The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (42 page)

of fortune seekers did not dilute the privileges of empire.

Consequently, Company India never developed a colonial settler

society on par with the Spanish Andes or British North America.

Where Peruvian cities were Spanish creole bastions, Britons were

ever mindful that they lived among a sea of real Indians. They became

more obsessed with defending the cultural boundaries of subjecthood, and the local customs and material culture that had seemed so

appealing a century earlier now threatened to conquer the conquerors

through seductive assimilation. Thus, the new generation of priggish

and upright Company offi cials and merchants replaced the nabobs’

hookahs, pajamas, and curry (which was largely an Anglo-English

invention) with port, formal dinner dress, and French cuisine. They

lived in gated compounds where they rarely allowed Indians beyond

the verandas of their bungalows, a style of segregated housing that

became emblematic of British imperial society around the world.

These cultural shifts also reshaped the intimate relationships that

Britons had with their Indian subjects. In the era before Plassey, it was

not unusual for EIC employees to marry local women, and until the

214 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

reforms of the 1780s the children of these unions, known variously as

Anglo-Indians or Eurasians, grew up to enter the Company service or

marry Company offi cials. Just as Cuzco’s Convent of Santa Clara molded

mestiza daughters into Spanish wives for the conquistadors, orphanages

in Madras and Calcutta trained Eurasian girls to enter white society as

respectable spouses for junior offi cials and army offi cers.

Although they depicted themselves as the champions and defenders of oppressed Indian women, nineteenth-century liberal and evangelical reformers introduced a new discriminatory order that closed

off these opportunities. Asserting that common Indians despised

“half-castes” because they shared the vices of both the western and

Asian races, they barred Eurasians from the military and civil service and stigmatized conjugal relations between Europeans and local

women. Suffi ciently light-skinned Eurasian children could still blend

into the imperial elite if they had a respectable father who acknowledged their paternity, but the children of lower-class Britons were

largely doomed to join the subject majority. Over time, the entire

Eurasian population, which numbered about twenty thousand in

Bengal, gradually devolved into a subordinate class of imperial auxiliaries after the metropolitan government refused their repeated pleas

for full British citizenship.

The arrival of greater numbers of metropolitan women in the

nineteenth century further sharpened these racial boundaries. The

privileges of empire meant that regardless of their social origins, these

women immediately became respectable damsels and matrons upon

reaching India. As such, their supposed frailty and chastity provided

an excuse for new segregationist policies to protect them from allegedly lascivious “native” men. In depicting themselves as the defenders of chaste western European and degraded Indian women, British

empire builders cast Indian men as both debauched and unmasculine. Macaulay was typically chauvinistic in suggesting that Plassey

and the victories that followed proved that Bengal’s diet, climate, and

vices had turned its men soft, slothful, and effeminate. “The physical

organization of the Bengali is feeble even to effeminacy. . . . His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more

hard breeds.”36 Indian men were thus unfi t to govern themselves.

The attempt of Macaulay and his fellow reformers to redefi ne

Bengali masculinity was part of a larger project to impose a more

Company

India 215

precise and discriminatory kind of subjecthood on Indians. Seeking to

better understand and exploit local communities, Company offi cials

made caste and religion the central feature of governance, military

service, policing, production, customary law, and, eventually, political

representation. They came to believe that some Indian communities

(“martial races”) were natural soldiers, that a criminal sect known as

thuggee
made banditry a central feature of its devotional practices,

and that certain “criminal tribes” were biological and culturally conditioned to defy central authority.

Although these caste and tribal stereotypes showed how little the

British understood the workings of Indian community and identity,

they allowed Indians to turn the Company’s efforts to defi ne and categorize them to their own ends. Rural Bengali elites embraced the

martial label to jump to the head of the line in recruiting for the wellpaying Company army. Similarly, notables in the Madras Presidency

claimed superior caste status to defend land claims and demand precedence in British courts. Hindu and Muslim legal experts exploited

British assumptions about the power of Indian tradition and superstition to retain a central role in advising Company jurists on the

application of religious law and custom. Imposing “unclean” status

on marginal groups also helped wealthy farmers and landlords lower

their labor costs. Finally, common highway robbers earned higher

status and even pardons by confessing to being “thugs.”

Educated Hindus further countered the British reformers’ attacks

on their faith and culture by developing a more coherent and unifi ed

version of the eclectic religious practices that Indians had observed

at the community level for centuries. The fact that British observers

were the fi rst to refer to these more standardized doctrines as “Hinduism” led some scholars to mistakenly credit them with inventing

the modern version of the Hindu faith. It is far-fetched at best that

a tiny imperial elite could have this kind of social impact. In reality,

Hinduism was an indigenous response to the bigoted and chauvinistic

assault on Indian religion and culture that legitimized the Company’s

empire.

Rammohun Roy, a western-educated assistant collector in the

EIC’s civil service, was a driving force in this movement. Drawing

on centuries-old scholarly Vedic texts, he depicted Hinduism as an

ancient rational monotheistic religion on par with the Judeo-Christian faiths. This enabled him to rebut the evangelists and utilitarians

216 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

who cited the ritual suicide of Hindu widows, which actually was relatively rare in early nineteenth-century Bengal, as proof that Indian

faith and culture were barbarous and depraved. More specifi cally, he

argued that
sati
had no basis in Hindu scripture and collected petitions demanding that the Company ban the practice. More conservative Hindu scholars and intellectuals attacked Roy and the younger

generation of western-educated Indians for tinkering with their faith

to make it more compatible with western ideology, but it is striking

how little contemporary British observers understood the origins and

stakes of this debate. Most simply assumed that Hinduism was an

ancient but degenerate pagan religion.

Like the Iberians and Andeans, Indians exploited the ignorance of

their imperial rulers, but they could not escape the oppressive realities of empire. While the 1833 charter revisions explicitly declared

that Indians would suffer no discrimination in applying for positions

in the Company’s civil service, modern conceptions of racial bigotry

took on an imperial dimension. Rango Bapojee, who spent more than

a decade living in Britain, echoed the bitter charges of hypocrisy that

the Inkan nobleman Don Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala had leveled

against the Pizarrists nearly three centuries earlier: “The white man,

or Company’s servant, [is] always regarded as the embodiment of virtue and truth, incapable of wrong even in his own showing, and alone

worthy of belief—the dark man, or native, [is] held up as the personifi cation of vice and falsehood, to be accused only to be condemned,

degraded, vilifi ed, punished, imprisoned at will, tortured, beggared,

and all in secret and unheard.”37

Even Macaulay’s westernized, anglicized Indian auxiliaries did not

escape the taint of this imperial racism. Far from accepting them for

their English “taste, opinions, morals, and intellect,” Britons in India

ridiculed the graduates of western schools as semieducated “baboos.”

Babu
was a Persian honorifi c meaning “mister” or “esquire,” but it

evolved into a sneeringly derisive term for a partially westernized

native who did not know his place. In British eyes, baboos were pretentious social climbers who used Macaulay’s schooling to avoid honest

work. According to the stereotype, they spoke stilted English, mixed

western and Indian clothes, brazenly fed their voracious appetites for

food and sex, and were inherently stupid. Such people never really

existed; rather, the baboo was born of the British attempt to deny

the very existence of western-educated Indians. Imperial ideologues

Company

India 217

needed reassurance that their commitment to rescuing Indians from

their backwardness confi rmed that they were platonic moral guardians rather than selfi sh tyrants.

Ironically, one of the surest ways to escape this new racially

bounded subjecthood was to travel to Britain. Although Bristol street

children threw stones at Rammohun Roy because they mistook him

for Tippu Sultan, the Company’s archenemy in Mysore, metropolitan Britons had little stake in the imperial racial hierarchy of British

India. Company offi cials therefore went to great lengths to prevent

Indians from coming to Britain. But their authority stopped at the

water’s edge, and Indians were free to go where they wished once

they had slipped the geographical bonds of the empire. As a result,

a steady parade of Indians sought redress in London. Few had any

signifi cant success, but they embarrassed the Company, particularly

during the charter revisions, by publishing books and pamphlets,

making speeches, and giving testimony in Parliament that drew public attention to the most abusive aspects of its Indian empire.

Moreover, not all of the Indians who traveled to Britain were

aristocrats. It was not unusual for Indian wives to join their western husbands upon retirement, and their children blended into British society if they were suffi ciently light-skinned. More signifi cant,

Dadabhai Naoroji, the fi rst Indian professor at Bombay’s Elphinstone

Institute, entered British politics after arriving in London in 1855

as the representative of a Bombay commercial fi rm. As a founder of

the East India Association, he accused the British Empire of draining

India’s wealth. Many metropolitan Britons were not offended by this

carefully measured attack on the parasitism of empire, and the voters

of Central Finsbury sent him to Parliament as their representative

in 1892. While imperial special-interest groups built popular support

for the empire as the nineteenth century progressed, Naoroji’s career

demonstrated that the metropolitan rule of law could trump imperial

authoritarianism and racism.

These imperial exchanges also reshaped British culture. Expensive

shawls from Kashmir became a mark of status for upper-class women,

and the curry dishes that the new generation of empire builders dismissed as gauche in India became a central feature of metropolitan

cuisine after expatriate Britons brought them home. In time, entrepreneurs brought out premixed spices (curry powder) to capitalize

on popular perceptions that Indian curries were romantic, exotic, and

218 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

healthy. Metropolitan cooks gradually made the dish their own by

substituting apples for mangoes, lemon juice for tamarind, and fl our

roux in place of coconut-based thickeners, but there was no denying

India’s profound culinary impact on British tastes.

Similarly, words such as
calico, chintz, dungaree, seersucker, ban-

dana, khaki, pariah
, and
pundit
entered the English language. Over

time, English-speakers came to use these and other words without

giving much thought to their Indian origins. This led groups like the

Society for Pure English to warn of the danger of “contaminating

our speech with unassimilated words, and to the disgrace, which our

stupidity or laziness must bring upon us, of addressing the world in a

pudding-stone and piebald language.”38

Although its reasoning was insulting, the society was correct.

Empire blurred the cultural boundaries between citizen and subject

in both the imperial periphery and metropole. It was impossible to

govern a people without learning and internalizing their language

and culture. Macaulay and the rest of the reformist lobby may have

thought they could remake Indians in their own image, but they never

realized how much the Indian majority was slowly but surely remaking them. Company offi cials would have denied this vehemently

because they understood that their ability to govern and extract

wealth depended on maintaining suffi cient social distance from their

subjects. This explains their invention of the baboo, their denigration