Inglorious Empire

by Shashi Tharoor

  The East India Company’s interest in Indian education began after the publication of a report by the company evangelist, Charles Grant, in 1792, which ‘believed that the introduction of Western education and Christianity would transform a morally decadent society’. After the setting up of missionary schools was legitimized in the revised Charter Act of 1813, the Company’s Court of Directors, in a dispatch to the Bengal government offering guidance on the implementation of the act, also noted that English would ‘improve the communication between Europeans and natives’ and ‘produce those reciprocal feelings of regard and respect which are essential to the permanent interests of the British empire in India’. In other words, this was not only about Christian missionary zeal; it was also to be seen from the point of view of the Company’s interests. The preferences of the natives were to be taken into account only ‘whenever it can be done with safety to our dominions’.

  While the evangelicals saw English education as a means of supplanting the pernicious influences of both ‘Hindoo and Mohemedan learning’, the philosopher James Mill and his followers urged the promotion of Western science and learning in India from a utilitarian point of view. However, Mill was not of the opinion that English was the language to do it in; rather, he preferred that texts be translated to the vernacular. In this he could also find support in the Charter of 1813, which also provided for the ‘revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India’.

  These seemingly contradictory objectives could not be reconciled, however, and it was rapidly apparent to those entrusted with Indian affairs that it had to be one or the other. A debate ensued between the two schools of thought, but there seemed to be little doubt where the Company’s bias lay. Teaching Sanskrit or Arabic to Indians was not going to be of much practical use to the business of the Company, but Indians who could read and write English, however badly they spoke it, could indeed be of value to the British.

  In this debate between ‘Orientalists’ and ‘Anglicists’, the Anglicists prevailed—thanks, it is commonly believed, to the championing of their cause by Lord Macaulay, who had been appointed chair of the Committee on Public Instruction. Some argue that Macaulay’s contribution to the system of education in India is overstated, and that the forces he represented would probably have been successful anyway. Governor-General William Bentinck was an open supporter of the Anglicist cause and had begun to implement a policy of English education through Company-ruled India, and Macaulay’s task, they suggest, was merely to justify the prevalent policy rather than concoct a new one. But there is no doubt that his articulation of the Anglicist cause remains the clearest and most far-reaching statement of colonial purpose in the field of education, the most notorious in India for its flagrantly contemptuous dismissal of Oriental learning, and the most liable to quotation and misquotation by critics of the entire enterprise. (To this day English-speaking Indians are denounced as ‘Macaulayputras’, or ‘sons of Macaulay’, by their non-Anglophile critics—usually, of course, in English.)

  In his Minute on Education12 Macaulay took an uncompromisingly, and many would say arrogantly, ethnocentric stand on the issue. His view, which prevailed with the reformist governor-general, was that ‘the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them’. He did not allow his ignorance of the East to undermine his self-confidence. ‘A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, he notoriously declared, while admitting he had not read a single work from the literatures he was dismissing. ‘We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government…of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects… What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India… The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar…’

  [12 Dubbed by an Indian wag, with a penchant for alliteration, as ‘Macaulay’s Moronic Minute’.]

  What about the practical legal aspects of governing a foreign population, many following their own customs and laws?

  ‘The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly from Sanscrit books, and the Mahometan law from Arabic books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear at all on the question. We are commanded by Parliament to ascertain and digest the laws of India. The assistance of a Law Commission has been given to us for that purpose. As soon as the [new, British-drafted legal] Code is promulgated, the Shasters and the Hedaya will be useless to a moonsiff or a Sudder Ameen. I hope and trust that, before the boys who are now entering at the Mudrassa and the Sanscrit College have completed their studies, this great work will be finished. It would be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things which we mean to alter before they reach manhood.’

  (There is irony in this justification of the dismantling of traditional education: the penal code Macaulay drafted in the 1830s would only be enacted by the British a generation later, in 1861.)

  To their credit, the Anglicists did not altogether dismiss the vernacular languages. They sought that European scientific and literary knowledge should percolate down to the masses through an intermediary élite class of English-speaking Indians. Macaulay had pointed out that ‘it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people’. To this élite, interpretative class, therefore, ‘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.’ Another Anglicist ‘most fully admitted that the great body of the people must be enlightened through the medium of their own languages, and that to enrich and improve these, so as to render them the efficient depositories of all thoughts and knowledge, is an object of the first importance’. Mass English education was never British policy, therefore, nor was it necessary to dispense ‘European’ scientific knowledge to Indians; the educated Indians would do so in their own languages.

  This did happen, to some extent. The Delhi College was founded in 1825 partly with such an object in view: a Vernacular Translation Society was formed there in the 1840s, which attempted to translate English textbooks on history, law, science and medicine into Urdu, with the help of Western-educated Indians and other college officials. These were some of the earliest textbooks on ‘modern’ subjects that were written to propagate an updated Western curriculum, and served as vernacular education textbooks in the northwestern provinces and Punjab in the 1840s and 1850s. It is difficult to argue, however, that such education acquired as much reach or influence as English education in India, which to this day is considered the passport to success and influence in Indian society. Most Indians educated in English used that language for their own career self-advancement, not to serve as academic translators or instructors for the masses; and vernacular teaching remained an orphaned profession, reserved for those unfortunates whose own English was not good enough for professions that required the language of the colonials. The Anglicists’ purpose was not served, but one wonders whether, in these circumstances, it ever could have been.

  Under the British, the universities remained largely examination-conducting bodies, while actual higher education was carried out in affiliated colleges, which offered a two-year BA course (following a year of intermediate studies after high school). The colleges, like the British
schools in India, heavily emphasized rote learning, the regurgitation of which was what the examinations tested. Failing the exams was so common that many Indians proudly sported ‘BA (F)’ after the names as a credential, to indicate that they had got that far (the ‘F’ stood for ‘failed’). Dropout rates were always very high, and successfully completing a bachelor’s degree was widely hailed as a rare and considerable achievement.

  Still, the British higher education system did little to promote analytic capacity or creative thinking and certainly no independence of mind. It produced a group of graduates with a better-than-basic knowledge of English, inadequate in ninety per cent of the cases to hold one’s own with an Englishman, but adequate to get a clerical position in the lower rungs of government service or a teaching position in a government school. (The other ten per cent shone despite the limitations of the system and either excelled in various private capacities or went abroad to England for higher education.) Worse, though, it left the individual graduate—every one of them—Westernized enough to be alienated from his own Indian cultural roots. Indians educated under this system, observed a senior civil servant in 1913, ‘become a sort of hybrid. This is due to their English masters, who are obsessed with the idea that the only way to “educate” anyone is to turn him into a plaster Englishman.’

  The problem persisted throughout British rule. An Indian nationalist group declared, in a book published in London in 1915:

  All Indian aspirations and development of strong character have been suppressed. The Indian mind has been made barren of any originality, and deliberately kept in ignorance… The people are kept under an illusion in order to make them more amenable to British control. The people’s character is deliberately debased, their mind is denationalized and perpetually kept in ignorance and fed with stories of England’s greatness and ‘mission’ in the world…

  As Pankaj Mishra has observed:

  European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which left its victims resentful but also envious of their conquerors and, ultimately, eager to be initiated into the mysteries of their seemingly near-magical power.

  An intriguing example of the successful colonization of the Indian mind is that of the notorious Anglophile Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British Empire in India:

  To the memory of the British Empire in India,

  Which conferred subjecthood on us,

  but withheld citizenship.

  To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:

  ‘Civis Britannicus sum’

  Because all that was good and living within us

  was made, shaped and quickened

  by the same British rule.

  This unedifying spectacle of a brown man with his nose up the colonial fundament made Chaudhuri a poster child for scholarly studies of how Empire creates ‘native informants’, alienated from and even abhorring their own cultures and societies. Chaudhuri’s admiration for the British empire extended to his appreciation of it for restraining Indians from defecating in public—an activity which assuredly the British did not, in fact, succeed in controlling, let alone stopping, except in the public areas of major towns. This suggests a curious correlation between dislike for one’s own body and a yearning for foreign rule: ‘these two processes of self-othering’, the scholar Ian Almond observes, ‘work in tandem to replicate a crucial distance between colonized and colonizer, Babu and native, mind and body’. One of the consequences of a colonial education was Chaudhuri’s xenolatry, rooted in the conviction that he was ‘a displaced European/Aryan suffering the present-day and (millennia-old) consequences of an ancestor’s unwise decision to wander in the wrong direction and settle in an unsuitable climate’. Chaudhuri, at the age of seventy-three, upped sticks and moved to Oxford, there to live out his centenarian life. In his mind, of course, he had always lived there.

  Chaudhuri wore his erudition anything but lightly, quoting Greek and Latin and dropping classical allusions in a style that went out with the sola topi. (No doubt woggishness loses something in translation.) It was typical that his take-no-prisoners assault on all the citadels of Indian culture and civilization was titled The Continent of Circe: he had to turn to Western mythology even for his principal metaphor. Though Chaudhuri dismissed most British histories of India as little more than ‘imperialistic bragging’, he remained seduced by the Raj, seeing even in Clive’s rapacity and theft the ‘counterbalancing grandeur’ of the grand imperialist project. The scholar David Lelyveld wrote in an indulgent review that ‘Nirad Chaudhuri is a fiction created by the Indian writer of the same name—a bizarre, outrageous and magical transformation of that stock character of imperialist literature, the Bengali babu’. But while the British in India laughed at the typical babu for his half-successful attempts to emulate his colonial masters, Nirad babu sought to demonstrate to post-imperial Britain that he was impossible to laugh at. That there might be something faintly comical about the sight of this wizened figure, in his immaculate Bengali dhoti, strutting about Oxford lamenting the decline of British civilization, does not appear to have occurred to him.

  But there was still one fatal fly in the Anglophile’s ointment. Even Nirad Chaudhuri had to admit that British racism, snobbery and exclusiveness (‘all the squalid history of Indo-British personal relations’) had a great deal to do with the downfall of the Empire. He wrote bitterly of ‘intolerable humiliation’ and ‘national and personal degradation’ from British behaviour towards Indians. In repeated personal instances of racism, Ian Almond points out, ‘the comprador intellectual discovers the precise limits of his contract’—the supposed benevolence of the Empire which he celebrates in his writings encountering the more prosaic reality of the British baton and the white man’s sneer.

  Textual Harassment

  In 1859–60, education in Bengal received 1,032,021 rupees from the British government, which was about the same amount spent on rebuilding army barracks that year. The funding of education continued to be a low priority for the British throughout their rule. Durant noted in 1930 that the British government in India preferred to devote the limited resources it allocated to education to ‘universities where the language used was English, the history, literature, customs and morals taught were English, and young [Indians]… found that they had merely let themselves in for a ruthless process that aimed to de-nationalize and de-Indianize them, and turn them into imitative Englishmen’. This was done with minimal resources: Durant observed that the total expenditure for education in India (in 1930) was less than half that in New York state alone. Between 1882 and 1897, a fifteen-year period marked by a significant expansion of public education worldwide, the appropriation for the army in India increased by twenty-one-and-a-half times the increase for education. ‘The responsibility of the British for India’s illiteracy,’ Durant concluded, ‘seems to be beyond question.’

  Still, there was one unintended benefit of the British approach to Indian education. Since educating Indians was not a major British priority, it did not attract eminent Britons, and from early in the twentieth century, academia became the one available avenue for Indian advancement. With very few exceptions, the vice-chancellors of the main public universities after the 1890s were Indians, though inevitably most were staunch defenders of British imperial rule.

  While English instruction acquired a position of dominance in British India, albeit for a small if well-placed elite, a British perspective also infused the study of other subjects taught to Indians through English—notably history. The British saw precolonial Mughal history as consisting of a linear narration of events devoid of context or analysis; as for pre-Mughal texts, John Stuart Mill dismissed them as ‘mythological
histories…where fable stands in the face of facts’. To replace these versions, the British reconstructed ‘factual’ accounts of Indian historiography, adding more contextual analysis in a structured ‘European’ style—but with the teleological purpose of serving to legitimize British rule in India. As we have seen, English histories and theoretical constructs of India not only promoted divide et impera by inventing the religious ‘periodization’ of the Indian past, but portrayed a nation waiting for the civilizing advent of British rule. By arguing that history texts should ‘rely upon facts and serve a secular curriculum’, they also moved away from the teaching of religious and mythological texts, including India’s timeless epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which at the very least could have occupied the place in Indian schoolrooms that the Iliad and Odyssey did in British ones. Independent India carried on this tradition of secular neglect of the classics, for which it is now reproached by a new, Hindu-chauvinist government that accuses the British and their Indian Macaulayputras of promoting the intellectual and cultural deracination of Indian children.

  If the teaching of history served an evident purpose, literature served the same ends in a more tangential way. Professor Gauri Vishwanathan has done pioneering work on the role of the study of English literature in colonial India as a means of socializing and co-opting Indian elites during the early nineteenth century. Indeed, she argues that the very idea of English literature as a subject of study was first devised by the British in India to advance their colonial interests. It was not only that the English felt their literature would be a way of striking awe and respect for British civilization into the minds and hearts of the colonized Indians; it was also that the British colonists considered many of the great works of Indian literature to be ‘marked with the greatest immorality and impurity’—and that included Kalidas’s Shakuntala, described by Horace Wilson, the major nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholar, as the jewel of Indian literature, but disapproved of as a suitable text for study in Indian schools and colleges in British India.