Colonial History of India

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<!--QuoteBegin-rajesh_g+Dec 23 2005, 01:27 AM-->QUOTE(rajesh_g @ Dec 23 2005, 01:27 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The erosion of self-confidence and the defeat of the intellect, and the splitting of the elite from its own people (who alone could have given it any sort of spiritual or intellectual sus-tenance), naturally led to the imitation and adoption of British ideas and preferences. If William Wilberforce, the greatest Englishman of the 19th century and known as ‘Father of the Vic-torians’ thought that the Indians could only be leading ignorant and wretched lives ‘without the blessings of Christian light and moral improvements’, it had to be treated as true. Thus a com-pletely new imagery developed about India. This imagery was given powerful literary garb by men like James Mill, one of the chief executives in the British Governance of India and the author of the voluminous History of British India. The black Englishman of Macaulay was already on the scene, and speedily being duplicated, much before Macaulay had anything to do with India. Some years before Macaulay’s arrival in India, the British Governor General Bentinck expressed satisfaction that prosperous and leading Indians were giving up the feeding of Brahmins and beggars and instead had taken ‘to the ostentatious entertainment of Europeans’. Not that all resistance to the British had ceased but the resistance of the elite was no longer against British ways and preferences but rather against the British habit of not allowing the Indians to have any share in the exercise of power. The Indian elite, of the 19th and the 20th century, by and large, merely desired that the British would function as the Mughals had done earlier on when men like Raja Man Singh, or Raja Todarmal were treated like Mughal nobles and governors and were given important roles in the maintenance of imperial Mughal rule over the people of northern and western India. This attitude of the Indian elite, even of many of those who called themselves ‘sipa-his’ of Mahatma Gandhi continued more or less uninterruptedly till the time when Britain decided, or was persuaded, to transfer power to Indian hands.

It is in such a context that, as time passed, the Indian elite began to look at India through British eyes. Indians began to be seen as wretched and ignorant the way they had appeared to Wil-liam Wilberforce, or to James Mill, or to Macaulay, or to Karl Marx. To Karl Marx, the commencement of Indian misery lay ‘in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world’. He stated that in spite of  ‘whatever may have been the crimes of England’ in India, England ‘was the unconscious tool of His-tory’ in bringing about what Marx so anxiously looked forward to: India’s Westernisation. Even Indian scriptures, the smritis, the text on law, the scholarly works had to pass through the intel-lectual and spiritual sieves of Europe. What ever received appro-bation or approval had to be accompanied with suitably selected commentaries and newer interpretations. It was not only the ostentatious entertainment of Europeans which henceforth became the aspiration of the Indian elite, but the readings of the ap-proved and acclaimed Indian texts; and even more so, an uncritical attachment to the philosophies, theories and literature of Great Britain became the new opium of the Indian elite. That this is no exaggeration is evident from continued Indian fascination not only with Plato and Aristotle, or the Roman historians, but even with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Bishop Berkeley, John Stuart Mill, or men like Bertrand Russell.

Naturally, all this had to result in movements like the Brahmo Samaj, and its various other versions in different parts of India; the long lasting fascination of the Indian elite with theosophy, a new variant of the ancient Masonic orders of Western Europe; and with the various ideologies which have come out of Europe in the past century and a half. Even when we wished to be patriotic, or wished to hark back to the past, the medium and the guide had to be the discipline of Indology or Orientalism, or some foreign traveller from the West or the East, who had hap-pened to live in or pass through India since the time of the Greek adventurer Alexander.

In such a situation, the Indian elite’s response to the loss of freedom began to be couched in a Western idiom. Hence the West-ernised pronouncements of patriots like Ram Mohan Roy (Monstuart Elphinstone regretted that Ram Mohan Roy was presenting himself as too much of a firangi) of Keshav Chandra Sen, of the illustri-ous Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, of Iswara Chandra Vidyasagar, or of the Indologist Rajendralal Mitra. To each one of them, the European and British intervention in India seemed a divine boon. It is possible that in comparison to what they had learnt about the oppressions of the Muslim rulers, mostly either through hearsay, or through European compiled accounts, the British rule looked like the rule of angels: tranquility and order pre-vailed and the men of property felt secure from one generation to another.

Such men perhaps had also begun to believe in the theory of the common origin of the Indo-European peoples; and in their own way, even before Frederic William Max Mueller, had begun to look forward to the day when these long parted cousins could join hands in some shared common enterprise. Explaining his works, Max Mueller had mentioned to Gladstone, many times prime minister of Great Britain, that what he was trying to do was to bring together some 1800 years after Jesus of Nazareth, those who had got separated around 1800 years before Jesus’ birth.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In this way, Swami Vivekananda brought money and inspired men and women to come from abroad. Miss Margaret Noble, or Bhagini Nive-dita, was one of those. We find that Bhagini Nivedita later helped the eminent scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose in editing his works; she also helped and translated some of the works of Bra-jendranath Seal. The conclusion from all this is that our bhadra-lok had totally lost the capacity to identify the capacities and talents of this society and take them forward. No healthy society in the world would dream of achieving functionality and regener-ating its creativity with foreign help.

Vivekananda had a great deal of confidence in India’s men and women. However, even he could not escape from being seriously affected by whatever image and model, that the newly educated class had already built, of our society: the age-long depriva-tion, wretchedness and ignorance of our ordinary people.
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