tree located in Indra’s svarga], every one receives fruit exactly according to his works. But according to Christianity, God, by a mere act of his will, creates souls; which is both improper and impossible. There are many souls walking disorderly, and are altogether unfortunate: would God knowingly and wilfully have created these? And yet you say, the infinitely wise God has created souls who he knew very well would eventually be miserable in Hell forever! On this supposition I do not ask merely, where is his wisdom gone, but what has become of his justice and his mercy too? …
Sixth Doubt: Christianity denies the transmigration of souls. This doctrine involves much injustice. True, for those who after death obtain salvation, it is well enough. But with regard to those who die in their sins, and are never to obtain birth again, the case is very different. Their punishment is not only useless, but it would prove God to be guilty of enmity, cruelty, and injustice.
The doctrine of the Ved and Shasters on this point is far more reasonable. According to them, whatever a soul suffers here is for the sins of a former birth. Thus, by a sensible punishment, they receive correction and instruction; and if they refuse nevertheless to reform, they will clearly be without excuse.
One word, before I conclude, as to what you object in regard to what are esteemed the evil deeds of the gods and incarnations—for instance, those of Krishna. Surely, you would not bind God as you bind yourself! What is sin and what is holiness, but just what God determines to be so? Listening to the story of the divine amusements, whether in Krishna’s incarnation or those of others, is death to evil passion and every sinful desire in man. So that what the Christians say, that the only tendency of Krishna’s doings is to increase sin, is all a calumny. If wicked people make these amusements an excuse for themselves committing sin, … theirs is the sin. God is blameless.
[From Richard Fox Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Vienna: De Nobili Research Library, 1981), 104–105.]
RASSUNDARI DEVI: THE FIRST BENGALI AUTO-BIOGRAPHER LOOKS BACK ON A RESTRICTED LIFE
In her autobiography, Āmār Jīban (My Life) (part 1, 1876; part 2, 1906)—the first autobiography to be written in the Bengali language, and a major publication event in its day—Rassundari Devi (b. 1810) adds a human dimension to the phenomenon of child marriage (discussed above by Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar). Married at the age of twelve to a stranger, a man living three days’ travel away, she recounts the heartrending sorrow of being torn from her mother after the wedding, “like the sacrificial goat being dragged to the altar, the same hopeless situation, the same agonized screams.” Although she credits her husband’s family for being nice to her and frequently praises God for his kindness, she also describes the exhausting toil of housework, the labor involved in raising eleven children, and the stultifying strictures against women’s education and freedom of movement. Her metaphors bespeak entrapment: she is a caged bird who will never be freed, a fish caught in a net, a slave sent to her in-laws’ house. Is all this suffering and deprivation, she asks, due to the simple fact that she was born a woman?
LEARNING TO READ
Writing at a time when female education was becoming acceptable in Bengal, she exclaims over the good fortune of “women of today,” giving them, however, a taste of what emotional and physical hardships she endured in order to learn to read and write, furtively, in the kitchen, over long periods, by watching her son at his lessons.
THE THIRD COMPOSITION
… The news made me very happy indeed. I would be married. There would be music, I would hear the women ululating. How exciting that would be! Yet I felt scared at the same time. I cannot express the apprehensions that came to my mind. Meanwhile the various things necessary for the ceremony began to arrive. Relatives and guests began pouring in. I was scared to death by all this. I did not talk to anyone and spent most of the time weeping. Everybody did their best to reassure me. They embraced me, but the unspoken agony in my mind did not lift.
Later on I was cheered up by the ornaments, the red wedding sari, and the wedding music. I forgot my earlier worries and went about laughing and watching the elaborate preparations. My happiness knew no bounds. When everything was over the next day, I heard people asking my mother, “Are they leaving today?” I thought they were referring to the guests. Then the music started. There was an air of festivity. The guests must be leaving now, I thought. It made me happy and I went about following my mother. Presently everybody assembled inside the house. Some looked happy, but others were in tears. That made me feel really frightened. Then my brother, aunts, uncles, and my mother all took me in their arms by turn as they burst into tears. Their tears made me so sad that I began to cry too. I knew mother was going to hand me over to the other family. I tightened my hold on her and pleaded, “Don’t give me over to them, Mother!” That made everybody present even more upset. They broke down and tried to say nice words to console me. My mother took me in her arms and said, “You are a good girl, you understand everything, don’t you? God is with us, you needn’t be afraid. You are going to come back to us in a few days’ time. Every girl has to go to her in-laws’ house. Nobody else cries like this. There is no reason to be so upset. Please calm down and talk to me.” But I was trembling all over with fear. I was quite unable to speak. Somehow I managed to say through my tears: “Are you sure that God will go with me?” Mother promptly reassured me that he most certainly would. “He will be with you all the time, so stop crying now.” But in spite of her soothing words my apprehensions kept growing and I could not check my tears.
With great effort they took me away from my mother. I still feel sad when I think of the state of mind I was in and the agony I was going through. As a matter of fact it is indeed a sad thing to leave one’s parents, settle in some other place, and live under other people. A place where your parents are no longer your own. But such is the will of God, so it is praiseworthy.
I clung to whomever came to pick me up and went on weeping incessantly. Everyone, old and young, was moved to tears. Eventually they managed to put me into a palanquin, which was not the one intended for me. No sooner was I seated inside than the bearers started marching off. With none of my near ones close by I sank into a deep depression. Since there was no way out, I started praying through my tears: “Please be with me, God.” If I am asked to describe my state of mind, I would say that it was very much like the sacrificial goat being dragged to the altar, the same hopeless situation, the same agonized screams. I could see none of my relatives near me. I was miserable, and in tears I kept calling for my mother. I also prayed with all my heart as Mother had told me to. If you ever feel afraid, think of God, she had said.
All these thoughts went through my mind as I sat weeping. Very soon I felt too parched to cry.
THE FIFTH COMPOSITION
… My first child was born when I was eighteen and the last when I was forty-one. God only knows what I had to go through during those twenty-three years. Nobody else had any idea either.
There were eight maidservants in the house, but all of them lived outside the household. There was nobody to do the household chores in the inner quarters. I was the only one. As was the custom, I had to do all the work and look after the children as well. I had to work right through the day and the night, without a moment’s rest. Suffice it to say that I had no time to think about my own health. So much so that I often did not eat either of the two meals. There were days when the pressure of work did not let me even have one meal during the course of the day. …
Merciful God! I am only an unfortunate girl. I hardly know you. I don’t know what I would have done without you. If I had had a sickly body I couldn’t possibly have raised my children. I would have been most miserable with a sick body. I thank you a hundred times. Friend of the poor! It is only through your good grace that I have come to know what it takes to bring up a child, what agony the mother has to go through. I never knew that a mother has to suffer so much for the sake of her children. People never realize these things unless they go through similar pressures. Now I know perfectly well the tortures a mother has to undergo because of her children. Every human being should know this. Most people do not have any knowledge about the matter.
I regret to say that I have not taken good care of my own mother, who was so affectionate. A mother is a very precious thing—it is my misfortune that I did not understand it. She suffered so much for my sake. But I was not of any use to her. She did not derive any benefit from me. She used to cry for me and wanted to have me over. But I am a virtual prisoner here. They never sent me to her because the household work here would suffer. I was allowed to go back to attend some family festival but had to return in a couple of days like a slave. About fifteen people accompanied me on the boat along with two senior men and two maidservants. I was allowed to visit my people only under certain conditions. I was allowed to go only on special occasions, not otherwise. When my mother lay on her deathbed she wanted very badly to see me. I have caused her sorrow, hateful sinner that I am. I tried my utmost, but could not go. It is my misfortune. It is a matter of no ordinary regret. Alas my God, why did you let me be born as a human being? It is indeed a very rare fortune to be born a human being. Birds and beasts are inferior beings. And to think of the sin I have committed even after being fortunate enough to be born a human. Why was I ever born a woman? Shame on my life! A mother is the most affectionate person in the world, the representative of God on earth—and I could not even be of any use to her. My grief knew no bounds. If I were a son I would have flown directly to my mother’s bedside. But I am helpless. I am a caged bird.
THE SIXTH COMPOSITION
I was so immersed in the sea of housework that I was not conscious of what I was going through day and night. After some time the desire to learn how to read properly grew very strong in me. I was angry with myself for wanting to read books. Girls did not read. How could I? What a peculiar situation I had placed myself in. What was I to do? This was one of the bad aspects of the old system. The other aspects were not so bad. People used to despise women of learning. How unfortunate those women were, they said. They were no better than animals. But it is no use blaming others. Our fate is our own. In fact older women used to show a great deal of displeasure if they saw a piece of paper in the hands of a woman. So that ruled out my chances of getting any education. But somehow I could not accept this. I was very keen to learn the alphabet. When I was a child I used to sit in the schoolroom and listen to the chanting of the students. Could I remember any of that? By and by I recalled the thirty letters with all their vowel combinations. I could recognize the letters, but was still not able to write them. What was I to do? Actually one cannot learn without a teacher. Besides, I was a woman, and a married one at that, and was not supposed to talk to anyone. If anyone spoke a harsh word to me I would die of shame. That was the fear that kept me from talking to anyone. My only hope was God and my constant prayer was, “Dear God, I can only learn to read and write if you teach me. Who else is there to be my teacher?” Days passed in this manner.
One day I dreamt that I was reading the Chaitanya Bhagavata. When I woke up I felt enthralled. I closed my eyes to go over the scene. It seemed that I was already in possession of something precious. My body and my mind swelled with satisfaction. It was so strange! I had never seen the book yet I had been reading it in my dream. For an illiterate person like me, it would have been absolutely impossible to read such a difficult book. Anyhow I was pleased that I was able to perform this impossible feat at least in a dream. My life was blessed! God had at last listened to my constant appeals and had given me the ability to read in my dream. Thank you, dear God. You have made me so happy. He had given me what I had wanted so much, and I was happy.
Our home contained several books. Perhaps the Chaitanya Bhagavata is one of them, I thought to myself. But what did it matter to me after all? An illiterate woman like me wouldn’t even recognize the book. So I prayed to God again, saying, “You are the friend of the poor; allow me to recognize the book. You must let me have that book. You are the only one whom I can approach.” That was how I prayed to God silently.
How strange are the ways of God and the effects of his kindness! He heard my prayers and set out to grant me my wish. My eldest son was then eight. I was working in the kitchen one day when my husband came in and said to him, “Bipin, I am leaving my Chaitanya Bhagavata here. Please bring it over when I ask you to.” Saying that he put the book down there and went back to the outer house.
I listened from the kitchen. No words can express the delight I felt when I heard his words. I was filled with happiness and rushed to the spot to find the book there. Pleased with myself, I said to God, “You have granted my wish,” and I picked the book up. In those days books were made differently. There were illustrated wooden frames to hold the sheets. Since I did not know how to read, I tried to remember the illustrations.
When the book was brought into the room I detached one sheet and hid it. But I was afraid lest it were found. That would be a disgrace. … Where should I keep it so that nobody would find it? But if they did, what would they say? Finally I decided to put it in some place where I would be present most of the time and nobody else was likely to go. The khori in the kitchen was the only hiding place I could think of. … But I had no time to look at it. I kept the sheet in my left hand while I did the cooking and glanced at it through the sari, which was drawn over my face. But a mere glance was not enough, because I could not identify the letters.
I decided to steal one of the palm leaves on which my eldest son used to practice his handwriting. One look at the leaf, another at the sheet, a comparison with the letters I already knew, and, finally, a verification with the speech of others—that was the process I adopted for some time. Furtively I would take out the sheet and put it back promptly before anybody could see it.
Wasn’t it a matter to be regretted, that I had to go through all this humiliation just because I was a woman? Shut up like a thief, even trying to learn was considered an offense. It is such a pleasure to see the women today enjoying so much freedom. These days parents of a single girl child take so much care to educate her. But we had to struggle so much just for that. The little that I have learned is only because God did me the favor. …
After a great deal of time and with great effort I somehow managed to stumble through the Chaitanya Bhagavata. Books were not printed in those days. The handwriting was difficult to decipher. Oh, the trouble I had to take to read. In spite of all that, I did not learn to write. One needs a lot of things if one is to write: paper, pen, ink, ink pot, and so on. You have to set everything before you. And I was a woman, the daughter-in-law of the family. I was not supposed to read or write. It was generally accepted as a grave offense. And if they saw me with all the writing paraphernalia, what would they say? I was always afraid of criticism. So I gave up the idea of writing and concentrated on reading. I never thought I would be able to read. It seemed an impossible task in my situation. The little that I have learned was possible because God guided me. I was deeply engrossed in whatever I could read and the idea of writing did not cross my mind.
[From “Amar Jiban” (My Life) in Women Writing in India, vol. 1: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Susia Tharu and K. Lalita (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 192–193, 196, 198–202. Trans. E. Chatterjee.]
BIBI ASHRAF: A YOUNG MUSLIM GIRL STRUGGLES TO EDUCATE HERSELF
Ashrafunnisa Begum (1840–1903) was born into a family of Shia Sayyids living in a small rural community in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh. She was eight when her mother died; since her father had moved to Gwalior to work as a lawyer, she was brought up thereafter by her loving grandmother and a rather unloving aunt and uncle. Soon after birth she was engaged to a second cousin nine years her senior; they were married when she was nineteen. Her husband was a professor of Arabic at the Government College in Lahore, but he died young in 1870, leaving Bibi Ashraf with two young daughters. Within a few months her father died as well. She supported her children with a teaching job, and eventually became the head teacher of a middle school in Lahore. She never remarried; widow remarriage was uncommon among the Muslim elite of South Asia during the nineteenth century. Her life was, by her own account, grief-stricken, for in addition to all the deaths she had suffered prior to 1870, her two daughters predeceased her, one leaving a baby boy who also did not survive long.
LEARNING TO WRITE
Although Bibi Ashraf came from what might be considered a progressive family in the mid-nineteenth century—the men of the house left home to develop their own professional careers elsewhere—even as late as 1850 it was not considered proper for women to learn to write. The following excerpts from her account, detailing how she taught herself to read and write, first appeared in Urdu in a women’s magazine, in March 1899.
It had long been customary in my family to teach the girls to read—but to teach them how to write, that was strictly forbidden. The girls were taught only to vocalize the Arabic of the Qurʾan and to read a bit of Urdu so that they could gain some knowledge of their faith and learn the rules of prayer and fasting. …
Eventually, as time went by, all the girls except for me began to study with their mothers; my mother, as my ill luck would have it, fell ill. I was at the time about seven or eight and my brother, may God preserve him, was just six months old. My mother was not so much worried about her illness as she was concerning my lack of education, but there was nothing she could do. She was, however, the daughter of a marsiya-xwan and herself knew how to recite a marsiya. Even as she lay sick, she taught me from memory a number of religious, benedictory poems [mujrē salām]. Woe, a thousand times woe, that life failed her and she died while we were still very young. …
I cannot describe the pain and grief I felt when my mother died. I thought of her night and day. I would wander through the house and break into tears at all the places where my mother used to sit or sleep or say her prayers. If a majlis was held I would cry all day long, for I would remember how my late mother used to participate. I was then too young to shed tears over the misfortunes of the martyred Imam and his blessed household. I did not think that anyone could be more afflicted with adversity than I was. …
I was […] dying to learn to read Urdu, but I could not find any woman who would teach me. Why was I so eager to read Urdu? In our house, during the forty day observance of Muharram, separate majālis for men and women used to be held every day. In addition, a majlis was held every Thursday in fulfillment of someone or other’s vow. That was the reason I was so keen to read Urdu. All the ladies in my family knew Urdu quite well. When they visited other homes—on some happy or sad occasion—or when other ladies came similarly to visit us, my female relatives would read aloud from books on matters of faith and religious observances. Listening to them I came to know by heart a little about such matters, just as one does with stories, but that did not at all lessen my keenness to be myself blessed with the gift of reading.
Once I went to each and every lady in the family and begged her to teach me just one or two words every day. I said, “Teach me and I would be your slave for life.” But not one of them was the slightest moved by my pleading. Each gave the same reply: “Girl, have you gone crazy? You better find some cure for this madness. First of all, what will you do with it even if you learned to read? Secondly, why do you think it is all that easy to teach someone to read? It’s not an easy task. It demands much hard work. I don’t have so much energy to waste on you.”
I lost all hope when I heard that response, and began to cry. In fact, I felt so hurt I screamed. That only made them more angry. …
Later one night, […] it occurred to me that if I had a salām or a mujrā I could myself figure out the words and begin to read. What was so difficult about that! After all, I already knew the letters of the alphabet. What did I care if no one wanted to teach me! That idea so much raised my courage and hope that the very next morning I sent a maid to all my friends with this message: “I need some salām and some mujrā. Please let me borrow some from you. I shall have them copied and returned.” May God ever keep them happy, for all of them sent me some.
But who was there to copy them for me? That had been merely an excuse. I used the same excuse again and said to my grandmother, “Please get me some paper. I shall ask Uncle to copy these poems for me.” She immediately sent someone to the market and got me some paper. Now the question was, how should I make copies, and where should I hide myself to do that? For it would have been disastrous for me if anyone was even to suspect me of writing. I had no mother to cover up for me, and writing was strictly forbidden to girls. How was then I to reach my goal and also keep it secret? My aunt was already furious with me. She used to call me nasty names for reading the Qurʾān so much; she would say, “Thank God, this girl hasn’t learned anything else, otherwise she would have time for nothing at all.” God knows what she would have said if she were to see me writing.
After thinking about these matters at length I decided that at noon, when everyone was resting, I would make some ink with the blacking from the griddle [tāwa] and start copying. Believe me, that is exactly what I did. I got hold of some blacking from the kitchen, the clay lid of one of the water pots, and a fistful of twigs from the broom. Thus equipped I went up to the roof, pretending that I was going to rest there, and excitedly began to copy out words. I cannot tell you how happy I felt that that moment. Childhood is so innocent! No sooner had I copied a few words than I felt I had already won the battle. …
However, I could not understand what I was writing. I didn’t have the sense to know that one cannot learn to read without a teacher. I believed that just as other skills could be learned merely by watching and imitating others so would be the case with reading. As a result, I spent a great deal of time and effort for nothing. When no headway was made my crying spells started again. Then God gave me a teacher.
[She describes the help she got from the son of her grandmother’s sister, a boy who taught her a little—three pages of a book in his school bag—before he was sent away to study in Delhi.]
Once again I was in despair. I went around begging everyone to teach me. No one did. Finally I started reading that book on my own. I would look at new words, and if I recognized any familiar letters I would put them together. Slowly, in this piecemeal manner, I would figure out whole words and read on—half right, half wrong. I also memorized whatever I read. In this way I read through the entire book. I then used the same method on other books and eventually began to read Urdu fairly well. Then I turned to all those several mujrē and salām that I had earlier copied down without understanding a word. You can’t imagine how happy I was the day I read those copies. I don’t think there has been a happier day since. As I read my own handwriting I felt doubly encouraged and that much more confident. […] No one yet, however, came to know my secret. …
After my uncle left and joined my father in Gwalior, the fact that I could write came to be known by the ladies at home. How long could I hide it? In any case, it was my uncle I had mainly been scared of, for he strongly disapproved of women’s learning to write. When he was gone, I began to practice writing openly. No one objected. On the contrary, my skill at writing was viewed as a novelty by my relatives, and also by others. Whenever any woman had the need to send a letter, she would come to me to get it written. On my part, I gladly transcribed—any which way I could—whatever was dictated to me. During that process, women would disclose to me their innermost secrets; they would tell me things that they would never speak of in front of anyone. And their letters brought replies. I could, however, understand only a tenth part of what I was told. …
When the mutiny in Delhi occurred it put an end to all exchanges of letters. Consequently, for nearly eighteen months, we received no letter from my father, neither could we write to him. All of us were greatly anxious about each other. Finally when some peace returned, my father sent a man to get our news. When that man was ready to return to Gwalior, my grandmother gave him a letter that she had her brother write for her. I gave him a letter too, a letter that I had written myself, containing all that I had seen or heard of the mutiny. …
My father was absolutely delighted when he read my letter. … Then I wrote my father the whole story—how I had learned to write on account of my own intense desire. He rewarded me by sending me an expensive comforter and several suits of clothes, having had them sewn for me in Gwalior. But my uncle, may God grant him peace, was very angry to learn that I could write. He wrote me a chiding letter and never quite forgave me so long as he lived.
[From C. M. Naim, “How Bibi Ashraf Learned to Read and Write,” Annual of Urdu Studies 6 (1987): 102, 104, 105–110.]
MIRZA ASADULLAH KHAN GHALIB: DO NOT WORSHIP THE DEAD
Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib” (1796–1869) was one of the two greatest poets of the classical Urdu ghazal genre of lyric poetry. He prided himself even more, however, on his Persian poetry and prose, and on his aristocratic lineage; in general, he sought to make the British behave like the Mughals—especially when it came to patronizing poets like him.
REFUSING SIR SAYYID AHMAD KHAN
When Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who had a great antiquarian interest in Mughal literature and architecture, and who wanted to affirm and establish the Indo-Muslim heritage both in British eyes and in the eyes of Indo-Muslims themselves, asked Ghalib to write a preface for his new edition of Abul Fazl’s famous “Institutes of Akbar,” Ghalib firmly rejected the idea as being backward-looking. He had traveled to Calcutta, and valued such British innovations as grid-planned streets, newspapers, and the postal service. So he replied to Sir Sayyid with the following Persian poem.
Good news my friends, this ancient book’s door
Is now open, because of the Sayyid’s grace and fortune,
The eye began to see, the arm found strength
That which was wrapped in ancient clothes, now put on a new dress.
And this idea of his, to establish its text and edit the Ain
Puts to shame his exalted capability and potential,
He put his heart to a task and pleased himself
And made himself an auspicious, free servant.
One who isn’t capable of admiring his quality
Would no doubt praise him for this task,
For such a task, of which this book is the basis
Only an hypocrite can offer praise.
I, who am the enemy of pretence
And have a sense of my own truthfulness,
If I don’t give him praise for this task
It’s proper that I find occasion to praise.
I have nothing to say to the perverse
None know what I know of arts and letters,
In the whole world, this merchandise has no buyer.
What profit could my Master hope from it?
It should be said, it’s an excellent inventory
So what’s there to see that’s worth seeing?
And if you talk with me of Laws and Rules
Open your eyes, and in this ancient halting-place
Look at the Sahibs of England.
Look at the style and practice of these,
See what Laws and Rules they have made for all to see
What none ever saw, they have produced.
Science and skills grew at the hands of these skilled ones
Their efforts overtook the efforts of the forebears.
This is the people that owns the right to Laws and Rules
None knows to rule a land better than they,
Justice and Wisdom they’ve made as one
They have given hundreds of laws to India.
The fire that one brought out of stone
How well these skilled ones bring out from straw!
What a spell have they struck on water
That a vapour drives the boat in water!
Sometimes the vapour takes the boat down the sea
Sometimes the vapour brings down the sky to the plains.
Vapour makes the sky-wheel go round and round
Vapour is now like bullocks, or horses.
Vapour makes the ship speed
Making wind and wave redundant.
Their instruments make music without the bow
They make words fly high like birds. …
Go to London, for in that shining garden
The city is bright in the night, without candles. …
Worshipping the Dead is not an auspicious thing
And wouldn’t you too think that it’s no more than just words?
The Rule of silence pleases my heart, Ghalib
You spoke well, doubtless; not speaking is well too.
Here in this world your creed is to worship all the Prophet’s children,
Go past praising, your Law asks you to pray:
For Sayyid Ahmad Khan-e Arif Jang
Who is made up entirely of wisdom and splendour
Let there be from God all that he might wish for
Let an auspicious star lead all his affairs.
[Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, “Preface” to Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s edition of the Aʾin-e Akbari (1855–56). Kulliyat-e Ghalib Farsi, vol. 1, ed. Sayyid Murtaza Husain Fazil Lakhnavi (Lahore: Majlis Taraqqi-e Adab, 1967), 314–318. Trans. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi.]
THE INDIAN REBELLION OF 1857: DELIBERATIONS, FATALITIES, AND CONSEQUENCES
On May 10, 1857, in the town of Meerut in North India, sepoys of the East India Company’s army mutinied against their British officers because of rumors that they were soon to be required to bite off cartridges greased with cow or pork fat in order to load their new Enfield rifles. Such rumors might have been quelled—or the problem behind them perceived and remedied—in an earlier period in the history of the East India Company army, when there was one English officer to every three Indian soldiers, and when the levels of the army hierarchy interacted more closely. By 1857, however, the expansionist ambitions of the British, as particularly evidenced by the policies of Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, had angered and alarmed Indians from many echelons of society: Dalhousie pushed forward with the mechanization of the empire, introducing the first railway lines in 1850, establishing the first telegraph system in 1851, and nationalizing the regional postal operations in 1854. While these innovations created the technological base for an evolving modern South Asian nation, in the mid-nineteenth century they also provided the means of increased British control over land, made English presence felt more universally, and led many Indians to fear that modernization would come at the expense of their own traditions. In 1848 Dalhousie also started seizing lands, ignoring prior treaties and using the rules of “lapse” and laziness or incompetence—according to which territories without blood successors (adoption did not count) or with dissolute rulers could be annexed. Between 1848 and 1856, Dalhousie annexed the estates of deceased princes of Satara (1848), Udaipur (1852), Jhansi (1853), Tanjore (1853), Nagpur (1854), and Oudh (1856) through such methods. Other reasons for Indian frustration with and anxiety over British interventions include the effects of missionary activity, the institutional replacement of Persian with English, and the increased economic drain and impoverishment of the home market, due to cheap British imports that forced artisans, textile workers, and weavers out of work. The sepoys’ action, therefore, was merely the boiling over of an increasingly simmering cauldron of discontent.
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India in 1857
Like wildfire, other mutinies and civilian rebellions erupted across north and central India, with the major hostilities confined to present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, northern Madhya Pradesh, and the area around Delhi, to which many of the sepoys rushed in an effort to restore the aged Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, to power. The Company, caught off balance by this first serious threat to their power, managed to contain the Rebellion only after more than a year. What occurred in 1857 has been described variously by historians writing in different times and with different political biases. For the British, of course, it was a mutiny, since the rebellious East India Company army sepoys turned against their superior officers. Since V. D. Savarkar’s influential work appeared in 1909 (discussed in chapter 7), however, the conflict has often been called the “first war of independence,” foreshadowing what was to come in 1947. Other historians, attempting to interpret outside either colonial or nationalist frames, have referred to the event as an uprising, a revolt, or a rebellion.
AN ATTEMPTED MUGHAL RESTORATION: THE AZAMGARH PROCLAMATION
In the summer of 1857, with much of north central India in rebellion against British rule, the Azamgarh Proclamation was allegedly (though in fact its authenticity is doubtful) issued by a grandson of the emperor Bahadur Shah. The proclamation was quite secular in tone, and the various appeals made in order to rally support commingled promises of reward for those who would join to root out the British with threats of punishment for those who would not, and appended a list of grievances against the British. Indeed, many princes and landholders from western and northern India took advantage of the temporary period of chaos and anarchy provided by the sepoys to avenge their own experiences of overtaxation, economic despoliation, and Britain’s “doctrine of lapse,” which affected princely states without an “acceptable” natural heir. The Azamgarh Proclamation was the closest thing to a manifesto for independence from the British that the Rebellion ever produced, and it expressed the contemporary conviction that Hindus could prosper under a Mughal ruler. A few weeks after the proclamation was issued, the British recaptured Delhi and Bahadur Shah was taken prisoner.
It is well known to all that in this age the people of Hindostan, both Hindoos and Mohammedans, are being ruined under the tyranny and oppression of the infidel and treacherous English. It is therefore the bounden duty of those who have any sort of connexion with any of the Mohammedan royal families, and are considered the pastors and masters of the people, to stake their lives and property for the well-being of the public. With the view of effecting this general good, several princes belonging to the royal family of Delhi have dispersed themselves in the different parts of India, Iran, Turan [Turkestan], and Afghanistan, and have been long since taking measures to compass their favourite end; and it is to accomplish this charitable object that one of the aforesaid princes has, at the head of an army of Afghanistan, etc., made his appearance in India; and I, who am the grandson of Abul Muzuffer Sarajuddin Bahadur Shah Ghazee, king of India, having in the course of circuit come here to extirpate the infidels residing in the eastern part of the country, and to liberate and protect the poor helpless people now groaning under their iron rule, have, by the aid of the Majahdeens [mujāhidīn, “fighters for Islam”] … erected the standard of Mohammed, and persuaded the orthodox Hindoos who had been subject to my ancestors, and have been and are still accessories in the destruction of the English, to raise the standard of Mahavir.
Several of the Hindoo and Mussulman chiefs, who have long since quitted their homes for the preservation of their religion, and have been trying their best to root out the English in India, have presented themselves to me, and taken part in the reigning Indian crusade, and it is more than probable that I shall very shortly receive succours from the west. Therefore, for the information of the public, the present Ishtahar [proclamation], consisting of several sections, is put in circulation, and it is the imperative duty of all to take it into their careful consideration, and abide by it. Parties anxious to participate in the common cause, but having no means to provide for themselves, shall receive their daily subsistence from me; and be it known to all, that the ancient works, both of the Hindoos and the Mohammedans, the writings of the miracle-workers, and the calculations of the astrologers, pundits, and rammals [fortune-tellers], all agree in asserting that the English will no longer have any footing in India or elsewhere. …
Section I.—Regarding Zemindars [landholders].— It is evident that the British government, in making zemindary settlements, have imposed exorbitant jummas [taxes], and have disgraced and ruined several zemindars, by putting up their estates to public auction for arrears of rent, insomuch that on the institution of a suit by a common ryot [cultivator], a maidservant, or a slave, the respectable zemindars are summoned into court, arrested, put in gaol, and disgraced. In litigations regarding zemindaries, the immense value of stamps, and other unnecessary expenses of the civil courts, which are pregnant with all sorts of crooked dealings, and the practice of allowing a case to hang on for years, are all calculated to impoverish the litigants. Besides this, the coffers of the zemindars are annually taxed with subscriptions for schools, hospitals, roads, etc. Such extortions will have no manner of existence in the Badshahi government; but, on the contrary, the jummas will be light, the dignity and honour of the zemindars safe, and every zemindar will have absolute rule in his own zemindary. The zemindary disputes will be summarily decided according to the Shurrah [Sharimagea] and the Shasters [śāstras], without any expense; and zemindars who will assist in the present war with their men and money, shall be excused for ever from paying half the revenue. …
Section II.—Regarding Merchants.—It is plain that the infidel and treacherous British government have monopolised the trade of all the fine and valuable merchandise, such as indigo, cloth, and other articles of shipping, leaving only the trade of trifles to the people, and even in this they are not without their share of the profits, which they secure by means of customs and stamp fees, etc., in money suits, so that the people have merely a trade in name. … When the Badshahi government is established, all these aforesaid fraudulent practices shall be dispensed with, and the trade of every article, without exception, both by land and water, shall be open to the native merchants of India, who will have the benefit of the government steam-vessels and steam carriages for the conveyance of the merchandise gratis; and merchants having no capital of their own shall be assisted from the public treasury. …
Section III.—Regarding Public Servants.—It is not a secret thing, that under the British government, natives employed in the civil and military services, have little respect, low pay, and no manner of influence; and all the posts of dignity and emolument in both the departments, are exclusively bestowed on Englishmen. … But under the Badshahi government, … the posts … which the English enjoy at present … will be given to the natives … together with jagheers [landed estates], khilluts [ceremonial dress], inams [tax-free lands], and influence. Natives, whether Hindoos or Mohammedans, who fall fighting against the English, are sure to go to heaven; and those killed fighting for the English, will, doubtless, go to hell. Therefore, all the natives in the British service ought to be alive to their religion and interest, and, abjuring their loyalty to the English, side with the Badshahi government and obtain salaries of 200 or 300 rupees per month for the present, and be entitled to high posts in future. …
Section IV.—Regarding Artisans.—It is evident that the Europeans, by the introduction of English articles into India, have thrown the weavers, the cotton-dressers, the carpenters, the blacksmiths, and the shoemakers, &c., out of employ, and have engrossed their occupations, so that every description of native artisan has been reduced to beggary. But under the Badshahi government the native artisans will exclusively be employed in the services of the kings, the rajahs, and the rich; and this will no doubt insure their prosperity. Therefore the artisans ought to renounce the English services, and assist the Majahdeens … engaged in the war, and thus be entitled both to secular and eternal happiness.
Section V.—Regarding Pundits, Fakirs, and other learned persons.—The pundits and fakirs being the guardians of the Hindoo and Mohammedan religions respectively, and the Europeans being the enemies of both religions, and as at present a war is raging against the English on account of religion, the pundits and fakirs are bound to present themselves to me, and take their share in this holy war, otherwise they will stand condemned according to the tenor of the Shurrah and the Shasters; but if they come, they will, when the Badshahi government is well established, receive rent-free lands.
Lastly, be it known to all, that whoever, out of the above-named classes, shall, after the circulation of this Ishtahar, still cling to the British government, all his estates shall be confiscated, and his property plundered, and he himself, with his whole family, shall be imprisoned, and ultimately put to death.
[From Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, giving a detailed account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India and a Concise History of the Great Military Events which have tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan (1858–1859; New Delhi: Master Publishers, 1981), 2:630–632.]
THE RANI OF JHANSI: AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT
The rulers of many princely states chose to side with the British during the Rebellion of 1857. The Begum of Bhopal, for example, who took the reins of state after her father died, renounced purdah, and worked until her death in 1868 to “improve” Bhopal along British lines, personally rode with her army to aid the British in 1857, for which she and her state were liberally rewarded. The Rani of Jhansi, by contrast, ultimately led her people in support of the sepoys, and for this she lost her life—and attained a place of honor in popular Indian lore.
The memoirs of Vishnubhat Godse are one of the few surviving accounts of the 1857 Rebellion that do not derive from the British. Godse came from a Chitpavan Brahman family near Bombay, and spent his life as a traditional family priest, with important familial and patronage connections to the Maratha chiefs in North India, in particular those at Bithur, Gwalior, and Jhansi. On a yearlong trip from Maharashtra to North India, starting in 1857, he happened to witness several incidents of the Rebellion, one of which, involving the Rani of Jhansi, to whom he refers as Baisaheb, we reproduce here. Godse came to Jhansi in early 1858, and was trapped in the fort when the city was besieged and sacked by the British army commanded by Hugh Rose. In 1884 he wrote down his memories in the form of a travelogue that was sponsored by one of his landowner patrons but purposely withheld from publication until 1907, after the author’s death. The text has been known to Maharashtrian historians since at least the late nineteenth century, and has generally been taken as a straightforward description of events as they actually occurred. V. D. Savarkar (see chapter 7) took inspiration from this account when writing The Indian War of Independence of 1857, which was published in 1909 in England and then immediately banned. The references to women and children in this and the following selections remind us that no one, on either side, was spared violence: English women were hacked to death by the sepoys; Indian women and children were burned alive in villages fired by the advancing British armies. Moreover, these sources reveal that honor was often couched in gendered terms, with the violation of women being equated with the despoliation of home. Women were reported to have preferred death to capture by the enemy, and men—especially British men—became savages in vengeance for the death of their women.
The Baisaheb was devoted to physical fitness. Rising at first light she would go to the wrestler’s pillar and exercise for 48 minutes, then ride on horseback or exercise her elephant, then in the fourth ghatika of the day (72nd to 96th minute, literally) she ate and drank milk; after that she bathed. Seven or eight cauldrons of water were needed for her bath. Even after she became independent the Bai never did anything improper. It is true that cultivating the body turns one away from immoral desires. In the third prahara she would sample any gifts that might have arrived and then sit in the open court (darbar). On Fridays and Tuesdays she would assemble all her retinue and proceed in state to the shrine of Shri Mahalakshmi.
As war was imminent, preparations were being made for it. Lalu Bakshi was appointed to prepare fresh stocks of ammunition, and soldiers from the [former British] regiments were being recruited for service. News was daily received from Kalpi and other places. …
[The Raja of Banpur intercepted letters from Jhansi being sent to the English at Gwalior and brought them to the Rani in the middle of the night.] He then said that it would be best to collect the army, evacuate Jhansi and march to Kalpi where the Peshwa was. “My reason is that these letters are not written by any ordinary townsman. They are written by a commander or official; he will be impossible to trace and the effort will cause consternation. Finally we shall be trapped here.”
The Baisaheb responded “Up till now, the decision was to fight here; so no special connection has been made with the Peshwa, and furthermore you have to remember whose daughter-in-law and whose wife I am. It does not seem good to me to flee in fear of my life to that male gathering at Kalpi. Instead, I shall assemble all the officers, question them about these letters and make them swear an oath and do whatever is necessary.”
The Raja replied “Do not fall into this confusion. Whoever is plotting treason will not confess. It does not seem good to confide in such a place. In future you will have cause to remember my words. Let it be. What is fated to happen even Brahmadeva cannot avert. I shall take my family out of this fortress.”
[The Rani summoned all the officers, new and old.] They all lit torches and began to assemble. I went up to the eastern tower of the fort to enjoy the spectacle. Torches burned all the way from the streets of the city to the big gateway of the fort. All the officers were coming up to the fort according to their status. The Raja of Banpur was seated before the Baisaheb. The Minister was standing before her with his sash on. The Baisaheb had a sacred stone lingam and bel leaves and turmeric powder in a silver stand brought in by Brahmans and placed in the midst of the gathering. The Raja of Banpur brought out the letters and read them to the assembly. The Baisaheb then spoke, saying these letters show that there is treason in our camp. Some have suggested that we take all our forces and equipment and go and join the Peshwa. They say “Let whatever happens there happen, let us not remain here.” Upon this Lalu Bakshi and Dulaji Singh the chief and others replied, “this state is an old one and the fortress strong. To abandon all these and seek shelter with the Peshva as soon as danger threatens does not seem right to us. We have said what we had to say, let everyone hear us and do what should be done. If anyone has the least inclination to intrigue let him be reassured of safety if he confesses it and takes an oath for the future. Then no suspicion will remain.”
The Minister (Divan) then spoke, saying it is difficult to confess in front of this multitude. But let whoever has done this consider that for the sake of personal advantage, he is consigning everyone else to death and destruction. So let him abandon this course and take an oath of loyalty, and everyone’s suspicions will be at rest. This letter was not written by an ordinary townsman, but by an officer. All the officers are present here.” Everyone remained silent. The Baisaheb then said “I am a widow woman, that too of mature years and you must consider whose daughter-in-law I am. At this time to go to seek protection from that company of men in Kalpi—it is better that something be done here. The Peshwa is our patron and we must send emissaries to ask his help in repelling the English attack. This arrangement can be entrusted to the Divan. At present, if anyone has any strategem in mind, let him give it up and join in taking an oath on the sacred emblem of Shiva with the sacred leaf and powder in his hand.”
When Baisaheb said this all the old and new officers rose and took the oath with their hands on the silver stand previously placed in the assembly, and returned to their places. At that time, Dulaji Singh also took the oath before the Bai and returned to his place. Then everyone’s mind became free of suspicion and pan-supari was distributed, rosewater and perfume sprinkled and the assembly broke up. The Raja of Banpur took his family and treasures, bade the Bai farewell and returned to his camp beside the Vetravati (Betwa) river. …
When the British advanced to attack the city, Dulaji Singh who commanded four thousand men deliberately misloaded his cannons with bags of grain instead of shot. The people around him panicked and abandoned the walls. The English began to mount the city wall. Perceiving this the Bai mustered her old Vilayati [Muslim soldiers] and came down from the citadel with 1500 men. They all had drawn swords in hand and they confronted a thousand English. The Bai was there sword in hand too. The two sides fought briefly with swords—then the English in fear of their lives drew back into the city and opened fire from there. An old officer of the Vilayatis took the Bai by the hand and said that if they remained there they would die uselessly as the English fired from cover. It was better to withdraw into the fortress and consider what to do next. This was done and the gates were closed. The English began entering the city and shooting down every man that they saw and setting fire to houses. They first commenced burning and killing in the Halvaipura quarter. They sought out males from the age of five to the age of eighty and killed them. At this time soldiers of the Bai’s garrison rushed to find barbers to cut off their moustaches and side-locks, applied ash and sandal-paste and pretended to be harmless devotees. Those who could not find a barber hacked off their beards with their own swords and dressed as ascetic fakirs. Thousands of white soldiers entered the city from all sides and commenced massacring people. The terror in the city at this time was immeasurable. The screaming and crying was endless. At that time there was a small garden belonging to Bhide in the middle of the city. People fled into it from all directions. Up to twenty thousand people were gathered there. The English soldiers came, whereupon all the people lay prone on the ground and begged for mercy, saying that they were ordinary folk and none of them was a soldier. The English had pity on them, posted a guard at the gates and went elsewhere. They began entering houses and killing men they encountered; sometimes they caught and tortured them, demanding rupees, gold, pearls or other valuables. If they found these, then they sometimes let them go. Sometimes they dragged them about with their own waistcloths tied about their necks to force them to show where valuables had been buried; if they were found the men might be released, only to be killed by the next party of English that came by. But they did not kill women. However young women of good families feared that they would be defiled, and so, as soon as the English entered their houses they went to the well at the back and drowned themselves. Sometimes when they were killing men, their womenfolk sought to protect them and were killed by gunshot. The men would still be taken and killed. But women were not deliberately killed. If soldiers came to a house where there only women they stood at a distance and made them surrender their ornaments, searched the house and left. Horses, camels, cows, dogs and cats wandered the streets howling from thirst. …
Looking down from the fort battlements, the city seemed in desperate condition. At dusk the Bai permitted everyone to escape from the fort if they wished. Brahmans, men and women servants, etc., all went out at this time. I also left the fort and sought the house of Mandavgane. …
[The Rani fled the city.] The Bai was seated on a white horse which was worth 2500 rupees. She was in male attire, trousers etc. She wore stitched boots and chain-mail armor. She did not take a single bit of money. Only a silver cup was tied to her sash. She had her weapons strapped to her waist, and a sword in a scabbard. She had her twelve year-old adopted son strapped to her back with a silk cloth. She uttered the words “Jai Shankar” and the whole troop left the fort by the northern gate. The English advanced to intercept them. The Bai fired from her carbine and pressed on. She broke though but most of her Vilayati escort was killed. The survivors scattered. Only a slave-woman who was good rider, and one horseman remained with her as she took the road to Kalpi. The English gave up the chase in the darkness and returned to their camp. …
[Having fled the fort, Godse sought out his friend Mandavgane, who told him what had transpired in the town. They discussed what they should do to save their lives. The latter proposed hiding at night in the hollow space between the walls of a derelict mansion across the street, where they would not be visible to anybody.] At dusk after evening prayer and food, I climbed up to the roof to survey the city. Such was the destruction that I trembled in every limb at the sight. I was filled with dread. The whole city had become a land of corpses. Animals were howling from hunger and thirst, as were a few destitutes roaming the street. Beyond the Halvaipura, the city was ablaze. Huge tongues of flame blown by the wind leapt from house to house. Such a dreadful fate overtook Jhansi as no other town had suffered. …
[Intercepted by two white soldiers] I lay prone on the ground and began speaking in the Hindustani language. “Saheb, I come from the Thana district under the Bombay government. I came here on pilgrimage. I have a son and since I am a mendicant I came to know the owner of this house while on the road. He brought me here in the hope of charity. Fifteen days have passed since I came here.” The soldiers judged from my language that I was not from those parts. They began to demand money from me and searched me and my bedding. I had brought 250 rupees from the fort, which was tied up in the bedding. The coins clinked when the soldiers threw it down, and the soldiers took the money and left.
I then went to hide in the space between the walls. The space filled up with men and young women. Four persons squeezed in where there was place for three. Terror filled the city. Hundreds of gunshots began to be heard. There was not the slightest breeze where I sat. It was summertime. By midnight I was seized with a terrible thirst, an incomparable thirst. I felt as though I would die. Our group had decided that when there was no firing people would go back to the house and drink from the well, using a jug on a string that had been secreted there. But I lacked the courage. And gunshots could be heard in that direction. I suffered the thirst. Finally, considering that there had been no shots for some time, I went to well, drew water and drank. I had hardly done so when I heard noises close by, and dropping the jug fled back to the hiding place, and quickly squeezed into a space already occupied by two young women. The young woman within faced west and I was facing east. The space was so confined that we were pressed breast to breast. There was only her blouse between us, and it was soaked with perspiration. We were like this for an hour or so. At that time I was thirty or thirty-three years old, and the woman was eighteen or twenty. But we were in such fear of our lives that neither of us became aroused. After an hour so I left that place and went to my original spot.
In that crisis no pollution rules were observed. Many men were killed on the second day. Seeing the soldiers coming, people had hidden in the fodder stores; these were set alight and they burned to death. Others leapt into the ponds or lakes. But the English soldiers sat down by the ponds and shot them as they put their heads above water. Others hid in the fields but were hunted out and killed. … Thus for three days the killing continued.
[Vishnubhat Godse, Majha Pravas: 1857 cya Bandaci Hakikat, ed. Datto Vaman Potdar (Pune: Venus Prakashan, 1974), 66–67. Trans. S. Guha.]
BAHADUR SHAH: THE LAST DAYS OF THE LAST MUGHAL EMPEROR
The soldiers who had mutinied at Meerut in 1857 marched to Delhi and, joined by sympathizers, made a force of sixty thousand armed men in the city. Jivanlal, an official of the court, wrote a detailed narrative of the last days of the Mughals. Whatever was argued later at his trial, it is almost certain that the emperor, Bahadur Shah, a talented poet who wrote under the nom-de-plume “Zafar,” had not been in collusion with the sepoys before they stormed into Delhi and turned to him for shelter, maintenance, and leadership. Moreover, at first, and then often in subsequent weeks, he expressed his disapproval of their riotous activities in his city. But either out of necessity, given the sepoys’ presence in Delhi, or out of longing for the restoration of his dynastic power, he eventually acquiesced to the mutineers’ desire to use him as a figurehead, and on May 11 the elderly emperor allegedly sent them a welcoming poem.
May all the enemies of the Faith be killed to-day;
The Firinghis be destroyed, root and branch!
Celebrate the festival of Eed Kurban by great slaughter;
Put our enemies to the edge of the sword—spare not!
[“Jiwanlal’s Narrative,” trans. C. T. Metcalfe, Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi (London: Constable, 1898), 177.]
Bahadur Shah’s position, despite his symbolic value as a rallying point, was weak. An eighty-two-year-old mystic poet, Sufi, and calligrapher, the emperor was not eager to unite the sepoys and their allies against the British. Conditions in Delhi—for everyone, but especially for the local population—worsened from repeated plundering on the part of the army; by mid-August ordinary people were starving. Bahadur Shah was unable even to stop the sepoys from converting his audience hall into an ammunition store, harassing the women in his zenana, and ruining his gardens. Increasingly depressed, sensing that the rebellion would lead to the destruction of Delhi and the end of his dynasty, the elderly emperor nevertheless had bouts of energy, often when trying to protect people or institutions in Delhi, but also when he hoped for help.
In the following letter, he appealed, ultimately unsuccessfully, to the neighboring rajas and chieftains for aid in routing the British. At his trial, he denied having written the letter, suggesting—quite plausibly—that it had been composed by his son, Mirza Mughal, or by someone else who had access to the royal seal.
Consider yourself honoured and learned. That I have been made thoroughly acquainted, by your petition, with all the particulars of the slaughter throughout your territory of the accursed unbelieving English. You are worthy of a hundred commendations. … Of the small number of infidels, who in jeopardy of their lives had betaken themselves to their entrenchments on the Ridge, considering them a refuge and a protection, many have been killed and the very few holding on in their precarious existence are equally doomed. … You are directed to use all diligence to come to the royal presence, bringing your tributary contributions of money with you, and to slay the accursed unbelieving English and all other enemies wherever you may find them on your way.
[Letter to the Gulab Singh, the ruler of Jammu, 22 August 1857, in “Evidence taken before the court appointed for the trial of the king of Delhi,” House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1859, vol. 18.]
The Delhi that Bahadur Shah’s court had cultivated, prior to 1857, represented a composite Hindu-Muslim, Indo-Islamic civilization: there was nothing odd at the time in a largely Hindu sepoy army rushing to Delhi to rescue, shore up, and receive aid from a Mughal empire that still conferred political legitimacy. Even in his straitened circumstances during the summer of 1857, Zafar tried to prevent the rebellious sepoys from despoiling the prosperous Hindu merchants in Delhi. He urged the two groups to cooperate in the struggle against the British.
[The King issued a proclamation by beat of drum that the Hindus and Muslims must not quarrel. But] Moulvie Mahommed Said demanded an audience, and represented to the King that the standard of Holy War had been erected for the purpose of inflaming the minds of the Mahommedans against the Hindus. The King answered that such a jehād was quite impossible, and such an idea an act of extreme folly, for the majority of the Purbeah rebel soldiers were Hindus. Moreover, such an act would create internecine war, and the result would be deplorable. It was fitting that sympathy should exist among all classes. It was pointed out that the Hindus were leaning towards an alliance with the English and had no sympathy with the Mahommedans, and were already holding themselves apart. A deputation of Hindu officers arrived to complain of the war against the Hindus being preached. The King replied: “The holy War is against the English; I have forbidden it against the Hindus.”
[“Jiwanlal’s Narrative,” 98.]
The British, however, were strongly entrenched on the Ridge, the hill north of the city, and Bahadur Shah expressed his awareness of the hopelessness of his situation to his officers.
“The Royal Treasury is empty …” General Bukht Khan came to the Durbar and complained that the soldiers no longer obeyed his orders. The King replied,” Tell them, then, to leave the city.” … “It is quite clear to me that the English will ultimately recapture this city, and will kill me.”
[“Jiwanlal’s Narrative,” 179–180.]
GHALIB’S DELHI DIARY: STORM AND TURMOIL
Many people, Indians and foreigners, have left accounts of events in Delhi as the city was occupied by troops who had rebelled against the British, and then as it was reoccupied and sacked by the British. Among those who wrote of the fate of the city, which had been a cultural as well as political power, was the great Urdu poet Ghalib, who had been patronized by Zafar and was a friend of many of the British officials. His poetic hyperbole is corroborated by responsible British accounts. His account is in the form of a diary. Ghalib stresses, as few accounts do, that there was guilt on both sides. His emphasis on “loyalty” as a cardinal virtue, even to foreign rulers, is a distinctive element in the Indo-Islamic culture of the time, and must be taken seriously in order to understand the history of the period.
It may be worth mentioning that during this storm and turmoil the nature of calamity is different in every lane and bazaar. The manner of killing and looting by the soldiers is not uniform but varies, and whether a soldier shows kindness or unkindness depends on his individual nature.
Orders have been given to spare the lives of those who do not resist these assaults. But whosoever does resist them will lose his life along with his possessions. It is believed that those who were killed were ones who did not show obedience (to the British). …
O you who commend justice and you lovers of truth… think of what we have done. Although everyone knows that disloyalty is a sin… we raised our swords against our masters and we killed helpless women and infants playing in their cradles. The British rose up in revenge against such atrocity. … Most of the citizens had fled the city but some, caught between hope and despair, are living inside the walls… The hearts of the helpless inhabitants of the city, and those of the grief-stricken people outside, are filled with sorrow, and they are afraid of mass slaughter. …
The speed of my pen is like the speed of a half-dead ant, and it is difficult to put all of this on paper for the befit of my readers. Nothing more can be said of the fate of the Mughal princes than that some were shot and devoured by the dragon of death; and some were hung by their necks with ropes, … and the aged and fragile Mughal emperor is under trial by the court.
[Ghalib, Dastanbūy: A Diary of the Indian Revolt of 1857 by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, trans. K. A. Faruqi (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970), 49, 50, 57–58.]
BAHADUR SHAH’S DEFENSE
The British recaptured Delhi in September 1857, and the city, already repeatedly plundered by the sepoys, was subjected to further horrific plundering, along with the murder of civilians by British soldiers, with the approval of their officers. All of this was, then as now, standard treatment of a defeated people.
The emperor was put on trial; he was charged—somewhat strangely—as a British subject, with disloyalty and treason against the British queen. As he awaited trial, British men and women came to peer at the feeble old man who, as one woman put it, had once been ruler of one of the world’s most magnificent cities and a great empire but was now confined to a small, squalid room. During the trial, the emperor, used to being hailed as “Lord of the Universe,” was addressed by the judges as tum, the pronoun used for children and servants. Not surprisingly, he refused to speak during the trial, but the advocate-general read his defense, a selection from which is given here in the official translation. He claimed that he had been forced to side with the soldiers from Meerut who had rebelled against the British. He showed a touching concern for the safety of his wife, Zinat Mahal, although she described him at this time to William Russell, the correspondent of the London Times, as “a troublesome, nasty, cross old fellow.”
Witnesses were found who contradicted the emperor’s version of events. Some of them were spies for the British, some were anxious to prove their loyalty to the British in order to save their own lives, but in any case the verdict of guilty was a foregone conclusion. He was exiled to Rangoon, Burma, where he died in 1862. The sons and grandson whom he identified as responsible for some of his alleged crimes were summarily executed without trial. Later, twenty-one princes of the royal family were hanged.
The real facts are as follows: I had no intelligence on the subject previously to the day of the outbreak. About eight o’clock in the morning, the mutinous troopers suddenly arrived and set up a noisy clamour under the palace windows, saying that they had come from Meerut after killing all the English there; and stating, as their reason for having done so, that they had been required to bite with their teeth, cartridges greased with the fat of oxen and swine, in open violation of the caste of both Hindus and Mussulmans. … Not long after this the mutinous soldiery rushed into the hall of special audience … and the hall of devotion, surrounding me completely, and placing sentries on all sides. I asked them what their object was, and begged them to go away. In return they told me to remain a quiet spectator, saying they had staked their lives and would now do all that might be in their power. Fearing that I should be killed, I kept quiet and went to my own apartments. Near evening, those traitors brought, as prisoners, some European men and women … and resolved on killing them. … Though I again did all in my power to reason with the rebellious soldiery, they would not heed me and carried out their purpose of slaying [some European men and women]. I gave no orders for this slaughter. Mirza Moghul, Mirza Khair Sultan [his sons], and Mirza Abul-Bakr [his grandson], who had leagued with the soldiery, may have made use of my name. … Whenever the soldiers or [my sons] or [grandson] brought a petition, they invariably came accompanied by officers of the army, and brought the order they desired, written on a separate piece of paper, and compelled me to transcribe it with my own hand. … Matters went so far in this way that they used to say, so that I might hear them, that those who would not attend to their wishes would be made to repent their conduct, and for fear of them I could say nothing. …
What power in any way did I possess? … The officers of the army went so far as to require that I should make over the queen Zinat Mahal to them that they might keep her prisoner, saying she maintained friendly relations with the English. … [The soldiers] plundered not only many individuals, but several entire streets, plundering, robbing, killing. … I was helpless, and constrained by my fears, I did whatever they required. … They, one day, went to the house of Queen Zinat Mahal, intending to plunder it. … If I had been in league with them, how would these things have occurred? In addition to all this, it is worthy of consideration that no man demands the wife of the poorest man, saying, “Give her to me, I will make her a prisoner.” …
In all the above, which I have caused to be written from my own dictation … God knows, and is my witness, that I have written only what is strictly true, and the whole of what I can remember.
[“Translation of the written defense put in by Bahadur Shah,” in “Evidence taken before the court appointed for the trail of the king of Delhi,” 9 March 1858, in House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1859, vol. 18.]
QUEEN VICTORIA’S PROCLAMATION, NOVEMBER 1, 1858
Although the Rebellion failed, British resumption of power came at a terrific cost to both sides—in life, property, resources, and good will. The brutality of British vengeance, slaughter, and summary executions galled too few Britons at the time, but all this did alert the British government to the inadvisability of allowing the East India Company to remain in active control of India. Hence on November 1, 1858, Queen Victoria made a historic proclamation, read out in as many Indian villages as possible, in which she declared that thereafter India would be governed by and in the name of the British monarch through a secretary of state. The governor-general was given the title of viceroy, or the monarch’s representative; later, in 1877, Queen Victoria herself took the title “Empress of India,” assuming the direct government of more than one hundred million Indians.
In a letter to Lord Derby, whom she asked to draft the actual proclamation, she requested that he communicate to her Indian subjects her promise of generosity, benevolence, and equality with all other subjects of the British Crown. In fact, general amnesty was announced as official policy, and the Queen pledged noninterference in matters of custom and religion and universal access to government service. The 24,000-man military force formerly belonging to the Company was incorporated into the British Army. The effect of the proclamation and the policies it promulgated was to favor the princes and landowners and hence to create a class of Indians loyal to the state; this “divide and rule” strategy proved effective in containing political discontent until the 1920s.
And we, reposing especial trust and confidence in the loyalty, ability, and judgment of our right trusty and well-beloved cousin and councillor, Charles John Viscount Canning, do hereby constitute and appoint him, the said Viscount Canning, to be our first Viceroy and Governor-General in and over our said territories, and to administer the government thereof in our name, and generally to act in our name and on our behalf, subject to such orders and regulations as he shall, from time to time, receive from us through one of our Principal Secretaries of State.
And we do hereby confirm in their several offices, civil and military, all persons now employed in the service of the Honourable East India Company, subject to our future pleasure, and to such laws and regulations as may hereafter be enacted.
We hereby announce to the native Princes of India that all treaties and engagements made with them by or under the authority of the Honourable East India Company are by us accepted, and will be scrupulously maintained, and we look for the like observance on their part.
We desire no extension of our present territorial possessions; and, while we will permit no aggression upon our dominions or our rights to be attempted with impunity, we shall sanction no encroachment on those of others. We shall respect the rights, dignity and honour of native Princes as our own; and we desire that they, as well as our own subjects, should enjoy that prosperity and that social advancement which can only be secured by internal peace and good government.
We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects, and those obligations, by the blessing of Almighty God, we shall faithfully and conscientiously fulfil.
Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity, and acknowledging with gratitude the solace of religion, we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects. We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in anywise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure.
And it is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to discharge.
We know, and respect, the feelings of attachment with which the natives of India regard the lands inherited by them from their ancestors, and we desire to protect them in all rights connected therewith, subject to the equitable demands of the State; and we will that generally, in framing and administering the law, due regard be paid to the ancient rights, usages, and customs of India.. …
Our clemency will be extended to all offenders, save and except those who have been, or shall be, convicted of having directly taken part in the murder of British subjects. With regard to such the demands of justice forbid the exercise of mercy. …
When, by the blessing of Providence, internal tranquillity shall be restored, it is our earnest desire to stimulate the peaceful industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement, and to administer its government for the benefit of all our subjects resident therein. In their prosperity will be our strength; in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward. And may the God of all power grant to us, and to those in authority under us, strength to carry out these our wishes for the good of our people.
[From The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858 to 1947: Select Documents, ed. C. H. Philips (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 10–11.]
SIR SAYYID AHMAD KHAN ON THE CAUSES OF THE MUTINY
The career of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) parallels in many ways that of Rammohan Roy. Both men were born into families of the high social rank, and both were educated in the Persian and Arabic learning required of entrants into the service of the Mughal Empire—well after that empire had been replaced by another. Both came to know and trust British officials and to appreciate the advanced knowledge and new form of government they brought to India. Both men rejected the Christian doctrines being preached by missionaries, and made their own independent studies of the Christian scriptures. Both men searched for the central messages at the core of the religions of their ancestors, then sought to purge those religions of superstitions and medieval accretions, reinterpreting them so as to give their ancient meanings new vitality in the present. Both men edited periodicals, enriched with their writings the languages of their regions, and founded schools to make Western learning available to young people. (Sayyid Ahmad far outdid Rammohan in the amount of time and money he devoted to educational work.) Both men occasionally took stands critical of their rulers; both traveled to England to learn from, and offer advice to, its inhabitants; and both suffered bitter attacks from their coreligionists. In spite of the fact that neither one has had a noticeable impact on normative Muslim or Hindu religious practice, each by the twentieth century was being hailed as the founding father of his community’s “modern” worldview. The religious ideas they were trying to defend and revitalize, however, and the geographic and sociopolitical contexts in which they operated, were quite different.
Sayyid Ahmad as a boy might have seen Rammohan in his customary Persian-style gown, shawl, and turban, presenting himself to the powerless Mughal emperor before setting off for London as His Majesty’s ambassador; Sayyid Ahmad’s family was attached to the Delhi court, his mother’s father having twice served the emperor as his prime minister. This grandfather was also on good terms with the British, having been principal of the Calcutta Madrasa (school of Islamic learning) and an attaché with an embassy sent to the king of Persia by the East India Company. His example and personal influence (for his grandson grew up in his house) prepared young Sayyid Ahmad for a distinguished career of dual allegiance to India’s Muslims and to their British rulers. Through his mother’s brother, a subjudge in the East India Company’s service, he obtained a clerkship in the judicial branch and did so well that he rose to be a subjudge himself within a few years.
The great shock of Sayyid Ahmad’s life, which changed him from an observer to an active worker in defense of Muslims and of Islam in India, was the 1857 outbreak of military mutinies and civil strife in northern India. His immediate response was to save the lives of the British families of the district in which he was stationed as subjudge and then to try to keep the peace until the Company’s forces arrived. But he failed in peace-keeping because of fighting between Hindu and Muslim factions.
In 1858, after the rebels had largely been defeated, Sir Sayyid penned a remarkable document in which he surveyed what he felt to be the likely reasons for Indian discontent with Company rule. Fearing that making such assessments publicly available would appear to be seditious in the atmosphere of the time, he wrote his comments in Urdu (he never learned enough English to write confidently in it) and circulated them only to a few select British officers of the East India Company. After criticizing the British for their insensitivity to their subjects’ opinions, he recommended that a few Indians be appointed to the governor-general’s legislative council, a practice that was initiated in 1861, with Sir Sayyid himself holding such an appointment from 1878 to 1883. But what worried him most in the next decade were indications that the British were placing the blame for the mutinies and rebellions on the Muslims, and that in consequence his already disadvantaged community would be rendered even more helpless than before.
The non-admission of a native as a member into the Legislative Council was the original cause of the out-break; … the importance of such an admission discussed.
Most men, I believe, agree in thinking that it is highly conducive to the welfare and prosperity of Government: indeed is essential to its stability, that the people should have a voice in its Councils. It is from the voice of the people only that Government can learn whether its projects are likely to be well received. The voice of the people can alone check errors in the bud, and warn us of the dangers before they burst upon and destroy us.
A needle may dam the gushing rivulet. An elephant must turn aside from the swollen torrent. This voice however can never be heard, and this security never acquired, unless the people are allowed a share in the consultation of Government. The men who have ruled India should never have forgotten that they were here in the position of foreigners, that they differed from the natives in religion, in customs, in habits of life and thought. The security of a Government, it will be remembered, is founded on its careful observance of their rights and privileges.
Look back at the pages of History, the record of the experience of the past, and you will not fail to be struck with the differences and distinctions that have existed between the manners, the opinions, and customs of the various races of men: differences which have been acquired by no written rule, or prescribed by any printed form. They are in every instance the inheritance of the peculiar race. It is to these differences of thought and customs that the laws must be adapted, for they cannot be adapted to the laws. In their due observance lies the welfare and security of Government. From the beginning of things, to disregard these has been to disregard the nature of men, and neglect of them has ever been the cause of universal discontent. Can we forget the confusion that ensued on the acceptance of the Dewannee by the British Government in the year 1760, a confusion brought about by the ignorance then prevailing? If one wishes to recall those times, he can read of them in Marshman’s History. Who, on the contrary, does not remember the prosperity of Bengal when under the rule of Lord Hastings? I attribute it to the knowledge of its peculiarities and the acquaintance with the Vernacular which obtained in those days.
To form a Parliament from the natives of India is of course out of the question. It is not only impossible, but useless. There is no reason however why the natives of this country should be excluded from the Legislative Council, and here it is that you come upon the one great root of all this evil. Here is the origin of all the troubles that have befallen Hindustan. From causes connected with this matter sprang all the evil that has lately happened.
I do not say that Government has made no attempt to acquaint itself with the characteristics and economy of the country. I am well aware that serious efforts have been made. The Regulations of Government, the Circulars of the Board of Revenue, and Mr. Thomason’s Directions to Revenue Officers are sufficient proof of this. But I do say that Government has not succeeded in acquainting itself with the daily habits, the modes of thought and of life, the likes, and dislikes, and the prejudices of the people. Our Government never knew what troubles each succeeding sun might bring with it to its subjects, or what sorrow might fall upon them with the night. Yet day by day troubles and anxieties were increasing upon them. Secret causes of complaint were rankling in their breasts. Little by little a cloud was gathering strength, which finally burst over us in all its violence.
The non-admission of such a member proved a hindrance to the development of the good feeling of the Indian subject towards the Government and of their good intention towards it; on the contrary, contrary effects were produced.
The evils which resulted to India from the non-admission of natives into the Legislative Council of India were various. … The greatest mischief lay in this, that the people misunderstood the views and the intentions of Government. They misapprehended every act, and whatever law was passed was misconstrued by men who had no share in the framing of it, and hence no means of judging of its spirit. At length the Hindustanees fell into the habit of thinking that all the laws were passed with a view to degrade and ruin them, and to deprive them and their fellows of their religion. Such acts as were repugnant to native customs and character, whether in themselves good or bad, increased this suspicion. At last came the time when all men looked upon the English Government as slow poison, a rope of sand, a treacherous flame of fire. They learned to think that if today they escaped from the hands of Government, tomorrow they would fall into them; or that even if they escaped on the morrow, the third day would see their ruin. There was no man to reason with them, no one to point out to them the absurdity of such ideas.
When the governors and the governed occupy relatively such a position as this, what hope is there of loyalty or of good-will? Granted that the intentions of Government were excellent, there was no man who could convince the people of it; no one was at hand to correct the errors which they had adopted. And why? Because there was not one of their own number among the members of the Legislative Council. Had there been, these evils that had happened to us, would have been averted. The more one thinks the matter over, the more one is convinced that here we have the one great cause which was the origin of all smaller causes of dissatisfaction. …
I do not wish to enter here into the question as to how the ignorant and uneducated natives of Hindustan could be allowed a share in the deliberations of the Legislative Council; or as to how they should be selected to form an assembly like the English Parliament. These are the knotty points. All I wish to prove here is that such a step is not only advisable, but absolutely necessary, and that the disturbances are due to the neglect of such a measure. As regards the details of the question, I have elsewhere discussed them, and those who wish to enter into it can read what I have said.
The outbreak of rebellion proceeded from the following five causes.
This mistake of the Government then made itself felt in every matter connected with Hindustan. All causes of rebellion, however various, can be traced to this one. And if we look at these various causes separately and distinctly we shall, I think, find that they may be classed under five heads.
1.    Ignorance on the part of the people: by which I mean misapprehension of the intentions of Government.
2.    The passing of such laws and regulations and forms of procedure as jarred with the established custom and practice of Hindustan, and the introduction of such as were in themselves objectionable.
3.    Ignorance on the part of the Government of the conditions of the people; of their modes of thought and of life; and of the grievances through which their hearts were becoming estranged.
4.    The neglect on the part of our rulers of such points as were essential to the good government of Hindustan.
5.    The bad management, and disaffection, of the army.
[Causes of the Indian Revolt; Three Essays by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, ed. Salim al-Din Quraishi (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1997), Sir Sayyid’s preface, 61–63, 64, 65–66, as slightly edited by F. W. Pritchett.]
CAN MUSLIMS LIVE IN A CHRISTIAN STATE? ULEMA WHO SPEAK FOR THE BRITISH IN 1871
As seen in the excerpt from Shah Abd ul-Aziz near the end of chapter 1, a few Muslim scholars and religious leaders claimed that because religious freedom was no longer possible under British rule, India should be considered Dār ulharb. Other ulema denied this interpretation, arguing that the British had not shown themselves to be enemies of Islam. Probably with British persuasion, ulema in Mecca and North India concluded that India was still a land of Islam, despite being ruled by Christians. This and Aziz’s opposite ruling are only “opinions,” based on the authors’ readings of Islamic law and history. All of them should be read against the views of Muslim leaders noted elsewhere, such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan in this chapter and Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah in chapter 7. No one in this latter group, however, was regarded as one of the ulema.
SIR WILLIAM WILSON HUNTER: DECISIONS OF ULEMA IN MECCA, LUCKNOW, AND RAMPUR
Sir William Wilson Hunter (1840–1900) was a British civil servant, historian, statistician, and compiler, who from 1862 to 1887 oversaw a number of important publications, including works on the local traditions and records of Bengal, Orissa, and Assam, and a comprehensive statistical survey and imperial gazette of British India, the first edition of which was released in 1881 and which greatly facilitated the carrying out of the 1882 census. He also presided over the Commission on Indian Education, and in 1886 was elected vice-chancellor of Calcutta University. In his influential book interpreting the Rebellion of 1857, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen?, Hunter insisted that North India was covered by treasonable networks of mosques and schools, where men of “keen intelligence and ample fortune” have embarked on plots to overthrow the British. “While the more fanatical of the Musalmans have thus engaged in overt sedition, the whole Muhammadan community has been deliberating on their obligation to rebel.”5 The appendixes to his own book, in which he quotes ulema approving of British rule, apparently did not quell his fear of the dangers from seditious Muslims, and his reading of the political situation was accepted not only by many of the British, but also, perhaps more importantly, by many Hindus, becoming a factor in the anti-Muslim sentiment of Hindu nationalism.
Appendix I: Decision of the Mecca Law Doctors (The Heads of the three Great Musalman Sects)
QUESTION.
“What is your opinion (may your greatness continue for ever) on this question: Whether the country of Hindustan, the Rulers of which are Christians, and who do not interfere with all the injunctions of Islam, such as the ordinary daily Prayers, the Prayers of the two Iʾds, etc., but do authorize departure from a few of the injunctions of Islam, such as the permission to inherit the property of his Muhammadan ancestor to one who changes his religion (being that of his ancestors), and becomes a Christian, is Dar-ul-Islam or not? Answer the above, for which God will reward you.”
ANSWER NO. I.
“All praises are due to the Almighty, who is the Lord of all the Creation!
O Almighty, increase my knowledge!
As long as even some of the peculiar observances of Islam prevail in it, it is Dar-ul-Islam.
The Almighty is Omniscient, Pure, and High!
This is the Order passed by one who hopes for the secret favour of the Almighty, who praises God, and prays for blessings and peace on his Prophet.
(Signed) Jamal Ibn-i-Abdullah Shaikh Umar-ul-Hanafi, the present Mufti of Mecca (the Honoured). May God favour him and his father.”
ANSWER NO. II.
“All praises are due to God, who is One; and may the blessings of God be showered upon our Chief, Muhammad, and upon his descendants and companions, and upon the followers of his Faith!
O God! I require guidance from Thee in righteousness.
Yes! As long as even some of the peculiar observances of Islam prevail in it, it is Dar-ul-Islam.
The Almighty is Omniscient, Pure, and High!
This is written by one who hopes for salvation from the God of mercy. May God forgive him, and his parents and preceptors, and brothers and friends, and all Muhammadans.
(Signed) Ahmad Bin Zaini Dahlan, Mufti of the ShafiSect of Mecca (the Protected).”
ANSWER NO. III.
“All praises are due to God, who is One! O! Almighty! increase my knowledge!
It is written in the Commentary of Dasoki that a Country of Islam does not become Dar-ul-Harb as soon as it passes into the hands of the Infidels, but only when all or most of the injunctions of Islam disappear therefrom.
God is Omniscient! May the blessings of God be showered upon our Chief, Muhammad, and on his descendants and companions.
(Signed) Written by Husain Bin Ibrahim, Mufti of the Maliki Sect of Mecca (the Illustrious).”
Appendix II: The Decision of the Law Doctors of Northern India. Translation of the Istifta or Question, Put by Sayyid Amir Husain, Personal Assistant to the Commissioner of Bhagalpur.
What is your Decision, O men of learning and expounders of the law of Islam, in the following?—
Whether a Jihad is lawful in India, a country formerly held by a Muhammadan ruler, and now held under the sway of a Christian Government, where the said Christian Ruler does in no way interfere with his Muhammadan subjects in the Rites prescribed by their Religion, such as Praying, Fasting, Pilgrimage, Zakat, Friday Prayer, and Jamaʾat, and gives them fullest protection and liberty in the above respects in the same way as a Muhammadan Ruler would do, and where the Muhammadan subjects have no strength and means to fight with their rulers; on the contrary, there is every chance of the war, if waged, ending with a defeat, and thereby causing an indignity to Islam.
Please answer, quoting your authority.
Fatwah dated the 17th Rabeeoossanee, 1287 H., corresponding with the 17th July 1870.
The Musalmans here are protected by Christians, and there is no Jihad in a country where protection is afforded, as the absence of protection and liberty between Musalmans and Infidels is essential in a religious war, and that condition does not exist here. Besides, it is necessary that there should be a probability of victory to Musalmans and glory to Islam. If there be no such probability, the Jihad is unlawful.
Here the Maulavis quote Arabic passages from Manhajul Ghaffar and the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, supporting the above Decision.
Seals of     Moulavi Ali Muhammad, of Lucknow;
Maulavi Abdul Hai, of Lucknow;
Maulavi Fazlullah, of Lucknow;
Muhammad Naim, of Lucknow;
Moulavi Rahmatullah, of Lucknow;
Moulavi Kutab-ud-din, of Dehli [sic];
Maulavi and Mufti Sadullah, of Lucknow;
Maulavi Lutfullah, of Rampur;
Maulavi Alumali, of Rampur.
[Appendixes from William W. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (London: Trubner, 1871), 213–215.]