ABSTRACT
In the last chapter we saw the way in which the English Company set about constructing a governing strategy in the early years of the nineteenth century. Our argument in that presentation was that the British sought to create devices and learning centers for teaching Indian languages to junior Company employees in the hope that they would make better administrators. Our goal was to show that British intentions had purposely included the desires of local Indians about their own culture as an incentive to incorporate them in the whole dialogic governing process. They would thereby be easier to govern and would be contained both by governing and self-disciplining mechanisms. Warren Hastings said that the project of translating Indian classics into English was a golden chain that would bind Indians to the English in a process that would last many years, longer even than the period they remained in India. We also saw that, in both Madras and Bengal, the process of teaching junior Company employees how to read and speak the languages of India also incorporated many Indians into what turned out to be a vast project. On the one hand, there were a great many Indian teachers or munshis who were recruited to teach the languages themselves. On the other, in both Madras and Bengal, Indians were incorporated into the work process whereby Indian authors wrote and printed textbooks on law, grammar and literature or history for the use of these young men from Britain. Even more important than all these effects was the fact that this ruling strategy created a revival of letters and learning of substantial proportions particularly among Bangla speakers. Because these linguistic activities were oriented toward the spoken and written languages of Indians, the sentiments of these Indians were incorporated and would naturally be supportive of, even obedient to, the Company government. In this chapter we shall look at the development of strategies brought for-
ward by the East India Company to offer an education to Indians, a project that had its intermediate fulfillment in the ultimate creation of three universities in 1857, at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Our goal will be to show how these policies and acts helped to encircle and contain Indians in a web that aided in the project in keeping the population disciplined and morally connected and therefore supportive of the Company government. This was a
project to make Indians into subjects. By making them subjects, our goal is to show how the Company sought to make local people dependent on it. Even more important than that, though, it was to become increasingly involved with the way a person is tied to his or her own identity by a conscience or selfknowledge. We shall see that both in the matter of education and rebellion this last activity is the most central to our account. We shall continue and conclude the chapter with an account of the sepoy
rebellion of 1857. Our intention here will be to demonstrate not only a series of strategies on the part of the British in their attempts to circumscribe and exclude important elements of the Indian population, particularly in Awadh, central India and Maharashtra, but also to indicate the ways in which many elements of the population participated in what later some nationalists would call “the first war of Indian independence.” Although many Christian missionaries had founded schools starting in the
sixteenth century and mostly in south India, Hastings’ decision to found the Calcutta madrassah in 1781 and Duncan’s decision to establish a Sanskrit college in Banaras in 1792 were the first in a series of attempts by the Company to educate Indians both to enhance the Company’s reputation in the eyes of the local population and to provide trained legal personnel to assist in the Company courts. Shortly after Duncan founded the Sanskrit College, a number of organiza-
tions and individuals in England, as part of the discussion about the renewal of the Company Charter, participated in a campaign there to demand that missionaries be allowed into the Company’s territory to evangelize. We cannot understand this project unless we look at developments from the
time when Protestant missionaries first arrived in India. In 1706, the first Protestant missionary, Bartholomeo Ziegenbalg, set foot on shore at a Danish entrepôt on the south Indian coast. Known as Tranquebar in its anglicized or Europeanized form, and meaning “The singing of the waves” in Tamil, this entrepôt, like the Danish port of Serampore up the Hughli River from Calcutta, in the eighteenth century was outside the English East India Company territories. Bound as he was to his “mission” to convert the local people to Chris-
tianity, Ziegenbalg had to confront all the things that local people said about him and other whites. For instance, in one open discussion with local people, one merchant in March 1714 stood up and said that the local residents thought of themselves as a very happy, understanding people. Their society was well regulated. They did not lack anything that the body and soul needed. Therefore, they wondered why Europeans criticized their religion. “Do we look like monsters? Don’t we have as much understanding as you do? The things manufactured here are greatly in demand by Europeans. What would move us to change our religion?” Another local individual named Aleppa said that white people perform very few good works, give very few alms, have no penitence, willingly accept presents, drink strong drinks, ill-treat animals and use them for food, care very little about bodily cleanliness, look
down upon all others as inferiors and are very avaricious, proud and passionate. Indeed, their Brahmans said that the white people were descended from the giants, and do not know the difference between good and evil but sin continuously. All the “heathen” in Tranquebar looked on the missionary and those in the Danish settlement as ignorant and fearfully unclean. Ziegenbalg said that the Tamils were a witty and sagacious people and
would have to be managed with a great deal of “Wisdom and Circumspection.” Ziegenbalg also reported that his Tamil teacher argued daily with him, and demanded good “Reasons and Arguments for every thing.” “We hope to bring him over to the Christian Knowledge; but he is confident as yet, that one time or another, we shall all turn Malabarians [Tamils] and in this hope, he takes all the Pains Imaginable, to render things as plain and easie to us as possibly he can.”1 For the teacher it was clear who had the superior culture. Ziegenbalg, the missionary, was therefore stood up to actually by a society that was more sophisticated than his own. He wrote, “I must declare that my conversations with them [the Tamils] have often led me to deeper consideration of many subjects, and that both in theology and in philosophy I have learned much of which neither I nor other students had thought before.” When the archbishop of Canterbury wrote a preface to a translation of
Ziegenbalg’s letters for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the missionary arm of the Church of England, he urged the missionary in south India “to prosecute these most Noble and Heroical Designs that lie before you, for His Glory only, and the Good of Souls! And thus over all the World may the BRITISH CONQUESTS be extended, while you gain still new Accessions to the Kingdom of Christ.” An older contemporary missionary of Ziegenbalg, a man named Nicholas Dal, said in 1725 that the Muslim and other kings could hunt the Danish East India Company and the missionaries right out of India because the Company could not resist them. Furthermore, those who were converted to Christianity would learn all kinds of things other than Christianity. They would learn how to booze, the arts of treachery, lying and hypocrisy, things they knew nothing about before the coming of Christianity. During the course of the eighteenth century, both the evangelical move-
ment in England and the expansion of the East India Company in India altered the conditions of the arrival of Christianity considerably, as we have seen. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, the Company held large parts of Eastern India and in 1792 the discussions concerning the renewal of the East India Company produced many evangelical attempts not only to urge that missionaries be allowed into Company territories, but also to articulate what Christianity could do for India. We have seen how the work of Warren Hastings, various Persianate Indian
scholars, employees of the Company and particularly William Jones had helped to give a new insight and a more positive reading to the high qualities of ancient Indian culture. Among other things, the work of Jones and his companions in the Asiatic Society had successfully connected Sanskrit with Greek and other ancient languages and cultures. The work of both Indian
and English scholars had helped to raise the status of ancient Indian culture in the eyes of the West. One of the most articulate and influential individuals who helped to put
forth Christian ideas about India in the last decade of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was Charles Grant and his colleagues from the English Clapham sect. Grant had been an employee of the East India Company but had returned to England and, along with William Wilberforce, played an active role in seeking not only to renew the Charter of the Company in 1793 but specifically to press for opening up India to missionaries. It was in this connection that Grant wrote a long tract with a lengthy title in which he laid out his ideas about Indian culture and society. His argument was that Indian society not only was very conservative but also had remained unchanged over many hundreds, even thousands, of years because of the self-interested efforts of Brahmans and their instrument, the caste system. Although, by comparison with William Jones and others, Grant felt that he was unlettered in the study of ancient India, he still believed the light of Christianity could bring hope and regeneration to India. In the event, the East India Company Charter was renewed in 1793 but
missionaries were not allowed into British India. By the time missionaries were permitted into British India in 1813, there was already a considerable amount of discussion in Calcutta about the deficiencies not only of Christianity but also of Hinduism and Islam. A generation previously, in September 1780, a group of Muslims approa-
ched Warren Hastings, saying that they had come to him because a scholar of Muslim jurisprudence of some repute, Mujid al-Din, was living in Calcutta. In the hope of keeping this scholar among them, these Muslim petitioners sought Hastings’ support to establish a madrassah-a special educational institution to teach Muslim jurisprudence. Hastings immediately recognized that a college or seminary such as this would have great importance for the Company administration not only in Bengal but elsewhere as well. In a sense, this group of petitioners was speaking not only to Hastings’ personal interests and suggestibilities (he knew both Urdu and Persian and had interested himself in Muslim learning for many years), but also, as we have seen in the previous chapter, to the Company’s needs for trained Muslims to interpret the law in Company courts. We can well appreciate that, were the Company to establish a madrassah for teaching Muslim jurisprudence in Calcutta, this act itself would raise the reputation and legitimacy of the Company in the eyes of the Muslim population. Realizing that his own predilections and the needs of the Company coincided with the need to keep Mujid al-Din in Calcutta, Hastings agreed to the request to found the madrassah at the initial meeting with the petitioners, even though he had initially to use his own money to do so. These monies supported not only Mujid al-Din but also the stipends of 40 students who came from Bengal and Bihar but also from as far away as Kashmir, Gujarat and the Carnatic. It was a mechanism to incorporate Muslims from many different areas, some not even from Company territories.
