by Simon Schama
In London, Macaulay is supposed to have dutifully plunged into the tomes, filling up his famously cavernous memory bank with details of salt evaporation in Gujarat or the niceties of caste. What he learned he almost certainly retained. But his heart was not in his homework. Too much knowledge of India, he thought, ran the risk of bewitching a healthily rational, liberal, progressive mind with the mumbo-jumbo of exotic culture. Although he had been a critic of James Mill he certainly read his influential The History of British India (1817), and, to those who objected that its author had never actually been to India, Macaulay would have endorsed Mill’s opinion that ‘whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India can be expressed in writing … a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could during the longest life by the use of his eyes and ears in India’. Besides, Macaulay had it on good advice that perfectly decent, sensible fellows went out there only to become infatuated with the erotic abominations of temple sculpture or bogged down, beyond hope of rescue, in senselessly elaborate attempts to codify Hindu law. As if any sound 19th-century administrator with a modicum of common sense could suppose that that was what India needed! What India needed was the crisp reasoning of Europe. Perhaps he would not have gone quite as far as Curzon, who in a characteristic outrage told an audience at Calcutta University that ‘truth is a Western concept’; but he would not have demurred either.
Macaulay’s prejudices were, to a great extent, shared by the Governor-General, William Bentinck, ‘the clipping Dutchman’ who had brought a dose of his own personal evangelicalism with him to Calcutta. Bentinck spoke, one visitor thought, like a Pennsylvania Quaker, and he certainly dressed like one in black broadcloth frock coats, in deliberately reproachful contrast to the flashier older generation’s fondness for Indian scarves and brocaded waistcoats. When its charter had been renewed in 1813, under evangelical pressure the Company had been made to open territories under its control to the penetration of ‘Western’ ideas – often a code phrase for the beginning of serious missionary activity. Whilst Bentinck was too prudent to lend his authority to something bound to stir up trouble he was also not shy of identifying ‘abominations’, the removal of which might pave the way for the reception of ‘enlightenment’. And lest he slide in this determination there was always Charles Trevelyan, his political secretary, to remind him of the call of duty. Trevelyan was the son of the Archdeacon of Taunton and had grown up full of uncoordinated zeal. The East India Company College at Haileybury, where he had been taught by the grimly brilliant economist the Reverend Thomas Malthus (an experience that would have a profound and terrible influence on his later career), had given Trevelyan’s civic anxiety direction and purpose. He had arrived in Delhi in 1827 at the age of 20 ardent with the kind of passions only Trevelyan’s generation could enthuse over: tariff reform, for example. When, a few years later, he pursued Macaulay’s sister Hannah, his courtship repartee (according to the admittedly possessive Tom) consisted of ‘steam navigation, the education of the natives, the equalization of the sugar duties, the substitution of the Roman for the Arabic alphabet. He is by no means as good a wooer as a financier … and he never read, I believe, a novel in all his life.’ Hannah accepted him all the same.
Trevelyan, then, was a prig; but he was a prig for the empire. Corruption made him smoke with fury. He had been in Delhi only a few months when, at the age of 21, he took it on himself to expose Sir Edward Colebrooke, the chief magistrate and a noted authority of the older generation on Hindu and Muslim law, for accepting gifts. Even if it had occurred to Trevelyan that refusing those gifts would have caused a far greater sense of grievance and anger among those who offered them, he would have been horrified that the Company could possibly lend its authority to such wicked customs. Publicly vilified, Colebrooke (whose threats against the whippersnapper puritan had made him even steelier) was sent home in disgrace, a broken man. Trevelyan felt the pleasure of vindication, not to mention promotion. He moved to Calcutta as Bentinck’s deputy political secretary.
Trevelyan was not a bigot. He had been a thoughtful tutor to the son of the Raja of Bhurtpore and he encouraged young Brahmins who were interested in Western learning to come to him for guidance. He himself (unlike Macaulay) had been a brilliant student of Indian languages, both classical and vernacular. This, however, did not make him a cultural pluralist. The sanction of tradition left him cold. The fact that a disreputable custom had been long practised, he believed, made it in no way less reprehensible. And in the case of sati – the ritual cremation of a widow alongside her husband – Trevelyan and Bentinck saw an unqualified abomination. There were others – female infanticide, child betrothals and forced consummations – that were also self-evidently abhorrent. But abolishing sati – even though there were no more than perhaps 500 documented cases every year in all of India – became a test case of the application of ‘civilized’ values to India.
The extent of the British Empire in 1914.
Although a reading of the Westernizers’ literature on the subject suggested that this was a campaign they had dreamed up by themselves, it was in fact the cause célèbre of Hindu reformers like Rajah Ram Mohan Roy. As early as the 1820s he had attacked sati as unauthorized by the sacred Hindu scriptures known as the Vedanta, and brought a group of equally learned Hindu reformers to the Governor’s House to urge him to abolish the practice. Bentinck certainly made the abolition of sati his own mission. In 1829, after heated speeches had been made and volumes of investigations published by parliament, Bentinck decreed that it was banned. Officers were now authorized to intercept widows en route to the pyre. Shortly afterwards, a statue of the Governor presiding over native women plucked from the flames was set on a pedestal in the park immediately behind where the Victoria Memorial Monument would stand in the next century. Beneath his expression of amiable benevolence, Hindu widows – their features absurdly Westernized to resemble the standard early Victorian epitome of maidens in distress – are rescued from the clutches of sinister turbaned types as they are marched towards the flames.
Although the abolition of sati was part of an Eastern campaign to purify Hindu practice and reform what Ram Mohan Roy thought was the illegitimate, usurped authority of Brahmin caste authority, it became a self-congratulatory mantra for Westernizers convinced that their idea of ethics would be an unqualified boon for India. They spoke as though their government were the first truly to know India without their freedom of action being compromised by the knowledge. In fact, they knew a lot less than their predecessors and a lot less than they supposed. Sati was taken as an emblem of the cruel obscurantism of Hinduism when in fact Hinduism did not call for it. And it was invariably twinned in the apologias for British supremacy with the phenomenon of thagi, the ritual strangling with scarves said to be practised by devotees of the goddess Kali (whose very mention was guaranteed to send a shiver up Victorian spines). The Confessions of a Thug (1839), written by Philip Meadows Taylor from information given to him by one of the criminals, became a best-seller as soon as it was published. Queen Victoria was so impatient to read it that she demanded the galley proofs ‘as corrected by the author’, and sat up late in bed much excited by its revelations. Major William Sleeman, thug-hunter-in-chief who became an early Victorian hero, cast himself as an imperial mastermind who had been able, with the help of informants, to penetrate the occult language and underworld of the pan-Indian cult conspiracy. When they were on leave in the home counties many sahibs and memsahibs were treated as instant authorities, pestered for samples of the killer scarves or accounts of the juiciest murders. For example, Harriet Tytler, the young wife of an army officer, was sure that, whilst an initiate was required by religious vows to Kali to commit an assigned number of murders a year (usually three), should a bat or owl suddenly appear at the moment he was about to strike this evil omen would cause him to stay his hand. Although not particularly successful at making the trunk roads safer, uncontrolled thugophobia in Brit
ain and India in the 1830s did, however, hugely expand the police power, not to mention the moral self-importance of the government, permitting the authorities to make pre-emptive arrests of persons suspected of belonging to the cult even when there was no evidence of a crime having been committed. Much of the hysteria was an elaborate fantasy laid over the genuine reality of violent lawlessness on the highways, the product of the breakdown of the local Indian authorities that British military power had done much to accelerate. The ‘secret language’ that Sleeman claimed to have decoded, which was said to bind together the underworld brotherhood of stranglers, was in all likelihood nothing more than local gang slang.
But thugophobia, at its height when Macaulay arrived in Calcutta, certainly played to the British sense that, notwithstanding the overwhelmingly military character of their power, they were a force for peace. As a member of the governor’s council (although often so bored by meetings that during them he wrote to his friends back home), Macaulay was responsible for drafting reports on reforms to be made to the penal system – even though, as his enemies later pointed out, he knew virtually nothing about traditional India. As far as he was concerned, however, familiarity with the minutiae of Hindu law would do nothing to shake his conviction that a single, unified penal code, applicable to Indians and British alike, and available in English, not Persian, should be the foundation of any respectable system of justice.
But it was his February 1835 Minute on Education that threw Macaulay headlong into a furious debate about the entire meaning and direction of British rule in India. The ostensible issue was whether it should be English or Indian languages that were subsidized by the company for use in higher education in India. This was, of course, a generation for whom education was the mightiest of all engines of social progress. As far as Macaulay and Charles Trevelyan (who took the cause of English as his personal crusade) were concerned, access to the rational, scientific enlightenment was a universal right. Depriving Indians of the chance to jump aboard the mighty steam locomotive of benign change, just because of some misplaced sensitivity towards their indigenous languages and texts, was not to do them any favours. Macaulay’s pithiest remark along these lines, the one for which his name is still infamous in India, was that ‘I have never found [anyone] distinguished by their proficiency in the eastern tongues who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ No Ayurvedic medicine or Sanskrit literature for Clever Tom.
Why would one wish to patronize ‘medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move girls in an English boarding school to laughter, history abounding with kings thirty feet hight and reigns thirty thousand years long and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’? (How easily, when it suited him, had the encyclopedic Macaulay memory deleted from recollection the chronologies and the miraculous apparitions of the Old Testament!)
For Macaulay and Trevelyan, the issue was not just a matter of enlightening the ‘benighted Asiaticks’ for its own sake. On the creation of an English-educated class of Indians depended the entire viability of the imperial enterprise. There were just too many Indian millions and too few bright, decent chaps to civilize them (the chaps were notoriously vulnerable to the broth of infectious diseases cooked up under the southern Asian sun). Besides, there wasn’t time to learn all the minutiae of caste and religious practice, let alone in the 18 most common languages of India. Cultural go-betweens were, therefore, a necessity: ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, opinions, morals and in intellect’. Such men, exposed to Newton as well as Shakespeare, imparting ‘useful’ as well as refining knowledge, would be the human conduits through whom an immense cultural transformation would flow. The system would be like a monitorial system for the millions, with the top boys instructing those lower down in the form and so on until the work of civilization spread through the length and breadth of India. The consequences of this change would be momentous. It was not just a question of creating Indians who could recite Milton and Blackstone, admirable though that undoubtedly was. Through English, they would be open to ‘proper’ concepts of justice and develop a healthy aversion to ‘barbarous’ customs, dress and manners. They would become, in short, the stuff of citizenship, which in turn would make them avid customers for the best that Britain had to offer from the common law to broadcloth. It was not entirely to be ruled out that some of them, one radiant day, would also become Christians.
As far as the reformers were concerned, then, the issue of the medium of instruction was not just some high-minded quibble. It was the Archimedean point on which the future of the empire turned. For with a Westernized population there would be such natural sympathy between rulers and ruled that coercion would be unnecessary; the numbers of the military and the weight of taxation needed to fund them could be reduced. With disposable income beyond the needs of subsistence, the masses would share Britannia’s bounty. ‘We shall exchange profitable subjects for MORE profitable allies,’ Trevelyan had written. Above all, the English language was to be understood as the electricity of change; the jolt that could galvanize Asian ‘inertia’ into dynamism. It would produce light and power.
But this obsession with English-language instruction was dismissed as just another ‘visionary absurdity’ by the orientalist Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, H.H. Wilson, who had spent many years in India and, like his friends and colleagues, understood its languages, law and religion at a depth that neither Trevelyan nor Macaulay remotely approached. All they knew, Wilson and the Company civil servant Henry Thoby Prinsep fulminated, was the world of the Calcutta clubs, insulated from the vast, unyielding reality of Indian village life. English, the orientalists insisted, would never penetrate anything but the upper-crust commercial and legal classes in the towns and cities whom the British administrators already knew. Instead of creating a group that could diffuse such knowledge downwards, English would merely create a clique detached from the rest of Indian society. Even if Macaulay, Trevelyan and like-minded men should succeed, what they would spawn would be a cultural mongrel group, with a vested interest in telling the sahibs what they thought they wanted or needed to hear.
Besides, in the orientalist view it was not the proper mission of the British to make India some sort of cultural satrap of the West; or even to refashion it in the image of the European enlightenment. Ever since Warren Hastings’s governor-generalship in the 1770s and 1780s the Company had accepted that it had a duty to repair and restore India’s own institutions, however apparently diverse and contradictory. That was why Hastings himself had learned Persian; why the judge and scholar Sir William Jones and the great Sanskrit authority Henry Colebrooke had eaten up years of their life attempting to clarify and codify Hindu law; why Vedic scholars like Ram Mohan Roy could respond positively to what the West had to offer, since it did not presume to impose its values on them. And by posing the issue as a choice between Indian classical languages and modern English, the orientalists worried that opportunities to teach modern subjects in popular vernaculars such as Hindustani would also go by the board.
A bitter debate ensued in the 1830s, with the heavy artillery of the orientalists, Prinsep and Wilson, appalled at the ignorance and presumption of their aggressively Westernizing adversaries. Some 20 years later, in the 1850s, testifying before the House of Lords, Wilson commented acidly that ‘Macaulay knew nothing of the people; he spoke only from what he saw immediately around him, which has been the greatest source of the mistakes committed by the advocates for English exclusively.’ But for better or worse, Macaulay’s and Trevelyan’s way was the way of the future. They told Bentinck – and they were not in fact altogether wrong – that much of the demand for English, rather than traditional, instruction was coming from Indians themselves. The Governor-General duly abolished the government grants to the Islamic Madrassa and the Hindu Sanskrit College set up in Hastings’ and Wellesley’s day, alon
g with Fort William College, which, at the time of its liquidation, was giving excellent instruction in six Indian languages to its British students. All that was left of that programme were the Sanskrit courses at Haileybury, which students in succeeding generations treated as an excruciatingly tedious joke. Although the defeated party, the orientalists, have become a byword for cultural imperialism, the stubborn fact remains that they were the first and only generation of the British in southern Asia who had both the capacity and sympathetic enthusiasm to understand the culture in which they had planted themselves. When, referring to Macaulay and Trevelyan, Wilson spoke of ‘individuals of undoubted talent but of undeniable inexperience … who set themselves up to undo all that was effected by men at least their equals in ability and their betters in experience and who can never be surpassed in an ardent desire to accelerate the moral and religious amelioration of the natives of India’ he was not far off the mark.
What struck the orientalists as particularly naïve – or hypocritical – was the argument that through English the millions presently divided by many languages and dialects, religions and castes would be brought together, both with each other and with their rulers. In fact, they prophesied all too accurately that the adoption of English as an official lingua franca would guarantee that the language of government was the language of a ruling caste, whether British or Westernized Indian; a code that would alienate the mass of the people from their rulers, just as had been the case with Mughal court Persian. Instead of turning their backs on the past, as the British kept on promising, they were recycling it with a different accent. Charles Trevelyan actually recruited Indian graduates of the English College at Delhi as interpreters and personal assistants to English agents sent on embassies to neighbouring states. The progress of their conversion into Westernized Indians was monitored by the assiduousness and punctiliousness with which they kept journals of their missions. Before long some of them, like Shahamat Lal, who went with Major Claude Wade to the Punjab in 1837, and then on the catastrophic military expedition to Kabul in 1839, were heard complaining about native ‘superstitions’ and ‘despotisms’ in a voice of disgusted ridicule that perfectly echoed that of their colonial masters.
