Insurgent Empire
Page 11
At the outset, still defending his own inaction on the question of India and his past endorsement of the ‘improvement’ mission, Congreve suggests, perhaps a little disingenuously, that he had been waiting ‘patiently for the day when … the energies of the native population should make our further hold impossible’, even as he hoped that England would, on the basis of a ‘purer moral feeling’, voluntarily relinquish its hold on India.179 The revolt changed all that, showing clearly that the ruled, not the rulers, would be the prime movers of both India’s immediate present and distant future. ‘Recent events’ had demonstrated that the only way for the English to keep India was by force. Whatever their own problems, Indians appeared to ‘prefer the chances of less settled government to the certainty of an alien despotism’.180 Principles of trusteeship, Congreve pointed out, prefiguring anticolonial thinkers of the next century, could not be imposed on a reluctant people, but were ‘valid only with those who accept them’.181 The revolt could be read then as the future of the Empire in India writ large: ‘For, either they expel us, or we retire.’182 The other justification for colonial rule Congreve had to deal with was precisely a relativist one: ‘that what holds good of independent States in Europe is not binding in the East’.183 It was unclear that this claim was defensible: ‘What are the limits of this difference, and on what rational basis does it rest?’ Admitting frankly that he was ‘not deeply versed in the literature and religious antiquities of India’, based on a ‘mass of information’, Congreve insisted on the right of Indian civilization not to be subjected to English rule.184 As other liberals had done, he cited Burke copiously on the difference between savages in the Americas (whom it was, presumably, acceptable to conquer) and the Indians, ‘cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods’.185 Ultimately, however, Congreve’s own argument, while it drew on the Burkean critique of empire, rested less on India’s civilizational achievements than on the fact of ongoing resistance, which had made clear that there was no probability of amalgamation (of the sort Norton wanted) and ‘a genuine union being at last effected’.186 Given that ‘the different manners of the East’ were not, to his mind, grounds for a relativist application of international law or moral principles, the fact was that the rebellion pointed to the impossibility of common cause under British rule.187 With the right kind of imaginative labour, common cause could, however, be forged between English working-men and Englishwomen, on the one hand, and Indians under British rule on the other. If colonial conquest had resulted in such a ‘want of sympathy’ with conquered societies, that even ‘instructive forms of civilisation’ were destroyed, it could be attributed to a distinctively class-based attitude.188 Congreve was clear that the end of colonial rule was specifically ‘alien in conception and results to the thoughts and wishes of the upper classes of England’.189 But he was more hopeful of others’ attitude to Indians, the ‘large numbers in England who, if my opinions could reach them, would sympathise with them in spirit at least, if they could not wholly accept them’.190 This was a necessarily dialogical process, involving cognition and recognition, imaginative labour that the English people could undertake, even in the absence of actual contact with Indians. Adam Smith’s cognitive model of ‘sympathy’ as denoting not just pity or compassion but ‘our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever’ is useful here.
Congreve’s appeal to women was brief and relatively predictable in its gendered assumptions: since they hold aloof from the strife and personal ambition that mar men’s politics, women can bring vital moral considerations and a moderating power to political questions. Here, too, in ‘the court of moral feeling’, Congreve stressed the need to pose questions, then listen for and keep in the foreground the wishes of the ruled in India: ‘Is it with the consent of its people that we persist in trying to rule it, or solely by virtue of a favourable judgement on our claim pronounced by none but ourselves?’191 It is really, however, with his appeal to ‘the Working Men of England’ that Congreve came up with a theory of common condition that enabled him to make the case for the ‘keenest political sympathy’ not just between himself as philosopher and the proletariat, but between them and the subjects of British India.192 Here Congreve enunciated a claim about the intertwined structures of empire which would be articulated by other critics too in the decades to come: ‘The question is two-fold. It is an Indian one, but it is also an English one. The interests of both countries are at stake. You may take them apart for convenience, but you cannot really separate them.’193 The working-men were in a unique position to listen to and sympathize with the aspirations of the ruled, not least because they lacked the upper classes’ material and personal connections to India and ‘derive no advantages from its possession’.194 They too were ruled and lied to by the same class: ‘You will not be deceived by the assertions that the mass of the Hindoo nation wishes us to continue its ruler’, not least because of the ‘similar ones made at home by your own state of feelings’.195 The extent to which Congreve stressed the similarity (rather than congruity) of condition, as well as the resulting capacity to interpret the feelings of the ruled, is striking: ‘You know that your own state of feeling is misinterpreted or entirely neglected by those who administer your Government; is it likely that they would be successful in interpreting that of the distant and alien population of India?’196
Congreve is not suggesting that the standpoint of the working Englishman is the same as that of the subject of rule in India – or not quite. He is instead calling for this man to recall at once his own condition and ‘sympathise’ – as he already does with those in Hungary or Italy who ask for independence and justice – ‘with the Hindoo in his struggle for the same objects’.197 This did not, as he had already made clear, imply an identity of culture or belief systems. It did, however, mean that those at the receiving end of exploitation were in a better position to conceive ‘what we ourselves should feel in the like situation’, to use Smith’s elaboration of ‘sympathy’.198 The working-men of England, by contrast with the English upper classes, were in a unique position to undertake the imaginative labour that could bridge some of that distance and difference:
You can judge of the bearing of the English in India by the bearing of the same classes at home, by the bearing of your aristocracy, whether commercial or landed, by the bearing of your middle classes. The hard indifference of the latter, the haughty neglect of the former, the reckless way in which both satisfy their personal tastes and feelings, and take no care of yours, the strange display of almost fabulous wealth and luxury, in vivid contrast with the extreme of poverty and suffering, all these you can appreciate at home. You watch them with mingled feelings, for those who so act are your countrymen, and have some points in common with yourself, some points of friendly contact, some common feelings. Take away all that softens the relation; let the conduct be the same, and let the men be conquerors of another colour, another language, and another religion, and let them add the contempt such difference too naturally inspires: you may then have the measure of the feelings of the subject Hindoo or Mahometan towards his European masters. You may understand their vengeful spirit; you may not palliate their mode of vengeance.199
I quote this passage at some length because of its extraordinary emphasis not only on ‘feelings’, but also the bold equation Congreve makes between fellow feeling and the capacity to judge not only the causes but the ferocity of – and the means deployed against – the Indian rebellion. Common ground, even shared human feeling, is not a given, but is arrived at through imaginative work. The relationship between English working-man and distant Indian subject is one that has to be dialogical in some form, entailing the work of interpretation, comprehension and reconstitution. The form of ‘sympathy’ that Congreve calls for entails, then, emphatically not charity, benevolence or compassion, but ‘common human feeling’,200 or what Smith would call ‘fellow feeling’, which is ‘an analogous emotion … at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every
attentive spectator’.201 Women and the working classes are more likely to be ‘attentive’ interpreters in this mode.
There is also, of course, a sound material basis for, and indeed self-interest in, identifying analogous aspirations. Like Jones, Congreve emphasizes to the working classes he addresses that the disadvantages of an exploitative domestic order and those of colonial rule are part of the same formation: ‘India is the keystone of the existing system of Government.’202 It is they, the English working classes, who will foot the bill as well as provide the cannon fodder for holding down India by force:
On all grounds, then, so far as India is concerned, I fearlessly appeal to you for a verdict, given by the light of your common English experience, and by the light of your common human feeling; and, as you would rise, to a man, to prevent your country from being the victim of foreign oppression, so I call on you to raise your voice no less unanimously in protest against her being the oppressor.203
There could be no change in the domestic social order without an end to the Indian empire, and the result could be salutary: ‘a dominion narrower in extent but better wielded’.204 It is precisely in the light of this relatively modest proposal for the domestic benefits – ‘in no revolutionary spirit’ – of letting go of empire that we must read Congreve’s pamphlet on ‘India’ less as a Positivist assimilation of a far-off uprising than as an exemplar of Positivism pushed to more radical analysis by a rebellion with distinct domestic resonances.205
The Afterlife of 1857
‘The events of 1857 forced all of us to consider the whole question of the Empire’, recalled another Positivist, Congreve’s former Oxford tutee, and lawyer, Frederic Harrison, some years later. ‘From that day I became an anti-Imperialist’.206 Harrison, a figure we shall meet again, initially appears to have been divided between seeing the uprising, like Congreve, as necessarily universal in its assertion of righteous resistance, and deeming it a consequence of ‘savage instincts’, the insurmountable alterity underpinning ‘the inevitable struggle of black man against white – native against European’.207 Yet, in that same autumn of 1857, Harrison found himself accepting that this was ‘a long-expected inevitable rebellion of a keen race against their conquerors and masters’.208 Now he credited the rebels with greater thoughtfulness and agency than he had before, arguing that the soldiers who had mutinied were ‘the élite, the leading class, the most spirited, the most intelligent, the most thoroughly Hindoo. They lead and represent the rest, as much as Cromwell’s Ironsides were the marrow of England.’209 It is the emergence of this resistance that makes a ‘phantom’ of British rule, a simulacrum of conquest.210 Clearly, the mission to ‘Europeanise’ was not successful, even if much had been imparted, for ‘no respectable native class ever identifies itself with us’.211 If the British in India were to be overthrown in the course of an insurgency, there could be no re-conquest, for then the British working classes ‘would not allow their lives, their money, and their claims to be sacrificed in an object they would feel to belong wholly to the commercial classes’.212 What is striking about Harrison’s meditations, in contrast to Congreve’s rather more surefooted insistence on the wrongness of colonial rule, is that they are shot through with doubt. ‘We are indeed a nation of colonists; and India is the fairest of our possessions’, Harrison concedes; but what if, in fact, all such conquests do, other than enhance commercial interests, ‘is to wrap round Britannia a useless purple’ which will enable historians of the future to ‘show how the imperial pomp blinded both English and Europeans to the real position of this country on the map’?213 In the end, 1857 had shown that India resisted incorporation and could only be governed now as a ‘temporary possession’, one which it was futile to attempt to Europeanize or Christianize. From this vantage-point, Britain’s empire was at best folly, and at worst a catastrophe that did nothing for ‘national existence’.214 Though he prognosticated that the century ‘long before its close – will see the last of British rule in India’, within a few weeks of writing these words Harrison would find himself once more doubtful, as it became clear that the uprising would be suppressed.215 Now, not unlike Jones, he suggested he would support a reformed project ‘to govern India, but solely from the point of view of an intelligent and patriotic native – if it can be done. If not – marchons!’216
For all that it created both uneasiness and public anguish, the Indian uprising of 1857 did not constitute a crisis that forged anything like a critical consensus on the downsides of empire. As others have noted, it undermined the liberal pedagogical mission to raise the inhabitants of the subcontinent to higher civilizational standards. It is also widely accepted that lines of difference were hardened, confirming ‘the mutual distrust between rulers and ruled’.217 Yet, as I have argued here, some responses to the uprising laid the ground for a different interpretation of such crises of rule – one that undermined attitudes of paternalism and benevolence in favour of dispositions that emphasized fellow feeling, reciprocal engagement and reverse pedagogy. Such interpretations may have been a minor key against the upsurge of emotions that marked the response to the uprising, but they constitute, nonetheless, a bookmark which kept different political possibilities open. These included modes of relating to non-Europeans that both acknowledged the variety of the ways in which the ‘human’ expressed itself in cultures and sought to forge common ground. The idea that Englishness, or Britishness, also needed to reconstitute itself for the better in the face of resistance, learning from it in the process, was also put into play at this time.
Let us return, finally, to Edward Thompson, writing not quite seventy years later, convinced that another Indian struggle was once again imminent, but hoping that it would not be necessary, and arguing that it need not be embittered. If there was ‘irreconcilability’ between white and brown in India, its roots lay far back in the events of 1857: ‘But from Bihar to the Border the Mutiny lives; it lives in the memory of Europeans and of Indians alike. It overshadows the thought and the relations of both races … Those memories have never slept, and now they are raising their heads as never before.’218 The shadow of accepted accounts of the ‘Mutiny’ thus fell over events that followed, from the second Afghan War to the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, by enshrining harsh retribution for any resistance. On the British side, General Dyer could not be pilloried as the sole villain of the horrific massacre in Amritsar, but needed to be seen instead, in Thompson’s view, as the embodiment of a national delusion generated by a fatal mythology: ‘It was our inherited thought concerning the Mutiny and Indians and India that drove him on. The ghosts of Cooper and Cowan presided over Jallianwala.’219 If relations between the British in India and Indians were not to escalate into a final, irrevocable clash, then it was for the British, not the Indians, to ‘face the things that happened, and change our way of writing about them’.220 The process of changing the way the Empire was written about would take a very long time; indeed, it remains incomplete. Events that made such a rewriting imperative, however, would take place with determined regularity across British colonial possessions: the next one would be less than a decade after the Indian insurgency, in faraway Jamaica. It too would put questions of empire and the imperial project back into the public consciousness in Britain.
2
A Barbaric Independence:
Rebel Voice and Transnational
Solidarity, Morant Bay, 1865
The rebellion of the negroes comes very home to the national soul. Though a fleabite compared with the Indian Mutiny, it touches our pride more and is more in the nature of a disappointment.
The Times, 18 November 1865
What have the English people done that the irrepressible negro should make an interruption into their daily press, disport himself at their dessert, chill their turtle, spoil their wine, and sour their pine-apple and their temper? … Are we henceforth to be separated, as a nation, into negrophilites and anti-negroites?
Saturday Review, October 1866
Constitutionally considered, it makes no difference in the question, that what Governor Eyre did was done in Jamaica and not in England. For this purpose, the two islands are one and the same.
The Bee-Hive, 1 September 1866
On a cloudy Monday morning in October 1865, a few hours after the end of the Sabbath, George William Gordon, a forty-five-year-old man, stood beneath the arch of a burned-down courthouse in the Jamaican town of Morant Bay. His hands and feet had been pinioned and a halter was draped around his neck. After the drop fell at 7.10 a.m., the corpse, dressed in a borrowed white coat, was kept suspended and swinging on public view in inclement weather for a full twenty-four hours and then thrown into a felon’s grave. It was, however, far from being consigned to anonymity. Gordon’s name would soon reverberate 4,500 miles away on another island, one which, by that point in history, was more habituated to rainy days than to summary public executions of opposition politicians. From late November 1865, when news finally reached London of Gordon’s execution under martial law and of the extra-judicial deaths of many others – mostly black or Afro-Jamaican men deemed part of a conspiracy to overthrow white rule – a controversy raged in England for nearly three years. The so-called ‘Jamaica Affair’ would shake the English intelligentsia and political classes, creating fresh and bitter divisions while widening existing cleavages. It would also be discussed at working-class meetings held in the run-up to the Second Reform Bill, which was coming up for parliamentary debate.1 For nearly three years, the English public sphere would concern itself with what also came to be known as ‘the Eyre controversy’, as attempts were made by some of England’s best-known political and intellectual figures to bring to book the colonial governor under whose administrative aegis Gordon and over 500 others had met their untimely deaths.