By the late autumn of 1857, Jones appeared to switch from cheering on the insurgency to assessing the flaws and strategic mistakes of the counterinsurgency, including poor planning: ‘Thus imbecility is losing a great colonial Empire.’144 This, Pratt suggests, exemplifies ‘his proclivity to switch between identification with rebel or counter-insurgent as the likelihood of a successful rebellion receded’.145 While it is clear that, as the insurgency was put down over several months, Jones manifestly revised his vision of where things would go, deflated perhaps after his bout of raucous cheerleading, and also explicitly sickened by the bloodshed he wanted stopped, it is certainly not the case that he simply reneged on his commitments to popular resistance: ‘The national character of the Indian insurrection can be no longer truthfully disputed’, he wrote. ‘No matter whether it be the Anglo-saxon or the Hindhu, the American or the Celt … the people are ever the only saviours of imperilled nations, the cradle and the home of all great thoughts and truths. It is the people who conceive; it is the people who realise, the greatness of every age.’146 Indians were setting a ‘noble example’. The failures of counterinsurgency largely provided Jones with a weapon with which to continue his relentless attack on the incompetence and blunders of the ruling elites. Indeed, after a few weeks’ silence, as 1857 drew to a close Jones would title an article ‘How to Secure India’, but almost immediately issue a caveat: ‘Let not the above title mislead our readers … We do not believe that the British can prove a rightful claim to one solitary acre of ground … of Hindostan.’147 But, he says, with the knowledge of where things are headed, it would be another half-century or so before English rule could be undone, in which case, the only recourse was to make English-ruled India ‘as happy as you can; do as much justice as circumstances admit’.148 To this end, British rule had to be democratized, and treaties honoured in the name of the English people, with princes restored to their thrones and their subjects treated on terms of honourable equality.149 One of the last articles on the topic in the paper, which would itself fold in 1858, would note categorically that, in the final analysis, given that the insurgency was not quite fully crushed, ‘the development of Indian greatness will be found most consistent with India’s freedom from British rule, and its thorough, uncontrolled, and unshackled independence’.150
Marx and 1857: A Brief Note
What of Jones’s friend and comrade, Karl Marx? In an interesting essay Thierry Drapeau argues that, while scholars have ‘long established the intellectual ascendancy Marx had over [Jones], they have failed to track the opposite direction of influence’.151 Drapeau contends that, while it may be that Marx’s eventual ‘multilinear perspectives’ on anticolonialism derived from intensive study of non-Western societies, ‘Ernest Jones was inextricably linked to the unfolding of those efforts in the early 1850s … adding nuance and deeper understanding to them’.152 There is some merit to the argument that Jones and Marx influenced each other during the early 1850s, when their friendship took root, and certainly Marx would move away over time from the ‘Eurocentric, unilinear, and determinist model of historical development’ he had cleaved to in 1848.153 But there is less evidence to suggest that Marx made huge strides in that direction in the 1850s as a consequence of Jones’s influence. For one thing, Jones himself would not really relocate ‘the initiative of revolutionary transformation … to the oppressed peoples of the British Empire’ until after 1857; his ‘The New World, a Democratic Poem’ was only reworked as a tribute to the Indian uprising several years after its first publication.154 It was in the wake of 1857 that the ‘vantage point of the colonized’ became a manifest reality outside the text for Jones. The other fact is that, for all its deprecation of the brutality of British rule and condemnation of the exploitation of the Indian peasantry, and notwithstanding a sense that a national insurrection of sorts could be discerned in events, Marx’s famous dispatches on the Indian uprising for the New York Tribune did not particularly interest themselves in that vantage point – one reason that I have not engaged with them here. His suggestion that it was conceivable that the Indians could throw off the English yoke remained abstract, something for the distant future. But it is true that, by this point, Marx was markedly less inclined to view colonialism as a beneficial force – and this, as well as his passing concession that what England ‘considers a military mutiny is in truth a national revolt’, may well have had something to do with Jones’s analysis.155
It is fair to say that, even if 1857 was not the occasion for the immediate production of revolutionary anticolonialism in Britain, some important political and intellectual seeds had nonetheless been sown, including in Marx’s case. While proletarian internationalism of the domestic variety may have always been integral to Jones’s engagement with colonial questions, there seems little doubt that the historical actuality of the 1857 uprising caused him to shift markedly in the direction of seeking ‘contagion’ from that source of revolutionary agency. Given that Marx and Jones were estranged by that point, it remains open to question whether Jones in fact influenced his friend after 1855, but it is not inconceivable that engagement with Jones in the first half of the 1850s, and then subsequently studying the 1857 rebellion, were part of Marx’s developing understanding of anticolonialism in the long run. Pranav Jani has argued eloquently that it took the events of 1857 ‘to force Marx to develop a better understanding of the agency of the colonized subject’, and that there is to be discerned ‘a more dialectical relationship between the development of Marx’s ideas and the 1857 Revolt’ than scholars have identified before.156 While this dialectical understanding is not, I think, immediately visible in his famous articles on the Revolt itself for the New York Tribune, which focus largely on British mistakes and military manoeuvres, Marx does evoke even here ‘the secret connivance and support of the natives’ given to the sepoys, while cautioning against expecting ‘an Indian revolt to assume the features of a European revolution’.157 He notes too that the imperial project in India is one that benefits individuals, and as such increases the national wealth, but is also offset by the very great costs involved in ‘endless conquest and perpetual aggression’.158 Agreeing that some of the outrages committed by the sepoys were ‘hideous’ and ‘appalling’, Marx was inclined to see them as mirroring colonial atrocities: ‘the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India’.159 Jones too noted trenchantly: ‘The conduct of the “rebels”, throughout the mutiny, has been in strict and consistent accordance with the example of their civilised governors.’160 He would repeatedly point out that the ‘wild, wanton, and wicked demand for native blood’ would only make sense if it weren’t the British who had, in the first place, ‘sowed the seeds of that sanguinary harvest which is but now being reaped in British India’.161 Certainly Marx, like Jones, was inclined to read the discourse of counterinsurgency critically, as one in which it was supposed that ‘all the cruelty is on the side of the sepoys, and all the milk of human kindness flows on the side of the English’.162
No ‘Patient Acquiescence’: Richard Congreve and ‘Common Human Feeling’
If Jones appeared to back down on his revolutionary fervour for the Indian cause in favour of an interim amelioration of grievances (which Marx regarded as a turn to the right), a rejection of reforms aimed at keeping Indians as happy as possible came from an avowedly non-revolutionary quarter: the leading English Positivist, Richard Congreve. In a pamphlet published in November 1857, even as national outrage in Britain was reaching a high point, Congreve, aware that he might be charged with ‘reckless opposition to the feelings of the majority’, launched an attack on what he called ‘the better language now adopted’ to justify continued British rule in India:
We occupied India under the impulse of commercial and political motives; we have governed it as a valuable appendage, commercially and politically. That is the broad truth. When our Empire is tottering to its fall, then to step forward with moral or Christian motives for holding it, which have nev
er influenced our previous policy, is a very questionable course.163
His own response to the uprising is ‘simple in the extreme’: ‘that we withdraw from our occupation of India without any unnecessary delay’.164 Two years later, as the country prepared a national Thanksgiving ordered by Queen Victoria for 1 May 1859 to commemorate victory over the rebels, Congreve released the pamphlet again, along with what he called a ‘Protest Published as a Placard’, in which he pleaded with his fellow English to ‘reflect’ on the rebellion as ‘the legitimate effort of a nation to shake off an oppressive foreign yoke’, and not, therefore, to commemorate ‘the triumph of force over right’.165 At one level this position was of course entirely consistent with Congreve’s doctrinal allegiance to Positivism. In the preceding year, he had published an article on Gibraltar where – in accordance with the views of the Positivist guiding spirit, the French philosopher Auguste Comte – he had laid out the case for a foreign policy driven by moral rather than political considerations, whereby England would do the right thing in relation to ‘weaker’ entities. Why, then, had he not spoken of India in this context? Only, he claims, because he had detected no native resistance: England’s dominion in the subcontinent was ‘apparently unquestioned’ and the seeming acquiescence to arbitrary English actions had suggested that there was ‘no probability of an immediate agitation of the Indian question’.166 Thus, while clear as to the wrongness of the acquisition itself, he ‘had accepted it as a fact’. Indeed, he had himself partaken of the rationale of the ‘improvement’ mission, accepting that any withdrawal from India could be adjourned for some time while the government redeemed itself and offered compensation for conquest to its Indian subjects ‘by the enforcement of order, the furtherance of material improvements, and by the lessons of Western punctuality and honour’.167
Why so dramatic a change in position, then, from one whose doctrinal allegiances to Positivism also committed him to order and gradualism, evolution not revolution?168 Quite simply: ‘The recent revolt has dispelled all such ideas of patient acquiescence in a recognized evil.’169 For Positivist principles to be fully activated in relation to India, eliciting parity with weaker European nations, the emergence of native resistance was vital. Like Jones, Congreve read the revolt in India as making specific claims of England (for him, too, it was ‘England’ rather than Britain) and as having, in turn, distinct implications for this nation’s conception of itself. In his assessment of Congreve as one of a very small minority who did indeed advocate full withdrawal from India, distinguished historian of empire Bernard Porter notes that the Positivist philosopher insisted that withdrawing from India would in fact be in Europe’s interest, and that, contrary to the standard view, the country ‘would not lapse into barbarism and anarchy once the imperial grip were relaxed’.170 Such a ‘sympathetic approach to alien civilisations was something new in English colonial criticism’. Speculating on the reasons for Congreve’s unusual attitude, Porter argues that at work here was not so much ‘the mass of information about those civilisations which had been accumulated in the recent past by travellers and scientists’, but instead ‘cultural relativism’ – meaning, in this instance, a standpoint that simply chose not to be ethnocentric, and to regard other ‘cultural systems’ as different but not inferior to that of Western Europe.171 This, it seems to me, is to overlook two determining aspects of Congreve’s meditations on the future of India. The first is the admitted centrality of the 1857 uprising in getting him to abandon the reformist position. The second is the extent to which Congreve emphasizes the need for the English working classes and women generally to extend ‘sympathy’ to the ruled, sympathy defined here not merely as commonality of feeling but as a means of thinking together with Indians.
Richard Congreve was Britain’s foremost exponent of the influential ideas of Comte, the Positivist founder of the ‘Church of Humanity’ whose values appealed to the nineteenth-century British middle classes: ‘upholding morality, providing a means of controlling social change, and providing a sense of identity to the individual by defining his place within the community’.172 There was to be no revolution, but order and progress were to be reconciled through social reconstruction. While both liberal individualism and class society were to be shunned, ‘the dominant values of this society would be largely those of the middle class’ and capitalism could have a ‘moralized’ form.173 Congreve – who founded the English Comtean organization, the ‘Religion of Humanity’, in January 1859 – lectured on Positivism, and his lectures were attended by, among others, George Eliot (though she apparently found him dull). It is this commitment to a moral, ordered and controlled social change – he would reiterate that his ‘whole notions are alien to disorder’ – that makes the impact of the 1857 uprising on Congreve all the more remarkable for its undoubted radicalism in getting him to call for immediate, not gradual, withdrawal.174 (Half a century later, his pamphlet ‘India’, responding to the uprising, would be republished and disseminated by the London-based Indian radical and editor of the Indian Sociologist, Shyamji Krishnavarma.) While Congreve was something of an outlier, he matters for any study of British dissent inasmuch as Positivism’s scientific and humanist tenor was one of the tributary strands of mid-nineteenth-century British radicalism. Both as a high-profile Oxford don until 1854, and later as a Comtean, Congreve also influenced a later generation of critics of empire, most importantly Frederic Harrison. A distinctive contributor to what might be regarded as the nineteenth-century legacy of imperial scepticism, Congreve would become a supporter of trade unions, as well as an advocate of Irish independence. Even as a smaller voice, however, he was among the first to bring into view three dimensions of British criticism of empire which would become increasingly salient: the need to listen to and make central the wishes of those at the receiving end of colonialism; the ways in which resistance to the imperial project called upon the metropole (in Congreve’s case, England) to reflect on and reconstitute itself; and finally, perhaps most importantly, the need to forge ‘sympathetic’ bonds that at once recognized differences and identified points of commonality.
There are a great many things to be said about this slim but powerfully articulated work – not least about the ways in which it prefigures Thompson’s critique of the one-sided writing of the history of the uprising in calling for justice (not ‘military vengeance’) to be dispensed in all directions without national or racial superiority determining the outcome: ‘Not alone the white woman, or the child of English parents, but Hindoo women and children, should be fearfully avenged.’175 What is of most relevance for our purposes, however, is the way in which Congreve appears to break not only from gradualism, but from benevolence as the driving force of reforms, advocating instead a ‘sympathy’ with the ruled that is conceived very differently from paternalism. Indeed, Congreve was in many ways an early theorist of ‘solidarity’ – not a word that he would have had available to him, but certainly a concept he seemed to understand fully. He dispenses very quickly, for instance, with the idea of imperial rule as a form of ‘trusteeship’ – a concept and term that would recur in arguments for the Empire well into the twentieth century, when it would also be challenged by black and Asian anticolonialists on grounds very similar to those Congreve articulates. Confronting Gladstone’s argument that the mode of acquisition of India mattered less now than the ‘obligations … contracted towards the nearly 200 millions of people under our rule in India’, Congreve noted that the rebellion had made one thing abundantly clear in relation to the former’s claim that the British occupy ‘the condition of trustees’ between God and the Indians: this ‘trusteeship has not hitherto been recognised’.176 Rebellion is thus a forceful reminder that the colonized share the right to recognize and be recognized – but also, crucially, to refuse recognition. Given the importance of the act of ‘recognition’ to international law, to which Congreve explicitly alludes in his questioning of the British right to hold India down by force, his insistence on the rig
ht of Indians to recognize or refuse recognition of the colonial presence is of no small import: ‘Is there in the East Indies a different international law from what exists in England?’177 Thus, rather than call for reforms, ‘solutions which to me are incoherent and immoral’, he preferred to pose the question that he believed the revolt itself was posing of England: ‘Shall we set to work to re-conquer India?’178 It is the basis on which he offers his resounding negative that is most significant: the ruled did not wish to be ruled.
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