Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Neither can such improvement arise from such speculations as the following, which are the themes suggested by the Vedant:- In what manner is the soul absorbed into the deity? What relation does it bear to the divine essence? Nor will youths be fitted to be better members of society by the Vedantic doctrines, which teach them to believe that all visible things have no real existence; that as father, brother, etc., have no actual entity, they consequently deserve no real affection, and therefore the sooner we escape from them and leave the world the better. Again, no essential benefit can be derived by the student … from knowing what it is that makes the killer of a goat sinless on pronouncing certain passages of the Veds and what is the real nature and operative influence of passages of Ved, etc.

  Again the student … cannot be said to have improved his mind after he has learned into how many ideal classes the objects in the Universe are divided, and what speculative relation the soul bears to the body, the body to the soul, the eye to the ear, etc.

  In order to enable your Lordship to appreciate the utility of encouraging such imaginary learning as above characterized, I beg your Lordship will be pleased to compare the state of science and literature in Europe before the time of Lord Bacon, with the progress of knowledge made since he wrote.

  If it had been intended to keep the British nation in ignorance of real knowledge the Baconian philosophy would not have been allowed to displace the system of the schoolmen, which was the best calculated to perpetuate ignorance. In the same manner, the Sangscrit system of education would be best calculated to keep this country in darkness, if such had been the policy of the British Legislature. But as the improvement of the native population is the object of the Government, it will consequently promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy, with other useful science [s] which may be accomplished with the sum proposed by employing a few gentlemen of talents and learning educated in Europe, and providing a college furnished with the necessary books, instruments and other apparatus.

  In representing this subject to your Lordship I conceive myself discharging a solemn duty which I owe to my countrymen and also to that enlightened Sovereign and Legislature which have extended their benevolent cares to this distant land, actuated by a desire to improve its inhabitants, and I therefore humbly trust you will excuse the liberty I have taken in thus expressing my sentiments to your Lordship.

  Calcutta,

  I have etc.,

  RAMMOHUN ROY

  * * *

  Part II

  Reformers And Radicals

  * * *

  Introduction to Part II

  British rule in the subcontinent was by no means uncontested. Indian chiefs and armies had to be subdued and conquered through a series of military offensives, extending over the better part of a century. Between the 1770s and the 1850s, there were also many small-scale rebellions, where peasants, tribals and preachers protested against colonial policies as these related especially to land and natural resources on the one hand, and to religious practices on the other.

  These localized protests had no real chance of overthrowing the British. A rebellion which carried this potential began in the early months of 1857. This is referred to by some (usually British) writers as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and by other (always Indian) writers as the ‘First War of Independence’. In fact, it was much more than the former, yet somewhat short of the latter. Its origins lay in the disaffection of soldiers in the employ of the East India Company. The mutinies in the barracks soon merged with the continuing discontent of the peasantry with regard to colonial agrarian policies. The arrogance of Christian missionaries and the fear that the state was promoting conversion also contributed to the disaffection. Stoking the fires further were princes and nobles who had been dispossessed or rendered impotent by the new order.

  This uprising was underpinned neither by a sense of a common nationality nor by a modern idea of freedom. Had it succeeded, it would not have created a new Indian nation-state. Rather, it would have led to the restoration of a pre-colonial political order, with a Mughal emperor in Delhi exercising uncertain control over regional satraps and chiefs. Victory for the rebels was likely to have led to low-level conflict and economic stasis rather than to peace and economic development.

  That said, the rebellion had a genuinely popular base, as well as a very wide reach. Beginning in army camps near Calcutta and Delhi, it soon spread into the countryside, gathering support as it went along. There were bitter and continuing clashes between the rebels and troops who had stayed loyal to the British. Large parts of north, east and central India were caught in the conflict. There were horrible atrocities by both sides. The death toll ran into the hundreds of thousands. Many more perished through starvation and disease.

  It was only towards the middle of 1858 that the East India Company was able to restore some semblance of order. The old, weak and somewhat decadent Mughal emperor in Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was found guilty of aiding the rebels and exiled to Rangoon. The government of the middle-aged and rather more authoritative Queen in London, Victoria, now assumed responsibility for the affairs of the subcontinent. Indians were henceforth to be subjects of the British Empire, rather than of the East India Company. A major reorganization of the Government of India took place, with the creation of a professional civil service whose members would serve as magistrates and tax collectors in the districts and oversee the departments of finance, home, education and public works in the provincial and central secretariats. The organization of the colonial army was also streamlined, and a massive expansion of the railway network set in motion, to facilitate speedy troop movements in case of a future uprising against British rule.

  The rebellion of 1857 is a topic of continuing interest, not to say enchantment, to historians as well as the lay public. One hundred and fifty years later, a steady stream of books continues to appear, which memorialize afresh the victories and defeats, the heroes and the villains, of both sides. However, less remembered now is an event of perhaps even greater significance in Indian history, which likewise took place in 1857. This was the establishment of the first universities in India.

  Founded in the same year as the Mutiny/War of Independence, the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were the crucibles of modernity in India. As the sociologist André Béteille has pointed out, these universities ‘opened new horizons both intellectually and institutionally in a society that had stood still in a conservative and hierarchical mould for centuries’. These universities were ‘among the first open and secular institutions in a society that was governed largely by the rules of kinship, caste and religion’. Thus ‘the age-old restrictions of gender and caste did not disappear in the universities, but they came to be questioned there’.

  The Bengal, Bombay and Madras Presidencies were the three main territories under British control. Each was the size of a large European country and each was home to a diverse as well as divided population. The first universities were located in the capitals of these three Presidencies. These were soon followed by the Allahabad University, in the United Provinces, and the Punjab University, located in that province’s capital and main city, Lahore. Dozens of colleges were also founded in the smaller towns; these were affiliated to the new universities, which set their curricula and certified their degrees.

  Although open to all castes and communities, at least in the first decades of their existence, Indian universities were patronized most actively by Brahmins. Scribes, scholars and advisers to pre-colonial regimes, this highest caste of Hindus now sought to serve in the same capacity under the new rulers. In a study of western India, the social historian Ravinder Kumar observes that although Brahmins were merely 5 per cent of the population, in the 1880s they constituted 80 per cent of all university students and graduates. This turn to modern education was partly disinterested—a genuine search for knowledge—but mostly instrumental, namely, a means to employment in the
colonial administration as clerks, teachers, tax and revenue officials and subordinate judges. Brahmin dominance in the academies quickly translated into Brahmin preponderance in the middle rungs of the colonial administration. For example, of 384 Indian officials in the Bombay civil services in the year 1886–87, 328 were Hindus, of which as many as 211 were Brahmins. The bulk of these belonged to the sub-caste of Chitpavan Brahmins from the west coast.

  While some Brahmins were content with loyal service to the Raj, others had higher ambitions. They were reading Burke, Mill, Bentham and other European thinkers as part of their university education; this inculcated the desire to work for an India whose leaders and lawmakers would be Indians, rather than Englishmen. The historian B.R. Nanda thus remarks that ‘thanks to Western education, the thoughts of the Chitpavan Brahmans were turning not towards a violent upheaval, but towards greater participation in the government of their own country through representative institutions’. Contemporary British historians put it less dispassionately, the governor of Bombay, Richard Temple, writing in 1879 that ‘never have I known in India a national and political ambition so continuous, so enduring, so far reaching, and so utterly impossible for us to satisfy, as that of the Brahmins of Western India’.

  These reform-minded, Western-educated Indians formed clubs and associations in their respective towns and provinces. It was a far-sighted Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume, who first suggested that these associations be brought together in an all-India body with a representative character. In December 1885, some eighty educated men from all over the country met to form what was at first called the ‘Indian National Union’, but which was soon renamed the ‘Indian National Congress’. One speaker said that with this gathering ‘we now begin to perceive that notwithstanding the existing differences in our mother tongue, social habits and manners, we possess the true elements of nationality about us’. Another said that from this meeting onwards, ‘we can with greater propensity than heretofore speak of an Indian nation, of national opinion and national aspirations’.

  These aims might have been sincere, but in actual fact the new body was less than representative of the nation-in-the-making. The historian of that first Congress, Briton Martin, Jr., points out that only two of its delegates were Muslims. Not unexpectedly, there were far more Brahmins than their proportion in the Indian population would warrant. There was a sprinkling of participants from other high castes such as Rajputs, Banias and Kayasths, four representatives of farming castes, and apparently no Untouchables. However, ‘this religious and caste distribution did not mean necessarily that specific religious and caste interests were given political representation or expression.’ Rather, the speeches and debates at the Congress stressed the non-parochial and inclusive aims of the new organization.

  The Indian National Congress was to meet every year hereafter, the meetings circulating among the major cities of the subcontinent. The rebellion of 1857, the establishment of the universities in the same year and the formation of the Congress are the three framing events of Part II of this book. The five ‘Makers’ featured here all lived and wrote against the background of these events.

  Four of these individuals came from a single region, western India. All had Marathi as their mother tongue. Two were Brahmins, two were not. There had been a long history of contestation between different castes in western India. Local Brahmins had refused to officiate at the coronation of the warrior-chief Shivaji (1630–80) on the grounds that the caste of Marathas, to which the king belonged, were not really Kshatriyas, but Sudras, that is to say, from the fourth (or peasant) rather than the second (or warrior) strata of the Hindu hierarchy. Brahmins from the north came to legitimize the ruler—at a price—but the slight was not forgotten by Shivaji’s kinsmen. The Peshwas, who ruled Maharashtra after Shivaji but before the British, were Brahmins, and tended to favour their kinsmen in matters of politics and economics.

  Despite these divisions by caste, there remained a strong sense of regional identity in Maharashtra. From Shivaji onwards, there was a tradition of local resistance to the Mughals in Delhi. Through the medieval period, the region had given birth to many fine poets in the Bhakti tradition, who sought to finesse caste hierarchies by suggesting that all were equal before God. In the absence of a Bengal-style Permanent Settlement, there was a thriving agrarian economy, with enterprising and outward-looking peasant-cultivators. Finally, the emergence of Bombay as a major centre of commerce and culture promoted a growing and increasingly self-aware middle class. Nor was Bombay the only urban centre of consequence—there was also Poona, the old capital of the Peshwas, where some of the best modern colleges were situated and where the most active Marathi newspapers were based.

  In sum, Maharashtra was to the late nineteenth century what Bengal had been to the early nineteenth century—the epicentre of critical thinking and social reform among Indians coming to terms with modernity and alien rule.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  The Muslim Modernist

  Syed Ahmad Khan

  An early biographer of Syed Ahmad Khan claimed that as a young boy, Khan had several times seen Rammohan Roy in the court of the Mughal emperor. This is not altogether implausible—for Khan’s family was closely associated with the ruling family of Delhi, in whose service Roy had also been. Could this sighting have been in 1828 or 1829, when Roy called on the emperor en route to London to plead his case? And would this (admittedly tenuous) acquaintance with the modernizer of the Hindus have been a precocious influence on the first modernizer of Indian Islam? It is an intriguing thought.

  Syed Ahmad Khan1 was born in Delhi in 1817. His grandfather had served briefly as prime minister to one of the Mughal emperors. The family was not orthodox—they patronized musicians and mystics and may also have allowed the consumption of wine. There was a tradition of scholarship: among Syed Ahmad’s forebears were some keen mathematicians.

  Syed Ahmad was educated at home by his mother and later sent to a traditional school. The language he grew up with was Urdu, the lingua franca of the court and of the city beyond. In his studies he learnt Arabic and Persian. At the age of twenty, he departed from tradition by joining the service of the East India Company. His family of Mughal loyalists were not best pleased but, by identifying with the rulers-to-be, the young man had accurately read the future. He served as a clerk and then a judge in various towns in north India, rising steadily up the Company’s hierarchy.

  Like Rammohan Roy, Khan’s facility in English was acquired through keeping company with Englishmen. Like Roy again, he wrote prolifically in more than one language. His first book, in Urdu, was an archaeological history of Delhi. Another early book examined doctrinal disputes in early Islam. He also published an edition of the Ain-i-Akbari, the great work by the scholar Abul Fazl on the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar.

  During the uprising of 1857, Syed Ahmad Khan was posted in the town of Bijnor, in the western part of the United Provinces. In a quiet but determined way, he took the side of his masters, and helped shepherd several English families to safety. However, he was deeply affected by the revolt and worried about its consequences for his fellow Muslims in particular. A book he wrote shortly afterwards challenged the theory that the uprising was planned by disaffected Muslims who opposed British rule. He pointed out that as many Hindus as Muslims had taken part in the revolt; and that more Muslims had stayed loyal to the British. He rejected the theories that the rebels were egged on by Russia or Persia. In his view, the protests were neither a conspiracy nor a crusade. Rather, they were a response to the arrogance of Christian preachers and to the failure of the Company to admit Indian members into the Legislative Council.

  Khan’s book on the 1857 revolt was followed by another whose title gave a clue to its contents, viz. The Loyal Mohammedans of India. This documented the various acts of loyalty by Muslim officials and subjects during the uprising. Its author was convinced that the way forward for the Muslims now was to embrace modern education
, which would serve to dispel the idea that they were inherently nostalgic or disloyal, while bringing them on par with the Hindus who were taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by British rule. In 1864 he started a Scientific Society for Muslims, whose members would study modern works of history, science and political economy, in English and in translation. Two years later, the society started a journal edited and largely written by Khan himself.

  The parallels with the endeavours of Rammohan Roy are quite striking. These may not have been entirely accidental. The biographer who claimed Khan as a young boy had seen Roy was the Urdu poet and writer Altaf Husain Hali. Hali writes that after the 1857 mutiny, Khan ‘realized that the future well-being of his fellow Muslims depended on two major factors—Western education and an ability to understand and mix freely with the British; otherwise it seemed to him that the Muslims stood little chance of making progress or of retaining a place of honour and respect in India’. Compare this with what Rammohan Roy wrote in December 1829: ‘From personal experience, I am impressed with the conviction that the greater our intercourse with European gentlemen, the greater will be our improvement in literary, social and political affairs; a fact which can be easily proved by comparing the condition of those of my countrymen who have enjoyed this advantage with that of those who unfortunately have not had that opportunity …’

  In April 1869 Khan travelled to England himself. He was then almost exactly the same age (fifty-seven) as Rammohan Roy had been when he made his journey to the centre of imperial power. Like Roy, he met with British notables; like him, he published books in English for an English audience (in his case, a book of essays on Muhammad, which sought to refute the belief that Islam was a religion of the sword). Like his great predecessor, Khan travelled to England to learn more about the land of the conqueror and to place before him the problems and aspirations of his people, who were the Muslims of the subcontinent.