An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

  Still, there was one unintended benefit of the British approach to Indian education. Since educating Indians was not a major British priority, it did not attract eminent Britons, and from early in the twentieth century, academia became the one available avenue for Indian advancement. With very few exceptions, the vice-chancellors of the main public universities after the 1890s were Indians, though inevitably most were staunch defenders of British imperial rule.

  While English instruction acquired a position of dominance in British India, albeit for a small if well-placed elite, a British perspective also infused the study of other subjects taught to Indians through English—notably history. The British saw precolonial Mughal history as consisting of a linear narration of events devoid of context or analysis; as for pre-Mughal texts, John Stuart Mill dismissed them as ‘mythological histories…where fable stands in the face of facts’. To replace these versions, the British reconstructed ‘factual’ accounts of Indian historiography, adding more contextual analysis in a structured ‘European’ style—but with the teleological purpose of serving to legitimize British rule in India. As we have seen, English histories and theoretical constructs of India not only promoted divide et impera by inventing the religious ‘periodization’ of the Indian past, but portrayed a nation waiting for the civilizing advent of British rule. By arguing that history texts should ‘rely upon facts and serve a secular curriculum’, they also moved away from the teaching of religious and mythological texts, including India’s timeless epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which at the very least could have occupied the place in Indian schoolrooms that the Iliad and Odyssey did in British ones. Independent India carried on this tradition of secular neglect of the classics, for which it is now reproached by a new, Hindu-chauvinist government that accuses the British and their Indian Macaulayputras of promoting the intellectual and cultural deracination of Indian children.

  If the teaching of history served an evident purpose, literature served the same ends in a more tangential way. Professor Gauri Vishwanathan has done pioneering work on the role of the study of English literature in colonial India as a means of socializing and co-opting Indian elites during the early nineteenth century. Indeed, she argues that the very idea of English literature as a subject of study was first devised by the British in India to advance their colonial interests. It was not only that the English felt their literature would be a way of striking awe and respect for British civilization into the minds and hearts of the colonized Indians; it was also that the British colonists considered many of the great works of Indian literature to be ‘marked with the greatest immorality and impurity’—and that included Kalidas’s Shakuntala, described by Horace Wilson, the major nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholar, as the jewel of Indian literature, but disapproved of as a suitable text for study in Indian schools and colleges in British India.

  In this, the British educationists were only echoing the biases of Macaulay and his ilk, who made no bones about their convictions regarding the superiority of English literature. Macaulay had, after all, argued in his Minute that ‘the literature now extant in [English] is of greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together… The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity.’ Charles Trevelyan in his 1838 book On the Education of the People of India admitted that the arguments made for propagating English literature through the English language were not based on any scientific notion but on the simple Macaulayan prejudice that European knowledge was axiomatically ‘superior’ to oriental knowledge. Nonetheless, it worked, since Indians socialized through the study of English literature were bound to be more admiringly Anglophone and therefore more willing to be complicit in British dominance.

  The study of history was not only Anglo-centric, it was deliberately designed to impress upon the student the superiority of all things British, and the privilege of being the subject of a vast Empire, whose red stain spread across a map of the world on which the sun never set. (The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark.)

  The study of English literature served a similar purpose. Amongst the required texts was Arthur Stanley’s collection of English patriotic poetry, with an introduction by the Lord Bishop of Calcutta extolling the virtue of verse (‘for an Empire lives not by bread alone’, he intones sagely), and commencing with Tennyson’s famous lines ‘The song that nerves a nation’s heart / Is itself a deed.’ The poems are all, of course, intended to exalt the greater glory of the British empire. The poet G. Flavell Hayward wrote in praise of ‘Glory or death, for true hearts and brave / Honour in life, or rest in a grave.’ The spirit of English ‘fair play’ was instilled in Newbolt’s ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game’ and Kipling’s odes to the White Man’s Burden no doubt made the heathen feel suitably grateful for the stamp of the colonial jackboot. (‘East is East and West is West / And never the twain shall meet/’, I wrote bitterly after discovering the poem in college, ‘Except of course when you lie crushed / Under the Briton’s feet!’)

  In those pre-televisual days, popular fiction, too, helped the anxious English-educated reader imbibe the virtues of colonialism. Those redoubtable bestsellers by G. A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and Kipling himself told tales of imperial derring-do in which the intrepid Englishman always triumphed over the dark, untrustworthy savages. Kipling’s notorious verse told the English (and the Americans who were conquering the Philippines) to ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden, Send forth the best ye breed / Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives’ need’, despite the ingratitude of the heathens they were ruling; the White Man had to bear his Burden despite ‘his old reward: / the blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard’. And he was to do this, in lines reeking of hypocritical paternalism, for the needs of resentful ‘sullen peoples, Half-devil [sic] and half-child’. (A brilliant contemporary riposte, in verse, ‘The Brown Man’s Burden’, came from the Liberal MP and theatre impresario Henry Labouchère, which deserves to be better known. I have therefore reproduced it in extenso later in this chapter.)

  The inclusion of an Indian character in the hugely popular children’s stories featuring Billy Bunter, a staple of boys’ pulp-magazine fiction in the first quarter of the twentieth century, creatively sought to inveigle the colonials into a narrative of complicity. The boy was, of course, an aristocrat, improbably named Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, his royal provenance compounded (like his illustrious compatriot Ranji) by his talent at cricket. Still, his English classmates knew him as ‘Inky’, and the illustrations always showed him several shades darker than them; and he was usually relegated to the margins of the Bunter stories, whose real heroes remained the English boys.

  Salman Rushdie has written of the creation of a ‘false Orient of cruel-lipped princes and dusky slim-hipped maidens, of ungodliness, fire and the sword’, endorsing Edward Said’s conclusion in his path-breaking Orientalism, ‘that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic’. To Rushdie, such portrayals did not belong only to the imperial past; ‘the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain’.

  Despite the efforts of the Orientalists and their glamorous exoticizing of British imperalism, however, there was one problem: once an Indian was taught to read, study and understand, it was impossible to restrict where his mind might take him. William Howitt presciently observed in 1839 that ‘it is impossible to make the English language the vernacular tongue, without at the same time producing the most astonishing moral revolution which ever yet was witnessed on the earth. English ideas, English tastes, English literature and religion, must follow as a matter of course…??
? And, of course, though he did not mention it, English political ideas too. By 1908, the notorious Empire apologist J. D. Rees was complaining that ‘in our schools pupils imbibe sedition with their daily lessons: they are fed with Rousseau, Macaulay, and the works of philosophers, which even in Oxford tend to pervert the minds of students to socialistic and impractical dreams, and in India work with far greater force upon the naturally metaphysical minds of youths, generally quick to learn by rote, for the most part penniless, and thus rendered incapable of earning their living, except by taking service of a clerical character under rulers, whom they denounce as oppressors unless they receive a salary at their hands. The malcontents created by this system have neither respect for, nor fear of, the Indian Government. Nor is this surprising, for the literature upon which they are brought up in our schools is fulfilled with destructive criticism of any system of Government founded upon authority…’ Rees urged the British government in India to ‘follow Lord Curzon’s courageous lead in refusing to subsidise the manufacture of half-baked Bachelors of Arts and full-fledged agitators. It is too late, I suppose, to go back upon the decision in favour of the Anglicists, but is there any particular reason why Herbert Spencer, for instance, should be given in the Indian system so prominent a place? Is there any need to fill Indian students with philosophy, the study of which, even in Oxford, induces a regrettable tendency towards vain speculative dreams and socialistic sophistries?’

  By the late nineteenth century, English education had indeed created a class of Anglophone Indians well-versed in the literature, philosophy and political ideas of the British; but, as we have seen, when they began to clamour for rights, and access to positions that they believed their education had qualified them for, they met with stubborn resistance.

  There were always, of course, those who argued that the real obstacle was Indian attitudes, especially those relating to caste, since the prospect of students from various castes mingling in classrooms filled Indian traditionalists with horror. On this argument—that castes would not mingle in schools—Durant points out that they already did mingle indiscriminately ‘in railway coaches, tramcars and factories’ and that ‘the best way to conquer caste would have been through schools’. But the British chose to shelter behind imagined objections from the traditionalists, because it suited them not to have to spend more on education.

  Still, there were memorable exceptions. The pioneering Dalit reformer Jyotiba Phule, born in a ‘lower’ caste of gardeners and florists, became an inspiring example of how a student could study in an English school with Brahmin and other high-caste friends, energize and invigorate his intellect with literature from around the world, and build on that to transform his society. Mahatma Phule, as many called him, not only became a pioneer of Dalit empowerment and women’s education but also a voice for global movements and ideas of equality. He dedicated his book Gulamgiri (‘Slavery’, 1873) to the ‘good people of the United States’ for their liberation of slaves. A few decades later, Dr B. R. Ambedkar followed in his footsteps, though after an Indian schooling he did all his higher education abroad, in both Britain and America.

  It has been argued that the British were not selective, and at least theoretically favoured the education of all castes and not just the upper castes, whereas India’s own leaders were divided on whether modern education should be extended to all. A bill for universal compulsory primary education was indeed tabled by the ‘moderate’ Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the legislative council of the Governor General in 1911 and another by Vithalbhai Patel in the same body in 1916, but both were defeated by the votes of the British and government-appointed members. What is less known, however, is that the bills were also opposed by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Surendra Nath Banerjea, staunch nationalists both. Gandhiji wrote in Hind Swaraj : ‘The ordinary meaning of education is knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? It is not necessary to make this education compulsory. Our ancient school system is enough. We consider your modern school to be useless’.

  Fortunately, on this issue, Gandhiji’s somewhat eccentric views did not prevail. But perhaps his real objection was not to literacy and education as such, but to British education in particular. In 1937, when Congress ministries were elected in eight provinces and for the first time enjoyed control over education, Gandhi put forward a plan called the Wardha Scheme for Education, which envisaged seven years of basic education for rural children, including vocational training in village handicrafts. It was never fully implemented, but it would certainly have imparted the basics, including literacy in the mother tongue, mathematics, science, history, and physical culture and hygiene, in addition to crafts. It is difficult to argue against the proposition that the Wardha scheme would have been a vast improvement on what little colonial education was available in rural India.

  One of the consequences of a colonial education was, as we have seen with Nirad Chaudhuri, the colonization of the minds of Indians by the languages, models and intellectual systems brought into our lives by the West. In many ways Indians judged their societies according to Western intellectual or aesthetic standards (Ashis Nandy has written pointedly of how Third Worlders construct a ‘non-West which is itself a construction of the West’). Colonialism misappropriated and reshaped the ways in which a subject people saw its history and even its cultural self-definition. Nationalists sought, in reaction, to contribute towards, and to help articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity of their society, but they did so coloured, inevitably, by the influence of their own colonial education. It was only after India had emerged into Independence, awaking from the incubus of colonialism, that Indians realized how much imperial rule had also, in many ways, fractured and distorted their cultural self-perceptions. This is changing gradually over the decades, as Indians understand that development will not occur without a reassertion of identity: that this is who we are, this is what we are proud of, this is what we want to be. The task of the Indian nationalist is to find new ways (and revive old ones) of expressing his culture, just as his society strives, with the end of colonialism, to find new ways of being and becoming.

  By virtue not so much of British colonization, as of American twentieth-century dominance, English has become the language of globalization, the benefits of which are also accruing to India. But though the worldwide adoption of English has ‘certainly facilitated more global exchanges and business transactions among English speakers everywhere’, including India, as Adrian Lester observes, ‘it [has] only served to heighten the exclusion of most non-English speaking subjects and women from access to the credit and political capital that flowed through Anglophone global networks’.

  I am not suggesting that India’s traditional forms of education, in Indian languages, could have met the challenge of making India literate and competitive with the rest of the world. It could, of course, have given India a basic competence and self-confidence that cultures like Japan which educate themselves in their national languages have, and the foundation to set up great schools and colleges in the Nalanda mode; and an India that had grown and flourished without the ordeal of colonialism, could always have imported the best educationists, technological systems and English teachers from wherever they were, to create our own links with the globalized world. At least, without the British having expropriated our national wealth for two centuries, we would have had the resources to do so.

  One of the regrettable consequences of British rule was how colonialism suffocated any prospect of a revival of India’s traditional spirit of scientific enquiry, whether by neglect or design. The destruction of the textile and steel industries has already been discussed, but it is striking that a civilization that had invented the zero, that spawned Aryabhata (who anticipated G
alileo, Copernicus and Kepler by several centuries, and with greater precision) and Susruta (the father of modern surgery) had so little to show by way of Indian scientific or technological innovation even under the supposedly benign and stable conditions of Pax Britannica. The mathematical genius Ramanujan had to travel to Cambridge to have his genius recognized, and though C. V. Raman won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 and S. N. Bose should have (instead, the discovery of the particle named for him, the boson, won two others the 2013 Prize), and Bose’s namesake and mentor, Jagadish Chandra Bose, blazed an astonishing path as physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist and archaeologist (as well as an early writer of science fiction), there was little else to celebrate by way of scientific accomplishment in the two centuries of British colonial rule. Strikingly, the British themselves flourished in these fields in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while funding no great institutions in India, and neglecting the enormous potential of Indian minds to excel in science and technology. It would take a while for India to make any headway in science and technology given the ground the country had to make up in these areas. The lack of facilities at home led to an exodus of sorts; several Indians went on to excel in foreign institutions, three winning science Nobels under foreign flags, while the stunted or fledgling research institutions in India were still seeking to establish themselves as worthy homes for brilliant Indian minds. (There are signs, though, that scientific studies are improving, as the remarkable innovations in space and missile technology have shown; this owes nothing to the colonial period but is a product of independent India’s own efforts.)

  Still, I am conscious that there is something ironic about English-speaking Indians like myself attacking the British in English for having imparted their English education to Indians. Ironic, yes, but only up to a point. I had my English schooling in India, and I learned it without the shadow of the Englishman judging my prose. I delighted in the language on its own terms, as a pan-Indian language today, and not as a symbol of colonial oppression. In any case, most English-educated Indians, including myself, will not repudiate Shakespeare and P. G. Wodehouse: we must concede we couldn’t have enjoyed their masterworks without the English language. But had we not been colonized by the English, and continued using Persian or Urdu to interpret each other across our linguistic divides, the English could always have sent us a whole bunch of toothsome VSOs instead of sturdy colonial-era master sergeants, and we’d have probably learned the language better than we in fact did…