The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  But it is the second meaning of peccavi, the meaning of “sin” as moral error, that is most relevant here.kh Though Sir Charles apparently never said (or wrote) peccavi, he seems to have had a sense that he had sinned in Sind. When he was posted there, he wrote: “We have no right to seize Sind, yet we shall do so and a very advantageous piece of rascality it will be.”105 “Rascality” is a rather flip way to refer to the murder of many people defending their own land, but afterward he wrote, speaking of his ambition, “I have conquered Scinde but I have not yet conquered myself.”106 Napier was also surprisingly sensitive to the disintegration of the sepoy-officer relationship after 1813, when the first wave gave way to the second. Years before 1857, he expressed regret that the older type of officers who “wrestled” with their sepoys were being replaced by men who did not know the sepoys’ languages and practices and who readily addressed the latter as “nigger”ki or “suwar” (pig).107 He was also aware of the British complicity in the negative role of caste: “The most important thing which I reckon injurious to the Indian army, is the immense influence given to caste; instead of being discouraged, it has been encouraged in the Bengal army; in the Bombay army it is discouraged; and that army is in better order than the army of Bengal, in which the Brahmins have been leaders in every mutiny.”108

  But Napier was also capable of equivocating, as when he wrote of the Sind campaign: “I may be wrong, but I cannot see it, and my conscience will not be troubled. I sleep well while trying to do this, and shall sleep sound when it is done.”109 This last phrase is almost verbatim what Harry Truman said after the bombing of Hiroshima: “I never lost any sleep over my decision.”110

  SHALLOW ORIENTALISM

  The sense of sin is not usually a part of the discussion of the story of Napier in India, but it may indicate a moment when some of the British felt moral ambivalence about their conquest of India and, perhaps, when we ourselves should feel morally ambivalent about the British. The list of massacres and degradations that I selected for my cavalry charge through the history of the Raj, England’s greatest hits (in the Mafia sense of hits), is what Indian logicians call the first side (purva paksha), establishing good reasons to hate the British. I should like now to try to nuance that view a little, to aim for a more balanced hate-love toward them.

  The Freudian and post-Freudian Marxist agendas tell us to look for the subtext, the hidden transcript, the censored text; the Marxist and to some extent the Freudian assumption is that this subtext is less respectable, more self-serving, but also more honest, more real than the surface text. In India the British surface text—“We are bringing civilization to these savages”—reveals a subtext: “We are using military power to make England wealthy by robbing India.” But there are more than two layers to any agenda, and we mustn’t assume that it’s self-interest all the way down. The peccavi anecdote suggests that beneath the subtext of self-interest may lie at least a slightly nobler self-perception, a place where guilt is registered. And perhaps, beneath that, there may be yet another layer, an admiration of India, a desire to learn from India, perhaps even a genuine, if misguided, desire to give India something in return, still surviving, bloody but unbowed, from the first wave of Orientalists.

  If we ask, What did the Hindus get out of the Raj besides poor? the answer, in part, is the mixed blessing of certain social and legal reforms, which reinforced the native reform movements already under way. Most of the giants of the independence movement—Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Dadabhai Naoroji, and others—studied abroad, generally in London.111 But they also got, as they did from the Mughals, the complicated legacy symbolized by horses, now more complex than ever.

  HORSES IN KIPLING’S KIM

  Horses were, you will not be surprised to learn, a problem for the British in India. Some horses were bred well in India; in 1860 a Captain Henry Shakespear, who had bred horses in the Deccan for many years, insisted that “no foreign horse that is imported into India . . . can work in the sun, and in all weathers, like the horse bred in the Deccan.”112 But the native Indian forces that opposed the British kept most of the best horses for themselves, and only a small fraction of the worst horses reached the horse fairs in the east, where the British were in control.113 There was therefore, as usual, the problem of importing horses (most of them being shipped in from New South Wales, hence called Walers); shipping such fragile and valuable cargo “in a pitching East Indiaman on a six-month journey halfway round the world” was a costly and risky venture, and British horses became even more scarce, and even more expensive, when so many of them were used in the Napoleonic Wars.114 (They imported dogs too; one Englishman in 1614 ordered from England mastiffs, greyhounds, spaniels, and small dogs, three of each, cautioning the importer that dogs were difficult to transport.115) Occasionally, exporting, rather than importing, horses also became a problem. Sir Charles Napier was crazy about a half-Arabian horse named Blanco, “perfectly white,” whom he rode, talked to, and talked about for sixteen years. Sparing no expense, Napier had tried to ship the old horse home like a pensioned-off Indian civil servant, to spend his final days out at grass—good pasturage at last. But Blanco died in the Bay of Biscay while being, against the usual current, exported from Portugal to England.116

  At the same time, itinerant native horse traders, who were often highway robbers in their spare time (the equine equivalent of used car salesmen), posed an even greater threat as a kind of underground espionage network, a cosmopolitan culture that had its own esoteric language, a mixture of various local dialects combined with a special jargon and an extensive code of hand signs, exchanged during the actual bargaining at the fair, mainly concealed under a handkerchief.117 In recorded British history, horse breeding, spying, and Orientalism combined in the character of William Moorcroft, a famous equine veterinarian. In 1819, the British sent him to Northwest India, as far as Tibet and Afghanistan, on a quixotic search for “suitable cavalry mounts.”118 Moorcroft had seen mares from Kutch that he thought might be right for the army, and he was granted official permission “to proceed towards the North Western parts of Asia, for the purpose of there procuring by commercial intercourse, horses to improve the breed within the British Province or for military use.”119 But he also collected information on military supplies and political and economic conditions obtaining at the borders of the Raj,120 and shortly before his mysterious final disappearance in 1824, he was briefly imprisoned in the Hindu Kush on suspicion of being a spy. Moorcroft had delusions of Orientalism; he told a friend that he would have disguised himself “as a Fakeer” rather than give up his plan, and after he was lost, presumed dead, in August 1825, legends circulated about “a certain Englishman named Moorcroft who introduced himself into Lha-Ssa, under the pretence of being a Cashmerian” or who spoke fluent Persian “and dressed and behaved as a Muslim.” The final piece of Orientalism in his life was posthumous: From 1834 to 1841 his papers were edited not by a military or political historian but by Horace Hayman Wilson, secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford. According to his biographer, Moorcroft was thrilled by the stories he heard “from the north-western horse-traders—swarthy, bearded men like Kipling’s Mahbub Ali.”121 But Kipling created Mahbub Ali—a Muslim horse trader who works secretly for the master spy Colonel Creighton—fifty years after the publication of Moorcroft’s papers, and aspects of the characters of Creighton, Mahbub Ali, and Kim himself may have been inspired by Moorcroft. Kim is the son of a British soldier (a disreputable Irishman named O’Hara, already a marginal figure in the British world, who married an Irish nursemaid), but he masquerades sometimes as a Hindu, sometimes as a Muslim, and Mahbub Ali, a Tibetan lama, and Colonel Creighton all claim him as their son.

  Horses are deeply implicated in espionage in Kipling’s Kim, right from the start. Napier’s code message, in the anecdote, was about a war; the very first chapter of Kim introduces a message about a war, coded not in Latin but in horses: “[T]he pedigree of the white stall
ion is fully established.” Again, it is a triple code, of which the first two levels are easy enough to crack: Ostensibly, on the first level, it means that the Muslim horse trader Mahbub Ali is able to vouch for a valuable horse that the colonel may buy. The coded message on the second level is that a provocation has occurred that will justify a British attack in Northwest India (much like Napier’s).

  The third level of signification is more complex. The idea of a pedigree implies that you know the horse when you know its father and mother (or dam and sire); the ideas underlying the breeding of horses, ideas about “bloodlines” and “bloodstock” and Thoroughbreds, also marked the racist theory of the breeding of humans. Kim is said to have “white blood,” an oxymoron. The question that haunts the book is, Who are Kim’s sire and dam? I need not point out the significance of the color of the stallion in a book by Kipling (who coined the phrase “the white man’s burden”). But we might recall that the Vedic stallion of the ancient Hindus, the symbol of expansionist political power, was also white, in contrast with the Dasyus or Dasas, who were said to come from “dark wombs” (RV 2.20.7). British racist ideas, supported by a complex pseudoscientific ideology, rode piggyback on already existing Hindu ideas about dark and light skin conceived without the support of a racist theory like that of the British; one might say that the Indians imagined racism for themselves before the British imagined it against them. The white stallion also implicitly represents Kim’s Irish father in the metaphor that Creighton and Mahbub Ali apply to Kim, behind his back: Kim is a colt that must be gentled into British harness.122 On the other hand, to Kim’s face, Mahbub Ali uses horses as a paradigm for the multiculturalism of Kim’s world, which includes not only his English, Indian, and Tibetan Buddhist father figures, but both a good Catholic chaplain and an evil Anglican chaplain, the Bengali Hindu babu named Hurree Chunder Mookerjee and the Jainas of the temple where the lama resides. Kim feels that he is a sahib among sahibs, but he questions his own identity “among the folk of Hind” in terms of religion: “What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist?” Mahbub Ali’s response (in the passage cited at the start of this chapter) is: “This matter of creeds is like horseflesh . . . the Faiths are like the horses. Each has merit in its own country.”123

  KIPLING, THE GOOD BAD POET

  Kim’s multireligious identity crisis (“What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist?”) is stripped of its multicultural details in the simple question that he asks himself over and over again—“Who is Kim?”—and then, in the final chapter: “I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?”kj Kipling bequeathed this individual quandary of multicultural identity to other novelists too, including Salman Rushdie, who, I think, modeled the hero of Midnight’s Children on Kim, a boy with English blood who appears to be both Hindu and Muslim. But Rushdie reverses the point about race: The English blood doesn’t matter at all, or the Hindu blood; the boy is a Muslim because he is raised as a Muslim. Hari Kunzru too is indebted to Kipling for some elements of the multicultural hero of his novel The Impressionist, though he takes the theme in very different directions: Kunzru’s hero has an English father and an Indian mother, and he passes for white but loses the white girl he loves, loses her because (final irony) she prefers men of color.

  How are we to evaluate the legacy of Kipling, doing justice both to his racism and to his deeply perceptive portrayal of India?

  In his surprisingly appreciative essay on Kim, Edward Said wrestles with his conflicted feelings about Kipling. On the one hand, Said demonstrates how deeply embedded, indeed coded, in Kim is the racist and imperialist view for which Kipling became notorious. On the other hand, Said speaks of Kim as “profoundly embarrassing”124—for Said, and for us, for any readers caught between their warm response to the artistry of the book and their revulsion at the racist terminology and ideology. Said speaks of Kipling as “a great artist blinded in a sense by his own insights about India,” who sets out to advance an obfuscating vision of imperial India, but “not only does he not truly succeed in this obfuscation, but his very attempt to use the novel for this purpose reaffirms the quality of his aesthetic integrity.” Said’s ambivalence was matched by that of the poet W. H. Auden, who argued (in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 1939) that history would pardon “Kipling and his views,” though he later excised those lines from subsequent editions.

  Yet Auden’s verses are powerful in precisely the way that, George Orwell pointed out, Kipling’s own verse is powerful. Auden argued that Kipling would be pardoned “for writing well.” Orwell argued that Kipling is a “good bad poet,” who wrote the kind of poetry that you would like to forget but that you remember, almost against your will, more easily, and longer, than good poetry. 125 Kipling is “good bad” not merely in his literary qualities but also in his ethical qualities; he is both a racist and not a racist. Mowgli, for instance, the Indian hero of The Jungle Book, is portrayed in positive terms to which race is irrelevant. And Kipling, always aware that the “captains and the kings” would depart from India, could have had Charles Napier in mind when he prayed for divine guidance, “lest we forget”—forget, perhaps, the harm that the British had done in India? Rushdie, writing of his ambivalence toward the good and evil Kipling, remarks, “There will always be plenty in Kipling that I find difficult to forgive” (as Auden decided not, ultimately, to pardon Kipling), but then he adds: “but there is also enough truth in these stories to make them impossible to ignore.”126

  That truth grew out of a deep knowledge and love of India, where Kipling was born and which he described (in “Mandalay”) as “a cleaner, greener land” (than England). Some of his stories can be read as variants on some of the classical texts of Hinduism. “On Greenhow Hill” (1891) is a translation, in the broadest sense, of the story of Yudhishthira and the dog who accompanies him into heaven; in the Kipling story, some Methodists are trying to convert an Irish Catholic to Methodism. They don’t like his dog, and tell him that he must give up the dog because he is “worldly and low,” and would he let himself “be shut out of heaven for the sake of a dog?” He insists that if the door isn’t wide enough for the pair of them, they’ll stay outside rather than be parted. And so they let him bring the dog to chapel. In “The Miracle of Puran Bhagat” (1894), a Hindu who becomes a high-ranking civil servant under the British and is even knighted gives it all up to become a renouncer; wild animals befriend him, as he shuns all human life. But he reenters the world when, warned by the animals, he saves a village from a flash flood, giving up his own life in the process. By translating dharma and the householder life into civil service for the Raj, Kipling gives a new twist to the old problem of the tension between renunciation and service to the world. Kim is as much about the search for Release from the wheel of samsara as it is about the intensely political and material world of espionage. In the final chapter, the lama’s vision of the universe, including himself (“I saw all Hind, from Ceylon in the sea to the Hills. . . . Also I saw the stupid body of Teshoo Lama lying down . . .”), replicates the vision of the universe, and themselves, that Yashoda and Arjuna saw in the mouth of Krishna.

  Kim is a novel written about, and out of, the British love of India. In part, of course, that love was like the love of one Englishman, Shakespeare’s Henry V, for France: “I love France so well, that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine.”127 But that is not the only kind of love there is, even in the hearts of other dead white males who “loved” the civilizations of people they colonized;128 Gandhi referred to the British as “those who loved me.”129 The British also loved India for the right reasons, reasons that jump off every page of Kim: the beauty of the land, the richness and intensity of human interactions, the infinite variety of religious forms.

  CHAPTER 22

  SUTTEE AND REFORM IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE RAJ

  1800 to 1947 CE

  CHRONOLOGY

  1772-1833 Rammohun Roy lives; 1828 he founds Brahmo Samaj

  1824-1883 Dayananda Sarasva
ti lives; 1875 he founds Arya Samaj

  1869-1948 Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi lives

  1861-1941 Rabindranath Tagore lives

  1919 Amritsar massacre takes place

  1947 Independence and Partition happen

  [Version A] After they had performed their superstitious ceremonies,

  they placed the woman on the pile with the corpse, and set fire to the

  wood. As soon as the flames touched her, she jumped off the pile. Immediately

  the brahmuns seized her, in order to put her again into the

  flames: she exclaimed—“Do not murder me! I do not wish to be burnt!”

  The Company’s officers being present, she was brought home safely.

  Missionary Register, March 18201

  [Version B] What most surprised me, at this horrid and barbarous rite, was the tranquility of the woman, and the joy expressed by her relations, and the spectators. . . . She underwent everything with the greatest intrepidity, and her countenance seemed, at times, to be animated with pleasure, even at the moment when she was ascending the fatal pile.

  J. S. Stavorinus (a Dutch admiral who visited Bengal in 1769 and 1770), 17702

  WOMEN: SUTTEE UNDER BRITISH EYES