Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  Macaulay, the author of the Minute on Education in India, was a quintessential product of this process of British conquest and political and economic ascendancy. He drew a princely salary of £10,000 a year and spent less than £100 annually on the army of servants he employed; he kept house, as he admitted himself, more handsomely than any other member of the Council; as part of his daily routine he read French and Greek to his sister Hannah after lunch; in the evening he went out in his carriage for a drive along the river front, with servants running alongside. With unlimited arrogance and complete conviction he could thus say: ‘Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That’s worth all the grammar of rhetoric and logic in the world.’ And, in his Minute on Education he could write: ‘It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy the relative position is nearly the same.’

  Macaulay’s brother-in-law George Trevelyan was, if anything, even more contemptuous of the culture of the natives and more convinced of the need to bring in English as quickly as possible as the sole medium of instruction. Macaulay, a bachelor himself, had come to Calcutta with his sister, Hannah, whom he dearly loved. Trevelyan, a young officer of the Company, met her socially soon after their arrival. In December 1834, they were married, and Trevelyan moved into Macaulay’s home. Trevelyan was imbued with a missionary zeal to ‘uplift’ the natives. Macaulay noted that his ‘mind is full of schemes of moral and political improvement and his zeal boils over in his talk … His topics, even in courtship, are steam navigation and the education of the natives …’ One of Trevelyan’s pet causes was to replace the scripts of all the Indian languages with the Roman script, so as to end the ‘curse of Babel’, and help the formation of a national literature wholly based upon that of ‘the civilized world of Europe’. According to him there was no synonym in the local languages for words like ‘virtue’ or ‘public spirit’ or ‘patriotism’ or ‘honour’. In 1834, after the adoption as government policy of his brother-in-law’s minute, Trevelyan gloated that Lord Bentinck would be remembered by posterity because ‘in his time the Oriental mania which broke out under Lord Wellesley’s government; advanced under Lord Minto’s; was in the height of its career under Lord Hastings’; and began to flag under Lord Amherst’s, has completely exhausted itself.’ 12

  The crucial aspect to introspect about is what impact this dismissal of their language and literature had on the Indians themselves. The vast majority, illiterate and impoverished under their new rulers as they had been under many of the old, were of course condemned to uncritical servility and not equipped to follow the arguments between the Anglicists and the Orientalists. But what about the educated Indian elite, who were knowledgeable about their literary and cultural heritage and should have been sensitive to the contempt with which it was being evaluated? The debate among the British was carried out in the open and for a considerable period of time; to every statement from the Orientalists, there was a spirited riposte from the opposite side. When William Jones compared Kalidasa to Shakespeare, Trevelyan countered by saying that ‘the more popular forms of [Oriental literature] are marked by the greatest immorality and impurity’. The Utilitarian James Mill argued that the ‘lyricism and sentiment in Indian drama’ was ‘a mark of a self-indulgent society’, and this in turn was the ‘product of a despotic state’. Refined people would not, Mill argued, countenance the marriage that took place in the forest in Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam between the heroine and her lover, where sinfully ‘two lovers contract from the desire of amorous embraces’. Trevelyan was emphatic that the British did not need to spend any money to publish ‘erotic Sanskrit dramas teaching lechery in its most seductive forms’.

  Were the members of the Indian elite outraged by this? Did they protest the arbitrary imposition of a foreign language and the trashing of their own, or did they become colluders in the perpetuation of the Company’s agenda?

  An instructive way to try and understand the response of the Indian elite is to study the life of perhaps the most famous of its members then, Raja Rammohan Roy. The purpose is not to pass judgement on the well-intentioned choices he made. Individuals are products of their time and circumstance, and it is unfair to judge them in hindsight. But even so, it is useful to explore the subtle and direct ways in which colonial rule co-opts the ruled and makes them accessories in its project. Under the imperial gaze of the ruler, the victim goes through a complex process of emotions: resentment, denial, loss of self-worth, acquiescence, emulation and, ultimately, capitulation. He is often unable to distinguish between the erosion of self-respect and the pursuit of material incentives, between long-term loss and short-term gain, and between what he needs to retain and what he must reject from his own inheritance. The discourse within the ruling group on what is the best course for him has a mesmerizing and beguiling effect. He genuinely believes that his own interests are at the centre of this debate, and that the view that finally prevails is in his best interest. The subtext to this process of cultural co-option is, of course, power, but the victim does not see it so starkly. He believes that the choice he is making is of his own free will, and that the adoption of elements of the ruler’s culture is his rightful destiny. He feels empowered.

  Rammohan Roy was born in 1772 in the village of Radhanagar in Hooghly district. His father claimed descent from Narottam Thakur, a prominent follower of the fifteenth-century Vaishnava saint Chaitanya. His mother’s forebears were chief priests of the Sakta sect, and she spent her last years in the Jagannath temple at Puri. Roy was himself very religious, and indeed contemplated becoming a sanyasi at the age of fourteen. It is said that he would not even drink water without first reciting a chapter of the Bhagwata Purana. His early education was in Bengali, and by the age of fifteen he had mastered Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. He did not learn English until he was twenty-four, and his first introduction to western culture and literature was almost a decade later when he took up employment in the East India Company as an assistant to a minor functionary, John Digby. As a hard-working clerk in the Rangpur collectorate, Roy was treated well by Digby, who had apparently asked his British colleagues not to keep his assistant standing in their presence, something which even the highest placed natives were expected to do.

  After ten years of service, Roy took voluntary retirement and settled down in Calcutta in a house he had built in the European style. (The inclination of a few among the Bengali elite to adopt western lifestyles had already been noted with smug satisfaction by the British. Bishop Reginald Hebber recorded that they had begun to decorate their houses with Corinthian pillars and acquire English-style furniture.) In Calcutta, Roy organized the Atmiya Sabha, where members of the Bengali elite would meet to discuss ways to ‘uplift’ Indians from the degradation they had fallen into. The desire of some urbanized and wealthy natives in Calcutta to study European literature and science had become quite vocal, and Roy helped David Hare, an English merchant, and Sir Hyde East, Chief Justice of Bengal, to set up the Hindu College, whose avowed purpose was to abjure Hindu theology and metaphysics in favour of western history, literature and natural sciences. Roy was also very supportive of Christian missionaries entering the field of education. The Reverend Alexander Duff of the Church of Scotland was one of the first to respond. When he had difficulty in finding premises for his school, Rammohan put a hall at his disposal. On the first day a Bible was placed in the hands of the children, but Roy placated the protesting parents and students. Three hundred applicants had come for admission in a hall that could accommodate only a hundred and twenty. According to Duff, the students begged to be taken in. This is how he records their pleas: “Me want read your good books; oh, take me” “Me good boy” “Me poor boy” “Me know your commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me; oh, take me” “Oh take me
, and I pray for you”. 13

  On 11 December 1823, Roy wrote a petition to Governor General Lord Amherst against the teaching of Sanskrit and for the introduction of western sciences. The document makes for remarkable reading:

  The Sanskrit language, so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for its perfect acquisition, is well known to have been for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge; and the learning concealed under this almost impervious veil is far from sufficient to reward the labour of acquiring it … no improvement can be expected from inducing young men to consume a dozen of years of the most valuable period of their lives in acquiring the Byakaran of Sanskrit Grammar. For instance, in learning to discuss such points as the following: khad, signifying to eat, khaaduti, he or she or it eats. Query, whether does the word khaaduti, taken as a whole, convey the meaning he, or she, or it eats or are separate parts of this meaning conveyed by distinct portions of the word? As if in the English language it were asked, how much meaning is there in the word eat, how much in the [letter] s, and is the whole meaning of the word conveyed by these portions of it distinctly, or by them taken jointly?

  Neither can such improvements arise from such speculations as the following, which are the themes suggested by the Vedant: In what manner is the soul absorbed in 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 … Again, no material benefit can be derived by the student of the Meemangsa from knowing what it is that makes the killer of the goat sinless on pronouncing certain passages of the Veda … Again, the student of the Nyaya Shastra cannot be said to have improved his mind after he 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. 14

  Roy’s motivations in writing this petition were laudable. He wanted the study of western mathematics, chemistry and anatomy, clearly more advanced at this time than eastern or Indian science, to be available to Indian students. He argued for European teachers and for educational institutions to have the necessary books and scientific instruments for this new curriculum. But the important point is that in order to ask for this he had to ridicule his own civilization and heritage. As a learned student of Sanskrit, he must have known that the language was not confined only to the futile tedium of splitting infinitives: Panini’s majestic work on Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi, with which the history of linguistics begins, was written in the fourth century BC, at a time when the British were centuries away from speaking a coherent language. The six systems of Hindu philosophy constitute one of the most sophisticated metaphysical structures the world has known, and even as he dismissed the Nyaya Shastra, Roy must have been aware of the brilliance of this second-century AD text that deals, through its emphasis on debate and example, with the science of correct knowledge. Again, as a student of Vedanta Roy could not have been ignorant of the fact that Shankaracharya’s speculation on the real and the unreal was in essence a deeply insightful inquiry into the nature of reality.

  The irony is that only a few years before his petition to Amherst, Roy had authored scholarly works on the Kena, Isa, Katha and Mandukya Upanishads, and brought out a compendium of the Vedanta doctrines, the Vedantasara. What, then, made him damn his linguistic and philosophical heritage so spectacularly? If it was a tactical ploy, to gain the support of British authorities or to rebut his critics within the orthodox Hindu establishment, it must nevertheless have been deeply humiliating to endorse the superficial yet relentless criticism of his culture by the Anglicists.

  For the Anglicists, of course, Roy was an important ally—‘that enlightened native’, as William Bentinck referred to him. In fact, it is interesting to note that in Macaulay’s infamous minute, one of the examples he gives to rubbish Indian civilization, is taken straight from Roy’s petition. In his letter, Roy had reduced the legacy of the Mimamsa school of philosophy merely to passages that need to be recited to expiate the killing of a goat; a decade later Macaulay wrote that all that the ‘Hindoos’ learnt from studying their texts was ‘how to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat’. And yet, even if Roy was an ally, he was never to forget the limits of his brief. As a student of religion, and as an unabashed votary of the west’s civilizing mission, he had studied the Bible in both Hebrew and Greek. However, when he tried to extend to Christianity the same rational approach that informed his criticism of orthodox Hinduism, ‘a volley of theological thunder’ was directed his way from the Church and the British establishment. In several articles Roy had sought to separate the spiritual message of Christianity from its doctrinal fiats, and to rationally assess the miracle stories of the Gospel. But the very people who held him up as a role model for his critique of the obscurantisms in his own religion, now viciously attacked him. The influential journal Friends of India, which was published by the Baptist Missionary Society at Serampore, denounced him as ‘an intelligent heathen, whose mind is as yet completely opposed to the grand design of the Saviour’s becoming incarnate’. Roy greatly protested the use of the word ‘heathen’. It implied an exclusion which was especially hurtful to him.

  Much the same happened on other issues where Roy, perhaps simplistically, believed that he could appeal to British rationality and liberalism. When he protested in 1823 (the same year that his petition against Sanskrit was received so well by the British) against restrictions imposed on a Bengali paper that he edited, his petition to the Supreme Court in Calcutta was rebuffed, and his appeal to the King and Privy Council met with the same fate. The lines were clearly drawn, and Roy was left in no doubt about where he belonged, however eloquent his admiration for the rulers. This had been made amply clear even earlier at a personal level. In 1809, Sir Frederick Hamilton, a British official, had publicly abused Roy for not getting out of his palanquin to greet him. Roy had tried to explain that he had not seen the official as the palanquin doors were shut to keep out the dust of the road. But to no avail. Later, in a letter to Governor General Lord Minto, dated 12 April 1809, Roy protested this kind of behaviour, while expressing full confidence in the impartial justice of the British government. ‘Your petitioner is aware,’ he wrote, ‘that the spirit of the British laws would not tolerate an act of arbitrary aggression, even against the lowest class of individuals, but much less would it continue an unjust degradation of persons of respectability …’ There is no evidence that his petition merited a reply, leave alone any kind of action against the arrogant Sir Hamilton.

  Perhaps the most celebrated cause espoused by Roy was for the abolition of sati. It is said that the sight of his brother’s widow being burnt alive on her husband’s funeral pyre created a sense of deep sorrow and revulsion in him. In 1818 he issued his first pamphlet denouncing the custom, and cited Hindu sacred literature as sanction for his viewpoint. Two years later, he issued another polemic, this time quoting Hindu law. This was followed by the publication of a booklet entitled ‘Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females According to the Hindu Law of Inheritance’. The Bengali paper he brought out, Sambad Kaumudi, was equally vocal in its condemnation. On this issue, Roy was an eloquent and very genuine social reformer, seeking to rid his society of inhuman practices for which the fanatically orthodox claimed religious sanction. Naturally, the British were supportive of such a campaign, not the least because it reinforced their claim that they were dealing with a barbaric and depraved people who needed to be saved from themselves. In his study of the ideologies of the Raj, Professor Thomas Metcalfe of the University of Cambridge emphasizes that ‘the dramatic representations of these evils was essential to the self-image of the Raj’. ‘Few of their activities in India,’ he writes, ‘gave the British greater satisfaction than this vision of themselves as the reformers of In
dian morality.’ 15 Lord Bentinck, who steered the Act abolishing sati in 1829, had a larger-than-life statue commissioned showing him dramatically rescuing an Indian woman from the funeral pyre. This piece of sculpture can still be seen in the compound of the Victoria Memorial Museum, but was at that time placed prominently at a central location in Calcutta.

  Sati was indeed a heinous custom. But it is important to understand the contradictions and cynicism that informed British intervention on the issue. When the British were still consolidating their rule in the subcontinent, they were happy to ignore issues like sati that were to become so central to their ‘civilizing’ mission once they had established their military and political supremacy and wanted to buttress that with the notion of moral and intellectual superiority. In his 1829 report, ‘On Ritual Murder in India’, Bentinck wrote: ‘When we had powerful neighbours and had greater reason to doubt our own security, expediency might recommend an indirect and more cautious proceeding, but now that we are supreme my opinion is decidedly in favour of an open, avowed, and general prohibition …’ In fact, in 1813, the British had legalized sati. While there was never any consensus even among upper-caste Hindus about scriptural sanction for the practice of sati, the British authorities legitimized it by saying that it did.

  Several Indian scholars and reformers had been speaking against the practice of sati and highlighting that it was not enjoined in any religious text that a widow burn herself on her husband’s pyre. Among them were Mritunjay Vidyalankar, Gourisankara Bhattacharya, Kalinath Roy Chowdhury and others. They were all ignored and the 1813 law legalizing sati was passed. Later, too, reformers continued to work against the practice of sati—chief among them, of course, was Rammohan Roy. Many of them understood the true nature of sati, as a social aberration, and knew that the best way to fight it was from within, through reform. Rammohan Roy himself was not in favour of official intervention and had advised Bentinck against British intervention and legislation. It was valuable advice and he felt strongly about it. Yet, when Regulation XVII of 1829 abolishing sati was promulgated, he gave it uncritical, unqualified and public support.