topics: |  history | british-india | philosophy

Metcalf underlines two different trends in the British interaction with
India.  The first (let's call it centripetal, drawing the other
inwards) was to identify similarities with India, such as Wilson Jones'
attempt to map the Indian gods to Greek and Roman figures.  A definite
success in this was the identification of linguistic similarities.

A second trend, (centrifugal, say, throwing him out), underlines the
differences between the Indian and the Britisher.  Most of the arguments in
the book fall into this category, and these differences which were used as
arguments supporting colonial presence.  Thus, the liberals, who would
stand for nothing but representative rule in England, saw no contradiction
in imposing centralized rule in India, where it was to have greater utility
and be more likely to bring happiness.  This was also supported by the
construction of the Indian stereotype as an indolent dullard used to
despotic rule, and also to the martial afghans or jats and the effeminate
bengali.

In the end, the insistence on India's differences, which legitimized the
civilizing presence of the British, were in conflict with the similarities
they could never entirely repudiate....  The last chapter deals with
the Indian presence in fictional narratives (Indian women in Kipling are
mostly objects of desire), and particularly, the English woman whose
purity had to be protected at all costs...

The colonial enterprise

The mission of the British was stated eloquently by Curzon in his last speech
at Byculla Club, Bombay, before leaving India, in November 1905:

    [the purpose that sustained the empire was] to fight for the right, to
    abhor the imperfect, the unjust or the mean, to swerve neither to the
    right hand nor to the left, to care nothing for flattery or applause or
odium or abuse ...  

	    remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest
of his ploughs ... to drive the blade a little forward in your time,
and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little
justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral
dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment,
or a stirring of duty, where it did not before exist.  'That,' Curzon
concluded, 'is enough, that is the Englishman's justification in
India.'

Related: Robert Travers, Ideology and empire: 18th century Bengal, 2007

Excerpts

The basis of the colonial myth in 16th c. Ireland

The British idea of themselves as an imperial people, charged with the
governance of others, [originated] in the 1560s and 1570s as [Ireland was
subdued and] 'plantations' of Britishers imposed there...  They endeavoured
to devise explanations, satisfactory to their own consciences, which would
justify these expeditions. ... the English conquerors sought
justification for practices that often involved massacre and expropriation
by asserting that the Irish, especially the Gaelic-speakers beyond the
Pale surrounding Dublin, were, despite their professed Christianity, no
more than pagans, or even barbarians. As evidence, the English cited their
wandering pastoralism, so unlike the settled agriculture of England, and
their unorthodox belief. 'They are all', so Edmund Spenser wrote, 'Papists
by their profession, but in the same so blindly and brutishly informed for
the most part as that you would rather think them atheists or infidels.'
The Irish, as another put it, living like 'beastes, void of lawe and all
good order', were 'more uncivill, more uncleanly, more barbarous and more
brutish in their customs and demeanures, then in any other part of the
world that is known'.

Sir Thomas Smith: God had given the English responsibility to 'inhabite
	and reform' this 'barbarous' nation.

1740: 'God Save the King' was first sung in Britain, and the
	same year brought the first publication of 'Rule Britannia'.

Enlightenment view of the Orient

[as] Europeans, under the influence of the ideals of the Enlightenment,
[viewed] own pre-eminence as a 'modern' and 'civilized' people.  ... Partha
Mitter has shown how Hindu gods, conceived as inventions of the devil, took
shape in Western painting as monsters and demons.

18th c.: [viewed distant lands in terms of the] taxonomic structure of
eighteenth-century natural science. for the family of 'Man'...  it
decisively set the non-European world apart as an 'Other'.  From
Montesquieu's 'Persian Letters' to the invocation of the 'noble savage', the
philosophes of the Enlightenment drained non- European societies of all
content. p.5

The tropical climate of India powerfully reinforced European ideas
of it as a land fitted for 'despotism'. For the inhabitants of India the
'labour of being free', as Alexander Dow put it, simply could not
surmount the 'languor' occasioned by the heat and humidity the
English saw as the characteristic features of the country's climate.
With 'tranquillity' and 'ease' the chief objects of their desire, Indians
let themselves be subjected 'without murmuring' to the 'arbitrary
sway' of despotic rulers. The 'enervating character' of India's climate
was complemented by the subjection of the land for six centuries to
rulers who accepted the 'faith of Mahommed'. The perception of Islam
as a religion, in Dow's words, 'peculiarly calculated for despotism',
was of course deeply rooted in the European consciousness.... p.8

Contact with Indian texts

During the 1770s, however, just after Dow had completed his history, the
Governor-General Warren Hastings began elaborating a view of the Hindus as
a people who 'had been in possession of laws which continued unchanged
from remotest antiquity'. The country's 'ancient constitution', he
insisted, was very much intact. What the British must do, in his view, if
they were successfully to govern India, was to master these laws and the
Sanskrit language in which they were contained, and, more generally, to
respect the customs of their new subjects. As he told the company
directors in 1772, 'We have endeavoured to adapt our Regulations to the
Manners and Understandings of the People, and the Exigencies of the
Country, adhering as closely as we are able to their ancient uses and
Institutions.'  [Cited in Bernard Cohn, 'The Command of Language and the
Language of Command', in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi,
1985), p. 289.]

Asiatic Society of Bengal: Founded in 1784, under the
patronage of Hastings, and with William Jones as its first president.
... The scholarship of the Hastings era was informed by assumptions
whose consequences were to shape all subsequent British understanding
of India.

The discovery of a "Hindu religion"

The first [assumption] was the belief that there was something which
could be identified as a separate religion called 'Hinduism'. Europeans
were from the beginning determined to make of Indian devotional
practice a coherent religious system possessing such established
markers as sacred texts and priests. This process of definition gained
momentum during the later eighteenth century as the British secured
greater knowledge of India and its languages.

The coherence of the Hindu religion, so these early scholars insisted,
was, like that of Christianity itself, to be found in its sacred texts. In
their view, the ancient Sanskrit texts would reveal the doctrinal core of
the Hindu faith, and they turned for advice in the interpretation of those
texts to those whom they saw as the 'priests' of the religion, the Brahmin
pandits. These texts were seen as embodying not only moral injunctions but
precise legal prescriptions....  1776: N. B.  Halhed published A Code of
Gentoo Laws. Subtitled The Ordination of the Pundits, this work involved a
collaboration between Halhed and eleven 'professors' of Sanskrit, who
created a text 'picked out sentence by sentence from various originals in
the Shanscrit language'. The articles thus collected 'were next translated
literally into Persian ...  and from that translation were rendered into
English'. From this laboriously contrived text, Halhed conceived, could be
formed a 'precise idea of the customs and manners of these people', as
well as making available materials for the 'legal accomplishment of a new
system of government in Bengal'. [Marshall, British discovery of Hinduism,
1970. p. 143.]

The notion that there existed 'original texts', and that these could be
taken as representing an enduring Indian reality, inevitably meant that
any code based on these texts would devalue India's historic experience.

James Mill: History of British India (1818)

expresses the liberal view of Indian society:
the ideals of Scottish Enlightenment laid out a series of stages by which
the degree of 'civilization' of any society could be measured with
'scientific' precision, Mill set himself the task of ascertaining India's
'true state' in the 'scale of civilization'. For Mill, following Bentham,
the criterion of utility was the measure of social progress. 'Exactly in
proportion as Utility is the object of every pursuit', he wrote, 'may we
regard a nation as civilized.' After scrutinizing India's arts,
manufactures, literature, religion, and laws, he concluded, vigorously
disputing Sir William Jones's claims, that the Hindus did not possess, and
never had possessed, 'a high state of civilization'. They were rather a
'rude' people who had made 'but a few of the earliest steps in the progress
to civilization'. There existed in India, he wrote, a 'hideous state of
society', inferior even to that of the European feudal age. Bound down to
despotism and to 'a system of priestcraft, built upon the most enormous and
tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of
mankind', the Hindus had become 'the most enslaved portion of the human
race'. Moreover - and here Mill agreed with Jones - Hindu society had been
stationary for so long that 'in beholding the Hindus of the present day, we
are beholding the Hindus of many ages past; and are carried back, as it
were, into the deepest recesses of antiquity'.

To free India from stagnation and set it on the road to progress, James Mill
proposed a remedy which was at once, as he saw it, simple and obvious. All
that was required was a code of laws that would release individual energy by
protecting the products of its efforts.  'Light taxes and good laws', he
insisted, in good Benthamite fashion, 'nothing more is wanting for national
and individual prosperity all over the globe.' In fact, of course, the
simplicity was deceptive, for
   Mill's scheme, with its creation of individual property rights enforced
   by 'scientific' codes of law, involved a wholesale revolution in Indian
   society.

Nor did it matter to him that India's government remained
unrepresentative.
For James Mill, as for his mentor Bentham, happiness and
In England, Mill supported representative government as the only way to keep
power-hungry elites in check. But he insistently denied that participation
in government was a key to moral improvement. So long as the business of
India's government was 'well and cheaply performed', it was, he argued, 'of
little or no consequence who are the people that perform it'. From these
views came an enduring British belief in the value of good government
provided by British experts. p.30

J.S. Mill: levels of civilization'

J.S. Mill, [who was employed with the EIC from 1823-1858 and rose to its
highest post of "examiner"] is best known for his On Liberty, in which he
argued, against his father, that liberty possesses an intrinsic value of its
own beyond mere happiness.  In his Representative Government, however, he
made clear his view that this 'ideally best polity', as he called it, was
not suited to all peoples. Only those capable of fulfilling its
'conditions', he argued, were entitled to enjoy the benefits of
representative government. For the rest, subjection to 'foreign force', and
a government 'in a considerable degree despotic', was appropriate, and even
necessary.

Behind Mill's views lay a hierarchical classification of all societies.
'The state of different communities, in point of culture and development',
Mill wrote, 'ranges downwards to a condition very little above the highest
of the beasts.' At its lowest point were those who lived in 'savage
independence', and so required an 'absolute ruler' who would teach them to
obey. Just above them were slave societies, where the people were being
taught the need for 'continuous labour of an unexciting kind'. The next step
upward was that of a 'paternal despotism', where the government exercised a
general superintendence over society but left individuals to do much for
themselves. The Inca state of Peru was of that sort, together with the
societies of Egypt, India, and China, which had reached that point in
ancient times. But these 'Oriental' societies were then 'brought to a
permanent halt for want of mental liberty and individuality; requisites of
improvement which the institutions that had carried them thus far entirely
incapacitated them from acquiring*.
The French too were 'essentially a southern people' who, if they
possessed 'great individual energy', still could not match the 'selfhelping
and struggling Anglo-Saxons'.4

A cynic might contend that the rungs on this ladder marked out not
stages of civilization but the relative distance of these societies from
England, or more precisely, from the values cherished by John Stuart
Mill.

Among the 'Oriental races', in Mill's view, only the Jews escaped
this enduring stagnation...  p.32

Thagis (Thuggees)

The campaign against sati, or widow burning reinforced notions of Indian
women as helpless victims of religion, while lurid tales of the doings of
the thags powerfully reinforced the idea of Indians as treacherous and
unreliable.  Stranglers in the service of the goddess Kali, thags were
perceived as roving bands of men, linked by hereditary ties, who preyed upon
travellers along the roads, luring them into their company and then ritually
murdering them. The discovery of tbagi afforded the British once again an
opportunity to take pride in their commitment to reforming a depraved Indian
society. Yet thagi was never a coherent set of practices, nor could thags
easily be differentiated from other armed robbers, who were known more
generally as dacoits.

Despite W. H. Sleeman's acclaimed extirpation of thagi, this successful
campaign did not put an end to a fear of 'criminal communities', nor did it
eradicate apprehension of Indian duplicity and dishonesty....  in the
English language itself, 'thug' came to mean a particularly nasty kind of
ruffian or tough.11

The 1857 war and its aftermath

As the victorious British armies moved on the rebel strongholds, the
1857 revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. Sepoys, even if only suspected
of mutiny, were blown from cannon; villagers were, on occasion,
indiscriminately shot; while the erstwhile Mughal capital of Delhi was
sacked, and its major monuments saved from destruction only by the
intervention of John Lawrence. The intensity of the punishment
meted out reflected the vulnerability of the British in India, precariously
set over a vast land they barely comprehended. Desperate and
fearful, they sought to quell by a vengeful terror the harrowing vision
of the loyal sepoy or faithful bearer as a treacherous murderer.
...
Above all, the murder of English women at [Nana Rao]'s hands stirred a
fierce hatred of those who seemed to put at risk the 'purity' of English
womanhood, and left as an enduring legacy lurid tales of rape and
molestation. 43

Despite the widespread expression of Indian hostility revealed by
the events of 1857, Britain's right to rule India went unexamined. ...
the cause of
the Mutiny was to be found in the 'cartridge affair and nothing else';
that the people had been 'for the most part in our favour'; and that the
revolt was consequently nothing more than an irrational panic on the
subject of caste among credulous and superstitious sepoys.

Conservative critics like Disraeli, never an admirer of Dalhousie or
of liberal reform, described the mutinous sepoys as 'not so much the
avengers of professional grievances as the exponents of general discontent',
and insisted that the events of 1857 were 'occasioned by
adequate causes'. Among these Disraeli included the 'destruction of
Native authority', the 'disturbance' of property rights, and the 'tampering
with religion' of a government bent on reform of Indian
society. Yet he never called into question the legitimacy of that
government.


The memorial at the Bibighar well.  After independence both the statue of the
angel and the wall behind it were transferred to the all-soul's church.  The
angel now lies in forgotten glory on the south verandah of the church.

The creation of Difference (Ch 3)

[While the research of Wilson Jones and other revealed some familial
similarity with India in ancient times, it was soon asserted that]
Aryan institutions had 'been arrested in India at an early stage of
development'. The country was, as a result, 'a barbarism', but it remained
one which 'contains a great part of our own civilisation, with its elements
as yet inseparate and not yet unfolded'. - Henry Maine, Cambridge Rede
lecture 1875 p.66

This process of a differentiation with the subject race [see also remarks
re: Ireland earlier] were the basis for justifying the british dominion.

Curzon and Archaeology

Alone among India's viceroys, Curzon devoted substantial energy
to archaeological preservation. He reorganized the Archaeological
Survey into an efficient administrative body and tirelessly toured
India's ancient monuments. He was the first governor-general in
eighty years to visit Gaur, Bengal's historic capital, and one of only
two in a century of British rule ever to tour the Hindu shrines of
Brindaban. Curzon's obsession, however, was the Taj Mahal, which
he visited six times during the course of his viceroyalty. Convinced
that the local engineers were 'destitute' of the 'faintest artistic perception',
he set on foot a number of restoration projects, which he
then supervised with a single-minded devotion to detail. Behind this
commitment to precision lay, however, a world of 'Oriental' fantasy.
Curzon dressed the hereditary custodians of the tomb, for instance,
in the white suits and green scarf that he had decided was 'the
traditional garb of Mogul days'; he ordered the removal of the 'garish
English flowers' from the gardens and their replacement by a row of
cypress trees framing the Taj at the end; and he determined to
procure a hanging lamp for the domed chamber above the cenotaphs.

As the style of the Taj was, in his view, Indo-Saracenic, 'which is
really Arabic', he asked Lord Cromer, British proconsul in Egypt, to
design a lamp for him modelled on those still to be found in the
mosques of Cairo. Dissatisfied with Cromer's suggestion, Curzon
then sought, unsuccessfully, to locate a copy of his childhood illustrated
edition of 'The Arabian Nights' as a source for suitable
designs. Finally, during his trip back to England, upon his retirement
from the viceroyalty, he stopped in Cairo, where he selected the
design for the lamp, installed in the Taj in 1906, which still hangs over
the tomb chamber.37

Although the Taj always stood forth for the British as, so Curzon
put it, a 'vision of eternal beauty', nevertheless even this great
monument had to be made to fit into the appropriate categories of the
British discourse on India's past. As the Taj was by definition a
'Saracenic' design, a lamp from Cairo - or even one drawn from a
Victorian illustrator's 'Arabian Nights'! - could alone suitably complement
its soaring domes and arches. What mattered was not the
Indian reality of shared architectural forms, but an 'Orient' constituted
of opposed 'Saracenic' and 'Hindu' elements. In its majesty the
Taj evoked too the grandeur of empire, against which the British
sought always to measure themselves. Although Curzon insisted,
when he set out to build the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, that there
could be 'no greater rashness than to attempt a modern Taj', and
though he scrupulously avoided elements of 'Saracenic' design, still at
every stage of construction the Taj remained his animating ideal.
Sometimes it presented an unreachable goal - he could not, he
admitted, aspire to the eighteen-foot-high terrace of the Taj. Yet he
took pride in the fact that he had made the Queen's Hall larger than
the tomb chamber of the Taj, and he insisted, despite objections on
grounds of cost, that the marble for Victoria's memorial be taken from
the same quarry as Mumtaz Mahal's.

[He was not allowed to enter the Bhubaneshwar temple].
Climbing up a ladder outside to inspect the restoration work for which his
government was paying, he denounced the 'supposed prejudices' of its
guardians, who excluded, as they still do, non-Hindus from the shrine.

At Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha's enlightenment, the government was
determined to restore the main temple to what it 'is undoubtedly, and always
has been primarily, a Buddhist temple'. That the site had been in the
control of a Hindu mahant since 1727 the Bengal authorities dismissed with
the assertion that his religious observances were 'unreal and unorthodox'.
Still, when the mahant obstinately refused to vacate, Curzon backed down.
As the British found themselves, Curzon wrote in 1904, involved in 'so many
sources of somewhat sharp disagreement with the native community in Bengal
(arising out of our Universities Bill, the Official Secrets Act, and the
suggested partition of Bengal), it did not seem to be worthwhile to add
another to their number, or to provide a possible handle for a religious
agitation'.

As the British defined India's past, they sought always to make
room in it for themselves. The massive six volume Cambridge History
of India can be seen in particular as a complementary enterprise to the
archaeological survey, as it sought to comprehend all of India's past in
a single narrative that led inevitably to the Raj.

Architecture of the Raj

[Attempts to view the Raj as truly "Indian"... ]

As the British set out to incorporate Indic features into their
architectural work, they were drawn especially to the forms, above all those
of the arch and dome, that made up what they conceived of as the 'Saracenic'
style. As they disdained the 'idolatrous' Hindu religion, so too did they
disdain the architectural styles that, in their view, expressed its values
in stone. ... for the Saracenic was the style associated with the Mughal
Empire, whose power and majesty the British now wished to claim as their own.



[Fig. The Madras Law Courts, designed by J. W. Brassington and H. C. Irwin
(1889-92). The structure, in the characteristic manner of the British
Indo-Saracenic, joined together features, most notably arches and domes,
from a variety of Indian styles, and incorporated as well arcaded verandas,
colonnades, and a tower in the shape of a minaret containing a light to
guide ships toward the nearby harbour. From Indian Engineering, 7 September
1895.] 157

Womanhood: Indian and British

Chapter 5 deals with interesting views of gender.

Kipling:
Indian women were almost invariably defined by their sexuality - whether the
prostitute Lalun, who by her intrigues shook the stability of the Raj, or
the beautiful young Bisesa and Ameera, who drew British officers into doomed
love affairs.

The very streets where these Indians lived were at once mysterious
and forbidding. Bisesa, for instance, lived at the end of a gali, behind a
'dead wall pierced by one grated window'.  161

Flora Annie Steel:
The Indian woman's 'eternal cult of purely physical passion', her 'eternal
struggle for perfect purity and constancy, not of the soul, but the body',
and her 'worship alike of sex and He who made it'... On the face of the
waters (1896)]

British womanhood

In this vision of a sensual India the English woman, was, as we have
seen, made to play a distinctive role as the embodiment of the virtues
of domesticity and moral purity. However much she might amuse
herself, as in Kipling's 'Plain Tales from the Hills', with gossip and
flirtation, the English woman of necessity existed as something
it exposed Britain's vulnerability, not surprisingly generated a near
obsessive fear of savage Indian men raping helpless English women.
Even though the evidence available even at the time made it clear that
no British women were sexually violated before being killed, tales of
systematic rape, torture, and mutilation began to circulate among the
British before the revolt had been suppressed. Even Harriet Tytler,
who had been present at the seige of Delhi, conjured up a vision of 'so
many poor women' who had had to face a 'worse death' than mere
killing. These stories served at once to reassure the British of their
right to rule India, and affirmed afresh the image of English women as
virtuous and innocent. (See fig. 10.)


   Fig. 10: Miss Wheeler Defending Herself Against the Sepoys at Cawnpore,
   from Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny (1858). When British
   women were depicted as acting heroically, as at the time of the famous
   Kanpur massacre in July 1857, commentators represented them as doing so
   in order to protect their moral purity from dishonour at the hands of
   licentious Indians. Miss Wheeler, daughter of the commanding general at
   Kanpur, was reported at the time to have thrown herself into a well
   after shooting a number of sepoys. In fact, her fate is not known.

A fear of the Indian educated elite

By the last decades of the century such fears had become focussed
with a renewed intensity on the figure of the educated Bengali. At once
a political threat to the stability of the Raj, and a parody of the
Englishman himself, the babu, no longer simply a stock figure of
caricature, was, in the hands of men like Kipling, the object of a hatred
informed by mockery and derision. Throughout the writings of his
Indian years Kipling denounced the educated 'native' with bitter
satire. In his sketches for the 'City of Dreadful Night', for instance,
Kipling linked Calcutta's inadequate sanitation directly to its system
of municipal self-government. 'In spite of that stink', he wrote, 'they
allow, even encourage, natives to look after the place! The damp,
drainage soaked soil is sick with the teeming life of a hundred years
and the municipal board list is choked with the names of natives — men
born in and and raised off this surfeited muck heap!'

Not only in Calcutta, but at the opposite end of the country, on the
Northwest frontier, the hapless and ineffectual Bengali was made the
butt of ridicule. In Kipling's story 'The Head of the District', when the
respected deputy commissioner, Yardley-Orde, dies suddenly, the
viceroy, determined to advance the principles of the 'New India',
appoints as his successor Grish Chunder De, MA, a Bengali 'more
English than the English', who is 'crammed with code and case law',
but wholly incapable of rule. The tribesmen refuse to accept this 'fat,
black eater of fish' as their ruler, and so rise in rebellion. Stammering
that he had not yet taken official charge of the district, Chunder De
contrived to 'fall sick' and fled, leaving his British assistants to quell
the uprising. Facing the defeated hillmen, the assistant Tallantire
assured them that next time the government would 'send you a manV
The hillmen were, of course, in Kipling's opinion, no more capable of
self-rule than the Bengali. Though 'strong men', they remained captives
of their own impulsiveness. They were, as Orde told them on his
deathbed, 'children'; hence they, as much as the effeminate Bengali,
required the ordering presence of the Raj.

One might argue that Kipling's visceral animosity toward the educated
Bengali had deeper roots than simply the desire to sustain the
British Raj. As Wurgaft and Nandy have alike pointed out, the
so-called effeminacy of the Bengali, together with the attraction these
men expressed for English learning, brought a man like Kipling, a
writer and literary figure, face to face with a side of his own personality
he could not openly avow in the hypermasculine society of late
Victorian India. Only by a vigorous repudiation of everything connected
with the babu and his culture could he effectively contain those
elements he saw, and despised, within himself, and so retain a place
amongst his Anglo-Indian peers. Oddly, and revealingly, years later,
after he had left India for good, Kipling was able, in the character of
Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, to craft a figure who mocked not just the
educated Bengali but the colonial stereotype itself. For the 'hulking
obese Babu' in Kim, so incongruous in the masculine arena of the
Great Game, was one of its most skilled practitioners. His actions, as
he took on the task of instructing Kim in the ways of espionage and led
two Russian spies to their undoing across the trackless wastes of the
Himalayas, stood always in ironic contrast to his derogatory description
of himself as a 'very fearful' man.2

2 Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination, pp. 132, 142; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy,
PP- 37-38, 69-70.

Connected to the insistent denial of any complicity in Bengali
effeminacy was an equally strong repudiation of the homoerotic. As
India presented the seductive image of the feminine to the Englishman,
so too did it open up for him a field of homoerotic possibilities. They
could never be acknowledged, but, as Sara Suleri has argued, homoeroticism,
as much as the classical Orientalist imagery of rape, denned
the sexual appeal of India for the British. In her view, indeed, the
imperial dynamic was shaped more by a 'dialogue between competing
male anxieties' than by the 'traditional metaphor of ravishment and
possession'. However India's attraction made itself felt, the tensions it
generated - between mastery and submission, denial and desire, an
insistence upon difference and the perception of sameness - could not
easily be reconciled. Kipling sought some resolution by insisting on
the value of steady and unreflecting hard work. His hero was the
district officer, a man such as Orde, riding hard in the saddle, or the
bridge-builder Findlayson who subdued the raging Ganges. The 'still
small voice of fact' could to some degree quell doubt and uncertainty,
and carve out a space of order amidst the chaos of India.3

3 Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, especially pp. 16-17, 77-

Contents

Preface ix
1 Introduction: Britain and India in the eighteenth century i
2 Liberalism and empire 28
3 The creation of difference 66
4 The ordering of difference 113
5 Coping with contradiction 160
6 Epilogue: Raj, nation, empire 215
Bibliographic essay 235
Index 241

Illustrations

1 The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, by Spiridion Roma, British
  Library F245 page 16
2 A Brahmin, on the monument to Warren Hastings 22
3 Statue of Lord William Bentinck 95
4 'An Indian Woman Burning Herself on the Death of her Husband', British
  Library Pi947 97
5 'The Magistrate's Wife' from G.F. Atkinson, Curry and Rice 108
6 Detail from 'A Company Officer about to sketch a
  Ruined Temple', British Library LID 586 115
7 'Brinjara and Wife', from Watson and Kaye, The People of India 118
8 Monument to Warren Hastings 131
9 The Madras Law Courts 157
10 'Miss Wheeler Defending Herself Against the Sepoys at
   Cawnpore', British Library X2 164
11 Victoria Memorial, Calcutta, British Library 430/62 169
12 Viceroy's House, New Delhi 170
13 Bungalow, Allahabad, British Library 491/1 178

   Figures 1, 4, 6, 10, 11, and 13 are reproduced by permission of The
   British Library. Figure 12 is reproduced courtesy of the British
   Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects. Figures 2,
   3, and 8 are reproduced courtesy of Barbara Groseclose.

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