by Jon Wilson
Colonel’s retreat
Powell shared with most recent historians the idea that Britain’s empire was a coherent force in the world. In the last few decades, for radical critics of global capitalism and defenders of global Western power alike, the history of Britain’s empire in India has become a metaphor and a political football. In the process empire is seen to represent a straightforward set of ideas about global domination which have endured from the days of the Raj to the present day. This book has challenged these myths of imperial purpose and power propagated on both the political left and the right. Looking at empire from the bottom-up, through the real lives of its functionaries and subjects, we see how imperial power was rarely exercised to put grand purposes into practice. Its operation was driven instead by narrow interests and visceral passions, most importantly the desire to maintain British sovereign institutions in India for its own sake. That desire created structures and institutions in the subcontinent, as well as those thousands of cemeteries which mark the resting place of Britons who died and were buried in Indian soil. But it left no purpose, culture or ideology.
We get a sense of this by looking at the fate of the monuments the British built to commemorate their rule in the subcontinent. The total, sudden British retreat from South Asia in 1947 meant there was little impetus to pull imperial monuments down. British observers in the 1950s and early 1960s were surprised to find ‘there were still many streets named after English viceroys’, even statues of the British army’s most brutal commanders in place. British visitors imagined this was because of the high opinion South Asia’s ‘leaders of opinion’ placed on their connections with Britain. After his wife sat opposite a portrait of her grandfather, the one-time Viceroy Lord Dufferin at a dinner in Delhi in 1958, Harold Macmillan was ‘impressed by the respect in which the British people were now held’. More important was the fact that political elites wanted to maintain stability and continuity, and that the rapid departure of the British made them quickly irrelevant to South Asian life. When politicians thought about removing a statue of Queen Victoria in Bombay, the Indian Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel sharply criticized them ‘for bothering about the question of monuments when they had far more urgent business on hand’. Patel’s point was that because the statues embodied a form of power which had disappeared there was no point in pulling them down. The absence of enduring imperial purposes or ideologies meant the British were quickly irrelevant to South Asia.17
The statues started to tumble in the 1960s. By then, images of long-dead British officers had begun to symbolize something new and different. For the left, particularly, in South Asia, they came to embody a far more expansive form of power than the British had ever claimed in India. They came to represent the West’s cultural and economic domination of the ‘third world’, a kind of power summed up by the word ‘imperialism’ but which critics thought had been continued into their own present time. The United States was the state seen to embody this malign force most of all, regarded as extending its influence not merely through military might but through the economic clout of US-owned companies. But as Britain tried to mitigate its loss of imperial sovereignty by deepening its partnership with the United States in the 1960s, the UK increasingly became a target, too. A movement grew calling for economic ties with Britain and the US to be cut, for English to be replaced with Hindi and for old imperial statues to be pulled down. These campaigns were driven by a kind of vernacular north Indian populism concerned to challenge Anglicized Indian elites who had retained power after independence; their target was domestic more than global. They had little traction in southern India, where imperial statues stayed longer than elsewhere. But the consequence was that state and city governments started to move figures of kings, queens and viceroys into disused exhibition grounds, junk yards and parks. For the most part, that is where they have stayed, replaced in their original location by new figures of regional and national heroes.
But in the last decade India has seen the emergence of a new attitude towards the imperial past. Many statues have been uncovered and washed; the grass around them has been cut, and their sites have been added to India’s tourist maps. Old imperial monuments have been cleaned and renovated. In 2016, Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata was in the process of being renovated. Delhi is to have a ‘heritage corridor’, which will connect a series of monuments from pre-Mughal to British times by underground railway. Throughout India, British-era buildings have been opened up as resorts for the delight of India’s middle classes. Hotel chains market British governors’ residences and hill station retreats alongside Mughal monuments and rajas’ palaces as part of India’s single seamless ‘heritage’. The chaos and fragility of British rule are passed over. For Indian consumers British rule is associated with a ‘colonial’ style of solid wood, high ceilings and leather armchairs, which evokes escape from India’s fraught present into ‘old-world charm’, power and luxury.
For some, then, British rule seems to represent a form of power that newly connects to the ambitions of a modern, outward-looking global India. For others it denotes a systematic form of oppression, a site of devastating cultural and economic oppression. In either case British memorials can be assimilated into stories about the exercise of political power in the past running up to the present. In the process, British rule has become an almost infinitely manipulable set of images and symbols, few of which connect back to the realities of British power.
As an example, one might take the fate of Coronation Park in New Delhi, the site of the 1877, 1903 and 1911 Durbars but also the dumping ground for some of the Indian capital’s largest imperial monuments. The park will have an underground station and a new visitors’ centre. The statues of Queen Victoria and George V have been cleaned, but placed alongside new large red stone edifices which have Ashoka’s circle, the symbol of the Indian nation, carved into them. In the process, British monarchs have been assimilated into a story about Indian institutions and power. Renovation was begun to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the decision to move the capital of British India from Calcutta (as it was called then) to Delhi in 1911. Now, that moment might be seen as the start of Delhi’s growth into a sprawling metropolis of more than twenty million people, the centre of political power but also the largest lure in India for rural migrants. In 2011, it was celebrated as the point when the British finally recognized Delhi’s centrality to the Indian nation, an instant which ‘return[ed] to the historic city its lost glory’, but which also signalled the beginning of their city’s rise to prominence. The history of empire has been appropriated into a narrative about Indian national life.
But the contrast with the moment when Delhi became British India’s capital could not be more extreme. Nineteen eleven was the only time a British monarch stood as sovereign on Indian soil. The durbar was held to celebrate British sovereign power over India; the decision to announce the new capital was a minor part of proceedings. In fact, the British government decided to shift their capital because they did not think Delhi mattered. The move was the attempt by a regime in recess to protect its power through retreat, from the vibrant site of political opposition to a city they thought was dead and empty. The point is that unlike Indian governments now, British officers in India were not concerned with their practical power to do things throughout India. They had no outcomes to deliver, no objectives to implement, and no way to be held to account. They were interested merely in defending themselves and maintaining the trappings of authority, and that could happen distant from the scenes of real political action. As perhaps we too often forget, they belonged to a world which was very different from ours.18
NOTES
Preface
1John Burnell, Bombay in the Days of Queen Anne, ed. Samuel Townsend Sheppard (London, 1933), 25, 62.
2Calculated from Julian J. Cotton, List of European Tombs in the Bellary District with Inscriptions Thereon (Bellary, 1894).
3Peter Robb, ‘Memory, Place and British Memorials in Early C
alcutta’, in Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh, and Upal Chakrabarti, Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India. Essays in Honour of Petter Robb (New Delhi, 2016); Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (London, 1866), 56.
4Graveyards calculated from British Association of South Asian Cemeteries records, India Office Records, (hereafter abbreviated as IOR) Mss Eur F/370/1.
5Public Works Department, Government of India, Central Public Works Department Manual (New Delhi, 2012), v.
6Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Government of India, Central Secretariat, Manual of Office Procedure (New Delhi, 2010).
7Ranajit Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, Critical Inquiry, xxiii (London, 1997), 488.
8Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred: Or, The New Crusade (1847), 268; in a famous reference to this passage Edward Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth, 1978), xiii, 5 rightly criticizes Disraeli’s assumption of a homogeneous ‘East’, but misinterprets it to suggest Asia mattered in British political life.
9Lytton Strachey, ‘Warren Hastings. An Essay for the Grieves Prize’, 1901–7, BL Add Mss 81930; Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey. The New Biography (1980), 190 [ch.4]; S. P. Rosenbaum, ‘Strachey, (Giles) Lytton (1880–1932)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004.
1. Societies of Societies
1David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze–Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2010), 454; Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2003), 37–98.
2Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Deccan Frontier and Mughal Expansion, Ca. 1600: Contemporary Perspectives’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, xlvii (2004), 357–89; Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives (2005), 1–9.
3Rosalind O’Hanlon and Christopher Minkowski, ‘What Makes People Who They Are? Pandit Networks and the Problem of Livelihoods in Early Modern Western India’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, xlv (2008), 382; Dilip M. Menon, ‘Houses by the Sea. State Experimentation on the Southwest Coast of India 1760–1800’, in Neera Chandhoke (ed.), Mapping Histories: Essays Presented to Ravinder Kumar (2000), 161–87.
4For Bengal’s fluvial ecology, see Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke, 2010); Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley, CA, 1993).
5N. B. Dirks, Castes of Mind. Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 13; R. B. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1990).
6Ghulam Hossein Khan, The Seir Mutaquerin, or Review of Modern Times (Delhi, 1926) iii, 189.
7Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200–1800 (London, 2004); Mouez Khalfoui, ‘Together but Separate: How Muslim Scholars Conceived of Religious Plurality in South Asia in the Seventeenth Century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, lxxiv (2011), 87–96; Nandini Chatterjee, ‘Reflections on Religious Difference and Permissive Inclusion in Mughal Law’, Journal of Law and Religion, xxix (2014), 396–415.
8Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730 (Cambridge; New York, 2004), 58–61; Farhat Hasan, ‘Forms of Civility and Publicness in Pre-British India’, in Rajeev Bhargava and Helmut Reifeld, Civil Society, Public Sphere, and Citizenship. Dialogues and Perceptions (New Delhi, 2005), 84–106.
9Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes: Brahmins, Ka¯yasthas and the Social Order in Early Modern India’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, xlvii (2010), 563–95; David L. Curley, ‘Kings and Commerce on an Agrarian Frontier: Kalketu’s Story in Mukunda’s Candimangal’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, xxxviii (2001), 299–324.
10‘Case of the Rani of Rajshahi’, 26 September 1780, IOR H/215, 353–66.
11M. J. Akbar, The Administration of Justice by the Mughals (Lahore, 1948), 13; Stewart Gordon, ed., Robes of Honour: Khil’at in Pre-colonial and Colonial India (Delhi, 2003).
12Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge, 1993), 32.
13Stewart Gordon, ‘The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720–1760’, Modern Asian Studies, xi (1977), 1–40; Gordon, The Marathas 76–78.
14Gordon, The Marathas 70–79.
15M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge, 1987), 13; Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1997), 64.
16Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama (Cambridge, 1997), 50–56.
17Pearson, The Portuguese in India, 55.
18David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, (Cambridge, 2000), 8.
2. Trading with Ghosts
1Sushil Chandra Dutta, The North-East and the Mughals, 1661–1714 (New Delhi, 1984), 154–6.
2William Hedges, The Diary of William Hedges, Esq. during His Agency in Bengal (1681–1687), ed. Henry Yule (London, 1887), i, 43–4.
3Ibid., i, 133–4.
4‘His Majesty’s Commission to the Commander of the Beaufort and 18 other ships’, 14 Jan 1686, IOR E/3/91, 56.
5Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), 11 & passim; Philip Stern, ‘Corporate Virtue: The Languages of Empire in Early Modern British Asia’, Renaissance Studies, xxvi (2012), 512.
6Philip Lawson, The East India Company. A History, 1600–1857 (London, 1993), 9–52.
7Basil Morgan, ‘Smythe, Sir Thomas (c.1558–1625)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
8For a detailed account of the trial see Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York, 2011), 41–61.
9T. B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1816), x, 430–1; Henry Pollexfen, The Argument of a Learned Counsel (London, 1696).
10Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials x, 484–6.
11Ibid., 386–94; Pollexfen, Argument of a Learned Counsel, 54; Stern, The Company-State, 43.
12‘His Majesty’s Commission to the Commander of the Beaufort and 18 other ships’, 14 Jan 1686, IOR E/3/91, 59.
13John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray (London, 1850), 173.
14Gary S. De Krey, ‘Hedges, Sir William (1632–1701)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004).
15Hedges, Diary of William Hedges, i, 30, 15; Stern, The Company-State, (New York, 2011), 46.
16Hedges, Diary of William Hedges, i, 52, 81–2; Charles Fawcett and William Foster, The English Factories in India, 1678–1684, 4 vols (Oxford, 1954), IV, 308; Kasimbazar Factory Records, IOR G/23/4.
17Hedges, Diary of William Hedges, i, 33; K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1978).
18Hedges, Diary of William Hedges, 35–42.
19Fawcett and Foster, The English Factories in India, 1678–1684, iv, 230; Hent de Vries, ‘Connecting Europe and Asia. A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape Route Trade, 1497–1795’, in Dennis O. Flynn et al. (eds.), Global Connections and Monetary History 1470–1800 (Burlington, VT, 2003), 35–106; Farhat Hasan, ‘Indigenous Cooperation and the Birth of a Colonial City: Calcutta, c. 1698–1750’, Modern Asian Studies, xxvi (1992), 65–82.
20Hedges, Diary of William Hedges, i, 64.
21Hedges, Diary of William Hedges, i, 165.
22‘Transactions of the Committee of Secrecy’, 14 January 1686, IOR E/3/91, 70–82.
23John Bruce, Annals of the Honorable East-India Company (London, 1810), ii, 646–653.
24Dacca Diary, August–Dec 1690, IOR G/15/1.
25Ray Strachey and Oliver Strachey, Keigwin’s Rebellion (1683–4), an Episode in the History of Bombay (Oxford, 1916); Stern, The Company-State, 62–4.
26John Ovington, A Voyage to Sur
at, in the Year 1689 (Oxford, 1929), 150; Alexander Hamilton and Carl Bridenbaugh, Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1948), 219.
27Bombay Diary Book, Feb 1689–June 1690, IOR G/3/3.
28Edward Barlow, Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea in King’s Ships, 1659 to 1703 (London, 1934), ii, 433; Stern, The Company-State, 123.
29Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, 509–511.
30Lawson, The East India Company.
31Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, The History of Bengal (Bengal, 1948), 384–90.
32Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies (London, 1744), ii, 4–5.
33Aniruddha Ray, Adventurers, Landowners and Rebels: Bengal c. 1575–c. 1715 (New Delhi, 1998).
34‘Native Legend of Job Charnock and the Founding of Fort William’, Calcutta Review, cxx (old series) (1905).
3. Forgotten Wars
1John Biddulph, The Pirates of Malabar, and an Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago (London, 1907), 253–67.
2Philip MacDougall, Naval Resistance to Britain’s Growing Power in India, 1660–1800: The Saffron Banner and the Tiger of Mysore (Wodbridge, 2014), 90–94.
3Manohar Malgonkar, The Sea Hawk: Life and Battles of Kanoji Angrey (New Delhi, 1959), 163.
4Stewart Gordon, The Marathas (Cambridge: 1993), 109–110.
5Biddulph, The Pirates of Malabar, and an Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago, 266; Bombay Proceedings, Nov 12, Dec 28, Dec 9, 1712, IOR 131–4.
6J. F. Richards, ‘Norms of Comportment among Mughal Imperial Officers’, in B. D. Metcalf, Moral Conduct and Authority. Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 285.
7Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (Delhi, 1998), 23–40.
