Metcalf -- New Cambridge History of India Flashcards
Introduction: Britain and India in the Eighteenth Century – Oriental Despotism
-British initially understood India through framework of “Oriental Despotism”, undetstanding of which traced back to Aristotle… paradigmatic example was Greek view of Persia
-“Despotism” became a descriptor for how “Oriental” states were organized.
-Alexander Dow in his History of Hindostan (1770) referred to India as “the seat of the greatest empires”, and “the nurse of the most abject slaves”… British justified their rule as bringing order to a people who were accustomed to despotism, the absence of law
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Introduction: Britain and India in the Eighteenth Century
-Origin of British self-conception as an imperial people originated in discoveries and conquests of the Tudor state in 16C. As Ireland was subdued, they had to develop explanations that justified those expeditions… the English as “new Romans”
-17C scientific study of comparative religion dissolved cosmological significance of the “East” for Europeans, described instead through the taxonomic structure of 18C natural science… taxonomies of natural history, by cosntructing secualirzed notions of the ‘modern’, and the ‘civilized’ inevitable emphasized at once the difference, and the inferiority, of non-european societies
-Alterity (e.g., civilized v. uncivilized, enlightened v. unenlightned), what one might call the creation of doubleness, was an integral part of the Enlightenment project. As the British dendeavoured to define themselves as British, and htus not Indian, they had to make of the Indian whatever they chose not to make of themselves .
Introduction: Britain and India in the Eighteenth Century - Hastings
-Contra Alexander Dow, Hastings asserted that the Hindus did in fact have an ancient law, and that effectively ruling India required an understanding of those laws
-Scholarship of the Hastings era was informed by assumptions whose consequences were to shape all subsequent British understanding of India. The first was the belief that there was something which could be identified as as a separate religion called “Hinduism” (10)
-Europeans were from the beginning determined to make of Indian devotional practice a coherent religious system possessing such established markers as sacred texts and priests… this model can be seen in Holwell’s Religious Tenets of the Gentoos (1767) and by Jones’s and Colebrooke’s detailed descriptions of Indian belieff in volumes of Asiatick Researches
Introduction: Britain and India in the Eighteenth Century - Construction of “HInduism”
The coherence of Hindu religion, acc. to Orientalists, was to be found in its sacred texts… ancient Sanskrit texts would reveal the doctrinal core of the Hindu faith. They turned to advice in the interpretation of these texts to Brahmin priests,,, the first products of this encounter can be seen as early as 1776, when Halhed published “A Code of Gentoo Laws”, a collaboration between Haled in eleven “professors” of Sanskrit
-Purpose of the text was to precisely describe the custom and manners of the people, to create a legal accomplishment of a new system of government in Bengal
-The view of Indian society derived from the study of texts and cooperation with pandits inevitably encouraged the British to view Brahmins as the predominant group in Indian society
-Parallels between “Hinduism and Christianity”, Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, mytholigical comparison, sought to make India legible in European terms for a European audience
-In the last decades of the eighteenth century, fundamental framework of British understanding of India had been established
Introduction: Britain and India in the Eighteenth Century - Burke
Clive’s conquests, beginning with Plassey in 1757 undertaken on behalf of the EIC, forced Britain to face the question of whether the mercantile body should play a role in India apart from mkaing money
-1784 Pitt’s India Act, EIC became a governing body with trading privileges. Many atempts were made to subject India to direct crown rule (Fox’s 1783 INdia Bill), but were unscuccessful, in teh settlement of 1784, EIC directors retained control of patronage and day to day adminsitration, but Board of COntrol subordinate to parliament was created in London. The Board supervised all activities of the Company and had to approve ina dvance all dispatches sent to INdia. India governor general was appointed by EIC but subject to recall by the Crown => double government
Burke => debates on Fox’s India Bill, argued that English were worse than Mughals, wanted to impeach Hastings, accused EIC of exercising arbitrary power. Burke’s critique revealed underlying anxiety that misdeeds in India would reverbrate in England
-1793 Settlement reflected whig understanding of history and politics… Cornwallis thought he was ushering in an agrarian evolution in Bengal, but instead he entrenched the zamindars– their taxes fixed in perpetuity– who had no incentive to understake productive investment. They were a rentier class who took advantage of their new legal position by extracting ever greater rents from the tenantry left bereft of the protection of custom.
Introduction: Britain and India in the Eighteenth Century - Liberalism
Industrial revolution + Britain’s predominance following Napoleonic wars, inspired by Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, liberalism was a strategy for remaking Britain => Reform Bill of 1832, New Poor Law, repeal of Corn Laws and creation of the administrative state
-hard to define but shared assumptions that set them off from Burke’s oligarchic Whigs or, subsequently, Dsiraeli’s Tory conservatives => liberals conceived that human nature was intrinsically the same everywhere and could be transformed by workings of law, education, and free trade
-Liberals sought to free individuals frim age-old bondage of priests, despots, and feudal aristocrats so they could become autonomous, rational beings, leading a life of conscious deliberation and choice
- In Britain, liberals were tightly constrained by local bodies, India became a laboratory for the administrative state, conflicts within liberalism became muted.
-Liberalism at its heart waw sinformed by a radical universalism
Introduction: Britain and India in the Eighteenth Century - Liberalism
Although settlements of 1820s and 1830s in the upper Gangetic plain set aside the zamindars and collectors, in reality property relations in the north Indian countryside remained unchanged.
Anglo-Indian law, on the contrary, enshrined rights of family and community above the individual, and enforced values seen as embedded in religion from antiquity. This was a development from Jones’s formulation of Hindu and Muslim law.
The Creation of Difference
Henry Maine, who served seven years as a law member of the Viceroy’s Council, delivered lecture in 1875 at Cambridge, “THe Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought”: India shared with Europe a “whole world” of Aryan istitutions, customs, lawsa, nd beliefs, but they were “arrested in India at an early stage of development”
-India was “a barbarism” but remained one which “contains a great par tof our own civilisation, with its elements as yet inseperate and not yet unfolded.”
-“India was implicated with Britain, somewhat paradoxically, in a common origin, and yet was fundamentally different. In much the same way, the British were, in Maine’s view, at once agents of “progress”, charged with setting INdia on the road to mdoernity, at the same time custodians of an enduring India formed forever in antiquity (66)
-India’;s rulers had to keep their watches set simultaneously to two longitudes.
-For men like Maine, India was Europe’s past, or rather its various pasts.
-British histories of India were united by 19C historicism, together they shaped the way the British constructed the difference they ascribed to India. Above all, through a theory of “Decline” that complemented Britain’s own “progress”, the history of INdia was made to accomodate not just the existence of the Raj, but a course of historical development that made the imposition of British rule its necessary culmination (67)
The Creation of Difference
-Victorian Britain used history as a way to create a national identity , that brought the Irish, Scots and English together as a United Kingdom
THe varied British histories of India may have been inconsistent, but were tied together by a 19C “historicism”– together they shaped the way the British constructed the differnce ascribed to India
-Above all, through a theory of declien that complemented BRitain’s own “progress”, the hsitory of India was made to a ccomodate not just the existence of the Raj, but a course of historical development that made the imposition of British rule its necessary culmination (67)
The Creation of Difference
