British form of Colonialism in India

Its been a while(in fact more than a while) since i ve posted here and as a friend says,procrastination was the key. i know serious stuff isnt my "cup of tea"(i prefer coffee instead),but here's an attempt to analyse the British form of colonialism in India and the intelligent game that was played between the British and the Indian nationalists.

The British form of colonialism in India was remarkably different from the ones practiced in Africa, Australia and America. While the British administrators believed in getting more intimate with the people elsewhere, either through the distribution of gifts or by their policies, they were all set to conquer the minds of the people residing in the subcontinent.

Colonialism in India was a state of economic hegemony. It aimed not at grabbing land, but the markets present in those lands. It was state of dominance resulting in exploitation and repression of the colonized. Colonialism in India is often misconceived as the victory of the military rule. Actually, the British colonialism in India owes its success to the soft expressions of control. These are what Dirks calls the ‘investigative modalities’ which the British used to classify, categorize, order and fix the identity of ‘India’ from the landmass, population, culture and traditions it represented. Colonialism was thus a project of control which was executed in the form of several gazetteers, archaeological expeditions, surveys, the census and other government reports. It were the minds of the people that the British colonized, be it through knowledge, education or science. Michel Foucault theory statement that knowledge is power is clearly visible with respect to the British colonial state; it was only the knowledge of the native which was instrumental in their ability to govern effectively. The British seek to establish a kind of panopticon state where they had the know how of the all the activities around them.

It started with activity of learning administrative control and inheriting the political knowledge of Indian rulers and thus began attempts to know the land as under the revenue department. To know the land became an attempt to know the people tilling it, the people supported on that land and so started the full fledged accounts to understand the economic structures, socio-cultural differences, linguistics, religions, extensive narratives about the caste and domestic organizations.

The British weren’t here to “civilize” India but to create a mindset that they were far better people and it was their duty to civilize the “savages”. Their primary motive was to make profits. In order to gain acceptance among the people, they played into the hands of the existing caste system. Pride was never a concern for them, it were always the policies that mattered. British revived the learning of Sanskrit in India to move towards the Brahminical class.

Public buildings, palaces and fortified post of district and public administration built by the previous rulers were left almost completely unused by the British. Instead of occupying the traditional office buildings, the British created cantonment areas. In 1757 a dual system of government was established which comprised of the city and the cantonment. The British stayed in the cantonment and it was here that the laws were made. This served two purposes. Since it were the cantonments that were the centre of power and authority; the cities started fearing the cantonment. Secondly, this provided British an opportunity to boast of their racial superiority in order to vent their economic interests. British insisted on having no emotional relationship with the Indians, it was pure economic gains that they desired. British Cantonments hindered the intimate contact between the British and the Indians and hence the realization that the British were ordinary people (just like them) came in very late. Cantonment was an institution of fear based on the foundation of social racism. The insecurity of the British to protect their racial superiority can be gauged from the impositions on the serving British Officers. The British officers were asked to leave the country after a certain age, so as not to expose their fallacies of old age. This brought along the illusion that the British race was always healthy, full of vitality masculinity and power. Unmarried women, unless they were sisters of high ranked British officers, weren’t allowed to visit the country. British displayed a keen interest in making the cultural relation completely non-productive. To add to the precautionary measures, barracks in the cantonment had no partition so as to alleviate the fear of a conspiracy being hatched.

British completed the task of colonization of the minds of Indians by imparting “Western education”. Scholars like Raja Ram Mohan Roy persuaded the British to impart English education in India. Notable in this regard was the contribution of Thomas Macaulay. Gradually, a perception was created which regarded knowledge of the colonizers to be far superior from those of the colonies. Literature from England was termed to be logical where as the Indian literature was either condemned or ignored. British form of colonization influenced our ability to distinguish between inferior and superior goods. Any thing coming from England was perceived as a boon. Much inferior goods from the colonizers were sold at a premium.

Colonialism was in fact a massive thrust towards gaining native knowledge of the colonized and applying it to subjugating him. For e.g. it involved for the British to study the plant life of India, carrying out botanical surveys. At a glance it might appear to be just a scientific, purely objective study of nature but it was also an instrument of exercising economic control for it entailed them to grow cash crops. Indigo farming or tea plantations and the eventual exploitation were a direct result of such knowledge endeavors. What colonialism did to India was not only to replace the ruler from brown to a white man but to try to destroy whatever pockets of local native knowledge existed.

The fight against the rule was stemmed by ways of reacquiring the lost knowledge systems and an attempt was made to reset the balance. The Indian National Congress in 1885 consisted mainly of lawyers, journalists, businessman, landowners and professors and one of their initial demands was for equality in opportunity for Indians to enter into Indian Civil Service by introduction of simultaneous exams in India and England. What we see here are basically middle class intellectuals, who thrive on knowledge based occupations asking for their right of access to the knowledge the British had which they used to govern the country. The Indian freedom struggle was thus led not by peasants, not by armed sepoys but by learned men who understood the importance that knowledge had in their ability to get back the freedom of their nation. Thus, started the game of politics of knowledge played between the Indian freedom fighters and the imperial authorities.

As a protest against Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905, on the lines of the policy of “divide and rule” as an attempt to control the budding nationalist activity in Bengal, British manufactured goods were boycotted and huge bonfires of Lancashire goods and British cloth were lit arousing memories of Vedic sacrificial fires. The movement soon spread out to other parts of the country and efforts began in promoting indigenous industry. Hand spun cloth, khadi became the symbol of Indian struggle against the factory produced fine cloth. The swadeshi movement soon stimulated indigenous enterprise in many fields, from Indian cotton mills to match factories, glassblowing shops, and iron and steel foundries. Demands for national education followed and students boycotted the English schools and colleges. Bal Gangadar Tilak and Gokhale were pioneers in establishing Indian education institutes in Deccan. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya founded the Banaras Hindu University in 1910. One of the last major demands to be added to the platform of the Congress in the wake of Bengal's first partition was swaraj. Swaraj was first articulated, in the presidential address of Dadabhai Naoroji, as the Congress' goal at its Calcutta session in 1906.

The economic critique of colonialism was the basis of the Indian national movement. India with its diverse culture and modes of life was united under the British rule under collective economic exploitation and so emerged the ideas of political economy of nationhood. India was reduced to a dumping ground for the British manufactured goods. India was to be only the supplier of raw materials and a market of finished goods. The British rulers in a way destroyed the indigenous industry and made it pay for the upkeep of the Crown in England. The British argument that India was basically an agrarian economy was totally farce, it was only result of British induced deindustrialization, ruralization that had set the clock back and reduced India from being a major world exporter to now dependent on England for even basic consumption goods. The British pointed out that setting up of railways, telegraph networks, irrigation canal systems was a positive work of their towards the development of the nation. The nationalist counter argued the networks are merely instruments of controlling the flow of information and bounded the geographical space of India. The setting of railways in India only resulted in more impoverishment unlike America where it had generated employment and gave rise to opportunities. The task of setting up of the Indian railways was the most expensive in the world and the risk were born by Indian taxpayers. The British portrayed there work as for ‘great public benefit’, but it really meant a more manageable nation, more productivity and more exploitation for the benefit of British trade. The British sought to downplay the industrial growth in India and sought to limit the research in science to be merely ‘pure’ in nature unlike the nationalist for whom the nation was to be visioned in a state actively promoting and applying science and technology. Nobody understood the British better than Gandhi. It was his concept of a Civil Disobedience that sent their quest for economic gains crippling.

The Colonial figures for development always painted a rosier picture of a state of well being; Naoroji countered them with figures of his own and painted out a picture of famines, of indebted peasants and discontent. Thus emerged a parallel statistic body to gather knowledge in order to counter the British claims.

The nationalists rooted demands for stake in the control of power by contesting the knowledge base established by the British. They attempted in Gyan Prakash’s words to ‘rescripting the rationality of colonial governance as the logic of nation’. They tried their hands at controlling the techniques of rule, they tried to adopt technology, science and indigenous knowledge as their counter weapon against the British hegemony and swadeshi was a by product of these efforts.

Since India already had well established administrative and fiscal law, when the Company established its government the problem of making a choice between the traditional legal system and the British legal system had to be faced. Indians manipulated this problem to their advantage beautifully. They would opt for the traditional legal system in instances of quick mutual settlement and choose the British legal system in order to delay the impending judgment.

British Colonial structure in India was a pragmatic attitude in which India was no more than a source of continuous economic gains. Indians developed their own insidious and subversive ways of receiving the alien influence for pragmatic reasons. The fact that British brought in modern ideas and that Indian held on to their traditional ideas, deems both the sides to be successful. British controlled India through law and language whereas the Indian subverted the British by bilingualism and their ability to be comfortable with different, opposite and mutually exclusive behaviour, thought or speech. The cultural pattern, therefore was an elaborate pattern of collaboration and confrontation.

Reference:

1.) Dr. Ganesh Devy- After Amnesia

2.) Ashish Nandy- The Intimate Enemy

3.) Gyan Prakash – Another reason, science and the imagination of Modern India

4.) Nicholas B. Dirks – The Ethnographic State

5.) Bernand S. Cohn – Colonialism & its forms of Knowledge

Acknowledgements:

Dr. Ganesh Devy

Prakhar Amba