An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  THE BRITISH PUNDITOCRACY

  In the late eighteenth century, when the East India Company was establishing its stranglehold on India and its senior officials included some with a genuine interest in understanding the country, the British began to study the shastras, so they could develop a set of legal principles to help them adjudicate disputes in Indian civil society. Governor General Warren Hastings hired eleven pandits to create what became known as the Code of Gentoo Laws or the Ordinations of the Pandits. As the British could not read or interpret the ancient Sanskrit texts, they asked their Brahmin advisers to create the code based on religious Indian texts and their knowledge of Indian customs. The resulting output was an ‘Anglo-Brahminical’ text that arguably violated in both letter and spirit the actual practice: in letter, because it was imprecise in regard to the originals, and in spirit, because the pandits proceeded to take advantage of the assignment to favour their own caste, by interpreting and even creating sacrosanct ‘customs’ that in fact had no shastric authority. This served to magnify the problem of caste hierarchy in the country.

  Prior to this, scholars argue, disputes in Indian civil society were settled by jati or biradri, i.e. a person’s fate was decided within a community or clan by his own peers in accordance with their local traditions and values and without needing approval from any higher caste authority. The pandits, instead of reflecting this widespread practice, cited doctrinal justifications from long-neglected texts to enshrine their status as the only authority figures, and most of the British took them at their word. (Some had their doubts. The most learned of British Orientalists, William Jones, who in 1797 founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and served in the Supreme Court of Judicature, remarked, ‘I can no longer bear to be at the Mercy of our pandits who deal out Hindu Law as they please, and make it at reasonable rates, when they cannot find it ready made’. But Jones died tragically young and his wisdom was not replicated in his successors.)

  It was evident from a cursory look at Indian society that actual social practices did not necessarily follow the official or ‘shastric’ code, but the ancient texts were now cited, and given an inflexibility they did not in fact possess, essentially to restrict the autonomy of society and so control it more easily in the name of religious authority. This served the interests of British policy, which explicitly sought to ‘enumerate, categorize and assess their [colonial] populations and resources’ for administrative purposes. Ethnic, social, caste and racial classifications were conducted as part of an imperial strategy more effectively to impose and maintain British control over the colonized Indian population. The process also reaffirmed their initial conviction that the Brahmins, with their knowledge of the Vedas, were the most qualified and best suited as their intermediaries to rule India. The Brahmins enjoyed British patronage over other groups and began considering themselves above all other castes, whom the British, internalizing Brahmin prejudice, thought of as lower castes.

  The result was a remarkable preponderance of Brahmins in positions of importance in the British Raj. Brahmins, who were no more than a tenth of the population, occupied over 90 per cent of the positions available to Indians in government service, except the most menial ones; they dominated the professions open to Indians, especially lawyering and medicine; and they entered journalism and academia, so it was their voices that were heard loudest as the voices of Indian opinion. India had arguably been a far more meritocratic society before the British Raj settled down to enshrine the Brahmins in such a position of dominance.

  Nineteenth-century ideas of race also got into the mix. The American scholar Thomas Metcalfe has shown how race ideology in that era defined European civilization as being at the peak of human attainment, while the darker-skinned races were portrayed as being primitive, weak and dependent on European tutelage in order to develop. Indians internalized many of these prejudices, instilled in them by two centuries of the white man’s dominance and the drumming into them of the cult of British superiority. I recall reading, as a child, the account of an early Indian visitor to England, astonished that even the shoeshine boys there were British, so completely had the mystique of English lordliness been internalized in India. The young prince, and later cricket star, Ranji, arriving in England as a student, was taken aback by ‘the sight of Britishers engaging in low-caste work’ (he was assured the stevedores were ‘only Irishmen’).

  HOW THE CENSUS UNDERMINED CONSENSUS

  British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.

  The census joined the map and the museum as tools of British imperial dominance in the nineteenth century. The British fondness for taxonomy and social classification continued to be in evidence throughout their rule, and was formalized by means of the census they undertook first in 1872 and then every ten years from 1881, converting it into an ‘ethnographic census’ in 1901.

  The census reconfirmed the process of defining castes, allocating them certain attributes and inventing extraordinary labels for entire communities, such as ‘martial races’ and ‘criminal tribes’. Just as ‘Brahmin’ became a sought-after designation enshrining social standing, the census definition of an individual’s caste tended to seal the fate of any ‘Shudra’, by fixing his identity across the entire country. Whereas prior to British rule the Shudra had only to leave his village and try his fortunes in a different princely state in India where his caste would not have followed him, colonialism made him a Shudra for life, wherever he was. The British belief in the fighting qualities of the ‘martial races’ also restricted the career possibilities of those not so classified, since British army recruitment policies were usually based on caste classifications. In the old days, any individual with the height and musculature required could make a livelihood as a warrior, whatever his caste background. In British India, this was far more difficult, if not impossible, since entire regiments were constructed on the basis of caste identities.

  Census-taking in British India differed significantly from the conduct of the census in Britain, since unlike in the home country, the census in India was led by British anthropologists seeking to anatomize Indian society, the better to control and govern it. As I have mentioned earlier, Indians in precolonial times lived in imprecisely-defined ‘fuzzy’ communities with overlapping cultural practices, minimal self-awareness and non-existent consciousness of the details of their differences from other communities, except in the most general terms. This is underscored by the scholar Sudipta Kaviraj, who observes that precolonial communities had imprecise (‘fuzzy’) boundaries because some collective identities are not territorially based, and because ‘part of this fuzziness of social mapping would arise because traditional communities, unlike modern ones, are not enumerated’.

  The census, of course, changed that, as did the more stable territorial lines drawn by the colonists on their new, and very precise, maps. In the precolonial era, community boundaries were far more blurred, and as a result these communities were not self-conscious in the way they became under colonial rule. In the absence of the ‘focused and intense allegiances’ of the modern era, precolonial groups were less likely to be antagonistic to each other over perceived community or communal differences. They have become so only as a consequence of their ‘definition’ by the British in mutually exclusive terms.

  The British could find no one to tell them authoritatively where or in what number any particular community was; the census commissioners discovered that boundary lines among Hindus, Sikhs and Jains barely existed, and that several Hindu and Muslim groups in different parts of the country shared similar social and cultural practices with regard to marriage, festivals, food, and worship. This went against the colonial assumption that communities mu
st be mutually exclusive and that a person had to belong to one community or another. The British then simply superimposed their assumptions on the Indian reality, classifying people by religion, caste or tribe on the basis of imprecise answers to the census commissioners’ questions.

  The British approach inevitably suffered from the prejudices and limitations of the age: thus, the ICS’s Herbert Risley, census commissioner for the 1901 census and author of the compendious The People of India, took an anthropological and eugenicist approach, making physical measurements of Indian skulls and noses on the then-fashionable assumption that such physical qualities reflected racial stereotypes. (It was he who announced that 1901’s would be an ethnographic census, and led it personally.) Backed up by extensive photographs of facial features and social practices, Risley’s work helped the British use such classification both to affirm their own convictions about European biological superiority over Indians, and to construct racial, social and ‘tribal’ differences between different segments of India’s people which served to reshape and substantiate ‘the dominant paradigms of social knowledge’.

  Indians questioned by Risley’s team predictably asserted both their caste identities and their entitlement to special privileges over other castes, accentuating the very differences the British wanted to see and had brought to the fore. By so doing they sought benefits for their group—admission to certain military regiments, for instance, or scholarships to some educational institutions—at the expense of, or equal to, others. Such caste competition had been largely unknown in pre-British days; caste consciousness had never been made so explicit as in the late nineteenth century.

  All these classifications in turn served the interests of the colonizers by providing them with a tool to create perceptions of difference between groups to prevent unity amongst them, and justifying British overlordship—which alone could be seen as transcending these differences and guiding the Indians to a higher, more civilized, plane of being, under the benign tutelage of the well-meaning Empire. The British made these divisions such an article of faith that even a writer seen as broadly sympathetic to Indians, E. M. Forster, has his Indian protagonist, Aziz, say in A Passage to India, ‘Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing’.

  This colonial process of identity-creation in British India occurred even in the formation of linguistic identities. Both David Washbrook and David Lelyveld believe that territorially-defined linguistic populations came into being out of the British colonial project to categorize, count and classify—in order to control—Indian society. The very notion of linguistic identities, they suggest, emerged from the nineteenth-century belief in language as the cementing bond of social relations, and the implicit conviction that ‘races’ or ‘nations’ spoke a common language and lived within defined territorial locations. Incidentally, in their zeal for classification, the British even subsumed ancient, and not dishonourable, professions like devadasis (temple dancers) or baijis (court musicians), who in some respects served functions akin to the geishas of Japan, into a rough-and-ready category of ‘prostitutes’, thus casting them out for the first time from respectable society.

  A troubling side effect of this changed pattern of social dominance was political: ideas of democracy were not extended to all strata of Indian society under British rule. An instructive indication of this has lain in the rise of the more numerous ‘backward classes’ to positions of political prominence in independent India, which only became possible as democracy permitted free Indians to undo some of the more pernicious rigidities of the British-buttressed Indian social order.

  The result of these British policies, whether by accident or design, or both, was a process of social separation that soon manifested itself as psychological separation and conscious of difference, leading in turn, where possible, to physical separation and—when demands for self-governance arose in time—political fragmentation, as each community was encouraged to fear that its self-interest could be jeopardized by the success of others.

  THE HINDU–MUSLIM DIVIDE

  The most important of these identity differences was the religious cleavage, real or imagined, but immediately focused upon, between Hindus and Muslims.

  Religion became a useful means of divide and rule: the Hindu–Muslim divide was, as the American scholar of religion Peter Gottschalk documents, defined, highlighted and fomented by the British as a deliberate strategy. Three arguments, as Romila Thapar has explained, were foundational to the colonial interpretation of Indian history. The first was the British division of Indian history into ‘periods’ labelled in accordance with the religion of the rulers: thus the ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘British’ periods formulated by James Mill in The History of British India (published between 1817 and 1826). Implicit in such periodization was the assumption that India was always composed of monolithic and mutually hostile religious communities, primarily Hindu and Muslim. Another foundational argument was that India’s precolonial political economy was a form of ‘Oriental Despotism’, which essentially held that Indian society was a static society ruled by ‘despotic and oppressive rulers’ who impoverished the people. This is a notion I touch upon and have dismissed earlier in this book. The third foundational argument—that Hindu society had always been divided into four main castes or varnas—is addressed separately in this chapter.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, the trio of Mill, Macaulay and [Friedrich Max] Müeller, the German Indologist working in Britain, had effectively established a colonial construction of the Indian past which even Indians were taught to internalize. In their reading, Indian civilization was seen as essentially Hindu, as defined by the upper castes, and descended from the Aryan race, which it was claimed invaded around 1500 bce from the Central Asian steppes in the north, displaced and merged with indigenous populations, evolved a settled agrarian civilization, spoke Sanskrit and composed the Vedas. The Muslims came as a first wave of invaders and conquerors, in turn supplanted by the British. This history in turn became the received wisdom for late-nineteenth century Indian nationalists, Hindu and Muslim revivalists, and even cosmopolitan movements rooted in ancient Indian spiritualism like the Theosophical Society, whose co-founder, Colonel H. S. Olcott, became a major propagator of the ‘Aryan origins’ theory in the nineteenth century. Olcott was the first, though, to argue that the Aryans were indigenous to India and took civilization from India to the West, an idea that is today promoted by Hindutva ideologues.

  By excluding Muslims from the essential national narrative, the nineteenth-century colonial interpretation of Indian history helped give birth in the twentieth to the two-nation theory that eventually divided the country. It also legitimized, with a veneer of scholarship, the British strategic policy of ‘divide and rule’ in which every effort was made by the imperialists to highlight differences between Hindus and Muslims to persuade the latter that their interests were incompatible with the advancement of the former.

  Once again, as with caste and linguistic differences, this had no basis in precolonial history. The scholar Gyanendra Pandey suggests that religious communalism was in large part a colonial construction. His work demonstrates how the colonialists’ efforts to catalogue, classify and categorize the Indians they ruled directly led to a heightened ‘horizontal caste consciousness’, and also contributed to the consciousness of religious difference between Hindus and Muslims The colonial authorities often asked representatives of the two communities to self-consciously construct an ‘established’ custom, such as by asking them what the prevailing beliefs and practices were around cow-slaughter, which prompted both groups to give an exaggeratedly rigid version of what they believed the beliefs and practices should be! Though Pandey confirms that such identities existed in the precolonial period, he believes colonial policies led to the hardening of these communal identities.

  This is entirely plausible. Stories abound of the two communities habitually working together in precolonial times on issues that benefited principally
one: for instance, Hindus helping Muslims to rebuild a shrine, or Muslims doing the same when a Hindu temple had to be reconstructed. Devout Hindus were sometimes given Muslim names and were often fluent scholars in Persian; Muslims served in the army of the Maratha (Hindu) warrior king Shivaji, as did Hindu Rajputs in the forces of the fiercely Islamist Aurangzeb. The Vijayanagara army included Muslim horseback contingents. At the village level, many historians argue that Hindus and Muslims shared a wide spectrum of customs and beliefs, at times even jointly worshipping the same saint or holy spot. In Kerala’s famous pilgrimage site of Sabarimala, after an arduous climb to the hilltop shrine of Lord Ayyappa, the devotee first encounters a shrine to his Muslim disciple, Vavar Swami. In keeping with Muslim practice, there is no idol therein, merely a symbolic stone slab, a sword (Vavar was a warrior) and a green cloth, the colour of Islam. Muslim divines manage the shrine. (In another astonishing example, astonishing since it is both anachronistic and syncretistic, a temple in South Arcot, Tamil Nadu, hosts a deity of Muttaal Raavuttan, a Muslim chieftain—complete with beard, kumkum and toddy pot—who protects Draupadi in the Mahabharata. Note, of course, that Islam did not exist when the Mahabharata was composed, but in post-Islamic retellings, a Muslim chieftain has entered the plot!)