Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Although better known for writings on European affairs, including the Crimean War, Jones had long taken an interest in Indian affairs, writing stinging polemics in the People’s Paper about the management of the East India Company in 1853, when its charter came up for renewal before parliament. In these, he had described a ‘mighty and magnificent country’ turned into ‘a nest for the most profligate nepotism’ by the greed of a ‘race of harpies’.93 Critical as those pieces are of British rule, there is little sense in them of the presence of colonial subjects – still less of any resistance on their part. Jones’s focus is squarely on misrule. News coming out of India in the late spring of 1857 initially appeared to interest him less for its implications for the subjects of East India Company rule than for what it meant in terms of securing British lives and commercial interests. As news of regimental mutinies started to pick up in frequency during late June 1857, the People’s Paper began by analysing them in generally familiar terms, as an all-too-understandable soldiers’ rebellion born of disaffection with poor working conditions which included reduced pay and pensions, onerous terms of enlistment, and lengthened marches. Given this situation as well as the sharpening of the lines separating the races, ‘is it unreasonable’, one excerpt from another newspaper asked, ‘that they should exhibit symptoms of discontent?’94 While speculating that slighted religious feelings and the racial divide between ruler and ruled might be at work, the paper’s initial reports did little more than note that the Indian populace was ‘held at bay only by the bayonet’s point’.95 Eventually, Jones wrote of the existence of wider discontent generated by the tax regime of the ‘Permanent Settlement’, noting accusingly that ‘the ryot was thrown into destitution – the universal confiscation of the soil was your great crime, and you are beginning to taste the fruit of retribution’.96 Though within weeks he would deem it a ‘patriotic assertion of a gallant people’s rights, against the vilest usurpation that polluted the black page of history’, Jones seemed initially unsure whether the Indian rebellion would indeed grow.97 He did, however, provide his readers with extended essays on the ‘vast land’, in which he delineated its many features, including a ‘mighty gathering of races’, diverse resources, and historical and artistic achievements; terra nullius, it was not.98

  When by August, however, it had become clear that what was unfolding in India was indeed a large-scale uprising, Jones’s tone would change quite dramatically, as he set himself the task of deciphering the text of the rebellion against the grain of the interpretation provided by The Times and other organs on the side of the East India Company. He found in the rebels’ actions not only vindication of his earlier critique of Company rule, but also evidence of a will to resist, an insurgent consciousness exhibiting an ‘internal drive’ to transform historical circumstances.99 This story had to be deployed against the emerging consensus: ‘The organs of the Government are trying to represent in their blackest colours the conduct of the Hindhus, Mahommedans, and Brahmins.’100 In ways that are reminiscent of Norton’s story of the sepoys who counter-accused those who charged them with treachery, Jones tells his readers that the actuality was the opposite: those who ‘now talk of loyalty and truth – of faithlessness and treason’ to describe rebel actions – were doing so ‘as though every hour of complicity in their ill-gotten sway, were not disloyalty and falsehood, treachery and guilt, against all that man holds holiest in his individual and aggregate capacity’.101 His position at this stage was that of a principled patriotic dissident: ‘When a war of extermination is being waged between two mighty nations, the one oppressed by the other – and when the vital interests of business-life/are [sic] at stake – those who aim at higher morals, those who desire the prosperity of their country on the basis of justice, those who profess the sacred principle of liberty and truth, should not be silent.’102 He had already cautioned against consuming the news coming in from India uncritically: ‘The reader must recollect he hears one side of the question only.’103

  More questionable perhaps is Jones’s casting of the ‘retributive agency’ of the rebels as a struggle for an independent nation by a ‘patriot army’ – though he was not alone in countering claims that this was merely a military mutiny by pointing to a wider project that might be understood in ‘national’ terms.104 As he read more deeply and extensively into the reports coming in, Jones advised his readership that, in the British press generally, they were only hearing one side. He went on openly to attack The Times – the ‘dishonest’ and ‘unprincipled’ ‘organ of the Leadenhall Moneymongers’ – for parroting the line that events in India constituted a military mutiny rather than a national insurrection.105 It was clear to him that the ‘independence’ of India had to be recognized, and rule by the ‘merchant-robbers of Leadenhall St’ ended, if things were not to get even bloodier.106 Was this a discursive annexation in its own right, then – India functioning as little more than an elaborate metaphor? For Pratt, Jones’s attitude to the uprising in India, even as it shifted, was relentlessly opportunistic, involving the manipulation of news and events to mould it in the image of the renewed Chartist movement he now hoped to revive and lead. This meant that he also ‘began to configure India and the rebellion in an increasingly European image … refracting the image of India and her people through the prism of English political culture to dissolve the boundaries of race and religion, asserting the justice of the rising’.107 Ultimately, it would seem, the 1857 uprising had been little more than an ‘effective motif’ through which ‘Jones could construct and manipulate bonds of identity between the reform movement and both sides in the conflict to suit his purposes’.108 Pratt’s argument here resonates with Guha’s own assessment of socialist readings of peasant rebellions as a species of ‘assimilative thinking’ which seeks to ‘arrange it along the alternative axis of a protracted campaign for freedom and socialism’.109 There is some truth to the argument that Jones, at least initially, registered and interpreted events taking place in India in ways that confirmed and validated his own vision for a renewed Chartist struggle. It is certainly possible to see in the blatant transformation of a poem written for the New World into an encomium to the ‘revolt of Hindostan’ evidence of the Chartist leader annexing 1857 to ‘a broader narrative of the coming of democracy across the world’.110 It is also fair to say that, in early articles on the insurgency, Jones’s invocation of the ‘jewel’ of Indian independence had something abstract about it: a will to bestow equality of aspiration upon these faraway denizens of a strange land, and command on their behalf the solidarity of English democrats and working-men as votaries of ‘liberty and truth’.111 Any hope of ‘securing’ the Indian empire, by no means assured, would necessitate a radical reform programme not entirely unlike what was being demanded at home – land given back, just laws, readjusted taxation, abolition of torture, respect for local laws and an improved judiciary. This was, of course, a familiar Chartist recipe.

  Once the full scale of the bloody uprising became clear, however, Jones would begin to read events more in terms of their own implications – clearly enthused, even surprised, by what seemed to be an even more powerful rebellion than he claimed to have anticipated. This made him far more cognizant of difficulty; reform now was too little, too late, since the claims of the insurgents themselves would have to be central: ‘It is all very well to talk now about remedying the state of things in India – about redressing grievances. The natives are not waiting for us to redress them – they are beginning to take the question of redress in their own hands.’112 This is the insight which militates against reducing the entirety of Jones’s engagement with India in 1857 to ‘self-interested political calculation’, a charge which obscures the fact that events served to shape his understanding of anticolonial resistance in more supple ways than is suggested by simple opportunism.113 It is true, of course, that Jones was positing, in Guha’s terms, ‘an ideal rather than the real historical personality of the insurgent’, as was true of most British attempts to
read the rebellion against the grain in the absence of direct contact with rebels; the insurgent’s consciousness was mediated by the dissident’s.114 When it comes to the past, as Guha also suggests, it is necessary ‘not to deny the political importance of such appropriation’.115 But Jones was also doing important work in relation to his present in actively rereading – and reframing – the information that came to him and the rest of Britain via the government and The Times, the main source of reportage about the uprising, rather than simply ‘min[ing] them for evidence’.116 Reprinting these sources in the paper, Jones constructed an archive of sorts, comprising, in addition to The Times (which he would attack directly in stinging editorials), government dispatches, telegrams, private correspondence, articles from the Indian press, eyewitness accounts, placards and proclamations. The People’s Paper also carried reviews of books critical of the East India Company and British rule in India, which frequently alluded to native discontent and simmering resistance. As Jones read vast quantities of ‘the prose of counter-insurgency’, he discovered Guha’s insurgent, the ‘entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion’.117 That which can be dismissed as appropriation may also be evidence of a growing sense that the impulse to liberation was indeed to be found beyond familiar spaces, and in particular beyond Europe’s boundaries.

  What makes Jones’s reading of the rebellion more active and dialogical than a mere annexation of events to a pre-existing framework would invoke is the way in which he repeatedly identifies the rebel as a speaking subject with a voice who can be heard in sundry texts, and who, as such, ought to be heeded. Engaging with and interpreting these utterances enabled Jones to elaborate a discourse which ran counter to the one being forged in the British public sphere. Once it became clear that the ‘mutinies’ were picking up in frequency, Jones began to republish his densely informed articles from 1853, giving his readership more contextual knowledge. There he had cited the unheeded petitions and complaints made by subjects under East Indian Company rule, to which Norton also refers. Rather than immediately annexing early dispatches about the insurgency to the Chartist cause, Jones in fact appeared disinclined to see what was happening as genuinely revolutionary. As more detailed reports of the actual mutinies came in, the paper criticized the colonial regime’s failure to listen; ignoring symptoms of disaffection in people who knew their rights had been a big mistake on the part of the British India government. The sanguinary events of the summer of 1857 should not have come as a surprise, for ‘the native press [had] openly revealed’ the possibility of an uprising.118 Parliament had ignored ‘the complaints of the injured’ in the form of petitions, as well as ‘seditious journals’ brought to its attention, and so: ‘The result is before us.’119

  These voices, and this result, would now need to be heard as inspiration in the other direction. ‘Now is the time to shew the Hindhus that we are prepared to reform, not them, but ourselves’.120 The argument that Jones is merely annexing a distant rebellion to an English cause is complicated by the trouble he takes to invert the direction of influence; events in India became more a textbook than a motif. ‘Democracy must be consistent’, he insists, noting that he has not concealed the fact that he is ‘avowedly … on the Indian side’.121 It is Indian action that casts light on Englishness, demanding that the latter clarify and assert itself; one form of national assertion makes claims upon the other: ‘If it is “un-english” to be on the side of the Hindhu, it is more “un-english” to be on the side of tyranny, cruelty, oppression and invasion.’122 If the Indians are to reclaim their country from their rulers, so too do the English need to reclaim their country, or rather, ‘England, as misrepresented by her rulers’. Jones was crystal clear about where transformation was required and it was not in India: ‘It is time that England change – or rather, that England make her veritable voice be heard – the voice of the English people – and cry, “right is right, and truth is truth.” ’123 The much-vaunted pedagogical enterprise of empire had rebounded on the British: ‘If they massacre us, we taught them how’.124 In several articles, Jones uses striking metaphors of corporeal transmission to draw out the reverse direction of influence, especially with regard to unity of purpose. ‘Suppose the spirit of the Sepoy host (without its barbarity) were infused into English Democracy’, he writes, ‘where then would be class government?’125 Two weeks later, as news of cholera outbreaks came in, he would exhort fellow Chartists with characteristic trenchancy: ‘Do you not see that the Asiatic East can send us something better: – yet more terrible than cholera; the glorious contagion of successful revolution?’126 The language here is, of course, distinctly reminiscent of David Hume’s elaboration of sentiments, passions or manners spreading between people like a ‘contagion’ – a word Hume uses along with its cognates, ‘sympathy’ included, ‘to refer to the process by which people enter into the sentiments of others’.127 It was also a deliberate reframing of the ruling elites’ anxiety that rebellion could spread across the colonies. So, for instance, the Duke of Cambridge: ‘I cannot forget the observation made by the Emperor Napoleon, who said, in alluding to our Indian affairs, that we should keep an eye to all our colonies, and on no account think of reducing our force in them, as a mutiny was a very catching thing, and nobody could foresee how other localities might take the infection.’128

  Rather than just point to the English love of liberty spread into the colonies or the happy coincidence of national aspirations, Jones seeks to chide and galvanize a dispirited, defeated people’s movement by drawing its attention to a resistance that does not appear to be futile – and one which has implications for their own democratic futures: ‘Indian mismanagement will be felt in our mines and mills, our farms and factories.’129 The biblical series of corporeal and fleshly metaphors of revitalization here enable Jones to pronounce prophecy: ‘Do you not see, the “dry bones” are shaking all around, putting on the full flesh of a new life, and rising up in glorious resurrection, to fight once more the old–old fight of freedom?’130 Beyond the figurative, the revolt in India has salutary material consequences: ‘Do you not see that our false system of exchange and credit, the golden crust on which our oligarchy stands, is breaking like the ice-floes at the April-thaws, before the hot breath of that Hindhu revolt?’131 Note the acknowledged shift in emphasis from deeds of (mis)rule to acts of resistance: indeed, the first such essay is titled, with simple significance, ‘The Indian Struggle’.132 As ‘one of the most just, noble, and necessary ever attempted in the history of the world’ (unlike many, Jones regards India as part of world history), the struggle for liberty in India cannot justifiably be seen as different from those European struggles his readership – and others – would have sympathized with: Poland against Russia, Hungary against Austria, Italy against the Germans and the French. He thunders: ‘Was Poland right? Then so is Hindostan. Was Hungary justified? Then so is Hindostan. Was Italy deserving of support? Then so is Hindostan. For all that Poland, Hungary, or Italy sought to gain, for that the Hindhu strives. Nay, more!’133 It is easy to underplay the radicalism of this insistence on parity at a point in time when ideas of freedom were considered distinctly European in provenance: ‘The wonder is, not that one hundred and seventy millions of people should now rise in part; – the wonder is that they should ever have submitted at all.’134 The rhetoric is no longer that of ‘slumbering millions’ who must awaken into the dawn of a taught freedom, but of people who would not have submitted in the first place had it not been for the betrayals of their ‘kings, princes, and aristocracies’, a shared curse with Britain – indeed, ‘the enemies and curses of every land that harboured them, in every age’.135

  With due attention to his emphasis on ‘sympathy’, necessarily an act of imagination catalysed by ‘contagion’, Jones’s yoking together of the Indian anticolonial and English democratic causes is plausibly read as an attempt to construct solidarity in the face of differences: ‘We bespeak the sympathy of the English people for their Hindhu
brethren.’136 As if unsure that this will be forthcoming – ‘Their cause is yours’, he urges – Jones suggests an elaborate exercise of the imagination in which his readers find themselves conquered slowly through intrigue, betrayal, confiscation, pillage and attack by various groups from Europe who had first arrived and asked permission merely ‘to build a factory on Woolwich Marsh’.137 What would they, the English, do? ‘You would rise – rise in the holy right of insurrection, and cry to Europe and to the world, to Heaven and earth, to bear witness to the justice of your cause’. This ‘sympathy’ derives, unlike contagion, not ‘so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it’, in Adam Smith’s terms, with fellow-feeling deriving from ‘changing places in fancy with the sufferer’.138 Both are distinct from benevolence, breaking from the paternalism of reform. Of course, Jones makes a leap of faith here – that a common standpoint will emerge from the imagination of a common condition. As Knud Haakonsen notes, however, the emphasis on imagination is embedded in Smith’s famous elaboration of ‘sympathy’, of which Jones cannot have been unaware: ‘The act of sympathetic understanding is a creation of order in the observer’s perceptions by means of an imagined rationale for the observed behaviour. As agents or moral beings, other people are, therefore, the creation of our imagination … the same can be said of ourselves; as moral agents we are acts of creative imagination.’139 Jones is also vulnerable to the charge of romanticizing what he calls ‘one of the grandest and most justifiable national wars ever waged by an oppressed people’.140 Yet, to leave it at that would be, firstly, to grossly underestimate the radicalism of insisting at this point in time that ‘Indians have as good a right to govern India, as the English have to govern England’.141 It also minimizes the extent to which Jones’s readings of the crisis were clearly responsive to events, and to the increasing emphasis he placed on the assertiveness of the rebels. The People’s Paper also carried letters by Indians, such as one on 23 January 1858, headed ‘Importance of the Study of the Indian Language’ and signed by one ‘Syed Abdoolah’, calling for daily spoken communication between British and Indians.142 Jones commented in this regard, ‘There can be no greater proof of the iniquity of our rule’ than that colonial officials ‘are not even expected to understand the tongue of those whom they are sent to govern.’143 It is also worth noting that Jones attended and spoke at public meetings on India, with, for instance, the paper carrying prominent front-page notices of such events. ‘An Important Exposure of our Government of India’, on 17 February 1858, was to be attended by MPs John Townshend, Charles Gilpin and H. Ingram. His ideas were not without means of circulation beyond the People’s Paper and were articulated within earshot of the influential.