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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. §

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