Indian Society In Colonial Mind: Colonial Knowledge And Its Impact On India

To think about the colonization of India is to generally think of the economic and political subservience of India to British dominion. But we must also understand that the colonization of India is not simply an economic and political affair. British dominion over India also entailed colonization of the minds of the people. Scholarly attention to this aspect of colonialism is not new, one example that comes to mind is Gramsci and the concept of Hegemony. But recent scholarship has greatly enriched our perspective on the ideological dynamics of State. Foucaultian analysis of state, its creation of knowledge and the implicit relationship of knowledge to power has further problematized as well as substantialized our understanding of the colonial past. To be certain, contact with Europe is nothing new to India and India has been the subject of many treatises, travelogues and memoirs. It society and culture has certainly come under scrutiny of alien eyes. Megasthenes, al-Beruni, Francis Travernier, Duarte Barbosa; they had all travelled extensively in India and had recorded their observation of the Indian society. Some of them like Barbosa even had extensive knowledge of the native vernaculars. They commented on the people of India and its institutions, they made observations on caste and religions but nowhere in them one is to see the domineering tenor of later colonial accounts. Yes, the east was the land of the gog and magog, it was the land where the Final Judgment of humanity is to begin but it was also a land of opulence and magnificence, of exotic luxuries and of wisdom. Much of these assumptions and imageries of the east can be found in such writings as Montesquie’s Esprit de Lois. As Dharampal has noted in his work on colonial science, the context of contact had changed with time. What once had been a preoccupation of travelers and mercantilists had, by the 19th century, become a political concern of a colonial elite. The formation of colonial knowledge about India had been a conscious project of2the colonial state from the very beginning. It is true that it had its own variations and differing strands but the basic assumptions remained the same. The denouncement of the Christian Missionaries of India religion and customs, the oriental’s appeal for the preservation of “the ancient constitution” of India and James Mill’s outright antagonism and ridicule of all things Indian in his History of India are products of the same Eurocentricism. It is very interesting to see how these presumptions about India lead to the creation of a knowledge base about India which in turn successfully created an India which was the altered image of the west. Beginning of the project of colonial knowledge formation about India can be very well traced to the Oriental phase. It was in this phase that the oriental scholars like N.B. Halhed, H.T. Colebrooke, John Gilchrist, John Shore, William Carey, etc. tried actively to gain a knowledge of the native languages. Their primary concern was to develop the requisite mastery over what they termed as the classical languages of India viz, Sanskrit and Persian. The college of Fort William at Calcutta provided the institutional setting for such studies. What one must keep in mind is the practical import of such undertakings to the British ruling class.

The assumption of diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa post Plassey had created the need for efficient dispensation of law and order and one of the avowed objectives of oriental scholarship was the recovery of the “ancient constitution” of India from texts so as to rule them in accordance to their own laws and customs. Implicit here is the assumption of the otherness of India, which in a way our present study is all about. But besides that it had a serious methodological fault. The European preoccupation with the written word is overtly manifested here although in Indian context law, dispensation of justice and for that matter culture was extremely subjective, contextual and region specific. This preoccupation with ancient texts also had the effect of rendering Indian society immune to time. As the great Western philosopher Hegel himself will put it, India was essentially timeless and unchanging. What was at the core of the oriental and subsequent utilitarian perceptions of India? Ronald Inden, perhaps, provides the most eloquent explanation. In his essay where he tries to trace back the history of Orientalism, he shows that most of the material for the construction of the oriental other is provided by post-Kantian German philosophy.3Following Foucault and the inquiring into Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel, etc he postulates that western philosophy assumes an essential distinction between the knower and the known. True knowledge is representative and never absolute and that the knowledge of the knower is always superior to the known. Also it assumes the existence of a unitary world, an absolute truth and a unitary human nature. In the discourse that follows, this epistemological argument makes it possible for the European to claim at having reached a superior level of intellectual development. It allowed for the claim that European knowledge of India was based on the spirit of rationality while Indian epistemological was mainly mythical and product of a dream state.

For the recreation of an India as a complete antithesis of the west it had to be put at complete loggerhead against western thought and institutions. If the west was rational, India had to be necessarily irrational; if democracy was the western political ideal, the Indian politics was to be a mire of despotism. Restraint was contrasted against passion, progress against stagnation. Far more importantly, individual action directed historical progress was completely denied. It was suggested that Indian history was the history of caste and its actions. Religion was the prime mover of Indian history. It was formulated as something objective and readily knowable. In the myriad of colonial writings about India; which Inden characterized as descriptive, commentative, explanatory and hegemonic; these assumptions are readily available. These texts formulated and embedded the idea that the Indian condition was natural and essential, it was endemic to the Indian ‘races’ and was the product of the environment and adaptation to it. These texts were truly the representative of colonial knowledge system and exemplifiers of the colonial discourse of domination.

To understand the nature of the active intervention of the colonial state in the formulation of the colonial knowledge base one must look into the works of Bernard Cohn. His study of the modalities of colonial knowledge gives us an understanding of how the colonizers used the knowledge of India as a tool for domination and how the relationship between knowledge and power was mediated by colonial state. He argues that one of the chief functions of the modern state is the collection of data. The modern state deploys its machinery to the collection of a vast array of social facts like statistical data of finance, trade, demography, crime, education, agriculture, etc. The collection of these facts enables the nation state to supervise and thus govern.

Cohn sees a replication of this process in India too. The British state believed that a knowledge of India based on hard facts would enable it to consolidate its power and to control its vast territory. Requisite knowledge of language was thus gained and what according to Cohn are the ‘investigative modalities’ of the colonial state were deployed in search of a quantifiable India. These modalities, according to Cohn, included the historical modality, the survey modality, the travel modality, the enumerative modality and the surveillance modality. The initial thrust towards the deployment of the investigative modalities was pragmatic concerns. A vast territory was to be governed and a stable revenue base was to be created. It began with ‘inquiries’ on the nature of land tenure etc. and soon metamorphosed into extensive surveys of all the British Indian territories where all details of population, caste, class, traditions, customs, usages came to be recorded. Surveys of these kind stated in the 18th century with James Renell’s survey of Bengal in 1765. However there was a constant aim at sophistication which reached its maturity in the 19th century. Let us take into consideration the Buchanan Hamilton survey of northern India, which though remained incomplete, was a monumental task in itself. It recorded such details of the Bihar region as the population, number of houses, caste and occupation of the occupants of these, health statistics, agricultural statistics, etc. What is interesting to note that its section on the people of the region gives detailed accounts of the customs and traditions pertaining to the various sects of Hindus and Muslims living in this region. What follows from such surveys is a deliberate process of enumeration which can be ascribed to the western proclivity towards positivist knowledge. The administrative ramification of such an outcome was that it instilled the British with a sense of security and certitude. In concrete numbers they could trust. However the residual effect it had was no less important. The idea of castes as sealed compartments with divergent codes of conduct for each caste had already crystallized. These surveys conveyed that caste was perfectly intelligible and can be reduced to hard facts and numbers. It gave justification to the British discourse on the essentially divisive nature of Indian society.

Further crystallization in this enumerative process can be seen in the great5censuses undertaken by the colonial government in post 1857 India. These censuses divided the entire society of India based on religious affiliation and caste. The facts gathered though such program was taken up by disciplines like ethnography, anthropology, political science and history to plot a complete and objective map of India. The ethno-histographical modality of the colonial state actively employed these data to create the legitimizing discourse of British rule in India. The champions of British rule in India like James Mill, Alexander Dow and Charles Grant all employed the colonial knowledge gathered about India for the object of legitimization. The texts produced by these scholars, officials, administrators of the colonial state which derided the nature of Indian society and culture and eulogized upon the benevolence and fairness of British rule were to become hegemonic. They were to become part and parcel of colonial policy and colonial mentality. They constituted the discourse of colonial domination. However what is further interesting to note is the penetration of these ideas into the Indian psyche.

While talking of colonial knowledge formation and its dissemination one usually confines oneself to its study within the framework of hegemony. However, researches into colonial law, education, medicine and science has all revealed that Indians actively participated in the formation of this knowledge base and elite sections of the colonized population also employed it in realizing their own interests. It is true that native collaborators played a very important role in the formation of colonial rule. The oriental scholarship of the initial phase was completely based on the knowledge of high caste Brahman interlocutors. Michael S. Dodson had revealed that this had the effect of strengthening the role of Brahmin in colonial society. Further the picture of India provided to the British was the one as imagined by this particular class. This ensured the preponderance of a view that accorded centrality of the Brahmin to Indian society. Partha Chatterjee has made a very subtle analysis of this tendency of the Indian population to appropriate the colonial discourse. In his essay on the shift in historiographic traditions he notes that a Brahmin scholar like Mrityunjay Vidyalankar writing a history of India in 1808 is still confined within the Puranic traditions. Vidyalankar reproduces a puranic chronology for his history in which he smoothly passes6from the Hindu rulers of ancient India to the Muslim medieval rulers and finally the Christian British rulers. For him causality is still a matter of divine will and dharma. The most important feature of his history is that it is a history of kings and not of the people. The concept of nationality was not yet intelligible to him and people for him were mere spectators in the affairs of state regulated by commitment to drarma by the king. In sharp contrast stands the history textbooks published in Bengal in the 1870’s. These text books had started to rationalize events and see causality in tangible human and individualistic terms. Thus the defeat of the Nawab of Bengal was not the result of divine will but because of the treachery of Mir Jafar. This reveals that the western mode of reasoning had started to penetrate educated Bengali society. However it is the Hindu nationalist strand of the writings produced in this period that is of greater interest. In one such text from 1866 we can see that the author has rationalized the fall of hindu suzerainty and the rise of Muslim power in India to the social and moral degradation that had seeped into Indian society. He argues that what once was a strong, courageous and valiant people who had conquered distant land had now become effeminate. He decries the fact that once dominant castes have now fallen to the extent of being dominated by shudras. To the historian, this book reveals the entire process of appropriation of colonial knowledge by the educated colonial Indian. He produces nothing new but reproduces the colonial discourse on the nature of Indian society and polity. However, what is new is that this colonial discourse of domination is now turned inwards to the Indian population with a divisive agenda. The knowledge about the divisiveness and fragmentariness of Indian society was already present in the colonial rhetoric; it was now used for a sectarian and communal agenda. If we look into V.D. Savarkar’s ‘Essentials of Hindutva’ we shall get a clearer understanding of the extent to which colonial imagination of India as well as western thought had penetrated into the mind of the educated Indian elite. A cautious reading of this influential book will reveal that all the categories of nationhood and nationality that Savarkar stressed on were western concepts. To be precise, his construction of a national identity based on race, blood, shared history and territory was of German provenance. His section on the history of the people of India is a history of the Hindus. This history is in complete exclusion of the Muslims (or for that matter, Christians) who according to him were foreigners whose loyalty lies outside India. To be a Hindu political loyalty was to be geographically centered in India while for the Muslim it was Mecca. Their gods were alien and so were their heroes. Thus they were inadmissible. It is interesting to note that though Savarkar explicitly claims to have created rational criterion to classify what constitutes a Hindu, the main basis of evaluation in his mode of reasoning is religion. For if one talks of shared history, culture or race, one cannot simply overlook the long centuries of syncretic coexistence of the two religions and their shared culture. It is nothing but a repetition of the colonial discourse in a rational garb.

Christophe Jaffrelot has made extensive studies on the communalism in India and has also extensively treated the socio-religious reform movements. Following anthropological models, he has proposed that when confronted by an external threat, a multilayered society starts differentiating within itself. It starts a process of stigmatization and emulation between members of the society. One section of the society stigmatizes the other as a threat and starts emulating imagined properties of the threatening other. The language and discourse of this conflict is always given by the society that is actually external to it. This is precisely the process that one can see as being played out when religious symbols were appropriated, gorakshinisabhas were created and calls to solidarity were made in the 20th century. But it is not just the radical Hindu nationalist thought that had reproduced or appropriated colonial forms of knowledge in their discourse; we see it also in the liberal nationalist historiography of India. The term Liberal Nationalist itself is endowed with all the connotations of western political thought that the mind can conjure. Their perspective of looking at the history of India may seem divergent in that the present problems of Indian society are seen as an effect of colonization but it is based on the same assumption of a golden past and a decadent present. It also has embedded in it the faith on nationalism as being the ultimate attainable goal of any society, the realization of socio-political excellence and the hope of a brighter future. But as Gyanendra Pandey points out, this view of nationalism completely blinded the nationalist historians from seeing the specificities of the Indian context. Pandey writes that this accounts for the nationalist acceptance of communalism as an objective reality.

Though Pandey’s work is open to question it shares an important link with Bipan Chandra in that even Bipan Chandra is critical of the nationalists open acceptance of communalism as a reality. It is according to him a false consciousness generated by the economic and political incidence of colonization. In reality there is no singular Hindu nora homogeneous Muslim with economic, political or social interests to protect. C. A. Bayly has recently tried to inquire into a prehistory of communalism. He has tried to locate what he sees as communal tension before the beginning as well as the maturity of British colonialism in India. He opines that in the ‘land wars’ of northern India and the Moplah uprisings we can see a remarkable similarity with modern day communal riots. He reserves the same opinion for the urban conflicts before 1857. However, what is completely overlooked is that the context of these conflicts was not the same. There was no consciousness of a single homogeneous Muslim or a homogeneous Hindu. In the absence of civil society, disputes which are purely economic or social may spill out to the arena of religion. Such disputes are not necessarily communal. It is only when religion becomes an essential factor in representation within civil society that communalism starts. Thus Bayly’s work may be seen as exonerating the British from the communal legacy of India but as in the above study we have seen, colonialism and colonial knowledge formation was at the very center of the later sectarian and religious mobilization.

Colonialism had first the effect of the production of a certain kind of knowledge of India that rendered it a complete antithesis of the west and it was this knowledge of Indian society that was given back to the population of the colonized through modes of dissemination. This knowledge was then appropriated and actively employed by the elite sections of the Indians to the task of sectarian and religious mobilization.