An Illustrated History Of Indian Literature in English

483 Pages·5.152 MB·English

by  Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

JR
An Illustrated History Of Indian Literature in English Edited By
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Contents
Contents
Introduction
1. The English Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray
2. The Hindu College - Henry Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt
3. The Dutt Family Album And Toru Dutt
4. Rudyard Kipling
5. Two Faces of Prose Behramji Malabari and Govardhanram Tripathi
6. The Beginnings of the Indian Novel
7. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore
8. Sri Aurobindo
9. Two Early-Twentieth-Century Women Writers Cornelia Sorabji and
Sarojini Naidu
10. Gandhi and Nehru The Uses of English
11. Verrier Elwin
12. Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s
13. R.K. Narayan
14. Nirad C. Chaudhuri
15. Novelists of the 1950s and 1960s
16. On V.S. Naipaul on India
17. Poetry Since Independence
18. From Sugar to Masala Writing by the Indian Diaspora
19. Looking for A.K. Ramanujan
20. Salman Rushdie
21. After Midnight The Novel in the 1980s and 1990s
22. The Dramatists
23. Five Nature Writers - Jim Corbett, Kenneth Anderson, Salim Ali,
Kailash Sankhala, and M. Krishnan
24. Translations into English
Introduction
ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA
Hindoostan, has by the people of modern Europe, been understood to mean
the tract situated between the river Ganges and Indus, on the east and west;
the Thibetian and Tartarian mountains, on the north; and the sea on the
south.
—Major James Rennell, Introduction to Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan; or,
the Mogul’s Empire (1786)

The expression ‘India’ shall mean British India, together with any territories
of any native prince or chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty, exercized
under the Governor-General, or through any Governor or other officer
subordinate to the Governor-General of India. —Interpretation Act of 1889

.. . the State of Chhokrapur, if indeed it ever existed, has dissolved away in
the new map of India.
—J.R. Ackerley, Preface to the 2nd edn of Hindoo Holiday (1st edn 1932;
2nd edn 1952)
This volume, which covers almost two hundred years of the literature written
largely by Indians in English, has for its starting point the year 1800. The
date has no literary significance but is chosen for its rough and ready
usefulness: by 1800 there was no real challenge left to the British
domination of India from either the other European powers in the region—
the Dutch, French, and Portuguese—nor, except for the Marathas, from the
native states. British domination eventually covered all aspects of Indian life
—political, economic, social, cultural. The introduction of English into the
complex, hierarchical language system of India has proved the most
enduring aspect of this domination.
By 1800 the battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) were fought and
lost. Siraj-ud-Daula’s defeat at Plassey was less at the hands of Col. Robert
Clive than at those of the compradors of Bengal, the Jagat Seths. Seeing
their profit margins reduced by Mughal impositions on their commerce,
these wealthy Hindu and Jain merchants and bankers, together with powerful
members of the nawab’s court, plotted his overthrow, a conspiracy in which
the East India Company joined. Militarily the battle was not more than a
skirmish; according to one estimate there were only seventy-two dead after
counting the figures on both sides, but as Joshua Marshman wrote in his
influential Bharatvarsher Itihas (1831), it ‘changed the destinies of sixty
million people in a vast kingdom’.
Among those whose destiny it affected was Dean Mahomed (1759—1851),
the author of The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), the first book ever
written and published by an Indian in English. Born in Patna into a family
that had traditionally served the Mughal empire, he joined, as had his father
and brother before him, the East India Cpmpany’s Bengal Army in 1769 and
travelled with it as a camp follower and subaltern officer for the next fifteen
years, going as far north as Delhi. His book, in the form of a series o'f letters
to a Active friend, is in large measure based on his experiences in the
colonial army. In 1784 he emigrated to Ireland, settling down in Cork and
marrying a young local Anglo-Irish woman. He also converted to the
Protestant faith. In later life, after unsuccessfully running the Hindostanee
Coffee House near Portman Square, London, he set himself up as a
‘Shampooing Surgeon’ in Brighton, where his herbal ‘Indian Vapour Bath’
was immediately popular and attracted the patronage of King George IV
who, in 1822, bestowed a Royal Warrant upon him.
Plassey effectively brought Bengal under Company rule and, following Mir
Qasim’s defeat, Buxar added the contiguous territory of Avadh to the areas
already under British influence. The Company now controlled the eastern
Gangetic plain from Benaras to Calcutta. In the following year, 1765, the
Mughal emperor appointed the East India Company his diwan (or chief
financial manager) of the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa,
thereby enabling it to collect revenue on his behalf. Known as the Treaty of
Allahabad, this arrangement has been called ‘the truly inaugural moment of
the Raj’. The Company’s accession to diwani, Ranajit Guha says in An
Indian Historiography of India (1988), ‘brought together in one single
instance all the three fundamental aspects of colonialism in our
subcontinent, namely, its origin in an act of force, its exploitation of the
primary produce of the land as the very basis of a colonial economy, and its
need to give force and exploitation the appearance of legality.’

There is to this inaugural moment of the Raj, as there was sometimes to the
Raj itself, a touch of farce. When, thirty years later, the painter Benjamin
West depicted the treaty— Lord Clive receiving from the Moghul the Grant
of the Duanney—he showed the Mughal emperor Shah Alam in an imperial
setting, seated under a canopy on a raised throne, from where he hands Clive
a rolled document. There are elephants in the background and in the
foreground attendants. Clive’s party, consisting of six Englishmen, is shown
on the left of the canvas. Some of the Englishmen appear to be talking in
whispers to each other, as do some of the Indians. The reality was quite
different: Clive actually received ‘the Duanney’ in his tent. Two of the six
Englishmen in the picture were not present with him in Allahabad on that
day, and the emperor’s throne, far from being a canopied, oriental affair, was
in fact Clive’s dining table surmounted by an armchair.
At about the time Shah Alam was being reduced to a piece of rococo
furniture, Captain James Rennell, who had already spent five years in the
country and carried out extensive surveys of the coastal areas of southern
India, was appointed by Clive as the first Surveyor-General of Bengal. The
Bengal Atlas that Rennell brought out in 1779, the culmination of more than
a decade’s effort, was the first modern atlas of the province. As more
colonial administrators realised the importance of cartography to empire
building, Rennell’s pioneering effort was duplicated in other British-
controlled Indian territories, notably by Captain Colin Mackenzie in the
Deccan, and by him and Major William Lambton, after the fall of Tipu
Sultan in 1799, in Mysore. Corresponding with the labours of these soldier-
engineers, the British set about mapping the intellectual, cultural, and
historical dimensions of their new territories. Comparative philology,
lexicography, and translation were some of the areas opened up by Sir
Charles Wilkins, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Sir William Jones, John
Gilchrist, and Henry Colebrooke, all of whom are now remembered as
pioneering ‘Orientalists’.
The British interest in Indian languages, as Halhed bluntly said, arose from
the necessity of having to cultivate ‘a medium of intercourse between the
Government and its subjects, between the natives of Europe who are to rule,
and the inhabitants of India who are to obey’. But the scholar-administrators
who busied themselves with Persian and Sanskrit, ‘Moors’ and Bengali,
were not always patronising in their attitude, nor did they put their
newly acquired skills always to imperialist uses. Even Halhed, who wrote
and printed one of the earliest Bengali grammars by a European, is
remembered also as the first Englishman to be influenced by Oriental
mysticism. The best known, Sir William Jones, the Calcutta Supreme Court
judge and founder (in 1784) of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, built a
formidable reputation as an Oriental scholar even before he made his
passage to India. He engaged more comprehensively with Indian civilisation
than any Englishman has since: orthography, mythology, literature,
chronology, chess, the zodiac, botany, music, and natural history are some of
the subjects on which he contributed authoritative articles for the
early volumes of Asiatick Researches. Described recently as ‘one of the
greatest polymaths in history’, Jones laid the foundation of historical
linguistics when, in the ‘Third Anniversary Discourse’ (1786), he made the
assertion that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin ‘have sprung from a common
source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’. He went on to posit the notion of a
common homeland for mankind, from which it had centuries ago migrated to
different parts of the globe. The Hindus, he said,
had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians,
the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians or Goths, and Celts, the
Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians-, whence, as no reason appears for
believing, that they were a colony from any one of those nations, or any of
those nations from them, we may fairly conclude that they all proceeded
from • some central country, to investigate which will be the object of my
future Discourses .. .
The Utilitarian philosopher James Mill, perhaps remembering this and
similar passages, was later to exclaim that the years spent by ‘Oriental
Jones’ in India had been a waste. Between Jones’s universalist and surreal
ideas of race and Halhed’s administrative ruler-ruled paradigm there is a
world of difference. Nevertheless, there had appeared by 1800 an assortment
of texts in English—grammars, dictionaries, teaching aids, phrase books,
and Translations of literary works, digests, and compendiums—which, like
Rennell’s Bengal Atlas, were meant to facilitate colonisation and explain the
new acquisition both to the Company’s servants in India and to an avid
literary and scientific community back home in England.
II
‘Expanding like the petals of young flowers’, wrote Calcutta’s Henry
Derozio in a sonnet addressed to his students at Hindu College, ‘I watch the
gentle opening of your minds’. What nourished these young minds, bringing
‘unnumbered kinds / Of new perceptions’ to them, was colonial education.
For twenty-five years before the founding of Hindu College in 1817, and for
nearly twenty years after it, the nature and purpose of colonial education and
the Company’s role in it had been furiously debated in London and Calcutta
by Britishers and Indians. In 1792, in one of the earliest discussions on the
subject, a director of the East India Company had stated: ‘we [have] just lost
America from our folly, in having allowed the establishment of schools and
colleges . . . [I]t would not do for us to repeat the same act of folly in
regard to India.’ All the same, the folly was about to be repeated, though
consensus on the kind of folly it would be was not easy to arrive at. In the
debates that followed, the ‘Committee of the Protestant Society’ took issue
with the Clapham sect. Rammohan Ray, who said in 1823 that the Sanskrit
system of education would be best calculated to keep this country in
darkness’, similarly took up the cudgels on behalf of English education for
Indians and against the Orientalist Horace H. Wilson. Matters came to a
head during the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy of 1835, to be resolved
once and for all by Thomas Babington Macaulay s Minute on Education’ of
the same year. It said in its most cited part:
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters
between us and millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in
blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

Lord Macaulay
‘Bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen! . . . English-medium misfits . . . Square-
peg freaks’ is how a character in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh
(1995) describes the class of persons it was Macaulay’s mission to create.
The class had long been in the process of formation and consisted largely of
the new urban elite, the rising bhadralok population of Calcutta. Many of
them were immigrants with landed property in the interior districts, but were
drawn to the city by the promise of office jobs in the expanding British
administration, the key to which was a knowledge of English. For ‘the sons
of respectable Hindoos’ there was Hindu College, where they acquired, as
the Committee on Public Instruction observed in 1830,‘a command of the
English language, and . . . familiarity with its literature and science . . . rarely
equalled by any schools in Europe’. Of how English was learned by aspiring
natives at the other end of the educational spectrum, in the hamlets and
villages of Bengal, Lal Behari Day has left a moving account. In the chapter
on ‘English Education in Calcutta before 1834’ in Recollections of My
School-days, serialised in Bengal Magazine between 1872 and 1876, Day
writes:
When I was a little boy I had a sight of one of these Vocabularies, which
used to be studied by a cousin of mine in my native village at Talpur. The
English words were written in the Bengali character, and the volume,
agreeably to the custom of the Hindus, began with the word ‘God.’ As a
curiosity, I put below the first words of my cousin’s Vocabulary, retaining
the spelling of the English words as they were represented in the Bengali
character:

Gad : Isvara
Lad : Isvara
A’i : A’mi
Lu : Tumi
Akto : Karmma
Bail : Jamin
In the course of time, several East Indian gendemen of Calcutta lent their
services to the cause of Native education. They went to the houses of the
wealthy Babus and gave regular instructions to their sons. They received
pupils into their own houses, which were turned into schools. Under the
auspices of these men, the curriculum of studies was enlarged. To the
Spelling Book and the Schoolmaster were added the Tootinamah or the Tales
of a Parrot, the Elements of English Grammar and the Arabian Nights’
Entertainments. The man who could read and understand the last mentioned
book was reckoned, in those days, a prodigy of learning.
One consequence of the changes taking place in Indian society under
colonialism was that Indians had mastered the coloniser’s language (as the
colonisers had mastered theirs) and, going one step further, had by the 1820s
begun to adopt it as their chosen medium of expression. These pioneering
works of poetry, fiction, drama, travel, and belles-lettres are little read today
except by specialists, but when they were published they were, by the mere
fact of being in English, audacious acts of mimicry and self-assertion. More
than this, the themes they touched on and the kinds of social issues they
engaged with would only be explored by other Indian literatures several
decades later. Krishna Mohan Banerjea’s The Persecuted (1831) might not
be good theatre, but the subject of Hindu orthodoxies and the individual’s
loss of faith in his religion had not been taken up by any Indian play
before it. Banerjea, who was eighteen years old when he wrote The
Persecuted, soon afterwards converted to Christianity. He was one of the
leading lights of ‘Young Bengal’, as Derozio’s disciples called themselves,
and founder-editor of The Enquirer (1831-5).
Kylas Chunder Dutt’s ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’
(1835) is about an imaginary armed uprising against the British. Insurrection
seems a commonplace idea, until we realise that the idea is being expressed
for the first time in Indian literature, and would next find expression only in
folk songs inspired by the events of 1857. It is uncanny that the year of the
uprising in Dutt’s imagination comes within two years of India’s actual year
of independence; uncanny, too, the coincidence that the work should have
been published in the same year that Macaulay delivered his ‘Minute’. In a
double irony, the insurgents are all urbanised middle-class Indians with the
best education colonialism could offer, the very class Macaulay had intended
as ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern’. A fable like
‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours’, where the ‘language of command’ is stood
on its head and turned into the language of subversion, suggests itself as the
imaginative beginnings of a nation.
§