Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765-1858

Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd i

7/15/2011 6:36:05 PM

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd ii

7/15/2011 6:36:05 PM

Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 Joseph Sramek

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd iii

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

GENDER, MORALITY, AND RACE IN COMPANY INDIA, 1765–1858

Copyright © Joseph Sramek, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11693–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sramek, Joseph, 1976– Gender, morality, and race in Company India, 1765–1858 / Joseph Sramek. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11693–1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. British—India—History—18th century. 2. British—India— History—19th century. 3. British—India—Public opinion— History—19th century. 4. East India Company—History. 5. Colonial administrators—India—History. 6. Imperialism—Social aspects— India—History. 7. Masculinity—Social aspects—India—History. 8. India—Race relations. 9. India—Moral conditions. 10. India—Politics and government—1765–1947. I. Title. DS465.S73 2011 954.03⬘1—dc22

2011008507

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd iv

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

The basis of this Empire is “opinion,“ an opinion of our temperance and moderation as Governors . . . —N.W. Kindersley, Madras revenue collector (1828) [B]y degrees I discovered that the object of their admiration was neither our arts, our arms, nor our science, but our moral qualities . . . —former Bengal official Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan (1853)

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd v

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd vi

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

Contents

List of Figures and Map

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

1

1

Colonial Beginnings, ca. 1600–1793

17

2

Trying to Rule India without Indians, 1793–1831

39

3

Honor, Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys, 1757–ca. 1830

67

“If the Natives Were Competent, From Their Moral Qualities”: Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization, 1813–57

97

4

5

Martial Races, Caste-Ridden Sepoys, and British Fears about Losing Control: Britons and Their Sepoy Armies in Late Company India

127

Conclusion

157

Notes

165

Bibliography

213

Index

233

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd vii

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd viii

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

Figures and Map

Figures 3.1

Number of sepoys (in thousands) in the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay Armies, 1763–1857 3.2 Relative percentages of the three sepoy armies, 1763–1857

77 80

Map 3.1

Northern India: Area of heaviest sepoy recruitment

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd ix

78

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd x

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

Acknowledgments

This book began as a doctoral dissertation written under the expert guidance, first, of Bonnie Anderson and then Timothy Alborn at the City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) Graduate Center. Special thanks also goes to Carol Berkin, Mary Gibson, Thomas Kessner, Robert Seltzer, and Randolph “Randy” Trumbach for running zerocredit courses for advanced doctoral students to write their dissertations in a structured manner—this is the Ph.D. Program in History at CUNY Graduate Center’s secret to why so many of us finished our doctorates in a timely manner. Randy has also been and remains a generous mentor in the years since graduate school; he has helped me immensely in making the transition from graduate student to assistant professor. He also read several chapters of this book in their early stages. I would be entirely remiss here if I did not also thank a wonderful set of friends from graduate school who helped me shape my ideas as well as deal with the “Sturm und Drang” of first writing my dissertation, and later, this book: Ben Alexander, Dave Aliano, Angelo Angelis, Dave Golland, Jacob Kramer, Steve Levine, Alejandro Quintana, Alex Stavropolous, and Christine Yaris. Bob Ambaras and Steve Essig also deserve thanks for their support and encouragement. Since the fall of 2007, I have belonged to a wonderful history department at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). There is not a day that goes by when I do not silently thank my colleagues for having the faith in hiring me as their British and British imperial historian. More specific thanks go to Robbie Lieberman, who has been a fabulous chair in mentoring me and other junior colleagues, as well as Jon Bean, Kay Carr, Holly Hurlburt, Rachel Stocking, Gray Whaley, Jonathan Wiesen, and Natasha Zaretsky. Jonathan Wiesen read the entire manuscript before I sent it out for review a second time for which I am eternally grateful. Kay Carr graciously devoted

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd xi

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

xii

Acknowledgments

her time and expertise into designing the map of northern India that appears in chapter 3. Nate Pedigo was an expert graduate assistant when I was only starting to think about revising my dissertation into a book. Special thanks also go to Christina and Roy Bearden-White, Paula Bilyeu, Rachel Malcolm Ensor, Bill Griffiths, and Deb and Butch Wilson for adopting this “New York exile” and making him feel at home in the often strange world that is southern Illinois. As a fellow junior colleague, Daron Olson made a great weekly lunch partner during my first two years out at SIUC and he might recognize some of the ideas now in this book. Although he has moved on to greener pastures, he has remained a close friend and a steadfast advocate. Like other scholars of British colonial India, I have been extremely fortunate in being able to work at the British Library. Our particular reading room has changed names multiple times in the short time I have worked there—from the distinctly un-politically correct Oriental and India Office Collections only a few years ago to the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections currently—but Dr. Margaret Makepeace and her research staff have never deviated from the exceptionally high quality of service they provide to researchers from around the world who come to work there. I would like to thank the British Library now for granting permission to quote from crown copyrighted materials within the India Office Records. I would also like to thank the New York Public Library for granting me access during graduate school to the Wertheim Study and the use of a dedicated shelf as well as the phenomenal inter-library loan services provided by SIUC’s Morris Library. I must also thank Chris Chappell at Palgrave and the three anonymous reviewers he commissioned to examine my manuscript at various stages of the process. It would not have become the book it now is without the close and careful readings of my work which each of them gave. Of course, all lingering mistakes remain mine. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Dave and Liz, my sister Aimee, her husband Erik, and my four-year old nephew Alex, for their continuing love and encouragement. It is a shame that my grandmother died while I was still writing my dissertation; she would have been very proud to see her only grandson publish his first book, especially as she funded my very first research trip overseas. This book is dedicated to my parents. From both I have learned that hard work is the coin of the realm, the necessity of thinking for myself and questioning authority when things make no sense but also to have the

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd xii

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

Acknowledgments

xiii

humility to admit when I am wrong, and the perseverance never to give up when the going gets rough. Without these crucial traits, I would have given up on this book a long time ago; indeed, I might never have even started it. Carbondale, Illinois January 2011

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd xiii

7/15/2011 6:36:06 PM

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd xiv

7/15/2011 6:36:07 PM

Abbreviations

AHR BL/APAC/IOR JBS JICH MAS OED ODNB PP SP

WSEB

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd xv

American Historical Review British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, India Office Records Journal of British Studies Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Modern Asian Studies Oxford English Dictionary Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Parliamentary Papers Selection of Papers from the Records at the East India House Relating to the Revenue, Police and Civil and Criminal Justice, under the Company’s Governments in India. London: E. Cox and Son, 1820, vols. 1–2; London: J.L. Cox, 1826, vols. 3–4. Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Ed. P.J. Marshall; gen. ed. Paul Langford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–2000, 9 vols.

7/15/2011 6:36:07 PM

Introduction

In 1813, the Bengal government dismissed Bengal Army Major James Mouat. On numerous occasions, he had attempted to sell his horse to the Nawab of Bengal, an Indian notable, for an extortionate sum of 96,000 sicca rupees (roughly £12,000).1 In trying to get the Nawab to buy the horse, Mouat had bribed his servants with pistols, a crystal hookah bottom, and a European hunting dog. In justifying Mouat’s dismissal, Governor-General Lord Minto (1806–13) argued that it was the duty of all Britons in India “to uphold the national character for integrity . . . and honor.” By engaging in bribery, Minto and other members of the Bengal government contended, Mouat had not only denigrated his “own character as a gentlemen” but also “tended to degrade the profession and Country to which he belonged.” Any individual, such as Mouat, who was so willing to “prostitute . . . the British Name . . . and Character” to his own personal greed, was simply not morally fit to continue serving as a Bengal Army officer. 2 Twenty-one years later, the Madras government fired Judge Henry Turner Bushby for a relatively minor transgression compared to Mouat’s, but one that colonial administrators nevertheless regarded as damaging to British colonial prestige. Bushby had borrowed a mere 500 rupees (or about £60) from an Indian working in his court in order to pay for travel expenses needed to convalesce, but agreed to repay the loan in two years. By doing so, Madras Governor Frederick Adam argued, Bushby had “laid himself under obligation to a Native under his protection in a manner calculated to subject himself to unworthy imputations and the Government to loss of reputation and authority.” This was particularly the case, Adam asserted, when it transpired that Bushby’s Indian creditor anticipated that his relative would find employment in Bushby’s court because of the transaction. 3 British officers and soldiers’ irreligion and drunkenness also prompted colonial officials to worry extensively about the loss of British prestige in India throughout the first half of the nineteenth

9780230116931_02_int.indd 1

7/14/2011 5:57:50 PM

2

Company India, 1765–1858

century. Governor-General Lord Dalhousie (1848–56) thus implored Company directors in 1851 to spend more money building regimental chapels up and down India. “In a country” like India “where every Mussulman community, however inconsiderable, constructs its Mosque [and] where every Hindoo Community erects its temple,” Dalhousie insisted that it simply was “not creditable to our name, that we should give occasion to the native . . . that, of all people, their Christian masters alone are content to worship their God in a barrack, or a shed.”4 Writing seven years later about drunkenness, Bombay Army Brigadier-General John Jacob feared that an intoxicated British officer placed “the prestige of the superior race” at risk. No sepoy, he argued, should ever see his commanding officer wasting his time in “frivolous [and] vicious” habits such as drinking, nor “living an idle, useless life.” Habitually drunk British officers stood to lose the confidence and respect of their sepoys, throwing their loyalties to British colonial rule into question.5 But even British soldiers could undermine the prestige of British rule by their drunken habits. As FieldMarshal Sir George Nugent, the Bengal Army’s commander-in-chief from 1811 to 1813, warned nearly four decades earlier, drunkenness among British soldiers in India was responsible for some of the basest “atrocities that dishonour the British name” among its Indian subjects such as murder, manslaughter, and rape.6 As the above examples suggest, throughout the near-century during which the East India Company, and not the British state, ruled India (1765–1858), imperial administrators and authors of colonial tracts alike generally believed their empire was one largely based on “opinion,” by which they usually meant “reputation” or “image.” They deemed it crucially important that an image of British moral and racial superiority always be preserved in their Indian subjects’ eyes; otherwise, they feared, Indian loyalty and tacit support might be endangered. Instances, for example, when British district officials borrowed money from their Indian subordinates, or when military officers gave bribes, or when British military officers and soldiers did not attend church or drank in front of sepoys, in the minds of many imperial elites, risked undermining the moral prestige of empire. This book, accordingly, focuses on colonial anxieties about the misbehavior of these three groups of Britons in India—the most direct “face” of empire—and the relationship of these concerns to the formation of early British colonialism. This book brings together subjects and themes that have thus far generally been considered separately. For example, various scholars

9780230116931_02_int.indd 2

7/14/2011 5:57:50 PM

Introduction

3

have written on the importance of the “empire of opinion” ideology to early British colonialism but few have focused on colonial anxieties regarding British misbehavior in its formation and operation. Douglas Peers, for example, has demonstrated how Company policymakers in the first half of the nineteenth century, faced with the fact of being heavily outnumbered by Indians, took seriously the need to make the British “appear as omnipotent as possible” to the Indians they ruled over.7 Martha McLaren has argued that early nineteenth-century colonial governors such as Sir Thomas Munro, Sir John Malcolm, and Mountstuart Elphinstone acknowledged that British colonial rule ultimately rested upon some form of tacit Indian consent, in spite of its authoritarian nature. Indeed, they believed the empire would only endure so long as Indians thought their British masters were “governing them in a way that would bring improvement to the quality of their lives, however marginally.”8 But so far, only Burton Stein has examined this colonial ideology’s wider meanings with regard to British personal behavior in India, although very briefly and only in connection with Munro’s colonial thought. Munro feared the consequences of “any serious criticism” arising of British officials or the Company as a whole as it would potentially threaten to expose “the naked might of [the Company’s] armies” as the “sole basis for its rule.”9 Taking this insight much further, I contend that imperial officials also worried about Britons’ misbehavior in India because it stood to bring into possible disrepute British colonialism’s very moral legitimacy as well as threaten Indian loyalty. Before proceeding further, it is important to clarify what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British colonial elites meant by the word “opinion.” Those who used the word to describe how they believed British colonialism worked did not usually mean what we would mean by it today. Concepts like “public opinion” were largely alien to a colonial regime that generally claimed, as did the succeeding British Raj, that India was a geographical abstraction rather than a nation deserving self-determination or that every preceding political regime was despotically imposed on Indians by conquerors, usually Muslim “outsiders” like the Mughals. Rather, during the very same era as the American and French Revolutions, when notions of governments deriving their authority and legitimacy from the consent of the governed were becoming more widely accepted—in other words, when most of our modern-day notions of “opinion” initially came about—the British instituted a form of colonial rule in India that

9780230116931_02_int.indd 3

7/14/2011 5:57:50 PM

4

Company India, 1765–1858

expressly sought to deny Indians substantive participation in their own government.10 Of course, this is not to say that the British always succeeded in doing this; Indians did try to have their voices heard and sometimes did. An entire generation of Subaltern Studies scholars, for example, has argued that underprivileged Indians often registered their voices of dissent against colonialism even despite its generally coercive nature.11 Other scholars, adopting insights from cultural critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin,12 have argued for “dialogic interaction” between Britons and Indians, whereby Indians, especially elites, managed to influence colonial thought as well as policymaking despite the often unequal nature of their encounters with British interlocutors.13 Finally, C.A. Bayly has shown that something resembling an Indian “public opinion,” which he has called an “ecumene,” existed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indian critics of British colonialism drew heavily upon an earlier South Asian ethical tradition about how rulers ought to act, but Britons rarely took notice of these verdicts on their rule.14 Indians, ranging from dismayed outsiders like late eighteenth-century Bengal Muslim notable Ghulam Husain Khan to angry civil servant Mir Shāhāmāt Ali, who wrote in the 1840s, to early nineteenth-century moral reformer Rammohun Roy, who was relatively sympathetic to British colonial rule, occasionally did manage to participate in wider debates about the direction of colonial policy. But in the main, this book’s findings corroborate many of Jon Wilson’s recent arguments, namely that the British from as early as the 1780s onward sought to remain as aloof as possible from their Indian subjects and to rule India as a “domination of strangers.”15 Britons in Company India, this book argues, when they referred to their empire as one based on “opinion,” generally meant that it derived most of its power from the preservation of British prestige in the eyes of their Indian subjects. In their minds, the preservation of an image of British moral and racial superiority was everything as it ensured Indian loyalty and deference. This notion of “opinion” was not unique to Company India. In several crucial respects it derived from seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury British political culture, where aristocrats exerted power and dominance over their social inferiors by acting out their power in public, thereby earning the “opinion” of plebeians in their right to rule. These assertions of power of course did not go unchallenged; through “rough music” and the “moral economy” of food riots, E.P. Thompson has shown how the lower orders in eighteenth-century

9780230116931_02_int.indd 4

7/14/2011 5:57:50 PM

Introduction

5

England were occasionally able to shame their social superiors.16 Similarly, Thompson and Douglas Hay have shown how aristocratic judges employed the threat of execution as well as the carrot of a possible last-minute reprieve from the gallows to ensure deference from the lower orders.17 Power, therefore, in this older British political culture was often displayed in personal terms. To be sure, Britain’s political culture was slowly changing during the period under review in this book from a closed oligarchy into something resembling, by the passage of the Second Reform Act of 1867, the beginnings of a modern democracy. Still, older English Whig notions, that rule was essentially a “trust” on behalf of the governed by those chosen (often by God) to rule over them, persisted well into the Victorian period if not beyond. Edmund Burke articulated this idea most fully in his long parliamentary career during the late eighteenth century; much, therefore, will be said about Burke in this book.18 This book will argue that Burke’s belief in the need of colonial rulers to exhibit high personal honor and appropriate public (and private) conduct, as well as an imperial commitment to rule on behalf of Indians, resonated widely with imperial elites from across the political spectrum throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond. The “empire of opinion” ideology was also in many ways analogous to various cults of honor practiced throughout the Anglo-American world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These ranged from late eighteenth-century America to white slaveholder society in the antebellum South to late nineteenth-century British colonial India.19 To the people living in these various societies, honor was both an individual aspiration—a man desires to be honored and for that honor to match his vision of his self-worth—and a collective judgment of his society in his moral worthiness to attain such an exalted position, or, in other words, his reputation. 20 Scholars of honor culture also point out its highly personal and psychological nature. Thus, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a leading historian on the subject of honor in the Old South, contends that white slaveholders obsessed about honor, given the inhospitality and danger under which they convinced themselves they “had to rule in fear.”21 Although Company India was not a slaveholding society this book will nevertheless show numerous instances throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Britons worried about Indian subordinates’ morality and reliability. This was true in the case of the colonial bureaucracy, where conservative estimates place the ratio of Indians to Britons working there

9780230116931_02_int.indd 5

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

6

Company India, 1765–1858

somewhere in the order of over two hundred to one, as well as in the Company’s military forces. Even as late as the outbreak of the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857, only 45,000 British soldiers served in India compared to 232,000 Indians, over five times as many. 22 Honor is also relevant for understanding what Britons in Company India meant by “opinion” in two further respects. Again, the Old South provides several interesting analogues. Kenneth Greenberg has labeled the mental world of white slaveholders there as a highly “superficial” one obsessed “with the surface of things—with the world of appearances.”23 A similar indictment could rightfully be lobbed at Britons in India throughout much of the nearly two centuries of colonial rule, whether it came to their superficial efforts to “understand” the Indian caste system, their fussiness about social precedence at dinner parties, their insistence that Indians take off their shoes in their presence, or, indeed, the various misconduct cases that opened this chapter. 24 But while superficial at some level, honor served an important function. As J.E. Lendon has written for the ancient Roman Empire, honor helped “conceal sterner realities” about how power actually operated in that society, and continued generally to operate in Western society up to the eve of the French Revolution if not beyond. 25 In the Old South, for slaveholders to “look inept, powerless, or squeamish,” Wyatt-Brown contends, threatened to bring into view the viciousness that underwrote that culture. A cult of honor among slaveholders helped obscure that unpleasant reality. 26 Similarly sordid realities threatened to confront the mental worlds of British imperialists during Company India and release them from being “prisoners of their own rhetoric.”27 Beyond the material exploitation caused by early colonialism, British colonial rulers glided over numerous instances of Britons in India, such as planters and soldiers, who had very different ideas about British prestige, which were often far more violent toward Indians than accounted for by imperial ideology’s niceties. Indeed, Britons in India repeatedly got away with murder from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, as well as with other physical crimes they committed against Indians, as many allwhite juries refused to convict an individual, or convicted him of a lesser crime (for example, manslaughter in place of murder). 28 Britons in India also acted untoward toward Indians even when the intent was not to murder or otherwise do bodily harm. This can be seen, for example, in cases where Company officials (known as covenanted servants) borrowed large sums from Indian creditors to live like princes,

9780230116931_02_int.indd 6

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

Introduction

7

without ever any intention to pay any of it back, or cases where British residents (or ambassadors) extorted bribes from Indian princes.29 The prevalence of such misconduct, though, does not in any way discount the myopia, let alone the arrogance, of imperial elites in persisting throughout the Company period in the delusional belief that all that really mattered in attaining the loyalty of Indians was the maintenance of an “opinion” by them of British racial and moral prestige. Historians generally refer to the British Raj after 1858 as a regime that was unduly arrogant and often out of touch with its Indian subjects.30 Indeed, Stephen Patterson has recently shown how members of the British Raj’s late nineteenth-century Indian Civil Service (ICS) took this arrogance even so far as to claim that, unlike their predecessors who worked for the Company, only they were truly committed to governing on behalf of their Indian subjects.31 But, through focusing on colonial anxieties about the conduct of covenanted servants, military officers, and soldiers—the most direct “face” of empire— and their broader relationship to colonial governance during the preceding Company period of colonial rule, this book shows a greater continuity between the two periods than has generally so far been understood to be the case.32

Gender, Morality, and Colonial Rule The second main argument of this book is that gender, morality, and colonial rule were intricately interrelated. This book engages with scholarship that has studied British personal behavior’s close relationship to the construction of early British colonialism. Scholars have examined colonial efforts to prevent British men taking Indian common-law wives outside the bounds of Christian marriage. They have studied how both the Company and the British Raj dealt with the large and growing numbers of mixed-race children who resulted from such relationships, as well as with prostitution and the spread of venereal disease.33 And, more broadly, scholars have observed how the maintenance of certain racial, social, cultural, and gendered distinctions between British rulers and their Indian subjects was crucial to early British colonialism.34 There remains to be written a study, however, that explicitly ties these colonial concerns about British misconduct in India to wider anxieties of colonial governance such as how to subordinate large numbers of Indian civil servants and sepoys or how to retain their loyalties. Moreover, other types of British misbehavior, particularly

9780230116931_02_int.indd 7

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

8

Company India, 1765–1858

various financial dealings between Britons and Indians such as debt and gift giving, have remained relatively unexamined. Such behavior often vexed imperial officials who, drawing upon common late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century associations of “independence” with manliness, believed that covenanted servants or military officers financially dependent on Indians could not possibly be independent.35 This book also intervenes in wider debates about the construction of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British masculinity. Scholars have recognized for more than two decades the importance of religion and morality to British masculinity’s (and femininity’s) construction during this period.36 Missing, however, is much attention to the broader British Empire. Despite Mrinalini Sinha’s challenge over a decade and a half ago to historians of British gender to more fully recognize “[t]he constitutive impact of the colonial experience in the making of British masculinity,”37 far too often the empire is still treated as distinct from British history, as “out there” rather than part of a single analytical frame.38 This remains particularly the case when considering religion and morality’s importance to the development of British gender during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, where the major emphasis within the scholarship has been on domestic factors such as industrialization or Evangelicalism. 39 Moreover, even despite various attempts by scholars working on both earlier and later periods to connect more directly domestic and imperial developments, important questions remain to be considered. For example, historians know a lot about how manliness operated within the British family, whether aristocratic, middle class, or working class during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.40 As Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard have rightly pointed out, however, British gender historians thus far have had “relatively little to say about masculinity and formal state or institutional politics.”41 With the notable exception of Sinha, who has explored the connections between colonial rule and masculinity in late nineteenth-century colonial India, few have probed the relationships between gender and British colonial administration and vice versa. Masculinity functioned differently, however, in two major respects in Company India than in Britain in this period or later on under the British Raj. First, rather than competing visions of manliness being put forward at home by aristocrats or the middle classes in their efforts to jockey for political and social power, I argue in the case of Company India that aristocratic conceptions of the importance of honor and prestige to manliness frequently mixed with concerns

9780230116931_02_int.indd 8

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

Introduction

9

about moral virtue and self-control often more associated with the middle classes. Second, although various scholars have argued that the rhetoric of effeminacy was prevalent throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, a close reading of the sources suggests that this was not generally the case.42 Although British colonial officials and authors of India tracts occasionally denigrated Indian civil servants and sepoys as being “effeminate” or “womanish,” they more commonly dismissed their Indian counterparts in the colonial regime, as well as those they ruled over, as “moral children,” who, through extensive British tutelage, would one day become “moral men” capable of ruling themselves and others.43 As Tillman Nechtman has recently contended, such ideological moves played important roles in squaring late eighteenth-century Enlightenment theories of stadial progress with British colonial aspirations.44 Of course, such stereotypes of moral childhood and adulthood need not always be gendered. In the almost exclusively masculine world of colonial administration, though, they frequently took on gendered meanings. In characterizing Indians as morally immature, this book argues, British colonial officials and military officers sought primarily to “unman” various groups of Indian men in order to monopolize political power.45 Only properly moral men—presumably some but, crucially, not all Britons—were thought to be sufficiently mature, virtuous, and, thus, manly enough to rule. Indians, tout court, were denied this possibility except possibly in the hazy, far-distant future under British tutelage.46 In frequently employing the metaphor of “moral children” to deny Indians full imperial citizenship, Britons during the Company period again harkened back to their own political culture, where landed elites were expected to protect and govern on behalf of their politically immature social inferiors. They also drew upon broader European colonial discourses of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.47 Throughout the colonial period in Peru, for example, Spanish colonial authorities considered a wide variety of adults, including most prominently Amerindians, to be perpetual children in need of protection from the Spanish crown.48 British imperial elites employed similar patriarchal discourses in the Thirteen Colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, indeed, eventually backfired on them. In addition to being a revolt against the right of the king or parliament to tax their colonial subjects without representation, the American Revolution was also at some level a rebellion against patriarchy.49

9780230116931_02_int.indd 9

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

10

Company India, 1765–1858

At the same time, scholars have pointed to paternalism’s importance in structuring political, social, and cultural relationships between rulers and ruled throughout the British Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.50 While both American and French revolutionaries sought to overthrow their respective tyrannical monarchs in order to be republican brothers, 51 British imperial officials installed paternalist modes of rule throughout the empire at the turn of the nineteenth century, including in Company India. 52 As not only one of the earliest but also the most significant of Britain’s “non-white” colonies, Company India therefore offers a prime model for understanding how earlier patriarchal metaphors of rule became invested with new political, gendered, and racial meanings over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. It also provides a prime example of how these new meanings began to point the way forward to newer modes of “tutelary colonialism” that would have long-lasting ramifications for British, as well as Western imperialism, well into the twentieth century.53

Company India and the British Raj This book, lastly, intervenes in debates regarding the nature of early colonial rule under the Company vis-à-vis later imperial rule under the British Raj after 1858. British rule was indirect and limited, with no more than a thousand covenanted servants and no more than 45,000 British soldiers ruling India by the end of the Company period. As several scholars have argued, the relatively tiny numbers of Britons on the ground involved in colonial administration thus allowed for considerable Indian involvement in policy development and execution, particularly by local elites, but also by Indian bureaucrats.54 Indeed, various scholars have pointed to many examples of “dialogic interaction” between Britons and various Indian elites in the forging of British colonialism during this period.55 That being the case, several scholars continue to argue that, because of greater possibility for interaction between Britons and Indians, British colonialism during the Company period was less racist, less socially exclusionary, and milder than that of the British Raj after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857.56 This book seeks to greatly modify this sweeping assertion, arguing instead that from the 1790s onward one can detect several significant early analogues to the British Raj’s political culture and pronounced racial arrogance. These ranged from Governor-General Lord Cornwallis’s decision to fire Indian

9780230116931_02_int.indd 10

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

Introduction

11

bureaucrats in 1793 to British imperial officials’ near-obsession with the maintenance of British colonial prestige (and with their concomitant fear of misbehavior by employees of the colonial regime) to their general mistrust of various Indian subordinates through whom they ruled. Several scholars working in race studies have recently located modern racism’s origins more generally, as well as within the British Empire, to the end of the eighteenth century, attempting to overturn an older consensus that emphasized the emergence of “scientific” racism in the advent of Darwinism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.57 Scholars such as Thomas Trautmann and Tony Ballantyne, it is true, have examined the salience of concepts such as a shared Aryan racial identity between Britons and Indians throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.58 But when one looks more at actual Company policy or the obsession among imperial officials throughout the first half of the nineteenth century regarding the maintenance of British racial and moral prestige, I hope this book will make clear the need to look much further back than the mid-nineteenth century for the origins of much of the British Raj’s political culture.

The Scope of the Book Chapter 1 examines various seventeenth and eighteenth-century contexts for why Britons worried so much about misbehavior by covenanted servants, military officers, and soldiers throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Although a relative latecomer to the profitable spice trade of the East, being chartered only in 1600, the East India Company managed by the end of the seventeenth century to become one of Europe’s most successful joint-stock companies. It accomplished this feat in large part due to its early success in creating various mechanisms by which it could trust its far-flung employees to perform their duties in an honest and competent manner. The chapter examines these various mechanisms, arguing they established many later precedents for why British personal behavior mattered to imperial elites. The collapse of the Mughal Empire over the first half of the eighteenth century provided another set of contexts for understanding why British behavior mattered greatly to colonial officials in structuring early colonialism. Frequent abuses by Company men in manipulating Company trading benefits for their own private use eventually prompted the Bengal regional government, under Nawab Siraj ud-Daula, to sack Calcutta in 1756; a year later, Robert Clive

9780230116931_02_int.indd 11

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

12

Company India, 1765–1858

orchestrated a coup d’état replacing ud-Daula with Mir Jafar, one of his generals. Clive inaugurated a fifteen-year period when much British corruption occurred, helping to establish much of the context for subsequent debates about British conduct in India throughout the following nineteenth century. At the same time, the chapter argues that despite much continued moral hand wringing about whether a trading company such as the Company, or its functionaries, ought to rule India, several major ideological shifts began to occur in the 1770s that helped structure colonial rule over the following century and beyond. Drawing upon Nicholas Dirks’s notion of “scandal of empire,” I argue that one of the key ways Britons sought to render their imperial endeavors in India during this period and afterward morally blameless was by focusing squarely on British imperialists’ personal behavior.59 Chapter 2 focuses on the various affects on colonial administration of Governor-General Lord Cornwallis’s decision, in 1793, to fire Indian officials based on his belief in universal Indian corruption. At the same time, Cornwallis banned covenanted servants from private trade as well as significantly raised their public salaries, hoping that such efforts would create new imperial officials, fully committed to their Indian subjects’ needs. Furthering this imperial goal, the Company eleven years later established Haileybury College, one of the earliest schools devoted solely to the training of colonial bureaucrats, and appointed noted moral thinker Thomas Robert Malthus as a professor in the college. In their efforts to govern India alone, without Indians, colonial officials placed great stock on proper moral conduct by British district officials. Already becoming “prisoners of their own rhetoric,” they presumed that covenanted servants were generally trustworthy and honorable men, even when there were several cases of individuals on the ground in India who borrowed heavily in order to live like little princes or who gave or accepted gifts or bribes.60 But feeling estranged from the Indians over whom they ruled and lacking much trust in Indians working in the colonial bureaucracy, colonial officials worried about how even the appearance of misconduct by district judges or revenue officials might undermine British colonial prestige in India. In this colonial obsession with appearances, the chapter concludes, one begins to see early analogues to the British Raj’s pronounced racial arrogance. The third chapter shifts focus toward the other major prop of empire, the colonial military, and traces the development and interplay

9780230116931_02_int.indd 12

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

Introduction

13

of two somewhat contradictory sets of British attitudes toward their Indian armies between the 1760s and the 1820s. On the one hand, during the same period that the Company changed from a regional power with only a few Indian footholds into South Asia’s dominant political and military power, various British colonial and military officials developed an “empire of conquest” theme in their writings. Britons commonly derided Indian methods of fighting and argued that British ones were culturally and racially superior. Britons during this period also began to develop pompous attitudes about British military officers and soldiers’ indispensability in molding sepoys into fighting men. Indeed, they argued in some cases that Indians were incapable of becoming proper soldiers by themselves. At the same time, many Britons during this period also saw Indian sepoys as gentlemen soldiers. The chapter argues these beliefs stemmed in large part from broader British beliefs that caste was broadly analogous to class and that the high-caste soldiers who dominated the Bengal Army were large landholders and, thus, honorable men in spite of much actual social evidence to the contrary. Unlike Indian bureaucrats working in the colonial bureaucracy who were thought to have a corrupting influence on British district officials, Indian soldiers were loyal to the Company, did not drink like many British soldiers, and sent money home regularly to their families. Believing them to be honorable and trustworthy men, the Company entrusted much of the Bengal Army’s inner workings to them, most importantly, recruitment. The chapter argues that both of these discourses came together to inform many British colonial anxieties about the behavior of British officers and soldiers in India. Again, like covenanted servants, who borrowed money from Indians or gave and received gifts, military officers who took advantage of Indians in various material relationships were thought to endanger British colonial prestige in India. Similar obsessions about the misconduct of soldiers, particularly drunkenness, and how it might look to its Indian soldiers, prompted Company officials to build several regimental chapels throughout its armies as well as other efforts during this period to promote religiosity among British soldiers in India. Company officials also sought to attack the problem of soldier drunkenness through building cantonment canteens, where Britons could drink under the guidance of their officers and without being seen by Indian soldiers, as well as through various sporting activities where sepoys could see British soldiers relaxing without drinking.

9780230116931_02_int.indd 13

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

14

Company India, 1765–1858

Chapters 4 and 5 consider developments within the colonial bureaucracy and the army during the last three decades of the Company period. Chapter 4 examines the nineteenth-century Indianization debate, in which British colonial officials argued about how far and how soon to turn over several day-to-day responsibilities of colonial administration to their Indian subordinates. Scholars have generally stressed administrative necessity or considerations of colonial finance for why Company officials chose during the early 1830s partially to overturn Cornwallis’s racial ban on Indians holding positions of decision-making authority while continuing to exclude Indians from belonging to the covenanted service, the uppermost rung of the colonial bureaucracy. In contrast, the chapter focuses on the importance of colonial conceptions of Indian immorality, on the one hand, and colonial paternalism, on the other, in justifying this policy of continued racial exclusion. Liberal imperial elites’ desires to expand Indian employment opportunities were thus brought into tension with concerns regarding the maintenance of British prestige, thus setting up many debates that would persist well into the succeeding Raj period. Chapter 4 also considers partial Indianization’s impact on shifting colonial expectations of British district officials, again pointing out various long-term continuities of imperial thought from the late Company period into the British Raj. As a result of partial Indianization, British colonial officials no longer worried as much as they did in earlier decades about material relationships between covenanted servants and Indians. Colonial concerns about the maintenance of British prestige remained as strong as ever, but now officials placed greater emphasis on British district officials’ ability to present an image of tireless duty on behalf of their Indian subjects. Several components of the “man on the spot” ideology existed, therefore, several decades before the advent of the British Raj, the period of colonial rule it is usually associated with. Moreover, the chapter contends that the growing perception during the 1830s and 1840s among Britons that the Company’s patronage system was producing too many “bad bargains,” who could not cope with the demands placed on them, ultimately led to late Company India becoming a laboratory for British civil service reform. Chapter 5 focuses on British attitudes toward the colonial military during the final three decades of the Company period. It examines the development of British ethnographic perceptions of various groups of Indian men during this period, looking particularly at the growth of “martial races” thinking among British military policymakers. Most

9780230116931_02_int.indd 14

7/14/2011 5:57:51 PM

Introduction

15

scholars see the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 as an originary moment in the creation of much British martial races thinking; so far only Douglas Peers has contended that the policy’s ideological roots lay in the early nineteenth century. The chapter also places the origins of the martial races ideology several decades before the Rebellion and emphasizes longer-term shifts in British attitudes toward the Indian caste system in this process. As long as Britons interpreted caste as generally analogous to class or to race, they admired the high-caste Hindu sepoys who dominated the Bengal Army (the largest of the three armies in India), regarding them as members of a “martial class” or a “martial race.” As religion became more central in British interpretations of caste by the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, and as British officers became more and more disillusioned with the performance of highcaste soldiers in various military campaigns, military reformers began to look to other more “trustworthy” groups of Indian men, such as Gurkhas from Nepal, Sikhs from the Punjab, and Indian Muslims as viable substitutes for military recruitment. Military recruitment policies remained unchanged until after the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. Nevertheless the chapter offers more of a longue durée interpretation of British racial attitudes relating to the military than currently exists within much of the scholarship on the subject. The chapter also seeks to show long-term continuities in colonial obsessions with British racial and moral prestige. It contends that growing levels of mistrust toward high-caste Hindu sepoys by several British military officers and colonial officials also led to heightened efforts to reform the behavior of British officers and soldiers in India. British officers were implored to take seriously their duty to elevate their Indian soldiers “to a British standard of manliness” through living exemplary lives in public.61 As in earlier decades, but with greater urgency, various governors-general urged Company directors in London to increase their church-building program so that Indians would know British officers and soldiers to be religious people. British officers who borrowed money from Indian creditors, likewise, were regarded by Britons, ranging from novelist and Bengal Army officer W.D. Arnold, son of Rugby headmaster Thomas Arnold, to Sir Charles Napier, the hero of the Sinde war in the 1840s and briefly commander-in-chief of British forces in India during the late 1840s and early 1850s, as knaves who risked undermining British moral prestige in India. These attitudes, the chapter will argue, anticipate later trends during the British Raj.

9780230116931_02_int.indd 15

7/14/2011 5:57:52 PM

16

Company India, 1765–1858

As already discussed, scholars have generally tended thus far to think of the British Raj as emerging mainly out of the crucible of the Sepoy Rebellion and have accordingly attributed much of the racism of British rule between 1858 and 1947 to that conflagration. By contrast, this book reveals the underlying continuities between the latter Company and British Raj periods. The tumultuous events of 1857 were certainly important in furthering racial arrogance, as well as a greater sense of fear of Indians, among Britons in India than in earlier decades. But there is a real risk in allowing this one important event to obscure the continuities between both periods of British colonial India or to create a myopic scholarly portrait among scholars of Company India. By deliberately shifting attention away from the events of 1857, this book not only shows the close relationship between British conduct and colonial rule during the Company period but also how these concerns bequeathed a dubious legacy to the later British Raj.

9780230116931_02_int.indd 16

7/14/2011 5:57:52 PM

1 Colonial Beginnings, ca. 1600–1793

The constitution of the Company began in commerce and ended in Empire. —Edmund Burke (1788) 1

Any understanding of why most nineteenth-century imperial administrators and colonial reformers regarded proper British conduct in India to be crucial to the maintenance of British colonial prestige must be foregrounded, first, in the East India Company’s broader history. It, rather than the British government, conquered and directly administered India, the British Empire’s “crown jewel,” for nearly its entire first century of existence, from 1765 until 1858. As H.V. Bowen has rightly observed: “[n]o commercial body has ever extended its reach so far or become so fully preoccupied with the business of empire” than the Company did. 2 The Company was a relative latecomer to Asia’s highly lucrative spice trade, only being chartered in 1600. The Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Companie (VOC), although founded two years later, was better able to establish itself in the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) and Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Chased away by the Dutch, the Company mainly looked to the Indian subcontinent for its trading opportunities, managing by 1617 to negotiate trading rights with the Mughal Empire, then at the height of its global power. Despite its early difficulties in attaining an Asian foothold, the Company had nevertheless managed by the end of the seventeenth century to become one of Europe’s largest and most profitable trading companies. This was partly due to its fortuitous trading position

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 17

7/14/2011 5:57:43 PM

18

Company India, 1765–1858

particularly as European demand for woven Indian cotton muslins and damasks accelerated during the second half of the seventeenth century due both to rising English and European demand and to the dramatic rise of English participation in the Atlantic slave trade after the 1660s.3 But also important were the Company’s early successes, in K.N. Chaudhuri’s words, in “imposing a centralized and bureaucratically directed system of exchange and distribution on markets that were traditionally decentralized, fragmented, and oriented toward individual efforts.”4 Of particular importance for us were the Company’s various strategies for controlling its employees several thousands of miles away from Britain, which it developed during the second half of the seventeenth century. Long after the Company’s primary emphasis shifted from commerce to colonial administration, it still drew to a large degree upon these earlier mechanisms for controlling their employees. Essentially, Company directors in the mid-seventeenth century crafted a “trust network,” to borrow the term from historical sociologist Charles Tilly. Tilly defines trust as “placing valued outcomes at risk to others’ malfeasance, mistakes or failures” and a trust network as a combination of individuals or groups who place confidence in one another despite various risks of doing so.5 Tilly does not include institutions in his analysis, nor governments for that matter; rather he is interested in tracing modern Western “civil society’s” historical roots by examining how Europeans have largely resisted government authority since the late Middle Ages through trusting one another and creating trust networks independent of state power. Still, the theory is a helpful one in understanding how the Company (or any far-flung global organization) operated vis-à-vis employees it could not directly supervise. It applies both to the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, when it was primarily a commercial enterprise, and to a later period when colonial administration became its main responsibility. During the seventeenth century, the Company had devised three strategies for controlling its employees’ actions in Asia, which were generally successful for the time but later on during the following century, as we shall soon see, proved largely inadequate. First, despite the Company’s formal monopoly over all English (and after 1707 British) trade with Asia, Company directors informally allowed its factors and merchants to engage in their own private Asian “country” trade while keeping the more lucrative Asia to Europe trade totally offlimits.6 As one might expect from any savvy corporation, however, the

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 18

7/14/2011 5:57:44 PM

Colonial Beginnings

19

Company did not place blind trust in its employees, for after 1674 it also required its employees to sign covenants protecting the Company from potential future loss before beginning their employment—hence the origin of the term “covenanted servant.” With each promotion to higher rank, Company servants were required to sign new covenants of increasingly higher amounts that also further restricted the commodities in which they were allowed to trade.7 Indeed, all the way up to its dissolution in 1858, and apparently for some time thereafter under the succeeding British Raj—that is long after the Company’s main priorities shifted from trade toward colonial administration— the Company (and later the Raj) still required all its civil and military officers to provide bonds in assurance of future good behavior before commencing their employment.8 While the Company’s trust network worked well during the seventeenth century to ensure profitability, over the course of the following century it began to unravel. The third, but perhaps the most important, of the mechanisms the Company relied on to police employee behavior in India was removed, namely the existence of a sufficiently powerful Indian polity like the Mughal Empire to constrain private British greed. Whereas the Mughal Empire under Aurungzeb (r. 1658–1707) defeated the Company in a war during the late 1680s, prompted by the greed of several Company officials in India, the Mughal Empire began to collapse soon after his death.9 Most historians of India, it is true, no longer explain the eighteenth century simply in terms of Mughal imperial decline. Since the 1980s, various scholars have instead pointed to an economic and social vibrancy at the regional level throughout northern and central India despite the collapse of imperial political authority.10 Even so, the Mughal Empire’s sudden collapse brought about increased political stability that, over time, allowed British private traders to gain an increased market share in Bengal and north Indian trade. They managed this largely by abusing an imperial edict (or farman), which Furrukhsiyar (r. 1713–19) granted to the Company in 1717. In exchange for a nominal annual fee, this edict accorded the Company customs-free trading privileges within the Indian subcontinent, provided that the goods traded were duly registered with permits (or dastaks). This trading privilege was technically limited only to Company trade. Nevertheless, by the middle of the eighteenth century, as Sudipta Sen explains, permits officially exempting trade from customs were being “translated and circulated as freely as money,” privately benefiting not only Company employees but also frequently their Indian trading partners.11 As an extensive,

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 19

7/14/2011 5:57:44 PM

20

Company India, 1765–1858

illicit, customs-free trade developed throughout northern India, those Company employees participating in it became more their own men and less the Company’s pliant agents, thus placing great strains upon the Company’s formerly successful trust network. Indeed, Company men’s untrammeled private greed, more than anything else, set into motion its conquest of Bengal in the late 1750s. Upon assuming the governorship (or nawabi) of Bengal in early 1756, Siraj-ud-Daula (r. 1756–57) decided to provoke a confrontation with the Company over the profusion of illegal dastaks, storming its chief trading port of Calcutta (modern-day Kolkata) in Bengal at the end of June. Robert Clive, the military commander the Company sent to recapture Calcutta, soon did so, prompting Siraj-ud-Daula to agree to a “generous restoration” of the Company’s prior trading privileges. British aims expanded during the following spring, however, to include his overthrow. By the end of May, Clive had reached an agreement with several prominent Calcutta financiers and political and military leaders to overthrow Siraj-ud-Daula and replace him with Mir Jafar, one of his generals. Three weeks later on June 23, 1757, Clive’s expeditionary force of about 3,000 soldiers and sailors fought a short, anticlimactic “battle” at Plassey, thirty miles north of Calcutta, consisting mainly of “limited . . . artillery exchanges” against troops loyal to Siraj and French artillerymen. At a crucial interval in the battle, as had been agreed upon in advance, Mir Jafar deserted along with most of Siraj’s army, ensuring the Bengal governor’s overthrow.12 Plassey inaugurated a revolutionary change in the Company’s role in India, although few Company officials (or many others for that matter) fully realized it at the time. Company directors avoided assuming the Mughal imperial mandate (or diwani) to govern Bengal for another eight years, preferring instead to use their new Bengal revenues to underwrite a burgeoning Chinese tea and porcelain trade instead of importing American gold and silver as they had previously done.13 Company officials in India increasingly acted as “kingmakers,” deposing three nominally independent rulers between 1757 and 1765 all while refusing to accept any responsibility for ruling. As a result, the already “precarious standards of official honesty in India” were placed under heavy strain, if not destroyed, as many Company men proceeded to greatly enrich themselves, receiving over £2,500,000 in the form of gifts and bribes in just the first fifteen years following Plassey.14 As the Bengali verb “to loot” came into the English language roughly at this time to describe the extensive British corruption and impoverishment of the country then occurring, the

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 20

7/14/2011 5:57:44 PM

Colonial Beginnings

21

Company’s initial trust network had clearly broken down, providing long afterward much of the context in which both imperial administrators and colonial reformers discussed British conduct in India.15

“A Two-Headed Monster in Nature That Cannot Exist Long:” Early Criticisms of the Company and Efforts at Reform Just as the Company’s older trust network gradually broke down in the half-century before 1757, reform was slow going for decades afterward. Company directors, British politicians, and commentators from various political perspectives had begun almost immediately after Plassey to take notice of the number of vast and ill-gotten fortunes made by Company “nabobs.”16 It was not, however, until the 1780s and 1790s that a series of reforms would be enacted that would begin to remedy problems in the Company’s older trust network and to create a new one, founded more on differentials of race and class. In the meantime, Company directors’ general failure to control their employees in India between the 1750s and the 1790s prompted many British politicians and Company critics alike to question whether the Company or its agents ought to be entrusted with colonial responsibilities. In so doing they would put forth several criticisms that would reverberate well into the nineteenth century. This is not to say, of course, that the Company was entirely oblivious to the need for reform during the second half of the eighteenth century. In fact, from the time news of rampant abuses by Britons in India began to trickle back after Plassey, Company directors tried a variety of reforms to control their employees better. They purged dishonest Company employees several times during the 1760s as well as forced stricter covenants on its civil and military employees. And they even appointed the swashbuckling Robert Clive, who by conservative estimates had returned from India in 1760 with a fortune of around £300,000, to a second stint as president of Bengal in 1764 with the plenary authority to dismiss corrupt employees.17 For a brief time this seemed to work, but when Clive returned home in 1767 for health reasons, corruption among the Company’s British employees soon returned to its prior pride of place. Company directors then tried another tack, appointing three outside commissioners to govern Bengal. (Tragically, though, their ship disappeared en route to India in 1769.) Finally, Company directors issued numerous directives

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 21

7/14/2011 5:57:44 PM

22

Company India, 1765–1858

throughout the 1760s and 1770s prohibiting certain activities that they had once tolerated, such as their employees “lending” money to Indian princes. Company directors understood these purported loans to be often merely facades to justify receiving extensive “presents or gratuities” from princes and court officials “by way of exorbitant Interest on monies lent, or said to be lent to them by our Servants.”18 Company directors kept issuing such directives in almost verbatim form until the end of the century but to relatively little effect, as demonstrated by the fact that several British officials in Madras continued to “lend” money to the Nawab of Arcot and other South Indian potentates, sometimes in exceedingly large amounts. British trader Paul Benfield’s claims against the nawab, for example, were said to range between £500,000 and £800,000, while Thomas Rumbold, governor of Madras for only two years in the late 1770s, somehow managed to return to Britain in 1780 with a fortune of around £750,000, much of it claims against the nawab.19 Why was the Company so seemingly inept in stopping its employees in India from committing major abuses? Some British commentators argued in the 1760s and thereafter that the Company’s difficulties stemmed from the impossibility of its trying to be two, ultimately irreconcilable things at once, a merchant and a government. Not only would such criticisms continue to be made of the Company’s rule over India up its demise in 1858; like these later debates, this argument also cut across political and Company/non-Company lines. In the argument’s initial rendition in the 1760s and early 1770s, for example, individuals ranging from Company director Nathaniel Smith and high-ranking Bengal official John Zephaniah Holwell to Company outsiders such as MP and former Massachusetts governor Thomas Pownall and private trader William Bolts all doubted whether the Company could still remain profitable while governing Bengal. Nor did they believe that Bengal could be governed well as long as the Company continued to prioritize its commercial functions. As Holwell colorfully put it in 1765, “a trading and a fighting company, is a two headed monster in nature that cannot exist long, as the expence and inexperience of the latter, must exceed, confound, and destroy every profit or advantage gained by the former.”20 Then there was the issue of the Company’s frequently unstable corporate governance between the late 1750s and the early 1770s, itself largely a consequence of the explosion of “shareholder democracy” within the Company during this period. Annual elections for Company directors, formerly a placid affair, suddenly became far

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 22

7/14/2011 5:57:44 PM

Colonial Beginnings

23

more fractious with many directors now failing to win reelection the following year. Shareholders were also less willing to accept their decisions. Whereas during the entire half-century prior to 1765, there had only been seven officially recorded votes by shareholders challenging director decisions, in just the eight years following Clive’s assumption of the diwani of Bengal, there were forty-five such ballots. Finally, although the Company tended throughout the period prior to the mid-1760s to hold just five meetings a year of shareholders, the minimum required, the number of meetings held dramatically increased during the late 1760s and early 1770s, reaching an all-time high of forty-eight in 1773. 21 As Adam Smith famously contended in his Wealth of Nations (1776), the Company’s sudden explosion of “shareholder democracy” practically guaranteed corruption among many of the Company’s employees in India. Shareholders bought the required minimum £1,000 in Company stock, entitling them to a vote in Company affairs, not principally so they could earn dividends. Rather, Smith argued, they sought to possess “a share, though not in the plunder, yet in the appointment of the plunderers of India” through participating in the Company’s patronage system. 22 In normal market circumstances, Smith contended, shareholders might demand that employees who misbehaved in India be punished as the failure to do so would harm their bottom line. In the anomalous case of the Company, however, that both traded and ruled a colony, shareholders hoped to reap their share of the illicit wealth many of their relatives and friends gleaned from India. Far from being big business’s uncritical admirer, as he is sometimes portrayed to be today, particularly by portions of the economic right, Smith thus joined many other eighteenth-century critics in regarding one of his era’s biggest corporations—the East India Company—as an utter anathema.23 Finally, during this early period of British colonialism, various critics, both British and Indian, alleged that the Company simply did not care about their Indian subjects’ welfare. Like arguments that a commercial body had no business running a colony, criticisms of the Company’s excessive greed and lack of concern for its Indian subjects persisted well into the nineteenth century. In its initial rendition in the early 1770s, critics such as Bolts contrasted many prior Hindu and Muslim rulers’ “parental” concern for their Indian subjects’ well being with the Company’s desire to squeeze as much money as possible from India. Mughal rule, Bolts further contended, was not despotic. Testifying before parliament later in the year, he also pointed out that

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 23

7/14/2011 5:57:44 PM

24

Company India, 1765–1858

Indians generally willed property to descendants, thereby implying that the Mughals had generally respected Indian private property rights. In contrast, Bolts argued that the Company and its employees in India had attained unprecedented despotic powers enjoyed by no previous ruler of India and that such powers were rapidly resulting in the country’s impoverishment.24 Bolts had a major personal axe to grind against the Company and so his polemic, however rich it is in many respects, needs to be read carefully. As a private trader, Bolts had indeed engaged in several highly questionable trading methods, which netted him nearly £90,000 in only two years between 1767 and 1769, but which also put him on the Company’s radar screen. In 1769, the Company ordered his arrest and deportation from India, even though he was an elected alderman of the city of Calcutta and therefore supposedly immune from such punishment. The Company continued to hound Bolts even after his return to Britain, thwarting his efforts to recoup much of his money. In the end, Bolts managed to gain access to only about a third of his fortune and, indeed, went bankrupt a few years later.25 It is certainly possible, therefore, to interpret Bolts’s invectives largely as the rantings of an individual who believed the Company had wronged him. Yet a different interpretation becomes possible when read alongside Muslim Bengali notable Ghulam Husain Khan’s Sëir Mutaqherin. This book, a four-volume history of eighteenth-century northern India translated in 1789 into English as A View of Modern Times, was one of the first books written by an Indian, critical of the Company’s actions in India, to reach a British audience. For one thing, Khan corroborates Bolts’s favorable view of the Mughal Empire visà-vis the Company. The Mughals, in Khan’s elegiac view, had largely provided Bengal and northern India with good government that protected private property and created the conditions for general agrarian prosperity. The Company’s sordidness was now ruining the country. Anticipating later nineteenth-century authors who would run down a similar list of Company wrongs, Khan argued that the Company failed to build wells, bridges, and other public improvements that would benefit all their subjects, as he claimed the Mughals and other prior rulers had done. Rather, Khan accused Company functionaries of only desiring to return to Britain as quickly as possible with fortunes drained from India. Many Indian subordinates in the colonial bureaucracy committed widespread corruption and oppression which further compounded the misery caused by the widespread avarice of Company officials. Khan contended that these subordinates most unmercifully

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 24

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

Colonial Beginnings

25

plundered and oppressed Indian landholders while their British superiors often looked the other way, in many respects inaugurating several laments against Company (and later British) colonial rule that would persist all the way up to the end of British colonialism.26

The Beginnings of British Imperial Commitment: Early Company Reforms Just as many of the earliest criticisms of the Company during the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s would prefigure later nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates, reforms enacted beginning in the 1770s also would structure later colonial rule in several important respects. First, despite continued hand-wringing over the following eight decades about the moral dubiousness of a company continuing to govern India, already the colony was far too important to Britain economically and politically to willingly let go, particularly after the demise of much of Britain’s North American empire in 1783. Moreover, however much reform at both the metropolitan (British) and local (Indian) levels may have proved necessary and even desirable, the Company itself was already far too important an economic and political institution, propping up what John Brewer has called Britain’s eighteenth-century “military-fiscal state,” to be dismissed lightly. 27 (It had frequently lent money at low interest throughout the eighteenth century to the British government, for example, helping it to prosecute its various wars against France during this period.) Impending threats to the Company’s solvency largely caused by their employees’ misconduct, therefore, finally prompted parliament to act in 1772. Not only did parliament lend the Company an emergency state loan of £1.4 million to stave off immediate bankruptcy; in a highly clumsy effort to restore the Company’s profitability, it had also granted the Company an ill-fated concession to sell surplus tea to North America at bargain prices. This measure, because it undercut the profitable business of New England privateers who illegally traded for tea with the French and Spanish Caribbean, contributed to the Boston Tea Party in Massachusetts the following year. 28 Along with these various moves by parliament to bail out one of the eighteenth century’s institutions that were “too big to fail” came the first efforts at political reform, the Regulating Act of 1773. The Regulating Act’s reforms to colonial governance, although a start, were meager and largely ineffective. For example, although

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 25

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

26

Company India, 1765–1858

higher salaries were granted to various high ranking Company employees to discourage them from engaging in private trade—which was thought to be corrupting—the far greater problem of the low salaries of lower-level Company functionaries was not addressed at all and, indeed, would not begin to be dealt with until two decades later. 29 More disastrously, parliament created the post of governor-general to supervise the three Company presidency (or regional) governments of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay and appointed then-Bengal president Warren Hastings to it. Fearful, though, that too much power in any one man’s hands would only continue to foster corruption, parliament appointed a council to serve alongside him. Despite the best intentions of the members of parliament, though, this council, consisting of two Company employees (Hastings and Richard Barwell) and three ministerial appointees (General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Philip Francis), did not yield a more responsible government of India but rather immediately disintegrated into internecine warfare between Hastings and Francis and their respective factions, drawing many of the battle lines that would resurface fifteen years later in Hastings’s impeachment trial.30 A decade later, the looming threat of Company bankruptcy again prompted parliament to enact more significant legislation but not without first sparking eighteenth-century Britain’s greatest constitutional crisis.31 As a result of the political fallout from the British loss of the American colonies, four separate ministries governed Britain between 1782 and 1784. One of them, the Fox-North coalition, drafted what came to be referred to as Fox’s India Bill between July and September 1783. The bill, had it been enacted into law, would have stripped the Company of all political and military authority in India and transferred those responsibilities to a separate parliamentary commission. It would have, thus, followed the advice of many commentators who, since the 1760s, had been dubious of the Company’s abilities to juggle its corporate with its political responsibilities. The bill passed the House of Commons in early December by a majority of over a hundred, despite frantic lobbying against the legislation by the Company and other prominent British financial institutions such as the Bank of England. Opponents of the legislation also feared that its passage would have given Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke, and their fellow Whigs a major partisan advantage by giving them control over large amounts of Indian patronage. The bill was not enacted because of George III’s personal dislike of Charles Fox. Nursing an active dislike of the Fox-North Coalition,

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 26

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

Colonial Beginnings

27

which parliament had forced on him earlier in the year, he ignored several decades of political convention of monarchs generally deferring to parliament for their ministries and engineered a political coup against his adversaries. Threatening the loss of personal favor to any peer who voted for the legislation, the king got what he wanted. The House of Lords narrowly defeated the bill; the king used this failure by the Fox-North ministry to carry an important piece of legislation as the excuse to demand Fox’s resignation as prime minister; and, under such inauspicious circumstances, appointed the twenty-three year old William Pitt as the new prime minister. Pitt would remain in office for the next eighteen years until he crossed George III over Catholic Emancipation in Ireland in 1801.32 Although the Company dodged a bullet in being the fortunate beneficiary of George III’s personal pique toward Charles Fox, the widely perceived need for parliament to enact meaningful Indian reform did not disappear. Seven months later, after Pitt won a snap general election, parliament enacted his India Act, which, while not as sweeping as Fox’s India Bill, nevertheless was “one of the most important measures passed by Parliament” in the 1780s. 33 Most crucially, the India Act created the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India (more commonly known as the Board of Control) to supervise the Company’s management of political and military affairs in India. Under the India Act, the Board of Control had to approve dispatches from Company directors prior to their transmission to India. While, as H.V. Bowen concedes, there were only forty-nine instances between 1813 and 1830 when the Board ordered the Company to prepare different dispatches to India than those initially proposed (out of over 8,000), there was still no mistaking the fact that “the Board of Control was very much the senior partner” in colonial administration. (Bowen contends that the various presidents of the Board of Control generally alerted the various Company chairmen whenever the government was intending a change of policy, thus avoiding much overt friction between the two bodies).34 The crown also directly appointed the governor-general of Bengal (after 1833, India) and the governors of the two subordinate presidencies of Madras and Bombay. When this fact is added to the Board’s extensive supervisory powers over the Company’s colonial administration, it is clear that long before nationalization in 1858 the British government was already exerting a leading role in setting colonial policy. Each successive renewal of the Company’s charter in the nineteenth century further bears this out. In 1813, the Company lost its

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 27

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

28

Company India, 1765–1858

trading monopoly except over Chinese tea; it was also humbled by Evangelical members of parliament such as Charles Grant and William Wilberforce into being forced to admit Protestant missionaries into India. Two decades later, it lost the right to trade at all, becoming for the last quarter-century of its existence merely the crown’s licensed political agent in India. And in the Company’s final charter renewal, in 1853, along with losing its civil patronage with the advent of competitive examinations, the Company also lost its former right to be given three years’ prior notice at any intent by the British government not to renew its charter rights. At any time after 1853, the British government could take over direct responsibility for colonial rule, which, indeed, is what it did in 1858. In addition to inaugurating a clear unmistakable trend toward greater government involvement in colonial administration, Pitt’s India Act also signaled that, already in the mid-1780s, while abuses might continue to exist here and there and would need to be corrected by further reform, both the Company and its prized Indian colonial possessions were far too important to British political and economic life to be seriously questioned. The India Act, in effect, enacted a compromise solution: the Company would continue being directly responsible for governing India, except now under the British government’s close watch and, ultimately, sufferance. In exchange, the Company safely dispensed Indian patronage up to 1853 so that it did not taint British domestic politics.35 But in making these arrangements, parliament also reduced the Company’s colonial rule over India largely into a management problem, whereby earlier doubts about British colonialism’s morality were now increasingly being shunted off to the side. Key to how imperial elites sought to manage whatever moral dilemmas of empire still lingered, as later chapters of this book will argue, was by displacing any moral blame for colonialism’s various failings onto the colonial regime’s civil and military functionaries. The next section shows how even during British colonialism’s very first decades—that is, before Pitt’s India Act—Company officials and colonial reformers alike were already laying much of this governance strategy’s intellectual groundwork.

British Misbehavior and the “Corrupt Indian” Stereotype’s Origins Many British (and Indian) critics of the Company as an institution during this period drew particular attention to reports of Company

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 28

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

Colonial Beginnings

29

employees in India misbehaving. They focused, first, on many Company employees’ personal greed. Company directors feared in 1765 that “an unbounded thirst after riches” afflicted nearly every one of their British employees in India. Similar indictments appear throughout William Bolts’s Considerations on Indian Affairs. Without any trace of irony given whence much of his own personal fortune derived, Bolts accused Company employees of engaging in such “unrestrained avarice and tyranny” as the world had never known before. In particular, Bolts pointed to the rampant abuse of various tax-free privileges which, in theory, only the Company was supposed to enjoy, something that he himself had been accused of doing. Even so, Bolts rightly explained that the Company’s British employees frequently abused these privileges for their own private benefit; this, in turn, enabled several to return home to Britain with “princely fortunes.” In order to prevent further misery and oppression of Indians, Bolts insisted on the need for much stronger rules and regulations.36 Various colonial officials and Company critics also worried about the considerable degree of independence that many of the Company’s British employees seemed to enjoy in India, a concern that would continue to bedevil political leaders and imperial administrators well into the nineteenth century. As Clive explained to Company directors in 1765, again, like Bolts, without any of the slightest hint of irony, the avidity with which Company employees sought to acquire personal fortunes led to a near breakdown of all authority in India. Senior Company employees’ greed, as well as the ease with which many acquired their fortunes, Clive argued, set such a horrible example to others that “every one thought he had a Right to enrich himself.”37 As if this were not bad enough, several also feared that Company employees intended to swarm Britain with their ill-gotten wealth (as relatively few actually came from aristocratic backgrounds) and buy themselves into the British landed elite.38 Anticipating many of the same themes put forth more prominently by Edmund Burke a few years later, British MP James Macpherson worried about the prodigious amounts of corruption in India and contended it mainly resulted from Company men desiring to rapidly rise above their social stations.39 Several authors and colonial officials also worried during the 1760s and 1770s that rampant British greed led to the Company’s governance of India being more oppressive than that of previous rulers. Pownall thus feared many Company men’s desire to return to

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 29

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

30

Company India, 1765–1858

Britain as quickly as possible with large fortunes had already “ruined [Indian] commerce and manufactures.” A year earlier, an anonymous critic calling himself “A Friend to Fair Discussion” more pointedly criticized the misconduct of the Company’s British employees. Not only did these employees commit “[e]normities, which no Englishman would dare to avow openly,” but as a consequence of such misbehavior, the Company also provided far worse government to Bengal than previous Muslim rulers.40 Indeed, several officials worried about British colonialism’s long-term security so long as Britons so grievously misbehaved. Directly articulating for the first time the “empire of opinion” argument in 1765, that British rulers’ personal behavior mattered greatly to the maintenance of British colonial rule in India, Bengal officials expressed pessimism about its long-term stability. Misbehavior by Britons over the past decade or so, they declared, had “rendered the English name so odious” that they lacked confidence that their Indian subjects would continue to remain loyal.41 These fears influenced colonial policy when the Company finally accepted the Mughal grant of diwani (the right to collect taxes) over Bengal in 1765, formally inaugurating British colonial rule in eastern India. Appointed to lead the new government, the last thing that Robert Clive wanted was Britons being directly involved in colonial administration. Clive thus initially entrusted nearly all aspects of government to Muhammad Reza Khan, a prominent minister under Mir Jafar, the kingdom’s last Indian ruler.42 Four years later, when Khan failed to meet the Company’s unrealistic fiscal expectations, British revenue supervisors were sent into Bengal districts.43 Even so, colonial officials in India remained wary throughout the next two decades of trusting the Company’s British employees with much autonomous power. For example, Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal between 1773 and 1785, deeply mistrusted British officials and feared their ability, if left unchecked, to oppress Indians and accumulate large illicit sums of wealth.44 At the same time, however, other colonial officials started to worry about Indian dishonesty and corruption. As early as 1766, Company directors warned that Britons would never be able “to follow the subtle native through all his arts to conceal the real value of his country.”45 Coming at the heels of much consternation among directors at that time regarding their British employees’ corrupt behavior, such a tactic in combat against private British greed—as a kind of “weapon of the weak”—might be laudatory, even necessary, from the Company’s perspective if Bengal were to remain a profitable business opportunity.46

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 30

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

Colonial Beginnings

31

Yet, only a few years later, various authors of Indian tracts as well as colonial officials started to put forth a different argument. Expressing dissatisfaction with the lower-than-anticipated amounts of revenue received from Khan, several Britons accused him and his Indian subordinates of pocketing much of the tax revenues collected from Bengalis as well as of engaging in systematic oppression.47 Operating on a similar track, various British authors of India tracts also inaugurated in this early period what would be a running theme throughout British colonialism’s nearly two-century long history: a wariness, if not outright fear at times, of having to rely so extensively upon Indian subordinates in order to rule. Initially the targets of such fear and mistrust were individuals known in British parlance as “Banyans,” an English corruption of the name for the main merchant caste in Bengal (banian). Banyans frequently were Britons’ private Indian agents and business partners. Fears about having to rely on these Indian go-betweens were further stoked during this period (and later) by the fact that most Company employees first went out to India in their teens (sixteen being set as the minimum age only in the 1750s) without knowing any Indian languages, laws, or customs.48 Thus, while William Bolts considered it bad enough that Indians often were at the mercy of Britons “who are trained up from youth to have no conscience of their own” (presumably because they arrived in India too young to have formed a firm moral core in their actions), he also warned that Britons’ youthful inexperience enabled their Indian banians to generally get away with oppressive and corrupt acts.49 Indeed, Bolts contended that the Company’s colonial rule over Bengal was not, properly speaking, British. Instead, because the Company’s British employees ceded much informal power to their Indian subordinates, Bolts regarded the government as one of “civil and military harpies” in which banyans routinely engaged in “fraud and deceit” for their own private advantage.50 Despite Bolts’s highly public vendetta against the Company, several prominent colonial officials also shared this view. For example, the Bengal government banned banyans in 1775 from holding any revenue farms because of their supposedly pervasive and corrupt influence over British revenue supervisors and Bengal revenue collection more generally.51 Thus, already during British colonialism’s first decades we begin to see the first stirrings of what can only be called a concerted strategy of blaming the colonial victim. This management strategy, quite unseemly to the modern eye, nevertheless often helped to assuage any British moral twinges regarding empire in India throughout the first

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 31

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

32

Company India, 1765–1858

half of the nineteenth century and beyond; indeed, it has continued to be useful to this day to many in the pursuit of Western corporate or neocolonial power and influence in other regions of the world. The Company’s British employees, as Bolts and others argued, were not generally trustworthy, but the Indians they ruled through were even worse. They were totally outside the possibility of being trusted, being by their very nature corrupt, deceitful, and without honor. They were strangers to true morality. Such racial-cultural categorizations would also play a significant role in Edmund Burke’s numerous parliamentary speeches on India during the 1780s and 1790s, to which we shall now turn.

Edmund Burke’s Moral Judgments of Company Rule In Burke’s prolific speeches and writings on India during the 1780s and 1790s, culminating in his high-profile impeachment of Warren Hastings between 1788 and 1795, we see the working out of many of empire’s moral dilemmas. Could an empire ever be moral? Could Company men be trusted to govern India in such a manner that would not “dishonour the British name” or “forfeit [Britain’s] fame for honour and integrity?”52 Such questions, although considered by many writers on India from the 1760s on, were brought into sharper focus by Edmund Burke in his various Indian speeches during the 1780s and 1790s. Burke focused a great deal of his attention on imperial issues throughout his long parliamentary career, from 1767 to 1795. In addition to advocating the American colonialist cause in parliament, as well as political reform in his native Ireland, Burke focused his greatest attention as a parliamentarian and public intellectual on the Company’s colonial administration of India. As Isaac Kramnick has calculated, India or Warren Hastings alone constituted nearly “half of Burke’s published work.”53 Moreover, as Uday Singh Mehta argues, no other issue “involved the febrile intensity and gravity of purpose that India did for Burke.”54 Thus, while Burke is better remembered today for his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) and his parliamentary bromides against the French Revolution, India was his central focus. A major theme running throughout Burke’s writings and speeches was his historically informed moral judgment of the Company’s

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 32

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

Colonial Beginnings

33

rule over India. Initially, Burke had largely sympathized with the Company, opposing the Regulating Act in 1773, for example, for egregiously violating, in his view, what he considered a chartered company’s nearly sacrosanct rights.55 Already fearing George III and his ministers’ centralizing tendencies, Burke worried about the increase in Crown patronage provided by the new law, such as the appointment of governors-general, governors, and judges in each presidency’s Supreme Court of Judicature. The shift in Burke’s thought regarding the Company, as scholars have long noted, came in the following decade.56 Thus, he argued in 1786 that the Company’s rule over India since Clive had won the Battle of Plassey in 1757 had been one continuous “scene of peculation, rapine, fraud, injustice, and disgrace.” Its dishonorable actions in India, Burke contended, had “sullied [the] national honour” and damaged Britain’s good name.57 For such a sordid state of affairs, Burke mainly blamed GovernorGeneral Warren Hastings, holding him personally responsible for some twenty-two charges ranging from systematic corruption and misgovernment to accepting extensive bribes from various Indian potentates. He also hoped the House of Lords would settle the more fundamental question of “whether millions of mankind shall be miserable or happy?” Burke repeatedly insisted during the seven-year long impeachment trial that the House of Lords needed to convict Hastings before British colonial rule could begin to be based “upon solid principles of State morality.”58 In his prosecution (some would say persecution) of Hastings for not governing India according to long-established principles of “State morality,” Burke appealed often to Indian history and tradition.59 This was not surprising for the “father” of modern conservatism. But, so too, did Hastings. In his defense, the former governor-general had argued that he had only acted according to preestablished authoritarian modes of rule in India.60 Burke rejected this historical interpretation of previous centuries of Muslim and Hindu rule. Most previous Muslim and Hindu monarchs, Burke contended, were paternal rulers, not tyrants. No Indian prince had ever “claimed to [himself] a right to act by arbitrary will,” something which could not be said about Hastings.61 But even while he turned his sights primarily on Hastings, Burke also condemned how the Company governed India more broadly, drawing upon many themes advanced by earlier critics. For example, like earlier critics, Burke lambasted the confusing nature of the Company’s role and function in India. Was it primarily, Burke demanded to know, “a great Empire carrying on subordinately (under the public authority),

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 33

7/14/2011 5:57:45 PM

34

Company India, 1765–1858

a great commerce?” Or, rather, was it mainly “a State in disguise of a Merchant, a great public office in disguise of a Counting house?”62 From such confusion about the Company’s true role, Burke argued, arose many abuses in its rule over India. Although Burke was critical of previous Muslim rulers of India in his 1783 speech in favor of Fox’s India Bill, characterizing their invasions of the country as generally being “ferocious, bloody, and wasteful in the extreme,” he nevertheless contended that Muslim rulers spent most of their riches in the country, thus restoring some of their loot to their Indian subjects. By contrast, Burke contended that British greed was far worse. Not only were Company men generally little older than “boys;” they also lacked a developed sense of personal honor and drank “the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads [were] able to bear it . . . [and] long before they [were] ripe in principle.” By appointing such immature, unprincipled, and dishonorable “boys” to rule India, and failing to prohibit their corrupt behavior while there, Burke maintained, both the Company and its governor-general were morally complicit in their criminality.63 In his East India speech, Burke also alleged that the Company’s rule was oppressive in other ways. Burke argued that, in the three decades since the Company had begun governing India, it had spent very little, if any, money for its benefit, thus repeating a criticism made by Bolts and Khan but drawing more public attention to it. Burke accused the Company of squeezing as much revenue as possible from India. Previous Muslim rulers of India, by contrast, had all left “some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind them.” Indeed, Burke contended that the Company’s greed was so bad that were it to be driven out of India, “nothing would remain . . . better than the ourang-outang or the tiger” to demonstrate that it had ever ruled India. Burke argued that only when Britons started to demonstrate true imperial commitment to their Indian subjects’ well-being would their Indian empire be rendered more virtuous and secure.64 At the same time, as several scholars have shown, there were major limits to Burke’s moral critique of Company colonialism, however rich it may be in other respects.65 Nowhere in Burke’s prolific speeches on India, for example, did he ever preclude the possibility that British colonial rule could eventually be righted. Nor did Burke believe that imperialism necessarily was unjust; indeed as a good conservative he would have rejected such abstract notions. Rather, he always held out the possibility that what seems to many modern-day observers a contradiction in terms—an honorable and moral empire—could

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 34

7/14/2011 5:57:46 PM

Colonial Beginnings

35

indeed exist. In the next section we shall consider yet another way that Burke’s moral critique was ultimately limited: his extensive focus on Hastings and other Company employees’ personal failings rather than imperialism’s broader ethical problems, an intellectual sleight of hand that contributed much to the “empire of opinion” governance ideology of the first half of the nineteenth century.

“The Master is No Longer a Master”: British Misbehavior as a Violation of Trust in Burkean Thought Central to Burke’s hierarchical vision of politics was the high personal responsibility of those elected (by God) to rule over others. Regarding rule as essentially a “trust,” Burke argued that rulers needed to exhibit a considerable amount of personal honor and moral conduct in order to maintain the proper levels of deference and admiration among social inferiors for their social betters that he regarded throughout his thought as central to how societies cohered. Like many other conservative-minded eighteenth-century Whigs, Burke did not believe that everyone was capable of leadership over others; rather, in Burke’s view a ruler needed first to be honorable in order to govern properly. According to Burke, this essential character trait was most often to be found among aristocrats and landed elites, far less so among commercial men such as those employed by the Company.66 Thus, Burke complained a great deal in his Indian speeches that the Company and its governor-general, Hastings, had turned to the wrong Indian social classes when governing India. Again, he drew on earlier criticisms made by other critics but greatly expanded them. Thus, in a 1782 speech Burke greatly criticized Hastings for having relied on Indian “Banyans” to collect government revenue, much as Bolts had argued a decade earlier. Complaining of their dishonest, secret, and corrupt tendencies, Burke argued that they were neither sufficiently manly nor honorable enough to be trusted with any authority largely because they were members of nouveau riche mercantile families. They lacked the personal honor of Indians of more genteel backgrounds who had typically served in the Mughal imperial administration. This lack of personal honor, Burke continued, was shown above all by their choice of tactics against government oppression. Rather than choosing to defend themselves through “a manly Assertion of their Rights,” as Burke insinuated anyone of an

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 35

7/14/2011 5:57:46 PM

36

Company India, 1765–1858

elite landed background would naturally do, they instead employed dishonest and cowardly means. The consequences, therefore, of trusting them with colonial governance, Burke argued six years later, was extensive “oppression, rack and ruin, cruel exactions and horrible tortures” perpetuated upon Indians, particularly Indian landed elites. In this dystopia, in Burke’s mind not unlike that unleashed by French revolutionaries, particularly during the Reign of Terror, unfeeling banyans descended upon the Indian landscape extracting as much revenue as possible to fill government coffers while in the process fundamentally undermining India’s aristocracy and its social fabric.67 In his opening impeachment speech, Burke also joined earlier critics in fearing the knowledgeable and crafty Banyan’s ability to ensnare many of the Company’s young British employees. Burke argued that Banyans, as Indians, already possessed much greater “knowledge of the country” than those the Company sent out to govern India. Thus, Burke feared that it was easy for these Indian subordinates to “take possession” of British officials and put British power and authority to ill-use.68 Burke worried particularly about failings in British officials’ conduct such as when they borrowed money or accepted gifts from Indians. He feared the loss of British racial prestige and control that such rather mundane monetary interactions presented. When a British covenanted servant borrowed money from his Indian banyan, Burke contended, British colonial control itself was rendered a fiction: “it is not the Englishman, but . . . the black Banyan that is the Master.”69 He argued that such momentary lapses of honorable conduct impugned British officials’ personal reputations as well as threatened to overthrow the social order of things, outcomes he dreaded as a conservative. By engaging in monetary relationships with individuals so bereft of personal honor, the Company’s British employees had proved themselves “nothing but the inferior tools and miserable instruments of the tyranny which now the lower part of the natives exercise, to the disgrace of the British power.”70 By betraying the trust entrusted to them as rulers, they had demonstrated their own lack of personal honor and, therefore, for Burke, their utter unfitness to rule over others. They had let both their employers and their country down.

Conclusion Ultimately, Burke was unsuccessful in gaining Warren Hastings’s conviction for any of the twenty-two charges that the House of Commons had impeached him for. In part, as various scholars have suggested,

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 36

7/14/2011 5:57:46 PM

Colonial Beginnings

37

Burke failed because of his melodramatic oratory, which, as the trial continued on and on for seven years, began to irritate.71 The fact that the Hastings impeachment trial coincided with the opening years of the French Revolution also did not help. Indeed, after the trial ended in 1795, “Burke and his fellow managers of the impeachment were seen as vengeful, irresponsible, and disloyal to the British nation” then fighting for its life against the French.72 Many nineteenth-century historians’ verdicts were not particularly kind, either. Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who agreed with Burke that much had occurred in the first few decades following the Battle of Plassey to leave “on the fame of the East India Company a stain, not wholly effaced by many years of just and humane government,” nevertheless attacked him for running wild with his imagination in his accusations against Hastings. Others, such as Oxford don Horace Hayman Wilson, who updated and annotated James Mill’s History of British India (1817) in the 1850s, were harsher. Wilson conceded that Hastings occasionally “judged erroneously” and “acted wrongly,” like most other statesmen, but insisted that none of this justified Burke’s “almost insane virulence” toward him.73 Scholars have tended to interpret Burke’s spectacular failure to gain Hastings’s conviction in the 1790s, as well as later criticisms by Macaulay, Wilson, and others, regarding the harshness of his attacks on Hastings, as evidence that the British were moving on from many of their earlier moral hang-ups about empire. Thus, Thomas Metcalf has argued that by the early nineteenth century, most Britons in India “had convinced themselves of the righteousness of their conquest of India, and, after the agonies of the Hastings trial, of their own moral superiority over their Indian subjects.” Robert Travers, likewise, sees the 1790s as a sharp break, a period when the Company’s covenanted servants “were being transformed . . . from suspect mercantile frontiersmen into respectable pillars of empire” and when British colonial rule was becoming, in the eyes of many Britons, “an empire of improvement and enlightenment.”74 As later chapters of this book shall argue, such views of the succeeding nineteenth century must be reexamined. While this book agrees that general moral qualms about British imperialism diminished over the following half-century, more specific criticisms of the Company’s governance of India did not. Any analysis of the extensive tract literature published in 1813, 1833, and 1853 during parliamentary debates over the renewal of the Company’s charter abundantly bears this point out. Such moral qualms about the Company, moreover, provided

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 37

7/14/2011 5:57:46 PM

38

Company India, 1765–1858

ample fodder for Britons during the second half of the nineteenth century to draw on in claiming that the British Raj and its functionaries provided India with a more ethical government that was truly dedicated to its Indian subjects’ welfare in ways that the Company and its agents never were or desired to be. But more to the point, as Nicholas Dirks has rightly contended, by making so much of his focus the conduct of Warren Hastings, Burke suggested how a “moral mandate for a new kind of imperial project” could be achieved.75 As we will see, Burke’s philosophy of governance and, particularly, his emphasis on the need for British colonial rulers always to exhibit high personal honor and moral conduct, resonated widely among Britons in India during the first half of the nineteenth century ranging from obscure colonial bureaucrats to high-profile advocates of civil service reform, from conservatives to liberals and Utilitarian reformers. There remained for a while to come hand-wringing among imperial elites about whether, in fact, the Company’s British employees could be trusted to conduct themselves in such a way appropriate to their new status as colonial masters. Britons on the ground in India responsible for colonial governance, or in the case of the colonial military, for defending and expanding the Company’s conquests, often, also, had very different ideas about how to act toward their Indian subjects that were generally more racist, exploitative, and violent than allowed for by imperial ideology’s niceties.76 That being the case, though, does not diminish the importance, for many Britons in India from the late eighteenth century onward, of the maintenance of an image of British personal honor and high moral character. By the end of the eighteenth century, most Company officials, British politicians such as Pitt and Burke, as well as the majority of British commentators on empire, were already well on their way—to again borrow a phrase from E.P. Thompson—toward becoming “prisoners of their own rhetoric.”77 British colonialism in India was something that no longer seemed to many to be intrinsically immoral. Provided that those who were charged with ruling could behave, the Company’s governance of India could indeed become something that was virtuous and that earned the loyalty and respect of its Indian subjects. Indians, finally, were increasingly blamed for causing lapses in British morality when they regrettably occurred. As we will see in the next chapter, all three of these discourses led not only to Governor-General Lord Cornwallis’s racial ban in 1793 on Indians holding decision-making positions within the Company’s colonial bureaucracy but also to major reforms aimed at improving British covenanted servants’ moral conduct.

9780230116931_03_ch01.indd 38

7/14/2011 5:57:46 PM

2 Trying to Rule India without Indians, 1793–1831

Every native of Hindustan is corrupt. —Governor-General Lord Cornwallis (1789) 1 Those who go out to India must and will be men the moment they reach the country. —Thomas Robert Malthus (1817) 2

Although singularly unsuccessful in his relentless prosecution of Warren Hastings between 1786 and 1795, Edmund Burke nevertheless helped establish several core themes in British colonial governance over the next four decades. First of all, through focusing so intently on Hastings, Burke played a major role in turning the question of British colonialism’s morality into a management problem, whereby the conduct and character of those Britons charged with the responsibility of ruling (and how it appeared to Indians as well as fellow Britons back home) mattered much more than the imperial venture’s morality itself. As part of this larger theme, Burke also forcefully and continually urged fellow members of the British political elite during the 1780s and 1790s to make a greater imperial commitment to India. As he argued in 1783, the Company needed to send out “men sanguine, warm, and even impassioned in the cause” of governing in their Indian subjects’ best interests rather than “English boys full grown in fortune before they are ripe in principle.”3 Burke also feared the corrupt tendencies of Indians he labeled as “Banyans”—crucial intermediaries in British colonial administration as they knew the country, its laws, and its languages whereas most Britons did not.

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 39

7/14/2011 5:56:59 PM

40

Company India, 1765–1858

He insisted, therefore, that only by sending out men of high personal honor and moral rectitude would Britain demonstrate a serious commitment to its Indian empire and begin to make up for the moral stains of the Company’s conquest of Bengal and its initial decades of rule. These two interlocking themes in Burke’s colonial thought guided much colonial administrative policy between the 1790s and the 1830s. This can be seen most directly in Lord Cornwallis’s various reforms to the colonial administration, which he enacted in 1793. As the first epigraph opening this chapter shows, Cornwallis, governorgeneral of Bengal between 1786 and 1793, shared many of Burke’s beliefs about Indians’ generally corrupt tendencies. Cornwallis sought to insulate British colonial administration from sources of corruption and he took the extraordinary step in 1793 of firing all Indians then serving in posts of executive authority within the colonial administration. Henceforth, until the mid-1860s, when the first Indian successfully gained entry into the covenanted service, only Britons directly appointed by Company directors could serve as district revenue collectors, judges, or magistrates. Far from being what Eric Stokes once labeled “a defensive form of Anglicization,” Cornwallis’s racial ban on Indian employment within decision-making posts marked a radical break from previous colonial policy, which had been to rely a great deal upon traditional Indian administrative elites.4 As a result, the policy began to usher in a more racist form of colonialism that would linger on, although with some changes, over the next century and a half of colonial rule.5 Alongside his prohibition of Indians holding any post of decisionmaking authority, Cornwallis enacted three other major reforms in 1793 aimed at improving the moral behavior of those Britons charged with ruling India. Drawing heavily upon eighteenth-century Whig notions of government, which held that the only true way to stem abuse by government officials was to constrain their discretionary power, Cornwallis vested revenue and judicial functions of colonial government at the district level in different officials.6 Officials were also made strictly accountable for their actions to various supervisory boards and, indeed, could be sued by Indians for wrongdoings.7 Secondly, in part aiming to close off any possible avenues of corruption for British revenue officials, Cornwallis also enacted the Permanent Settlement, which forever fixed government land taxes in Bengal as well as imposed Western notions of property rights upon India for the first time in its history.8

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 40

7/14/2011 5:56:59 PM

Rule India without Indians

41

Cornwallis also believed, though, that covenanted servants would remain corrupt as long as they continued receiving low salaries little changed from the mid-seventeenth century. Allowing Company employees to trade privately also in his view festered corruption. He convinced Company directors of the folly of continuing such a policy: in 1793 they completely banned British district officials from trading.9 At the same time, their official salaries were significantly increased. While the average British covenanted servant earned about £150 a year in the middle decades of the eighteenth century in official perquisites his successor at the end of the century was being paid an average official annual salary of just under £2,600, and, after serving for twelve years or longer, often closer to £4,000 or more.10 In effect, Cornwallis opted to bribe corrupt British nabobs to become instead—in the words of Frederick John Shore, son of Governor-General John Shore (1793–98), Bengal civil official, and prominent critic of Lord Bentinck’s colonial administration during the early 1830s—“men of a higher order.”11 While not entirely believing British employees to be trustworthy, Cornwallis nevertheless thought Britons in India were morally redeemable while Indians were not. In later decades, Shore and other critics of Company colonialism would condemn the notion that any ethnic group could rightly claim a monopoly on morality, particularly one with such a checkered past as the British in India. Indeed, Shore attacked his fellow Britons in India for their self-serving hypocrisy—which he termed “albocracy”—in accruing to themselves all the perks of empire while leaving most Indians in a permanently degraded and wretched condition. Indians, he warned, were already developing a growing hatred toward their British overlords, which, if the British were not careful, would eventually sap the tenuous bonds of loyalty that girded colonialism.12 But such critiques, however admirable they may seem to us, largely fell on deaf ears among Britons in India throughout this period and afterward. British colonial rule was increasingly being turned into a “public relations” problem in which the morality of colonialism itself was less important than the “opinion” of it, which, colonial officials believed, could be achieved through British imperial rulers always acting in an honorable and ethical manner. This chapter explores this emergent colonial ideology (and its various inherent contradictions) as it operated within the colonial bureaucracy during the period between 1793 and 1831, when Cornwallis’s policy of trying to govern India without Indians was most fully in effect. The chapter first will examine the growing importance of

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 41

7/14/2011 5:56:59 PM

42

Company India, 1765–1858

British notions about religion and morality during the early nineteenth century to colonial administration. It argues that religious and moral concerns helped both to further extend the colonial stereotype of the “corrupt and depraved Indian” and in a broader sense to frame colonial India as a “moral empire” through emphasizing the high importance of British personal honor and ethical behavior. These efforts by imperial administrators to construct an ideal of a moral empire that would hold its Indian subjects’ respect and esteem—not to mention that of Britons back home—will then, in the second half of the chapter, be contrasted against numerous cases in the colonial record that show a far messier reality of Company officials who continued to engage in pecuniary relationships with their Indian subordinates, much as British “nabobs” had done fifty years earlier, such as borrowing money or exchanging gifts.

The “Indian Corruption” Stereotype and Its Further Development in the Early Nineteenth Century It was one thing for British colonial officials like Cornwallis to assert that all Indians were dishonest and corrupt; it was quite another to prove that they were actually so. Indeed, before proceeding any further we must ask why Cornwallis and other Britons concerned with colonial India (such as imperial administrators and authors of India tracts) so mistrusted Indian colonial officials by the end of the eighteenth century, especially when confronted by the far greater problem of British corruption throughout this period. This question is particularly necessary in the light of recent scholarship by William Dalrymple and Maya Jasanoff, among others, that has painted a picture of British colonialism that was more open and less racist during the Company period compared to the pervasive cultural and social racism of the British Raj after 1858.13 As discussed already in this book’s introduction, several scholars have disputed this interpretation. They have pointed to the racial segregation of eighteenth-century Calcutta and Madras and official attempts to prevent interracial relationships between British men and Indian women as instances where racial and cultural differences between Britons and Indians mattered greatly in the construction and consolidation of early British colonial rule over India, even during the eighteenth century.14 Historians of the Company’s colonial administration during this period, however,

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 42

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

Rule India without Indians

43

still generally view Cornwallis’s 1793 racial ban on Indians holding positions of decision-making authority as an isolated mistake of colonial governance that owed much to his Anglicist orientation and personal racism.15 Few have examined how the policy also flowed out of a persistent and stubborn tendency among the British in India to remain, as far as possible, culturally, socially, and racially distinct from the Indians they ruled over throughout much of the nearly two centuries of colonial rule.16 Maintaining and policing these racial and cultural boundaries between ruler and ruled, however, was always problematic. As Homi Bhabha has observed, a fundamental contradiction always exists at the heart of colonial stereotypes, such as the “morally depraved Indian.” On the one hand, as Bhabha points out, such colonial discourses depended “on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness.” On the other hand, supposedly essential differences needed constantly to be reiterated. Therefore, the very process of reiteration, Bhabha reminds us, continually exposed a fundamental concern (perhaps even anxiety at times) among imperialists about the very essential thing or things that supposedly demonstrated clear difference between themselves and their colonial subjects. This was particularly the case, as Ann Laura Stoler shows in her work on Dutch colonialism in the East Indies, when the maintenance of power relationships between ruler and ruled were at stake.17 By taking both these insights about the role of discourses of colonial difference on board, we will see how Britons’ monetary relationships with Indians were regarded by many imperial administrators as particularly threatening precisely because they showed Britons acting seemingly like the Indians they ruled over. In attempting to mark off clear essentialist differences between British and Indian morality, late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury British colonial officials and authors of India tracts frequently turned to religion.18 Many contended that Hinduism caused Indians to lack a proper regard for truth, compared to Protestantism and its emphasis on an individual’s personal moral responsibility for his or her actions. Thus, during the heated early nineteenth-century debate about whether British Protestant missionaries ought to be allowed into India, both Claudius Buchanan, a prominent Anglican divine and Company chaplain, and Andrew Fuller, a Baptist minister and theologian, attacked Hinduism for failing to inculcate the virtue of telling the truth among its adherents. This discourse persisted throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond. Accordingly,

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 43

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

44

Company India, 1765–1858

Presbyterian missionary Alexander Duff blamed Hinduism in 1840 for not holding Hindus personally accountable for actions like serial dishonesty, fraud, corruption, and vice, as Christianity did through the threat of eternal damnation in the afterlife.19 In asserting this, Duff (and other missionaries) conveniently ignored—or perhaps did not know about—a long-standing Indian ethical tradition that, as C.A. Bayly explains, regarded morality “as the actions and beliefs of the rational soul for which virtue consisted in a proper balance between natural desires and emotions” and leading an ethical life as the height of a happy existence. 20 Admitting that Indians had an extensive moral system that resembled aspects of Christian thought, however, would have directly undercut the rationale for missionary endeavors in India. In attacking the power of Brahmins over ordinary Indians, Duff—a good Calvinist—drew instead upon a common argument that many Protestants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used against Roman Catholicism. As long as Brahmin priests treated ordinary Indians as children who were incapable “of acting or thinking” for themselves—which he also accused Roman Catholic priests of—Duff thought there could not be any “personal moral responsibility for good or evil” among Hindus. As long as Indians remained Hindu, therefore, Duff heavily implied, only Protestant Britons (who were taught by their religion to be capable “of acting or thinking” for themselves) should rule.21 In this way, missionary thought was by no means antithetical to colonial administration as has been sometimes suggested by missionary scholars. 22 Indeed, British imperialists’ discussions about Indian oath taking shared many of these same concerns. Deeply suspicious of Indians, in 1793 Cornwallis had mandated that all Indian employees left in the colonial bureaucracy (serving now in subordinate clerical positions) swear twice a year to perform their duties with honor and integrity. This requirement was modified only in 1840. It also was not applied to Britons, in part because they were already bound by covenants to act honorably and in part because Cornwallis believed in their moral superiority.23 Even before then, many colonial officials and authors questioned whether Indian consciences could be bound through oaths, just as many Britons had argued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that oaths were not reliable in ensuring political loyalty to the English (and later British) State among Catholics, Jacobites, or Protestant nonconformists such as Baptists or Quakers.24 Like their earlier British counterparts, several Indian tract authors pointed out pious Hindus’ reluctance, if not refusal in some cases, to take religious

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 44

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

Rule India without Indians

45

oaths, which they considered profane.25 This indeed happened in a 1783 investigation into the alleged acceptance of bribes by British revenue officials in Madras. All nine of the Indian witnesses called to give testimony refused to take an oath, claiming that doing so would violate their religious beliefs and their social statuses as Brahmins or as prominent landholders. The prosecutor, eager to build a case, allowed the nine witnesses to give their testimony without formally swearing in. Madras Governor Lord Macartney, however, judged the evidence of the Indian witnesses as ultimately inconclusive because of their refusal to take an oath and he dismissed the entire case in 1784.26 Other British colonial officials contended that the rampant perjury committed in Indian courtrooms and Indian judicial clerks’ corrupt proclivities proved the folly of trying to enforce honesty via oaths among a profoundly dishonest and dishonorable people such as Indians. Here, instead of characterizing Indians as moral children made incapable by their Brahmin priests of thinking for themselves as many missionaries were doing, Bombay civil official Mr. Rattray made greater reference to Indians as morally wicked—the other half of Rudyard Kipling’s famous characterization of natives in his 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden.” Rattray asserted in 1828 that there was “no Country on earth, in which the sanctity of an Oath is less respected” than India, in large part because Brahmins had taught them to engage in Jesuit-like casuistry. Brahmins, Rattray argued, often instructed Indian bureaucrats that deliberate falsehood was not always evil and could, indeed, be a “virtue in the highest degree when employed for the advantage of the Caste.” For Rattray, as well as for many other officials and authors, the fact that many Indians could so willingly swear in vain demonstrated their moral depravity, their utter untrustworthiness, and their total lack of personal honor, traits that made them incapable of participating to any great extent in their country’s government.27 Early nineteenth-century British missionaries and religious figures also took the lead in blaming Hinduism for causing Indian venality and corruption. Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller thus attacked Hinduism in 1808 for failing to teach Indians the difference between right and wrong. Likewise, writing nine years later, Baptist missionary William Ward criticized as naïve, Britons who claimed that Indians were generally a moral people. Morality was not possible, Ward insisted, among a people whose religion “encourage[d] falsehood, revenge, and impurity” and “whose gods were monsters of vice.” Such bad moral examples, Ward concluded, made Indians “the most corrupt” people on earth. 28

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 45

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

46

Company India, 1765–1858

Like in the case of missionary-inspired discourses regarding Indians’ supposed lack of due regard for truth, numerous nineteenthcentury colonial officials and authors of secular colonial tracts generally repeated missionary discourses about universal Indian corruption. Governor-General Minto thus insisted in an 1811 minute to fellow members of the Bengal government that forgery and perjury were more prevalent among Indian bureaucrats largely because of their lack of proper moral instruction. Likewise, writing in the 1830s, both colonial reformer Robert Montgomery Martin and senior Company official Peter Auber condemned Hinduism for mentally enslaving Indians. Over the course of many centuries, they argued, Hinduism had neither bred Indians to think for themselves nor to be held personally responsible for their actions. As a result, both Martin and Auber regarded Indians as “exceedingly depraved” and prone toward venality.29 Thus, while several missionary historians have continued to emphasize instances of conflict between the Company and Protestant missionaries during the early nineteenth century, missionary polemic was neither ancillary nor necessarily opposed to broader colonial concerns or vice versa.30 Indeed, this overall consensus between missionary and Company world-views can also be seen by examining the Company’s efforts to ensure that covenanted servants were properly trained, academically but also morally, for their new duty as colonial administrators prior to their arrival in India. This was exemplified above all else by the establishment of Haileybury College in 1804, which the next section considers.

Moral Pedagogy: Lord Wellesley’s Proposed Fort William College and Thomas Malthus’s Haileybury By making British covenanted servants responsible for governing their districts, Cornwallis’s racial ban on Indians holding decision-making posts rendered the nature of British training far more important an issue than had previously been the case. The Company had instituted small monetary grants in 1790 to junior British officials so they could hire private language tutors to teach them Persian, the language of state inherited from the Mughals, as well as various vernacular languages. Other than this, though, the Company did little initially to ensure that their employees could actually govern their districts. Only when Lord Wellesley became governor-general of Bengal in 1798 would this change.

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 46

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

Rule India without Indians

47

Wellesley was perhaps the first governor-general to arrive in India with a fervent belief in British imperial grandeur. Writing to Company directors in 1800, Wellesley declared that colonial India needed to be governed not “as a temporary and precarious acquisition, as an empire conquered by prosperous adventure and extended by fortunate accident” but as a “sacred trust and a permanent acquisition.” Such an empire required judges and revenue officials who could competently, professionally, but most importantly, honorably perform the duties assigned to them.31 More broadly, like Cornwallis, Wellesley shared Burke’s deep mistrust of Indians working in the colonial bureaucracy, even those now employed in menial posts. Like Burke, he worried about comparatively ill-informed British officials losing control over their districts to Indian underlings who, undoubtedly, were more knowledgeable, but also, he feared, more corrupt. Wellesley insisted that only by undergoing comprehensive training at the start of their careers would British district officials properly and honestly perform the important duties entrusted to them. Wellesley thus proposed to Company directors that all covenanted servants henceforth be required to undergo three years of training at Fort William College in Calcutta. There, future colonial officials would learn various Indian languages, Hindu and Islamic law, various government regulations, European history, classics, and other subjects.32 Although Wellesley proposed a heavy dose of academic training, he also focused attention on covenanted servants’ moral education, aiming to produce men of high personal honor and morality who could be entrusted with the extensive and important duties of colonial administration. Under his proposed plan for Fort William College, students would study, eat, and lodge together under the close supervision of a provost and a vice-provost, both of whom were to be Anglican clergymen. Wellesley conceded that these arrangements would be expensive, but he urged Company directors to support them as methods most likely to “establish the British Empire in India on the solid foundation of ability, integrity, virtue, and religion.” Only by exercising discipline over the students of the college, he argued, could college authorities protect them from “the dangers of profusion, extravagance and Excess” of which he imagined India to be teeming. Such training would also instill in covenanted servants the proper self-discipline and moral habits that he thought necessary of colonial officials. Indeed, Wellesley contended that anything less would soon lead to students falling into “ruinous courses of dissipation,

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 47

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

48

Company India, 1765–1858

licentiousness, and expense” to the detriment of their moral duty to both the Company and their Indian subjects.33 Company directors rejected Wellesley’s plans for Fort William College in January 1802, in part because of the expenses involved, but mainly because they suspected they would lose some, if not all, of their prerogatives over Indian patronage. But they did not entirely deny the need to provide professional bureaucratic training to their employees in India. This can be seen above all in their decision, two and a half years later, to establish the East India College (Haileybury) in Hertfordshire, England, one of the world’s first educational institutions dedicated solely to the training of colonial bureaucrats. H.V. Bowen has pointed to the various directives Company directors sent to its Indian employees in the early decades of the nineteenth century that they “record and report every single local action and event” as proof that the Company was overly concerned about its image before the British public as providing India with “an efficient and enlightened colonial administration.”34 The establishment of Haileybury College, likewise, was a major part of these efforts. For the next half-century Haileybury trained covenanted servants in Indian languages and legal systems as well as various European subjects. Each of the three presidency (or regional) governments of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, in turn, maintained language schools that further instructed British officials in Indian languages upon their arrival in India. In promulgating this system of bureaucratic training, Company directors echoed Edmund Burke’s fears of the supposed corrupting influences of India and Indians on otherwise honorable but comparatively ignorant Britons. They hoped to reduce and eventually eliminate whatever lingering corrupt proclivities still existed among their British employees in India. Haileybury, they believed, would instill future officials with “good Christian” moral virtues as well as train them in Indian languages and legal systems. To further this aim, in 1805 they appointed Thomas Robert Malthus, perhaps most famous today for authoring a tract on population control but in the early nineteenth century a leading moral thinker, to a chair in history and political economy at the college. 35 Malthus used the college over the next three decades to implement some of his broader ideas regarding moral self-restraint. Unlike Oxford, Cambridge, English public schools such as Eton or Harrow, or even, for that matter, Wellesley’s proposed Fort William College—all of which had extensive rules and regulations—Haileybury did not. This was deliberate. In 1817, when Malthus publicly defended the college

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 48

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

Rule India without Indians

49

against vocal criticisms from Company shareholders who sought its abolition, he explained that college officials intended, through laxly supervising their students, “to inculcate gradually, manly feelings, manly studies, and manly self-controul, rather earlier than usual.” Malthus fully shared Burke and Wellesley’s fears regarding the Indian temptations corrupting British officials while in India. Covenanted servants who went out to India, he insisted, “must and will be men the moment they reach the country” in order to resist such temptations. But Malthus believed this would only occur if students were taught proper moral restraint and self-discipline while still in Britain. Increased instances of unruly behavior by students at Haileybury were well worth the risk if it exposed, while still in Britain, individuals who were neither morally fit to rule India nor able to hold up an image of British moral superiority.36 Malthus and other colonial officials asserted that all it took for covenanted servants in India to “be men”—and hence morally superior to the supposedly corrupt and dishonorable Indians they ruled over—was a healthy amount of individual moral self-restraint. But this does not mean that British district officials always acted virtuously while in India. In trying to cope with the difficulties of governing India alone, many did not live up to the high expectations placed on them. Moreover, many entertained different notions of racial and social privilege as colonial masters in India than desired by their former teachers at Haileybury or by Company officials back home in Britain. These gaps between expectation and reality can be seen readily by examining colonial anxieties about covenanted servants’ material relationships with Indians. Instances, particularly, when British officials borrowed large sums of money from Indians in order to live lavish lifestyles, or cases in which they gave or took bribes or otherwise exchanged gifts with Indians under their immediate control, threatened to give lie to the belief among imperial elites that things had improved since the days of “nabobs” such as Robert Clive or Paul Benfield.

“Arabs, English Blood-Horses, Pegu Ponies, Curricles and Phaetons”: the Various Moral Dilemmas of Private Debt Arabs, English blood-horses, Pegu ponies, curricles and phaetons, come prancing before them with most bewitching fascination. Their

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 49

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

50

Company India, 1765–1858 pay, three hundred rupees per month, is quite sufficient to keep them respectfully, but not at all sufficient to purchase all these fine things. How are they to be procured? These young gentlemen who have got excellent situations in expectancy, upon their arrival in Calcutta, generally find some wealthy baboo [Indian banker or merchant] to advance them large sums at an exorbitant interest . . . these youngsters incur a burthen, galling to them many a day afterwards; they make their appearance at the course on high-mettled horses, or in equipages; go to balls, dressed out in all the puppyism of dandies; keep the first company; drink claret and champagne; have horses at Garden Reach; in fine, live far beyond their means . . . .37

Throughout the first three decades of the nineteenth century, Company officials and Indian tract authors worried considerably about covenanted servant indebtedness in India. While Margot Finn has argued that nineteenth-century Britons back home generally regarded indebtedness as an “accidental misfortune” rather than as something indicative of an individual’s moral failing, the reverse was generally true among Britons in India, where an older, “middling-sort” sensibility about debt’s destructive potentiality for a family’s or an individual’s financial well-being generally predominated instead. 38 Many Britons in India worried about how easy it was for Indian creditors to corrupt young Company employees. In only a few lapses of moral judgment, it seemed, they contracted impossibly large debts they could not possibly ever repay, leading to all kinds of grave doubts about British colonialism’s moral purity. These fears were based on two uncomfortable truths about early nineteenth-century colonial reality that no amount of colonial rhetoric could entirely gloss over. First, although precise statistics on British colonial officials’ debts are hard to come by, a survey commissioned by the Bengal government in 1824 concerning thirty-three Bengal covenanted servants appointed between 1808 and 1810 and their personal finances is suggestive. The report found that sixteen, or nearly half, were still in debt nearly fifteen years after their initial arrival in India, with twelve, or slightly more than a third, severely so. 39 For many imperial administrators and authors of colonial reform tracts, British colonial officers’ apparently pervasive indebtedness sat uncomfortably with another unpleasant reality, which were the “aristocratic” luxuries that they seemed to be borrowing money for. The Company’s patronage system, which operated until 1853, tended above all to benefit the sons, nephews, and

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 50

7/14/2011 5:57:00 PM

Rule India without Indians

51

friends of Company shareholders and directors. As a result, most covenanted servants (and army officers) appointed out to India came from the mercantile, banking, and professional parts of British society that disproportionately owned Company stock.40 Few were from landed or aristocratic backgrounds for no other reason than these social classes tended not to own Company stock. Yet, as Britons in India concerned about debt never ceased to complain, that did not stop many covenanted servants, upon their arrival in India, from suddenly acting like aristocrats, racking up bills with tradesmen and other Indian creditors they had no intention of ever repaying. British colonial officials’ private debts to Indians thus at once brought into focus the gap between colonial assertions of Britons governing India in a moral and professional manner and a far more unpalatable everyday colonial reality. It also threatened to undermine the careful efforts by Company administrators to claim their empire in India had morally improved since the time of Robert Clive, Paul Benfield, and other eighteenth-century nabobs who had made off from India with massive fortunes. The “corrupt and crafty Indian” lurked prominently in many early nineteenth-century British discussions about debt. Bengal Army Captain Thomas Williamson thus warned readers of his East-India Vade-Mecum, a best-selling guide for Britons going out to India published in 1810, to avoid Indian creditors if at all possible. Indian bankers, Williamson contended, were up to no good: they lent large sums of easy money to guileless and young covenanted servants and sought, through their loans, to take advantage of Britons. Indians “attach[ed] [themselves] firmly to the rising sun” either by appointing themselves or a relative to subordinate Indian posts within the young official’s local district administration until he repaid his debts (if he ever did).41 Several early nineteenth-century colonial officials also traded in a stereotype of the corrupt and wily Indian creditor little updated from the effeminate, cowardly, and dissimulating banyan that haunted the writings of William Bolts and the parliamentary speeches of Edmund Burke a generation or two earlier. In 1811, Company directors regarded it as “self evident” that a young British official, “embarrassed in his circumstances and indebted perhaps to a Native in a considerable Sum of money,” could not possibly be independent of his influence. Indeed, sharing this concern, the Bengal government, in its capacity as the Supreme Government in India,42 promulgated Regulation VII twelve years later in 1823, which prohibited district officials throughout India

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 51

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

52

Company India, 1765–1858

from borrowing money from individuals under their direct authority.43 Such an interdiction was necessary, Bengal Political Secretary Holt Mackenzie argued in 1823, to free British officials from “pecuniary obligations” to their Indian creditors.44 More importantly, though, Mackenzie insisted that the prohibition was necessary to eliminate even the appearance of impropriety, which, in his view, was just as “hurtful to the public service and injurious to the good name of the officers of Government.” Highly desirous of maintaining an image of imperial moral stewardship by its British district officers, the Bengal government thus enacted a modified version of the proposed regulation later in the year. All British officials in debt were required either to fully repay their debts within one year or to transfer to districts where they would not be under their Indian creditors’ sway. Covenanted servants who failed to comply with either one of these provisions could be dismissed from their posts.45 Two years later, the Bengal government dismissed revenue collector J.W. Sage for borrowing the sum of 33,206 rupees (about £4,100)46 from his district’s Indian treasurer in the early 1820s. Of this larger sum of money, Sage also apparently did not pay any interest on loans totaling about 10,000 rupees for nearly two years, which initially caused the Bengal government to become involved. In his defense, Sage claimed that he had borrowed the money because his salary was inadequate to live on, particularly compared to the official emoluments “usually given Collectors of much less standing.” He further contended that he had in fact paid interest, but according to a verbal agreement with his creditor that was not codified until much later.47 As to Sage’s first excuse for borrowing such a large sum, it is certainly possible that a covenanted servant’s ordinary living expenses were quite high in comparison to what similar posts might require in Britain. Later authors of India tracts such as John Capper and Benjamin Atkinson Irving definitely thought so, blaming the Indian caste system for causing a higher cost of living among British colonial officials in India. They claimed that Britons living in India needed to employ at least twelve Indian servants, and sometimes closer to twenty, because the caste system carefully delineated what labor certain servants could perform. In this variant of blaming Indians for British moral shortcomings Britons like Sage were not being unduly extravagant; rather immoral Indian custom left them little choice but to spend a considerable amount more than would be strictly necessary in a moral place such as Britain.48

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 52

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

Rule India without Indians

53

Still, it seems incredible that Sage would have needed to borrow an amount exceeding many of his British counterparts’ annual salaries simply to meet regular living expenses. Certainly members of the Bengal government were not having any of it. They not only believed the testimony of Moturam Shee, Sage’s creditor, that Sage had not paid him any interest for nearly two years; they further condemned Sage for falsely denying this under oath. But even had Sage actually paid interest, as he claimed he had, Bengal officials still deemed his conduct highly inappropriate and damaging to British colonialism’s reputation among its Indian subjects. It was absolutely necessary, they declared, that British district officials “keep themselves clear of suspicion” as far as possible.49 In borrowing so much money under such scandalous terms, they argued, Sage was impugning the colonial regime’s prestige in the eyes of its Indian subjects and endangering the Company’s careful efforts to present its governance of India as “moral” to both its Indian subjects and to Britons back home. Indeed, with these overriding concerns in mind, the Company even punished employees who had borrowed relatively small sums of money from Indians. The Madras government dismissed judge Henry Turner Bushby in 1834 for borrowing 500 rupees (about £60) to pay for travel while convalescing because he had signed a bond to his Indian creditor to repay the loan over a two-year period. By doing so, Madras Governor Frederick Adam argued, Bushby had placed himself “under obligation” to an Indian under his direct authority and in “a manner calculated to subject himself to unworthy implications and the Government to loss of reputation and authority.” It had transpired in the course of the investigation that the Indian who lent money to Bushby did so expecting an appointment in Bushby’s court for one of his relatives.50 Such a harsh penalty as the loss of official position for private debt, however, was not universally applied; the outcome largely depended on whether there was any quid pro quo arrangement between the British official and his Indian creditor. Thus, while David Elliot, a younger colleague of Bushby’s at the court, also borrowed a small sum of money (in his case 200 rupees) from an Indian court official under his supervision, he was only reprimanded. This was in part because of Elliot’s relative inexperience: Elliot had just arrived at the court whereas Bushby had been employed there for nearly two decades. But Elliot’s different fate mainly resulted from the fact that he had never promised his Indian creditor anything and, indeed, had

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 53

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

54

Company India, 1765–1858

promptly repaid the loan when it had been made known to him how much the colonial government disapproved of his action. 51 Again, as in Sage’s case, in the Bushby and Elliot cases we see how imperial administrators during the early decades of the nineteenth century regarded the mere appearance of impropriety by a British covenanted servant to be quite a serious matter in and of itself, regardless of whether any actual misconduct occurred. The mere threat of an “opinion” of untoward behavior was disturbing enough. Such a high concern regarding how things appeared also factored largely in many imperial administrators’ anxieties about the behavior of young British colonial officers upon their initial arrival in India.

“Levities of Foppery and Voluptuous Lounge”: Youth and Debt in Company India Bushby and Elliot borrowed small sums of money in order to meet emergency personal travel expenses. Sage borrowed significantly larger sums of money, but again (as he claimed) to meet expenses that he incurred while serving as the head of his district. Most imperial administrators, however, paid greater attention to instances when covenanted servants contracted large debts over many years. In trying to understand how and why these Company employees became mired in debt, many focused on the chronic indebtedness that usually resulted from the “dissipation and extravagance” of students at Fort William College in Calcutta and the other two presidency language schools at Madras and Bombay. In doing so, they confronted a fundamental disconnect between Malthusian expectations that all covenanted servants who left Haileybury would exert “manly selfcontroul” while in India and the actual reality. After graduating from Haileybury, Company employees gained their official appointments in India but still generally needed to spend an additional year or two learning Indian languages before assuming their positions. Like Malthus’s Haileybury, the three presidency colleges subjected their students to little if any real supervision.52 But while Malthus saw this as an effective pedagogical method to inculcate manly self-restraint in his students before sending them off to rule India, many colonial officials lacked confidence in the manliness or personal morality of young students. Large numbers of students under little restraint and “with too much command of money,” Fort William College officials warned in 1812, inevitably led to many promptly falling into debt in order to emulate their fellow classmates.53

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 54

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

Rule India without Indians

55

As has already been alluded to, other than the follies of youthful emulation of their peers, it seems that a large reason many covenanted servants fell into debt to Indian creditors soon after arriving in India was their sudden predilection to act as spendthrift aristocrats. In some sense, this might naturally have been expected, given that young British men often no older than sixteen or eighteen years of age suddenly were thrust into positions of some power and status upon their arrival in India. This was particularly so in Calcutta, which, as P.J. Marshall has written, “[f]rom its earliest days . . . had the reputation of being a settlement dominated by wealthy men who lived high.”54 Much as Burke complained four decades earlier, William Huggins argued in the 1820s that the new-found power and social and racial prestige of young Company officials went to many of their heads. Company employees generally sought to live like princes in India, borrowing heavily against their future anticipated salaries to pay for various “levities of foppery and voluptuous lounge” during their time spent in Calcutta (or the other two presidency towns of Madras and Bombay) learning Indian languages. 55 Yet there was one very basic problem: however much they may have wished it, covenanted servants were not aristocrats. Company’s India’s social structure, like the subsequent British Raj’s, it is true, largely accorded covenanted servants pride of place after the governor-general. District officers were generally placed not only ahead of army officers and soldiers but also “unofficial” Britons in India, such as planters and merchants, not to mention Indians. Yet, Company India’s “middle-class aristocrats” were still just that, middle class.56 Above all else, unlike most aristocrats, they did not have the legal device of a strict settlement of family lands to protect them from the consequences of their youthful debts, but only “excellent situations” they might eventually attain within the colonial bureaucracy after toiling in India for twenty or more years. Strict settlements helped preserve aristocratic and gentry family lands down the generations as well as largely accounted for these social classes’ political, economic, and social dominance in Britain well into the late nineteenth century and, to some degree, beyond. They also explain many of the differences during this period between the aristocracy and the emerging middle classes about how gentlemen, and especially young men, were supposed to act. Under these legal agreements, renewed every generation between the current owner and his first-born son, the family estates were settled “en tail” to the future first-born grandson with strict limits placed on the reasons for

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 55

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

56

Company India, 1765–1858

which land could be sold or mortgaged (usually only to set up younger sons in trade or a profession, pay marriage dowries of daughters, or provide for the current owner’s wife should she outlive him). The discharge of various family members’ private debts, through the selling off or mortgaging of family property, though, was usually forbidden under these agreements.57 It is likely, therefore, that “much of the debt of the great profligates was probably never discharged” due to their families’ strict settlements.58 Moreover, their personal sense of honor and social prestige (as well as the opinion of their social peers) was likely not negatively affected and was perhaps even enhanced by such profligate behavior. Studying the similarly hierarchical social world of the antebellum U.S. South, which drew heavily upon contemporary British aristocratic moral codes, Bertram Wyatt-Brown contends that for many white slaveholders, “[n]ot paying tradesmen and others of lesser social standing was no violation of the code [of honor], because honor was very much tied to hierarchy.” Indeed to “manipulate the weak (within some bounds),” if anything, enhanced the social power of the gentleman who borrowed money from a tradesman as it “made the lowly creditor obliged to the nonpaying client in hopes of eventual satisfaction of the debt.”59 But among middle- and upper-middle class commercial men, many of whom would have been the relatives and friends of Company employees in India, the situation was far different. For eighteenthcentury bankers, merchants, and tradesmen, a man’s word was his bond; his personal honor was inextricably tied up in his ability to make good on his debt obligations to his peers. Moreover, a father could possibly lose everything, particularly his family’s honor and reputation, because of his son’s profligate behavior.60 There is no reason to assume that these attitudes did not continue to hold largely true for many members of this social class during the early decades of the nineteenth century. It therefore seems clear from both many covenanted servants’ actual behavior in India and Company anxieties about such conduct, that these two highly different notions of personal honor came into open conflict in colonial India. This was even more the case when it came to the second major source of debt among British covenanted servants, namely their sexual and romantic relationships with Indian women. Before the 1850s, perhaps as much as 75 percent of all British men who went out to India went still unmarried upon their initial arrival.61 This does not necessarily mean, as Ronald Hyam has claimed, that most Britons

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 56

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

Rule India without Indians

57

went out to India and other places in the British Empire with the goal of having sex (although, as can be seen from the unvarnished writings of Madras Army Captain Edward Seddon, several clearly did).62 What it does suggest, as numerous scholars have contended, is that several young and unmarried eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Company employees frequented Indian prostitutes and took Indian mistresses.63 These relationships cost money and often led to debt. As Thomas Williamson warned, serious expenses often resulted from “concubinage in the East.” Covenanted servants who took Indian bibis (or mistresses and, in some cases, “wives”), Williamson pointed out, would generally need to employ at least two or three female servants. British officials would also need to provide them with money to purchase tobacco, shoes, clothing, and gold and silver ornaments (gynahs). Williamson further explained that they could not get away with being cheap without offending the sensibilities of Indians.64 In framing his argument this way, Williamson was presenting a very different idea of “Indian opinion” than that of imperial elites, who stressed individual British moral probity as being necessary to maintain British colonial prestige in their Indian subjects’ eyes. Indeed, although many Britons in Company India continued to have families and sexual relationships with Indian women throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, already by 1810, when Williamson wrote his guidebook, such relationships were beginning to be seen—as Durba Ghosh has argued—by colonial officials as highly improper and as impeding their efforts to make empire look “respectable.”65 Williamson’s warnings also accorded with broader early nineteenthcentury colonial fears about Indian wiles seducing young covenanted servants into acting immorally. In yet another variant of blaming the colonial victim, Indians were made responsible for debauching British manliness, much as they had supposedly done to previous conquerors of India, such as the Mughals.66 Thomas Malthus had, indeed, warned of such a possibility in his arguments in 1817 with Company shareholders about the need to retain Haileybury College: covenanted servants would be exposed to all sorts of unmanly temptations that they would have to resist, and could only resist, through exerting “manly self-controul.” But it seems as if his pupils did not listen. Instead of acting as the sober moral men they were supposed to become in India as a result of their training, they were dressing as dandies and buying race horses and other luxury accoutrements often enjoyed only by landed gentlemen. They were also cavorting

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 57

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

58

Company India, 1765–1858

with unmarried Indian women, siring mixed-race children with them, and falling deeply in debt while doing so. By acting in a manner so divorced from that expected of them by imperial elites, they were threatening to expose as threadbare much of the emerging British moral justification for their Indian empire. Had much really changed since the days of Robert Clive?

What Should Be Done about Private Indebtedness? The Limits of Malthusian Self-Control In addition to the controversies surrounding young covenanted servants’ borrowing of money, another question fraught with moral ambiguity surfaced during the 1820s. To what degree should indebted British district officials in India be held personally responsible for their debts? For some colonial tract authors, such as Adam White, students who contracted significant debts ought to be dismissed, as their profligacy represented such a “serious abasement of the national dignity.”67 Bengal officials, on the other hand, resisted holding indebted covenanted servants fully responsible for their private debts and approached the issue less consistently. Based on an aforementioned survey of the personal finances of Bengal district officials, they worried about the high percentage (nearly half) who seemed to remain in debt, some fifteen years after they graduated from Fort William College.68 The Bengal government thus resolved in December 1824 that those who proved “incapable of exercising in the commencement of their career that degree of self-denial” necessary to avoid falling into debt had only themselves to blame if their Indian subjects lacked “confidence in the force and integrity of their character.”69 Again, colonial officials dreaded the appearance of British wrongdoing just as much (if not more so) than the actual existence of such. Members of the Bengal government, however, also considered the problem of chronic indebtedness incapable of being solved solely by private initiative. They thus brought into conflict Malthusian expectations of moral manliness and prevalent colonial discourses of corrupt Indians who sought to debauch British men through debt. In a clumsy attempt to try to resolve this tension, they proposed to Company directors in 1824 that a fund be established to help indebted employees “who have been awakened, though late, to a sense of [the] evils” of private debt to gradually repay their loans. Under their plan, the Company would repay 10 percent per year of covenanted servants’ debts until they were fully discharged.70

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 58

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

Rule India without Indians

59

Company directors in London, however, adhering more to Malthusian strictures about the need for personal self-discipline among their employees, rejected the proposal two years later. They contended that indebted British district officials, who borrowed money without knowing when they would be able to discharge their debts, were “derelict of moral principle.” It was only the “strict discharge” by covenanted servants of their “moral obligations,” Company directors further insisted, that guaranteed that the large amount of public confidence placed in them in their public roles was not abused. British district officials who borrowed money, in their view, forfeited this confidence.71 Thus, while Britons at home may well have continued to view debt more as an accidental misfortune rather than something indicative of an individual’s moral failing, such was not the case in India.72 Imperial administrators and authors of Indian tracts alike commonly worried that any moral weakness (or, more precisely, any appearance of moral failing) exposed by covenanted servants would endanger both Britain’s moral justification for ruling over India and British racial and moral prestige over the Indians they ruled. They also feared as much regarding covenanted servants giving presents to or receiving them from Indians, which the next section will consider.

Gifts and Bribes Early nineteenth-century imperial administrators and Indian tract authors also worried considerably about covenanted servants who exchanged gifts with Indians under their direct control as well as engaged in bribery. Like their dread of private debt, colonial officials feared that the exchange of presents between British district officials and Indians living in their districts could only adversely affect the public conduct of the former by obligating them to return the favor. Like British fears that Indian creditors only lent money to young British officials so to gain influence over them in later years, many also thought that Indians were trying to buy influence through giving gifts. Again, as with early nineteenth-century discussions about private debt, Edmund Burke set most of the terms of the debate over gift giving. In the Eleventh Report of the Select Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs published in November 1783, which Burke is generally believed to have authored, he characterizes presents given by Indians as “pretended Free Gifts” tendered mainly “with a rational Hope, of some Mitigation in the oppressive Requisitions” of British officials.

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 59

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

60

Company India, 1765–1858

Similarly, Muslim Bengali notable Ghulam Husain Khan attacked the grasping nature of British officials in his Sëir Mutaqherin, his fourvolume history of eighteenth-century northern India, which was translated into English in 1789 as A View of Modern Times. Khan alleged that British revenue officials’ Indian underlings, through questioning the rights of wealthy landholders to certain kinds of tax-exempt status granted to them or their families by various pre-colonial rulers, managed to extort a considerable number of bribes from Indian elites, which they then passed on to their British superiors.73 Several imperial administrators and authors of colonial tracts, it is true, admitted British responsibility for turning Indian gift giving into a system of extortion during the eighteenth century. At the same time, many also engaged in yet another example of blaming Indians for British moral lapses by alleging that such a system of extortion was endemic to India and had existed there for centuries if not millennia. Madras officials, for example, argued in 1822 that gift giving’s prevalence in Indian society resulted from centuries of arbitrary and despotic rule. Indians had been conditioned through living under unremitting despotism, they maintained, into giving gifts in hopes of avoiding further oppression from their rulers. Indeed, fifteen years later, senior Company official Peter Auber likened Indian gift giving to “debts of vassalage” from servile Indians to their more powerful masters. Indian peasants did not give such gifts freely in gratitude for previous favors. Rather, Auber insisted that their rulers intimidated them into giving presents that they could not generally afford by threatening further oppression if they resisted.74 In their efforts, therefore, to claim they were governing India more ethically than earlier indigenous rulers, many Britons argued that covenanted servants were morally obligated not to accept gifts from Indians. As Madras officials warned in 1822, the acceptance of any gift from an Indian, no matter how small, was a “breach of public duty” that perilously threatened British colonialism’s prestige. Such behavior, moreover, the longer it continued to go on, undermined the duties of “protection and allegiance” owed by the colonial government and its Indian subjects to one another.75 Indeed, both these overriding (and interrelated) colonial concerns with the preservation of an image of British moral legitimacy and with maintaining Indian loyalties to colonial rule led imperial administrators during the 1820s to ban covenanted servants from receiving even customary presents such as nazars (small gifts of money), trays of fruit, and other traditional tokens of Indian respect. Colonial

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 60

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

Rule India without Indians

61

officials contended that such gifts operated as a “heavy tax upon the party offering the compliment” and needlessly subjected Indian gift givers “to useless and frequently vexatious expense.”76 Taking this ban even further, Governor-General Lord Bentinck issued a circular letter in 1833 to all covenanted servants throughout India instructing them to restrict as much as possible their personal contact with highranking Indians in their districts. Not seeming to care a whit about conventional Indian opinion, Bentinck and other colonial officials instead obsessed about the dangers to British prestige of district officials being seen as too close to individual Indians. Already we can see an early and important example of the general social estrangement between Britons and Indians usually associated with the British Raj after 1858.77 To what degree did British imperial administrators deliberately misunderstand Indian gift-giving practices during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? A few British writers such as former colonial official Henry Newnham conceded that the customary giving and receiving of presents was merely a mark of “the civilities and courtesies of polished [s]ociety” and nothing more. By and large, however, Britons feared the motives of Indian gift givers, believing they intended in most, if not all, cases to corrupt British officials.78 But as several scholars have demonstrated, Indian gift giving was often far more complicated than most eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britons imagined it to be. First of all, pre-colonial Indian gift giving was a fundamentally political process. Rulers incorporated subjects into their sovereignty through the giving and receiving of presents.79 Moreover, unlike British notions about Indian gift-giving practices, which assumed an immediate quid pro quo, Indians generally placed little immediate or specific value upon the gift itself. Much like the ancient Greeks in the world of Odysseus, written about by Moses Finley, or the Polynesians famously studied by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss nearly a century ago, Indians participated in a social gift-giving system that was simply not reducible to a set of material relationships.80 Rather, Indians gave presents in general gratitude for favors bestowed on them in the past and in hopes of further favor being granted to them in the future instead of expecting any immediate quid pro quo.81 What still needs to be explained, though, is why British colonial officials generally considered gift giving to be such a corrupting practice when in reality it generally had very different meanings. The answer cannot have been Britons having a total lack of understanding

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 61

7/14/2011 5:57:01 PM

62

Company India, 1765–1858

of gift exchange for a similar gift-giving economy existed in Britain throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The giving and receiving of presents was “widely pervasive” throughout British society, where “it worked at once to mark social distinctions and to maintain social solidarity.”82 Local notables exerted their social dominance over and sought to promote deference from the poor, various local yeoman farmers, and their own servants through the giving of presents. Gifts exchanged between social equals, by contrast, “sustained the horizontal ties of polite friendship.”83 This fundamentally social process of customary gift giving between Britons of various social classes therefore helped perpetuate an older, more honor-bound, and hierarchical society then beginning to be undermined by industrialization and political reform. Like in pre-colonial India, the giving and receiving of presents imbricated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons in a web of deference, reciprocity, and social and moral obligation that existed outside of the market economy. Second, British civil servants at home were also largely bound up in a gift economy resembling that of India. Landed governing elites disbursed most positions within the British government as personal favors. Indeed, these positions served, in E.P. Thompson’s words, as “a purchase-point from which other kinds of economic and social power were gained or enhanced.”84 In some cases even, particularly military-related offices, positions were openly bought and sold, although perhaps to a lesser extent than in the rest of eighteenthand nineteenth-century Europe. Finally, although John Brewer has argued for the presence of a well-oiled “fiscal-military state” that efficiently collected tax revenues during the eighteenth century to finance Britain’s many wars during the period, the largest single group of tax collectors—customs-collectors—received notoriously low official salaries and likely earned most of their income from fees for services rendered and other kinds of payments that later Victorians would label as “bribery.”85 Indeed, early nineteenth-century British radicals’ shared sense that British government offices were in “the gift” of aristocratic elites led to concerted calls for government retrenchment, ultimately helping to bring about the minimalist mid-Victorian British State.86 Far from misunderstanding Indian gift giving, therefore, it would seem that Britons understood the practice all too well. What many objected to was not gift giving per se but rather Indian participation within it. Such material bonds between Britons and Indians, they feared, like private debts owed to Indian creditors, threatened

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 62

7/14/2011 5:57:02 PM

Rule India without Indians

63

to increase social intimacy between Britons and Indians and render British officials more dependent on Indians rather than less so. In order to “be men” according to the Malthusian logic imparted to them at Haileybury, British district officials in India needed to avoid gifts from Indians completely. Glancing at the numerous bribery and corruption cases involving British officials that pepper the nineteenthcentury colonial record, this was often far easier said than done.

Colonial Discourse versus Colonial Reality: Bribery and Other Kinds of Corruption Committed by Covenanted Servants Several early nineteenth-century imperial administrators and authors of Indian tracts claimed that British district officials exercised such virtue that they generally avoided presents. They asserted this in spite of a glaring history of rampant British corruption during the previous century. Thus, while Huggins complained of young British covenanted servants borrowing excessive amounts of money from Indian creditors to enjoy the luxurious lifestyles of their eighteenth-century predecessors, he contended that British officials generally “discharge[d] their duties uprightly” and rarely, if ever, accepted bribes. Likewise, senior Bengal official William Butterworth Bayley extolled the virtues of covenanted servants in an 1829 minute. He confidently stated that he “imagine[d] no public functionary ever accepts a Nuzur of money, however trifling, when offered by a Native.” In both these lazy assertions, we thus already begin to see early analogues to the pronounced racial arrogance of the later British Raj.87 Of course, colonial reality did not always (or perhaps even often) match the colonial rhetoric. Most threatening to various nineteenthcentury efforts by imperial elites to project a uniform public image of British bureaucratic honesty and moral probity were cases where British covenanted servants either gave or took bribes. To cite just one example, in July 1814, Madras revenue collector Thomas Warden discovered that Indian revenue officers under his control had embezzled large sums of money from the local district treasury. He then attempted to recoup some of the money stolen by bribing the bankers whom the embezzlers used to launder the money to inform him where it was hidden. For this, the superintending Madras Board of Revenue recommended that disciplinary proceedings be initiated against him, proceedings which resulted his removal from office later in the year. Madras government officials feared that Warden’s actions had begun

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 63

7/14/2011 5:57:02 PM

64

Company India, 1765–1858

to “corrupt the morals” of the Indian revenue employees under his direct authority. But even more than that, they worried that his behavior had brought disgrace upon not just himself but also his office and the colonial government more generally. Again, colonial officials worried above all else about the maintenance of British prestige in their Indian subjects’ eyes.88 The case of Mordaunt Ricketts, British Resident (or ambassador) to the King of Awadh during much of the 1820s, also threatened to undermine colonial attempts to portray British officials as racially and morally superior to the Indians they ruled. Soon after Ricketts left office, charges surfaced that he had extorted significant sums of money and presents from the king and other Awadh court officials. Sir Thomas Herbert Maddock, Ricketts’s successor, initially refused to believe the charges, in large part because of his belief in the nearly universal dishonesty of Indians. Further evidence surfaced within the next four years, however, which definitively proved Ricketts’s guilt.89 Upon removing Ricketts from the covenanted service in November 1834, the Bengal government sought to make a public example of him by issuing a salutary warning to other British district officials. It instructed Lieutenant-Colonel Sir John Low, then British Resident at Lucknow, to explain to the king of Awadh that bribery and corruption were “detestable crimes” and that “all upright men” considered the receipt of presents to be “disgracing” both to the giver as well as the receiver. In executing these instructions, Low waxed historical. He explained in a letter to the king that in prior countries or empires where rulers had failed to punish corruption among government officials, prosperity had ended and ruin quickly ensued.90 One wonders though, whether the ruler of Awadh, who after all had been the chief victim of Ricketts’s extortion racket, was the appropriate audience for this historical lesson. Both Warden and Ricketts’s had actually given or accepted bribes. But, like in the Bushby and Elliot small debt cases cited earlier in this chapter, colonial officials worried also about cases where Britons only appeared to act corruptly. In 1818, for example, Bengal judge Edward Impey attempted to sell his house to an Indian official whom he had recently appointed to a chief position in his court. Although Impey defended himself by asserting that he was aware of no “impropriety” in selling personal property to whoever he chose to, the Bengal government nevertheless sharply rebuked him for creating the appearance of one. He was ordered to cancel the sale and refund the money already paid to him.91 Again and again throughout the

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 64

7/14/2011 5:57:02 PM

Rule India without Indians

65

early nineteenth century, colonial officials worried a great deal not just about real instances of wrongdoing but also how even the appearance of impropriety among covenanted servants might irreparably damage the colonial regime’s prestige in the eyes of both its Indian subjects and Britons back home.

Conclusion During the thirty-eight years between 1793 and 1831 when Cornwallis’s racial ban on Indians holding posts of executive authority was in effect, much emphasis was placed on covenanted servants’ behavior. During this period, colonial administrators and authors of India tracts alike continually reproached British district officials for their financial dealings with Indians, whether borrowing money from Indian creditors or accepting gifts or presents (“bribes”) from Indians living in their districts. Imperial elites such as Edmund Burke, Lord Cornwallis, and Thomas Malthus insisted that all that was really needed was for the Company’s British employees to grow up and assume the sober responsibilities of ruling for the benefit of their Indian subjects. They drew upon ideas about the high importance of moral probity and a lack of dependence on others to a man’s honor and manliness then commonly held by many bankers, merchants, and professionals of the emerging middle classes of British society. But it was almost as if the sons, nephews, and friends of Company shareholders, who had gone out to India as young covenanted servants, acted according to a different code. Rather than completely avoid monetary relationships with Indians that imperial elites considered to be morally threatening to British colonial prestige, many Company employees continued to act largely as their eighteenth-century predecessors. Young covenanted servants borrowed heavily to spend like little princes, living well beyond their means. They continued to accept gifts and bribes despite solemn prohibitions by Company officials and assertions by officials such as William Butterworth Bayley that covenanted servants never accepted gifts from Indians “however trifling.” After so much effort by the Company to present its rule over India in moral terms, to both its Indian subjects as well as Britons back home in Britain, what had indeed changed since the eighteenth century? Actually, quite a lot had changed in the four decades since Edmund Burke’s impeachment speeches. Although individual Britons would continue to misbehave in India throughout the first half of the

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 65

7/14/2011 5:57:02 PM

66

Company India, 1765–1858

nineteenth century and beyond, such ill-behavior was now regarded more as a public image problem rather than as something necessarily indicative of the moral rottenness of British colonial rule. Individual misdeeds here and there were remediable by removing those officials from office (or chastising them), therefore safely maintaining (in British minds at least) the appearance of an image of British moral and racial prestige. Having already become largely the “prisoners of their own rhetoric,” British colonial officials and other Britons in India presumed that covenanted servants were generally trustworthy and honorable men even when there were several cases of individuals who were not.92 But feeling estranged from the Indians over whom they ruled, they failed to trust their Indian subordinates at all during this period. In both these general attitudes of fear and loathing of Indians working in the colonial bureaucracy, we can see early expressions of the British Raj’s pronounced racial arrogance and of a “siege mentality” at work. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Britons in colonial India, even at this early date, were mostly estranged from Indian society or explicitly refused to trust Indians tout court. While, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, British military officers and imperial administrators alike would increasingly distrust the Indian soldiers (or sepoys) that comprised the backbone of British military power in South Asia, at first, this was not generally the case. Yet, even here, as the next chapter will show, Britons were more concerned with how things seemed or appeared than what they actually were.

9780230116931_04_ch02.indd 66

7/14/2011 5:57:02 PM

3 Honor, Racial Prestige, and Gentleman Sepoys, 1757–ca. 1830

No Sepoy, even one nurtured from his Infancy, can ever vye [sic] with the British Soldier in the energies of mind or Body. —Madras Army Commander-in-Chief J.T. Cradock (1806) 1 In the Bengal service . . . most of the native soldiers are men of high caste—many of the highest . . . . Without looking to their religious ideas of rank, the Bengal soldier is drawn from a superior class to that which usually furnishes recruits for the British army. Many of them are the sons of men of landed property or . . . are men of some property themselves. —Bengal Army officer Walter Badenach (1813) 2

This chapter traces the development and interplay of two somewhat contradictory British discourses about their colonial Indian armies between the 1760s and the 1820s. On the one hand, during the period when the Company transitioned from being a regional power with only a few Indian footholds into South Asia’s dominant political and military power, many colonial military officials advanced an “empire of conquest” theme in their memoirs and official dispatches. They argued that Indian methods of warfare were culturally backward compared to European and British ones and emphasized the important role of British officers and, to a somewhat lesser degree, British soldiers, in molding sepoys into fighting men. Indeed, they argued in some cases that Indians were incapable of becoming proper soldiers on their own.

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 67

7/15/2011 6:37:05 PM

68

Company India, 1765–1858

This chapter will also show how these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century examples of British racist attitudes toward their Indian soldiers were offset by general characterizations among many Britons in India of sepoys as gentlemen soldiers. During this earlier period, British military officials demonstrated higher levels of trust, if not esteem, for sepoys than Indian bureaucrats. Unlike the colonial bureaucracy after 1793, no attempt was ever made (or even suggested) by colonial officials to do away with the services of sepoys. Rather, as Bengal Army military official John Fendall warned in an 1825 minute: the “continuance of our Empire must almost entirely depend” upon sepoys’ continued “fidelity” to Company rule. “Any general feeling of want of confidence” by Indian troops toward either their British officers or the Company more broadly, he continued, would surely be “marked as the beginning of the decline of the British Power in India.”3 In seeking to explain why this might have been the case in the colonial military, this chapter plays close attention to the role of colonial ideology and discourse. Admittedly, British reliance on Indian military manpower was also pragmatic: how could the British expect to conquer and hold India without sepoys, especially when they lacked large numbers of British or European soldiers from the 1760s and the 1820s? Colonial pragmatism, the chapter will also argue, was largely responsible for the Company’s mainly hands-off recruitment system for its Indian armies, which resulted in sepoys generally selfrecruiting themselves. Yet, other factors help explain why the British depended on Indian soldiers while refusing to countenance a similar strategy in the colonial bureaucracy. Of particular importance, this chapter contends, were dominant eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury British interpretations of Indian caste that viewed caste as having more to do with class and social status than religion per se. Accordingly, many colonial military officials imagined their Brahmin and Rajput sepoys as the rough Indian equivalents of British landed gentlemen even, as this chapter will show, in spite of much social evidence to the contrary. The chapter will conclude by considering how these two rival and contradictory British discourses about their colonial military coalesced during the early nineteenth century, helping to frame colonial anxieties about British military officer and soldier misconduct in India. British assertions that their empire was one largely based on conquest, indeed that it was an “empire of sepoys,” as Bengal Army officer Henry Barkley Henderson put it in his 1829 memoir, placed

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 68

7/15/2011 6:37:05 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

69

high expectations upon British officers and soldiers in India always to demonstrate (or appear to demonstrate) British racial and moral prestige.4 Otherwise, as many colonial policymakers and authors feared, the “gentlemen sepoys” that the Company mainly relied on in the absence of Indian popular support would not stay loyal.

British Discourses Regarding Differences between How Indian and European Armies Fight From the very beginning of British colonial rule in the mid-eighteenth century, various Britons in India sought to account for the Company’s sudden rise to political and military power on the Indian subcontinent. The Company’s armies, it seemed, invariably defeated Indian armies, even ones considerably larger in size. Many argued that this was due to British armies prizing military discipline and regimentation far more than Indian ones. Thus, Bengal officials reassured Company directors in 1768 that while Hyder Ali of Mysore had come close to sacking Madras the year before, Company forces would ultimately prevail because of their superior military discipline. (The Company eventually did, although not as quickly as Bengal officials assumed would be the case.) Likewise, writing a quarter-century later, Bengal Army surveyor James Rennell argued that as long as the Company continued to face “undisciplined troops” who failed to improve either in discipline or how they fought, it would easily retain its militarily preeminent position on the Indian subcontinent.5 To some degree, these various British observations reflected reality. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, European warfare had undergone a “military revolution,” with various countries shifting from relying on locally raised bands of mercenaries to directly employing professionally trained soldiers.6 By contrast, Indian warfare remained far more “segmentary.” Wars continued to be fought by mercenaries that owed primary loyalty to their immediate commanders who paid them rather than to the distant state.7 There was not one Mughal army, for example, but rather several, each “controlled by independent commanders.” Indian armies also generally fought as “aggregates of individuals.” Individual prowess and, particularly, skill in hand-to-hand combat, continued to be highly valued in Indian warfare.8 Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons in India were aware of these differences between European and Indian forms of

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 69

7/15/2011 6:37:05 PM

70

Company India, 1765–1858

fighting, and they generally regarded the latter as inferior. A British officer, assuming the name of “Najeeb,” thus asserted in 1808 that Britons owed many of their Indian military successes to their Indian antagonists’ “imbecility.” Similarly, in 1829 colonial reformer Gavin Young characterized Indian soldiers as brave but also ignorant and barbaric. Small numbers of soldiers under British command continually defeated much larger numbers of Indian troops, Young contended, because of Indians’ reluctance to adopt military discipline and “other institutions of civilized life.”9 Several Britons in India also characterized this difference between European and Indian fighting methods in scientific terms. Thus, British Army Lieutenant-Colonel George Augustus Frederick Fitzclarence, the eldest illegitimate son of William IV and briefly stationed in India, generally attributed British military success in 1819 to British armies’ “extensive combination of machinery” guided by “the hand of science and system.” Likewise, Bengal Army Lieutenant Adam White argued three years later that European armies’ “superior science and intellectual energy” insured British military supremacy in India.10 By framing military discipline in “scientific” terms, British military officers such as Fitzclarence and White indirectly framed differences between how British and Indian armies fought in gendered terms much like contemporary Western scientists did in arguing that science ought to be exclusively practiced by men because they were supposedly more rational than women.11 It could be argued that Indian warfare methods afforded more opportunities for soldiers to demonstrate physical manliness than more “scientific” but also rigid European methods that relied on military discipline and strict adherence to column and line formation. But British commentators throughout this period uniformly avoided such interpretations, maintaining instead that Indians fought “irrationally” compared to the “rational”—and thus properly masculine—British methods of fighting (and winning) battles. While many of these gendered comparisons between how British and Indian armies fought were implicit, some were quite explicit. In his account of the Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803–04), for example, Bengal Army officer William Francklin contended that Britishled armies practiced a more “open and manly warfare” than their Maratha foes who were more “corrupt and treacherous.” Likewise, James Mill asserted in his History of British India (1817) that “effeminate” Indians were hopeless in war, particularly against Europeans. Mill attributed this hopelessness mainly to a “slavish and dastardly

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 70

7/15/2011 6:37:06 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

71

spirit,” which, he argued, proved no match to British courage and manliness.12 Mill and other Britons’ arguments for why the Company had already, by 1817, achieved Indian military predominance framed other early nineteenth-century British discussions about their colonial military. Nepal in the 1810s and the Punjab under Ranjit Singh in the 1820s and 1830s would both partially adopt European military regimentation. They were the Company’s only Indian adversaries ever to do so.13 Largely due to this, many Britons in India downplayed indigenous military threats. It bears repeating that in their own recent history, Britons and Europeans had largely fought as Indians did; but that was in the past. As they were conquering India over the six decades between the 1760s and the 1820s, Britons in India, drawing heavily upon Scottish Enlightenment models of stadial progress, smugly employed theories of cultural retardation to explain this “fact.” In the process they inaugurated discourses of “Indian backwardness” and essential “difference” between Britons and Indians that would become more strident as time went on.14 As the next section will argue, a similar degree of pomposity, from British colonialism’s earliest decades, can also be found in inflated British notions of British officers and soldiers’ high importance in molding sepoys into proper fighting men.

British Officers and Soldiers’ Idealized Role in Sepoy Armies Just as many colonial military officials generally attributed British military success in South Asia to superior military discipline, many also stressed the important roles British officers and soldiers played in the Company’s sepoy armies. First, many considered British officers to be essential in instilling military discipline among sepoys. In 1796, an anonymous Madras Army official emphasized how crucial it was that officers patiently, but systematically “infuse a certain degree of European Discipline” into their Indian soldiers. Writing a quartercentury later, British Army Major Joseph Sherer argued that the chief reason why Indians made bad soldiers was their lack of military discipline, which, he claimed, rendered them “very careless and indolent” in battle. Only through British officers patiently training them, Sherer insisted, would sepoys become good soldiers.15

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 71

7/15/2011 6:37:06 PM

72

Company India, 1765–1858

Other colonial officials and military officers stressed British officers’ importance in setting superior examples of public conduct that could be successfully emulated by sepoys. British Army Captain Innes Munro confidently asserted in 1789 that British officers were largely responsible for whether or not sepoys demonstrated “steady and soldierly behavior” in the heat of battle. Only when brave and competent British officers led them, he argued, did sepoys conduct themselves “with astonishing conduct and intrepidity.” These arguments took on even more paternalistic and gendered hues in the early nineteenth century. Thus, in 1813, Robert Grant, son of prominent Company director and Evangelical politician Charles Grant—as well as Board of Control President in the 1830s—contended that Indians, including sepoys, were naturally “feminine” and slothful. The “visible and immediate guidance” of British officers in battle was essential, he claimed. Likewise, writing in 1820, prominent Bengal official and eventual Company director Henry Thoby Prinsep stressed the crucial importance of Indian soldiers always observing their British officer “coolly giving his orders” and exhibiting “enterprising courage,” or, in other words, demonstrating a rational and ordered manliness.16 To be clear, British elites generally said similar things about the relationship between British officers and soldiers during this period. After all, the Duke of Wellington famously characterized British soldiers as “scum of the earth” because of their impoverished origins; they only became proper soldiers because of their aristocratic British officers.17 Even so, there is important ideological work going on in these above examples. By drawing attention to the rationality of British officers as well as implying that sepoys were not themselves capable of fighting properly, Grant and Prinsep were laying several ideological foundations for more strident British racial attitudes later on in the century. Indeed, several Britons in India during this period asserted that sepoys were only able to become proper soldiers at all under their British officers’ tutelage. Madras Army officials thus warned British officers in one of their first set of general orders, published in 1766, that proper order and discipline, indeed a particular sepoy regiment’s fighting effectiveness, entirely depended on them. By the early nineteenth century, these attitudes became more strident and racist in nature. In 1822, for example, a British officer writing anonymously of his experiences in the just-concluded Anglo-Nepal War (1814–16) belittled the average sepoy as being “no better than a living machine.” Greater numbers of British officers were needed in sepoy regiments, this officer sneered, to “communicate” to Indian soldiers what they

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 72

7/15/2011 6:37:06 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

73

“do not possess within themselves,” in other words, the rationality necessary to be capable of fighting properly.18 These attitudes closely resemble ones from later on in the century, a period we often associate with harsher racial attitudes. For example, W.D. Arnold, a Bengal Army officer and the son of Rugby headmaster Thomas Arnold (as well as Matthew Arnold’s brother), described sepoys in his Anglo-Indian novel Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East (1853) as being little more than “very docile animal[s].”19 And, as Lionel Caplan has documented for the later British Raj, it was commonplace for military officials to regard sepoys drawn even from the so-called martial races—such as Gurkhas—as children who were useless as soldiers unless properly directed by their more rational and masculine British officers. 20 As we can see, however, such racially arrogant attitudes were not new during the British Raj; from British colonialism’s earliest decades several British colonial officials and military officers had put forth arguments about Indians’ relative cultural backwardness in their fighting methods as well as British officers’ indispensability in sepoy armies. Partially interrupting these earlier racist attitudes, however, were several colonial officials and authors of Indian tracts who emphasized the duty of British officers to forge close personal bonds with their Indian men. Company historian John Bruce stressed the importance, in his 1793 tract, of knowing the languages and paying “minute attention” to sepoys’ “customs and religious prejudices.” Only by knowing these things, he insisted, could British officers retain their loyalties to British colonialism. Likewise, Robert Grant regarded many British officers’ willingness to gain an “intimate acquaintance” with many of their sepoys’ customs as a source of strength for British colonial rule.21 Still, it bears emphasizing that already many British authors regarded British officers as the crucial link between the colonial regime and the Indian soldiers it largely depended upon for its rule. Such beliefs, as we will see, would lead to high expectations being placed on military officers to behave in certain ways while in India which were not always met. *

*

*

To a lesser degree, colonial and military officials also emphasized British soldiers’ importance in Indian armies. First, despite the fact that sepoys consistently outnumbered British soldiers at least five to one throughout the Company period, several imperial officials considered British soldiers to be British colonialism’s primary bulwark

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 73

7/15/2011 6:37:06 PM

74

Company India, 1765–1858

largely because of their professional expertise and greater reliability. 22 Thus, in 1777, Company directors argued in a letter to Lord Weymouth, a British government official, that only “a proper number” of European soldiers “on the spot” would remove “every Idea of danger to which Our Settlements may be liable.” Likewise, in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, Company directors urged the British government that India’s long-term security depended on always having sizable numbers of British soldiers there. 23 At no time, though, did the Company’s desire to maintain large numbers of British soldiers in India ever prove feasible; indeed, even at the time of the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857, only about 45,000 British soldiers served in India, divided roughly equally between the British Army and the Company’s three European forces. This is compared to 232,000 Indian soldiers, or over five times that number, who served in the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay armies. 24 The Company’s general inability to recruit many British soldiers stemmed from various causes. First, the expenses involved in transporting British soldiers from Europe to India made them far more expensive than Indianraised soldiers. Indeed, Douglas Peers has calculated that British regiments on average cost twice as much as Indian ones. 25 But British soldiers were also “costly” in another sense that directly contradicted the pervasive colonial rhetoric of innate British superiority: they had far higher mortality rates compared to Indian soldiers. Several medical statisticians, working for British life insurance companies seeking to open up the colonial Indian market, would eventually document this in the 1840s. As the actuaries observed, British soldiers’ general annual death rate averaged between three and four times that of sepoys (usually averaging between five and six percent per year compared to one to two percent for Indians). Although Europeans’ general susceptibility to tropical diseases such as malaria and cholera was partly to blame, the various actuaries concluded that British soldiers died at a much higher rate than Indian ones mainly because of diseases brought on by excessive drinking. As Samuel Brown observed, the fatality caused by various liver diseases, so “scarcely noticeable amongst the Natives,” was “more fatal” at Madras than any British colony other than Sierra Leone. While only responsible for about 12 percent of British soldier deaths, a British soldier serving there was fifty-six times more likely to die of cirrhosis of the liver and other liver ailments than his Indian counterpart; he was also fourteen times as likely to die as a British soldier serving in Britain. These statistics not only demonstrated the high cost of empire in terms of British lives but

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 74

7/15/2011 6:37:06 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

75

also directly contradicted notions of British soldiers’ automatic superiority over Indians, morally or physically.26 Perhaps the most important reason, though, why Company officials were unable to recruit large numbers of British soldiers for Indian service was the British Army, who competed with the Company for recruits, particularly during the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. During both conflicts, the British Army used its greater clout to monopolize soldier recruitment in Great Britain and Ireland. Company directors sought redress from British politicians, insisting that their Indian possessions were in danger of being lost without fresh British soldiers. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, they often failed to convince British government officials of the need to act. Given the invasion threats posed by Napoleon’s armies on multiple occasions, British government officials’ reluctance to send more British troops to India made sense.27 For these three reasons, the Company turned mainly to Indians for its recruitment needs. Even so, many Britons in India argued that British soldiers—as small as their numbers were—played several pivotal roles in Indian armies. First, Company officials contended that British soldiers helped instill military discipline among sepoys. Without more British soldiers being sent to India to perform such a vital role, Company directors claimed in their many unsuccessful efforts to sway British government officials, “the character, discipline and attachment” of sepoys on which British colonial rule “must ever depend” would run the risk of being fatally undermined. 28 Second, several Britons in India maintained that British soldiers were far better soldiers than Indian ones, both physically and mentally. As early as the 1760s, Britons such as Robert Orme were already claiming that the “superior” courage of British soldiers proved decisive in battle “on every occasion” against far larger Indian foes. Four decades later, in October 1806, Madras Army Commander-in-Chief J.T. Cradock asserted that no sepoy, even one “nurtured from his Infancy” as a soldier, could ever “vye [sic] with the British Soldier in the energies of mind or Body.”29 Cradock more famously demonstrated his contempt for Indian soldiers earlier in the year by mandating that they remove their caste markings and earrings, as well as shave off their mustaches and wear a turban with a leather cockade. These orders led to the Vellore Mutiny, where sepoys attacked the British garrison in the middle of the night, killing over a hundred officers and men. The most serious armed insurrection against the British

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 75

7/15/2011 6:37:06 PM

76

Company India, 1765–1858

between Bengal Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula's 1756 sacking of Calcutta and the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857, the Vellore Mutiny alarmed many Britons in India. John Malcolm, for instance, wrote that the insurrection, although localized, led him to “tremble for India” while Madras Governor Lord William Bentinck reported that Europeans in Madras “went to bed in the uncertainty of rising alive.”30 Although both Cradock and Bentinck were recalled and the offensive orders were soon rescinded, the experience of the Vellore Mutiny provided a sobering reminder to Britons that their Indian empire was in a very real sense an “empire of sepoys,” as Bengal Army officer Henry Barkley Henderson admitted in 1829.31 However much Company administrators wished to defend their conquests with “superior” British and European soldiers; even as many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons in India held an inflated sense of British officers and soldiers’ importance in colonial armies; Britons in India could not escape the fact that their chief bulwark was their sepoy armies. How these armies were recruited thus mattered. So, too, was how the British explained this to themselves. Both these factors resulted in alternative sets of colonial discourses being crafted during this earlier period that were far more positive toward Indian soldiers.

Trust and Rule: Sepoy Recruitment in the Company’s Armies The best example of Britons placing trust in any group of Indian subordinates during the Company period can be found in the Company’s general recruitment system for its three sepoy armies. Between 1765 and 1858, British military officers did not recruit Indian soldiers but, instead, largely relied on sepoys to recruit themselves. The sheer numbers of soldiers recruited in this manner are quite impressive. In little more than six decades between 1863 and 1826, the total number of Indian soldiers serving under British arms skyrocketed from 18,430 to 290,834, an almost sixteen-fold increase (see Figure 3.1).32 Indeed, the Company’s three Indian armies together constituted the world’s largest mercenary army during the early nineteenth century, and, as such, greatly furthered British global power. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Governor-General Lord Bentinck cut the Company’s armed forces almost in half as part of his policy of fiscal retrenchment. Yet, a string of military conflicts soon thereafter in Afghanistan (1839–42), Sind (1843), and the Punjab (1845–46 and 1848–49) ensured that the Company’s three Indian armies always remained above 200,000 men

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 76

7/15/2011 6:37:06 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

77

350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 1763 1782 1805 1814 1823 1826 1830 1835 1845 1857 T otal

B engal

Madras

B ombay

Figure 3.1 Number of sepoys (in thousands) in the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay Armies, 1763–1857. Source: For 1763, 1782, and 1805 data, see Raymond Callahan, East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 7; for 1814, 1823, and 1826 data, see Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth-Century India (London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1995), 133, 189; for 1830 data, see Robert Montgomery Martin, Political, Commercial and Financial Conditions of the Anglo-Eastern Empire in 1832 (London: Parbury, Allen, and Co., 1832), 157; for 1845 data, see Samuel Brown, Few Thoughts on the Commission, Divisions of Profit, Selection of Lives, the Mortality in India, and other Subjects Relating to Life Assurance (London: W.S.D. Pateman, 1849), 46; for 1857 data, see David Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1994), 133. According to Henry Thoby Prinsep, a high-ranking Company official in the 1830s, there were a total of 152,948 sepoys in the Company’s three armies in 1835 but he does not provide precise breakdowns for each army. Prinsep, Indian Question in 1853 (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1853), 20. In the chart above, I have approximated troop strengths of the three armies for 1835 by averaging the 1830 and 1845 percentages for the three armies.

from the late 1830s until the Sepoy Rebellion two decades later.33 The Company’s possession of such awe-inspiring forces of coercive violence throughout the first half of the nineteenth century not only made an increasingly authoritarian form of colonial rule possible; it also, as chapter 5 will argue, created a crisis of confidence among several British colonial and military officials during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. From British colonialism’s very beginnings, in the 1760s, several important differences emerged among the three armies both demographically as well as in terms of overall recruitment strategy. The Bengal Army immediately became notable for its lack of diversity in

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 77

7/15/2011 6:37:06 PM

78

Map 3.1

Company India, 1765–1858

Northern India: Area of heaviest sepoy recruitment.

terms of its sepoys’ social, ethno-religious, and geographical backgrounds. High-caste Hindus (Brahmins and Rajputs) dominated the army, making up close to 80 percent, with “respectable” Muslims comprising most of the remainder. The army’s lack of geographical diversity was even more striking. Nearly all its sepoys came from the Gangetic plain of northern India between the cities of Lucknow and Patna (see Map 3.1); despite being named the Bengal Army, almost no recruits came from Bengal proper, or the delta region of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers.34 By contrast, the other two smaller armies of Madras and Bombay were more diverse. In the case of the Madras Army, South Indian Muslims constituted the largest group of sepoys, but they only amounted to about two-fifths. The army’s other demographic groups included north Indian high-caste Hindus, South Indian Telugus, and various low-caste Hindus.35 The Bombay Army was even more diverse. It was comprised of Marathas (the Bombay Presidency’s chief ethnic group), north Indian high-caste Hindus, and other Indian ethnic or religious groups that historically had not served in any Indian

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 78

7/15/2011 6:37:07 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

79

army, such as Jews, various low-caste Hindus, and persons of mixed European and Indian ancestry.36 In and of itself, sepoy recruitment did not cause these dramatic differences in the three armies’ social composition. All three generally relied upon the same recruitment method—the “levy system”—to supply the bulk of their sepoys. The Company expected sepoys on their annual furloughs to bring back new recruits. Depending upon regiments’ particular needs, this system would sometimes be modified. Furloughs were extended. The Company occasionally sent out special recruitment parties, as Bombay Army Colonel J. Kerr colorfully put it in 1802, “to go a hunting after new Men.”37 Officers sometimes granted bonus money or promoted sepoys who brought in many new recruits. Finally, the British established recruiting depots in districts where large numbers of new recruits might present themselves for enlistment.38 In all these cases, British regimental officers enforced certain age and height requirements but no evidence exists that they directly participated in sepoy recruitment at any time prior to the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857.39 Rather, to a remarkable degree, they entrusted this highly important colonial responsibility to sepoys themselves. If not recruitment per se, then, what account for the Bengal Army’s demographic and geographical uniqueness compared to Madras and Bombay—its lack of diversity? In large part, the answer lies in the Bengal Presidency’s close proximity to various north Indian regions that had constituted the main source of Indian soldiers during previous centuries.40 Once the Bengal Presidency became an Indian political and military power in its own right, soon after 1765, it tapped into this source of sepoys with relative ease. The other two presidency armies also sought soldiers from northern India.41 Of the three armies, though, only Bengal succeeded in consistently obtaining sufficient numbers of able-bodied recruits throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as can be seen by the Bengal Army’s relative increase versus the Madras Army’s relative decline (see Figure 3.2). This had two long-term consequences. By the time of the Sepoy Rebellion, which almost entirely involved Bengal Army sepoys, that army, by itself, constituted nearly 60 percent of the Company’s total Indian forces. This fact largely helps explain why that revolt in British minds imperiled the very survival of their rule. Second, although Lord Roberts only decided in the mid-1880s to greatly diminish the Madras Army’s size in favor of recruiting various northwest Indian “martial races”—such as Pathans, Sikhs, and Gurkhas—that army

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 79

7/15/2011 6:37:07 PM

80

Company India, 1765–1858 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1763 1782 1805 1814 1823 1826 1830 1835 1845 1857 Bengal

Figure 3.2

Madras

Bombay

Relative percentages of the three sepoy armies, 1763–1857.

Source: Refer to the citations for Figure 3.1.

was already sharply diminishing for several decades previously in overall importance. As we will see in chapter 5, the Bengal Army’s heavy dominance by Brahmins and Rajputs would lead several British colonial officials and military officers from the 1830s on to fear the tenuousness of British control over the army. Growing British mistrust toward their highcaste sepoys had much to do with increasingly dominant British interpretations over the first half of the nineteenth century that held that caste was essentially a religious system bound up in Hinduism. Such British “orderings” of caste, however, were not always dominant.

Initial British Perceptions of High-Caste Sepoys Prior to the 1820s Prior to the 1820s, British military writers and colonial officials tended not to view caste as something intrinsically religious in nature but rather as something largely analogous to class. In comparing caste to “class,” however, Britons mainly employed an idyllic and highly imagined sense of class as something “occupational and hereditary, organic and unchanging.”42 This conservative, indeed romantic vision of class, was more ideological than based in reality; had such visions of class ever comported to actual British social reality, they were being progressively undermined during the early nineteenth century

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 80

7/15/2011 6:37:07 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

81

by industrialization and the massive social and economic changes it wrought. Thus, John Sullivan, a former Madras official, explained in 1795 that certain castes inherited specific Indian professions and occupations. In the nineteenth century, writers such as H.T. Colebrooke, a Bengal official and prominent scholar of Hinduism, also drew a firm connection between caste and profession. In a collection of several of his essays on Hinduism, written initially in the early nineteenth century but only published posthumously in 1858, Colebrooke admired the caste system for instituting the “permanent separation of classes, with hereditary professions assigned to each.”43 This view of caste as being linked hereditarily with profession framed many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British descriptions of Bengal Army sepoys, particularly Rajputs. From the beginning of British colonial rule, many Britons believed that Rajputs were descendants of the ancient Hindu warrior caste, the Kshatriya, and, as such, the “natural” soldiers of India. Bombay official John Henry Grose argued in 1766 that Rajputs were born soldiers and that they inherited their military profession. Similarly, Bengal Army officer and Persian scholar William Francklin contended in 1805 that Rajputs, “without exception,” were either soldiers or farmers. Francklin believed this was because the caste system had allocated other professions and trades to other castes.44 Closely related were British beliefs that high-caste sepoys belonged to an Indian equivalent of the British upper class. Bengal Army officer Walter Badenach insisted in 1813 that Bengal Army sepoys were uniformly the sons of large landowners, if not large property owners themselves. Likewise, throughout his three-volume history of Rajputs, published between 1829 and 1832, Bengal Army Lieutenant-Colonel and Orientalist scholar James Tod repeatedly contended that they belonged to a “military class,” a “martial class,” or were “martial vassals.” Even poor Rajputs, he claimed, steadfastly adhered to such “aristocratic ideas” as refusing to plough their own fields or using lances except in battle.45 Several British military officers also drew attention in their memoirs to other “gentlemanly” aspects of sepoy behavior, such as their high personal honor and chivalry. William Francklin characterized Rajputs in his 1805 account as among the more “honourable, brave, and faithful” groups of Indian men; all individuals “of upright manners,” he asserted, “cannot associate with a better companion than a Rajpoot” because of their “high sense of honour,” their “natural politeness,” and their honesty. Similarly, Fitzclarence focused on

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 81

7/15/2011 6:37:07 PM

82

Company India, 1765–1858

sepoys’ chivalry in his 1819 memoir. Around the same time that Sir Walter Scott and other Britons were “reinventing” the chivalrous tradition back in Britain, topped off by George IV’s (Fitzclarence’s uncle) official visit to Scotland in 1822 dressed in a kilt, Fitzclarence described an instance when a group of sepoys defended several “helpless villagers” against a herd of rampaging elephants.46 Writing three years later, Adam White highlighted their high personal integrity. As men “from the better classes of society, if not the flower of its population,” they routinely practiced the “virtues of moral restraint, prudence, and economy” that Thomas Robert Malthus was trying to inculcate during this same time period to young covenanted servants at Haileybury College. White praised Bengal Army sepoys for regularly sending money home to their families rather than wasting it on the “low course of drinking and debauchery,” which he accused most British soldiers of doing.47 They were also steadfastly loyal. Recounting the recent AngloNepal War, White emphasized that there were many instances where sepoys could have deserted when the going got tough. Instead, he exclaimed, they considered it a matter of personal honor “that they pass through this ordeal without any stain upon their character.”48 Thus, unlike the anonymous British officer quoted earlier in this chapter who claimed that sepoys fighting in the Anglo-Nepal War were lifeless automatons, in White’s view, Indian soldiers fighting in this conflict were men animated by a high sense of personal honor and integrity. There are several different things occurring in these various British descriptions of high-caste sepoys as rough equivalents of British landed elites. First, these characterizations aptly demonstrate David Cannadine’s broad point about British imperialists: that they often sought, when evaluating cultures and societies alien to their own, to “begin with what they knew—or what they thought they knew— namely, the social structure of their own country.”49 Britons during this earlier period, therefore, did not automatically seek to find intractable difference between their own culture and India’s; they sometimes sought similarities. One example of this was imagining a shared predilection toward military service among landed aristocracies in both places. In response to the French Revolution and Napoleon, there was a general militarization of the British upper class during the early decades of the nineteenth century, with nearly half of the members of the still unreformed and largely oligarchic House of Commons between 1790 and 1820 serving also as officers in various

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 82

7/15/2011 6:37:07 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

83

“territorial” reserve regiments and a further fifth as actual British Army officers.50 It is not, therefore, much of an accident that during this same period the British commonly viewed the Bengal Army’s high-caste Hindu sepoys as gentlemen soldiers. Such characterizations of high-caste sepoys as rough equivalents of British landed elites also demonstrate how British military officials, like their civil service counterparts, were, again, becoming “prisoners of their own rhetoric.”51 By making this comparison, Britons in India ignored much social evidence to the contrary. Indeed, the various north Indian districts whence most Bengal Army sepoys were recruited were known for much agrarian poverty, which had been caused by pervasive patterns of partible inheritance, by general overpopulation, and by high British colonial taxation. Thus while the Bengal Army was a high-caste army, it was far from being an army full of “sons of men of landed property”—as Walter Badenach and other British officers believed was the case. 52 A more accurate description would be that it was a peasant army.53 But the British also misunderstood caste as it actually operated within north Indian society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather than being fixed, as the British generally imagined as being the case, caste status was actually far more socially fluid. In prior centuries, Indians could often assume a Rajput caste status through military service even if they were not born into that warrior caste.54 Conversely, a common way that poorer Brahmins could retain their high-caste status was through soldiering.55 Thus, no matter how hard Britons attempted during this early period to hammer the round peg of Indian caste into the figurative square hole of the British class system, it would not fit. While Britons in India would only exhibit greater arrogance as the nineteenth century wore on in their attempts to “order” caste, already here we can discern how many only seemed to see what they wanted to see.56

“Under the Constant Observation of Sepoys:” Early Nineteenth-Century Colonial Anxieties about British Officer and Soldier Behavior Thus far, this chapter has considered two rival colonial discourses: one based on an insistence that Britons were culturally and militarily superior to Indians and that sepoys needed the tutelage of British officers (and soldiers) and the other on the view that most Bengal Army

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 83

7/15/2011 6:37:08 PM

84

Company India, 1765–1858

sepoys were landed gentlemen and, therefore, far more honorable and trustworthy than other Indians (or, for that matter, most British soldiers). These discourses came together to inform early nineteenthcentury colonial anxieties about British military officer and soldier misbehavior in India. Assertions of British moral superiority and the necessity of British military leadership were hard to reconcile with the reality that many British officers and soldiers in Indian armies failed to show a proper regard for Christianity, took financial advantage of Indians, and excessively drank. Likewise, the beliefs that sepoys were gentlemen who possessed a high degree of personal honor and integrity meant that their “opinion” of British officers and soldiers could not readily be dismissed. In largely basing their control over India on the maintenance of large sepoy armies, many colonial officials deemed the loyalty of these elites as crucial to British colonialism’s continued existence and stability.

Anxieties about the Irreligion of British Soldiers Early nineteenth-century Britons in India, ranging from Company officials to missionary critics, worried, first, about British soldiers’ seeming inattentiveness toward religion. Madras Army Commanderin-Chief Lieutenant-General Hay Macdowall, for example, contended in 1807 that this problem could be mainly attributed to many army station’s lack of regimental chapels. But even in regiments with such chapels, religious officials often complained of British soldiers’ inattention to Christianity. Thus, Thomas Robertson, the chaplain at the Bengal Army cantonment of Dum Dum, informed the Bishop of Calcutta a decade later of the various problems he encountered in performing weekly service. Despite the best efforts of their commanding officers to police their behavior during his services, British soldiers at the cantonment often disrupted services by freely moving about, talking with fellow soldiers, and asking to leave while services were still being performed.57 Unfortunately, we are precluded from knowing entirely why the soldiers at Dum Dum were bored by Robertson’s services that day; this is chiefly because, unlike British Army private Frank Richards’s highly revealing memoir of his Indian experiences nearly a century later, higher levels of soldier illiteracy limit the existence of similarly rich sources during the Company period. (In one anecdote from Richards’s account, for example, soldiers coughed repeatedly in hopes that their chaplain would hurry up services so they could make it back

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 84

7/15/2011 6:37:08 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

85

in time to enjoy their company’s mess before it closed. They failed in their endeavors).58 Perhaps most British soldiers at Dum Dum were not even Anglicans, but instead Roman Catholics or members of one of the Protestant Nonconformist churches? Indeed, during this period, close to half of the Company’s European regiments came from Ireland and were thus largely Roman Catholics. Moreover, according to Michael Snape, the “Baptist influence over the army in India was already well established by 1813.”59 Certainly, the existence of multiple temperance societies within the Company’s European regiments by the 1830s lends to this argument’s plausibility.60 Finally, it is worth considering whether Methodism was also popular among the Company’s British soldiers in India. Peter Stanley has suggested that the Company tended to recruit its European soldiers more selectively than the British Army during this period. Unlike many British Army soldiers who often enlisted as “acts of desperation” to escape dire poverty, their counterparts in the Company’s European armies were drawn from a somewhat higher strata in British society, being comprised mainly of individuals who generally hoped that military service would prove a “route to prosperity and even respectability.”61 These were exactly the same sectors of British society who were likeliest to flock to Methodism, particularly as the established Anglican church, at least during much of the preceding eighteenth century, did not exhibit much interest in ministering either to their spiritual or material needs.62 Although it is important to try to imagine what the British soldier’s point of view might have been during this era for greater context, it hardly mattered at all to colonial elites. Like his counterparts back in Britain who expressed dismay at the seemingly innate immorality of the “lower orders” without probing deeply into their material causes, Robertson merely attributed many of his soldiers’ “vicious habits” to their lack of due regard for Christianity.63 Others, such as an anonymous British officer in India calling himself “Najeeb,” specifically tied British soldiers’ lack of religiosity to drunkenness (presumably, of course, he was referring to those who had not turned to the stricter creeds of Baptism or Methodism). He also worried about how British soldiers’ lack of Christian morality might affect the overall racial and moral prestige of Britons in India. Most Indians, he warned, already tended to regard a “thief, a drunkard, a dog, and a Christian” as “synonymous terms” because of British soldiers’ supposedly pervasive drunken habits. If such beliefs were left to fester, Najeeb warned, they might over time corrode Indian loyalty.64

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 85

7/15/2011 6:37:08 PM

86

Company India, 1765–1858

Company chaplains and Protestant missionaries, but also colonial officials and military officers thus insisted that British military personnel in India needed to become better Christians and thus “better and more moral men.”65 But how exactly could this occur when, as late as the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Company employed only thirteen chaplains for all of India? Few Protestant churches existed in India and those that did generally were located only in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, far from the mofussil outstations such as Cawnpore or Allahabad where most British soldiers were stationed.66 In response to this reality, Claudius Buchanan, a Company chaplain, Anglican divine, and one of the leading Company insiders before 1813 who advocated for the opening up of India to Protestant missionary activity, condemned the Company’s limited provision of religion not just as inadequate but as a “positive offense against Christian institution.”67 Baptisms, marriages, and burials, particularly in outdistricts far from the presidency towns, were irregularly performed. The Christian Sabbath was also hardly if ever strictly observed. With such a lack of attention to Christianity, Buchanan wondered two years later in a letter to Governor-General Minto how anyone could be surprised that so many “minds of Europeans assimilate to the Native Character after a long residence in this Country.”68 Here, we have a concern again about maintaining appearances and an early nineteenth-century example of the British fear, pervasive throughout the British Empire during much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, of “going native.” Buchanan was sharply critical of the Company’s lack of concern about Indian moral improvement and its efforts to impede Hindu and Muslim conversion to Christianity. But, as a Company chaplain, he did not indict his employers for being morally unfit to govern India, as many Baptist and other dissenting missionaries did. Buchanan was concerned that Baptists and other Nonconformists were stealing a march on the established Church of England through their illegal, but nevertheless generally tolerated missionary efforts during the two decades before 1813. He thus sought to convince fellow members of the English political and religious establishment of the need to establish a formal episcopal hierarchy in India. Only with proper means, Buchanan contended, could the Company fully perform its duty to “be the guardians” of its British employees’ morals. Furthermore, Buchanan insisted that many other problems that the Company then faced in its European regiments, such as

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 86

7/15/2011 6:37:08 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

87

disaffection and occasional insubordination among British soldiers, would greatly diminish.69 In 1813, at a time when most members of parliament focused on the question whether Protestant missionaries—and largely nonconformist ones—should be legally allowed to enter India, Buchanan achieved perhaps an even more significant victory for Evangelicals.70 Parliament established the Anglican church as India’s official religion, with a bishop in Calcutta and archdeacons in the other two presidencies of Madras and Bombay. Two decades later, after some confusion about Presbyterians’ official status in India, whom the Company treated de facto as members of a second, although junior, established church (with a Presbyterian church constructed with public funds in each presidency along with a chaplain and vice-chaplain on the Company’s payroll) despite not being legally required to do so, the Church of Scotland joined the Anglican church in becoming officially established churches in India under the terms of the Charter Act of 1833. At this time, the Madras and Bombay archdeaconries became elevated to bishoprics.71 The Company also established an Ecclesiastical Department in 1813 solely charged with building chapels, supplying religious texts, and employing Anglican and Presbyterian chaplains (as well as providing, although on a more ad hoc basis, for Roman Catholic priests) to minister to the spiritual needs of its Catholic European personnel in India. The importance of these official efforts at inculcating religion in the Company’s European personnel cannot be emphasized enough. During this same period, the Company, under missionary and evangelical pressure, began to divest itself from all former support of Hindu and Muslim religious festivals and shrines.72 Turning away from its former support for Indian religion, the Company now spent a considerable amount of money and energy on Christian religion in India, support that would continue long after the Company was nationalized in 1858. Far from adopting a stance of strict religious neutrality, the Company’s extensive ecclesiastical efforts instead suggest that the criticism posed by many non-Anglican missionaries at the time (as well as several scholars today), that the Company was in many respects “anti-Christian,” is just not so.73 Yet, even as early as the 1790s—that is, two decades before parliament established the Anglican church in India or forced the Company to allow missionaries into India—Company officials attempted to rebut claims that it was antireligious by building numerous regimental chapels throughout its three armies.74 The Company was broadly

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 87

7/15/2011 6:37:08 PM

88

Company India, 1765–1858

ecumenical and pragmatic; it realized that about half of its European soldiers (by far the largest number of Britons in India) during the early nineteenth century were Irish Catholics and it spent money to build and repair Protestant as well as Catholic chapels.75 For example, in 1807 the Madras government spent 1,000 star pagodas (roughly £400)76 on a Protestant regimental chapel for the Madras Army’s Masulipatam division, while Bombay officials spent over 17,000 rupees (roughly £2,200) constructing a Roman Catholic chapel for the far larger British cantonment of Colala in the mid-1820s.77 As Michael Snape has shown, the Company’s broadly inclusive religious policies offer a vivid contrast to the British Army’s, which did not undergo any significant chapel-building efforts for any of its regiments serving abroad until after the 1840s.78 Company officials also sought to promote religion among British officers and soldiers in India during the early nineteenth century in other ways. For example, in 1808, Buchanan proposed in a letter to Bombay Governor Jonathan Duncan that the Company ought to subsidize the printing of a cheap version of the Bible to distribute to the British soldiers in its three armies. Doing so, he contended, would greatly tend toward British soldiers’ moral improvement. Duncan and other Bombay officials agreed and strenuously recommended to London officials that his proposal be enacted.79 Although no reply from Company directors survives in the colonial record to this suggestion so eager were directors in later decades to have their personnel receive the word of God that in 1840 they exempted the British Foreign and Bible Society’s Madras branch from paying customs duty on paper imported from Britain used to print bibles.80 Again, the frequent charge lobbed against the Company that it was anti-Christian is not entirely convincing. It should be remembered that many of those accusing the Company of this were Nonconformists. Much as they did regarding the Church of England’s privileges, Nonconformist critics of the Company, particularly Baptist ones such as Andrew Fuller or William Ward, largely attacked it as part and parcel of the political-religious establishment at home. This was an establishment from which, prior to the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, they were largely excluded. Rather, various early nineteenth-century British imperialists, ranging from colonial officials such as Bombay Governor Jonathan Duncan, to Company chaplains such as Thomas Robertson and Claudius Buchanan, to military officers such as Hay Macdowall and “Najeeb,” generally worried about how British soldier’ irreligion (or even its appearance)

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 88

7/15/2011 6:37:08 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

89

might affect British prestige in India. What would religiously observant, high-caste sepoys think of their British comrades (or, even more worrisome, their British officers) who appeared to disregard their religious and moral obligations? These fears often spilled over into other discussions involving British officers and soldiers’ conduct, ranging from inappropriate financial relationships between military officers and Indians, to drunkenness, physical violence toward Indians, and sexual immorality.

Financial Improprieties by British Officers Like their civil service counterparts, military officials also worried during the early nineteenth century about British officers engaging in improper financial transactions with Indians. They feared that such behavior (or even the appearance of it) might harm British racial and moral prestige. Thus, Bengal officials rebuked Bengal Army Major James Mouat in 1813 for attempting to sell his horse to the Nawab of Bengal for what they considered the exorbitant price of 96,000 sicca rupees (roughly £12,000).81 They argued that it was the duty of all Britons in India “to uphold the national character for integrity . . . and honor.” Minto and other Bengal officials further condemned Mouat’s conduct when it transpired that, in attempting to get the Nawab to buy his horse, he had bribed his servants with pistols, a crystal hookah bottom, and a European hunting dog. By engaging in bribery, Bengal officials argued, Mouat had not only shown himself “willing to prostitute . . . the British Name . . . and Character;” he also demonstrated that he had a “character of moral turpitude stimulated by avarice.” Minto and others thus deemed him utterly unfit to continue serving as a Bengal Army officer and accordingly dismissed him. Similar concerns among colonial officials for the maintenance of British national honor and prestige in India arose eight years later when there was a miscommunication over the terms under which Bengal Army Major Fagan was willing to sell his house to Hakim Mehendie Ali Khan. Fagan had intended only to sell his house and the furniture that came with it. By contrast, Khan believed he was buying not just Fagan’s house and furniture but also all of his books. He balked at the asking price of 50,000 sicca rupees (roughly £6,250) for the house when he found out Fagan’s terms. However, LieutenantColonel Brown, Fagan’s agent in the transaction, suggested that Khan was acting ungentlemanlike by refusing to honor his commitment to pay. Khan relented and deposited the full 50,000 rupees in escrow

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 89

7/15/2011 6:37:08 PM

90

Company India, 1765–1858

pending the resolution of the dispute by a committee of three separate army officers.82 The Bengal government became involved when the committee (as might be expected) decided unanimously in favor of their fellow British officer, at which point Khan cried foul. Colonial authorities voided the transaction and censured Fagan and Brown for allowing their “zeal” in attaining excellent terms for Fagan’s property to cloud their better judgment. Such behavior was simply not honorable; nor did it conform to “the high tone of liberal sentiment becoming the character of British Officers in pecuniary transactions with Natives.” To prevent such instances occurring again, Bengal officials required in the future that financial transactions between Company employees and Indians above the value of sicca 5,000 rupees (£625) attain the preapproval of colonial officials before they went into effect.83 Here again, imperial officials privileged maintaining the colonial regime’s moral prestige as well as that of its officers above all else.

Drunkenness, Violence toward Indians, and Sexual Immorality In a similar way, but far more commonly, several colonial officials and authors of Indian tracts worried about the seemingly high incidence of British soldier drunkenness. As mentioned already in this chapter, British soldier drunkenness alarmed them in part because of its direct link to British soldiers’ considerably higher mortality rates vis-à-vis Indians. But many also feared its impact upon British prestige in the eyes of Indians. Thus, British doctor Thomas Trotter, among the first to develop the notion of alcoholism as a disease, warned in 1804 that Britons had little to be smug about regarding drunkenness.84 Rather than being a “vice of barbarous and uncivilized nations,” Trotter pointed out that intoxication was scandalously prevalent among Britons as well. Likewise, Bengal Army Field-Marshal Sir George Nugent, its commander-in-chief from 1811 to 1813, blamed drunkenness among British soldiers for some of the basest “atrocities that dishonour the British name” in India. Indeed, Adam White regarded sepoys as better soldiers than Britons precisely because of their comparative sobriety. Again, it bears remembering that while White praised sepoys for generally sending money home to their families, he had nothing but scorn for British soldiers who, he alleged, tended to waste it on drink. White also contended that sepoys were far less likely to be court-martialed than British soldiers.85 Clearly here, as

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 90

7/15/2011 6:37:09 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

91

White was embarrassed to admit, it was not British soldiers who had moral prestige but rather sepoys. Writing a decade later in the early 1830s, John Shipp, a Bengal Army noncommissioned lieutenant, advocated teetotalism among his fellow soldiers for similar reasons. Drunkenness, Shipp sternly asserted, was “a crime against [both] the laws of nature [and] . . . society” as well as a vice which “destroys our character” and “that which is beyond price—our immortal souls.” He exhorted fellow British soldiers in India to practice temperance, insisting that only through avoiding alcohol would they retain their health and their high moral character.86 At least some British soldiers in India took up Shipp’s call during the 1830s and 1840s and joined temperance societies, with one regiment even reducing its consumption of alcohol as a result from approximately 14,000 down to 2,516 gallons between 1836 and 1838.87 However, this did not stop colonial officials and Indian tract authors throughout this period from complaining about the drunken British soldier. Many Britons in India, though, did not just worry about drunkenness’ effect in undermining their conceits of their own moral superiority. They also feared instances when intoxicated British soldiers committed acts of violence against Indians. In 1808, while drunk, British Army private Peter Hay, along with fellow soldiers James Reilly and John Reid, broke into the home of “Buxee Begum,” an Indian courtesan, and attempted to strangle her. Although she managed to escape, her bodyguard was killed while defending her. All three men were brought to trial on charges of murder but the allEuropean jury convicted only Hay, and on the lesser charge of manslaughter. Indeed, Sir Henry Russell, the judge presiding over the trial, scolded the jury, accusing it of regarding the life and protection of “those of the vulgar of our own country” as more important than the Company’s Indian subjects.88 Clearly, when British notions of racial privilege clashed with concerns among colonial officials for how things might appear to their Indian subjects, as both Elizabeth Kolsky and Martin Wiener have recently argued, British racial privilege often prevailed; all-white juries often had different ideas about what constituted British or European prestige than colonial officials like Russell.89 Indeed, such cases were all the more worrisome as they presented an image problem for the colonial regime and threatened Indian loyalty to British rule. Finally, several colonial officials worried about drunkenness by British soldiers leading to sexual dalliances with Indian women.

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 91

7/15/2011 6:37:09 PM

92

Company India, 1765–1858

Largely based on this fear, Bombay military officials warned their counterparts in Bengal of the dangers of mixing European and Indian regiments in 1818. Not only would such a change place “the habits of intoxication to which the European Soldiery are so unfortunately addicted . . . under the constant observation” of comparatively teetotaling sepoys; Bombay officials also warned that intoxicated British soldiers’ sexual lust toward Indian women would also likely offend their Indian comrades. Because working-class British soldiers seemingly could not control their urges (or at least know how to keep them out of public view), Bombay military officials thought that it was better to retain a rigid division between the Company’s European and Indian regiments, even at the expense of greater military efficiency and possible cost savings, than to expose Britons in India to a loss of prestige among sepoys.90 Such fears of offending sepoys, along with a concern for their employees’ morality, led Company officials to institute several reforms during the early nineteenth century aimed at diminishing drunkenness. First, assuming that British soldiers would continue to drink no matter what, the Company established regimental canteens where soldiers could be properly watched by their officers and, thus, prevented from committing gross excesses, especially in front of Indian soldiers. Writing in 1814, Madras Army Military Secretary Hugh Scott considered soldier drunkenness to be a “disgrace” to the British national character and a problem that could only be properly remedied by the introduction of regimental canteens throughout the Madras Army. Only by regulating British soldiers’ consumption of alcohol, he contended, could officers ensure their physical well-being and prevent instances arising when drunken soldiers committed crimes or other vices that would “tarnish the moral character” of Britons in India. Soldiers could simply not be trusted on their own to keep up Britons’ good name.91 Second, Company officials cracked down on Europeans who sold liquor to British soldiers without a license, usually in punch houses located in the immediate vicinity of cantonments. In 1796, Bengal officials fined George Greek 400 rupees and threatened him with deportation back to France if he persisted in operating his punch house adjacent to Fort William, just outside Calcutta. It is extraordinary that Greek was treated as leniently as he was. Greek harbored intoxicated soldiers until they were reported as deserters and then collected the rewards for their capture. More typical was the case of William Kelly. In 1815, the Bengal government expelled Kelly

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 92

7/15/2011 6:37:09 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

93

from India for selling liquor to British soldiers at Cawnpore without a license. To prevent further cases arising in the future, Cawnpore Collector George Ravenscroft proposed to the Bengal government that collectors such as himself be granted summary powers to punish Europeans who sold liquor without a license in their districts.92 Various officials also advocated substituting British soldiers’ daily rum ration with other beverages, alcoholic as well as nonalcoholic. For example, Lieutenant-General Charles Colville, Bombay Army commander-in-chief in the mid-1820s, argued that dry wine would be healthier than rum while Company directors thought beer to be a “less deleterious beverage.” Dr. William Burke, the Inspector-General of Hospitals for the British Army, contended that either drink would instill abstemious habits in British soldiers. “The first step into temperance,” he argued, was “Beer, the next is Tea.” Soldiers, thus, would be saved from future moral or physical debilitation. Like arguments in favor of regimental canteens, many framed their proposals for substituting alcoholic drinks in paternalistic terms. They suggested that soldiers could neither make proper moral choices about liquor by themselves nor be trusted to maintain a proper image of Britishness in India.93 Colonial officials, however, did not always act paternally in their efforts to diminish soldier drunkenness. In several instances, they adopted a different strategy and argued that soldiers could in fact be trusted not to drink if given the right incentives. For example, Bengal officials urged the Court of Directors in 1819 to start paying soldiers for their unused liquor rations. They insisted that by trusting soldiers to be more sober, they would in fact become so.94 Based on this argument, the Bengal government established a savings bank at Calcutta for its military employees that same year. By the mid-1820s, James Salmond and other Company officials were urging the establishment of army savings banks at other presidency armies, as well as in the British Army, to further encourage sobriety among British soldiers in India.95 Finally, colonial officials believed that British soldiers drank because of excessive boredom, which they fought by creating alternative recreational activities.96 But colonial elites’ belief that British soldiers were often idle was mistaken. As Peter Stanley has argued, “[s]een from within . . . barrack-rooms could also be places of enterprise and enjoyment” where many “anna capitalists” employed their spare time operating a black economy. British soldiers, Stanley contends, sold their spirit rations to other soldiers, made clothing and

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 93

7/15/2011 6:37:09 PM

94

Company India, 1765–1858

hats, and participated in other “crafts [which] could have been practiced more cheaply by natives.” These activities, he writes, appear to have generally “provided occupational therapy as well as pocket money” to many soldiers.97 Ultimately, though, such enterprising activities, regardless of whether or not colonial authorities knew about them, did them little good, as they were largely done in private. Soldiers needed to be seen not drinking. To that end, both the Madras and Bengal armies constructed several courts for the British game of fives (a game similar to racquetball) at its various cantonments between 1813 and 1821.98 The Bengal Army also constructed tennis courts and football pitches throughout its cantonments in northern India.99 But, just as it was peculiar to expect that its mostly working-class soldiers might want to suddenly take up the upper class game of tennis, so too was it odd that various colonial officials and officers encourage British military personnel in India to take up tiger and other big-game hunting as an alternative to drink. They argued that participation in such “innocent recreation and mirth” would also foster masculine habits and camaraderie among British officers as well as show their Indian soldiers that they were honorable and moral men.100 Again, pervading throughout these moral reform efforts was colonial administrators’ concern with maintaining appearances. In order to retain the respect of sepoys deemed so necessary for colonial rule’s survival, British officers and soldiers in India needed to act appropriately.

Conclusion British colonial officials and military officers held a variety of views about their Indian armies during the six decades between the 1760s and the 1820s. During this period, the Company’s military position in India radically shifted from holding only a few “bridgeheads,” mainly in Bengal and the immediate hinterlands of Madras and Bombay, to becoming the Indian subcontinent’s dominant political and military power.101 Accordingly, British military officials advanced various arrogant and racist discourses about the relative backwardness of Indian fighting methods and about British officers’ indispensability in sepoy armies. These attitudes about Indian soldiers resembled those of colonial bureaucrats. In both cases, we can discern several early and important threads of the racial arrogance that would pervade the later British Raj.

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 94

7/15/2011 6:37:09 PM

Racial Prestige, and Gentlemen Sepoys

95

Despite their similarities, there was one important difference between the civil and military sides of the colonial regime and their respective views of Indians. Whereas colonial officials and authors of colonial tracts generally distrusted Indian bureaucrats during this period, military officials generally trusted sepoys. In all three of the Company’s Indian armies, sepoys recruited themselves under only very minimal British supervision. While this was a practical necessity given the chronic shortages of available soldiers from Europe during these decades, ideological factors also played a key role. Britons during this period generally rationalized their heavy reliance on highcaste sepoys, particularly in the Bengal Army, by roughly equating caste with class and assuming that many Indian soldiers were gentlemen. As fellow “gentlemen” like themselves, their “opinion” of British moral conduct thus seemed to matter to many colonial officials and military officers in ways not as readily apparent among their counterparts within the colonial bureaucracy. Whereas colonial officials during this period desired to govern India alone, without Indians, many of their military counterparts concluded this was not possible and sought therefore to retain personal bonds of mutual esteem and respect with sepoys. Both of these differing trends in colonial attitudes toward Indian subordinates, in their own ways, would further inform official concerns about the moral behavior of British covenanted servants, military officers, and soldiers in India in later decades. But already, with regard to both the colonial civil service and the colonial military before the 1820s, several long-term trends can be discerned, chief among them an obsession about the need always to maintain British moral and racial prestige in the eyes of Indians. This overriding concern, and the racist “siege mentality” that it often engendered, as we will see in the remaining two chapters of this book, would only harden during Company India’s final three decades.

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 95

7/15/2011 6:37:09 PM

4 “If the Natives Were Competent, From Their Moral Qualities”: Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization, 1813–57

Even if we could suppose that it were practicable without the aid of a single native, to conduct the whole affairs of the country, both in the higher and in all the subordinate offices, by means of Europeans, it ought not to be done, because it would be both politically and morally wrong. —Madras governor Sir Thomas Munro (1824) 1 [O]ur hold upon India rests altogether upon the superior ability and the superior character of the European. —Lord Ellenborough, former governor-general of India (1852) 2

In 1813, a contentious and highly publicized debate took place in Britain over the renewal of the East India Company’s charter. It centered on the question of whether India ought to be opened up to missionaries and free traders, but during the debate, Company directors also inquired into the operation of Governor-General Cornwallis’s administrative system. For the first time in two decades, since they signed off on his racial ban on Indians being employed as judges and revenue officials, they broached the question of what should be Indians’ role in their own government. In a questionnaire they sent to former British judges, they asked two questions: Did Indians trust British judges more than their own? And, were lower-level Indian

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 97

7/20/2011 3:32:54 PM

98

Company India, 1765–1858

judicial employees, “in respect to integrity and diligence,” capable of being entrusted with additional responsibilities, ones that would lighten the load of British judges and render colonial jurisprudence more efficient?3 The various responses that they received to these two questions, together with other evidence submitted to them and published in four volumes between 1820 and 1826, helped launch an intense debate among British colonial policymakers and authors of India tracts over how colonial administration in India ought to be structured.4 During this debate, questions were raised about the morality of colonial rule, Britons’ paternalist attitudes toward their Indian subjects, and the maintenance of British colonial prestige. Should the Company continue excluding Indians from serving in all but the most menial posts because of their supposedly universal moral depravity (as Cornwallis had done) or did the British have a moral and paternal duty to train Indians so that they could become more honest? In the distant future, could they even be capable of governing themselves? What would happen to British prestige—not to mention British employment opportunities—if Indians were suddenly allowed to participate actively in their own government? Would there still be a need for British colonial rule and, if so, what would that role be? This chapter explores British answers to these questions between the 1810s and the 1850s. The chapter first considers the Bengal government’s decision in 1831 to partially reverse Cornwallis’s racial ban and situates it within its wider ideological context. Various historians have recently stressed ideology’s important role in structuring early British colonialism but have tended, with regard to this particular policy change, to discount ideological factors.5 Instead, scholars have emphasized fiscal considerations or administrative necessity in explaining the shift in policy.6 But, while Company policymakers certainly welcomed the fact that Indian judges and revenue clerks were often cheaper and more efficient than British judges and revenue officials, this only tells part of the story. As this chapter will argue, colonial officials debated not only how much authority to devolve onto Indian subordinates; they also sought to limit Indianization’s scope during the first half of the nineteenth century and to offer ideological justifications that could reconcile liberal reforms with the maintenance of British prestige and, indeed, racial privilege. More broadly, the chapter seeks to explain the general rise of liberal paternalist discourses among Britons in India and their implications for colonial governance during this period. To be clear, I will not be arguing for any great shift in general British attitudes away from the

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 98

7/20/2011 3:32:55 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

99

common belief that Indians were morally depraved. Any reference to Britons’ near obsession from the 1810s on regarding Indian widow burning (sati or “suttee”) or the ritual strangling of travelers supposedly committed by “thugs” (thagi), to give two examples, will readily attest to the fact that, if anything, these attitudes hardened during this period and into the British Raj.7 Rather, this chapter will explore how similar ways of thinking can sometimes lead to very different colonial policy outcomes—in this case, a far greater reliance on Indian revenue and judicial subordinates after 1831 than colonial officials countenanced in earlier decades. British colonial officials and many colonial tract authors during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the chapter argues, generally regarded Indians as “misguided children in morals”—as Bengal legal official Sir Archibald Galloway put it in 1832.8 But like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons who regarded parents’ pedagogical role vis-à-vis their children as very important, many nineteenth-century colonial officials argued that Britons needed to guide Indians how to become “moral men” and, eventually capable of ruling themselves.9 Some of the most prominent colonial administrators during this era shared this sentiment while others doubted whether Indians were morally redeemable. Raj-era conservatives such as James Fitzjames Stephen eventually would severely criticize this liberal paternalist version of the “civilizing mission,” pointing out its inherent contradictions. He would forcefully argue in the 1870s that Indians were incapable of any moral improvement and simply needed to be ruled.10 But this imperial vision would also find its proponents during the later British Raj, most famously Courtenay Ilbert and British Viceroy Lord Ripon, who, in 1883, proposed removing the racial double standard whereby all-white juries tried British defendants. The resultant “white riot” over the Ilbert Bill, particularly among planters, nevertheless did not solely originate in the 1880s.11 Rather, this chapter will trace some of its long-term origins back to debates among Company officials and other Britons in India regarding Indianization.12 Finally, this chapter pays attention to the gendered implications of paternalist policies such as partial Indianization. It argues that concerns about British moral and racial prestige in India remained strong after the devolution of many day-to-day functions of colonial governance. But, after 1831, colonial officials now worried about different types of conduct among covenanted servants. As their role changed, at least in theory, from governing India alone to supervising and training subordinate Indian officials, imperial administrators placed greater

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 99

7/20/2011 3:32:55 PM

100

Company India, 1765–1858

emphasis on British district officials’ mental and physical capacity for strenuous work and on their ability to present an image of tireless duty to India. Simultaneously, Burkean and Malthusian concerns about immature Company officials falling into debt or accepting gifts from Indians (and, thereby, compromising British control over India) diminished in importance. Like middle-class Victorian men, who were expected, upon marriage, to put their bachelor ways behind them and assume the sobering responsibilities of good fathers and family providers, so too were British district judges and revenue officials expected to be “men on the spot” in India.13 The chapter contends that during the 1830s and 1840s Britons saw the Company’s patronage system as producing too many “bad bargains,” who were incapable, either mentally or physically, of coping with the high demands placed on covenanted servants in India. This concern helped transform late Company India into a laboratory for British civil service reform.

Arguing in Cornwallis’s Shadow: The Initial Indianization Debate up to 1831 The debate among colonial officials and reformers about whether to rely more extensively on Indian bureaucrats had its origins in Governor-General Lord Cornwallis’s failure to provide India with an adequate level of colonial governance in his 1793 reforms. As mentioned earlier in this book, at the same time that he fired Indian judges and revenue officials, he created whole new avenues of Indian grievances by enacting the Permanent Settlement, which robbed peasants of their customary rights in the land while grafting Western notions of landownership onto Bengal. Accordingly, the backlog in the number of civil suits tried in Bengal courts nearly tripled in the decade after 1793, rising from just under 60,000 cases a year in 1792 to over 160,000 by 1803.14 Rather than making colonial rule more accessible to Indians or more efficient, Cornwallis’s reforms actually made it less so. This fact would have significant consequences for the nineteenthcentury debate over partial Indianization of the colonial bureaucracy, eventually leading many to call for reform. Initially, though, as might be expected, various British imperialists—ranging from governors-general and district judges to Utilitarian historian James Mill, who served (along with his more famous son, John Stuart Mill) as an examiner of the Company’s Indian correspondence from 1819 to his death in 1836—generally blamed Indians when

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 100

7/20/2011 3:32:55 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

101

seeking to explain why Bengal courts were clogged by massive case backlogs. Governor-General Lord Minto, writing in 1811, argued that British judges constantly had to face “the prevalence of the Crimes of perjury and forgery” among Indians trying cases before them. These “crimes,” he contended, were largely ascribable to Indians’ “want of due instruction” in proper “moral and religious tenets.” Bengal judge Alexander Fraser Tytler, writing two years later, harped on a similar theme: British judges like him had to endure an untold number of claims and counterclaims by Indian litigants who held “a total disregard for truth.” These views would gain wider circulation in James Mill’s History of British India (1817), where he framed the issue in starkly religious-cultural terms. Indian duplicity, he argued, could be traced to Hinduism’s treating perjury “as a very trifling and venial offense,” which was in marked contrast to Britons’ high regard for truth attributable to Protestantism’s emphasis on individual moral responsibility. For Mill and other Britons involved in colonial administration, Indians’ seeming unwillingness to tell the truth, therefore, became a key marker of their cultural and racial backwardness.15 Notions of universal Indian moral depravity, while important in informing later British racial attitudes toward Indians during the British Raj, could only go so far during the early nineteenth century in accounting for the colonial regime’s general incompetence as shown by the large number of untried cases. This had much to do with the East India Company’s anomalous situation after 1784 of being a semi-autonomous organ of the British State. From this date until its abolition in 1858, the Company’s political and military administration of India was always subject to veto or amendment by the Board of Control, which was chaired by a cabinet minister. The Company was also a publicly chartered corporation, whose charter regularly came up for parliamentary renewal every twenty years, thus stimulating wide public debate over colonial policy. Both factors, according to H.V. Bowen, led Company directors throughout this period to continually strive to present a public image of providing “an efficient and enlightened colonial administration that paid due attention to the happiness, protection, and well-being” of their Indian subjects.16 Such a large number of case backlogs, regardless of whether Britons believed Indian moral depravity to be responsible, proved highly embarrassing to Company administrators back home in Britain. By 1813, then, when the Company’s charter next came up for renewal after Cornwallis’s administrative reforms were enacted, Company directors sought answers for why these various reforms

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 101

7/20/2011 3:32:55 PM

102

Company India, 1765–1858

were not working. More British colonial officials began to criticize Cornwallis’s policies as well as advocate extensive changes to them. Thus, former British judges T.H. Ernst, S. Davis, and Thomas Cockburn characterized Cornwallis’s racial ban on Indians holding anything but the most menial of positions within the colonial bureaucracy as highly impractical, given the limited numbers of British judges in India. Case backlogs, they argued, would only begin to diminish if Indian judges were entrusted to try more of the cases that currently came before British judges.17 This, they argued, would, in turn, free them up to supervise the decisions made by Indians and to try appeals.18 And, as Bengal revenue official Edward Colebrooke contended in 1815, allowing British revenue collectors such as himself greater opportunities to supervise their Indian subordinates would make an important difference whether a particular district was governed well or not, thereby enhancing British colonialism’s reputation among its Indian subjects.19 In addition to stressing how greater numbers of Indian judges and revenue officials might reduce case backlogs and complete more revenue settlements, proponents of Indianization during the 1810s and 1820s optimistically predicted other positive changes. They contended the policy shift would reduce the need for so many British officials who were paid many times what Indian bureaucrats were paid.20 This change would also lead to better governance because Indian judges and revenue officials were generally more knowledgeable of Indian customs, laws, and languages than British judges—even after years of systematic training at Haileybury College—ever could be. In multiple memoranda written between 1806 and 1818, then-Madras revenue collector Thomas Munro acknowledged that Indians working underneath him in his district kachari (or district office) not only knew the languages, social customs, and habits of ordinary Indians better than he did but also could better determine when Indian witnesses were telling the truth. Instead of writing off Indian bureaucrats for their alleged moral depravity, Munro stressed that they could actually be more profitably employed so that they could improve their fellow Indians’ morality. Similarly, in testifying before parliament in 1831, Indian moral reformer Rammohun Roy advocated entrusting subordinate Indian bureaucrats with greater authority. “European judges in India,” he observed, were “not generally expected to discharge judicial duties satisfactorily, independent of native assistance,” largely because of their comparative lack of knowledge of Indian languages, customs, and laws. Similarly, he argued, Indian bureaucrats who

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 102

7/20/2011 3:32:55 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

103

possessed such knowledge generally lacked the “dignity and firmness of the European” and, consequently, could not “command respect” for their decisions. By devolving more authority onto them, Roy contended, colonial governance would be made cheaper and more effective and Indians who worked for the colonial government would gain more respect and prestige.21 Several reformers also attacked Cornwallis for absurdly assuming that Britons could govern India alone, without Indians. As Munro argued in an 1806 letter to the Madras Board of Revenue, British revenue officials like him could “do little or nothing” without their Indian subordinates’ considerable help. A decade later, both Robert Grant, the son of Charles Grant, a prominent early nineteenth- century Evangelical and Company official, and William Thackeray, a Madras judge and nineteenth-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray’s uncle, put forth similar arguments. Indian court officials not only performed much of the grunt work; they often exercised more power over how a case was eventually decided than the British judge who nominally tried the case. Rather than pretend that Indian officials did not exert some share of influence already over colonial administration and leave them with some degree of informal power without responsibility, it was better for the colonial regime’s broader reputation for it to actually raise their salaries and accord them with some authority for which they could be held accountable. 22 Finally, several officials pointed out the dangers of continuing to deny Indians a major share in the colonial government for endangering British colonial rule’s broader popularity with its subjects. In making this argument, Colonel A. Walker appealed to the historical example of ancient Rome. Like Britons ranging from Edward Gibbon in the late eighteenth century onward to Lord Cromer at the beginning of the twentieth, who looked to ancient Rome for historical lessons for how to run an empire, Walker contended that the Romans offered a more pragmatic policy toward ethnic minorities that ought to be emulated. 23 Walker conceded that Roman imperialism was ultimately based on military might, just as British colonial rule was, but nevertheless argued that the Romans also conciliated important local elites to their rule by giving them powerful and prestigious positions.24 The British, by following the Romans, Walker insisted, would also earn greater amounts of Indian loyalty to their rule. Similarly, Roy testified before parliament in 1831 that he knew of no better way the British could ensure Indian elites’ continued loyalty than by “making them

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 103

7/20/2011 3:32:55 PM

104

Company India, 1765–1858

eligible to gradual promotion, according to their respective abilities and merits, to situations of trust and respectability in the state.”25 By the early decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, greater numbers of colonial officials on the ground in India, authors of Indian tracts, and Indian reformers like Roy began to regard Cornwallis’s racial ban on Indians holding authority as wholly impractical. Faced with considerable case backlogs in Indian courts and stalled revenue settlements, reformers agreed with Munro that Cornwallis’s policy was “one of those visionary schemes which never could be rendered to practice,” and which, even if it could, ought never to have been adopted. 26 Such criticisms, starting out as practical concerns about how best to improve colonial administration, soon expanded to encompass broader moral concerns. Should Britons continue to exclude Indians from holding important positions within the colonial government? And, if not, could Britons induce Indians toward greater habits of honesty by being paid more and entrusted with greater responsibilities? In the ensuing debate over these questions, new paternalist conceptions of British colonialism came to the fore.

Indianization, Morality, and Liberal Paternalism During the early nineteenth century, colonial officials and authors of Indian tracts also advanced various moral arguments in favor of devolving further colonial responsibilities onto Indian subordinates. First, several contended that the British degraded and humiliated Indians, particularly elites, by continuing to exclude them from all but the most menial positions. This, Bombay Governor Sir John Malcolm believed, potentially endangered British colonial rule; if Indian elites themselves saw no reason to be loyal to an alien regime, why would other Indians be as well? By continuing to exclude such elites from honorable government employment, Malcolm feared, the British were running the grave risk of fomenting active insurrection.27 Several officials and authors also condemned Cornwallis’s racial ban for unfairly presuming that every Indian was morally depraved.28 Colonel A. Walker derided this “indiscriminate reproach” on Indian morality, arguing instead that most Indians were just as moral and honest as Europeans. 29 Various officials further pointed to the large amounts of British corruption in the eighteenth century. They asked: If raising covenanted servants’ official salaries could reduce dishonesty among them in such a short time, why would not a similar reform also work for Indians?30

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 104

7/20/2011 3:32:55 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

105

But even if many Indians—for whatever reason—were dishonest and corrupt, several colonial officials and authors maintained that the Company nevertheless still had a paternal and moral duty to improve their character. Bengal Judge Henry Stratchey asserted in 1813 that if Indians officials were not trustworthy enough to be given greater responsibilities, the British ought to assume most of the blame because they had done nothing in the meantime to improve their morality. Others in later decades, such as a former Bengal civil servant and Company shareholder, writing anonymously in 1829, likewise severely condemned the Company for not living up to its moral obligations to its Indian subjects. The Company would not likely make headway in improving Indian morality, this former official insisted, as long as Cornwallis’s racial ban remained in effect.31 In order to undo the bad effects of Cornwallis’s system on Indian morality, many officials recommended, first, that Indian officials’ public salaries be significantly raised. Munro insisted in 1813 that it was only by “purchas[ing] integrity” among Indian officials that the Company would ensure that they faithfully and honorably discharged their duties.32 Others contended that candidates from the most honorable families would only come forward if they were paid better salaries.33 Indeed, some officials, such as R.W. Cox and Henry St. George Tucker, then co-commissioners of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, contended that British colonial rule would only become less corrupt once honorable Indian elites, rather than “needy individuals,” took positions within the colonial bureaucracy. Partial Indianization of the colonial bureaucracy, they maintained, would not only tend to improve Indian morality, but it would also help the colonial regime build bridges with various Indian elite groups, thus enhancing its moral reputation among Indians more generally.34 Several colonial officials during the early nineteenth century also recommended that Indian colonial bureaucrats be entrusted with greater administrative responsibilities. As Thackeray contended in 1815, India’s prior Muslim rulers had generally entrusted most functions of government to Hindus, which encouraged their officials to become “men of perhaps as much integrity” as had ever existed among government employees. He wondered whether a similar strategy might also work for the Company.35 Similarly, Holt Mackenzie, a member of the Bengal government during the 1820s and early 1830s, testified before parliament in 1831 that Indian bureaucrats would only become reliable upon being “trusted more and paid better.”36

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 105

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

106

Company India, 1765–1858

Various early nineteenth-century proponents of greater Indianization, therefore, began to put forth a more paternalistic vision of colonialism that contrasted with Cornwallis’s. As Munro argued in 1827, the British ought to “look forward” to eventually employing Indians in “almost every Office however high.”37 Admittedly, this was not quite arguing for allowing Indians to hold every post in the colonial regime; there is no indication at all, for example, that Munro would have supported appointing Indians as presidency governors. Nevertheless, in insisting that Indians ought to be entrusted with more of the day-to-day business of colonial governance, Munro and other reformers rejected many core principles of Cornwallis’s administrative system. To be sure, not everyone subscribed to Munro’s views. A significant minority of British colonial officials and authors of Indian tracts during the early nineteenth century continued to doubt whether Indian behavior could be reformed, and they presented arguments that would be repeated throughout the rest of the Company period and into the British Raj.

Opponents of Indianization What had appeared to be a practical or moral necessity to Munro and other colonial officials proved highly problematic to other Britons in India who continued to fear widespread Indian venality and dishonesty. In 1813, former Bengal judge William Dorin asserted that Indians were generally corrupt and lacked moral principle. He wondered, therefore, why the Company would ever want to trust any significant part of colonial administration to them. Similarly, Baptist missionary John Bentley warned readers of his 1823 tract of the “deepest profligacy and corruption” which, he claimed, afflicted nearly every Indian colonial bureaucrat. These officials, he argued, committed so many corrupt and dishonest acts because they vastly outnumbered British officials and possessed a greater familiarity with Indian languages, laws, and customs. Therefore, Bentley argued, further extending their formal responsibilities would only increase the amount of “injustice, fraud, and profligacy” in India.38 Moreover, as various early nineteenth-century authors and colonial officials contended, even if the colonial regime wanted to devolve significant administrative responsibilities onto Indian bureaucrats, the policy was bound to fail because the wrong kind of Indians would be so entrusted. Colonial reformer James Caulfield asserted in 1832 that

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 106

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

107

Indianization would only work when there was a solid Indian middle class that was firmly devoted to British colonial rule and educated in English values and language. Until then, entrusting such people with greater responsibilities of colonial administration would be a most unwise policy, as it would open the door to unchecked corruption and oppression. 39 Indeed, several colonial officials in earlier decades warned that because of this widespread Indian corruption, further Indianization of the colonial bureaucracy would bring British colonial rule into disrepute. In 1813 and 1816, respectively, Bengal judges Alexander Fraser Tytler and Walter Ewer argued that corrupt Indian underlings already abused the powers that they had, which resulted in local Indians losing confidence in British justice. Any further formal expansion of their powers, Tytler and Ewer concluded, would invariably result in Indians possessing even less respect for British officials and British colonial rule more generally.40 Again, like proponents of greater Indianization of the colonial bureaucracy, opponents of the policy change also couched their arguments in broader concerns about the colonial regime’s reputation in the eyes of its Indian subjects. Several skeptics of greater Indianization argued that even if Indian subordinates were to take over more responsibilities of colonial administration, British district officials still needed to extensively supervise their activities. Madras revenue collector John Ravenshaw contended in 1806 that Indian revenue officials would not perform their duties honestly and correctly “unless they know they are [being] diligently watched.”41 Other former British judges, who answered the Company’s judicial questionnaire in 1813, likewise recommended that Indian judges be entrusted with further judicial responsibilities only under direct British supervision.42 Anything more than this, an anonymous former colonial official sneered, would result in “affording them the means of evincing, in a more prominent manner, their total unworthiness of such advancement.”43 Finally, several opponents of partial Indianization argued that, even with extensive British supervision, Indian bureaucrats still could not be trusted with additional responsibilities. Several British indigo planters, for example, who feared they would have much to lose in any significant augmentation of Indian court officials’ judicial responsibilities, took the lead in making this argument during the 1820s and early 1830s, much as their successors would five decades later during the Ilbert Bill controversy.44 Many planters asserted that Indian judges would not fairly try their cases against itinerant Bengali

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 107

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

108

Company India, 1765–1858

laborers, given that Bengal planters were notoriously violent toward their Indian workers and other Indians. But what planters really feared most of all—although they did not always admit it—was a loss of their racial privilege (in their eyes) to do as they pleased to Indians.45 Thus, although planters such as William Huggins and John Crawford conceded that Cornwallis’s judicial system caused significant case backlogs in Bengal civil courts, they did not regard granting venal and dishonest Indian judges more discretionary power as the solution. Rather, they fully bought into ideas regarding universal Indian depravity and the need to maintain British racial prestige. Crawford self-servingly proposed that he and other fellow British planters in India be appointed as assistants to British judges so that British racial superiority and privilege in India would be preserved.46 Although a significant minority of Britons in India remained wary of extending the scope of Indian employment within the colonial bureaucracy, already by the late 1820s the terms of the debate over Indianization had begun to shift. This was for two reasons. First, de facto Indianization already existed in many districts, in spite of Cornwallis’s formal racial ban. This was particularly the case in the colonial judiciary. Beginning in the 1810s, each of the three colonial governments, but particularly the subordinate presidencies of Bombay and Madras, had progressively turned over more cases to subordinate Indian munsiff judges, sadr amins, and punchayets (a form of Indian jury) in order to decrease case backlogs.47 But just as important, various opponents of greater Indianization had trapped themselves in a circular argument. They ignored the possibility that Cornwallis’s racial ban might be to blame, at least in part, for why some Indian clerks were dishonest and corrupt. They also misperceived the colonial regime’s corruption and inefficiency during the early nineteenth century as proof of universal Indian depravity when in actuality it had little to do with this. To be sure, the “Indian corruption” stereotype would continue to have a long life throughout the remainder of British colonial rule. It needs also to be remembered that Britons in India were beginning during this period to obsess about the (relatively small) numbers of Indian widows who committed suicide (sati or “suttee”) on their husbands’ funeral pyres or “thugs” who roamed the Indian countryside in search of victims to rob and strangle for their goddess Kali.48 By the 1830s, however, the idea that every Indian bureaucrat was corrupt and morally irredeemable gradually lost its effectiveness as an excuse for denying Indians some measure of participation in their

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 108

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

109

own government. Cornwallis’s administrative reforms simply did not provide adequate colonial governance to India no matter how many efforts were made to blame Indians for this. Problems in colonial administration, moreover, proved highly embarrassing to Company administrators back in Britain who needed to maintain British opinion in their governance of India, particularly whenever their charter next came up for parliamentary renewal. Consequently, as paternalist notions of Britain’s role in India became more prevalent and finally met a reforming governor-general in the late 1820s in the person of William Bentinck, opponents of Indianization found themselves fighting a mostly rearguard action to preserve a racial ban that many now wished to overturn.

Partial Indianization of the Colonial Bureaucracy under Bentinck The momentum for reform finally prevailed in the early 1830s during Lord William Bentinck’s governor-generalship. By this point, Bentinck’s position on this issue had greatly changed. A quartercentury earlier, while serving as governor of Madras, Bentinck had opposed entrusting further responsibilities of governance to Indian subordinates. Like other colonial officials from that era, Bentinck considered it hard enough to transform immature and corrupt British “nabobs” into sober and moral British officials without also attempting what he perceived to be the far more Herculean task of reforming Indian behavior.49 By the time Bentinck assumed the reins of the Bengal government in 1828, however, he viewed things very differently. He regarded it a “monstrous absurdity” to continue committing the entire Bengal government “to less than 400 strangers.” Bentinck also questioned the morality of maintaining Cornwallis’s racial ban just to grant comparatively unqualified British officials “all the honours and emoluments of the administration, to the exclusion of the native and natural agency of the country.”50 British colonial rule would only seem legitimate (or “natural”), therefore, if Indians again were entrusted with many aspects of colonial administration. Economic considerations also motivated Bentinck to partially Indianize the colonial bureaucracy. By the late 1820s, Company and British officials alike had become alarmed at the parlous state of the Company’s finances, caused mainly by nearly constant warfare during the previous two decades. But although Bentinck focused mainly on the military, he also looked to the colonial bureaucracy for

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 109

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

110

Company India, 1765–1858

savings, appointing a committee upon arriving to examine possible cost savings.51 The committee concluded fairly early on that significant economies would only be realized in the cost of colonial administration by increasing Indian bureaucrats’ formal responsibilities (as they were paid considerably less than British ones). Still, it took three years before Bentinck could achieve government consensus about how to proceed.52 In the end, the Bengal government’s November 1831 reforms for all of India, in its capacity as the supreme government, which were confirmed by parliament two years later in the Charter Act, were less than Bentinck had hoped for.53 For example, Bentinck wanted to grant Indian judges complete cognizance over civil suits, leaving British judges to try only appeals and criminal cases. Other members of the Bengal government such as William Butterworth Bayley, however, warned that too rapid an extension of judicial authority to Indian judges might undermine the deep impression they believed Indians held of British judges’ integrity and “moral superiority;” in other words, the colonial regime needed to tread carefully lest it undermined British colonial prestige.54 Agreeing with Bayley, members of the Bengal government thus overruled Bentinck, opting instead to increase the monetary cap on trials over which Indian judges were allowed to preside from 150 rupees (roughly £19) to 5,000 rupees (£625), with British judges still deciding cases over this amount.55 This was a considerable reform, resulting in Indian judges after 1831 initially trying about 95 percent of Indian civil cases, but symbolically a defeat for Bentinck. Similarly, Bentinck had recommended that the salary cap for Indian uncovenanted servants be raised tenfold, from 100 rupees (£12 10d.) to 1,000 rupees a month (£125).56 Bentinck’s colleagues, however, bargained this down to 400 rupees a month (£50), prompting Bentinck in 1832 to gripe in a letter to Board of Control President Charles Grant that the new top salary that an Indian official could receive was still no more than what “your wretched [and] incapable” British functionary received as his initial salary upon arrival in India.57 Not quite seeing it this way, his colleagues, by deliberately choosing this lower salary cap, sought rather to balance greater Indian employment access with the maintenance of British racial privilege and prestige. As the rest of this chapter will contend, these contradictory impulses of the colonial regime would also factor heavily in British discussions about the colonial bureaucracy after 1831.

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 110

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

111

Exploring the Limits of Indianization, 1831–53 The early 1830s marked the height of colonial administrators’ enthusiasm for Indianization. As a direct result of the 1831 reforms, the British conceded, at least in theory, considerable Indian participation at most levels of colonial administration. No Indian, however, would gain entry into the covenanted service, the colonial bureaucracy’s uppermost rung, for another three decades, despite a legal mandate after 1833 for Company directors to appoint qualified Indians (which they simply ignored claiming that no Indian was properly qualified). Moreover, enthusiasm among Britons in India for granting further authority to Indian subordinates diminished sharply during the quarter-century following 1833. This occurred in spite of a profusion of imperial rhetoric by supporters of partial Indianization, who presented the policy as proof of the Company’s civilizing and moralizing intentions and, thus, its fitness to continue ruling India. With partial Indianization accomplished, many colonial officials and authors of colonial tracts began to consider what the policy’s proper limits ought to be. In particular, they sought to reconcile a desire to expand Indian employment and improve Indian morality with the maintenance of British racial privilege and prestige. In the process, they put older stereotypes about Indians’ supposedly universal venality and immorality to new use. To be sure, several Britons in India never reconciled themselves to the idea that Indian bureaucrats could or ever should be trusted with further administrative duties. During the 1840s and 1850s, opponents of Bentinck’s partial Indianization policy basically repeated Caulfield and Martin’s criticism from the 1830s that Indian bureaucrats came generally from the wrong social classes. Because most Indian officials were not landed elites but rather increasingly urbanized, Westerneducated, middle-class Bengalis, some worried that they would likely subvert whatever powers they were granted to their own private benefit.58 Others, such as Bengal officials W.L. Melville and Sir Frederick James Halliday, trotted out the old stereotype of universal Indian moral depravity in claiming that ordinary Indians preferred the old judicial system under Cornwallis, where British judges tried nearly all of the cases, to the new system where Indian judges tried most of the cases and Britons mainly tried appeals.59 In the late 1840s, Mir Shāhāmāt Ali, an Indian official working in the Bengal service, would counter these views.60 He contended in his

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 111

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

112

Company India, 1765–1858

Notes and Opinions of a Native (1848) that claims that Indians preferred British judges, who were innately morally superior, were specious and libelous. Despite the constant reiteration of canards about universal Indian moral depravity and untrustworthiness, who, Ali asked, performed most functions of colonial administration? It was certainly not Britons, who, Ali pointed out with some bitterness, were often more incapable than their Indian subordinates. It could hardly be accurately assumed, therefore, that Indians would naturally prefer comparatively incompetent British judges to ones of their own who knew India’s customs, languages, and laws.61 It is hard to know precisely what kind of impact Ali’s book had on the British public, although one suspects that it could not have been great considering that Ali published his book anonymously and through a minor press based on the Isle of Wight. The book remains useful, though, as it is one of the few Indian responses to colonial rule published in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century and, moreover, one written by a colonial bureaucrat. Ali’s tract also reveals how partial Indianizers were “prisoners of their own rhetoric”—to again borrow E.P. Thompson’s highly useful phrase—in another major sense as well: they insisted on the pure motives behind the policy even though it was designed primarily to maintain British colonial prestige (and jobs).62 Several good examples of this disconnect can be found in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s judicial minutes during the mid-1830s. Although only in India for three years between 1834 and 1837 as Indian Judicial Commissioner before embarking on his more famous career as a Whig historian and politician, while there, Macaulay drafted much of what would later be enacted, after the Sepoy Rebellion, as the Indian Penal and Civil Codes. In 1836, he argued, in broad abstract terms, that the British had a moral duty to gradually open up administrative positions to worthy Indians and train them for those positions. A failure to do so, he insisted, would be “altogether unworthy” of a government “which profess[ed] to have the welfare of its subjects in view.” To this end, a year later he proposed that the annual salaries of Indian munsiff judges (the lowest rung of Indian judges) be raised from 1,200 to 1,350 rupees (roughly from £150 to 170). He insisted that even a modest increase in official salaries such as this would begin to make the “difference between . . . dependence and independence, and consequently between official corruption and official integrity” among the Company’s Indian employees.63 In both these minutes Macaulay presented partial Indianization as the liberal policy of the most disinterested of governments, one

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 112

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

113

whose foremost concern was its Indian subjects’ moral improvement. At the same time, though, Macaulay undermined these very arguments in the same 1836 minute cited above. When various British judges logically suggested that Indian judges might also be entrusted with initial cognizance of criminal cases in addition to civil ones—as a step to further Indianization—Macaulay announced his opposition. Without going into explanation, he baldly asserted that Indians simply were not yet ready, morally speaking, to be trusted with such powers.64 Perhaps after three years’ experience serving as a member of the Indian government, Macaulay thought further Indianization was to be avoided because it might threaten British prestige (as well as employment) within the colonial bureaucracy, thus potentially calling into question British colonial rule?65 Whatever the reason for Macaulay’s sudden reticence, it was a volte-face. While still a member of parliament and of the Board of Control in the early 1830s, Macaulay had played a key role in inserting language into the Company’s new charter that required it to employ qualified Indians in more posts. Partial Indianization, he then had hoped, would be the first step toward eventual self-rule. “Having become instructed in European knowledge,” Macaulay had argued, “they may, in some future age, demand European institutions.”66 But now, Macaulay and other fellow liberals cautioned patience. As fellow liberal historian and Company official John William Kaye insisted in an 1853 paean to the Company’s rule over India, it was “simply a matter of time” before Indians proved themselves ready to assume many of the highest administrative positions. But the time had not yet arrived.67 Many proponents of partial Indianization, beginning in the 1830s, sought to square the contradictions between expanding Indian employment access with the maintenance of British colonial prestige by employing gendered metaphors of Indian civil servants as “moral children” in need of British tutelage on how to become “moral men.”68 According to this view, because Indians were so morally depraved, it would take the British a long time to train them how to properly govern themselves. Although they shared much of their opponents’ rhetoric, liberal paternalists were more optimistic that Indian behavior could be changed. Many expressed a confidence that Indians would eventually learn how to govern themselves properly, and, in effect, grow up and become moral men. But it would take a long time.69 Supporters of partial Indianization employed this new infantilizing stereotype of “moral children” most when discussing

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 113

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

114

Company India, 1765–1858

English-educated middle-class Bengalis, who began to dominate the colonial bureaucracy by the 1830s. Several authors, for example, argued that Bengalis were unnaturally litigious and “notorious for low cunning and deceit,” thus drawing on earlier British arguments about Indians.70 Macaulay famously argued in his Minute on Indian Education (1835) that English-educated Indian civil servants would be useful to the colonial state as “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.”71 Nevertheless, like his volte-face a year later, he attacked Bengalis—the ethnic group he was most referring to in his Minute—for their supposed effeminacy and moral immaturity five years later in his historical essay on Lord Robert Clive. He declared that “whatever the Bengalee does he does languidly,” except for “the war of chicane[ry]” in which he was “singularly pertinacious.” Thus, Macaulay warned that the British needed to be careful in how much power they extended to Bengalis lest they bring British colonial rule into disrepute among other Indians.72 Therefore, despite favoring involving Indians more in India’s governance, if for no other reason than to encourage their greater loyalty to colonial rule, many British proponents of partial Indianization remained wary of extending too much authority to Indians. Without further British tutelage, Indians, they continued to argue, could not yet be trusted with greater administrative responsibilities. Yet, as we shall soon see, by framing Indianization in such paternalist terms, Macaulay, Kaye, and other leading colonial officials opened themselves up to charges of bad faith. As various critics of the Company’s colonial administration, including Indians like Ali, would rightly contend, the Company could not claim that it was acting honorably in extending Indian employment opportunities while they also prioritized the maintenance of British colonial prestige. Colonial prestige’s overall importance in the minds of colonial officials can also be seen in their multiple anxieties about British conduct, to which the chapter now turns.

“Our Service Presents a Vast Deal of Rough Hard Work:” New Expectations of British Covenanted Servants after 1831 After 1831, largely due to partial Indianization, colonial anxieties about covenanted servants’ conduct shifted away from a focus on their

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 114

7/20/2011 3:32:56 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

115

material relationships with Indians toward their general physical and mental ability to perform their jobs and present an image of tireless British duty on behalf of Indians. This is not to say that colonial concerns regarding British district officials’ material relationships with Indians, particularly debt, ever entirely went away. Most colonial officials after 1831, however, worried less about Britons who fell into debt or accepted gifts from Indians than in earlier decades. Senior Bengal official Frederick James Halliday conceded in parliamentary testimony in 1853 that it was far from ideal for young covenanted servants to study their Indian languages in Calcutta and other presidency towns (as many tended to delay taking their examinations as long as possible). Nevertheless, he insisted that indebtedness among the Company’s British civil employees was “quite a joke compared to what it used to be in former times.”73 To be sure, others testifying before parliament in 1853, such as senior Bombay official John Pollard Willoughby, considered covenanted servants’ indebtedness still to be a great problem. Willoughby particularly condemned junior officials who incurred debt in order to purchase out more senior colleagues blocking their promotion. As Company directors had done in the late 1820s, he proposed denying promotion to a covenanted servant who was mired in debt, particularly if such debts were “by his own fault.”74 Yet, even while British officials in India continued to condemn private debt in ways broadly analogous to contemporary debates back home in Britain, what is most striking in his testimony is the absence of any indication of whom Britons were borrowing from. While this was always foremost in colonial officials’ minds prior to 1831, suddenly this was no longer as much the case. Once Britons allowed Indian judges, under their supervision, to try roughly 95 percent of civil cases or entrusted many of the details of the devising of revenue settlements to Indian revenue clerks, for example, it did not make much sense to worry about the influence of Indian creditors on colonial decision making. Rather, with extensive Indian participation in colonial administration now conceded, although still not at the higher administrative levels, covenanted servants’ role after 1831 shifted more toward one of morally training and supervising their Indian subordinates. British revenue collectors and district judges on the ground in India, so few in number (less than a thousand throughout the first half of the nineteenth century), were also now expected to act as “men on the spot.” Through derring-do, pluck, integrity, and high personal honor, they would present an image of the Company and its officers’

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 115

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

116

Company India, 1765–1858

tireless efforts working on behalf of Indians. After 1858, members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) claimed they were doing exactly this, and doing it better than Company officials ever could.75 Yet official colonial concerns about individual British officials’ ability to live up to this image predated the British Raj. Company director Henry St. George Tucker asserted in 1843, for example, that governing India “presents [such] a vast deal of rough hard work” that only “men of good understanding, of moral character, and of industrious habits” would do. The maintenance of British colonial prestige in India depended upon it.76 Of course, like earlier anxieties about covenanted servants who borrowed money from Indians and who gave or accepted bribes, colonial officials had to confront the reality that not every district official could meet the high expectations placed on him to act as the “man on the spot.” Physical illness was often a realistic possibility given the climate and the hard work expected of colonial officials. For several months in 1830, Bengal judge James Baillie Fraser held only sporadic court sessions because of personal illness, and he devolved nearly all of his district’s official judicial business to Indian officials under his authority. Indeed, for part of this time, Fraser was so sick that he only permitted his chief Indian court officials to visit him. Consequently, as an Indian named “Abdullah” complained in December 1830, Indian court officials could “do as they please” and murders and robberies, among other crimes, generally went unpunished.77 Two months later, when Abdullah’s charges were wholly substantiated, Bengal officials strongly condemned Fraser’s remissness of duty. Governor-General Bentinck argued that an official such as Fraser, “who could betray such utter indifference” to the well-being of Indians living in his district—or could even appear to have done so by, for example, not allowing any of his Indian subjects visit him during his illness—“must be considered unfit” for such an important trust. Indeed, Bentinck was so angered by Fraser’s neglect of his duty that he wanted to issue a circular letter, to be reprinted in government newspapers throughout India, castigating his behavior and warning others of the colonial government’s displeasure. Bentinck’s colleagues in the Bengal government, however, overruled him. Concerned how such a public scathing rebuke of a British official might look to their Indian subjects, they instead adopted the more private course of dismissing Fraser and rebuking Fraser’s most immediate supervisor (Mr. Ainslie), again in a private letter, for not punishing Fraser sooner.78 Image overruled everything else.

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 116

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

117

Broader Concerns about Company Patronage after the 1830s Bentinck implied, in his March 1831 minute recommending the public condemnation of Fraser, Ainslie, and the members of the supervising Bengal Court of Appeals, that the people of Bundelkund (Fraser’s district) had suffered “an entire denial of justice.” The problem, Bentinck claimed, had been further exacerbated by Ainslie and other officials’ failure to properly inform the Bengal government about Fraser’s remissness of duty earlier than they finally did.79 It is hard to know how true or not this may have been in actual fact. What is clear, though, is that several Britons in India from the 1830s on began to attack the Company’s patronage system for producing such “bad bargains” as Fraser that might prove highly embarrassing to the colonial regime. Cases like Fraser’s also stood to endanger the believability of the image of the solid, responsible, and overly capable British district official that the Company was now trying hard to present both to their Indian subjects as well as to Britons back home. Various colonial officials and authors of Indian tracts contended that the only reason why incapable officials such as Fraser were even sent out to India at all was because they happened to know a Company director or an influential shareholder, not because they actually could govern. In 1833, the Company finally lost all its remaining mercantile functions, which greatly augmented these concerns about Company patronage. So long as the Company retained some of its trading rights, Bengal official George Campbell explained two decades later in 1853, employees who were “known and ascertained to be fools” were “safely shelved in comfortable sinecures” within the Company’s commercial service to avoid their harming the more important business of governing India. Now that this was no longer possible, Campbell insisted that only fully qualified men should be selected to go out to India. Similarly, colonial reformer Sir Thomas Edward Colebrooke mocked the notion that mediocre and barely competent Company men could effectively govern their districts, or should even be allowed to, simply because they had powerful Company patrons. Indians required a colonial government that was attuned to their needs and colonial administrators who could keep up (or at least appear that they could).80 In these criticisms lay the beginnings of the frequent, and somewhat overblown, contentions by many late nineteenth-century members of the British Raj’s ICS, that, unlike their predecessors who worked for the East India Company prior to its nationalization in 1858, only they were seriously committed to India and the welfare of the Indians they ruled over.81

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 117

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

118

Company India, 1765–1858

Although Campbell and Colebrooke focused on the question of whether British district officials could generally govern their districts, others such as Tucker expressed more overtly gendered doubts about the covenanted service. In 1843 he attacked the academic nature of British covenanted servants’ training at Haileybury. Haileybury, he complained, produced numerous erudite scholars who could translate ancient Sanskrit or write Persian poetry, but these were not skills that were needed in India. Prior to the existence of Haileybury, Tucker declared, the men sent out to rule India possessed “masculine character” and were “fully equal in every attribute of statesmen to those who have succeeded.” He doubted, however, that this was still the case in the 1840s. Indeed, further underscoring his anti-intellectualism, Tucker suspected that had India’s eighteenth-century conquerors been required to learn what the Company now expected of its covenanted servants, Britain would never have conquered India, “or, if conquered, would not long have been retained by the force of erudition.” Only properly masculine men, Tucker maintained, could maintain British prestige in India. Already we can see analogues to later Raj-era officials’ doubts about “competition wallahs.” This overriding concern with maintaining British colonial prestige can also be found in various colonial officials’ testimony before parliamentary committees in 1852 and 1853 during the debate over the renewal of the Company’s charter. This was particularly the case among imperial administrators who worked at the center of colonial rule in Calcutta. Thus Bengal official William Wilberforce Bird stressed the importance of sending out the right sort of British men to govern India, arguing that only those who were “fit for the exercise of superior duties” and who could maintain in the eyes of Indians “a general impression of the superiority of Europeans” would do. Likewise, former governor-general Lord Ellenborough insisted that the maintenance of British colonialism rested “altogether upon the superior ability and the superior character” of British district officials. He further complained that Company directors sent out too many “middle-class” Britons to India, recommending instead that much larger numbers of English landed gentlemen and aristocrats be selected. Demonstrating a class bias, Ellenborough baldly asserted that only landed gentlemen ought to go out to India because only they could possibly retain the confidence of Indians in their ability to rule.82 The Company’s patronage system, to be sure, did have its defenders during the 1853 debate over the renewal of the Company’s charter. Indeed, there appears to have been a curious Bengal-Bombay

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 118

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

119

split among colonial officials called to testify before parliamentary committees with officials hailing from the more commercial presidency capital of Bombay tending to defend middle-class covenanted servants. Bombay Governor Sir George Russell Clerk thus rejected Ellenborough’s complaints that not enough aristocratic gentlemen became colonial district officers: no group, he insisted, was more “peculiarly suitable” for colonial administration than the mercantile, banking, and professional families that tended to dominate Company patronage. No other group of Britons, he continued, “educate[d] their children in more honourable principles,” nor regarded corruption and the acceptance of perquisites as “filth[y]” and unmanly behavior.83 Similarly, Bombay official John Pollard Willoughby argued that the Company’s patronage system encouraged “a tone of manly independence” among covenanted servants. This seeming paradox was achieved, Willoughby explained, through the fact that while Company officials initially appointed future colonial officials, thereafter they ceased to have any control over their individual career prospects. Covenanted servants still had to pass out of Haileybury, whose professors, including Thomas Robert Malthus, jealously guarded their prerogatives against possible encroachments either by Company directors or shareholders.84 Then they had to pass their language courses in India. Only then were they actually appointed to a post within the colonial bureaucracy, and when that appointment finally came, it was from the presidency governments in India, not Company directors. All this, Willoughby contended, created a situation where covenanted servants knew that their Indian career prospects depended largely upon their own merit and self-initiative, not on the “arbitrary will or caprice of men in power.”85 Many members of the British Raj’s ICS (and their historians, it seems) after 1858 would, self-servingly, contrast with pride the selection process for the ICS—an annual, competitive examination testing subjects from the Oxford-Cambridge curriculum—versus the seemingly corrupt nature by which their Company-era predecessors were chosen.86 But, again, like much else this book has been considering, the reality was far more complicated.

The Ending of Company Patronage in 1853 Despite these various arguments in favor of continuing the Company’s patronage system, Board of Control President Sir Charles Wood abolished Haileybury in 1853 with relative ease. A year later, Company directors appointed its last entrants, and the college finally closed three years later when this class of students graduated. Henceforth,

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 119

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

120

Company India, 1765–1858

until Indian independence ninety years later in 1947, colonial administrators were chosen through competitive examinations that were given annually in London.87 As a result, most historians have generally portrayed the debate in 1853 as being about other things than the introduction of competitive examinations per se such as whether Haileybury College ought to retain its monopoly over the training of colonial bureaucrats or whether the Company itself retained any remaining usefulness to British political leaders.88 At the same time, there was considerable debate in 1853 and thereafter over whether competitive examinations would ensure that the right sort of British men would be selected to rule India. Sir James Cosmo Melvill, the Company’s chief London-based secretary, generally supported retaining the Company’s patronage system in order to continue insulating British domestic politics from the grubbiness of Indian placement. But he also contended that competitive examinations would promote greater “manliness and mental enlargement” among would-be British district officials. Similarly, British civil service reformer and former Bengal colonial official Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan favored competitive exams for future colonial officials, believing they would keep out the “idle and ignorant” as well as other men of “inferior moral character.” Only those who possessed “industry, perseverance, self-denial and courage,” he averred, would even manage to pass the examinations. This would ensure that only men who possessed “considerable moral qualities” governed India.89 Other colonial officials, however, such as Bombay judicial official Sir Thomas Erskine Perry, worried that too many “book-worms” would be selected. Echoing Tucker’s concerns a decade earlier, Perry maintained that ruling India did not require men who possessed academic prowess. Rather, Perry only wanted “men who can get on a horse and ride thirty miles before breakfast.” Unlike broader defenses of the Company’s patronage system, however, this was not a line of argument limited just to Bombay officials. Company director and former Bengal official Henry Thoby Prinsep, for example, also worried about the wisdom of relying “too exclusively on book-learning,” for this might potentially enable Indians to qualify as covenanted servants. Rather, Prinsep insisted that manly Britons who possessed “qualities in which the natives of India know themselves to be deficient”— which Prinsep implied included things such as integrity, honor, and physical manliness—be appointed to India. There was no guarantee, though, that Britons sitting for merit-based examinations would possess these qualities.90

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 120

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

121

These doubts about whether competitive examinations would select the right sort of British men to rule India, and thence maintain British racial prestige over their Indian subjects, only intensified after 1853. Although Trevelyan and other reformers ensured that Oxbridge candidates dominated the covenanted service after the introduction of merit examinations, ultimately the senior colonial civil service became dominated by “book-worms” just as Perry had feared would be the case. Ironically, Trevelyan’s son most forcefully pointed out the inadequacies of his father’s strategy. In The Competition Wallah (1864), George Otto Trevelyan lampooned the manliness of the Oxbridge scholar-cum-colonial bureaucrat. British district officials, he contended, were known more for their pedantry, and for having an “unpractical turn of mind” and a “sedentary effeminate habit of body” than for the “physical dash and the athletic habits . . . so essential in India.” Echoing many of the same concerns of Tucker and Perry, Trevelyan contended that only British district officials who could “ride fifty miles on end without seeking for roads or bridge” ought to be sent out to govern India. Otherwise, the supposed racial superiority of Britons over the Indians they ruled and, more importantly, the belief in this among Britain’s Indian subjects—which Trevelyan deemed so crucial to the maintenance of British colonialism—would quickly crumble.91 Such an overriding concern among colonial officials with the maintenance of British racial prestige was also evident in 1853 debates over whether Indians ought to be allowed to join the covenanted service.

The 1853 Debate over Continued De Facto Indian Exclusion from the Covenanted Service Be it enacted, that no native of the said territories, nor any natural-born subject of his Majesty resident therein, shall, by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them, be disabled from holding any place, office or employment under the said Company. —The Charter Act of 1833, Clause 8792

During the 1853 debate over what would end up being parliament’s last renewal of the Company’s charter, the hoary imperial rhetoric of Thomas Babington Macaulay, John William Kaye, and other proponents of the Company’s partial Indianization policy began to

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 121

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

122

Company India, 1765–1858

suffer under the weight of its own contradictions. For, declarations about Britons’ moral mission to train Indians toward eventual selfgovernment, notwithstanding, the policy was mainly about maintaining British racial prestige within the colonial administration. But, now that Indian judges tried nearly all civil suits and Indian revenue officials devised and implemented many revenue settlements, there remained little difference between the functions of British covenanted and Indian uncovenanted servants other than the vastly different amounts of pay members of each service received. Given this reality, ought not Indians have been allowed to join the covenanted service, particularly if they were qualified? This question featured prominently in debates over the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1853. Despite the Charter Act of 1833, which mandated that the Company appoint qualified Indians to the covenanted service, the Company failed to appoint a single Indian in the two decades following the law’s passage, thus opening itself up to condemnation by various members of parliament in 1852 and 1853. For example, in a lengthy and rancorous exchange in 1852 during Sir James Cosmo Melvill’s testimony before the Select Committee of the House of Lords, various peers accused the Company of willfully ignoring the law and of demonstrating bad faith toward Indians. One lord wondered whether any meaningful distinction still existed, “with respect to moral character,” which precluded Indian judges from becoming covenanted servants. Another argued that given that the job of a judge required “higher moral properties” than most other government positions, it made no sense, either practically or morally, to continue to exclude Indians from the covenanted service.93 Indeed, various critics went further and contended that the Company’s policy of partial Indianization was essentially a sham. Was not the Company acting totally hypocritically, Mir Shāhāmāt Ali demanded four years earlier, when it decried dishonesty and corruption among its Indian employees while still continuing to pay them salaries that were plainly inadequate to live on? Was not the Company most unfair when it cavalierly dismissed from office senior Indian officials, who had faithfully served the colonial regime—in some cases for twenty or thirty years—upon the mere, often wholly unsubstantiated rumor of corrupt behavior? Ali asserted that most Indian colonial bureaucrats performed their duties honorably and skillfully, indeed often with greater expertise than their British supervisors. Yet, by failing to live up to their legal and moral obligations to appoint Indians as covenanted servants, the Company and its employees had

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 122

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

123

allowed their own private selfishness to cloud their better judgment. Such myopia, Ali warned, would eventually prove costly; continually humiliating Indians in this manner would only further increase their “hatred towards a rule which subjects them to such highly unbecoming, or rather savage, treatment.”94 Ali’s complaints provide historians with a viewpoint of an Indian official directly affected by the Company’s partial Indianization policies. But, as pointed out earlier in this chapter, his trenchant criticisms fell largely on deaf ears given that he published anonymously with a minor publisher. In the debate over the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1853, a minority of British voices echoed Ali’s criticisms. For example, Company critic John Capper criticized as empty and hollow claims that the Company’s efforts to expand employment within the colonial bureaucracy to Indians had been motivated by altruism. Instead, the British simply reiterated “monstrous” shibboleths about depraved Indians despite countless examples of the “most perfect integrity” among their Indian subordinates. As long as Indians remained excluded from the covenanted service, Capper insisted, Company rule would remain nothing more than a “costly sham” and a “gilded mockery” in the eyes of its Indian subjects. It was high time, Capper and several other reformers during the 1850s demanded, for the Company to live up to the inflated rhetoric put forth by many Company officials.95 Senior Company officials did not have good arguments to counter these criticisms. Rather, they generally defended the Company’s record before parliamentary committees in 1852 and 1853 by reiterating various paternalist arguments developed by proponents of partial Indianization over the previous two decades. For example, although Melvill conceded that Cornwallis’s racial ban impeded good governance of India between 1793 and 1831 and debased the moral character of Indians, he also advocated patience with the policy of partial Indianization. He admitted it would be a “practical wrong” if Indians were excluded from the covenanted service in spite of obvious evidence that they were “competent, from their moral qualities,” for such positions. Melvill asserted, however, that no such evidence existed that this was the case. He further insisted that the British were making great strides in improving Indian morality. Far more would need to be done, though, before Indians could safely be appointed as senior colonial officials.96 Similarly, liberal philosopher and high-ranking London-based Company official John Stuart Mill doubted whether Indians were moral enough to become covenanted servants. Unlike his father

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 123

7/20/2011 3:32:57 PM

124

Company India, 1765–1858

James Mill, who had attacked Bentinck’s partial Indianization of the colonial bureaucracy in 1831 as being the “most dangerous Hindophilism,” Mill supported admitting Indians “to all situations for which they [were] fit.”97 He acknowledged that the Company was breaking the law by refusing to appoint Indians as covenanted servants. Like Melvill, however, his broad support for Indianization did not extend to removing the racial barrier to entry by Indians into the more senior administrative service. Indeed, he argued that the Company’s policy, although illegal, was a “practical exclusion” which needed to be maintained until Indian morality improved. This was a rather extraordinary statement coming from an individual otherwise greatly concerned about issues of fairness and equality. But, like fellow liberals Thomas Babington Macaulay and William Kaye, Mill urged patience: until Indian morality was improved, which might not be until the distant future, Mill thought that it would be most unwise to allow Indians to join the covenanted service and become district judges, magistrates, and revenue collectors.98 Finally, several Company officials warned in their parliamentary testimony that British colonial prestige would be undermined if Indianization were carried to its next logical step and Indians were appointed as covenanted servants. For example, Frederic Millett, the secretary of the Indian Law Commission, feared the ability of British officials to “maintain their superiority” over Indian subordinates in such circumstances. Similarly, although Bengal official William Wilberforce Bird praised Bentinck for allowing Indians a share in their own country’s government, he insisted that it was absolutely necessary that the “superiority of Europeans” be maintained. The racial distinction between the two colonial civil services therefore needed to be continued. Otherwise, he feared, Indians might no longer stay loyal to British colonial rule. Ultimately, therefore, partial Indianization was about far more than the liberal veneer of moral improvement many of its proponents gave it. It was really about maintaining, for the unforeseeable future, British colonial domination over India.99

Conclusion Bird proposed relying upon Indian manpower under strict British supervision, with the maintenance of a rigid division between the British covenanted and the Indian uncovenanted services. This halfway solution effectively illustrates many of the tensions and limitations

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 124

7/20/2011 3:32:58 PM

Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization

125

embedded in the Indianization project. After all, Bird, like many other liberal paternalists, did not oppose entrusting Indians with most of the day-to-day responsibilities of colonial government. Indeed, he regarded partial Indianization as the only morally correct course of action. It was only just, he declared, that the colonial government should not “be monopolized entirely by foreigners.” Indians needed to have a “share in” it, too. But there were limits to what that share should be. Certainly, Bird believed, the covenanted service, for at least the unforeseeable future, must “be monopolized entirely by strangers.” By framing the issue this way, Bird, like many other colonial officials in this chapter, both demonstrated a liberal optimism regarding the possibility of Indian moral improvement and a fear about its consequences for British colonial prestige and employment.100 The British debate in 1853 over continued Indian exclusion from the covenanted service, however, far from resolving the issue, helped establish a nasty racial legacy for the subsequent British Raj. For, also in that year, parliament finally ended the Company’s patronage system, replacing it with merit-based competitive examinations. Although only given once a year in London and covering only subjects that were part of the Oxbridge curriculum, these exams were nominally open to all, regardless of race, creed, or class. In theory, now, any Indian who passed the exam would earn an appointment in the senior-most colonial administrative service. In 1864, an Indian, Satyendra Nath Tagore, did qualify, and by the 1880s twelve additional Indians (out of about 1,200 overall) also successfully joined the ICS. As Mrinalini Sinha has shown, the British tried various expedients during the late nineteenth century to ensure that further Indians, and especially, Bengalis such as Tagore, failed to qualify. They progressively lowered the upperage limit after which a candidate could no longer sit for the entry examinations so that only British candidates attending Oxford or Cambridge would generally be eligible. Until 1921, the exams themselves were only given in London, despite several repeated petitions from Indians that the exam be given simultaneously also in India. British colonial authorities continuously revised the exams so that Indians and undesirable Britons from lower social classes could not successfully “cram” for them. Finally, the British introduced a horse-riding test at the end of the nineteenth century to weed out all those who were not proper “English gentlemen,” thus enacting one of Erskine Perry and George Otto Trevelyan’s criteria for a proper “man on the spot.”101

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 125

7/20/2011 3:32:58 PM

126

Company India, 1765–1858

None of these official concerns had much, if anything, to do with ensuring that India was efficiently governed or that the most qualified men were chosen. Rather, as Sinha has shown, the British were primarily driven by an ideological concern to keep out “weak-kneed, effeminate, effete Bengalees.”102 Ultimately, then, the Company’s partial Indianization policies were about far more than administrative necessity or colonial pragmatism. They were also profoundly driven by ideology. They helped establish several themes in British colonial thought about the colonial administration and the proper role of Britons in India that would carry over into the British Raj. Such was also the case with many British attitudes toward Indian soldiers in the Company’s sepoy armies after the 1820s, to which we shall now turn our attention.

9780230116931_06_ch04.indd 126

7/20/2011 3:32:58 PM

5 Martial Races, Caste-Ridden Sepoys, and British Fears about Losing Control: Britons and Their Sepoy Armies in Late Company India

A considerable fusion of Sikhs [and] Punjaubee Mahommedans . . . into the ranks of the native army . . . would unquestionably be attended with inestimable benefit . . . . Nothing would tend more effectually, rapidly, and safely, to break down bigotry and false pride of caste in the native army, than this wide-searching yet imperceptible reformation in the system of recruiting. —Bengal Army officer John Studholme Hodgson (1850) 1 The Asiatic bows before generous honesty and high moral power—before manliness in fact. —Bombay Army Brigadier-General John Jacob (1851) 2

This chapter is about Britons and their sepoy armies, particularly the Bengal Army, during the three decades leading up to the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. As one of colonial India’s greatest crises, the Sepoy or “Great” Rebellion has continued to draw the attention of many scholars. Military historians have pointed to the Rebellion’s various long-term origins, such as growing levels of mistrust and discord between Britons and sepoys in the Bengal Army, and they have marveled at the Company’s seeming inattentiveness to these problems in the decades leading up to 1857.3 Other scholars have emphasized the Sepoy Rebellion’s various consequences for British colonialism after 1858. Heather Streets and Thomas Metcalf, for instance, have argued that

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 127

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

128

Company India, 1765–1858

the Rebellion and the violent manner in which the British put it down in 1857 and 1858 forged much of the British Raj’s pervasive arrogance and racism.4 Jennie Sharpe and Nancy Paxton, similarly, have pointed out the wide saliency, during the second half of the nineteenth century, of rumors that Indian men committed shocking cruelties against Britons in 1857, particularly British women.5 Other scholars have examined the psychological trauma produced by the uprising in British minds as well as its great importance in British literature afterward.6 Finally, E.M. Collingham and Veena Oldenburg have contended that the Rebellion led to greater social and racial segregation of Britons and Indians in India.7 Despite these different foci, scholars generally maintain that the Rebellion ushered in a more racist and arrogant form of colonialism than that which existed under the Company, a contention that this book so far has largely argued against. Several scholars, lastly, have looked to the Sepoy Rebellion for several of the martial race policy’s origins. This policy, the British Raj’s single best example of colonial racism in action, held that only a few groups of Indian men were “biologically or culturally predisposed to the arts of war.”8 Starting in the 1880s, British military officials exclusively recruited Nepalese men they labeled as “Gurkhas,” Sikhs, and Punjabi Muslims into their colonial armies. Thus, Heather Streets argues that the Rebellion was a “crucial moment in the articulation of martial races masculinity” and a “crucible through which ideologies of both British and Indian masculinities were renegotiated.”9 David Omissi also denies much continuity between Company India and the post-1857 period: because 69 of the 74 regiments of the pre-1857 Bengal Army either revolted or were disbanded in 1857, he contends, the British recruited an entirely new army afterward. Streets and Omissi also maintain that race did not factor much into the recruitment of Indian soldiers before 1857 whereas afterward, they argue, it was the factor.10 While the scholarship surveyed above has explored many of the ruptures caused by the Sepoy Rebellion, this chapter by contrast asserts a greater continuity in British attitudes toward their Indian armies between late Company India and the British Raj. Obviously there were disjunctures. The Sepoy Rebellion was significant after 1857 in part because it represented in British minds the ultimate act of Indian disloyalty and offered proof of the constant need for vigilance. Prior to 1857, for example, it is hard to imagine British soldiers bringing guns with them to Sunday services in case of another Indian revolt. According to Frank Richards, a British Army soldier, such a preemptive measure was common in early twentieth-century India.11

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 128

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

129

But notwithstanding such post-Rebellion developments, British attitudes toward Indian soldiers had already begun to change several decades earlier, in the 1830s. As British interpretations of caste shifted from emphasizing class to race and finally religion, increasing numbers of Britons in India began to mistrust high-caste sepoys. They increasingly considered them religious fanatics and “moral children” under the thrall of their Brahmin priests rather than gentlemen soldiers who could safely be relied upon. Such attitudes coincided with growing concerns about sati and “thuggee” mentioned already in the previous chapter. Thus when British imperialists worried about the influence of Brahmin sepoys over their high-caste counterparts within the Bengal Army, they were responding to a more general fear about social breakdown. Even when boasting about British military dominance, they began to fear British officers’ loss of control over their regiments. They sought to avert a perceived catastrophe for colonial rule by urging the recruitment of other South Asian ethnic and religious groups such as Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Muslims as “counterpoises” to high-caste Hindu sepoys. Ultimately, there were other voices claiming that Bengal Army sepoys were still generally gentlemen soldiers, and that British officers still retained their loyalty and respect. The Company, therefore, enacted few changes to its military policies before 1857. But the absence of any major change in military policy does not mean that the fears were any less real. Indeed, they foreshadowed the sentiments behind the British Raj’s martial races policy after 1857.12 This chapter will proceed in five parts. First, it will consider some of the long-term continuities in British racist attitudes toward Indian ways of waging war and training soldiers. It will then examine various changes in British interpretations of caste, which ultimately led to wider fears about its role within the Bengal Army and which fed British anxieties about an overall loss of British control over the army. The remaining two sections of the chapter will then focus on various proposals for reform in the latter decades of the Company period. The concluding section will then reassess the role of the Sepoy Rebellion.

An Empire of Might: Continuity in British Military Bravado during Late Company India Before considering changing British attitudes about caste, we need to consider some of the underlying continuities between the pre-1820s

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 129

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

130

Company India, 1765–1858

and post-1820s periods in terms of British military thinking. As we saw in chapter 3, from the very beginnings of colonial rule in the mid-eighteenth century, Britons held negative attitudes toward Indian soldiers. They asserted the cultural backwardness of Indian fighting methods and accorded great importance to British officers and soldiers’ role in molding sepoys into proper soldiers. Many colonial officials and military officers continued to express similar views during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Like in earlier decades, several colonial officials and military officers argued that Britons were culturally superior to Indians in waging war. Company director Henry St. George Tucker contended in an 1842 minute that British-led armies almost always defeated numerically superior Indian-led ones because Britons were more “advanced in the science of war.”13 Other military authors and colonial officials focused on specific tactics of fighting which in their minds demonstrated British superiority. Thus, Bengal Army Captain Godfrey Charles Mundy, writing in 1833, and Bombay Army Brigadier-General John Jacob, writing in 1848, both asserted that nothing was more terrifying on the field of battle than a British cavalry charge. Switching emphasis to British expertise in using the bayonet, Sir Charles James Napier, the victor of Scinde (1843) as well as briefly the commander-in-chief of British forces in India during the late 1840s and early 1850s, likewise insisted that “Eastern” soldiers had little or no chance against Britons in battle. Rather romantically, Napier claimed this was largely because there had been “no falling off in British swordsmen since Richard Coeur de Lion.”14 This assertion was historically inaccurate—after all, after the First and Second Crusades, Britons and other Europeans lost the remaining six. It also demonstrated that a significant shift was occurring in British racial discourses about their Indian soldiers. Unlike earlier British military discourses that relied more on late eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment theories of civilizational progress and decay, Napier’s opinions as to the cause of British military dominance pointed more toward more overtly racialist discourses being developed in the following century. The notion that the Company’s Indian empire was largely based on conquest also carried over into mid-nineteenth century British military writings. Edward Parry Thornton, a Bengal revenue official and the author of several Indian tracts, argued in 1835 that the “knowledge” among Indians that the British were “so prepared” to put down military disturbances, wherever they might occur, ensured British security and peace throughout India. Likewise, John Studholme Hodgson

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 130

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

131

maintained in 1850 that it was only the “involuntary conviction of our military strength to crush summarily all insurrection [that] maintains peace throughout the continent of India.”15 Thirdly, various colonial and military officials continued to emphasize British officers and soldiers’ important role in molding sepoys into proper soldiers. In an 1830 minute to Governor-General Lord Bentinck, Bombay Governor Sir John Malcolm insisted on their indispensability to sepoy regiments. “[N]o principle connected with the efficiency of an Army,” he argued, was “so universally admitted as, that its discipline depends more” upon British officers commanding individual regiments “than any other class.” British officers performed few more essential roles than teaching sepoys proper military discipline. Therefore, Malcolm urged Bentinck to use his good offices to obtain the appointment of greater numbers of British officers to avert Company armies’ “high tone and spirit” from further “deteriorating” and “degenerating.” But, in doing so, Malcolm betrayed a class bias. Like Lord Ellenborough’s concern, cited in the last chapter, that not enough aristocrats were being sent out to India as covenanted servants, Malcolm believed that only officers “of the higher class” could possibly gain sepoys’ respect and admiration and thus maintain their “spirit and animation.”16 Malcolm also stressed British soldiers’ role in molding sepoys into soldiers, augmenting earlier themes in British military writings. He advocated the mixing of Indian and European regiments as a measure that would ensure that sepoys came into more frequent contact with British soldiers’ “superior courage and energy,” thereby not only improving the quality of sepoys but also maintaining the image of British prestige. Similarly, Napier stressed British soldiers’ important role in helping to instill military discipline among sepoys and in upholding British superiority. He argued that British soldiers “furnish[ed] examples of the highest discipline and skill” simply by serving alongside Indian soldiers.17 Finally, many British officers and colonial officials emphasized British officers’ highly important role in cementing sepoys’ loyalty to British colonial rule. Thus, Malcolm contended that sepoys only became “attached” to the British “when treated with notice and kindness” by their British officers. But even colonial critics such as Bengal judge Frederick John Shore stressed the need for British officers to gain the personal loyalty and esteem of sepoys. The “attachment to the state, among the native soldiery,” he declared, was “only to be secured through their officers.”18

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 131

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

132

Company India, 1765–1858

As several authors contended, however, this was all fine and good if British officers fraternized with sepoys. But this was no longer as commonplace as in earlier decades. Some, such as N.H. Sleeman, downplayed the problem’s seriousness, insisting it only occurred at large stations, where British officers could readily socialize among themselves and other Britons. At small stations and during military service, Sleeman believed, the “tone of feeling” between British officers and sepoys remained largely unimpaired. Others, however, such as Shore, argued that the decline in “kindly feeling” between British officers and sepoys was more universally a problem in British India. If left unchecked, Shore contended, this lack of social esteem for one another would ultimately throw sepoys’ long-term fidelity to British colonial rule into much doubt.19 In the late 1840s and 1850s, however, a distinctly more strident tone appeared in several British military writings. Authors such as Bengal officer John Studholme Hodgson and Bombay Army Brigadier-General Sir John Jacob contended that the real problem was not British officers and sepoys’ growing racial and cultural rift (as was actually the case) but, rather, that British officers did not act sufficiently “British” or “manly” in front of sepoys. Hodgson severely criticized Bengal Army officers in his 1850 military tract for continuing to tolerate the extensive practice of caste rituals within their sepoy regiments. He insisted that British officers would only successfully gain their sepoy’s respect (and, thus, loyalty) by acting strictly according to a “British standard of manliness.” A year later, Jacob went even further and smugly asserted that all Bengal Army officers should do was to start acting like the “superior beings” they were in front of sepoys. Sepoys, Jacob claimed, would only truly respect the British officer who remained properly aloof from his men, who possessed “generous honesty and high moral power,” and above all, who always acted like a “thoroughly ENGLISH gentleman.”20 That Hodgson and Jacob, among several other colonial officials and military officers, believed it necessary to write in such a manner suggests a significant change in British attitudes toward the Bengal Army’s high-caste Hindu sepoys had already begun to occur. Their writings also show sagging levels of British confidence about their dominance of their Indian military forces. Whereas late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century British racist attitudes toward their sepoys were punctuated by positive discourses that extolled their sepoys’ supposed gentlemanly qualities, after the 1820s this was less

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 132

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

133

true. The key reason why, had to do with shifting British interpretations of caste away from class toward race and eventually religion, leading to growing doubts among British imperialists about Brahmin and Rajput sepoys’ reliability and desirability.

The Evolution of British Understandings of Caste and Attitudes toward High-Caste Sepoys after ca. 1820 Beginning in the 1820s, Britons in India started to employ a number of competing, and sometimes contradictory, discourses about Bengal Army high-caste sepoys. During this period, however, race began to supplant class as an overall explanatory framework for understanding caste and by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, religion became the overriding concept. In both cases, British discourses were starting to emphasize innate differences between Britons and Indians rather than draw attention to similarities between the two groups, as had earlier generally been the case. This shift in emphasis toward race and religion in British descriptions of Brahmin and Rajput sepoys, however, was a gradual one; one can still find examples of Britons imagining their Indian men as the rough equivalents of English aristocrats, although ones still stuck in the Middle Ages. Thus, throughout his three-volume history of Rajputs published between 1829 and 1832, James Tod described Rajputs as being a “military class,” a “martial class,” or as “martial vassals.” He argued that the “poorest Rajput . . . retains all the pride of ancestry” holding onto such “aristocratic ideas” as refusing to “hold the plough, or to use his lance but on horseback.” Likewise, Benjamin Atkinson Irving, the author of an 1853 treatise on the caste system and its implications for British colonialism, posited that because north Indian Rajputs descended from the ancient Kshatriyas, they were born into the military profession. 21 But while some Britons in India continued to describe Bengal Army high-caste sepoys as being Indian equivalents of upper-class British gentlemen after the 1820s, others began to employ a more consciously racialist language in their writings. In 1817, for example, Baptist missionary William Ward argued that Bengalis were darker, slenderer, and more prone to engage in “effeminate pleasures” than north Indians who were “more robust and independent.” Similarly, British Army Lieutenant-Colonel George Augustus Frederick Fitzclarence declared

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 133

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

134

Company India, 1765–1858

two years later that while Bengal Army officials had a “choice of men” from all over northern India to recruit, they . . . of course, prefer the hardy and martial races of Upper India for the material of the army, where the most powerful and finest men perhaps in the world are nurtured—men, who, by the most violent and athletic exercises, maintain to the last their muscular force and physical energies.

Although Fitzclarence did not clarify why such a policy was self-evident, this passage is nevertheless significant in that it contains the earliest reference of the phrase “martial races” that I have been able thus far to trace.22 Soon thereafter, though, it proliferated in British military writings. Thus, alongside his frequent allusions to aristocratic soldiers, James Tod also continually described Rajputs in his three-volume history of Rajasthan, as being a “warlike” or “martial race.” Similarly, former Bombay governor Sir John Malcolm argued in his 1832 memoir that Rajputs were “as brave and hardy soldiers as any in India” and, as a people, were “in their dress, manners, and usages, distinct from the other inhabitants of the country.” All of these differences, he averred, “denote[d] them [as] a superior race” to others in India. 23 Various Britons in India also began to draw upon nascent “Aryan race” ideas in their descriptions of high-caste Hindu soldiers. The Aryan race idea began in the 1780s in Sir William Jones’s and other Orientalist thinkers’ philological theories regarding the common linguistic origins of Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin, which would eventually coalesce into the Indo-European language family concept. During the early nineteenth century, however these ideas had transmogrified into the notion that a common “race” of “Aryans” must have both spoken this common ancestral language and invaded ancient Europe and India. 24 By the 1840s, prominent scholars such as Oxford Sanskritist Friedrich Max Müller were proposing that highcaste Hindus from north India, such as many soldiers in the Bengal Army, were the “Arian brethren” of Europeans, including Britons.25 Similarly, but almost two decades earlier, James Tod stated that his historical research’s central aim was to “affirm and endeavour to prove” Rajputs and the ancient conquerors of Europe’s “common origin.” Tod postulated that both north Indians and Europeans must share a common Aryan racial past considering their common treatment of women and their common feudal past. 26

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 134

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

135

Finally, but perhaps most vividly, several Britons in India also began during the 1820s to link north Indian high-caste Hindus’ skin colors and their physical bodies, arguing that comparatively lighterskinned Brahmins and Rajputs were more manly than other Indians. British authors made these comparisons most typically between Bengalis and north Indians. They derided the former as the most effeminate of all Indians and thereby helped inaugurate a common British stereotype that would pervade later British thought during the British Raj. 27 Thus, Bengal Army Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Skinner asserted in his 1833 memoir how easily it was “to perceive a change in the people” once one left Bengal proper and traveled north and west along the Ganges River. Instead of having the “coal-black forms,” “fawning manner and effeminate figure” of Bengalis, north Indian Brahmins and Rajputs had a “larger stature and [were] more manly in their appearance . . . and preserve a gravity of manner that gives them an air of great superiority over the Bengalees.” Similarly, Mountstuart Elphinstone argued in 1843 that north Indian high-caste Hindus were “the tallest, fairest, and most warlike and manly of the Indians.” By contrast, Bengalis were “small, black, and effeminate in appearance; remarkable for timidity and superstition, as well as for subtlety and art.”28 Again, we see long-term continuities between the late Company period and the British Raj in terms of British racial attitudes toward Indians. Several British military officials and authors, from the 1820s onward, began to employ many key ideas of what would later become the British Raj’s martial races policy. Perhaps the most important one was the exclusion, tout court, of the possibility that most groups of Indian men were, or ever could be, martial. At least several decades before the advent of Social Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century, therefore, many British military officials and authors were already assuming that only certain Indian races had it “in the blood” to become soldiers. The persistence of these attitudes among several leading colonial officials and military officers would guarantee that the British would continue to rely upon high-caste Hindu soldiers up to the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. But while several British authors continued to praise high-caste sepoys’ supposedly gentlemanlike qualities; whereas others generally lauded their manliness and supposed racial superiority compared to other groups of Indian men; during the second quarter of the nineteenth century these generally positive attitudes began to be interrupted by other British discourses that were of a darker,

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 135

7/14/2011 5:57:15 PM

136

Company India, 1765–1858

more negative variety. Interestingly enough, during the very same decades that Britons were beginning to trust (within limits) Indian bureaucrats, several of their counterparts within the colonial military began to suffer under a sudden loss of trust toward high-caste Hindu sepoys. As we will see, this had much to do with changing British understandings of caste.

British Anxieties about Caste and Brahmin Sepoys within the Bengal Army Starting in the 1820s, British colonial officials and military officers increasingly came to regard caste as playing a dangerous and sinister role within the Bengal Army in undermining basic military discipline. These fears were analogous to others held by Britons during this period that Hinduism caused revolting behavior such as the murder of widows (in sati) or the ritual strangling and robbery of travelers by “thugs” roaming the Indian countryside. 29 Many colonial officials and military officers also started to fear Brahmin sepoys’ religious influence within the army, believing Brahmins to disturb basic military discipline as well as threaten sepoy loyalty. From British colonialism’s very beginnings, British military officers and colonial officials had repeatedly expressed concern about religion’s role in their sepoy armies and stressed the need for British officers and soldiers always to respect sepoys’ religious beliefs. For example, Bombay Army officer John B. Seely argued in 1825 that sepoy loyalty could not be taken for granted by the British. Rather, it depended a great deal upon their British officers not interfering with their religious practices. The British officer who interfered with his sepoys’ religious practices, Seely feared, would cause his soldiers to “shun him as a pestilence and avoid him as an enemy.” This could only undermine military discipline and good feeling within the regiment, thus endangering British colonial rule. 30 Likewise, British military officials took the risk of religious-inspired rebellion seriously throughout this period, particularly among Muslim soldiers. Madras officials acted swiftly when a spate of five separate incidents involving the desecration of Madras Army cantonment mosques rocked South India in 1832 and 1833. In one of these incidents, an enraged mob killed a British sub-collector and joint-magistrate, a particularly worrisome development for colonial officials who generally valued the maintenance of British racial prestige above all else. The British feared another Vellore-style mutiny (see chapter 3) occurring

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 136

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

137

in South India. Accordingly, the ringleaders were quickly brought to justice, the Company promptly rebuilt cantonment mosques, and the army’s commander-in-chief went on a tour of general inspection to quell any remaining disaffection among Muslim soldiers.31 British anxieties about religion’s role within their sepoy armies only intensified as caste increasingly, during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, came to be seen under the influence of Protestant missionaries more as a religious phenomenon than as a marker of social or racial status.32 Rather than worrying, like Seely, about the consequences to British colonial rule of regimental officers not fully respecting their sepoys’ religious beliefs and observances, several British military and colonial officials began to argue in the 1820s and 1830s that caste itself fundamentally interfered with the proper performance of military duty.33 In an 1830 minute, for example, Malcolm agreed with other British officers that north Indian Brahmins and Rajputs, from their “robustness of frame, and Military habits,” made good soldiers. He also conceded the relative ease with which the Bombay Army met its recruitment needs in northern Indian districts that “abound in Recruits.” Even so, he argued that there were “several drawbacks to recruiting north Indian high-caste Hindus,” chiefly among them their high regard for caste rituals. High-caste Hindu soldiers, Malcolm thought, ultimately could not be relied upon; rather they were “mere mercenaries” who would likely desert rather than embark on overseas service for fear of loss of caste. This was because Hinduism forbade traveling overseas under penalty of losing caste. 34 Later that year, in his minute to Governor-General Bentinck, already cited earlier in this chapter, Malcolm went further, warning of the danger of substituting a former “pride of Corps” for a new “pride of Caste” which, he contended, would inevitably result from recruiting more high-caste Hindus. As the last chapter contended, with reference to the Indianization debate during the 1820s and 1830s, Malcolm generally believed that it was good policy to “conciliate and honour the higher and more respectable classes of our native subjects” to British rule through encouraging their greater participation in ruling India. But, with regard to the colonial military, he warned that the “pride of Caste” of Indian subordinates should not be augmented. The overall “safety of the Empire,” he declared, ultimately depended upon British officials getting this delicate balance right.35 Fears among some colonial officials and military officers regarding the loss of British control over their sepoy armies—and in particular, the Bengal Army—to the “pride of Caste” intensified in the 1840s

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 137

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

138

Company India, 1765–1858

and 1850s, especially after Governor-General Bentinck abolished corporal punishment for Indian soldiers (but not British soldiers) in 1835, and replaced it in serious cases of insubordination with outright dismissal from the army. The number of punishments meted out to Bengal Army sepoys more than tripled in the six-year period immediately following Bentinck’s abolition of corporal punishment, and several colonial officials and military officers blamed caste.36 Thus, writing in 1841, Edward Parry Thornton warned that “the bigoted attachment with which the Hindoo clings to an unsocial superstition” such as caste encouraged high-caste sepoy insubordination. Bombay Army Brigadier-General John Jacob was more forceful in his denunciations of caste a decade later. He warned that the chief danger of kowtowing to sepoys’ caste prejudices was “to subject” the Bengal Army “to the control, not of the Government and the Articles of War, but to that of Brahmins and Goseins, Moollahs and Fakeers.” This led to serious problems of army governance. Proclaiming in exasperation that “A NATIVE SOLDIER IS FAR MORE AFRAID OF AN OFFENSE AGAINST CASTE THAN OF AN OFFENCE AGAINST THE ARTICLES OF WAR,” Jacob concluded that the Bengal Army suffered from a total “want of discipline” which was absent from the other two armies and “almost incredible” to officers from those armies. Jacob insisted that only when Bengal Army officers began to “train” their sepoys to “pride themselves on their soldiership and discipline,” rather than “their absurdities of caste”—as Jacob claimed was the case in the Bombay Army—could the British truly rely on the Bengal Army as an effective and loyal fighting force.37 British fears about losing control over the Bengal Army to caste led to more negative attitudes toward Brahmin soldiers. As early as 1830, Bengal Army Adjutant-General George Fagan attempted to ban their further recruitment in the army. Fagan claimed that sepoys over-recruited Brahmins, while on annual furlough, not because they were “robust, stout, young men” but rather to have the “convenience” of “having a Brahmin youth . . . cook for them.” Four years later, however, Governor-General Bentinck reversed Fagan’s ban. It had transpired that many Brahmins joined the army anyway by listing themselves on official military muster rolls as “Rajputs.” In his 1834 minute reversing the ban, Bentinck employed the full range of descriptive language then in common usage in India, arguing that British colonial authorities should not make “any distinction between the Military Classes of different Races or Castes in the Bengal Presidency.” Rather, believing that it was wise for the colonial regime to foster bonds with Indian elites,

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 138

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

139

Bentinck insisted that policymakers ought to do whatever they could to encourage Brahmins as well as Rajputs to enlist in the Bengal Army.38 Despite Bentinck’s attempts to settle the issue of Brahmin recruitment once and for all, many Britons in India remained suspicious of Brahmin sepoys. They warned of Brahmin sepoys’ dangerous and pervasive influence over their coreligionists in the Bengal Army. Concerns particularly mounted once an official 1842 survey showed that over 24,000 Brahmins were enlisted in Bengal Army infantry units, making up nearly a third.39 In his 1850 military tract, Hodgson thus employed anti-Papist rhetoric in warning that Brahmin sepoys, through their “secret and jesuitical institutions,” corrupted fellow Indian soldiers by encouraging them to shirk their military duties on account of caste. Other authors of reform tracts in the early 1850s, such as Napier and George Campbell contended that Brahmins could not be trusted as they invariably instigated mutinies and other disturbances within the Bengal Army.40 Some military officers and colonial officials—though by no means all—also began to express broader doubts about high-caste sepoys’ overall desirability in the 1840s and 1850s. Bengal Army officer W.L. M’Gregor contended in 1846 that the quality of Bengal Army sepoys had progressively declined over the preceding three decades to the point that the British now looked “in vain for the gallant Rajpoot.” Indeed, M’Gregor doubted the British could have defeated the Sikhs in the just-concluded First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–46) had British soldiers not been present to assist their sepoy comrades. Similarly, although Hodgson conceded that Bengal Army sepoys were currently loyal to British rule, he worried about whether they could be trusted long-term. However, other military officers, coming from outside the Bengal Army, such as Napier and Jacob, feared that the army was already too far gone. Napier argued that since high-caste soldiers in the Bengal Army had “two commanders to obey, caste and captain,” ultimately they were unreliable.41 Such concerns led many to propose various strategies for reasserting British control over the army, which the rest of this chapter will now consider.

Racial Prestige and Colonial Anxieties about British Officer and Soldier Misconduct Several colonial officials and military officers first proposed to deal with their growing fears about high-caste sepoys’ loyalty by focusing

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 139

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

140

Company India, 1765–1858

more on British behavior. In a major shift from earlier decades, they began to blame British military officers and soldiers for what they perceived was a breakdown in the army’s discipline and general order. In an 1829 minute, for example, Bengal Army Commander-in-Chief General Lord Combermere praised its British officers for causing “much of the good feeling” in the army.42 Two decades later, however, various military reform tract authors were more critical of Bengal Army officers. Hodgson, for example, criticized his fellow officers for continuing to kowtow to their sepoys’ caste rituals, insisting instead that they needed to do more “to elevate the mind and character of the native soldier to a British standard of manliness.” Similarly, Jacob declared that Indian soldiers were only truly impressed with British officers who acted with the “highest moral tone” and “a simple and vigorous Anglo-Saxon honesty” in all their actions.43 In stressing the importance of moral behavior among British officers and soldiers in India, many Britons in India focused on similar themes as in earlier decades such as irreligiosity, their financial relationships with Indians, and soldier drunkenness, emphasizing again the need to preserve British moral and racial prestige.

Religion and the Elevation of British Moral Prestige Like in earlier decades, colonial officials and Indian tract authors worried about British officers’ and soldiers’ lack of religiosity, and not only out of a concern for their spiritual well-being. For example, Daniel O’Connor, the Roman Catholic Vicar Apostolic of Madras, recommended in 1830 that the Company send more priests to Madras Army regiments not simply because close to half of the Company’s European soldiers were Catholic and needed ministering to but also because he believed that more priests in military cantonments would help diminish drunkenness and other vices.44 Three years later, Catholic officers and soldiers in both the British Army’s 16th Foot and the 49th Regiment requested that the Company provide them with Englishspeaking priests from either Ireland or Britain to replace their current Portuguese ones, whom both regiments complained did not speak much English. Parroting O’Connor, the Catholic soldiers and officers argued that having greater access to clergymen of their faith and nationality would tend to reduce their tendency toward drunkenness and would awaken within them a better sense of their moral duties and obligations.45 It is not clear what became of these two requests but it is likely the Company acceded to them for, from the 1820s on, the Company routinely paid for the passage of Irish and British Catholic clergymen

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 140

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

141

to India.46 Indeed, in 1845, Company directors went one step further, ordering their colonial governments in India henceforth to hire only priests who were well-acquainted with English. To provide a further incentive for more Irish and British priests to make the journey out to India, Company directors also increased the minimum stipend paid to priests who ministered to their soldiers, from a prior range of 30 to 70 rupees to a flat rate of 100 rupees per month.47 Nevertheless, despite the Company’s various efforts to inculcate religion in its military personnel in India throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, several leading British political and religious figures in India still worried that not enough was being done. For example, Daniel Wilson, the long-serving Bishop of Calcutta, complained in 1844 to Board of Control President Lord Ripon that the Company did not send out nearly enough clergymen. He also criticized many military officials for placing unreasonable barriers on the performance of regular worship.48 But whereas Wilson was concerned primarily with saving fellow Christians’ souls, other colonial officials worried more about maintaining British moral prestige in India. In an 1847 letter to Company directors, Governor-General Lord Hardinge (1844–48) thus maintained that the “simple fact of showing a proper respect for our own religious duties” by, among other things, attending church regularly, would inevitably “raise the British character” in Indian eyes. But, while Hardinge discussed the issue more in general terms, his successor as governor-general, Lord Dalhousie (1848–56), employed a fear of a diminution of British colonial prestige four years later to advocate for an increase in Company expenditures on military chapel building in India. “In a country” like India “where every Mussulman community, however inconsiderable, constructs its Mosque [and] where every Hindoo Community erects its temple,” Dalhousie insisted that it simply was “not creditable to our name, that we should give occasion to the natives . . . that, of all people, their Christian masters alone are content to worship their God in a barrack, or a shed.”49 Such concerns about the maintenance of British racial and moral prestige in India also factored heavily in colonial discussions during the latter decades of the Company period regarding financial engagements between British military officers and Indians, such as private debt.

Proper Gentlemen Pay Their Bills: Concerns about Officer Indebtedness Early in the first volume of Oakfield, or Fellowship in the East, W.D. Arnold’s semi-autobiographical social novel about late Company

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 141

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

142

Company India, 1765–1858

India from 1853, Oakfield writes to his friend and confidant Stanton of his despair at his fellow regimental officers’ lack of gentlemanly qualities. Among these Oakfield lists a lack of “honesty in money transactions.” Slightly later, we learn that Cade, among the regiment’s various blackguards who Oakfield detests, owes money left and right to Indian tradesmen and fellow officers. But Arnold, imbibing much of his father Thomas Arnold’s moral rectitude, went considerably further in his indictment. “If all this is villainy—then Cade was a villain; and if Cade was a villain, there were a good many more besides him in the service.” This is further shown a page later when the reader learns that nearly everyone else in the regiment besides Oakfield regarded Cade’s severe indebtedness either as “a joke, or a subject of condolence” rather than a serious moral failing.50 In his recent book on the role of honor and honor culture during the British Raj, Stephen Patterson contends that Arnold’s novel “prefigured the changed moral tone of British rule after the Mutiny, when conquest gave way to the ‘virtuous’ rule of the British Raj and the new rulers of India would be lauded for their quiet and gritty determination to rule justly.” Patterson further writes that the novel, by itself, “accurately portrayed this changing ethos, when the questionable ethics and hazy morals of the early conquerors of India fell into disrepute” among the British rulers that replaced them after the Sepoy Rebellion in 1858. 51 It may well be that late nineteenth-century Britons read Arnold’s novel this way (although Patterson does not examine possible reader response to the novel). But the broader implication Patterson draws regarding the period prior to the Sepoy Rebellion—that hardly anyone but Arnold was concerned with honorable conduct—is simply not accurate. Like many other instances where British imperial elites worried about how British moral and racial prestige in their Indian subjects’ eyes might be adversely affected by British misbehavior in India, particularly among colonial employees, so was this the case regarding indebtedness among British military officers. Three years before Arnold published his novel, indeed anonymously at first, fellow Bengal Army officer John Studholme Hodgson argued that chronically indebted officers were the “unfortunate slaves” to their creditors. Such men, lacking personal honor, could not possibly exert proper moral leadership over their sepoys or gain their respect. After all, how could such people possibly “elevate [the] mind and character” of Indian soldiers “to a British standard of manliness” if they themselves were not living exemplary lives?52

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 142

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

143

High-ranking colonial and military officials throughout the latter decades of the Company period expressed similar concerns about officer indebtedness. Believing as he did that Britain’s hold over India depended greatly upon the “number, condition, and temper” of the Company’s Indian armies, Malcolm worried as early as 1830 that junior military officers’ extravagant spending habits (and subsequent debts), if left unchecked, would endanger sepoy loyalty to British colonial rule.53 More strident was British Army Lieutenant-General Charles Napier. In the general orders he issued in 1850 as commander-in-chief of British forces in India, Napier called into question the gentility and masculinity of military officers who fell into debt: . . . young men arrive in India and think that, having escaped from School, it is manly to be dishonourable. So they cheat the Government by not attending to their duties, and they cheat their tradesmen by not paying their debts. They meet Champagne drinking swindlers, who sponge on them, and lead them into expense. Thus comes debt—then Bankers are at hand to advance money. Thus they become involved past redemption.

Soon enough, Napier warned, “the habit of being constantly in debt makes them grow callous to the proper feelings of a Gentleman,” thus transforming otherwise honorable British military officers into “vulgar knaves.” By engaging in behavior “disgraceful” and ultimately “derogatory to the character of Gentlemen,” Napier feared, indebted British military officers were placing British moral and racial prestige at risk.54 Like late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century covenanted servants who borrowed freely in order to live like little princes, several Company military officers also overspent their salaries to enjoy several of the finer things in life. Both Malcolm and John McCosh, the author of a guide for British officers published in the early 1840s, worried about the high numbers of British officers who bet on horses, even though gambling among officers was “stringently prohibited.”55 A few authors, such as Bengal Army Major William Hough, argued that regimental messes, where a particular regiment’s officers shared dining expenditures, helped promote proper “conduct” among military officers as officers were always anxious to “be on good behaviour.” Reformers such as Napier and Hodgson, however, worried that regimental messes increased indebtedness among officers. Napier criticized the extravagant expenditures of some messes as burdensome for otherwise “poor and prudent Officers” who had to contract

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 143

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

144

Company India, 1765–1858

debts in order to pay for their peers’ indefensible profligacy. Hodgson went further, urging commanding officers to regulate closely their regimental messes’ expenses. By keeping their costs down, Hodgson argued they would “greatly inculcate habits of just economy, and foster a manly desire of independence” among junior military officers.56 As we have already seen, elsewhere in his writings Hodgson regarded continued examples of Britons not acting sufficiently manly in front of Indians as placing British prestige at risk. For this reason, Hodgson insisted that it was necessary that measures be taken to prevent junior officers from being swallowed up by debt. Similar concerns about maintaining British racial and moral prestige were also present in anxieties among colonial officials and authors of Indian tracts regarding officer and soldier drunkenness.

Drunkenness and Violence toward Indians Finally, like in earlier decades, several colonial officials and authors of colonial reform tracts worried about officer and soldier drunkenness. Frederick John Shore contended that British officers who drank in front of sepoys undermined the idea that Britons in India were morally superior to Indians. Such misconduct aptly demonstrated British hypocrisy in India and the need for root and branch reform to British colonial rule. But even ardent imperialists such as John Jacob worried about officer drunkenness. Writing in 1851, Jacob feared that an intoxicated British officer placed “the prestige of the superior race” at risk. No sepoy, he argued, should ever see his commanding officer wasting his time in “frivolous [and] vicious” habits such as drinking, nor “living an idle, useless life.” Habitually drunk British officers stood to lose their sepoys’ confidence and respect, throwing their loyalties to British colonialism into question.57 Like in earlier decades, cases where British officers and soldiers acted violently against Indians appalled colonial officials and caused them to worry about the maintenance of Indian loyalties to British rule. Between 1831 and 1832, Bengal Army Lieutenant Wilkinson was convicted three times of beating or threatening the lives of his servants. Wilkinson’s “course of incorrigible misbehaviour,” Bengal officials concluded in their letter to Company directors recommending his dismissal, had mainly been the result of a severe drinking problem. A similar incident occurred a year later in the same army involving Lieutenant James Melville McGregor, who was convicted twice in five years of excessive drunkenness while on duty. In the latter instance, McGregor had not only been unable to properly

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 144

7/14/2011 5:57:16 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

145

perform his duties for a two-day period; while drunk, he had also beaten a sepoy. 58 Later that year, in another case involving a British officer who violently assaulted an Indian, Bengal Army Lieutenant-Colonel Robertson insisted that it was British officers’ moral obligation to protect Indians from such violence. Such conduct, he insisted, was “one of the greatest enemies to our rule and good name that can exist,” particularly as Indians rightly deserved protection from their British rulers. A repeated failure of British colonial and military officials to provide such protection, Robertson feared, would ultimately cause to rise among Indians “a spirit of hostility against us which may take us by surprize [sic] like a volcano, and cause our destruction.” British racial and moral prestige, if not British colonialism’s very survival, he believed, required officers to check behavior among their counterparts that might tarnish colonialism’s broader reputation. Moreover, Robertson also thought such conduct ought to be “contrary to all the feelings . . . which should find a place in the Heart of every British Officer.” Britons in India would only succeed in maintaining an “opinion” among their Indian subjects of colonialism’s moral legitimacy by acting justly toward them.59

Prototypes for the Raj: Proposed Recruitment Alternatives during Late Company India Many colonial officials and Indian tract authors believed that Britons could exert better control over their sepoy armies through maintaining an image of their own moral superiority. But others argued that far more extensive reforms were required. A growing distrust of highcaste sepoys led several Britons in India before 1857 to recommend the wider recruitment of other groups of Indian men such as Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Muslims. In the process, they crafted ideas about these groups’ “martial” nature that would later be used by Raj-era military officials.

From Savages to a Martial Race: “Gurkhas” as an Alternative Source of Sepoys The British rarely thought about “Gurkhas,” or the various peoples living on the other side of the Himalayan mountains from them, prior to the Anglo-Nepal War of 1814–16.60 In the few instances they did,

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 145

7/14/2011 5:57:17 PM

146

Company India, 1765–1858

they described them as “barbaric savages.”61 British attitudes radically shifted, however, as a result of the war between Britain and Nepal, which erupted in 1814 after several years of border disputes over control of the southern foothills of the Himalaya Mountains. Although British arms ultimately proved victorious, the conflict had been more hard-fought than the British had previously experienced in other South Asian wars.62 In the end, the British forced Nepal to cede the foothills and demanded that it accept a permanent resident (or ambassador) at its capital, Kathmandu. But, otherwise, in a rare instance of conciliation by the Company, likely having much to do with the limited fiscal advantages to be gained by annexation, the Company allowed Nepal to remain independent.63 Largely as a result of this hard-fought conflict between Nepalese and British troops, beginning in the late 1810s many Britons began to extol their recent antagonists’ martial qualities. James Baillie Fraser, who was part of a geographic expedition in the late 1810s to map the Himalaya Mountains and Tibet, argued that a Gurkha possessed “in a high degree, almost to excess, the true sense of a soldier’s duty.” His high personal sense of honor was “his most attractive ornament” and something that “raises his character to the highest.” Similarly, Bengal Army Captain Godfrey Charles Mundy described Nepalese soldiers as “the enemies best worth of the British arms in India.” Perhaps the most evocative Gurkha descriptions, however, were written by John Shipp, the only known British soldier-participant in the conflict to write a memoir.64 Writing in sheer admiration of his Nepalese foes during the Battle of Kalunga in 1815, Shipp employed gendered language in his 1829 memoir: The enemy maintained their ground, and fought manfully. I hate a runaway foe; you have no credit for beating them. Those we were now dealing with were no flinchers; but, on the contrary I never saw more steadiness or more bravery exhibited by any set of men in my life. Run they would not; and of death they seemed to have no fear, though their comrades were falling thick around them.

Compared to his “manful” antagonists, Shipp thought of himself as no better than “a novice.”65 These generally favorable descriptions of Gurkhas, like earlier British discourses about high-caste Hindu sepoys, emphasized their bravery, stolidity, and gentlemanliness, and, they anticipated a more affirmative view of their role in the Bengal Army. Beginning in the 1820s several colonial officials and military officers began to advocate

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 146

7/14/2011 5:57:17 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

147

their increased recruitment to lessen high-caste sepoys’ dominance of the army. As early as 1823, only seven years after the conflict had ended between Nepal and Britain, Bengal Army Adjutant-General J.P. Nicol recommended establishing a recruiting depot on the border between the Company’s territories and Nepal.66Mundy, likewise, contended in 1833 that Gurkhas made better soldiers than north Indian high-caste Hindus, despite being “inferior in personal appearance,” largely because they were far less beholden to caste rituals.67 Two decades later, as British anxieties about their tenuous control over the Bengal Army increased, various military officers and colonial officials emphasized Gurkha’s comparative lack of caste consciousness. Reformers such as George Campbell preferred Nepalese men to the Bengal Army’s high-caste soldiers because they “eat whatever they can, and cook however they can, with a most laudable absence of [caste] prejudice.” Similarly, but blunter and more culturally insensitive, Napier recommended that greater numbers of Gurkhas be recruited into the army precisely because they did not place much importance on caste, or for that matter, Hinduism. “A cow would not long live alive with a hungry Goorkha battalion,” he declared. Believing that the British could place greater trust in them, he advocated the immediate recruitment of 30,000 to 40,000 Nepalese men. Indeed, he warned that British colonial rule would remain on shaky foundations without significant numbers of Gurkhas to counterbalance high-caste sepoys.68 However, because the Nepalese government placed severe restrictions on British recruitment of its subjects throughout the Company period and beyond, such proposals were not feasible.

“Bravest of All the Indians:” Sikhs as another Martial Race in British Minds Another group of Indian men whom many Britons considered a “martial race” were Punjab Sikhs. A common theme in many nineteenthcentury British descriptions of Sikhs was that they belonged to one of India’s foremost military classes. For example, Bombay diplomatic official Alexander Burnes argued in 1834 that the “genuine [Sikh] knows no occupation but war and agriculture, and he more affects the one than the other.” He also directly compared Sikhs with ancient Romans, stating that Sikhs were “either soldiers or husbandmen like the Romans of old.” Eight years later, military adventurer, antiquarian, and numismatologist James Lewis, writing under the nom de

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 147

7/14/2011 5:57:17 PM

148

Company India, 1765–1858

plume of “Charles Masson,” also described Sikhs as being “almost exclusively a military and agricultural people.”69 As we have seen, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brahmin and Rajput soldiers were not Indian equivalents of upper-class gentlemen at all despite British beliefs to the contrary. Similarly, a major contradiction existed at the heart of British attempts to characterize Sikhs as natural soldiers. Several Britons, throughout the Company period, emphasized the role of religious oppression by various Mughal emperors in creating the “martial” Sikh.70 In this reading, there was nothing particularly natural about Sikhs becoming a nation of soldiers by the nineteenth century. Rather, Sikhs changed from being a “peaceable race [into] a martial tribe” largely because of relentless religious oppression by the Mughals two centuries previously.71 Other colonial officials and military officers, however, attempted to avoid the issue of whether Sikhs may have always been a “martial” people entirely by focusing on particular traits they deemed manly. Several authors, for instance, praised Sikhs’ hardiness and their capacity to endure much physical fatigue, particularly in battle.72 Other Britons in India, particularly after the 1830s, emphasized that Sikhs were often taller and more muscular than other Indian men.73 Lastly, British authors such as William Francklin and Alexander Burnes contended that Sikhs’ unshaven beards helped “render their appearance imposing and formidable” as well as gave them “a very martial carriage.”74 In arguing that Sikhs’ beards added to their manliness, Francklin and Burnes anticipated a prominent cultural trend among many mid-Victorian British men to wear beards in order to demonstrate their masculinity.75 In imagining Sikhs as an Indian “martial race,” various British authors and colonial officials also pointed to their bravery and courage during battle. For example, both George Forster, a late eighteenthcentury Madras diplomatic official, and Alexander Burnes, writing in the 1830s, praised Sikh soldiers for their bravery, courage, and determination in battle.76 These initial impressions of Sikh soldiers would become more pronounced in various British military memoirs, published during the 1850s, written by participants of the two AngloSikh wars of the previous decade. W.W.W. Humbly, a Royal Lancers captain who fought in the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–46), lauded the resiliency of Sikh antagonists he faced in battle. Likewise, Bengal Army officer Hugo James asserted that Sikhs were “no cowards, and fought like brave men” against the British. They frequently displayed “their contempt of danger” even when greatly outnumbered.77 Indeed,

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 148

7/14/2011 5:57:18 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

149

even though the British won both conflicts, the Sikhs’ strong resistance against the British in both wars prompted praise from several authors during the 1840s and 1850s, who argued that they presented the British with their strongest challenge ever on the subcontinent.78 Several military officers and colonial officials, therefore, advocated Sikhs’ further recruitment to counterbalance high-caste sepoys during the 1850s. In an 1852 minute to Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, Hodgson complained that the Bengal army suffered from a “daily increasing cliqueism” among its high-caste sepoys and recommended extensively recruiting Sikh soldiers before this became an even graver problem. Similarly, George Campbell preferred Sikhs to high-caste Hindus for their lack of caste prejudice. Like Gurkhas but unlike high-caste soldiers, Sikhs fraternized with British soldiers and made an excellent contrast to Brahmin and Rajput sepoys with their “immense paraphernalia of . . . innumerable cooking-pots.” Finally, Campbell contended, Sikhs were braver, easier to subordinate, and, ultimately, more loyal than most high-caste Hindus.79 Unlike in the case of Gurkhas, however, reformers disagreed regarding whether large-scale recruitment of Sikhs was desirable. These doubts stemmed largely from the two back-to-back wars fought between the British and the Sikhs in 1845–46 and, then again, in 1848–49. At the end of the second conflict, Governor-General Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjab, the first of seven annexations of Indian princely states during his eight-year tenure as governor-general under his “doctrine of lapse” that nearly doubled British territorial holdings in India.80 As Bengal Army Major Herbert Edwardes warned in 1851, few Sikhs had neither “forgotten, nor forgiven, their humiliation” at British hands; therefore, they would be a dangerous presence within the Bengal Army if recruited in any large numbers. Likewise, although Napier enthusiastically urged greater Gurkha recruitment into the Bengal Army, he feared relying on Sikhs because of their recent wars against the British. Ultimately, these apprehensions won out and the British did not actively recruit Sikhs until after 1857.81

Muslims as a Third Possible Alternative Source of Sepoys in British Minds Finally, several Britons during this period labeled Muslims as a “martial race.” Like British discourses about north Indian high-caste Hindus and Sikhs, colonial military authors argued that Muslims belonged to a special military class. Thus Francis Buchanan, sent by the Bengal government to survey lands ceded by Mysore after the Third

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 149

7/14/2011 5:57:18 PM

150

Company India, 1765–1858

Anglo-Mysore War in 1799, wrote in his 1807 report that Muslims throughout southern India were generally “accustomed to a military life” and generally did “not readily enter into civil occupations.” Colonial officials also put forth similar ideas throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus, Mountstuart Elphinstone instructed various Bengal Army officers in 1818 to recruit only north Indian Muslims from the “Military Classes” or the “Military Profession” for the newly-formed Poona Auxiliary Horse. Two decades later, Governor-General Lord Auckland intervened to save the unit from being abolished for cost reasons, deeming it more important to continue ingratiating north Indian Muslim rural landed elites to British colonial rule.82 Beyond the idea that Muslims needed, as former conquerors of India, to be treated with some care—even humored—by their British successors, various military officers and authors also believed they made better soldiers. Like several British descriptions of Sikhs, Britons in India contended that Muslims—particularly Rohillas, or Afghans residing in India—were hardier than most other Indians.83 Several authors and colonial officials also compared the physical strength of Muslims with Hindus and contended that Muslims were often stronger and taller. For example, Bengal military officials explained in an 1835 letter to Company directors that they did not need to impose standard “limitations as to age or Height” when recruiting irregular cavalry units in the Bengal Army because these units already were “generally composed of young well formed Mussulmen” from northern India.84 Finally, various authors such as Fitzclarence and Sir John Malcolm praised Muslim soldiers’ bravery. Indeed, Malcolm claimed that military valor was “a common quality” among Muslims in India generally.85 Largely because several military officers and authors generally considered Indian Muslims to be a “military class,” as well as physically stronger and braver than most other Indians, several Britons in India throughout the Company period also advocated their extensive recruitment. Unlike Gurkhas and Sikhs, however, whose recruitment military reformers advocated during the 1840s and 1850s primarily to diversify the Bengal Army, many colonial and military officials urged greater Muslim recruitment in earlier decades to ensure north Indian peace and tranquility. Thus, Malcolm warned Governor-General Lord Wellesley in June 1805 that unless “some plan is adopted to attach [the] . . . unemployed men of the Military Classes” in northern India, particularly with the defeat of the Marathas during the Second

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 150

7/14/2011 5:57:18 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

151

Anglo-Maratha War (1803–04), “they will again flock to the first standard that is reared against us.”86 Only through recruiting Rohillas into irregular cavalry battalions, Malcolm insisted, would Company efforts to “improve the Country” and to “transform a rude and turbulent race of men into peaceable and useful subjects” be successful.87 Malcolm had a sympathetic ear in Wellesley who himself argued two months previously for a similar policy. The governor-general insisted that it was incumbent upon the British to “give [military] employment” to various north Indian Muslim soldiers, particularly those “formerly . . . engaged in the military service of the Native powers.” Only by enlisting these soldiers would they remain loyal to British rule and not stir up trouble.88 Others worried, however, about recruiting large numbers of Muslim soldiers precisely because they were too turbulent, if ultimately, not trustworthy enough. For example, in three letters written in 1796 to Company directors, Bengal officials warned they were keeping “a watchful eye” on various Rohillas in northern India on account of their previous behavior, which they considered underhanded and duplicitous. Although “reduced in Numbers,” these Rohillas were still “sufficiently numerous to be formidable” adversaries. Likewise, British Army General Sir Samuel Auchmuty, in discussing the Madras Army (in which, by this time, Muslims comprised about a third of its sepoys), argued in 1813 that it was “very desirable to discourage, in some measure, the recruiting of Mussulmans.” He also maintained that it would be prudent “take care that a due proportion of Hindoos are promoted to the Commissioned Ranks” to act as a “sufficient Counterpoise of Hindoo Strength to remove the apprehension of Mahommedan Intrigue.”89 By later decades, however, as several colonial officials and military officers began to worry more about caste and Brahmin and Rajput sepoys’ dominance over the Bengal Army, reformers gave differing reasons for increasing Muslim recruitment. Some now desired greater Muslim recruitment so that they could serve as counterpoises in the army to high-caste Hindus, if not replace them outright. For example, Hodgson argued that instead of maintaining an average of about 150 Muslim sepoys per regiment, Bengal Army officers should strive to increase that number to around 250 in order to create “a more politic equilibrium” within the army as a whole. Similarly, in addition to urging the recruitment of more Sikh and Gurkha soldiers, Campbell also advocated enlisting greater numbers of Muslims in the Bengal Army, arguing they would provide a safe “counterpoise to the present sepoys.”90

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 151

7/14/2011 5:57:18 PM

152

Company India, 1765–1858

Likewise, Jacob advocated greater Muslim recruitment, considering northern Indian and Punjabi Muslims particularly to be “the very best men for our army,” being as they were uniformly “very bold, brave, strong, well-made active men.” More importantly, though, for someone who perhaps more thoroughly attacked sepoys’ caste prejudices than any other British military author during this period, Jacob praised Indian Muslims for having “scarcely more prejudices of religion, &c., than Englishmen.” In this major respect, Jacob insisted, they were “superior beings” to high-caste Hindus, “whatever the Bengal officers may fancy.”91 Ultimately, though, the British did not alter their recruitment policies (such as they were) to increase the number of Muslim soldiers. The persistence of fears that, as recent conquerors of India who were only recently supplanted by the British, Muslims ultimately could not be trusted was largely responsible for this. This argument seems to have started initially as a missionary and Evangelical discourse. Both Anglican chaplain Claudius Buchanan and Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman, for example, urged early nineteenth-century British colonial authorities not to trust Muslims. Muslims, Buchanan feared, could not bend “humbly to Christian dominion.” Several decades later, fellow missionary Ferdinand de Wilton Ward likewise warned that Indian Muslims generally hated and resented the British. Many mutinies and disturbances within the Company’s sepoy armies, he claimed, had been “traced to Mussulman craftiness and hate.”92 In later decades, various Britons in India warned of similar threats posed by Muslims to British colonial rule. Edward Parry Thornton, for example, reminded readers of his 1835 colonial reform tract of the role that Muslim soldiers in the Madras Army played in fomenting the 1806 Vellore Mutiny. Thornton insisted that Britons had to vigilantly protect themselves against Muslims or any combination of Muslims and disaffected Hindus. Elsewhere in his writings, as we have already seen, Thornton had denounced caste for interfering with proper military duty and had criticized Bengal Army officers for tolerating caste rituals that undermined military discipline. He argued, though, that further recruitment of Muslim soldiers into Company armies would endanger British colonial rule. Several other military officers and colonial officials joined Thornton in perceiving Muslims to be enough of a threat to Britain’s Indian empire to squash the idea of further recruiting them into the Bengal Army before 1857. As a result, despite various calls by reformers for changing the Bengal Army’s recruitment practices, other Britons in India favored leaving

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 152

7/14/2011 5:57:18 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

153

things well enough alone, fearful of the risks involved in instituting major changes.93

Conclusion Ultimately, Buchanan, Marshman, and Thornton, among other Britons in India, mistrusted the wrong group of Indian soldiers. In the early morning hours of May 10, 1857, high-caste Hindu sepoys stationed at the Bengal Army cantonment of Meerut, some forty miles northwest of Delhi, mutinied. They protested the Enfield rifle’s introduction in their regiment and the harsh punishment meted out the day before by their military commander to eighty-five soldiers who refused to use the new rifle. Rumors had spread among sepoys over the preceding months up and down Bengal Army cantonments that the British were intending to rob them of their caste status (or religious status in the case of pious Muslims) by coating the rifle’s cartridges with beef or pork fat. The Enfield rifle’s indroduction, many Bengal Army sepoys had convinced themselves, was merely part of Britons’ much larger plot to Christianize them. The Sepoy Rebellion, which erupted in earnest a day later when mutinous soldiers from Meerut and other cantonments captured Delhi, the symbolic capital of India, swept across much of northern India in a matter of weeks. Shaking British colonial rule to its very foundations, it was British colonialism’s greatest crisis prior to Mohandas Gandhi’s 1930 salt march. As such, it resulted in several significant changes in British imperial rule. Blamed for its incompetent handling of the Rebellion, the Company was abolished a year later. Although the British government had been involved in colonial administration in some form or another from at least 1773, when parliament passed Lord North’s Regulating Act, it now assumed direct responsibility for governing India. A parliamentary commission was also established (the Peel Commission) to investigate what went wrong and to recommend various changes to the composition of Britain’s various sepoy armies. The Sepoy Rebellion was not entirely responsible for many British racial attitudes during the subsequent Raj about their sepoy armies nor as sharp a break as has sometimes been argued. Indeed, this chapter has examined several underlying continuities between late Company India and the early British Raj. Granted, there was very little continuity between the periods in one sense: the post-1857 Bengal Army looked nothing like its predecessor. Sixty-nine of its

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 153

7/14/2011 5:57:18 PM

154

Company India, 1765–1858

seventy-four regiments either mutinied in 1857 or were disbanded by British officers to prevent further rebellion. In reconstructing the Bengal Army after the Sepoy Rebellion ended, the British shifted its geographic focus from the Gangetic plain of north-central India to the Punjab in the northwest, recruiting Sikhs and Punjabi Muslims in place of Brahmins and Rajputs from districts in Bihar and Awadh along the Ganges River.94 There is also not much doubt about the Sepoy Rebellion’s highly traumatic nature for the British, particularly during the spring and early summer of 1857. Within a matter of weeks, nearly the entire Bengal Army, numbering over 135,000 men, mutinied; at many cantonments and stations, soldiers and other Indians turned on the British, killing thousands of their British officers, frequently their wives and children, and, indeed, in some cases, anyone with a white face. A few months later, General Neill and others seeking retributive justice killed considerably more Indians, sometimes in truly horrific ways such as blowing them out of cannons. The Sepoy Rebellion forever scarred British-Indian relations for the remaining near-century of British colonialism.95 Again, prior to 1857, it is hard to imagine instances of British soldiers bringing guns with them to Sunday services in case of another Indian mutiny as British Army private Frank Richards reported in his memoir was the common early twentiethcentury practice.96 Nevertheless, by focusing so much attention on the Sepoy Rebellion’s various ruptures, scholars have generally missed underlying connections across the events of 1857. The Bengal Army’s post-1857 recruitment strategies, for one, were not entirely “historical accidents” or ad hoc responses to the exigencies of the crisis in 1857.97 Rather, as this chapter has aimed to show, lacking much trust in high-caste Hindu sepoys’ long-term loyalties to British colonial rule, various reformers from the 1820s onward advocated the wider recruitment of Gurkhas, Sikhs, or Muslims to counterbalance the army’s large numbers of Brahmin and Rajput sepoys. In their search for more reliable Indian soldiers, they put forth many of the key ideas that would later become cobbled together as the British Raj’s martial races policy. This is further borne out in various official papers presented as evidence to the Peel Commission, some written by the same individuals who had most warned of the dangers of caste in the Bengal Army in the decade or two before 1857. John Jacob, for instance, strenuously urged British military officials to completely ignore caste when recruiting soldiers. Indian soldiers ought to be judged only according to “their power

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 154

7/14/2011 5:57:19 PM

British Fears about Losing Control

155

and willingness to perform their duties as soldiers,” not according to their caste backgrounds. Likewise, Herbert Edwardes attacked caste in his testimony. The narrow recruitment policy of the pre-1857 Bengal Army and its consequent dominance by high-caste Hindus, he contended, had nearly resulted in the overthrow of British colonial rule in 1857.98 Other military officers testifying before the commission advocated the total exclusion of Brahmins from the army, again echoing arguments made by Company-era reformers. Bengal Army Major-General Sir Hugh Rose insisted that the British would never be able to exert control over their sepoy armies so long as “clever” and “fanatical Brahmins” continued to be recruited. Bengal Army Colonel Burn conceded that Brahmin sepoys had proven to be excellent soldiers in the past and that many had stayed loyal during the Rebellion. At the same time, however, he contended that Brahmins needed to be completely dismissed from the service because “none of the old leaven should be left to impregnate the new mass.” Burns echoed pre-1857 reformers in recommending that the British turn to other “fighting classes” of northern and western India such as Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Muslims from the Punjab to replace the large numbers of Brahmins in the Bengal Army.99 But just as late Victorian India’s martial races policy has an older and far more complicated history than most scholars have suggested, so too did British racial arrogance toward their sepoys—toward Indians in general. British colonial officials and military officers argued that British colonial rule depended to a great deal upon the continued loyalty of sepoys. But these soldiers needed British guidance and leadership. In short, already by 1857, Britons in India were largely the “prisoners of their own rhetoric.”100 Up to the very moment of outbreak, some British colonial and military officials believed that all was well within the Bengal Army; that sepoys were gentlemen and men of honor who remained loyal to British colonial rule. Others, however, severely doubted whether this was the still the case, believing caste to denote religion rather than social status, and Brahmin sepoys to be a sinister presence within the Bengal Army rather than chivalrous aristocrats who could safely be relied upon. But even reformers believed that the various problems they perceived with the Bengal Army’s management could be rectified. British officers and soldiers would simply have to act more as paragons of personal virtue. Brahmin and Rajput sepoys could simply be replaced with more reliable Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Muslims. It is important to note, though,

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 155

7/14/2011 5:57:19 PM

156

Company India, 1765–1858

that few Britons in India actually concerned themselves with their sepoys’ growing grievances toward British colonial rule or saw much need to. Instead, they almost uniformly and arrogantly assumed that as long as British prestige was maintained, Indians and Britons alike would all know their place and the colonial order of things would continue on much as before. It thus came as a shock to many British officers and colonial officials when regiment after regiment in the Bengal Army refused to use the new Enfield rifle then being implemented in British military forces worldwide. Despite proclaiming again and again that their empire in India was one of “opinion,” few Britons in India actually expected Indians to exercise that opinion or to do so in such a violent manner. In the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion, much would change, not least of which the colonial regime. Britons would never quite trust Indians again. But while all this is true, both in terms of embryonic martial races thinking and in a general racial arrogance, British colonial and military officials during late Company India bequeathed a dubious inheritance to their British Raj successors.

9780230116931_07_ch05.indd 156

7/14/2011 5:57:19 PM

Conclusion

Such a blow to the prestige of British power and supremacy has not yet been struck in the whole history of British India. —Rev. Alexander Duff, Presbyterian missionary in India (1857) 1

The Sepoy or “Great” Rebellion of 1857–58 came as a total surprise to many Britons, both in India and at home. Within a matter of weeks, British authority across whole swathes of northern India simply crumbled. In many places, the rebellion turned personal as mutinous Bengal Army sepoys killed their British commanding officers, their wives and children, and, indeed, in some cases, any European whether a Company employee or not. Rumors, in some cases, of entire European populations of cantonments and stations being murdered struck fear into many Britons’ minds and hearts that spring and early summer. Alexander Duff, a prominent Presbyterian missionary who resided in Calcutta during 1857, wrote frantically to Dr. Tweedie, the Convener of the Free Church of Scotland’s Foreign Mission Committee, at the height of the crisis in late June about the precariousness of British life in India. “Formerly, of all life in India, the safest was British life” but now “the most insecure of all life is British life. At this moment, British life, undefended by walls and cannon, is not worth half a second’s purchase!”2 A few months later, as the British recaptured Delhi and various Indian princes stayed loyal, it became clear that the rebellion would fail. As fear for British lives turned into raw anger about the “magic circle” of British power over India having “been rudely broken”—as Robert Montgomery Martin put it—various Britons urged the need for revenge and retribution.3 A former colonial official, writing to The Times that summer under the strange name of “Indophilus,” stressed the need for retributive justice. Although he argued that the British needed to do a much better job in attending to “the public

9780230116931_08_con.indd 157

7/14/2011 5:57:23 PM

158

Company India, 1765–1858

opinion of the great body of the people of India,” he also contended that Indians needed to be impressed with British racial superiority and privilege. Not only was it necessary that “the feeling of the personal inviolability of the English race in India” be restored, but also that Britons’ “righteous indignation” at the wanton murder and cruelty “be appeased.” Britons would only find it possible to rule India with “a handful of foreigners” after Indians were impressed, without any doubt, as to British racial dominance.4 To be sure, alternative British and Indian voices urged restraint in the Sepoy Rebellion’s immediate aftermath. An Indian author calling himself “A Hindu,” for example, sought to reassure his British audience that the revolt had not unduly shaken British prestige. The events of 1857, he claimed, consisted merely of a few military mutinies among some soldiers; they had little popular support. Urging Britons to refrain from violent reprisals against Indians, he insisted that it would be folly to suppose they could retain India by bayonets alone. Rather, drawing upon the “empire of opinion” governance idea, he contended that it was only Britons’ “beneficent moral influence” that convinced Indians to remain loyal to British rule.5 Perhaps more influential was William Howard Russell, the famed Crimean and American Civil War correspondent for The Times; his newspaper sent him to India to chronicle the Sepoy Rebellion’s latter half. In his India diary, published in 1860, Russell asked: “If we, who are the governors of the people, do not govern ourselves and protect the people, what redress have they, and what have we to expect?” Russell was shocked at the social apartheid that he witnessed up and down India. British areas of cantonment towns Russell visited took up four-fifths of the available space. Traveling bungalows along major roads were being reserved only for whites although in theory open to all. Britons and Indians alike in Calcutta, Russell reported, were taking in the night air at Garden Reach without saluting one another. Russell insisted that different kinds of rulers were needed in India, ones who did not delude themselves into believing that they ruled through the “opinion” of supposedly morally inferior Indians instead of “on [their] sufferance and by force.” India needed rulers who were able (and, most importantly, willing) to bridge the vast gulf of difference between themselves and their Indian subjects.6 On the whole, few Britons in India were willing either then or subsequently to take Russell’s advice. John William Kaye conceded that the British had largely deluded themselves before 1857 into thinking that “if they mean well they must secure [Indians’] confidence” in

9780230116931_08_con.indd 158

7/14/2011 5:57:24 PM

Conclusion

159

their rule. Britons had been woefully out of touch and had not understood the true opinion of their Indian subjects. But gone now was his earlier enthusiasm for liberal reform. Indeed, Kaye now adopted a largely Burkean perspective. Criticizing Lord Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse, by which the former governor-general justified the absorption of several princely states into British India during the decade before the Rebellion, Kaye asked what was so strange about men liking their old forms of government, their old customs, even “with all their imperfections and corruptions about them,” over ones the British imposed on them.7 Various other Britons after 1857 also admitted, like Kaye, that the British in India were dangerously out of touch with their Indian subjects. Duff argued that the gulf between district officers and military officers and “the degraded, cowering masses around them” was so great that the British official was often the last to know what was really going on in his district.8 And colonial reformer Henry Richard contended that British officials were frequently trapped within the world of colonial rhetoric, resting their various assertions about India “not upon any definite acquaintance with facts, but upon mere assumption and hearsay.”9 Yet at the same time, most British authors in the Sepoy Rebellion’s immediate aftermath (with the possible exception of Russell) thought it inevitable that Britons remain strangers from their Indian subjects. Indians, they felt, never again ought to be trusted. “Throughout all ages,” Duff baldly asserted, “the Asiatic has been noted for his duplicity, cunning, hypocrisy, treachery; and coupled with this . . . his capacity of secresy and concealment.”10 *

*

*

Christopher Herbert has recently written that Britons, both at home and in India, experienced the Sepoy Rebellion as “a profoundly traumatic cultural crisis,” one that opened up a deep “psychological and spiritual wound” in the British psyche that never quite healed.11 Historians have generally taken the event to be a sharp break in colonial rule, responsible for much of the racial arrogance, fear, and distrust of Indians evident during the British Raj after 1858.12 Certainly, as can be seen from above, several Britons at the time and subsequently regarded the event this way. But, at the same time, as this book has argued, this is far too simple. There were important antecedents during much of the preceding Company period of British colonial rule,

9780230116931_08_con.indd 159

7/14/2011 5:57:24 PM

160

Company India, 1765–1858

starting with the frequent colonial obsession, from the 1790s onward, with the maintenance of British prestige in the “opinion” of Indians. Rather than base its rule on anything approaching popular consent—or our modern-day ideas of public opinion—the Company established an authoritarian form of rule over its Indian territories between the 1790s and the 1850s that expressly denied Indians substantive participation in their own government. Instead, Britons in India drew upon an older, more personal political culture in Britain then beginning to break down under the pressures of industrialization and the gradual rise of democracy and political parties. They generally sought to attain deference and loyalty from their Indian subjects by presenting an image of British moral and racial prestige. Misconduct by covenanted servants, military officers, and soldiers— the most direct “face” of empire—thus mattered greatly to colonial elites. Only by leading exemplary moral lives in public, colonial elites asserted over and over again throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, would these British imperial functionaries be able to maintain their Indian subjects’ loyalty and affection. Stephen Patterson has recently written for the late nineteenth-century British Raj, that “the Anglo-Indian seemed forever to be on stage playing a role” and that “the naked exercise of power [was performed] on a daily basis with Indians and Anglo-Indians as the potential audience, who were both witness and judge of the defining characteristics of the individual.”13 Although Patterson regards 1857 as a major turning point in bringing into being a cult of honor among British imperialists and he downplays much continuity between Company India and the British Raj, it has been one of this book’s major arguments that this cult of honor and imperial prestige also largely existed before the Sepoy Rebellion. Another important Company antecedent to the British Raj’s political culture can be found in many British colonial elites’ general distrust of Indian bureaucrats and sepoys. In the civil service, the desire to cleanse the empire of its various eighteenth-century abuses, together with the belief that “every native of Hindustan is corrupt,” led GovernorGeneral Lord Cornwallis to fire Indian revenue and judicial officials in 1793 and ban them from belonging to the covenanted service.14 Almost four decades later, as Cornwallis’s racial ban led to significant case backlogs and delays of revenue settlements, Governor-General Lord Bentinck reversed course and partially Indianized the colonial bureaucracy. But, despite often being couched in humane terms as a policy that would give Indian clerks “some share” in the government

9780230116931_08_con.indd 160

7/14/2011 5:57:24 PM

Conclusion

161

of their own country, Bentinck’s partial Indianization of the colonial bureaucracy ultimately aimed at maintaining British colonial prestige above all else. Leading colonial officials such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Kaye, John Stuart Mill, William Wilberforce Bird, and others, continually belittled Indians for not being quite moral enough to join the covenanted service. In the process, they left a nasty racial legacy for the British Raj, which would increasingly begin to backfire on the British from the decade of the 1880s onward. The colonial military operated somewhat differently than the bureaucracy in that the British initially trusted high-caste sepoys to a greater degree than any other Indian subordinate group whom they relied upon to rule India. At first believing caste to be analogous to class, Britons during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the Bengal Army’s predominantly Brahmin and Rajput sepoys as rough equivalents of upper-class gentlemen. After the 1820s, though, under the influence of Protestant missionaries, Britons in India began to interpret caste as more of a religious phenomenon; as such, Brahmins and Rajputs no longer seemed to be gentlemen sepoys who could be safely relied upon; rather, they came to be regarded as religious fanatics who could no longer be fully trusted. Before the outbreak of the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857, colonial and military officials were divided, however, over how to proceed. Several suggested that Britons could exert greater control over the Bengal Army by its officers comporting themselves to a higher ethical conduct, while others argued that more root-and-branch reforms were needed, particularly in the form of wider recruitment policies. Although the Sepoy Rebellion ultimately brought many of these concerns into fruition, this book has aimed to show important Company-era precedents in terms of a gradual and general loss of trust among several British colonial officials and military officers toward sepoys. It has also sought to trace many of the ideas behind the British Raj’s martial races policy back into the Company period. In its focus on British colonial prestige and proper conduct, this book has also challenged existing understandings of religion and morality under colonial rule and the interaction between missionaries and Company officials. During the same era that Britons obsessed about Indian women who were committing suicide and worried about the strange cult of “thugs,” they also worried about Indian bureaucrats who supposedly lied and engaged in corruption without scruple and Indian soldiers who placed the laws of caste above the regulations of the Bengal Army. In short, beliefs in universal Indian moral depravity

9780230116931_08_con.indd 161

7/14/2011 5:57:24 PM

162

Company India, 1765–1858

were widespread. They were espoused not only by missionaries and their Evangelical supporters back in Britain, they were also omnipresent among colonial officials. Thus, despite instances during the first half of the nineteenth century when missionaries and the Company came into conflict with one another, one can detect greater instances of agreement between missionaries and Company men than has heretofore been acknowledged.15 Finally, this book has intervened in wider debates about the construction of nineteenth-century British manliness. What, indeed, was the ultimate impact of colonial anxieties about British misbehavior in India upon broader construction of British manliness during this period? This question is important because British gender historians have generally failed to relate constructions of British masculinity (and femininity) to the reality that Britain was coming to possess a large territorial empire during the nineteenth century. With the important exception of Catherine Hall, who has examined the impact of Jamaica on British gender formation, leading historians of British gender formation have taken a more insular approach.16 They have generally ignored imperial developments in favor of Evangelicalism and early industrialization as key factors for why British masculinity was heavily imbued with moral concerns throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. By contrast, I would conclude that governance anxieties among colonial officials in India offer an equally compelling explanation for why British masculinity in India was deeply imbued with concerns about moral conduct throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. From Edmund Burke to Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, colonial officials and authors of Indian tracts alike agreed that Britain would only maintain control over India if the agents of empire earned the deference and loyalty of Indians through proper moral conduct. Ultimately, this was a grand delusion and it almost cost the British their Indian empire in 1857. In neither the mass revolt of Bengal Army sepoys nor in the broader insurrection that soon followed and which swept throughout much of northern India did British district officers, military officers, or soldiers’ personal morality much matter. British colonial rule, as Sir Thomas Munro and others surmised, ultimately rested on little more than the Company’s capacity to coerce obedience and loyalty from its Indian subjects through superior military might.17 The British, shaken by the realization that their “empire of opinion” was ultimately little more than an illusion, took steps after 1857, such as nearly doubling the British troop presence in India and

9780230116931_08_con.indd 162

7/14/2011 5:57:24 PM

Conclusion

163

banning sepoys from serving in artillery units as well as in all major forts, to ensure that their authority would never again be so directly challenged.18 As Stephen Patterson has argued, many Britons during the subsequent British Raj also liked to claim they were nothing like their Company predecessors, whom they now imagined as uniformly corrupt, profit-driven, and not at all committed to the empire and its welfare.19 The truth of the matter is far more complicated. Indeed, whether it be a pronounced colonial obsession with the maintenance of British racial prestige, or a general mistrust of Indian subordinates, Company India, rather than the Sepoy Rebellion per se, “made” the British Raj.

9780230116931_08_con.indd 163

7/14/2011 5:57:24 PM

Notes

Introduction 1. Nicholas Dirks has calculated that the average conversion rate between British pounds and Indian sicca rupees was about 1:8 in the nineteenth century. Dirks, Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 233. 2. Minto Minute, September 11, 1813, Extract Bengal Political Consultations, September 17, 1813; Minute by Alexander Seton, Member of the Bengal Council, October 1, 1813, Extract Bengal Political Consultations, October 1, 1813; both enclosed in Political Letter from Bengal to the Court of Directors, October 2, 1813, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/453/11102. 3. Adam Minute, April 22, 1834, Extract Madras Judicial Consultations, June 3, 1834, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1480/58265. 4. Home and Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 2 of 1851 from Governor-General Lord Dalhousie to Court of Directors, August 30, 1851, BL/APAC/IOR/L/ P&J/3/144, f. 441. 5. John Jacob, Views and Opinions of Brigadier-General John Jacob (1851; London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858, 2nd ed.), 127, 128. 6. Nugent Minute, June 20, 1813, Extract Bengal Military Consultations, September 25, 1813, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/456/11119. 7. Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth-Century India (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 62, 87. 8. Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001), 188. 9. Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 287. 10. Many scholars have written on this issue. See, for example: P.J. Marshall, “A Free though Conquering People”: Britain and Asia in the Eighteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003 reprint of inaugural lecture in the Rhodes Chair of Imperial History delivered at King’s College, London, 1981); C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 8–9; David Cannadine,

9780230116931_09_not.indd 165

7/14/2011 5:56:48 PM

166

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

Notes Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See, particularly: Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript of Subordinate Groups (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). The phrase “dialogic interaction” is Eugene Irschick’s. Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Also see: Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Bengal: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). C.A. Bayly Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India. The C.A. Bayly Omnibus (1998; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009 ed.). Jon Wilson, Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), chaps. 2 and 4. For a very different interpretation of British political culture during this period, but one that again focuses on the high importance of “opinion,” see J.W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chap. 3. Thompson, Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, and Cal Winslow, eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pantheon, 1976). For more on the role of “honor” and “trust” in Burke’s political thought, see: Abraham Kriegel, “Edmund Burke and the Quality of Honor,” Albion 12:4 (1980): 337–49; Richard Bourke, “Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63:1 (2000): 453–71; Frederick Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old

9780230116931_09_not.indd 166

7/14/2011 5:56:49 PM

Notes

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

167

South (1982; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 2nd ed.); Stephen Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor in British India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). This book profoundly disagrees with Patterson, however, in his frequent allusions to the preceding entire Company period, all the way up to 1857, as a time period without honor dominated by men of “questionable ethics and hazy morals.” (1). Rather, Company policymakers made concerted efforts from the 1790s onward to reform British behavior in India and worried that lapses in conduct among British covenanted servants, military officers, and soldiers might endanger British colonial prestige as well as the loyalty of Indians. See, for example: Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honor and Social Status,” in Honor and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J.G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), 22, 37; Pitt-Rivers, “Honor,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences ed. David Sills. 18 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1968–79), VI: 503, 506; Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 21. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 14, 34. On the civil service: Robert Eric Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 7; on the military: Peers, Between Mars and Mammon, 257; and David Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1994), 133. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, 3. On the social fussiness of dinner parties during the British Raj, see Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor, 100–06; on the British obsession with Indians taking their shoes off when in their presence, see Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 43, 133–34, 162. Cohn shows that British colonial officials regarded Indian shoe wearing in their presence as a sign of disrespect, even though they did not have a custom of removing their shoes at home. For Indians, on the other hand, “the proper wearing of slippers or shoes stood for a whole difference in cosmology” (162). J.E. Lendon, Empire of Honor: The Art of Government in the Roman World (1997; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 2nd ed.), 25, 26. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 372. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 263. Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Martin Wiener, Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chaps. 5–6. Beginning in 1674, Company employees appointed directly to their posts by Company directors (versus the far larger numbers of “uncovenanted” employees) were required upon commencement of their employment to sign covenants protecting the Company from financial embarrassment, hence the origin of the term. For example, holding an “Imperial Assemblage” in Delhi in 1877, at great expense, to announce the cronwing of Queen Victoria as Empress of India,

9780230116931_09_not.indd 167

7/14/2011 5:56:49 PM

168

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

Notes all while a major famine in southern India was occurring. Bernard S. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 632–82. Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor, chap. 2, part. pp. 83–84. Alas, Patterson does not interrogate effectively why members of the ICS in the late nineteenth century would be making such assertions. See, for example: Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor, which heavily implies that British colonial India before 1857 was a world without honor, and Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), which contends that British martial races thinking was largely a product of the Sepoy Rebellion and the period after 1857. Coming at the issue from the other end, scholars of early Company India such as William Dalrymple and Maya Jasanoff have bought into the notion of a sharp break occurring in 1857 as a result of the Rebellion to argue that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a period when close British-Indian social interaction was possible and, indeed, prevalent. Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (New York: Viking, 2002); Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750– 1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005), part. pp. 45–88. For a good recent corrective to this argument, see Wilson, Domination of Strangers. On the former issue, see: Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); C.J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833 (Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 1996); Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720– 1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 3; Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and, although focused on the Dutch East Indies, Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Regarding prostitution, see: Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj; Sumanta Bannerjee, Under the Raj: Prostitution in Colonial Bengal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003). See, for example: Carl Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York,” AHR 113:1 (2008): 48–71; Ghosh, Sex and the Family; E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001); Marshall, “White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company,” MAS 31 (1997): 89–108. On “independence” and “disciplined self-control’s” importance to “middling-sort” notions of manliness during the “long eighteenth century,” see: Margaret Hunt, Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Karen Harvey, “History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800,” JBS 44:2 (2005):

9780230116931_09_not.indd 168

7/14/2011 5:56:49 PM

Notes

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

169

301; Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century,” in OHBE Companion Series: Gender and Empire ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 18–19, 22. Historians are divided regarding whether the upper or the middle classes was most responsible for constructing British masculinity during this period. For scholars who give primacy to a continually reforming aristocracy, see: David Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 11, chaps. 5–6; and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 4. For scholars who contend that moral manliness was more of a middle-class ideology used to criticize and condemn the ruling order for being morally unfit to continue ruling Britain, see Hunt, Middling Sort; and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Other historians have pointed out the extent to which moral manliness was more of an ideal than something actually realizable for many men, particularly in the face of early nineteenth-century industrialization. See, for example: Dror Wahrman, “‘Middle-Class’ Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria,” JBS 32 (1993): 396–432; and John Tosh, Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 10. See, for example, the 2005 symposium on masculinity in British history since 1500 in the Journal of British Studies. Aside from sporadic mentions of the empire in John Tosh’s “Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914,” 330–42, there is hardly any mention of the empire’s impact upon British manliness over the past five centuries. JBS 44:2 (2005): 274–362. See, particularly: Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; and Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). For the upper-class: Randolph Trumbach, Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978); Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); for the middle class: Hunt, Middling Sort; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; Tosh, Man’s Place; for the working class: Anna Clark, Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). With regard to the history of British families in the imperial setting, see: Ghosh, Sex and the Family; and Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

9780230116931_09_not.indd 169

7/14/2011 5:56:49 PM

170

Notes

41. Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, “What Have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500– 1950,” JBS 44:2 (2005): 276. 42. Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 101; Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 109–10; Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 101, 106. 43. In this way, I am corroborating the findings of Uday Singh Mehta, who argues that metaphors of childhood and childhood development feature prominently in nineteenth-century British liberal justifications of imperialism. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 14, 31. 44. Tillman Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 1. 45. Gender historians have long noted the deep connections between ideologies of masculinity and political power. Such ideologies, many have argued, often functioned (and continue to function) to justify the full or partial exclusion of various groups of men (and women) from the wider body politic. See, for example: Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (London: Routledge, 1999); George Mosse, Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit. 46. On this idea more broadly: Francis Hutchins, Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 47. In using the word “discourse,” this book somewhat follows Michel Foucault’s idea of language constituting a system of knowledge geared toward reinforcing prevailing ideologies and thought practices through constant reiteration. Approaching language in this manner examines, as Stuart Hall contends, “not only how language and representation produce meaning, but how the knowledge which a particular discourse produces connects with power, regulates conduct, makes up or constructs identities and subjectivities, and defines the way certain things are represented, thought about, practiced and studied . . . and how they are deployed at particular times, in particular places.” Quoted from Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2000), 12. At the same time, this book rejects the tendency in Foucault’s and other poststructuralist thinkers’ thought to deny or minimize human agency and to place that agency in the discourse itself, a move that I believe is fundamentally ahistorical. It is important always to realize that, however often British imperialists were “prisoners of their own rhetoric,” to quote E.P. Thompson, they still chose to think about India and Indians in certain ways and not others, usually to maximize political and economic benefit for British colonial rule. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 263. 48. Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

9780230116931_09_not.indd 170

7/14/2011 5:56:49 PM

Notes

171

49. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Edwin Burrows and Michael Wallace, “American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation,” in Perspectives in American History, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), IV: 167–302; Melvin Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth: Familial Ideology and the Beginnings of the American Republic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 50. Cannadine, Ornamentalism; Bayly, Imperial Meridian. 51. For the American Revolution, see: Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims; Burrows and Wallace, “American Revolution”; Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth. For the French Revolution, see: Lynn Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Jeffrey Merrick, “Fathers and Kings: Patriarchalism and Absolutism in Eighteenth-Century French Politics,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 308 (1993): 281–303. 52. Several scholars have noted the broad importance of paternalism in the British Empire’s development and expansion. See, for example: Bayly, Imperial Meridian; Cannadine, Ornamentalism. For studies which specifically focus on paternalism’s role in structuring early colonial India, see: T.H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792–1818: The Origins of “The Munro System” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Stein, Thomas Munro; Seema Alavi, Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 3; Sudipta Sen, “Liberal Empire and Illiberal Trade: The Political Economy of ‘Responsible Government’ in Early British India,” in New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Wilson (2004), 136–54. 53. The list of scholars who have noted how racialized others were frequently equated with children throughout Western empires during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is extensive. See, particularly: Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 150; Benedict Carton, Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); Syed Alatas, Myth of the Lazy Native (London: Cass, 1977); Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; V.G. Kiernan, Lords of Human Kind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), 243. The phrase “tutelary colonialism” is Bianca Premo’s. Premo, Children of the Father King, 12. 54. Frykenberg, Guntur District; Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Anand Yang, Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

9780230116931_09_not.indd 171

7/14/2011 5:56:49 PM

172

Notes

55. Refer to note 13 above. 56. See, particularly: Dalrymple, White Mughals; Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, 45–88. To be sure, several other recent historians of Company India have disputed this interpretation, showing in various ways how the British, from almost the very beginnings of colonialism, sought to remain culturally, racially, and socially distinct from the Indians they ruled over. See, particularly: Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered”; Ghosh, Sex and Family; Marshall, “White Town of Calcutta”; Wilson, Domination of Strangers. 57. In addition to several of the citations contained in the previous note, on the issue of a major shift occurring in Western notions of race around ca. 1800, see particularly: Roxann Wheeler, Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Colin Kidd, Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For scholars of colonial India who also argue that a major shift occurs in race at this moment, see: Nechtman, Nabobs; Shruti Kapila, “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond, c 1770–1880,” MAS 41:3 (2007): 471–513; Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), part. chap. 4; Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class; and on the British Empire more generally: David Killingray, “‘A Good West Indian, a Good African, and, in Short, a Good Britisher’: Black and British in a Colour-Conscious Empire, 1760–1950,” JICH 36:3 (2008): 363–81; Kathleen Wilson, Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003). Other scholars disagree, following scholars such as Nancy Stepan or Ivan Hannaford who have argued that a more significant shift occurred in race with the emergence of Darwinism. Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982); Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For key examples of scholars who regard the mid-nineteenth century—rather than the turn of the nineteenth century—as a key moment in the articulation of British colonial racism in India, see: Peter Robb, ed., Concept of Race in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap 1; Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor; Streets, Martial Races. 58. Trautmann, Aryans and British India; Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002). 59. Dirks, Scandal of Empire. 60. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 263. 61. John Studholme Hodgson, Opinions on the Indian Army (1850; London: William H. Allen & Co., 1857, 2nd ed.), 59.

1 Colonial Beginnings, ca. 1600–1793 1. Edmund Burke, “Speech on Opening of Impeachment,” February 15, 1788, WSEB, VI: 283.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 172

7/14/2011 5:56:50 PM

Notes

173

2. H.V. Bowen, Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1. 3. Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 257. 4. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 121. 5. Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4, 12, 43. 6. Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, chap. 9; P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); I.B. Watson, Foundations for Empire: English Private Trade in India, 1659–1760 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980). 7. B.B. Misra, Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773–1834 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), 379–81. 8. These covenants can still be consulted: BL/APAC/IOR/O/1/1-139. According to the British Library’s finding guide for the O (or “Biographical”) series in the India Office Records, the British Raj continued the Company’s practice at first. Only later in the nineteenth century did the British switch over to “articles of agreement.” This seems, however, to be more a semantic shift than anything else. 9. Asher and Talbot, India before Europe, 260, 263. 10. Richard Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720–1801 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Muzaffar Alam, Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–48 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Stewart Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in EighteenthCentury India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 11. Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 62–63. 12. Sen, Empire of Free Trade, chap. 2; Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 77–78; Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 49–50. 13. Artur Attman, American Bullion in the European World Trade, 1600–1800 (Götesborg, Sweden: Götesborgs Universitetsbibliotek, 1986). 14. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, 160–79; Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131. 15. OED, q.v., “loot,” http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed January 14, 2009. 16. “Nabob” is a corruption of the Persian nawab, the Mughal title for governor of a province. It referred to Britons who returned home from India during the second half of the eighteenth century with extensive and often ill-gotten

9780230116931_09_not.indd 173

7/14/2011 5:56:50 PM

174

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

Notes fortunes. For the late eighteenth-century “nabob controversy” and its relationship to debates about British identity, see Tillman Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Lucy Sutherland, East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 81–83, 85. Court of Directors to Madras, May 17, 1766, BL/APAC/IOR/H/261(7). Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757– 1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 82–87; Sutherland, East India Company, 136–37, 195–200; Nicholas Dirks, Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 61–78. John Zephaniah Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan (London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1765), 181–82; Nathaniel Smith, General Remarks on the System of Government in India (London: J. Nourse, 1773), 49–50, 51, 114; William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs (London: J. Almon, P. Elmsley, Richardson and Urquhart, 1772, 2 vols.), I: vii–viii, 209, 210–11; Thomas Pownall, Right, Interest, and Duty, of the State, as Concerned in the Affairs of the East Indies (London: S. Bladon, 1773), 8–9. Timothy Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 1998), 22; Bowen, Business of Empire, 63–68. Until 1853, Company directors appointed covenanted servants and military officers. Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), 35, 61, 101–102. Bolts, Considerations on Indian Affairs, I: viii–ix, xi, 6, 12, 13–14, 19–20, 91, 137, 138–39, 147, 192, 207, 218, 227; II: 286–87; Testimony of William Bolts, n.d. [prob. 1772?], in Fifth Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Nature, State, and Condition, of the East India Company (London: J. Debrett, 1803), 549. Bowen, “Bolts, William (1739–1808),” ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/2810, accessed January 15, 2009; also see his voluminous case in the India Office Records: BL/APAC/IOR/O/5/1, ff. 297–497. “Nota Manus” [Ghulam Husain Khan], Sëir Mutaqherin, trans. from Persian by Haji Mustafa (1789; Calcutta: T.D. Chatterjee, 1902 reprint ed., 4 vols.), III: 154–55, 159, 178, 179–81, 183–86, 190. John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688– 1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Nechtman, Nabobs, 82. Under the Regulating Act, the governor-general received an annual salary of £25,000, the councilors £10,000, the Chief Justice, £6,000 and £5,000 to other officers, including judges. Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 179. Sutherland, East India Company, 268, 330–31; Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 187.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 174

7/14/2011 5:56:50 PM

Notes

175

31. Bowen, Business of Empire, 36. 32. John Cannon, Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782–84 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), chaps. 6–7; Alborn, Conceiving Companies, 25–26. 33. Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 10. 34. Bowen, Business of Empire, 78, 80. 35. Alborn, Conceiving Companies, 36–38. 36. Extract Letter from Court of Directors to President and Council at Fort William in Bengal, April 26, 1765, Appendix #30 in Harry Verelst, View of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the English Government in Bengal (London: J. Nourse, Brotherton and Sewell, G. Robinson, and T. Evans, 1772), 128–29; Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs, II: 120, 277. 37. Lord Robert Clive to the Court of Directors, September 30, 1765, cited in Third Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Nature, State, and Condition, of the East India Company, and of the British Affairs in the East Indies (1772; London: J. Debrett, 1803), 391. 38. As J.M. Bourne has shown, most covenanted servants came from professional, mercantile, and commercial backgrounds, groups in British society which disproportionately tended to own Company stock. Bourne, Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), 55, 85–88. For more on the dominance of commercial, mercantile, and professional sectors of British society among Company shareholders, also see: Bowen, Business of Empire, 116, chap. 4 passim. It is important to note, however, that very few Company shareholders (and, therefore, it can be safely presumed, few covenanted servants) came from Yorkshire, Lancashire, or other regions dominated during the nineteenth century by newly emerging industrial middle classes. Rather, Bowen estimates individuals who resided either in London or the surrounding “Home Counties” owned close to two-thirds of Company stock. 39. [James Macpherson], History and Management of the East-India Company (London: T. Cadell, 1782, 2 vols.), I: 235. 40. Thomas Pownall, Right, Interest, and Duty, 8; “Friend to Fair Discussion,” Letter to the Proprietors of East-India Stock, on the Subject of Sending Supervisors with Extraordinary Powers to India (London: S. Bladon, 1772, 2nd ed.), 19–20, 21–22. 41. President and Council at Fort William in Bengal to the Court of Directors, January 31, 1765, Appendix #1 in Verelst, View of the Rise, Progress, and Present State, 15. 42. Clive to Court of Directors, September 30, 1765, Letters to and from the East-India Company’s Servants, at Bengal, Fort St. George, and Bombay; Relative to Treaties and Grants from the Country Powers, from the Year 1756 to 1766, Both Years Inclusive (London, 1772), 26. 43. Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Bengal: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 77–79. 44. Warren Hastings, Minutes of What Was Offered by Warren Hastings (London: J. Debrett, 1788), 166; Travers, Ideology and Empire, 133, 139; Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, 249.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 175

7/14/2011 5:56:50 PM

176

Notes

45. Quoted from Travers, Ideology and Empire, 74. 46. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript of Subordinate Groups (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 47. See, for example: Anon., Observations on the Present State of the East India Company (London: J. Nourse, 1771), 15–18, 19; Nathaniel Smith, General Remarks on the System of Government in India (London: J. Nourse, 1773), 77–78; Anon., Short History of English Transactions in the East-Indies (Cambridge: Fletcher and Hodson, 1776), 125–26. 48. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, 10. 49. Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs, I: 124, 155–56. 50. Ibid, 161–62. 51. General Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, December 15, 1775; Observations of the Court of Directors on the Respective Conduct of Warren Hastings, Esquire (London: J. Debrett, 1787), 2. 52. Burke, “Speech in Reply to the Report on Lords’s Journals,” June 11, 1794, WSEB, VII: 523. 53. Isaac Kramnick, Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 200. 54. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 166. 55. Ibid. 56. See, for example: Sutherland, East India Company; Cannon, Fox-North Coalition, 106–7; Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 182–83. 57. Burke, “Motion for Papers on Hastings,” February 17, 1786, WSEB, VI: 54. 58. Burke, “Speech on Opening,” February 15, 1788, WSEB, VI: 270, 271, 272. 59. This view is strongly hinted at by P.J. Marshall, Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 189–91 as well as, more recently, Sara Suleri and Uday Singh Mehta. Suleri, Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 49–50, 56; Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 167–68. 60. Warren Hastings, cited by Burke, “Speech on Opening,” February 19, 1788, WSEB, VI: 448, 451. 61. Burke, “Speech on Opening” (February 16 and 19, 1788), WSEB, VI: 353, 476. 62. Ibid., 283. 63. Ibid., “Speech on Fox’s India Bill,” December 1, 1783, WSEB, V: 401, 402–3. 64. Ibid., 402, 403. 65. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 157–58; Jennifer Pitts, Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 60–61, 69, 73; Suleri, Rhetoric of English India, 46; Frederick Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 6–7, 21; and, most forcefully of all, Dirks, Scandal of Empire.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 176

7/14/2011 5:56:50 PM

Notes

177

66. For more on the role of “honor” and “trust” in Burke’s political thought, see: Kriegel, “Edmund Burke”; Richard Bourke, “Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63:1 (2000): 453–71; Whelan, Edmund Burke. For more on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English Whig notion of “opinion,” which was not the same thing as our more modern ideas regarding popular consent, refer back to this book’s introduction. 67. Burke, “Observations on First Report of Select Committee,” February 5, 1782, WSEB, V: 183; Ibid., “Speech on the Opening” February 15 and 19, 1788, VI: 292, 433, 456. For more on Burke’s concerns that Hastings’s rule over India was undermining India’s “traditional” social fabric, see: Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 132–44, chap. 5. 68. Edmund Burke, “Speech on Opening,” February 15, 1788, WSEB, VI: 292–93. 69. Ibid., VI: 293–94. 70. Ibid. 71. Marshall, Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 189–91; Suleri, Rhetoric of English India, 49–50, 56; Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 167–68; Kramnick, Rage of Edmund Burke, chap. 7. 72. Pitts, Turn to Empire, 64. 73. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, ed. G.M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 379, 447; Horace Hayman Wilson, ed., History of British India (1817; New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1968 reprint ed. of 1858 ed. [5th ed.] with commentary by Horace Hayman Wilson, 6 vols.), IV: 369 fn. 74. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27; Travers, Ideology and Empire, 231, 244. 75. Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 315, 333. 76. For a good recent survey of acts of physical violence committed by Britons against Indians during both the Company and the British Raj periods of British colonialism in India, see Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). I also discuss several of these themes in later chapters of this book. 77. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 263.

2

Trying to Rule India without Indians, 1793–1831

1. Cited from Percival Spear, Nabobs (1932; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 137. 2. Thomas Robert Malthus, Statements Respecting the East-India College, With an Appeal to Facts, in Refutation of the Charges Lately Brought Against It, in the Court of Proprietors (London: John Murray, 1817), 102. 3. Edmund Burke, “Speech on Fox’s India Bill,” December 1, 1783, WSEB, V: 402, 403.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 177

7/14/2011 5:56:50 PM

178

Notes

4. Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 3. 5. T.H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792–1818: The Origins of “The Munro System” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 2; Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 38; B.B. Misra, Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773–1834 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), 8. 6. Stokes, “Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 30 (1980): 147. 7. At least, it seems, until the late 1820s, when both the Bombay and Bengal governments sought an exemption from civil prosecution for covenanted servants’ official actions on grounds of maintaining British colonial prestige. Thus, in 1832, the Bengal government argued that the ability of Indians to sue officials in the colonial government risked exposing those officials to “unmerited degradation in the eyes of the people.” Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, June 19, 1832, Extract Judicial Letter (Lower Provinces) from Bengal to Court of Directors, September 24, 1833, BL/APAC/IOR/ F/4/1466/57703; see also Extract Judicial Letter from Bombay to Court of Directors, July 29, 1829, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1339/53186. 8. For more on both the ideological underpinnings, and the consequences of the Permanent Settlement, see Ranajit Guha’s still unsurpassed Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, with foreword by Amartya Sen (1963; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996 reprint ed.). 9. Cornwallis to Court of Directors, May 2, 1792, BL/APAC/IOR/H/79 (11). 10. H.V. Bowen, Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 213–14; Misra, Bureaucracy in India: An Historical Analysis of Development up to 1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), 48. 11. For more on Shore, see Peter Penner and Richard Dale MacLean, eds., Rebel Bureaucrat: Frederick John Shore (1799–1837) as Critic of William Bentinck’s India (Delhi: Charhya Publications, 1982). 12. Frederick John Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs (London: John W. Parker, 1837, 2 vols.), II: 521. 13. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in EighteenthCentury India (New York: Viking, 2002); Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005), especially 45–88. 14. See, for example: P.J. Marshall, “White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company,” MAS 31 (1997): 89–108; Carl Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York,” AHR 113:1 (2008): 48–71; Durba Ghosh, Sex and Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

9780230116931_09_not.indd 178

7/14/2011 5:56:50 PM

Notes

179

15. See, for example: Misra, Central Administration, 9; and Misra, Bureaucracy in India, 57; Beaglehole, Thomas Munro, 6; Malti Sharma, Indianization of the Civil Services in British India (1858–1935) (New Delhi: Manak Publications, 2001), 4; Ram Parkash Sikka, Civil Service in India: Europeanization and Indianization under the East India Company (1765– 1857) (New Delhi: Uppal Publishing House, 1984), 17. 16. But see Jon Wilson, Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Wilson argues that the British deliberately estranged themselves from Indian society during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rejected older Indian as well as British forms of governance based on affective relationships between ruler and ruled, an argument which this book largely corroborates. 17. Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2006, 2nd reprint ed.), 94; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 10. 18. This book largely accepts Roxann Wheeler’s contention that turn-of-thenineteenth-century theories of race frequently drew upon older, more “cultural” markers of difference between Europeans and non-Europeans, such as religion. Wheeler, Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 19. Claudius Buchanan, “Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India” (1805), Works of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, L.L.D. (Baltimore, MD: Neal and Wills, 1812), 204; Andrew Fuller, Apology for the Late Christian Missions to India (London: J.W. Morris, 1808), Part II, 119, 122; Alexander Duff, India and India Missions: Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of Hinduism Both in Theory and Practices (1840; Delhi: Swati Publications, 1988 reprint ed.), 147, 154, 284–85. 20. C.A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India. The C.A. Bayly Omnibus (1998; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009 ed.), 14. 21. Duff, India and India Missions, 154. 22. See, for example: Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Penelope Carson, “Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India,” JICH 18 (1990): 169–90; Robert Eric Frykenberg, “Christians and Religious Traditions in the Indian Empire,” in Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities, c. 1815-c. 1914 ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 473–92. 23. John Bruce, Historical View of Plans, for the Government of British India (London: J. Sewell and J. Debrett, 1793), 414. In 1840, the colonial government provided the option of making a solemn declaration without swearing on a religious object. “Act No. V of 1840: An Act concerning the Oaths and

9780230116931_09_not.indd 179

7/14/2011 5:56:51 PM

180

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

Notes Declarations of Hindoos and Mahometans,” Legislative Letter from India to Court of Directors, February 24, 1840, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1834/76170. See David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1999); John Spurr, “Perjury, Profanity and Politics,” Seventeenth Century 8:1 (Spring 1993): 29–50; Spurr, “Profane History of Early Modern Oaths,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 6 (2001): 37–64; Spurr, “‘Strongest Bonds of Conscience’: Oaths and the Limits of Tolerance in Early Modern England,” in Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 ed. Harald Braun and Edward Vallance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 151–65; James Oldham, “Truth-Telling in the Eighteenth-Century English Courtroom,” Law and History Review 12 (1994): 95–121. I thank Randy Trumbach for help with these references. See, for example: Harry Verelst, View of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the English Government in Bengal (London: J. Nourse, Brotherton and Sewell, G. Robinson, and T. Evans, 1772), 143; Robert Grant, Expediency Maintained of Continuing the System by Which the Trade and Government of India are Now Regulated (London: Black Parry, and Co., 1813), 93; William Howitt, English in India (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1839), 61. Proceedings of a Committee of Investigation, Appointed by the Governor and Council of Fort St. George (London: Frys and Couchman, 1784). Rattray Minute, December 20, 1828, Extract Bombay Judicial Consultations, January 8, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1366/54353. Fuller, Apology, Part I, 14–15; Part II, 62–63; William Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos (1817; Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970 reprint ed., 3 vols.), I: xxxvi, xxxix. Minto Minute, March 6, 1811, Extract Bengal Revenue Consultations, March 6, 1811, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/408/10172; Robert Montgomery Martin, Political, Commercial, and Financial Conditions of the Anglo-Eastern Empire in 1832 (London: Parbury, Allen, and Co., 1832), 50; Peter Auber, Rise and Progress of the British Power in India (London: William H. Allen & Co., 1837, 2 vols.), I: 664; II: 495–96. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines; Carson, “Imperial Dilemma”; Frykenberg, “Christians.” Wellesley to Court of Directors, July 10, 1800, Despatches, Minutes & Correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley during His Administration in India, ed. Robert Montgomery Martin (1836–37; New Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1984 reprint ed., 2 vols.), II: 339–40. Wellesley to Court of Directors, August 18, 1800, BL/APAC/IOR/H/487 (4); Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors with enclosure of Regulation IX of 1800, July 15, 1807, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/259/5664. Wellesley to Court of Directors, August 18, 1800, BL/APAC/IOR/H/487 (4); Wellesley to Court of Directors, July 10, 1800, Despatches, II: 339–40. Bowen, Business of Empire, 180.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 180

7/14/2011 5:56:51 PM

Notes

181

35. Court of Directors to Wellesley, January 27, 1802, BL/APAC/IOR/H/587 (5); Misra, Central Administration, 391–94, 397–98. 36. Timothy Alborn, “Boys to Men: Moral Restraint at Haileybury College,” in Malthus, Medicine & Morality: “Malthusianism” after 1798 ed. Brian Dolan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 38–43; Thomas Robert Malthus, Statements Respecting the East-India College (London: John Murray, 1817), 102. 37. William Huggins, Sketches in India (London: John Letts, 1824), 63–64. 38. Margot Finn, Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 20, 125–26, 150, 152; Margaret Hunt, Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 40–44. 39. W.B. Bayley Minute, April 2, 1825, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/916/25818. 40. Bowen, Business of Empire, chap. 4; J.M. Bourne, Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), 55, 85–88. Although few aristocrats or rural gentlemen owned Company stock, very few Company shareholders came from the northwest or the northeast of England, areas dominated by the emerging industrial middle classes of the nineteenth century. Indeed, on p. 116 Bowen has estimated that individuals who resided either in London or the southeast “Home Counties” owned close to two-thirds of Company stock. 41. Thomas Williamson, East India Vade-Mecum (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810, 2 vols.), I: 205. 42. Under the 1773 Regulating Act, Bengal was given supervisory authority over the other two presidencies of Madras and Bombay, a prerogative which Bengal occasionally used—as in this case—to set overall policy in India in the absence of direction from London authorities. 43. This was interpreted broadly not only to mean Indian employees working under a covenanted servant’s immediate authority, but any person residing in his district. 44. Mackenzie to Board of Revenue, May 9, 1823, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, June 12, 1823, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/954/27087. 45. Extract Public Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, May 22, 1811, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/916/25818; Mackenzie to Board of Revenue, May 9, 1823, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, June 12, 1823; Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, October 30, 1823; both documents, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/954/27087. 46. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, a conversion ratio of approximately eight Bengal sicca rupees per British pound generally obtained. Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 233. 47. “Petition from Moturam Shee, Native Banker at Zillah Bhangulpoore, to Governor-General Amherst in Council,” October 15, 1824; “Memorial by J.W. Sage, Late Collector of Deenajpoor,” March 16, 1830; both documents, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1241/40774. 48. John Capper, Three Presidencies of India (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853), 424; B.A. [Benjamin Atkinson] Irving, Theory and Practice of Caste (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853), 92–93.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 181

7/14/2011 5:56:51 PM

182

Notes

49. Resolution of the Governor-General in Council, Territorial Department, July 28, 1825, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1241/40774. Although Sage appealed their decision to the Court of Directors and then on to the Board of Control, it appears from both bodies’ silence that they agreed with the Bengal government’s decision. See: BL/APAC/IOR/F/2/10. 50. Adam Minute, April 22, 1834, Extract Madras Judicial Consultations, June 3, 1834, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1480/58265. 51. Ibid. 52. Extract Public Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, July 15, 1807, BL/ APAC/IOR/F/4/259/5664. 53. Fort William College Council to Governor-General Lord Minto, December 29, 1812, Extract Bengal Public Consultations, April 1, 1814, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/488/11845. 54. Marshall, “White Town,” 312. 55. Huggins, Sketches in India, 63–64. 56. I am borrowing Francis Hutchins’s apt terminology here: Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), chap. 5. 57. John Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership, 1650–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 294–99. 58. Ibid., 312. 59. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 345. 60. Hunt, Middling Sort, 41, chap. 2. 61. C.J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833 (Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 1996), 4. 62. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Edward Sellon, Ups and Downs of Life (1867; Ware, UK: Wordsworth Classics, 1987 reprint of 1892 2nd ed.). The latter volume is a nearly 100-page-long unvarnished account of the author’s numerous sex-escapades in India during the 1830s and early 1840s while serving as a Madras Army officer. 63. See particularly: Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 3; Ghosh, Sex and the Family; Hawes, Poor Relations; Sumanta Banerjee, Under the Raj: Prostitution in Colonial Bengal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003). 64. Williamson, East India Vade-Mecum, I: 414, 415. For an interesting gendered reading of Williamson’s manual, see Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 100–7. 65. Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 249. 66. For prime examples of this long-standing and early British historical interpretation, see: Luke Scrafton, Reflections on the Government of Indostan (1763; London: W. Strahan, G. Kearsley, and T. Cadell, 1770 reprint ed.),

9780230116931_09_not.indd 182

7/14/2011 5:56:51 PM

Notes

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

77.

78. 79.

80.

81.

183

18, 19, 21; Robert Orme, Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire (1782; New Delhi: Associated Pub. House, 1974 reprint ed. of 1805 2nd ed.), Book III, 268, 269, 279; Mountstuart Elphinstone, History of India (London: John Murray, 1843, 2nd ed., 2 vols.), I: 377; II: 493, 495. Adam White, Considerations on the State of British India (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, W. and C. Tait, and A. Allardice; Glasgow: James Brash and Co.; London: J.M. Richardson, 1822), 351. W.B. Bayley Minute, April 2, 1825, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/916/25818. Resolution of the Bengal Government, December 6, 1824, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/916/25818. Ibid. Extract Public Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, May 17, 1826, BL/ APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/419/363. Finn, Character of Credit, 125–26. Burke, Eleventh Report of Select Committee (November 18, 1783), WSEB, V: 334, 343; “Nota Manus” [Ghulam Husain Khan], Sëir Mutaqherin, trans. from Persian by Haji Mustafa (1789; Calcutta: T.D. Chatterjee, 1902 reprint ed., 4 vols.), III: 64–65. Madras Government Resolution, Extract Madras Revenue Consultations, November 22, 1822, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1480/58265; Peter Auber, Rise and Progress of the British Power in India (London: William H. Allen & Co., 1837, 2 vols.), I: 421–22. Madras Government Resolution, Extract Madras Revenue Consultations, November 22, 1822, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1480/58265. Minute of Governor-General Bentinck, May 28, 1829, Extract Bengal Public Consultations, June 2, 1829, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1308/51984; Government Advertisement, General Department, Madras, July 10, 1829, Extract Madras Public Consultations, July 10, 1829, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1293/51689. For many other examples during the Company period of social and political estrangement between Britons and Indians, see: Wilson, Domination of Strangers. Henry Newnham, East India Question (London: James Ridgway, 1833, 2nd ed.), 25–26. Dirks, Hollow Crown: Ethno-History of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 4; Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), chap. 2; David Curley, “‘Voluntary’ Relations and Royal Gifts of Pan in Mughal Bengal,” Stewart Gordon, ed., Robes of Honour: Khil’at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 50–79. M.I. Finley, World of Odysseus, with intro. by Simon Hornblower (1954; London: The Folio Society, 2002 reprint ed. of 1978 2nd revised ed.); Marcel Mauss, Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1922; London: Routledge, 1990 reprint ed.). Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 113–21; Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” Anthropologist among

9780230116931_09_not.indd 183

7/14/2011 5:56:51 PM

184

82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

89. 90.

91.

92.

Notes the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 635–37. Finn, Character of Credit, 81. Amanda Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 209. E.P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?,” Social History 3 (1978): 141. John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688– 1783 (London and Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Philip Harling, Waning of “Old Corruption”: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Harling and Peter Mandler, “From ‘Fiscal-Military’ State to Laissez-Faire State, 1760–1850,” JBS 32 (1993): 66. Huggins, Sketches in India, 70; Minute by W.B. Bayley, Member of the Bengal Government, May 28, 1829, Extract Bengal Public Consultations, June 2, 1829, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1308/51984. Madras Secretary David Hill to Madras Board of Revenue, November 15, 1814; Extract Revenue Letter from Madras to the Court of Directors, March 1, 1815, both documents: BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/505/12184. T.H. Maddock to Bengal Government, January 15, 1831, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/1418/55994. Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan to Low, November 6, 1834; translation of letter from Low to His Majesty the King of Oudh, December 8, 1834, both documents: Extract Political Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, April 20, 1835, BL/IOR/F/4/1527/60298. Impey to M.H. Turnbull, Esq., Registrar to the Nizamut Adalat, March 19, 1818; Letter from Sadr Diwani Adaulat, signed by J.H. Harrington, John Fendall, M.E. Rees, and G. Oswald to G. Sowdeswell, Vice President in Council, Bengal, May 9, 1818, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations (Civil), Lower Provinces, June 2, 1818; both documents, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/584/14183. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 163.

3 Honor, Racial Prestige, and Gentleman Sepoys, 1757–ca. 1830 1. Cradock Minute, October 21, 1806, Extract Military Letter from Madras to Court of Directors, October 21, 1806, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/234/5388. 2. Walter Badenach, Inquiry into the State of the Indian Army (1813; London: William Clowes, 1826, 2nd ed.), 109, 110. 3. Fendall Minute, Extract Bengal Military Consultations, December 29, 1825, BL/APAC/IOR/H/665(3). 4. H.B. [Henry Barkley] Henderson, Bengalee: Or Sketches of Society and Manners in the East (London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1829), 31.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 184

7/14/2011 5:56:51 PM

Notes

185

5. H. Verelst, John Cartier, R. Beciker, and Charles Floyer, Members of the Bengal Council, to Court of Directors, February 3, 1768; Harry Verelst, View of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the English Government in Bengal (London: J. Nourse, Brotherton and Sewell, G. Robinson, and T. Evans, 1772), 69; James Rennell, Marches of the British Armies in the Peninsula of India, During the Campaigns of 1790 and 1791 (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1792), 110, 112. 6. Geoffrey Parker, Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Kaushik Roy, “Military Synthesis in South Asia: Armies, Warfare, and Indian Society, c. 1740–1849,” Journal of Military History 69 (2005): 652–53. 7. The concept of “segmentary” is Burton Stein’s, who employs it to describe the common political structure of South Indian princely states before the British. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980). Drawing on this concept, Channa Wickremesekera argues that “Segmented states resulted in segmented armies.” Wickremesekera, “Best Black Troops in the World”: British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746–1805 (Delhi: Manohar, 2002), 38. 8. Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops, 42, 43. 9. “Najeeb,” Strictures on the Present Government, Civil, Military, and Political, of the British Possessions in India (London: J. Hatchard, and T. and R. Hughes, 1808), 11; Gavin Young, Reflections on the Present State of British India (London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., 1829), 152–53, 157. 10. George Augustus Frederick Fitzclarence, Journal of a Route Across India (London: John Murray, 1819), 252; Adam White, Considerations on the State of British India (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, W. and C. Tait, and Allardice; Glasgow: James Brash and Co.; London: J.M. Richardson, 1822), 141. 11. Londa Schiebinger, Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 12. William Francklin, ed., Military Memoir of Mr. George Thomas (London: John Stockdale, 1805), 317; James Mill, History of British India, ed. Horace Hayman Wilson with an intro. by John Kenneth Galbraith (1817; New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1968 reprint ed. of 1858 ed. [5th ed.] with commentary by Horace Hayman Wilson, 6 vols.), II: 149–50. 13. Roy, “Military Synthesis,” 664–65, 677–80. On disciplined military drill providing a broader advantage to European conquest of other areas of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see William McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 131–32, 135. 14. For an excellent recent treatment of how Scottish Enlightenment fixations with notions of stadial progress played useful ideological roles in justifying British imperialism in India during the late eighteenth century, see Tillman Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 1.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 185

7/14/2011 5:56:51 PM

186

Notes

15. “Short Sketch of the rise, progress, and Dependence of the Hon’ble East India Company’s Military Establishment in the Carnatic from Local Observation and tradition,” April 7, 1796, BL/APAC/IOR/H/451(12); Joseph Sherer, Sketches of India: Written by an Officer for Fire-Side Travellers At Home (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 70–71. 16. Innes Munro, Narrative of the Military Operations, on the Coromandel Coast, Against the Combined Forces of the French, Dutch, and Hyder Ally Cawn, From the Year 1780 to the Peace in 1784 (London: T. Bensley, 1789), 23, 330; Robert Grant, Expediency Maintained of Continuing the System by Which the Trade and Government of India are Now Regulated (London: Black, Parry, and Co., 1813), 154; Henry Thoby Prinsep, Narrative of the Political and Military Transactions of British India, under the Administration of the Marquess of Hastings, 1813 to 1818 (London: John Murray, 1820), 195, 258–59, 317. 17. Philip Henry, 5th Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, 1831–1851 (London: John Murray, 1888, 2nd ed.), 14. November 3, 1831: “The French system of conscription brings together a fair sample of all classes; ours is composed of the scum of the earth—the mere scum of the earth. It is only wonderful that we should be able to make so much out of them afterward. The English soldiers are fellows who have all enlisted for drink—that is the plain fact—they have all enlisted for drink.” 18. Madras Army, Orders, Rules and Regulations, to Be Observed Respecting the Troops on the Coast of Choromandel, 1766 (Vepery, India: The East India Company’s Press, 1766), 36; Anon., Military Sketches of the Goorka War, in India, in the Years 1814, 1815, 1816 (Woodbridge, UK: R. Hunter, 1822), x. 19. W.D. Arnold, Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East (1853; Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1973 reprint ed. of 1854 2nd ed. with intro. by Kenneth Allott, 2 vols.), I: 41. 20. Lionel Caplan, “‘Bravest of the Brave’: Representations of ‘The Gurkha’ in British Military Writings,” MAS 25:3 (1991): 579, 587, 590; Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen: “Gurkhas” in the Western Imagination (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995), 68, 107–9. 21. Grant, Expediency Maintained, 158. 22. David Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1994), 133. 23. Court of Directors to Lord Weymouth, October 16, 1777, BL/APAC/ IOR/H/134(17); Court of Directors to Castlereagh, November 6, 1804, BL/ APAC/IOR/H/502(2). 24. Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth-Century India (London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1995), 257. 25. Peers, “Imperial Vice: Sex, Drink and the Health of British Troops in North Indian Cantonments, 1800–1858,” in Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, c. 1700–1964 ed. David Killingray and David Omissi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 28.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 186

7/14/2011 5:56:51 PM

Notes

187

26. Edward Balfour, “Statistical Data for Forming Troops and Maintaining Them in Health in Different Climates and Localities,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 8:3 (1845): 195; T. Graham Balfour, Statistical Report on the Sickness and Mortality among the Troops in the Madras Presidency (Edinburgh: Stark & Company, 1847), 5; Samuel Brown, Few Thoughts on the Commission, Divisions of Profit, Selection of Lives, the Mortality in India, and other Subjects Relating to Life Assurance (London: W.S.D. Pateman, 1849), 59, 68, 87. 27. Governor-General Warren Hastings to Court of Directors, April 2, 1777, BL/APAC/IOR/H/134(23); Court of Directors to Lord Weymouth, October 16, 1777, BL/APAC/IOR/H/134(17); Court of Directors to Weymouth, December 11, 1777, BL/APAC/IOR/H/135(3); Governor-General Lord Cornwallis to Board of Control President Henry Dundas, November 16, 1787, BL/APAC/IOR/H/85(33); Company Chairman Hugh Inglis to Dundas, December 5, 1800, BL/APAC/IOR/H/86(22); Company Chairman W.F. Elphinstone to Board of Control, November 14, 1806, BL/APAC/ IOR/H/88(14). 28. Extract Military Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, February 11, 1801, BL/APAC/IOR/H/88(21); Court of Directors to Board of Control, December 24, 1806, BL/APAC/IOR/H/88(14); Court of Directors to Board of Control, September 15, 1814, BL/APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/411/298. 29. Robert Orme, History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, From the Year MDCCXLV (1763; New Delhi: Today & Tomorrow’s Printers and Publishers, 1974 reprint ed. of 1783 2nd ed., 2 vols.), I: 347; Cradock Minute, October 21, 1806, Extract Military Letter from Madras to Court of Directors, October 21, 1806, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/234/5388. 30. Quoted from Piers Brandon, Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781– 1997 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 52–53. 31. Henderson, Bengalee, 31. 32. Raymond Callahan, East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 7; Peers, Between Mars, 189. 33. Leitch Ritchie, British World in the East (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1846, 2 vols.), I: 356; Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj, 133. 34. Peers, Between Mars, 88–90. 35. Ibid., 92–93. 36. Ibid., 93–94. 37. Bombay Army Colonel J. Kerr to Bombay Army Commander-in-Chief R.C. Nicolls, December 10, 1802; Captain William Young to Nicolls, December 11, 1802, both cited in Extract Bombay Military Consultations, December 14, 1802, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/167/2901. Emphasis in original. 38. Bengal Army Deputy Adjutant-General W.J. Watson to Bengal Military Secretary, Extract Bengal Military Consultations, April 5, 1825, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/898/23428; Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, October 4, 1825, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/913/25761.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 187

7/14/2011 5:56:52 PM

188

Notes

39. Sita Ram Pandy, From Sepoy to Subedar: Being the Life and Adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a Native Officer of the Bengal Army, ed. James Lunt (1873; Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1970 reprint ed.), 12, 13–14. Various age and height requirements were set out in army recruitment codes: General Orders, July 16, 1795, citing Bengal Military Code, II: 121; General Orders, August 13, 1796, citing Bengal Military Code, II: 190, both documents: Extract Bombay Military Consultations, September 14, 1804; General Regulation, Extract Bombay Military Consultations, April 11, 1807; all three documents: BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/271/6010; Madras Army Deputy AdjutantGeneral E.W. Snow to Lieutenant-Colonel Scott, Commander of the Nagpur Subsidiary Force, January 2, 1819, Bengal Military Consultations, January 2, 1819, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/624/15946. Bengal required recruits to be above the height of 5’6” while Madras and Bombay were more lenient, allowing recruits above the height of 5’3” to enroll. 40. Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 41. Extract Military Letter from Madras to the Court of Directors, August 16, 1796, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/4/649; Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, June 26, 1819, with enclosure of Extract Bengal Military Consultations, January 2, 1819, both documents: BL/APAC/IOR/ F/4/624/15946; Bombay Army Commander-in-Chief Lieutenant-General Charles Colville to Bombay Government, July 9, 1824, Extract Bombay Military Consultations, July 28, 1825, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/928/26106. 42. Peers, “‘The Habitual Nobility of Being’: British Officers and the Social Construction of the Bengal Army in the Early Nineteenth Century,” MAS 25:3 (1991): 548–49. 43. John Sullivan, Tracts upon India; Written in the Years, 1779, 1780, and 1788 (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1795), 42; [Sir Henry Thomas] Colebrooke, Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus (1858; Delhi: Indological Book House, 1972 reprint ed.), 270. 44. John Henry Grose, Voyage to the East-Indies, Began in 1750; with Observations Continued till 1764 . . . (London: S. Hooper, 1766, 2 vols.), I: 187, II: xi; Francklin, Military Memoirs, 138. 45. Badenach, Inquiry, 110; James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan; or, The Central and Western Rajputs of India, ed. William Crooke (1829–32; Delhi, Varanasi, and Patna: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971 reprint ed. of 1920 2nd ed., 3 vols.), I: 35, 43, 81, 85, 162, 170, 310; II: 619, 637, 652, 764, 965, 979, 1032; III: 1493. 46. For more on the chivalric tradition’s revival during the first half of the nineteenth century, see Mark Girouard, Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). The concept of “invented tradition” comes from Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 47. Francklin, Military Memoirs, 139, 143, 243; Fitzclarence, Journal of a Route, 138; White, Considerations, 72, 73, 75.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 188

7/14/2011 5:56:52 PM

Notes

189

48. White, Considerations, 165. 49. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4. 50. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 4. 51. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 263. 52. Badenach, Inquiry into the State, 109. 53. Eric Stokes, Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 33–34, 42–43, chap. 3; Stokes, Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C.A. Bayly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), chaps. 2–3; Seema Alavi, Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 2. 54. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. 55. William Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), chap. 3. In north India during this period, Brahmin and Rajput caste statuses generally forbade the plowing of land, which was done by low-caste peasants of Shudra (servant) caste status. For poorer Brahmins and Rajputs, military service offered a respectable way to retain high-caste status. 56. Dirks, Castes of Mind. 57. Macdowall to Madras Political Secretary G. Strachey, November 19, 1807, Extract Madras Military Consultations, November 24, 1807, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/291/6564; Robertson to Bishop of Calcutta, March 28, 1817, Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, April 26, 1817, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/725/19655. 58. Frank Richards, Old-Soldier Sahib (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1936), 89. 59. Michael Snape, Redcoat and Religion (London: Routledge, 2005), 154–64, quotes on 161 and 164. 60. Peers, “Imperial Vice,” 43. 61. Peter Stanley, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–1875 (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 12–21, quote on 13. On the British Army, by comparison, see: Edward Spiers, Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1980), chap. 2; Huw Strachan, Wellington’s Legacy: The Reform of the British Army, 1830–54 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), chap. 2. 62. William Gibson, Church, State and Society, 1760–1850 (Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1994), 89–90; Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), 169–220; Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 30. Refer, also, to Pennington’s extensive list of the older scholarship regarding this issue contained in endnote 33 on page 194. 63. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented, 30–36.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 189

7/14/2011 5:56:52 PM

190

Notes

64. Thomas Robertson, Chaplain of Dum Dum, to the Bishop of Calcutta, March 28, 1817, Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, April 26, 1817, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/725/19655; “Najeeb,” Strictures, 92. 65. Extract Public Letter from Bombay to Court of Directors, February 20, 1808, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/281/6450. On Britons’ generally negative attitudes toward soldiers prior to the mid-nineteenth century, particularly regarding their moral redeemability, see Olive Anderson, “Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain,” English Historical Review 86 (1971): 46–72; Snape, Redcoat and Religion, chap. 2; Kenneth Hendrickson, Making Saints: Religion and the Public Image of the British Army, 1809–1885 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 9–15, 96. 66. Extract Public Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, August 7, 1805, BL/ APAC/IOR/F/4/209/4696. 67. On Buchanan, see Stuart Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries, 1789– 1858: The Social Background, Motives and Training of British Protestant Missionaries to India (Abington, Oxfordshire, UK: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1984), 19; Allan Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 1786–1813: Missionary Publicity and Claudius Buchanan (Abington, Oxfordshire, UK: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1990), part II passim; Penelope Carson, “Buchanan, Claudius (1766–1815),” ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed November 2, 2008 at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/3831. 68. Claudius Buchanan, “Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India,” (1805), Works of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan (Baltimore, MD: Neal and Wills, 1812), 18384; Buchanan to Minto, November 7, 1807, BL/APAC/IOR/H/690. 69. Buchanan, Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), 111, 114. 70. I follow several scholars of eighteenth and nineteenth-century British religion in using the noun “Evangelical,” here capitalized, to refer specifically to “low-church” elements within the Anglican church, particularly those associated with the “Clapham Sect” and the lay-based Church Missionary Society, versus the more generic lowercase adjective “evangelical,” which included the above groups as well as much of Protestant Nonconformity. 71. Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 2 of 1834, Draft 406 from Court of Directors to Bengal, August 20, 1834, BL/IOR/L/P&J/3/1126, f. 26. 72. Miscellaneous Revenue Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, February 20, 1833, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1819/74986. 73. See, for example: Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Penelope Carson, “Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India,” JICH 18 (1990): 169–90; Robert Eric Frykenberg, “Christians and Religious Traditions in the Indian Empire,” in Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914

9780230116931_09_not.indd 190

7/14/2011 5:56:52 PM

Notes

74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

191

ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 473–92. See, for example: A. Trotter, Acting Bengal Public Secretary, to the Bishop of Calcutta, April 7, 1817, Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, April 26, 1817; Major-General Gabriel Martindell, Commandant at Cawnpore, to J. Nichol, Adjutant General of the Bengal Army, March 23, 1821, Extract Bengal Military Consultations, April 14, 1821; Mr. R. Grant and other Protestant Inhabitants of Cawnpore, to Bengal Political Secretary C. Lushington, March 26, 1821, Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, April 23, 1821; Bengal Army General J. Hardwick to Bombay Army Military Board Secretary Captain J.A. Cobbe, August 10, 1821, Extract Bengal Ecclesiastical Consultations, August 21, 1821; all four documents: BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/725/19655; Extract Military Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, July 11, 1827, enclosing Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, April 21, 1825; Draft Extract Military Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, 1833–34?, enclosing Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, February 28, 1833; both documents: BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1435/56705; Extract Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Madras, August 29, 1837, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/1809/74406. Estimates of Roman Catholic soldiers in the Company’s European regiments ranged from about 45 percent to slightly more than half. See Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, April 21, 1825, BL/APAC/ IOR/L/MIL/5/405/234; Daniel O’Connor, Vicar Apostolic of Madras, to Madras Army Commander-in-Chief Lieutenant-General Sir Robert William O’Callahan, October 4, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1809/74406. Prasannan Parthasarathi has calculated that the average conversion rate in the late eighteenth century for the South Indian currency of pagoda was between 1:8 and 1:9 between pagodas and British shillings. A pagoda, in turn, was worth between 3 and 3.25 silver rupees. Parthasarathi, Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xi. Extract Public Letter from Madras to Court of Directors, March 6, 1807; Extract Public Letter from Court of Directors to Madras, January 11, 1809; both documents: BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/291/6564; Extract Public Letter from Bombay to Court of Directors, May 31, 1826, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/928/26074. Snape, Redcoat and Religion, 91. Extract Public Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, February 20, 1808, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/281/6450. Court of Directors to British Foreign and Bible Society, February 1840, BL/ APAC/IOR/F/4/1801/73961. Nicholas Dirks has calculated that the average conversion rate between British pounds and Indian sicca rupees was about 1:8 in the nineteenth century. Dirks, Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 233.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 191

7/14/2011 5:56:52 PM

192

Notes

82. Extract Political Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, June 13, 1823, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/809/21723. 83. Ibid.; Resolution of the Governor-General in Council, October 31, 1821, Extract Bengal Political Consultations, October 31, 1821, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/809/21722. 84. Paul Kopperman, “‘Cheapest Pay’: Alcohol Abuse in the Eighteenth-Century British Army,” Journal of Military History 60:3 (1996): 459. 85. Thomas Trotter, Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness, and its Effects on the Human Body (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1804, 2nd ed.), 52–53; Nugent Minute, June 20, 1813, Extract Bengal Military Consultations, September 25, 1813, BL/ APAC/IOR/F/4/456/11119; White, Considerations on the State, 72–73, 75. 86. John Shipp, Military Bijou; or, The Contents of a Soldier’s Knapsack: Being the Gleanings of Thirty-Three Years’ Active Service (London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., 1831, 2 vols.), I: 117–19, 120. 87. Peers, “Imperial Vice,” 43. 88. Supplement to the Calcutta Gazette, December 15, 1808, “Case of Peter Hay, James Reilly, and John Reid—1808,” BL/APAC/IOR/O/5/8, ff. 553–612. 89. Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Martin Wiener, Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chaps. 5–6. 90. Extract Military Letter from Bombay to Bengal, April 22, 1818, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/539/12968. 91. Madras Military Secretary Hugh Scott to Madras Political Secretary Edward Wood, June 28, 1814, Extract Madras Military Consultations, July 1, 1814; Scott to Wood, August 23, 1814, enclosing “Outline of Proposed Regulations for the Establishment, Management and Economy of Regimental Canteens,” Extract Madras Military Consultations, September 16, 1814; both documents: Extract Military Letter from Madras to Court of Directors, March 10, 1815, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/528/12679. 92. “Case of George Greek—1796,” BL/APAC/IOR/O/5/4, ff. 299–318; W.H. Tippet, Acting Magistrate of Cawnpore, to Bengal Judicial Secretary W.B. Bayley, November 16, 1815; George Ravenscroft, Collector of Cawnpore, to Tippet, November 14, 1815; both documents: Extract Bengal Judicial (Criminal) Consultations, December 12, 1815, enclosed in “Case of William Kelly—1815,” BL/APAC/IOR/O/5/16, ff. 1–20. 93. Colville to Elphinstone, October 6, 1824, Extract Bengal Military Consultations, November 23, 1827, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1078/29308; Draft Military Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, May 31, 1828, BL/APAC/ IOR/L/MIL/5/402/200A; Dr. William Burke to Governor-General Bentinck, February 15, 1835, BL/APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/407/257. 94. Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, June 26, 1819, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/625/16027. 95. Bengal General Order, May 14, 1819, Salmond Memorandum to Court of Directors, July 22, 1823; Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, December 30, 1820; Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court

9780230116931_09_not.indd 192

7/14/2011 5:56:52 PM

Notes

96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101.

193

of Directors, September 13, 1822; all four documents: BL/APAC/IOR/L/ MIL/5/391/135; Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, April 26, 1828, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1078/29308. See, for example: Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, September 29, 1821, BL/APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/391/135. Stanley, White Mutiny, 38–39. Extract Military Letter from Madras to Court of Directors, December 31, 1813; Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, September 29, 1821; both documents: BL/APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/391/135. Peers, “Imperial Vice,” 42. Minute by Sir Edward Paget, June 25, 1825, Extract Bengal Military Consultations, November 23, 1827, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1078/29308. See, also Joseph Sramek, “‘Face Him Like a Briton’: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800–1875,” Victorian Studies 48:4 (2006): 659–680. P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828: New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

4

“If the Natives Were Competent, From Their Moral Qualities”: Race, Paternalism, and Partial Indianization, 1813–57

1. Sir Thomas Munro, “Minute by Sir Thomas Munro, on the State of the Country, and the Condition of the People” (December 31, 1824), George Robert Gleig, Life of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830, 3 vols.), III: 362. 2. Evidence of Lord Ellenborough, June 18, 1852, PP, 1852: Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories, X (533), p. 239, q. 2307. 3. “Circular sent by East India Company Special Committee for Judicial, Political, and Revenue to its former judicial employees living in England,” n.d., but sometime in 1813, SP, II: 1, 2, qq. 2, 3, 8, and 9. 4. Selection of Papers from the Records at the East India House Relating to the Revenue, Police and Civil and Criminal Justice, under the Company’s Governments in India (4 vols.; London: E. Cox and Son, 1820, vols. 1–2; London: J.L. Cox, 1826, vols. 3–4). 5. Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Bengal: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002); Jon Wilson, Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds., Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1999).

9780230116931_09_not.indd 193

7/14/2011 5:56:52 PM

194

Notes

6. B.B. Misra, Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773–1834 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959); Misra, Bureaucracy in India: An Historical Analysis of Development up to 1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), 89–90; Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 156; Stokes. “Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 30 (1980): 150–51, 155; Ram Parkash Sikka, Civil Service in India: Europeanization and Indianization under the East India Company (1765–1857) (New Delhi: Uppal Publishing House, 1984), 43, 57, 59. 7. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Martine van Woerkens, Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 8. Sir Archibald Galloway, Observations on the Law and Constitution, and Present Government of India (London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1832), 323. 9. Joanne Bailey, “Reassessing Parenting in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 222–23; Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 113, 119–20, 121–22, 269; John Tosh, Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 89, chap. 4. 10. James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. with an intro. R.J. White (1873; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967 reprint ed. of 1874 2nd ed.), part. 89–91 11. See, particularly: Edwin Hirschmann, “White Mutiny”: The Ilbert Bill Crisis in India and Genesis of the Indian National Congress (Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1980); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), chap. 1. 12. Elizabeth Kolsky has offered a recent corrective to this view, arguing that the white furor over Macaulay’s “Black Act” of 1836, which, among other things, would have removed the automatic right of appeal of Britons living in the mofussil (or interior) of civil suits to the presidency supreme courts, helped frame later debates over Europeans’ racial and legal privileges in India such as the Ilbert Bill controversy. Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78, chap. 2. 13. Tosh, Man’s Place. 14. Misra, Central Administration, 9–10, 245–60, 270–84, 406–8. 15. Minto Minute, Extract Bengal Revenue Consultations, March 6, 1811, BL/ APAC/IOR/F/4/408/10172; Alexander Fraser Tytler, Considerations on the Present Political State of India (1813; London: Black, Parbury, & Allen, 1816, 2nd ed., 2 vols.), I: 199; James Mill, History of British India, ed. Horace Hayman Wilson with intro. by John Kenneth Galbraith (1817; New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1968 reprint ed. of 1858 ed. [5th ed.] with commentary by Horace Hayman Wilson, 6 vols.), V: 433. 16. Bowen, Business of Empire, 180.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 194

7/14/2011 5:56:52 PM

Notes

195

17. Written Testimony Submitted by T.H. Ernst to Court of Directors, December 16, 1813, SP, II: 31; Written Testimony Submitted by S. Davis to Court of Directors, December 28, 1813, ibid, II: 43; Written Testimony Submitted by Thomas Cockburn to Court of Directors, January 22, 1814, ibid, II: 158, 162. 18. Report of the late Judicial Commissioners [Thomas Munro and George Stratton] to Madras Government, October 15, 1818, ibid, II: 635; Judicial Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, July 23, 1824, ibid, IV: 32. In the latter document, Company directors chided the Bengal government for dragging its feet in appointing more Indian judges. 19. E. Colebrooke, Member of the Board of Commissioners for the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, to Bengal Vice-President N.B. Edmonstone in Council, May 30, 1815, Extract Bengal Revenue Consultations, July 1, 1815, ibid, I: 469. 20. See, for example: Written Testimony Submitted by Henry Stratchey to Court of Directors, December 30, 1813, ibid, II: 56; Written Testimony Submitted by Colonel A. Walker to Court of Directors, [prob. 1814?], ibid, II: 186, 188; “Report of the late Judicial Commissioners [Thomas Munro and George Stratton] to Madras Government,” October 15, 1818, ibid, II: 634. 21. Thomas Munro, “Report of the Principal Collector of the Ceded Districts to the Board of Revenue, Dated 15 August, 1807, Proposing a Plan for Permanently Settling Those Districts on the Ryotwar Principle, and on the Advantages of That Mode of Settlement Compared with Zemindary Assessments,” Extract Proceedings of the Board of Revenue at Fort St. George [Madras], February 4, 1808, SP, I: 106–7; Munro, “Memorandum on the Revision of the Judicial System” (1813), ibid, I: 110; Report of the late Judicial Commissioners [Thomas Munro and George Stratton] to Madras Government, October 15, 1818, ibid, II: 629–30, 631; Rammohun Roy, Exposition of the Practical Operation of the Judicial and Revenue Systems of India (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1832), 9–10, 14, 24–25. 22. Thomas Munro, Principal Collector of the Ceded Districts, to Madras Board of Revenue, November 30, 1806, Extract Proceedings of Board of Revenue at Fort St. George [Madras], January 5, 1807, SP, I: 94; Robert Grant, Expediency Maintained of Continuing the System by Which the Trade and Government of India are Now Regulated (London: Black, Parry, and Co., 1813), 88–89; Written Testimony Submitted by William Thackeray to Court of Directors, February 1, 1815, SP, II: 174. 23. On the Roman Empire’s broad and deep impact on nineteenth-century British imperialists, see Piers Brandon, Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781– 1997 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007); Stephen Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor in British India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), chap. 3. 24. Walker tended, though, to minimize the Roman tendency toward aggression in his analysis. On this point, see particularly E. Badian, Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968); William Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). The classic Roman statement on conquest can also be found in Vergil’s poem The Aeneid; A.E. Stallings, “Historical Present,” American

9780230116931_09_not.indd 195

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

196

Notes Scholar (2007), accessed August 25, 2010: http://www.theamericanscholar. org/the-historical-present/ But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts: to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

I would like to thank Dr. Rachael Goldman, as well as my colleague, Dr. Rachel Stocking, for help on these citations. Munro, “Memorandum on the Revision of the Judicial System” (1813), SP, I: 111; Written Testimony Submitted by Colonel A. Walker to Court of Directors, [prob. 1814?], ibid, II: 186, 187; Roy, Exposition, 110–11. Minute by Madras Governor Sir Thomas Munro, March 16, 1821, SP, IV: 68, 69. Sir John Malcolm, Political History of India, from 1784 to 1823, ed. K.N. Panikhar (1826; New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1970 reprint ed., 2 vols.), II: 78. Written Testimony Submitted by Colonel A. Walker to Court of Directors, [prob. 1814?], SP, II: 187; Written Testimony Submitted by J.D. Erskine to Court of Directors, September 21, 1814, ibid, II: 90, 91; Written Testimony Submitted by Thomas Munro to Court of Directors, November 22, 1813, ibid, II: 110, 111; Report of Colonel Munro, Principal Collector in the Ceded Districts, April 10, 1806, ibid, II: 231. Written Testimony Submitted by Colonel A. Walker to Court of Directors, [prob. 1814?], SP, II: 187. Written Testimony Submitted by Henry Stratchey to Court of Directors, December 30, 1813, SP, II: 67; Written Testimony Submitted by A. Falconar to Court of Directors, [prob. 1813?], ibid, II: 138, 141; Written Testimony Submitted by Colonel A. Walker to Court of Directors, [prob. 1814?], ibid, II: 187; Robert Montgomery Martin, Political, Commercial and Financial Conditions of the Anglo-Eastern Empire in 1832 (London: Parbury, Allen, and Co., 1832), 49. Written Evidence Submitted by Henry Stratchey to Court of Directors, December 30, 1813, SP, II: 67; “East-India Proprietor,” Address to the British Legislature, 68. Munro, “Memorandum on the Revision of the Judicial System” (1813), cited in SP, I: 110. See, for example: R.W. Cox and Henry St. George Tucker, Members of the Board of Commissioners in the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, to Governor-General Lord Minto in Council, April 13, 1808, Extract Bengal Revenue Consultations, June 20, 1808, SP, I: 40; Minute by Mr. Ross, November 20, 1829, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, January 8, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1366/54353; Malcolm Minute, November 30, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1409/55623.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 196

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

Notes

197

34. Cox and Tucker to Governor-General Minto in Council, April 13, 1808, Extract Bengal Revenue Consultations, June 20, 1808, SP, I: 40. 35. Written Testimony Submitted by William Thackeray to Court of Directors, February 1, 1815, ibid, II: 177. 36. Quoted from John Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1839 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 202. 37. Munro Minute, April 6, 1827, Extract Madras Judicial Consultations, April 27, 1827, Extract Judicial Letter from Madras to Court of Directors, July 4, 1828, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1260/50714. 38. Written Testimony Submitted by William Dorin to Court of Directors, December 1, 1813, SP, II: 23; John Bentley, Essays Relative to the Habits, Character, and Moral Improvement of the Hindoos (London: Kingsbury, Parbury, & Allen, 1823), 306–8. 39. James Caulfield, Observations on Our Indian Administration, Civil and Military (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1832), 53, 54. 40. Tytler, Considerations, I: 266; Ewer to Bayley, February 7, 1818, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, March 3, 1818, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/584/14182 (2); Ewer to Bayley, February 27, 1818, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, April 28, 1818, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/584/14182(1). 41. “Instructions of Collector of Southern Division of Arcot [John Ravenshaw] to His Sub-Collectors, on the Mode of Conducting a Ryotwar Settlement; Enclosed in His Report, Dated 1st July 1806,” SP, I: 115; Cox and Tucker to Governor-General Minto in Council, April 13, 1808, Extract Bengal Revenue Consultations, June 20, 1808, ibid, I: 11. 42. Written Evidence Submitted by John Rawlins, late Judge of the Behar Provincial Court, to Court of Directors, November 6, 1813, SP, II: 4; Written Evidence Submitted by T. Prattle to Court of Directors, December 7, 1813, ibid, II: 26; Written Testimony Submitted by A. Falconar to Court of Directors, [1814?], ibid, II: 152–53. 43. Anon., Observations on the Law and Constitution of India, on the Nature of Landed Tenures and on the System of Revenue and Finance, as Established by the Moohummundum Law and Moghul Government (London: Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, 1825), 178, 331. 44. Raymond Renford, Non-Official British in India to 1920 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 35, chap. 5. 45. Elizabeth Kolsky also argues this, and regards white planters’ hostile response to Macaulay’s attempted “Black Act” of 1836, which removed the automatic right of Europeans living in the interior to have an exclusive appeal to the presidency supreme courts (of Calcutta, Madras, or Bombay) in civil matters, as an important precursor to the “White Riot” against Courtenay Ilbert’s proposed Ilbert Bill in 1883. Kolsky, Colonial Justice, 76, 77. 46. John Crawford, ed., Letters from British Settlers in the Interior of India (London: James Ridgway, 1831), 69, 91. 47. Anon., Observations on the Law, 301. Jon Wilson contends this largely resulted from the great expansion of British territory during this period

9780230116931_09_not.indd 197

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

198

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62. 63.

Notes without a corresponding increase in colonial revenue. Wilson, Domination of Strangers, 151, 152. Mani, Contentious Traditions; van Woerkens, Strangled Traveler. Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck, 203–4. Ibid. Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth-Century India (London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1995), chap. 8. Misra, Central Administration, 283. Starting with the Regulating Act of 1773, the Bengal government exercised supervisory authority over the other two Indian presidencies of Madras and Bombay. Bayley Minute, November 5, 1829, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, October 12, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1353/53664. A rough conversion rate of eight rupees to the British pound generally obtained during the first half of the nineteenth century. Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 233. Misra, Central Administration, 283. Quoted from Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck, 204. See for example: Edward Parry Thornton, History of the British Empire in India (London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1841, 6 vols.), V: 184–85; Leitch Ritchie, British World in the East (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1846, 2 vols.), I: 382; John Chapman, Principles of Indian Reform: Being Brief Hints (London: John Chapman, 1853), 30. W.L. Melville, Agent to the Governor-General at Moorshedabad, to India Legislative Secretary W.H. Macnaghten, April 24, 1837, Extract India Legislative Consultations, July 21, 1837, Extract Legislative Letter from India to Court of Directors, August 5, 1837, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1682/67823; Evidence of Frederick James Halliday, March 10, 1853, PP, 1852–53: First Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories; Together with the Minutes of Evidence, XXVII (426), 107, q. 1624, March 18, 1853, 162, q. 2067. C.A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India. The C.A. Bayly Omnibus (1998; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009 ed.), 77. [Mir Shāhāmāt Ali], Notes and Opinions of a Native (Ryde, UK: George Rutler, 1848), 69–70, 90. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 263. Minute by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Indian Law Commissioner, December 12, 1836, Extract India Legislative Consultations, December 19, 1836, Extract Legislative Letter from India to Court of Directors, March 20, 1837, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1760/72084; Macaulay Minute, May 15, 1837; Macaulay Minute, July 10, 1837, both documents: Extract India Legislative Consultations, July 21, 1837, Extract Legislative Letter from India to Court of Directors, August 5, 1837, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1682/67823.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 198

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

Notes

199

64. Macaulay Minute, December 12, 1836, Extract India Legislative Consultations, December 19, 1836, Extract Legislative Letter from India to Court of Directors, March 20, 1837, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1760/72084. 65. In asking this question, I am in general agreement with Uday Singh Mehta’s broader point regarding British liberalism’s “infinite patience” regarding the colonial project. He wryly observes that the “temporalizing” of many liberal thinkers “between educating Indians but not yet deeming them worthy of autonomy, in the penumbra between crafting responsible government but not yet giving Indians self-government—in the morally, politically, and rationally justified ambivalence of liberalism for the time being remaining imperial” was an “infinitely patient” project, one “perhaps even secretly counting on its own extended incompetence, of not getting there and hence permanently remaining in between.” Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 30. 66. Quoted from Zastoupil and Moir, eds., Great Indian Education Debate, 25. 67. John William Kaye, Administration of the East India Company: A History of Indian Progress (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), 270, 427, 428. 68. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 11, 14, 31. 69. See, for example: Sir Archibald Galloway, Observations on the Law and Constitution, and Present Government of India (London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1832), 323; Martin, Political, Commercial and Financial, 29, 41, 48, 402; Kaye, Administration, 141, 142. 70. Henry Harpur Spry, Modern India: With Illustrations of the Resources and Capabilities of Hindustan (London: Whittaker and Company, 1837, 2 vols.), I: 3; George Campbell, Modern India (London: John Murray, 1852), 61–62, 486, 487. 71. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education, 2 February 1835,” in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, ed. G.M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 729. Emphasis added. 72. Ibid., “Lord Clive,” 329. 73. Evidence of Frederick James Halliday, April 8, 1853, PP, 1852–53: First Report from the Select Committee of House of Lords on Operation of Act for Better Government of H.M. Indian Territories, XXXI (627), 373, q. 3416. 74. Evidence of John Pollard Willoughby, May 28, 1852, ibid., 145, q. 1495; 148, qq. 1510–11; 154, q. 1584. In parsing the issue this way, Willoughby was in line with much nineteenth-century evangelical thought regarding debt. Evangelicals generally held that corporate bankruptcies, of which there were many, were divine punishment for the worldly excess of individual businessmen. Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 135–46. 75. Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor, chap. 2.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 199

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

200

Notes

76. Henry St. George Tucker, “Education of the Civil Service” (1843), in Memorials of Indian Government, ed. John W. Kaye (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), 430, 431. 77. Petition of Abdulah, December 29, 1830, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, July 12, 1831, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1305/51789. 78. W.H. Macnaghten, Secretary to the Governor-General, to Mr. Judicial Deputy Secretary Thomason, March 30, 1831; Minute of William Blunt, April 13, 1831; Minute of the Vice President, April 15, 1831; Macnaghten to M. Ainslie, Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit for the 8th or Humeerpore Division, May 13, 1831; all four documents: Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, July 12, 1831, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1305/51789. 79. Macnaghten to Thomason, March 30, 1831, Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, July 12, 1831, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1305/51789. 80. Campbell, India as it May Be, 256; Sir Thomas Edward Colebrooke, Letter to Thos. Baring, Esq., M.P. on the Indian Civil Service (London: Upham and Beet, 1852), 12, 14, 21, 22. 81. Numerous examples of this attitude abound in Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor, chap. 2, part. 83–84. Alas, Patterson is not terribly critical of these assertions or why late nineteenth-century Raj administrators might have made them. 82. Evidence of William Wilberforce Bird, May 18, 1852, PP, 1852–53: Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, XXIX (41), 117, q. 1203; 118, q. 1206; Evidence of Lord Ellenborough, June 18, 1852, PP, 1852: Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories, X (533), 239, q. 2307. 83. Evidence of Sir George Russell Clerk, April 5, 1853, PP, 1852–53: First Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories, XXVII (426), 181, q. 2211. 84. Timothy Alborn, “Boys to Men: Moral Restraint at Haileybury College,” in Malthus, Medicine & Morality: “Malthusianism” after 1798, ed. Brian Dolan (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 38–43. 85. Evidence of John Pollard Willoughby, May 27, 1852, PP, 1852: Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories, X (533), 143, 144, 145, q. 1494. 86. See, for example: Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor, 26, 27, 81–82. At several moments throughout his work, Patterson erroneously compares stoutly middle and upper-middle class Oxbridge-educated ICS officers with their “aristocratic” predecessors who worked for the East India Company prior to 1858. But as J.M. Bourne has shown through examining the class backgrounds of several thousands of the Company’s civil and military employees appointed during the period from 1807 to 1857 when Haileybury College was in operation, very few came from aristocratic or even landed gentry backgrounds. Indeed, much like the ICS after 1858, the covenanted service was dominated by individuals from the commercial and professional middle and upper-middle classes, groups that tended disproportionately to own Company stock. J.M. Bourne, Patronage and Society in NineteenthCentury England (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), 55, 85–88.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 200

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

Notes

201

87. Although, curiously enough, according to the British Library’s finding guide for the “O” (Europeans in India) series, covenants remained an employment precondition long after the Company was abolished in 1858. 88. R.J. Moore, “Abolition of Patronage in the Indian Civil Service and the Closure of Haileybury College, Historical Journal 7:2 (1964): 246–57; ibid, Sir Charles Wood’s Indian Policy, 1853–66 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), 86–91. Timothy Alborn locates the 1853 patronage debate within a different set of issues, arguing that it reflected a wider political struggle between radical and Whigs. In Alborn’s view, Wood and fellow Whigs implemented competitive examinations in an attempt to outflank “Young India” radicals such as John Bright who wished to make colonial administration more democratically accountable but, in doing so, removed the last remaining significant justification for the Company’s continued existence. Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 1998), 14, 40, 48–50. 89. Evidence of Sir James Cosmo Melvill, May 4, 1852, PP, 1852–53: Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories, X (533), 22, q. 246; ibid., May 10, 1852, PP, 1852–53: Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, XXIX (41), 44, q. 460; Evidence of Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, June 28, 1853, PP, 1852–53: Second Report from Select Committee of House of Lords on Operation of Act for Better Government of H.M. Indian Territories, XXXII (627–I), 216, q. 6904. 90. Evidence of Sir [Thomas] Erskine Perry, March 15, 1853, PP, 1852–53: First Report from the Select Committee of House of Lords on Operation of Act for Better Government of H.M. Indian Territories, XXXI (627), 264–65, qq. 2606–7, 2611–12; Henry Thoby Prinsep, India Question in 1853 (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1853), 71, 72. 91. G.O. [George Otto] Trevelyan, Competition Wallah (1864; London: Macmillan and Co., 1866, 2nd ed.), 8–9, 14. 92. The Charter Act of 1833 (3 & 4 Will. 4, c. 85), s. 87. 93. Evidence of Sir James Cosmo Melvill, May 10, 1852, PP, 1852–53: Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, XXIX (41), 53, q. 565; 56, qq. 597, 599. 94. Ali, Notes and Opinions, 56, 68, 69, 70, 75, 90, 93. 95. John Capper, Three Presidencies of India: A History of the Rise and Progress of the British Indian Possessions (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853), 261, 267–69. 96. Evidence of Sir James Cosmo Melvill, May 10, 1852, PP, 1852–53: Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, XXIX (41), 53, q. 564. 97. Quoted from Stokes, English Utilitarians, 64. Emphasis in original. 98. Evidence of John Stuart Mill, June 22, 1852, PP, 1852–53: Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, XXIX (41), 324–25, qq. 3110–11. 99. Evidence of Frederic Millett, May 24, 1852, ibid., 134, qq. 1405, 1412–13; May 28, 1852, PP, 1852: Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories, X (533), 160, q. 1651; Evidence of William Wilberforce Bird, May 18, 1852, PP, 1852–53: Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, XXIX (41), 117, q. 1203; 118, qq. 1206–7.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 201

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

202

Notes

100. Evidence of William Wilberforce Bird, May 18, 1852, PP, 1852–53: Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, XXIX (41), 117, q. 1203; 118, qq. 1206–7. 101. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 103–4. 102. Ibid., 104.

5 Martial Races, Caste-Ridden Sepoys, and British Fears about Losing Control: Britons and Their Sepoy Armies in Late Company India 1. John Studholme Hodgson, Opinions on the Indian Army (1850; London: William H. Allen & Co., 1857, 2nd ed.), 154. 2. John Jacob, Views and Opinions of Brigadier-General John Jacob (1851; London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858, 2nd ed.), 424. 3. See, for example: Seema Alavi, Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. 294–302; Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethno-History of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 187–90; Amiya Barat, Bengal Native Infantry: Its Organization and Discipline, 1796–1852 (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962), 186, 306. 4. Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 11, chap. 1; Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 43–44. 5. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Nancy Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 6. On the first issue: Gautam Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); on the latter issue: Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830– 1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), chap. 7; H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 206–09. 7. E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001), 112, 128, 165; Veena Oldenburg, Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–77 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 8. See, for example: Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 84–93, 104–05, 125–28; Pradeep Barua, “Inventing Race: The British and India’s Martial Races,” Historian 58:1 (1995): 107–16. 9. Streets, Martial Races, 1, 11, 19.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 202

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

Notes

203

10. David Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1994), chap. 1. 11. Frank Richards, Old-Soldier Sahib (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1936), 88–89. 12. Douglas Peers has also argued that many of the martial races policy’s ideological origins can be located in the preceding Company period. Peers, “‘Habitual Nobility of Being’: British Officers and the Social Construction of the Bengal Army in the Early Nineteenth Century,” MAS 25:3 (1991): 545–69; ibid, “‘Those Noble Exemplars of the True Military Tradition’: Constructions of the Indian Army in the Mid-Victorian Press,” MAS 31:1 (1997): 109–42. 13. Henry St. George Tucker, Memorials of Indian Government, ed. John W. Kaye (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), 232, 238. 14. Godfrey Charles Mundy, Pen and Pencil Sketches (London: John Murray, 1833, 2 vols.), I: 344; Jacob, “Papers on Sillidar Cavalry As It Is, and As It Might Be” (Bombay: Times Press, 1848), 76; Sir Charles James Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, of the Indian Government, ed. LieutenantGeneral Sir W.F.P. Napier (London: Charles Westerton, 1853), 297–98. 15. Edward Parry Thornton, India, Its States and Prospects (London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1835), 351; Hodgson, Opinions, 45. Emphasis in original. 16. Malcolm to Bentinck, November 27, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1287/51585. 17. Sir John Malcolm, Political History of India, from 1784 to 1823, ed. K.N. Panikhar (New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1970 reprint ed., 1826, 2 vols.), II: 130; Malcolm, Government of India (London: John Murray, 1833), 199–200; Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 232. 18. Malcolm, Government of India, 198; Frederick John Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs (London: John W. Parker, 1837, 2 vols.), II: 420, 423. 19. N.H. Sleeman, On the Spirit of Military Discipline in Our Native Indian Army (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1841), 55–56; Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs, II: 420, 423. 20. Hodgson, Opinions, 59; Jacob, Views and Opinions, 105, 424. Emphasis in original. 21. James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan; or, the Central and Western Rajput States of India, ed. William Crooke (1829–32; Delhi, Varanasi, and Patna: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971 reprint ed. of 1920 2nd ed., 3 vols.), I: 35, 43, 81, 85, 162, 170, 310; II: 619, 637, 652, 764, 964, 979, 1032; III: 1493; B.A. [Benjamin Atkinson] Irving, Theory and Practice of Caste (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853), 101. 22. William Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos (1817; Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1970 reprint ed., 3 vols.), I: 185–86; George Augustus Frederick Fitzclarence, Journal of a Route across India (London: John Murray, 1819), 249–50. 23. Tod, Annals and Antiquities, I: lx, 23, 68, 86, 97, 310, 397; II: 619, 637, 653, 979, 1123; III: 1442, 1443, 1444; Malcolm, Memoir of Central India (London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1832, 2 vols., 3rd ed.), I: 485; 2: 144. 24. Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002), intro., chap. 1; Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

9780230116931_09_not.indd 203

7/14/2011 5:56:53 PM

204

Notes

25. In an 1847 speech before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Max Müller stated that modern-day speakers of Indo-European languages were the “Arian brethren” of Britons and Europeans. Seven years later he went considerably further, arguing that Sir Robert Clive and his British soldiers had “the same blood” running through their veins as the “dark Bengalese” soldiers they defeated at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Quoted from Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 194. 26. Tod, Annals and Antiquities, I: lxiv–lxv, 72, 84, 153; II: 964, 1032. 27. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); John Rosselli, “Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal,” Past and Present 86 (1980): 121–48. 28. Thomas Skinner, Excursions in India (London: Richard Bentley, 1833, 2 vols.), I: 32, 136; Mountstuart Elphinstone, History of India (London: John Murray, 1843, 2 vols.), I: 331, 332. 29. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Martine Van Woerkens, Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India trans. Catherine Tihanyi. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 30. John B. Seely, Wonders of Elora (London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1825, 2nd ed.), 519. 31. For the various sectarian incidents, see the following archival files: BL/ APAC/IOR/F/4/1355/53878; BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1356/53969; BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/1356/53981; BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1382/55144; BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/ 1382/55145; BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1382/55146; BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1382/ 55147; BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1464/57517. Two separate incidents occurred within the Madras Army’s Arcot division, with a further incident each at Bangalore, Cuddapah, and Nellore. 32. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 2, esp. 21–28; Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81; Duncan Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London: Curzon Press Ltd., 1979), chap. 2. 33. In this way I am largely agreeing with Seema Alavi, that a crucial turning point in British military attitudes toward high-caste sepoys occurred in the 1820s, laying the groundwork for the Sepoy Rebellion almost three decades later. Key, Alavi argues, was British imperial officials’ growing ambivalence toward sharing power with high-caste soldiering elites, as they formerly had. Alavi, Sepoys and the Company, 8–9, 75–76, 88, 90–91, 92–93. 34. Malcolm Minute, January 27, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1287/51585; ibid, Political History, II: 128. 35. Malcolm to Bentinck, November 27, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1287/51585. 36. In 1841, Bengal Army Commander-in-Chief General Sir Jasper Nicolls calculated the effects of Bentinck’s decision to abolish corporal punishment upon

9780230116931_09_not.indd 204

7/14/2011 5:56:54 PM

Notes

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

205

discipline within the army. He estimated that the number of Bengal Army punishments rose dramatically from an average of two per year for each regiment to nearly seven. By comparison, Bombay’s average annual number of punishments per regiment rose more moderately from five to seven while that of Madras stayed the same at five. See Nicolls Minute, August 30, 1841, Extract India Legislative Consultations, December 20, 1841, Extract Legislative Letter from India to Court of Directors, December 20, 1841, BL/ APAC/IOR/F/4/1945/84477. Thornton, History of the British Empire in India (London: William H. Allen and Co., 1841, 6 vols.), IV: 58; Jacob, Views and Opinions, 108, 109, 112, 115, 118–19. Emphasis in original. Fagan Military Circular, August 9, 1830; Bentinck Minute, December 29, 1834, both documents: Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, January 10, 1835, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1523/60204. Barat, Bengal Native Infantry, 123. According to this survey, there were 27,993 Rajput soldiers (34.9 percent), followed by Brahmins at 24,840 (31.0 percent), “Low-castes” at 13,920 (17.4 percent), Muslims at 12,411 (15.5 percent), and Christians at 1,076 (1.3 percent). The figure of “low-castes” appears suspiciously high, though, and may include other caste groups that claimed high-caste status such as Bhumihar Brahmins and Kasayths. Hodgson, Opinions, 117–18; George Campbell, Modern India (London: John Murray, 1852), 518; Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 28; Napier, India as it May Be; An Outline of a Proposed Government and Policy (London: John Murray, 1853), 349. W.L. [William Lewis] M’Gregor, History of Sikhs (1846; Patiala, Pakistan: Punjab Languages Department, 1970 reprint ed., 2 vols.), II: 96; Hodgson, Opinions, 56, 59; Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 29; Jacob, Views and Opinions, 112. Combermere to Bentinck, Extract Bengal Military Consultations, May 1, 1829, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1259/50578. Hodgson, Opinions, 59; Jacob, Views and Opinions 102. O’Connor to O’Callahan, October 4, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1809/74406. “Petition to His Excellency General Sir Edward Barnes, G.C.B., Commanderin-Chief, from the Roman Catholic Non-Commissioned Officers and Privates of His Majesty’s 16th Regiment of Foot,” n.d., Colonel R. Torrens, Adjutant General of His Majesty’s Forces in India, to Bengal Military Secretary Colonel W. Casement, June 20, 1833; “Petition to Barnes from the Noncommissioned Officers and Private Soldiers of His Majesty’s 49th Regiment, professing the Roman Catholic Religion,” n.d., Lieutenant Colonel Robert Barley, Commanding His Majesty’s 49th Regiment, to the Assistant Adjutant General, Presidency Division, May 28, 1833, Major General James Watson, Commanding Presidency Division, to Colonel Torrens, Adjutant General of His Majesty’s Forces in India, May 30, 1833; both documents: Separate Letter from Bengal to the Court of Directors, October 12, 1833, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1435/56705. See, for example: Extract Public Letter from Bombay to Court of Directors, November 18, 1825, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/928/26074; Extract Ecclesiastical

9780230116931_09_not.indd 205

7/14/2011 5:56:54 PM

206

47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

Notes Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, January 4, 1821; Extract Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, November 28, 1821; Extract Military Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, November 25, 1833; Company Secretary Peter Auber to Board of Control Member Thomas Babington Macaulay, February 28, 1833; all three documents: BL/ APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/405/234; Extract Ecclesiastical Letter from Court of Directors to Madras, August 30, 1837, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1809/74406. Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 5 of 1845 from Court of Directors to India, September 17, 1845, BL/APAC/IOR/L/P&J/3/1126, para. 7. Wilson to Ripon, August 1, 1844, BL/APAC/IOR/H/59. Ecclesiastical Despatch from Governor-General Lord Hardinge to Court of Directors, June 22, 1847, BL/APAC/IOR/L/P&J/3/143, ff. 479–81; Home and Ecclesiastical Despatch No. 2 of 1851 from Governor-General Lord Dalhousie to Court of Directors, August 30, 1851, BL/APAC/IOR/L/ P&J/3/144, f. 441. W.D. Arnold, Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East (Leicester: Leicester University Press; New York: Humanities Press, 1973 reprint of the 1854 2nd ed. [1853], 2 vols.), I: 39–40, 58. Stephen Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor in British India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1. Hodgson, Opinions, 59, 180, 181. Malcolm to Bentinck, November 27, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1287/51585. Napier General Orders, December 9, 1850, BL/APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/419/363. Malcolm to Bentinck, November 27, 1830, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1287/51585; John M.D. McCosh, Advice to Officers in India (1841; London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1856, 2nd ed.), 174–75. William Hough, India as it Ought to Be Under the New Charter Act (London: Messrs. W. Thacker & Co., 1853), 47, 48; Napier General Orders, December 9, 1850, BL/APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/419/363; Hodgson, Opinions, 180. Emphasis in original. Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs, II: 138; Jacob, Views and Opinions, 127, 128. Extract Military Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, November 21, 1832; Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, February 29, 1832; Extract Military Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, January 30, 1833; all three documents: BL/APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/390/132; Bengal Government General Order, July 1828; Bengal Government General Order, December 30, 1833; both documents: BL/APAC/IOR/L/MIL/5/417/347. Statement by Bombay Army Lieutenant-Colonel A. Robertson, Read on 8th Day of Trial, enclosed in Resolution of Government, February 25, 1832, Bombay Military Consultations, February 25, 1832, BL/APAC/ IOR/F/4/1311/52145. Lionel Caplan and Seema Alavi have demonstrated that there is no actual ethnic group called the “Gurkhas,” despite nineteenth- and twentiethcentury British beliefs to the contrary. Rather, as Seema Alavi argues, the Company cobbled together a collective “Gurkha” identity from “the Kumaonis, Garhwali, and Sirmouri hill men who flocked to its service”

9780230116931_09_not.indd 206

7/14/2011 5:56:54 PM

Notes

61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

207

after 1816. Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen, 10–13, 52; Alavi, Sepoys and the Company, 264. However, out of a concern to avoid clumsiness in the text, other instances where I use the term do not have quotation marks. See, for example: Thomas Pennant, View of Hindoostan (London: Henry Hughs, 1798, 2 vols.), II: 344; James Baillie Fraser, Journey of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1820), 154; Anon., Military Sketches of the Goorkha War, in India, in the Years 1814, 1815, 1816 (Woodbridge, UK: R. Hunter, 1822), 11. Kaushik Roy argues this was so largely because the Nepalese government had copied the Company’s infantry system. By 1814, Nepal possessed over 12,000 Westernized infantry who were drilled and organized in battalions. Deserters from the Bengal Army, who formed the nucleus of the army, taught other Nepalese soldiers Western military discipline. Roy, “Military Synthesis in South Asia: Armies, Warfare, and Indian Society, ca. 1740–1849,” Journal of Military History 69 (2005): 664. Of the other major conflicts the Company fought against Indian antagonists, besides Nepal only Mysore was allowed to be semi-independent, although at the expense of losing about half of its territory at the conclusion of the last Anglo-Mysore War in 1799. This is in marked contrast to the fate of the Punjab and Maratha kingdoms, which were directly annexed by the British. Tony Gould, Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas (London: Granta Books, 2000), 63. Fraser, Journey of a Tour, 10, 226; Mundy, Pen and Pencil Sketches, II: 213; John Shipp, Memoirs of the Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp (London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., 1829, 3 vols.), II: 102. Both Alavi and Caplan have argued that even though the Nepalese government reluctantly accepted the permanent presence of a British resident (or ambassador) in Kathmandu after 1816, it placed severe obstacles to the Company’s efforts to recruit its subjects into its armies such as banning Company recruiting parties from entering Nepal. Caplan has characterized of Nepalese authorities’ attitude throughout the Company period, to sepoy recruitment as “one of consistent hostility, so much so that the British had to carry on the recruitment sub rosa.” As a result, the goal of Nicol and other later officials to recruit large numbers of Gurkhas went largely unfulfilled. Alavi, Sepoys and the Company, 276; Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen, 20. Nicol to Bengal Political Secretary George Swinton, January 8, 1823, BL/ APAC/IOR/H/665 (7); Mundy, Pen and Pencil Sketches, II: 183, 310–11. Campbell, India as it May Be (London: John Murray, 1853), 350, 351, 359–60; Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 28, 29–30. Alexander Burnes, Travels Into Bokhara (1834; Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1973 reprint ed. 3 vols.), I: 45; III: 143; Charles Masson, Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and the Panjab (1842; Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1974 reprint ed.; 3 vols.), 1: 434. See, for example: Malcolm, Sketch of the Sikhs (London: John Murray, 1812); Mundy, Pen and Pencil Sketches; Ritchie, British World in the East.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 207

7/14/2011 5:56:54 PM

208

Notes

71. Mundy, Pen and Pencil Sketches, I: 129–30; George Buist, “Annals of India for the Year 1848” (Bombay: The “Times” Press, 1849), 30. 72. See, for example: George Forster to Mr. Gregory, n.d., but prob. 1783, cited in Forster to Board of Control President Henry Dundas, June 9, 1785, BL/ APAC/IOR/H/685 (3); Forster, Journey from Bengal to England (London: R. Faulder, 1798, 2 vols.), I: 289; David Hopkins, Dangers of British India, from French Invasion and Missionary Establishments (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1809, 2nd ed.), 177; Burnes, Travels into Bokhara, II: 288. 73. See, for example: John M.D. McCosh, Advice to Officers in India, 2; Masson, Narrative of Various Journeys, I: 433; Campbell, Modern India, 49, 50. 74. Francklin, Military Memoir, 110; Burnes, Travels into Bokhara, III: 101–2, 136. Other authors, however, such as William Thorn, a major in the Royal Dragoons, and Charles Mundy thought that the unshaven beards of Sikhs detracted from their otherwise very manly physical features. Thorn, Memoir of the War in India (London: T. Egerton, 1818), 500–01; Mundy, Pen and Pencil Sketches, I: 130. 75. Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,” Victorian Studies 48:1 (2005): 7–34. 76. Forster, Journey from Bengal to England, I: 294; Burnes, Travels into Bokhara, I: 287, 288; II: 139, 140. 77. W.W.W. Humbly, Journal of a Cavalry Officer; Including the Memorable Sikh Campaign of 1845–1846 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854). 45, 99–100, 144, 149–50, 155, 178; Hugo James, Volunteer’s Scramble Through Scinde, the Punjab, Hindostan, and the Himalayah Mountains (London: W. Thacker and Company, 1854, 2 vols.), I: 111. 78. See, for example: M’Gregor, History of the Sikhs, II: 98; John Clark Marshman, Letter to John Bright, M.P., Relative to the Recent Debates in Parliament on the India Question (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1853), 14; John Capper, Three Presidencies of India (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853), 7. 79. Hodgson to F.F. Courtenay, Private Secretary to Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, March 28, 1852, reprinted as “Appendix B” in Hodgson, Opinions, 207–08; Campbell, Modern India, 518; Campbell, India as it May Be, 359. 80. Barbara and Thomas Metcalf, Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 2nd ed.), 95–96. Dalhousie’s “doctrine of lapse” was a policy that presumed sovereign states to lapse to the British in the absence of a direct heir. Dalhousie deliberately ignored the prevalent Hindu custom of adoption to secure heirs. 81. Herbert Edwardes, Year on the Punjab Frontier, in 1848–49 (London: R. Bentley, 1851, 2 vols.), II: 105–6; Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 369, 373. 82. Francis Buchanan, Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807, 2 vols.), I: 47; Elphinstone to Major Cunningham, March 27, 1818; Elphinstone to Cunningham, n.d, but after March 1818, both documents, BL/APAC/

9780230116931_09_not.indd 208

7/14/2011 5:56:54 PM

Notes

83.

84.

85.

86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

209

IOR/F/4/718/19542; Auckland Minute, January 17, 1837, Extract India Political Consultations, January 17, 1837, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1651/65913. See, for example: Grose, Voyage to the East-Indies, I: 134; [James Macpherson], History and Management of the East-India Company, from its Origin in 1600 to the Present Times (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 33; “Account of Colonel De Boigne’s Troops” (ca. 1793), BL/APAC/IOR/H/388 (2); Peter Auber, Rise and Progress of the British Power in India (London: William H. Allen & Co., 1837, 2 vols.), I: 188–89. Extract Military Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, February 11, 1835, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/1556/63556; Ritchie, British World in the East, I: 194. Fitzclarence, Journal, 252; Malcolm, Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa, and Adjoining Provinces (London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1832, 3rd ed., 2 vols.), I: 355. North Indian Rajputs and Muslims comprised a good proportion of “Maratha” armies during this period just as they did the Company’s. Malcolm to Wellesley, June 28, 1805, BL/APAC/IOR/H/88(8). Wellesley to Bengal Secret and Political Secretary N.B. Edmonstone, April 11, 1805, enclosed in Bengal Revenue Consultations in the Department of Ceded and Conquered Provinces, April 11, 1805, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/183/3526. Political Letter from Court of Directors to Bengal, April 22, 1796; Political Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, January 25, 1797; Political Letter from Bengal to Court of Directors, September 11, 1797, all three documents, BL/APAC/IOR/F/4/43/1033B; Auchmuty Minute, March 1, 1813, BL/APAC/ IOR/H/88(26). Hodgson, Opinions, 121; Campbell, India as it May Be, 360. Jacob, “Remarks on the State of the Native Army in India in General’ Upon the Principles Whereupon its Efficiency Depends; and on the Means Whereby its Existing Defects May be Remedied,” in Jacob, Views and Opinions, 133, 134. Claudius Buchanan, “Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India” (1805), Works of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan (Baltimore, MD: Neal and Wills, 1812), 203; Joshua Marshman, Advantages of Christianity in Promoting the Establishment and Prosperity of the British Government in India (London: Smith’s Printing Office, 1813), 7; Ferdinand de Wilton Ward, India and the Hindoos (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850), 84. Thornton, India, Its States and Prospects (London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1835), 350–51; Thornton, History of the British Empire in India, IV: 58. Streets, Martial Races, 19; Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, 190. Herbert, War of No Pity; Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Great Uprising in India, 1857–58: Untold Stories, Indian and British (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2007), chap. 5; Salahuddin Malik, 1857: War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations? British Public Reactions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), conclusion. Richards, Old-Soldier Sahib, 88–89. Pace Streets, Martial Races, 31–32; Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj, 9.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 209

7/14/2011 5:56:54 PM

210

Notes

98. Papers Received from General John Jacob, PP 1859: Papers Concerned with the Re-Organization of the Army in India, 90; Papers Received from Sir John Lawrence, Brigadier-General Chamberlain, and Colonel Edwardes, June 24, 1858, ibid., 14. 99. Papers Received from Major-General Sir Hugh Rose, 74, q. 16; Papers Received from Colonel Burn, 155, q. 3; 156, q. 8; both documents, PP 1859: Papers Connected. 100. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 263.

Conclusion 1. Rev. Alexander Duff to Rev. Dr. Tweedie, Convener of the Free Church of Scotland’s Foreign Mission Committee, May 18, 1857 Indian Rebellion: Its Causes and Results, ed. Duff (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1858, 2nd ed.), 6. 2. Ibid., June 24, 1857, ibid., 33, 34. Emphasis in original. 3. Robert Montgomery Martin, Indian Empire (London: Printing and Publishing Company, 1858–61, 3 vols.), I: 3. 4. “Indophilus” [Sir Charles T. Metcalfe], Letters of Indophilus to “The Times” (London: Longman, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 5–6. 5. “Hindu,” Mutinies, the Government, and the People (Calcutta: D. Rozario and Co., 1858), 4, 6. 6. William Howard Russell, My Diary in India, in the Year 1858–59 (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860, 2 vols.), I: 53, 87, 105, 143, 180–81. 7. John William Kaye, History of the Great Revolt; or pub. as History of the Sepoy War (1864–76; New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2008 reprint ed., 3 vols.), I: 22, 351, 356. 8. Duff to Tweedie, February 20, 1858, Indian Rebellion, 282–83. 9. Henry Richard, Present and Future of India under British Rule (London: Ward and Co., 1858), 3. 10. Duff to Tweedie, July 10, 1857, Indian Rebellion, 54. 11. Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 7, 18. 12. Refer back to my discussion of this point in the Introduction. 13. Stephen Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor in British India (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2009), 42, 43; see also Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 14. Quoted from Percival Spear, Nabobs (1932; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 137. 15. See, for example: Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Penelope Carson, “Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India,” JICH 18 (1990): 169–90; Robert Eric Frykenberg, “Christians and Religious Traditions in the Indian Empire,” in

9780230116931_09_not.indd 210

7/14/2011 5:56:54 PM

Notes

16.

17. 18.

19.

211

Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities, c. 1815-c.1914, ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 473–92. See, particularly: Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 287. Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 19; David Omissi, Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860– 1940 (Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1994), 133. Patterson, Cult of Imperial Honor, chap. 2 passim, part. 83–84.

9780230116931_09_not.indd 211

7/14/2011 5:56:54 PM

Bibliography

Manuscript Sources BRITISH LIBRARY, ASIA, PACIFIC, AND AFRICA COLLECTIONS, INDIA OFFICE RECORDS (BL/APAC/IOR), LONDON, ENGLAND Board of Control Collections (F/4) Europeans in India (O/5) Home Miscellaneous (H) Military Department Records (L/MIL/5) Public and Judicial Department Records (L/P&J/3)

Parliamentary Papers First Report from the Select Committee of House of Lords on Operation of Act for better Government of H.M. Indian Territories. 1852–53, XXXI (627). First Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories; Together with the Minutes of Evidence. 1852–53, XXVII (426). Papers Connected with the Re-Organization of the Army in India, supplementary to the Report of the Army Commission. 1859, VIII (2541). Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords. 1852–53, XXIX (41). Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories. 1852, X (533). Second Report from Select Committee of House of Lords on Operation of Act for better Government of H.M. Indian Territories. 1852–53, XXXII (627–I).

Published Primary Sources: Archival Sources Fifth Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Nature, State, and Condition, of the East India Company, and of the British Affairs in the East Indies, Together with an Appendix Thereunto Reported by Colonel Burgoyne, 26 May 1772. London: J. Debrett, 1803. Letters to and from the East-India Company’s Servants, at Bengal, Fort St. George, and Bombay; Relative to Treaties and Grants from the Country Powers, from the Year 1756 to 1766, Both Years Inclusive . . . . London, 1772.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 213

7/15/2011 10:34:54 AM

214

Bibliography

Madras Army. Orders, Rules, and Regulations, To Be Observed Respecting the Troops on the Coast of Choromandel, 1766. Vepery, India: The East India Company’s Press, 1766. Ninth Report from the Committee of Secrecy Appointed to Enquire into the State of the East India Company. London: J. Debrett, 1804. Observations of the Court of Directors on the Respective Conduct of Warren Hastings, Esquire; Sir John Clavering, K.B., Colonel George Monson; Richard Barwell, Esquire; and Philip Francis, Esquire; in the Service of the Honourable East-India Company. London: J. Debrett, 1787. Proceedings of a Committee of Investigation, Appointed by the Governor and Council of Fort St.George, in Consequence of Orders from the Court of Directors, upon the Information of Mr. Sadleir against Mr. Floyer and others, for having received certain Sums of Money or Presents during the Time they respectively held the Office of Chief of Masulipatam. London: Frys and Couchman, 1784. Selection of Papers from the Records at the East India House, Relating to the Revenue, Police and Civil and Criminal Justice, under the Company’s Governments in India. London: E. Cox and Son, 1820, vols. 1–2; London: J.L. Cox, 1826, vols. 3–4. Third Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Nature, State, and Condition, of the East India Company, and of the British Affairs in the East Indies. 1772; London: J. Debrett, 1803.

Published Primary Sources: Books And Articles [Ali, Mir Shāhāmāt]. Notes and Opinions of a Native on the Present State of India and the Feelings of Its People. Ryde, UK: George Rutler, 1848. Anon. Military Sketches of the Goorkha War, in India, in the Years 1814, 1815, 1816. Woodbridge, UK: R. Hunter, 1822. Anon. Observations on the Law and Constitution of India, on the Nature of Landed Tenures and on the System of Revenue and Finance, as Established by the Moohummundum Law and Moghul Government. London: Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, 1825. Anon. Observations on the Present State of the East India Company. London: J. Nourse, 1771. Anon. Short History of English Transactions in the East-Indies. Cambridge: Fletcher and Hodson, 1776. Arnold, W.D. Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East. 1853; Leicester: Leicester University Press; New York: Humanities Press, 1973 reprint ed. Intro. Kenneth Allott. 2 vols. Auber, Peter. Rise and Progress of the British Power in India. London: William H. Allen & Co., 1837, 2 vols. Badenach, Walter. Inquiry into the State of the Indian Army, with Suggestions for its Improvement, and the Establishment of a Military Police for India. 1813; London: William Clowes, 1826, 2nd ed.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 214

7/15/2011 10:34:54 AM

Bibliography

215

Balfour, Edward. “Statistical Data for Forming Troops and Maintaining Them in Health in Different Climates and Localities.” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 8:3 (1845): 193–209. Balfour, T. Graham. Statistical Report on the Sickness and Mortality among the Troops in the Madras Presidency: Prepared from Official Documents Printed by Order of the Madras Government. Edinburgh: Stark & Company, 1847. Bentley, John. Essays Relative to the Habits, Character, and Moral Improvement of the Hindoos. London: Kingsbury, Parbury, & Allen, 1823. Bolts, William. Considerations on India Affairs; Particularly Respecting the Present State of Bengal and Its Dependencies. London: J. Almon, P. Elmsley, Richardson and Urquhart, 1772, 2 vols. Brown, Samuel. Few Thoughts on the Commission, Divisions of Profit, Selection of Lives, the Mortality in India, and Other Subjects Relating to Life Assurance. London: W.S.D. Pateman, 1849. Bruce, John. Historical View of Plans, for the Government of British India. London: J. Sewell and J. Debrett, 1793. Buchanan, Claudius. Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment: Being a Brief View of the State of the Colonies of Great Britain, and of the Asiatic Empire, in Respect to Religious Instruction: Prefaced by Some Considerations on the National Duty of Affording It; To Which Is a Sketch of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India. London: Cadell and Davies, 1813. ———. Works of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, L.L.D. Baltimore, MD: Neal and Wills, 1812. Buchanan, Francis. Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies; Black, Parry, and Kingsbury; W. Bulmer and Co., 1807, 2 vols. Buist, George. “Annals of India for the Year 1848.” Bombay: The “Times” Press, 1849. Burke, Edward. Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. V. India: Madras and Bengal, 1774–1785. Ed. P.J. Marshall; gen. ed. Paul Langford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. ———. Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. VI. India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, 1786–88. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. ———. Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. VII. India: The Hastings’s Trial, 1789–94. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Burnes, Alexander. Travels Into Bokhara, Together with a Narrative of a Voyage on the Indus. 1834; Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1973 reprint ed., 3 vols. Campbell, George. India as it May Be; An Outline of a Proposed Government and Policy. London: John Murray, 1853. ———. Modern India: A Sketch of the System of Civil Government, to Which Is Prefixed, Some Account of the Natives and Native Institutions. London: John Murray, 1852. Capper, John. Three Presidencies of India: A History of the Rise and Progress of the British Indian Possessions. London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853. Caulfield, James. Observations on Our Indian Administration, Civil and Military. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1832.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 215

7/15/2011 10:34:54 AM

216

Bibliography

Chapman, John. Principles of Indian Reform: Being Brief Hints. London: John Chapman, 1853. Colebrooke, [Henry Thomas]. Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus. Delhi and Varanasi, India: Indological Book House, 1972 reprint ed. [1858]. Colebrooke, Sir Thomas Edward. Letter to Thos. Baring, Esq., M.P. On the Indian Civil Service. London: Upham and Beet, 1852. Crawford, John. Ed. Letters from British Settlers in the Interior of India, Descriptive of Their Own Condition, and that of the Native Inhabitants under the Government of the East India Company. London: James Ridgway, 1831. Dallas, George. Letters, Political, Military, and Commercial, on the Present State and Government of the Province of Oude and its Dependencies, Addressed to Sir John Shore, Governor General of the British Possessions in India. London, 1796. Duff, Alexander. India and India Missions: Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of Hinduism Both in Theory and Practice. 1840; Delhi: Swati Publications, 1988 reprint ed. ———. Indian Rebellion: Its Causes and Results. London: James Nisbet and Co., 1858, 2nd ed. Dykes, James William Ballantine. Salem, an Indian Collectorate. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1853. Edwardes, Herbert B. Year on the Punjab Frontier, in 1848–49. London: R. Bentley, 1851, 2 vols. Elphinstone, Mountstuart. History of India. London: John Murray, 1843, 2nd ed., 2 vols. Fitzclarence, G.A.F [George Augustus Frederick]. Journal of a Route across India, through Egypt, to England in the Latter End of the Year 1817 and the Beginning of 1818. London: John Murray, 1819. Forster, George. Journey from Bengal to England. London: R. Faulder, 1798, 2 vols. Francklin, William [Ed.]. Military Memoirs of Mr. George Thomas. London: John Stockdale, 1805. Fraser, James Baillie. Journey of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains, and to the Sources of the River Jumna and Ganges. London: Rodwell and Martin, 1820. “Friend to Fair Discussion.” Letter to the Proprietors of East-India Stock, on the Subject of Sending Supervisors with Extraordinary Powers to India. London: S. Bladon, 1772, 2nd ed. Fuller, Andrew. Apology for the Late Christian Missions to India. London: J.W. Morris, 1808. Galloway, Archibald. Observations on the Law and Constitution, and Present Government of India. London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1832. Gleig, Rev. G.R. [George Robert]. Life of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, Bart., and K.C.B., Late Governor of Madras, with Extracts from His Correspondence and Private Papers. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830, 3 vols.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 216

7/15/2011 10:34:54 AM

Bibliography

217

Grant, Robert. Expediency Maintained of Continuing the System by Which the Trade and Government of India are Now Regulated. London: Black, Parry, and Co., 1813. Grose, John Henry. Voyage to the East-Indies, Began in 1750; with Observations Continued till 1764 . . . London: S. Hooper, 1766, 2 vols. Hastings, Warren. Minutes of What Was Offered by Warren Hastings, Esquire, Late Governor General of Bengal, at the Bar of the House of Commons, upon the Matter of the Several Charges of High Crimes and Misdemeanors Presented Against Him in the Year 1786. London: J. Debrett, 1788. Henderson, H.B. [Henry Barkley]. Bengalee: Or Sketches of Society and Manners in the East.London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1829. “Hindu.” Mutinies, the Government, and the People. Calcutta: D. Rozario and Co., 1858. Hodgson, John Studholme. Opinions on the Indian Army. 1850; William H. Allen & Co., 1857, 2nd ed. Holwell, John Zephaniah. Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan. London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1765. Hopkins, David. Dangers of British India, from French Invasion and Missionary Establishments. London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1809, 2nd ed. Hough, William. India As It Ought to Be Under the New Charter Act. London: Messrs. W. Thacker & Co., 1853. Howitt, William. English in India; Reprinted from “Colonization and Christianity”: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1839. Huggins, William. Sketches in India, Treating on Subjects Connected with the Government; Civil and Military Establishments; Characters of the European, and Customs of the Native Inhabitants. London: John Letts, 1824. Humbly, W.W.W. [William Wellington Waterloo]. Journal of a Cavalry Officer; Including the Memorable Sikh Campaign of 1845–1846. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854. “Indophilus” [Sir Charles T. Metcalfe]. Letters of Indophilus to “The Times.” London: Longman, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858. Irving, B.A. [Benjamin Atkinson]. Theory and Practice of Caste: Being an Inquiry into the Effects of Caste on the Institutions and Probable Destinies of the Anglo-Indian Empire. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853. Jacob, John. Views and Opinions of Brigadier-General John Jacob. 1851; London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858, 2nd ed. ———. “Papers on Sillidar Cavalry As It Is, and As It Might Be.” Bombay: Times Press, 1848. ———. “Remarks on the State of the Native Army in India in General; Upon the Principles Whereupon its Efficiency Depends; and on the Means Whereby its Existing Defects May be Remedied” (1854). Jacob, Views and Opinions of Brigadier-General John Jacob. 1851; London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858, 2nd ed.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 217

7/15/2011 10:34:54 AM

218

Bibliography

James, Hugo. Volunteer’s Scramble Through Scinde, the Punjab, Hindostan, and the Himalayah Mountains. London: W. Thacker and Company, 1854, 2 vols. Kaye, John William. Administration of the East India Company; a History of Indian Progress. London: Richard Bentley, 1853. ———. History of the Great Revolt. Or. Pub. as History of the Sepoy War. 1864–76; New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2008 reprint ed., 3 vols. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Macaulay: Prose and Poetry. Ed. G.M. Young. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. [Macpherson, James]. History and Management of the East-India Company, from its Origin in 1600 to the Present Times. London: T. Cadell, 1782, 2 vols. Malcolm, Sir John. Government of India. London: John Murray, 1833. ———. Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa, and Adjoining Provinces, with the History, and Copious Illustrations, of the Past and Present Condition of That Country. 3rd ed. London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1832, 2 vols. ———. Political History of India, from 1784 to 1823. Ed. K.N. Panikhar. 1826; New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1970 reprint ed., 2 vols. ———. Sketch of the Sikhs. London: John Murray, 1812. Malthus, Thomas Robert. Statements Respecting the East-India College, With an Appeal to Facts, in Refutation of the Charges Lately Brought Against It, in the Court of Proprietors. London: John Murray, 1817. Marshman, John Clark. Letters to John Bright, M.P., Relative to the Recent Debates in Parliament on the India Question London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1853. Marshman, Joshua. Advantages of Christianity in Promoting the Establishment and Prosperity of the British Government in India; Containing Remarks Occasioned by Reading a Memoir on the Vellore Mutiny. London: Smith’s Printing Office, 1813. Martin, Robert Montgomery. Indian Empire. London: Printing and Publishing Company, 1858–61. 3 vols. ———. Political, Commercial and Financial Conditions of the Anglo-Eastern Empire in 1832. London: Parbury, Allen, and Co., 1832. ———, Ed. Despatches, Minutes & Correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley During His Administration in India. 1836–37; New Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1984 reprint ed., 2 vols. Masson, Charles. Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and the Punjab. 1842; Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1974 reprint ed., 3 vols. McCosh, John M.D. Advice to Officers in India. 1841; London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1856, 2nd ed. M’Gregor, W.L. [William Lewis]. History of Sikhs. 1846; Patiala, Pakistan: Punjab Languages Department, 1970 reprint ed., 2 vols. Mill, James. History of British India. Ed. Horace Hayman Wilson. Intro. John Kenneth Galbraith. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1968 reprint ed. of 1858 5th ed., [1817], 6 vols. Mundy, Godfrey Charles. Pen and Pencil Sketches, Being the Journal of a Tour in India. London: John Murray, 1833, 2 vols.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 218

7/15/2011 10:34:54 AM

Bibliography

219

Munro, [Innes]. Narrative of the Military Operations, on the Coromandel Coast, Against the Combined Forces of the French, Dutch, and Hyder Ally Cawn, From the Year 1780 to the Peace in 1784. London: T. Bensley, 1789. Munro, Sir Thomas. “Minute by Sir Thomas Munro, on the State of the Country, and the Condition of the People.” December 31, 1824. George Robert Gleig, Life of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830. 3 vols. III: 319–390. “Najeeb.” Strictures on the Present Government, Civil, Military, and Political, of the British Possessions in India; Including a View of the Recent Transactions in that Country, Which Have Tended to Alienate the Affections of the Natives, in a Letter From an Officer, Resident on the Spot, to His Friend in England. London: J. Hatchard, and T. and R. Hughes, 1808. Napier, Charles James. Defects, Civil and Military, of the Indian Government. Ed. Lieutenant-General Sir W.F.P. Napier. London: Charles Westerton, 1853. ———. India as it May Be: An Outline of a Proposed Government and Policy. London: John Murray, 1853. Newnham, Henry. East India Question: Facts and Observations Intended to Convey the Opinions of the Native Population of the Territory of Bengal Respecting the Past and the Future. London: James Ridgway, 1833, 2nd ed. “Nota Manus” [Ghulam Husain Khan]. Sëir Mutaqherin; or View of Modern Times, Being an History of India, From the Year 1118 to the Year 1194, (this Year answers to the Christian Year 1781–82) of the Hedjrah. Tr. from Persian by Haji Mustafa [née M. Raymond, a French creole]. 1789; Calcutta: T.D. Chatterjee, 1902 reprint ed., 4 vols. Orme, Robert. Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan, from the Year MDCLIX. 1782; New Delhi: Associated Pub. House, 1974 reprint ed. of 1805 2nd ed. ———. History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, from the Year MDCCXLV. 1763; New Delhi: Today & Tomorrow’s Printers & Publishers, 1974 reprint ed. of 1783 2nd ed. 2 vols. Pennant, Thomas. View of Hindoostan. London: Henry Hughs, 1798, 2 vols. Pownall, Thomas. Right, Interest, and Duty, of the State, as Concerned in the Affairs of the East Indies. London: S. Bladon, 1773. Prinsep, Henry Thoby. India Question in 1853. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1853. ———. Narrative of the Political and Military Transactions of British India, under the Administration of the Marquess of Hastings, 1813 to 1818. London: John Murray, 1820. Rennell, James. Marches of the British Armies in the Peninsula of India, During the Campaigns of 1790 and 1791. London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1792. Richard, Henry. Present and Future of India under British Rule. London: Ward and Co., 1858. Richards, Frank. Old-Soldier Sahib. London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1936. Ritchie, Leitch. British World in the East: A Guide, Historical, Moral, and Commercial, to India, China, Australia, South Africa, and the Other

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 219

7/15/2011 10:34:55 AM

220

Bibliography

Possessions or Connexions of Great Britain in the Eastern or Southern Seas. London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1846, 2 vols. Roy, Rammohun. Exposition of the Practical Operation of the Judicial and Revenue Systems of India, and of the General Character and Condition of its Native Inhabitants, as Submitted in Evidence to the Authorities in England. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1832. Russell, William Howard. My Diary in India, in the Year 1858–59. London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860, 2 vols. Scrafton, Luke. Reflections on the Government of Indostan, with a Short Sketch of the History of Bengal, from MDCCXXXVIIII to MDCCLVI, and an Account of the English Affairs to MDCCLVIII. 1763; London: W. Strahan, G. Kearsley, and T. Cadell, 1770 reprint ed. Seely, John B. Wonders of Elora; or, the Narrative of a Journey to the Temples and Dwellings Excavated Out of a Mountain of Granite. London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1825, 2nd ed. Sellon, Edward. Ups and Downs of Life. 1867; Ware, UK: Wordsworth Classics, 1987 reprint ed. of 1892 2nd ed. Sherer, Joseph. Sketches of India: Written by an Officer for Fire-Side Travellers At Home. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821. Shipp, John. Memoirs of the Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp. London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., 1829, 3 vols. ———. Military Bijou; or, The Contents of a Soldier’s Knapsack: Being the Gleanings of Thirty-Three Years’ Active Service. London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., 1831, 2 vols. Shore, Frederick John. Notes on Indian Affairs. London: John W. Parker, 1837, 2 vols. Sita Ram Pandy. From Sepoy to Subedar: Being the Life and Adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a Native Officer of the Bengal Army. Ed. James Lunt. 1873; Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore: Vikas Publications, 1970 reprint ed. Skinner, Thomas. Excursions in India. London: Richard Bentley, 1833, 2 vols. Sleeman, N.H. On the Spirit of Military Discipline in Our Native Indian Army. Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1841. Smith, Nathaniel. General Remarks on the System of Government in India. London: J. Nourse, 1773. Spry, Henry Harpur. Modern India: With Illustrations of the Resources and Capabilities of Hindustan. London: Whittaker and Company, 1837, 2 vols. Stanhope, Philip Henry, 5th Earl. Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, 1831–1851. London: John Murray, 1888, 2nd ed. Stephen, James Fitzjames. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Ed. with an Introduction R.J. White. 1873; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967 reprint ed. of 1874 2nd ed. Sullivan, John. Tracts upon India; Written in the Years, 1779, 1780, and 1788. London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1795. Thorn, William. Memoir of the War in India. London: T. Egerton, 1818. Thornton, Edward Parry. History of the British Empire in India. London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1841, 6 vols.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 220

7/15/2011 10:34:55 AM

Bibliography

221

———. India, Its States and Prospects. London: Parbury, Allen, & Co., 1835. Tod, James. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan; or, The Central and Western Rajputs of India. Ed. William Crooke. 1829–32; Delhi, Varanasi, and Patna: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971 reprint ed. of 1920 2nd ed., 3 vols. Trevelyan, G.O. [George Otto]. Competition Wallah. 1864; London and Cambridge, UK: Macmillan and Co., 1866, 2nd ed. Trotter, Thomas. Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness, and its Effects on the Human Body. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1804, 2nd ed. Tucker, Henry St. George. Memorials of Indian Government; Being a Selection from the Papers of Henry St. George Tucker, Late Director of the East India Company. Ed. John W. Kaye. London: Richard Bentley, 1853. Tytler, Alexander Fraser. Considerations on the Present Political State of India. 1813; London: Black, Parbury, & Allen, 1816, 2nd ed., 2 vols. Vansittart, Henry. Letter to the Proprietors of East-India Stock, from Mr. Henry Vansittart, Occasioned by a Late Anonymous Pamphlet, and by the East-India Observer, No. VI. London: J. Newbery, J. Dodsley, and J. Robson, 1767. Verelst, Harry. View of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the English Government in Bengal. London: J. Nourse, Brotherton and Sewell, G. Robinson, and T. Evans, 1772. Ward, Ferdinand de Wilton. India and the Hindoos; Being a Popular View of the Geography, History, Government, Manners, Customs, Literature, and Religion of that Ancient People; with an Account of Christian Missions among Them. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850. Ward, William. View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos: Including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works. 1817; Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1970 reprint ed., 3 vols. White, Adam. Considerations on the State of British India. Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, W.and C. Tait, and A. Allardice; Glasgow: James Brash and Co.; London: J.M. Richardson, 1822. Williamson, Thomas. East India Vade-Mecum: Or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company. London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810, 2 vols. Young, Gavin. Reflections on the Present State of British India. London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., 1829.

Secondary Sources Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies ofWestern Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Alatas, Syed. Myth of the Lazy Native. London: Cass, 1977. Alam, Muzaffar. Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–48.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Alavi, Seema. Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 221

7/15/2011 10:34:55 AM

222

Bibliography

Alborn, Timothy. “Boys to Men: Moral Restraint at Haileybury College.” In Malthus, Medicine & Morality: “Malthusianism” After 1798. Ed. Brian Dolan. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. ———. Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England. London: Routledge, 1998. Anderson, Olive. “Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain.” English HistoricalReview 86 (1971): 46–72. Asher, Catherine and Cynthia Talbot. India before Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Attman, Artur. American Bullion in the European World Trade, 1600–1800. Götesborg, Sweden: Götesborgs Universitetsbibliotek, 1986. Badian, E. Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968. Bailey, Joanne. “Reassessing Parenting in Eighteenth-Century England.” In Family in Early Modern England. Ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 209–32. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Ballantyne, Tony. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Ballhatchet, Kenneth. Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980. Bannerjee, Sumanta. Under the Raj: Prostitution in Colonial Bengal. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. Barat, Amiya. Bengal Native Infantry: Its Organization and Discipline, 1796– 1852. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962. Barnett, Richard. North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720–1801. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Barua, Pradeep. “Inventing Race: The British and India’s Martial Races.” Historian 58:1 (1995): 107–16. Bayly, C.A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830. London: Longman, 1989. ———. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India. The C.A. Bayly Omnibus. 1998; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009 ed. Bayly, Susan. “Caste and ‘Race’ in the Colonial Ethnography of India.” In Concept of Race in South Asia. Ed. Peter Robb. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. 165–218.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 222

7/15/2011 10:34:55 AM

Bibliography

223

Beaglehole, T.H. Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792–1818: The Origins of “The Munro System.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Bhabha, Homi. Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2006, 2nd reprint ed. Bourke, Richard. “Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire.” Journal of the History of Ideas 63:1 (2000): 453–71. Bourne, J.M. Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-Century England. London: Edward Arnold, 1986. Bowen, H.V. “Bolts, William (1739–1808).” ODNB. Accessed January 15, 2009, at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2810. ———. Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757– 1773. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Brandon, Piers. Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Brewer, John. Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Buettner, Elizabeth. Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Burrow, J.W. Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Burrows, Edwin and Michael Wallace. “American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation.” In Perspectives in American History, IV: 167–302. Ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Cannon, John. Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Caplan, Lionel. “ ‘Bravest of the Brave’: Representations of ‘The Gurkha’ in British Military Writings.” MAS 25:3 (1991): 571–97. ———. Warrior Gentlemen: “Gurkhas” in the Western Imagination. Providence, RI and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995. Callahan, Raymond. East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Carson, Penelope. “Buchanan, Claudius (1766–1815).” ODNB. Accessed April 14, 2009, at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3831. ———. “Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India.” JICH 18 (1990): 169–90. Carton, Benedict. Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 223

7/15/2011 10:34:55 AM

224

Bibliography

Chakravarty, Gautam. Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Chaudhuri, K.N. Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Clark, Anna. Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. ———. Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———. “Representing Authority in Victorian India.” Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. 632–82. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Collingham, E.M. Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001. Cox, Jeffrey. Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Curley, David. “ ‘Voluntary’ Relations and Royal Gifts of Pan in Mughal Bengal.” In Robes of Honour: Khil’at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Bengal. Ed. Stewart Gordon. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. 50–79. Dalrymple, William. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. New York: Viking, 2002. Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Davidson, Allan. Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 1786–1813: Missionary Publicity and Claudius Buchanan. Abington, Oxfordshire, UK: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1990. Dirks, Nicholas. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Hollow Crown: Ethno-History of an Indian Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Finley, M.I. World of Odysseus. With introduction by Simon Hornblower. 1954; London: The Folio Society, 2002 reprint ed. of 1978 2nd revised ed. Finn, Margot. Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740– 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Forrester, Duncan. Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India. London: Curzon Press Ltd., 1979. Freeman, Joanne. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Frykenberg, Robert Eric. “Christians and Religious Traditions in the Indian Empire,” In Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities,

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 224

7/15/2011 10:34:55 AM

Bibliography

225

c. 1815–c. 1914. Ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 473–92. ———. Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Ghosh, Durba. Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Gibson, William. Church, State and Society, 1760–1850. Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1994. Girouard, Mark. Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Gordon, Stewart. Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in EighteenthCentury India.Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Gould, Tony. Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas. London: Granta Books, 2000. Greenberg, Kenneth S. Honor and Slavery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. ———. Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement. 1963; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996 reprint ed. with foreword by Amartya Sen. ——— and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Habbakkuk, John. Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership, 1650–1950.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. Ed. Cultures of Empire. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Harling, Philip. Waning of “Old Corruption”: The Politics of Economic Reform in Britain, 1779–1846. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. ——— and Peter Mandler. “From ‘Fiscal-Military’ State to Laissez-Faire State, 1760–1850.” JBS 32 (1993): 44–70. Harris, William. War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Harvey, Karen. “History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800,” JBS 44:2 (2005): 296–311. ——— and Alexandra Shepard. “What Have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500–1950.” JBS 44:2 (2005): 274–280. Hawes, C.J. Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 1996. Hendrickson, Kenneth. Making Saints: Religion and the Public Image of the British Army, 1809–1885. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 225

7/15/2011 10:34:55 AM

226

Bibliography

Herbert, Christopher. War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Hilton, Boyd. Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Hirschmann, Edwin. “White Mutiny”: The Ilbert Bill Crisis in India and Genesis of the Indian National Congress. Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1980. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hunt, Lynn. Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Hunt, Margaret. Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Hutchins, Francis. Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Irschick, Eugene. Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Jasanoff, Maya. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750– 1850. New York: Knopf, 2005. Jones, David Martin. Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1999. Joseph, Betty. Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Kapila, Shruti. “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond, c. 1770–1880.” MAS 41:3 (2007): 471–513. Kent, Susan Kingsley. Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990. London: Routledge, 1999. Kidd, Colin. Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kiernan, V.G. Lords of Human Kind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969. Killingray, David. “ ‘A Good West Indian, a Good African, and, in Short, a Good Britisher’: Black and British in a Colour-Conscious Empire, 1760–1950.” JICH 36:3 (2008): 363–81. Kolff, Dirk. Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethno-History of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kolsky, Elizabeth. Colonial Justice in British India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kopperman, Paul. “ ‘Cheapest Pay’: Alcohol Abuse in the Eighteenth-Century British Army.” Journal of Military History 60:3 (1996): 445–70. Kramnick, Issac. Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Kriegel, Abraham. “Edmund Burke and the Quality of Honor.” Albion 12:4 (1980): 337–49.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 226

7/15/2011 10:34:55 AM

Bibliography

227

Kuchta, David. Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Lendon, J.E. Empire of Honor: The Art of Governance in the Roman World. 1997; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 2nd ed. Levine, Philippa. Ed. OHBE Companion Series: Gender and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003. Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie. Great Uprising in India, 1857–58: Untold Stories, Indian and British. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2007. Malchow, H.L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Malik, Salahuddin. 1857: War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations? British Public Reactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Marshall, P.J. Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828: New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. ———. ‘A Free though Conquering People’: Britain and Asia in the Eighteenth Century. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003 reprint of inaugural lecture in the Rhodes Chair of Imperial History delivered at King’s College, London, 1981. ———. Impeachment of Warren Hastings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. ———. “White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company.” MAS 31 (1997): 89–108. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. 1922; London: Routledge, 1990 reprint ed. McLane, John. Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth Century Bengal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. McLaren, Martha. British India & British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance. Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001. McLeod, Hugh. Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996. McNeill, William. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Merrick, Jeffrey. “Fathers and Kings: Patriarchalism and Absolutism in Eighteenth-Century French Politics.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 308 (1993): 281–303. Metcalf, Thomas. Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. ———. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 227

7/15/2011 10:34:56 AM

228

Bibliography

———. Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. ——— and Barbara D. Metcalf. Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 2nd ed. Misra, B.B. Bureaucracy in India: An Historical Analysis of Development up to 1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773–1834. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959. Moore, R. J. “Abolition of Patronage in the Indian Civil Service and the Closure of Haileybury College.” Historical Journal 7:2 (1964): 246–57. ———. Sir Charles Wood’s Indian Policy, 1853–66. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966. Mosse, George. Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Nechtman, Tillman. Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Nightingale, Carl. “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York.” AHR 113:1 (2008): 48–71. Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Oldham, James. “Truth-Telling in the Eighteenth-Century English Courtroom.” Law and History Review 12 (1994): 95–121. Oldstone-Moore, Christopher. “Beard Movement in Victorian Britain.” Victorian Studies 48:1 (Fall 2005): 7–34. Omissi, David. Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940. Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan, 1994. Parthasarathi, Prasannan. Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Parker, Geoffrey. Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Patterson, Stephen. Cult of Imperial Honor in British India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Paxton, Nancy. Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Peers, Douglas. Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth-Century India. London and New York I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1995. ———. “The Habitual Nobility of Being’: British Officers and the Social Construction of the Bengal Army in the Early Nineteenth Century.” MAS 25:3 (1991): 545–69. ———. “Imperial Vice: Sex, Drink, and the Health of British Troops in North Indian Cantonments, 1800–1858.” In Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, c. 1700–1964. Ed. David Killingray and David Omissi. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 228

7/15/2011 10:34:56 AM

Bibliography

229

———. “ ‘Those Noble Exemplars of the True Military Tradition’: Constructions of the Indian Army in the Mid-Victorian Press.” MAS 31:1 (1997): 109–42. Penner, Peter and Richard Dale MacLean. Eds. Rebel Bureaucrat: Frederick John Shore (1799–1837) as Critic of William Bentinck’s India. Delhi: Charhya Publications, 1982. Pennington, Brian. Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Piggins, Stuart. Making Evangelical Missionaries, 1789–1858: The Social Background, Motives and Training of British Protestant Missionaries to India. Abington, Oxfordshire, UK: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1984. Pinch, William. Peasants and Monks in British India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pitts, Jennifer. Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. “Honor.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. David Sills New York: Macmillan, 1968–79, 18 vols. VI: 503–11. ———. “Honor and Social Status.” In Honor and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Ed. J.G. Peristiany London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965. 21–77. Pollock, Linda. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983. Premo, Bianca. Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Renford, Raymond. Non-Official British in India to 1920. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Robb, Peter, Ed. The Concept of Race in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Robins, Nick. The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006. Ross, Ellen. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Rosselli, John. Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1839. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. ———. “Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal.” Past and Present 86 (1980): 121–48. Roy, Kaushik. “Military Synthesis in South Asia: Armies, Warfare, and Indian Society, ca. 1740–1849.” Journal of Military History 69 (2005): 651–90. Schiebinger, Londa. Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript of Subordinate Groups. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. ———. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Sen, Sudipta. Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India. New York: Routledge, 2002.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 229

7/15/2011 10:34:56 AM

230

Bibliography

Sen, Sudipta. “Liberal Empire and Illiberal Trade: The Political Economy of ‘Responsible Government’ in Early British India.” In New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 136–154. ———. Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Sharma, Malti. Indianization of the Civil Services in British India (1858–1935). New Delhi: Manak Publications, 2001. Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Sikka, Ram Parkash. Civil Service in India: Europeanization and Indianization under the East India Company (1765–1857). New Delhi: Uppal Publishing House, 1984. Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Snape, Michael. Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War. London: Routledge, 2005. Spear, Percival. Nabobs. 1932; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Spiers, Edward. Army and Society, 1815–1914. London: Longman, 1980. Spurr, John. “Perjury, Profanity and Politics.” Seventeenth Century 8:1 (Spring 1993): 29–50. ———. “Profane History of Early Modern Oaths.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 6 (2001): 37–64. ———. “ ‘Strongest Bonds of Conscience’: Oaths and the Limits of Tolerance in Early Modern England.” In Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700. Ed. Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 151–65. Sramek, Joseph. “ ‘Face Him Like a Briton’: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800–1875.” Victorian Studies 48:4 (2006): 659–80. Stallings, A.E. “Historical Present.” American Scholar (Winter 2007). Accessed August 25, 2010, at: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-historical-present. Stanley, Peter. White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–1875. New York: NYU Press, 1998. Stein, Burton. Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980. ———. Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982. Stewart, Frank Henderson. Honor. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Stokes, Eric. “Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the Nineteenth Century.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 30 (1980). ———. English Utilitarians and India. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 230

7/15/2011 10:34:56 AM

Bibliography

231

———. Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. ———. Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857. Ed. by C.A. Bayly. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ———. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Stone, Lawrence. Family, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern England, 1500– 1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Strachan, Huw. Wellington’s Legacy: The Reform of the British Army, 1830–54. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Streets, Heather. Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Suleri, Sara. Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sutherland, Lucy. East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Thompson, E.P. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: New Press, 1993. ———. “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History 3 (1978): 133–65. ———. Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon, 1975. ———, Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, and Cal Winslow, eds. Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Pantheon, 1976. Tilly, Charles. Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Tosh, John. Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. “Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914.” JBS 44:2 (2005): 330–342. Trautmann, Thomas. Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Travers, Robert. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Bengal: The British in Bengal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Trumbach, Randolph. Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Academic Press, 1978. Van Woerkens, Martine. Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India. Trans. Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Vickery, Amanda. Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Wahrman, Dror. “ ‘Middle-Class’ Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria.” JBS 32 (1993): 396–432.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 231

7/15/2011 10:34:56 AM

232

Bibliography

Watson, I.B. Foundations for Empire: English Private Trade in India, 1659– 1760. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980. Wheeler, Roxann. Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Whelan, Frederick. Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. Wickremesekera, Channa. “Best Black Troops in the World”: British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746–1805. Delhi: Manohar, 2002. Wiener, Martin. Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wilson, Jon. Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Wilson, Kathleen. Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century.London: Routledge, 2003. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. 1982; Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2007, 2nd ed. Yang, Anand. Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Yazawa, Melvin. From Colonies to Commonwealth: Familial Ideology and the Beginnings of the American Republic. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Zastoupil, Lynn and Martin Moir. Eds. Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843. Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1999.

9780230116931_10_bib.indd 232

7/15/2011 10:34:56 AM

Index

Adam, Frederick (Madras governor), 1, 53 Alavi, Seema, 204 Alborn, Timothy, 201 Ali, Hyder, 69 Ali, Mir Shāhāmāt, 4, 111–12, 114, 122–3 American Revolution, 3, 9, 10, 25, 32, 75, 160, 177 and popular sovereignty, 3 Anglo-Nepal War (1814–6), 145–6 Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845–6 and 1848–9), 139, 148, 149 and British reluctance to recruit Sikhs as soldiers, 149 see also Sikhs Antebellum South, 5, 6, 56 anti-papism, 44, 139 Arnold, W.D. (William Delafield), 15, 73, 141–2 “Aryan race” idea, 11, 134, 204 Atlantic slave trade, 18 Auber, Peter, 46, 60 Auchmuty, Sir Samuel (Madras Army general), 151 Auckland, Lord (Governor-General, 1836–42), 150 Aurungzeb (Mughal emperor, r. 1658–1707), 19 baboos (babus), 50, 51 Badenach, Walter, 67, 81, 83 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 233

Ballantyne, Tony, 11 banyans (banians), 31, 35, 36, 39, 51 Battle of Kalunga (1815), 146 see also Anglo-Nepal War Battle of Plassey (1757), 20, 37 Bayley, William Butterworth, 63, 65, 110 Bayly, C.A., 4, 44 beard-wearing movement in Victorian Britain, 148 Benfield, Paul, 22, 49, 51 Bengal Army, 13, 77–8, 79–80, 127, 149, 151, 153–4 and British beliefs that it was too caste beholden, 149 and British concerns about its homogeneity, 151 and British doubts about its fighting effectiveness, 139 and British doubts about its loyalty, 139, 145, 154, 161 and British fears of loss of control over, 137–8 attempted ban on Brahmin sepoys in, 138 Brahmin sepoys in, 129, 136, 139, 155 changes in recruitment after 1857, see Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 comparison to Madras and Bombay armies, 77–9, 188 domination by high–caste Hindus, 13, 78, 83, 95, 151

7/15/2011 10:57:57 AM

234

Index

Bengal Army—Continued irregular cavalry units within, 150, 151 and peasants, 83 recruitment of sepoys before 1857 in, 13, 77–8, 79–80, 152–3 and social distancing between Indians and Britons within, 127, 132 tolerance of caste rituals within, 132, 140 Bengal government as supreme government of India, 51 Bengalis, 113–14, 114, 126, 133, 135 British beliefs they were effeminate, 114, 126, 133, 135 British beliefs they were morally wicked, 113–14 and dark skin color, 133, 135 Bentinck, Lord William Governor of Madras (1803–6), 76, 109 Governor-General (1828–35), 61, 109, 116, 117, 131, 137, 138, 138–9, 160–1 and abolition of corporal punishment in sepoy armies, 138, 204–5 and attitudes toward Indian gift-giving, 61 and economical reforms to colonial government, 109–10 and partial Indianization of the colonial bureaucracy (1831), see Indianization Bentley, John, 106 Bhabha, Homi, 43 Bird, William Wilberforce (Bengal official), 118, 124–5, 161 Black Act (1836), 194 Board of Control, 27, 101 Bolts, William, 22, 23–4, 29, 31, 35, 51

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 234

Bombay Army, 77, 78–9, 137 Boston Tea Party (1773), 25 Bourne, J.M., 175, 200 Bowen, H.V., 17, 27, 48 Brahmins, 68, 78, 129, 136, 139, 155 British beliefs they caused Indian immorality, 44, 45, 136 as sepoys in Company armies, 68, 78, 129, 136, 139, 155 British fears that they disturb basic military discipline, 136, 139 British fears that they threaten the loyalty of other sepoys, 136, 155 British fears that they undermine British authority over Bengal Army, 139 British mistrust of, 139, 155 see also Hinduism Brewer, John, 25, 62 bribery, 1, 7, 12, 20, 45, 49, 59, 63–4, 89 and British concerns about prestige, 1, 12, 89 and gift-giving, 12, 49 and looting of Bengal (18th century), 20 British aristocracy, 55–6, 82–3 and debt, see debt and military service, 82–3 and strict settlements, 55–6 British apprehensions about religion’s role in sepoy armies, 136–7 British Army, 75, 88 and religion, 88 British child-rearing practices (18th and 19th century), 99 British civil service reform, 62 and India, 14, 100 British district officials, see covenanted servants

7/15/2011 10:57:57 AM

Index British fears about the fragility of their colonial rule, 2, 3, 30, 41, 68, 76, 91, 103–4, 129, 132, 137, 143, 144 and British misbehavior, 2, 30, 91, 143, 144 and need to sustain Indian loyalties, 41, 68, 103–4, 132, 137, 143, 144 British fear of dependence on Indians, 102, 103 British fear of loss of mastery/ domination over India, 31, 36, 47, 129 British Foreign and Bible Society, 88 British historiography versus British imperial historiography, need for greater linkages between, 8, 162, 169 British interactions with Indian elites, need to be more frequent to ensure British colonial rule, 104, 105, 123, 137, 138–9 British judges in India as more trustworthy than Indian ones, see Indianization British military superiority, British beliefs regarding, 13, 67, 69, 71, 103, 129–30, 131, 162–3 caused by superior military discipline, 69, 185 inferiority of Indian fighting methods, 13, 67, 69–70, 71, 130 scientific nature of, 70, 130 superior British courage, 71, 131 ultimate basis of British colonial rule, 103, 130–1, 158, 162–3 see also “empire of conquest” ideology British political culture (18th century), 4–5, 62, 160 and gift–giving, 62

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 235

235

British private greed in India, 19, 20, 21, 23, 29, 34 British Raj, 7, 8, 10–11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 38, 42, 55, 61, 63, 66, 73, 94, 99, 101, 116, 117, 119, 125, 126, 127, 128, 135, 142, 153, 156, 159–60, 161, 163, 194, 201 and continuities between Company India, 7, 10–11, 14, 16, 19, 38, 42, 55, 61, 63, 66, 73, 94, 99, 101, 116, 117, 119, 125, 126, 127, 128, 135, 153, 156, 159–60, 161, 163, 194, 201 British sexuality in India, 7, 42, 56–7, 58, 91–2 and Britons’ marital status, 56–7 and British soldiers, 91–2 and Indian kept women, 7, 42, 56–7, 58 British social estrangement from Indians, see racism British beliefs that it was inevitable, 159 British soldiers, 1, 6, 10, 13, 55, 72, 73–6, 84–9, 90–4, 131, 140–1, 190, 191 and Baptist influence among, 85 and British ideas about their superiority over sepoys, 75–6, 131 boredom of in India, 93–4 British domestic attitudes toward, 190 and court-martials, 90 and drunkenness, see drunkenness high numbers of Roman Catholics, 85, 140, 191 and irreligion, 1, 84–9, 140–1 damaging to British moral prestige, 85, 141 and illiteracy, 84

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

236

Index

British soldiers—Continued low numbers compared to sepoys, 73–4 and Methodism, 85 and mortality, 74 and poverty, 72 as primary bulwark of British colonial rule, 73 recruitment of for service in India, 75 role within sepoy armies, 13, 67, 73, 75, 130, 131 as “scum of the earth,” 72 and sexual relations with Indian women, 91–2 social origins of Company soldiers vis-à-vis British Army ones, 85 and sport, 13, 94 superior courage of, 71, 131 and temperance, 85, 91 violence toward Indians, 6, 55, 91, 144 British violence toward Indians, 6, 91, 144–5, 177 seen as a threat to the long-term stability of British colonial rule, 145 Brown, Samuel, 74 Bruce, John, 73 Buchanan, Claudius, 43, 86–7, 88, 152, 153 Buchanan, Francis, 149–50 Burke, Edmund, 5, 17, 26, 32–6, 37, 38, 39, 47, 48–9, 51, 55, 65, 100, 162, 177 and American colonialist cause, 32 and banyans, 35–6, 39, 51 and British greed in India, 34 and colonialism, 32, 34–5 and conservatism, 33, 34, 36 and debt, 36, 51, 55, 100

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 236

and desirability of aristocratic rule, 35 and the East India Company, 33–4 parsimony of, 34 and favorable view of the Indian past, 33 and fear of Indians, 36, 39, 47, 48–9 and gift-giving, 36, 59, 100 and the Hastings impeachment trial, 32, 33, 36–7, 39 and honor, 33, 35–6, 38, 40, 166, 177 and imperial commitment to India, 5, 34, 39–40 importance of India in his thought, 32 and Ireland, 32 limitations to his critique of empire, 34–5, 39 and trust, 5, 35, 36, 47, 177 and use of morality in parliamentary rhetoric, 32–3 and Warren Hastings, 33–6, 38, 39 Burke, William (medical doctor), 93 Burnes, Alexander, 147, 148 Bushby, Henry Turner, 1, 53, 54, 64 Calcutta (Kolkata), 20, 42, 50, 55, 158 Campbell, George (Bengal official), 117, 139, 147, 149, 151 Cannadine, David, 82 Caplan, Lionel, 73 Capper, John, 52, 122 caste, 13, 15, 45, 68, 80–1, 83, 95, 127, 129, 133, 136–9, 155, 161 and Bengal Army, 136–9 British beliefs that it interfered with military discipline, 137, 139

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

Index interference with the sepoy’s relationship to his British commanding officer, 139 and British beliefs about, 13, 15, 45, 68, 80–1, 95, 129, 133, 136, 138, 155, 161 as analogous to class, 13, 15, 68, 80–1, 95, 129, 133, 161 as analogous to race, 15, 129, 138 as breeding Indian immorality, 45 as a religious phenomenon, 15, 129, 133, 136, 155, 161 British fears of, 15, 127 and missionaries, 137 social fluidity of caste in precolonial India, 83 shifts in British thinking about, 129, 132, 133–9 casuistry, 45 Catholic emancipation in Ireland, 27 Caulfield, James, 106, 111 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 17 Charter Act of 1833, 110, 111, 113, 121, 122–4 Chaudhuri, K.N., 18 Chennai, see Madras chivalry, nineteenth-century cult of, 82, 188 cholera, 74 Church of England, 85, 86, 87, 88 establishment of Anglican church in India (1813), 87 Church of Scotland, 87 civilizational superiority, ideas about, 70, 72–3, 130 see also Enlightenment Clerk, Sir George Russell (Bombay official), 119 Clive, Lord Robert, 11–12, 20, 21, 23, 29, 30, 49, 51, 58 as conqueror of Plassey, 11–12, 20

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 237

237

as nabob, see nabobs, 21, 49, 51, 58 as president of Bengal (1765–7), 21, 23, 29, 30 his suspicion of Britons in India, 29, 30 Cockburn, Thomas, 102 Cohn, Bernard, 167 Colebrooke, Edward, 102 Colebrooke, H.T., 81 Colebrooke, Sir Thomas Edward, 117 Collingham, E.M., 128 colonial prestige, 1–2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 36, 49, 60, 61, 98, 156, 160 and British arrogance, 7, 10, 16, 63, 66, 73, 94, 155, 156, 159 and British fears of violence toward Britons, 136, 157–8 and British obsessions over, 1, 3, 11, 12, 13, 15, 36, 38, 53, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 69, 85, 88–9, 90, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 116, 121, 122, 1256, 136, 139–40, 141, 142, 144, 145, 156, 157–8, 160, 161, 163, 167, 178 colonial rule, see Company India as a “management” or “public relations” problem, 28, 41, 66, 91 and morality of, 2, 3, 12, 28, 31, 35, 37, 38 as a “performance,” 160 and questions regarding its legitimacy, 3 Colville, Charles, 93 Combermere, Lord (commander-inchief, Bengal Army), 140 Company India, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 16, 24, 27–8, 29, 55, 61, 153, 160, 167

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

238

Index

Company India—Continued authoritarian nature of, 3, 160 denial of Indian popular sovereignty, 3, 160 despotic nature of, 24 and humiliation of Indians, 41, 104, 122–3 idea of Company India as an “empire of improvement,” 3, 37, 48, 101 idea of Company India as a “moral empire,” 34, 37, 42, 47, 112–13 idea of Company India as a “respectable empire,” 57 as model of new form of British imperialism, 10 oppressive nature of, 29 parsimony of, 24 racial discrimination under, 12, 145, 40, 43, 121–4 racial segregation in, 42, 128, 158 social estrangement between Britons and Indians, 158 social hierarchy of, 55 social snobbery in, 61, 167 trend toward greater British government involvement, 27–8, 153 see also East India Company The Competition Wallah (1864), 121 competition wallahs, 117 conquest of Bengal caused by British private greed, 20 conversion ratios between British and Indian money, 165, 181, 191, 198 Cornwallis, Lord (Governor– General, 1786–93), 10–11, 12, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 160

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 238

and administrative reforms (1793), 40–1, 65, 160 and increase in civil case backlogs, 100, 102, 104, 160 British criticisms that they were impractical, 101–2, 104, 109, 123, 160 British criticisms that they impeded good governance of India, 123 British criticisms that they were inadequate, 100, 109 British criticisms that they were inefficient, 98, 160 and belief in universal Indian corruption, 12, 39, 42, 44, 160 and decision to fire Indian bureaucrats (1793), 10–11, 12, 38, 40, 46, 65, 68, 97, 100, 160 and impact on British covenanted service, 46, 65 and questions regarding its morality as a policy, 97, 98, 104–6, 109 and partial reversal (1831), see Indianization British criticisms that it degraded Indians, 104, 123 extraordinary nature of, 40 and mandate that Indian civil employees take regular oaths, 44 and Permanent Settlement, see Permanent Settlement and personal racism, 41, 43, 44 and racial ban on Indians belonging to the covenanted service, 38 see also covenanted service corruption, 11–12, 20, 21, 24–5, 29, 31, 41, 42, 60, 64, 104

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

Index by Indians working in the colonial bureaucracy, 24–5, 31, 35, 63 problem of British corruption (18th century), 11–12, 20, 21, 29, 41, 42, 60 “country trade,” 18 covenanted servants, 8, 10, 12, 19, 37, 41, 104, 114–19, 120, 167 act as aristocrats while in India, 49–51, 54–5, 63 and concerns about their manliness, 118, 120, 121 and concerns about their morality, 47 and debt, see debt and low official salaries before 1793, 26, 41, 104 and physical illness, 116 and private trade, 12, 26, 41; abolition of, 41 see also “country trade” proper role of, 102, 115–16 social origins of, 51, 55, 118, 175, 200 trying to becoming aristocrats back in Briton, 29 unqualified compared to Indian officials, 109, 112, 122 youthfulness of, 31, 34, 36, 39, 47, 54–5, 57 covenanted service, 10, 14, 40, 111, 122, 124, 161 attacks on, 118 for not being aristocratic enough, 118 post-1857 criticisms of, 116, 117, 119 racism of, 40, 111, 122, 124, 161 Cox, R.W., 105 Cradock, J.D., 67, 75 see also Vellore Mutiny

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 239

239

Crawford, John, 108 Cromer, Lord, 103 Crusades, the, 130 Dalhousie, Lord (Governor-General, 1848–56), 2, 141, 149, 159 and concern for British colonial prestige, 2, 141 and doctrine of lapse, 149, 159, 208 Dalrymple, William, 42 Darwinism, 11, 135, 172 see also Social Darwinism dastaks, 19, 20 see also British private greed in India debt, 1, 6, 8, 12, 36, 42, 49–59, 62–3, 65, 100, 115, 141–4 aristocratic attitudes toward, 55–6 among covenanted servants, 1, 6, 12, 36, 42, 49–59, 62–3, 65, 100, 115 ubiquity of, 50, 58 among military officers, 15, 141–4 and caste system, 52 difference between Britain and India, 50, 59 East India Company efforts to stem, 51–2, 58–9 and gambling, 143 and honor, 56 and Indian women, 56–7 and language schools in India, 55, 115 and living expenses in India, 52 middle-class attitudes toward, 55–6 and officers’ messes, 143–4 and youth, 49–50, 54–8, 63, 100 as source of corruption, 100 desecration of sepoy mosques, 136

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

240

Index

“dialogic interaction” and British colonialism, 4, 10, 166 Dirks, Nicholas B., 12, 38, 165 diwani of Bengal, grant of (1765), 20, 23, 30 doctrine of lapse, 149, 159, 208 Dorin, William, 106 “drain” theory, 24, 29 drunkenness, 1–2, 13, 74, 90–4, 144–5 and British violence toward Indians, 91, 144 and disease, 74, 90 and East India Company reform efforts, 13, 92–4 establishment of cantonment canteens, 13, 92, 93 establishment of regimental savings banks, 93 substitution of “soft” liquor for “hard” liquor, 93 and its harm to British prestige, 85, 90, 92, 94, 144 lack of among sepoys, 13, 82, 90–1 and mortality in India, 74, 90 by British soldiers, 1–2, 13, 82, 90–4 Duff, Alexander (Presbyterian missionary in India), 44, 157, 159 Dum Dum (Bengal Army cantonment), 84, 85 Duncan, Jonathan (Bombay governor), 88 Dutch East India Company, see VOC Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), 17 East India Company, see Company India, 2, 11, 12, 17–19, 21–4, 25, 27–8, 37, 153 abolition of (1858), 153 and accusations that it cared little for its Indian subjects, 23, 24, 34, 122–3

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 240

and attacks for not living up to its moral duties to its Indian subjects, 105, 122–3 bankruptcy of (1772), 25 and British government, 25, 27–8, 75, 101, 153 competition with British Army for British soldiers, 75 and chaplains, 86 and charter renewals, 27–8, 37, 97, 101, 117 and covenants, 19, 21, 167, 173, 201 concern for public image in Britain, 42, 48, 53, 101, 109, 117 corporate governance of, 22 directors, 21–2 and Ecclesiastical Department, 87 employees, see covenanted servants and free traders, 97 failures in controlling their employees’ actions, 21–3 greed of, 23, 24 greed of its employees in India, see nabobs, 28–9, 30 mechanisms for controlling its employees, 18–19 and missionaries, 28, 43, 44, 46, 86, 87, 88, 161 forced to admit missionaries (1813), 28, 87 see also missionaries mistrust of its British employees, 30 moral qualms about, 37–8 and Nonconformists, 88 and patronage, 14, 23, 28, 50–51, 100, 117, 119–21, 125, 174 abolition of civil patronage (1853), 119–21, 125 parliamentary bailout of (1772), 25

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

Index questions regarding its roles as colonial government and merchant, 12, 21, 22, 23, 26, 33–4 reform efforts, 21, 25–7, 40–1 and religion, 2, 13, 15, 87–8, 140–1 church-building, 2, 13, 15, 87–8, 141 support for Catholic priests in India, 140–1 support for Hindu and Muslim places of worship, 87 and shareholders, 22–3 social origins of shareholders, 181 and trading monopoly, 18, 27, 28, 117 Chinese tea trade, 20, 27 training of its British employees, 46–9, 117 see also Haileybury College East-India Vade Mecum, 51, 57 Edwardes, Herbert B., 149, 155 effeminacy, see masculinity, 9, 120 Ellenborough, Lord (Governor– General, 1842–4), 97, 118, 119, 131 and concern that not enough aristocrats governed Indian districts, 118, 119, 131 and concern for British colonial prestige, 97, 118 Elliot, David, 53–4, 64 Elphinstone, Mountstuart (Bombay governor), 3, 135, 150 embezzlement, 63 empire of conquest ideology, 13, 67, 130 empire of opinion ideology, 2, 3, 5, 7, 30, 35, 41, 57, 95, 130, 131, 145, 156, 158, 160, 162–3, 177

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 241

241

need to intimidate Indians to support British colonial rule, 3, 130, 131, 162–3 ultimate delusion of, 7, 158, 162–3 Enfield rifle, 153, 156 see also Sepoy Rebellion English public schools, 48 English Whigs, 5, 26, 35, 40, 177 Enlightenment, the, 9 and stadial progress theory, 9, 71, 130 Ernst, T.H., 102 European military revolution (16th– 18th centuries), 69, 185 Evangelicalism, 8, 162 and debt, 115, 199 see also debt Ewer, Walter, 107 Fagan, George 138 Fendall, John, 68 Finley, Moses, 61 Finn, Margot, 50 Fitzclarence, G.A.F. (George Augustus Frederick), 70, 81–2, 133–4, 150 forgery, 46, 101 Forster, George, 148 Fort William College (Calcutta), 47–8, 54 Foucault, Michel, 170 Fox, Charles James, 26 Fox-North coalition, 26–7 Fox’s India Bill (1783), 26 Francis, Philip, 26 Francklin, William, 70, 81, 148 Fraser, James Baillie, 116, 117, 146 French Revolution, 3, 10, 32, 36, 37, 82–3, 160, 177 and popular sovereignty, 3 French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 75 Fuller, Andrew, 43, 45, 88

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

242

Index

Furrukhsiyar (Mughal emperor, r. 1713–19), 19 Galloway, Sir Archibald, 99 gambling, see debt Gandhi, Mohandas K., 153 Garden Reach, 49, 158 see also Calcutta George III (British monarch, r. 1760– 1820), 26, 33 George IV (British monarch, r. 1820–30), 82 Ghosh, Durba, 57 Gibbon, Edward, 103 gift-giving, 8, 12, 20, 36, 42, 49, 59–63, 100 and British fears about its corrupting nature, 36, 59, 61, 62–3, 63–4, 100 British gift-giving practices, 62 British misunderstandings of Indian practices of, 61–3 customary gifts (nazars), 60–1 gifts as a form of political incorporation in pre-colonial India, 61 “going native,” British fears of, 86 Grant, Charles, 28, 72, 110 Grant, Robert, 72, 73, 103 Greek, George, 92 Greenberg, Kenneth, 6 Grose, John Henry, 81 Gurkhas, 15, 73, 128, 129, 145–7, 154, 155, 206–7 and British attitudes toward, 145–7 and British beliefs that they should be recruited more, 146–7, 154, 155 Haileybury College, 12, 46, 48–9, 54, 63, 82, 102, 117, 119–20, 200 Hall, Catherine, 162 Hall, Stuart, 170

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 242

Halliday, Sir Frederick James, 111, 115 Hardinge, Lord (Governor–General, 1844–8), 141 Harvey, Karen, 8 Hastings, Warren (GovernorGeneral, 1773–85), 26, 30, 32, 33, 35–8 and conflict with Philip Francis, 26 and distrust of British officials, 30 and Edmund Burke, 32, 33, 35–8 and impeachment trial, 26, 32, 33, 37 Hay, Douglas, 5 Hay, Peter, 91 Henderson, Henry Barkley, 68, 76 Herbert, Christopher, 159 high-caste Hindus, see Brahmins and Rajputs and British mistrust toward, 136, 154, 161 and dominance within Bengal Army, see Bengal Army and prohibition against plowing their own land, 189 and prohibition against traveling via water, 137 seen by Britons as ultimately undesirable because of their caste rituals, 137 Hindu ethical theories about governance, 4, 44 Hinduism, 43, 44, 45–6, 101 and Brahmins, 44 and British beliefs it caused Indian corruption, 45, 46 and British beliefs it caused Indian immorality, 43–4, 45, 101 and British beliefs it caused mental enslavement of Indians, 46 see also anti–papism

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

Index History of British India (1817), 37, 70, 101 Hodgson, John Studholme, 127, 130–1, 132, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 149, 151 Holwell, John Zephaniah, 22 honor, 5, 6, 8, 32, 33, 35–6, 40, 42, 44, 56, 62, 81, 120, 142, 160, 167 and the British aristocracy, 56, 62 conflict between aristocratic and middle-class notions of honor in India, 56 and debt, see debt and Indians, 11, 32, 35, 45, 81, 120 Indians possessed honor, 11, 32, 35, 45, 81, 120 Indians did not possess honor, 32, 35, 45, 120 and the middle classes, 56 horse racing, 49–50, 57 see also debt Hough, William, 143 Huggins, William, 50, 51, 55, 63, 108 Humbly, W.W.W. (William Wellington Waterloo), 148 Hutchins, Francis, 182 Hyam, Ronald, 56–7 ICS, see Indian Civil Service Ilbert Bill controversy (1883), 99, 194, 197 Impey, Edward, 64 independence, idea of, 29, 34, 54–5 see also masculinity India and British fears that it is debauching British manliness, 57 as morally dangerous to Britons, 47, 48, 49, 57

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 243

243

India Act (1784), 27, 28, 101 Indian civil servants, 13, 24–5, 29–30, 31, 36, 38, 60, 98, 102, 106, 112, 116, 122 cheaper than British officials, 98, 102 more efficient than British officials, 98 more knowledgeable than British officials, 102, 112, 122 and oppression by, 24–5, 29–30, 31, 36, 60, 106, 116 and their supposedly corrupting nature over Britons, 13, 31, 38 Indian Civil Service (ICS), 7, 116, 117, 119, 125, 200 and horse-riding test, 125 and merit examinations, 120–1, 125 similar class background in its membership to East India Company’s covenanted service, 200 Indian history (18th century), 19 and idea of Indian despotism, 60 and Muslim conquests, 3 Indianization, 14, 98–100, 102–14, 122, 124–5, 160–1 and British racial prestige, 110, 112, 122, 124–5, 160–1 and diminished British enthusiasm for after 1830s, 111, 124–5 British opposition to, 97, 106–7, 111, 114 fears that Indians from the wrong social classes would be entrusted, 106–7 ideas that British judges are more trustworthy than Indian ones, 97, 111 mistrust of Indians holding any significant authority, 107

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

244

Index

Indianization—Continued need for a more Anglicized Indian elite to rule through, 107, 114 British support for, 98, 99, 102–5, 109, 112, 113, 115, 125 Indians already performed most of the tasks of colonial administration, 112 Indians ought to share in their own government, 109, 125 moral duty of British to train Indians to become more moral, 99, 105, 115 moral duty of British to train Indians toward eventual self– government, 98, 112, 113 paying Indians higher salaries would lead to less corruption, 104, 105, 112 would help improve Indian morality, 102, 104 would lead to cheaper colonial administration, 103 would lead to a more efficient colonial administration, 103 would win greater support for colonial regime among Indian elites, 103–4, 105 de facto, between 1793 and 1831, 108 impact of Indianization on British civil servants, 99–100 partial reversal of Cornwallis’s racial ban on Indian employment (1831), 98, 109–10 Indian Penal and Civil Codes (1860), 112 Indian servants, 52 Indian soldiers, see sepoys Indians, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 64, 66, 70–1, 95, 98–9, 101, 106,

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 244

108, 113–14, 120, 122, 127, 129, 136, 139, 160–3 and British fear of dependence on, 31, 36, 39, 47, 51, 106 and British beliefs regarding their immorality, 14, 42, 101, 161–2 and British beliefs that they lacked integrity, 120 and British beliefs that they were not morally redeemable, 41, 108 and British beliefs that they were universally corrupt, 12, 32, 40, 106, 161 British beliefs that they were universally dishonest, 32, 45, 64, 101, 161 British mistrust of, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 30, 36, 42, 47, 66, 95, 106, 127, 136, 160, 163 as effeminate, 9, 70–1 as “moral children,” 9, 44, 99, 113–14, 129 as morally wicked, 45, 98, 98–9, 108, 113 as prone to venality, 39, 40, 45, 46, 106 as secretive, 30, 35, 139 trustworthy nature of, 98, 122 Indonesia, see Dutch East Indies industrialization, 8, 80–81, 160, 162 Irving, B.A. (Benjamin Atkinson), 52, 133 Jacob, John, 2, 127, 130, 132, 138, 139, 144, 152, 154–5 Jafar, Mir, 12, 20 James, Hugo, 148 Jasanoff, Maya, 42 Jones, Sir William, 134 Kaye, John William, 113, 114, 121, 124, 158–9, 161 Kelly, William, 92–3

7/15/2011 10:57:58 AM

Index Khan, Ghulam Husain, 4, 24, 60 Khan, Hakim Mehendie Ali, 89–90 Khan, Muhammad Reza, 30, 31 Kipling, Rudyard, 45 Kolkata, see Calcutta Kolsky, Elizabeth, 91, 194, 197 Kramnick, Isaac, 32 Kshatriya, see Rajputs language schools, 47, 48, 54, 55 see also Haileybury College and Fort William College Lendon, J.E., 6 life insurance companies, 74 Low, Sir John, 64 Macartney, Lord (Madras governor), 45 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 37, 112–13, 114, 121, 124, 161, 194 Macdowall, Hay, 84, 88 Mackenzie, Holt, 52, 105 Macpherson, James, 29 Maddock, Sir Thomas Herbert, 64 Madras (Chennai), 42 Madras Army, 77, 78, 79, 151 and relative decline in military importance, 79–80 malaria, 74 Malcolm, Sir John (Bombay governor), 3, 76, 104, 131, 134, 137, 143, 150–1 and belief in need to conciliate Indian elites to British colonial rule, 104 and belief in need for more British military officers in sepoy regiments, 131 and concerns about caste, 137 and concerns regarding sepoy loyalty, 143 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 12, 48–9, 54, 57, 58–9, 63, 65, 82, 119

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 245

245

as professor at Haileybury College, 12, 48–9, 119 belief that British colonial officials needed to “be men” prior to arrival in India, 48–9, 54 belief that India was morally dangerous to Britons, 57 emphasis on moral self-restraint, 48–9, 59, 82 “man on the spot” ideology, 14, 100, 115–16, 120, 125 Marathas, 150 Marshman, Joshua, 152, 153 “martial races” ideology, 14–15, 79, 128, 134, 135, 145–53, 154, 155, 161 Company antecedents to, 14–15, 134, 135, 145–53, 154 and implementation as recruiting policy in 1880s, 79 and Sepoy Rebellion, 128, 154, 161 Marshall, P.J., 55 Martin, Robert Montgomery, 46, 111, 157 masculinity, 8–9, 99, 127, 132, 144, 162, 168, 169, 170 and the family, 8 and imperialism, 8, 9, 162 importance of as a character trait among Britons in India, 49, 57, 115, 118, 120, 121 and “independence,” 8, 144, 168 and morality, 8, 9, 127, 132, 169 and paternalism, 99 and politics, 8, 9, 170 Masson, Charles, 147–8 Mauss, Marcel, 61 Max Müller, Friedrich, 134, 204 McCosh, John, 143 McGregor, James Melville, 144–5 McLaren, Martha, 3 Mehta, Uday Singh, 32, 170, 199

7/15/2011 10:57:59 AM

246

Index

Melvill, Sir James Cosmo (East India Company official), 120, 122, 123 Melville, W.L., 111 merit-based examinations, see ICS British qualms about, 120–1 Metcalf, Thomas, 37, 127 M’Gregor, W.L. (William Lewis), 139 military officers, 1, 2, 8, 13, 55, 132 and concerns about their manliness, 132, 140, 142 and corruption, 1 and material relationships with Indians, 13, 15 role in sepoy armies, 13, 67, 71–3, 130, 131, 155 help cement sepoy loyalty to British rule, 73, 131 indispensable, 73, 130, 131, 155 provide guidance to sepoys, 155 set superior examples of conduct, 72 teach sepoys military discipline, 71, 131 Mill, James (Utilitarian philosopher and East India Company official), 70, 100, 101, 124 Mill, John Stuart, 100, 123–4, 161 Millett, Frederic, 124 Minto, Lord (Governor–General, 1806–13), 1, 46, 86, 89, 101 and views regarding Indian corrupt tendencies, 46, 101 Minute on Indian Education (1835), 114 missionaries and India, 28, 43, 44, 46, 86, 97, 106, 152 and common ground between missionaries and colonial administrators, 44, 46, 152

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 246

and views of caste, see caste and views of Indian immorality, 43, 106 mixed-races, 7 Mouat, James, 1, 89 Mughal Empire, 11, 17, 19, 23–4, 46, 57, 69, 148 and its armed forces, 69 and eighteenth–century collapse of, 19 and religious oppression of Sikhs, 149 Mundy, Godfrey Charles, 130, 146, 147 Munro, Innes, 72 Munro, Sir Thomas (Madras governor), 3, 97, 102–6 Muslims, 15, 127, 128, 129, 136–7, 145, 149–53, 154, 155 and British apprehensions about recruiting them as sepoys, 152 and British beliefs, that as former conquerors of India, they need to be accommodated, 150 and British beliefs that they were physically stronger than other Indians, 150 and British beliefs they would make great sepoys, 151, 152, 154, 155 and British fears of unrest by, 136–7, 152 and British mistrust toward, 151, 152 due to Vellore Mutiny (1806), 152 as a “martial class” in British minds, 149–50, 155 Mysore, 207 nabobs, 21, 41, 42, 49, 51, 63, 104, 173–4

7/15/2011 10:57:59 AM

Index “Najeeb,” 70, 85, 88 Napier, Sir Charles James (commander-in-chief of British forces in India), 15, 130, 131, 139, 143, 147, 149 and beliefs in British military superiority, 130, 131 and concerns about caste, 139 and debt among British military officers, 143 and fears of Sikhs, 149 and Gurkhas as replacements for high–caste Hindu sepoys, 147 Napoleon, 74, 75, 82 Nawab of Arcot’s debts, 22 Nechtman, Tillman, 9 Neill, General James, 154 Nepal, 71, 147, 207 and barriers to British recruitment of Gurkhas soldiers, 147, 207 Newnham, Henry, 61 Nicol, J.P., 147 Notes and Opinions of a Native, 112 Nugent, Sir George, 2, 90 Oakfield, or Fellowship in the East, 73, 141–2 oaths, 44–5, 179–80 O’Connor, Daniel, 140 officer messes, see debt Oldenburg, Veena, 128 Omissi, David, 128 Orme, Robert, 75 paternalism, 9, 10, 14, 93, 98, 99, 105, 106, 109, 114, 123, 171 and patriarchy, 9 patronage, see East India Company and British politics, 26, 28 Patterson, Stephen, 7, 142, 160, 163, 167, 168, 200

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 247

247

Paxton, Nancy, 128 Peel Commission (1858), 153, 154 Peers, Douglas, 3, 15, 74, 203 perjury, 45, 46, 101 permanence of British colonial rule, idea of, 47 Permanent Settlement, 40, 100, 178 Perry, Sir Thomas Erskine, 120, 121, 125 Pitt, William, 27 planters, 6, 55, 99, 107–8, 194, 197 and opposition to Indianization, 107–8 and opposition to Ilbert Bill (1883), 99, 107, 194, 197 and violence toward Indians, 6, 55, 108 Pownall, Thomas, 22, 29–30 Presbyterians in India, see Church of Scotland Prinsep, Henry Thoby, 72, 120 prostitution, 7 Protestantism, 43, 101 and emphasis on personal moral responsibility, 43, 101 and truth-telling, 43, 101 punch houses, 92 see also drunkenness punchayets, 108 Punjab, 71, 127, 149 Ravenscroft, George, 93 Ravenshaw, John, 107 racialized others as “children,” rhetoric of, see Indians as “moral children,” 171 racism, 10–11, 13, 16, 40, 66, 68, 91, 95, 121–4, 128 and Company India, 10–11, 16, 40, 66, 68, 91, 95, 121–4 and British ideas of their innate racial superiority over Indians, 13, 41, 68, 95, 158

7/15/2011 10:57:59 AM

248

Index

racism—Continued and emphasis of Company administrators on maintenance of British racial privilege in India, 91, 98, 108, 110, 111, 113, 124, 125 general origins of, 11, 172 racial discrimination under Company India, see Company India racial segregation under Company India, see Company India role in maintaining clear differences between British rulers and their Indian subjects, 43 social aloofness between Britons and Indians, 4, 10, 12, 41, 43, 61, 62–3, 66, 86, 132, 158, 183 Rajputs, 81–2, 83, 133–5, 161 and the ancient kshatriya, 81, 133 and British attitudes toward, 81–2, 83, 133–5, 161 and feudalism, 134 and racial kinship to Britons, see Aryan race idea as sepoys in East India Company armies, 68, 78, 81 regimental savings banks, see drunkenness Regulation VII of 1823, 51 see also debt Regulating Act (1773), 25–6, 153, 174, 181, 198 Reid, John, 91 Reilly, James, 91 religion role in maintaining cultural differences between Britons and Indians, 43 Rennell, James, 69 reputation, importance of, see colonial prestige, 2, 3, 30, 52,

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 248

53, 58, 64, 65, 66, 69, 85, 88–9, 90, 91, 93, 95, 102, 103, 105, 107, 114, 116, 121, 139–40, 141, 142, 144, 145, 157–8, 160, 161, 163, 178 Richard, Henry, 159 Richards, Frank, 84, 128, 154 Ricketts, Mordaunt, 64 Ripon, Lord (Board of Control President), 141 Robertson, Thomas, 84, 85, 88 Rome, and British imperialism, 6, 103–4, 195–6 Rohillas (Afghans resident in India), 150, 151 Rose, Sir Hugh, 155 Roy, Kaushik, 207 Roy, Rammohun, 4, 102–3, 103–4 Rumbold, Thomas, 22 Russell, Sir Henry, 91 Russell, William Howard, 158, 159 Sage, J.W., 52–3, 54 Salmond, James, 93 sati, British obsessions regarding, 99, 108, 129, 136, 161 Scott, Hugh, 92 Scott, Sir Walter, 82 Second Reform Act (1867), 5 Seddon, Edward, 57 Seely, John B., 136, 137 self-control, see masculinity, 8–9, 47, 48–9, 54, 57, 58–9, 63 selling of houses to Indians, 64, 89–90 Sen, Sudipta, 19 sepoys, 13, 66 and height requirements, 188 as crucial bulwark of British colonial rule, 68 British beliefs that they were gentlemen, 13, 68, 129, 132, 155 British beliefs in importance of maintaining sepoy loyalty, 2,

7/15/2011 10:57:59 AM

Index 68, 69, 73, 76, 84, 129, 143, 144, 155 cheaper than British soldiers, 74 incapable of becoming good soldiers without British officers, 67 lack of drunkenness among, see drunkenness only fight rationally under British command, 72–3 see also Brahmins and Rajputs Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, 6, 10, 15, 16, 74, 76, 79, 127, 128, 129, 142, 153–5, 157–9, 161, 204 and British fears of losing India, 157 and British psychological trauma, 128, 154, 159 and British rape rumors, 128 and British violence toward Indians, see violence, 128, 154, 157–8 and changes to British sepoy recruitment policies, 153–4 and greater British mistrust of Indians, 128, 154, 156, 159 and increase in number of British troops in India, 162–3 and racial policies of the British Raj, 128, 153, 159 and racial violence between Britons and Indians, 154, 157–8 as a sharp break in British colonial rule, 159 failure of, 157 Indian fears of losing caste as cause of, 153 long-term origins of, 127, 204 near universality of mutiny within Bengal Army, 153–4, 162 rapidity with which it spread throughout northern India, 153, 157

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 249

249

sepoy recruitment in East India Company armies, 68, 76–80, 95, 137 sexuality in the British Empire, 56–7 Sharpe, Jennie, 128 Shee, Moturam, 53 Shepard, Alexandra, 8 Sherer, Joseph, 71 Shipp, John, 91, 146 Shore, Frederick John, 41, 131, 132, 144 Sikhs, 15, 127, 128, 129, 145, 147–9, 154, 155, 208 and beard-wearing, 148, 208 and British attitudes toward, 147–9, 155 and British mistrust of, 149 not caste beholden, 149 ought to be recruited into the Bengal Army, 149, 154, 155 would be more loyal than high–caste Hindu sepoys, 149, 154 Singh, Ranjit (ruler of Punjab), 71 Sinha, Mrinalini, 8, 125, 126 Skinner, Thomas, 135 Sleeman, N.H., 132 Smith, Adam, 23 Smith, Nathaniel, 22 Snape, Michael, 85, 88 Social Darwinism, see Darwinism Spanish colonial Peru, 9 spice trade (17th century), 17 Sri Lanka, see Ceylon Stanley, Peter, 85, 93–4 Stein, Burton, 3, 185 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 99 Stokes, Eric, 40 Stoler, Ann Laura, 43 Stratchey, Henry, 105 Streets, Heather, 127, 128 strict settlements, see British aristocracy Subaltern Studies Collective, 4 Sullivan, John, 81

7/15/2011 10:57:59 AM

250

Index

Tagore, Satyendra Nath, 125 taking off of shoes by Indians in Britons’ presence, 6, 167 see also colonial prestige Test and Corporation Acts, 88 Thackeray, William, 103, 105 thugs, British obsession regarding, 99, 108, 129, 136, 161 Thompson, E.P., 4–5, 38, 62, 112, 170 Thorn, William, 208 Thornton, Edward Parry, 130, 152, 153 Tilly, Charles, 18 time, use of in British justifications of colonial rule, 113, 123, 124 Tod, James, 81, 133, 134 Trautmann, Thomas, 11 Travers, Robert, 37 Trevelyan, Sir Charles Edward, 120, 121, 162 Trevelyan, George Otto, 121, 125 Trotter, Thomas, 90 trust, 5, 11, 18, 95, 136 trust network, 18, 19, 20, 21 truth-telling, 43, 45 Tucker, Henry St. George (East India Company director), 105, 116, 118, 120, 121, 130 and attacks on the insufficient manliness of colonial officials, 116, 118, 120, 121 and beliefs in British military superiority over Indians, 130 and concern for colonial prestige, 116, 118 and support for Indianization of colonial bureaucracy, 105 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 101, 107 ud-Daula, Siraj (ruler of Bengal, r. 1756–7), 11–12, 20, 76 “unofficial” Britons in India, 55

9780230116931_11_ind.indd 250

Utilitarianism, 38 Vellore Mutiny (1806), 75–6, 136–7, 152 venereal disease, 7 VOC (Vereenigde Oost–Indische Companie), 17 Ward, Ferdinand de Wilton, 152 Ward, William, 45, 88, 133 Warden, Thomas, 63–4 The Wealth of Nations (1776), 23 “weapons of the weak,” 30 Wellesley, Lord Richard (GovernorGeneral, 1798–1805), 46–8, 49, 150–1 and belief in imperial grandeur, 47 and belief in permanence of colonial India, 47 and distrust of Indians, 47, 49 and Fort William College, 47–8 and recruitment of Muslims into irregular battalions, 150–1 Wellington, Duke of, 72 Weymouth, Lord, 74 Wheeler, Roxann, 179 White, Adam, 58, 70, 82, 90–1 Wickremesekera, Channa, 185 Wiener, Martin, 91 Wilberforce, William, 28 William IV (British monarch, r. 1830–7), 70 Williamson, Thomas, 51, 57 Willoughby, John Pollard, 115, 119, 199 Wilson, Horace Hayman, 37 Wilson, Daniel, 141 Wilson, Jon E., 4, 179 Wood, Sir Charles, 119–20 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 5, 6, 56 Young, Gavin, 70

7/15/2011 10:58:00 AM

9780230116931_09_not.indd 212

7/14/2011 5:56:55 PM

9780230116931_08_con.indd 164

7/14/2011 5:57:24 PM

9780230116931_05_ch03.indd 96

7/15/2011 6:37:09 PM

9780230116931_01_prexvi.indd xvi

7/15/2011 6:36:07 PM