The Return of the Mughal: Historical Fiction and Despotism in Colonial India, 1863–1908

179 Pages·2018·1.854 MB·English

by  Alex Padamsee

The Return of the Mughal:
Historical Fiction and
Despotism in Colonial
India, 1863–1908
Alex Padamsee
The Return of the Mughal: Historical Fiction
and Despotism in Colonial India, 1863–1908
Alex Padamsee
The Return of the
Mughal: Historical
Fiction and Despotism
in Colonial India,
1863–1908
Alex Padamsee
School of English
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK
ISBN 978-1-137-35493-8 ISBN 978-1-137-35494-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-35494-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956732
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C
ontents
1 Introduction: The Returns of the Mughal 1
2 The Devil’s Sovereignty: Plagiarism and Political
Theology in Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would
Be King 25
3 Flora Annie Steel and the Jurisprudence of Emergency 91
4 Time and the Nation: Mughals, Maine and Modernities
in Romesh Chunder Dutt’s Historical Fiction 129
5 Conclusion 161
Index 173
v
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Returns of the Mughal
Abstract This introduction revisits the European deployment of the
concept of Oriental Despotism in India and its colonial imbrication with
Mughal history. Padamsee locates the founding appeal of the Mughal
past in early and deeply conflicted British attempts to legitimate a des-
potic claim to territoriality that could not otherwise be accommodated
by English legal and constitutional norms. While colonising the Mughal
past became instrumental to colonial self-empowerment, the politi-
cal-theological contradictions it entailed resurfaced in the embattled late
colonial state and substantially shaped British and Indian historical fic-
tion, continuing to fuel the contentious figure of the Mughal in Hindu
Nationalist politics today.
Keywords Colonialism · India · Oriental Despotism · Mughal ·
Sovereignty · Political theology · Hastings · Hindu nationalism
taking Delhi
On October 15 1990 a DCM-Toyota van, gaudily transformed into the
television-style replica of an ancient Indian chariot, advanced through
the streets of an upper middle class suburb in Delhi. Through loud-
speakers affixed to its cab, a slight and bespectacled Sindhi gentleman
berated the local residents about their inattention to their ancient Hindu
© The Author(s) 2018 1
A. Padamsee, The Return of the Mughal: Historical
Fiction and Despotism in Colonial India, 1863–1908,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-35494-5_1
2 a. PaDaMsee
heritage, while behind him processed an exotic line of travellers, their
skin painted blue and orange, their compact wrestlers’ bodies costumed
with metal crowns and flowing robes. They carried with them swords,
bows and tridents.
For the most part, the suburban Delhi-ites proffered the strangers a
polite, if bemused, welcome, some even applauded; when the van passed
through South Delhi, onlookers would throw flowers in its path, others
would come forward to the Toyota cab and hand offerings to its occu-
pants. It was only when it crossed into the walled former Mughal city of
Shahjahanabad and reached its oldest thoroughfare that the riots began.
The bespectacled tourist was L.K. Advani, the ideological leader of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the Hindu Nationalist
movement. He had been on his travels through western, central and
now northern India for over a month. Advani styled his progress a ‘Rath
Yatra’, an ancient pilgrimage, travelling ultimately to the contested
‘birthplace’ of Rama in the city of Ayodhya, where he would instigate a
televised, global movement to tear down a local mosque and build in its
place a Hindu temple.1 A recent popular television series based on the
myth of the Ramayana had suggested the idea of marking out a politi-
cal constituency by procession. Delhi was the only city in which Advani’s
tour lingered for several days, and the only one on his itinerary not gen-
erally associated with Hindu pilgrimage. Alongside New Delhi’s impor-
tance as the remote modern centre of Indian national politics, Old Delhi
represented the other aspect of the discursive dyad that Advani had fore-
grounded in his visual and pamphleteering narrative of Rama’s home-
coming. If the aim of the tour was the reconstruction of ‘Hindutva’, a
term enjoined by V.D. Savarkar in 1923 and centred on the notion of
territoriality, its route to that ethnonationalist homecoming lay precisely
through the medieval Mughal empire.
When Advani first set out in his pasteboard-clad Toyota van, Hindu
Nationalists were considered by the mainstream Indian press as a thug-
gish political absurdity. Today, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the
BJP are enjoying their second stint as the national government of India.
If Delhi was the moment of political departure for the movement, then
the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya marked its full arrival in
the national imagination. Now swollen to thousands, Advani’s panto-
mime army razed to the ground—brick by brick and filmed in real time
by the world’s television cameras—the sixteenth-century mosque sup-
posedly erected there by the first Mughal emperor (Babur). Historians
of the event have taken for granted the communalist significance of its
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RETURNS OF THE MUGHAL 3
Mughal dimension; since the late nineteenth century, Mughals and
Muslims in India have been easily conflated.2 Few have noticed that
although enacted as a televisual spectacle—through the new global
media of what one historian calls ‘electronic capitalism’3—the taking of
Delhi and the demolition of the Babri Masjid originate, at least in part,
from a surprisingly literary narrative, one centred as much on reinven-
tions of the political-theological roots of colonial sovereignty in India, as
on the vicious pleasures of sectarianism.
Advani would have absorbed this more literary heritage, if not from
his own colonial education in Karachi and Hyderabad, then from the
canonical texts of ‘Hindutva’: propagandist histories that since the late
nineteenth century had imaginatively invested and reduced the architec-
ture of Mughal India over and over again.4 Perhaps too, as Indian boys
still did in the 1930s and 1940s, he had also read the many regional
translations of the popular late nineteenth-century Bengali historical nov-
els of Romesh Chunder Dutt and Bankimchandra Chatterji, in which
brave young patriots left their provincial homes to fight for national
self-determination against the distant forces of the Mughal empire.5
Stop off in any bookshop in a major Indian city today and you will find a
surprising selection of racy contemporary interpretations of this genre of
fiction, more often than not written in English. It is quite possible that,
like those early Indian novelists, Hindutva propagandists and anti-co-
lonial nationalists, Advani had also grown up reading the Mughal his-
tories and historical novels written by the British colonisers, orientalist6
and romantic narratives of Indian feudal despotism, aristocratic chivalry
and fanatical local resistance that in the wake of the Indian Rebellion
of 1857 leant weight and shape and an enlarged colonial and metro-
politan audience to the Anglo-Indian literary industry.7 What is certain
is that the plot the BJP ideologue had chosen for his reinvigoration of
late twentieth-century neo-Hindu sovereignty was not only romantically
bookish, but also decidedly colonial in its political iconography. It is this
overlooked, collaborative and highly politicised literary Mughal imagi-
nary that I want to explore in this monograph, through the historical
fiction—British and Indian—of late colonial India.
‘White Mughals’ anD the ghosts of eMPire
While the BJP enjoyed their first year of coalition government at the
centre, a young British journalist was conjuring up a resonant title for
his own more scholarly raid on Indian history, settling on a catchphrase
4 a. PaDaMsee
that would indirectly respond to the ‘clash of civilizations’ narra-
tive being peddled in London, New York and New Delhi. In 2002,
William Dalrymple published to critical acclaim and astonishing sales,
White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, a richly
researched and yet highly imaginative account of the colonial career of
James Kirkpatrick and his marriage in Hyderabad, in 1800, to Khair
un-Nissa, the daughter of a local Deccan Mughal aristocrat.8 Kirkpatrick
was a distant ancestor of the author. Despite the gentle irony of its title,
Dalrymple’s narrative embraces and arguably reinvigorates the romanti-
cised self-presentation of late eighteenth-century British cosmopolitans.9
His intention was to reclaim a slice of early colonial history from dis-
courses governed, he wrote, by ‘the normal steely dualism of Empire—
between rulers and ruled, imperialists and subalterns, colonisers and
colonised’. For what he had found in the archives, distinct from the later
cultural, racial and political apartheid of Victorian colonial ideology, was
a British life in India that ‘seemed instead to be about intermixing and
impurity, a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples
and cultures and ideas’ (p. xlvi). This was a history, he argued, that had
been eclipsed not just by later colonial writers, but by post-Independence
nationalist historians, and perhaps more surprisingly by recent postcolo-
nial scholarship operating with what he considered to be the blunt binary
tools of Said’s theory of Orientalism (p. xlvii). Through its speculative
narrative style as much as its historical content, White Mughals claimed
to reach back to a world in which a clear line between a Mughal and
British socius had not yet been drawn.10 Here waiting to be found in the
London archives of the British Library, was a sound riposte to the malign
fantasy of clashing cultures that late empire had fostered.
Dalrymple rightly identifies a major socio-cultural shift in colonial
attitudes to India at the turn of the nineteenth century.11 Aamir Mufti
(2016) is only the most recent of historians to describe the far-reach-
ing consequences of the pivot away from a close British interest in and
(beyond Calcutta) active absorption into the ecumenical Indo-Persian
culture of the elites of North India at this time. Disentangling itself from
that early embrace, which had come about as much through political
pragmatism as cosmopolitan curiosity, British Indian government for the
next century and a half attempted to set rulers and ruled on either side
of an increasingly impermeable socio-political boundary. A willed retreat
from their investment in this elite ‘Indian ecumene’ had begun to gain
pace among East India Company employees as early as the 1780s, in a
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RETURNS OF THE MUGHAL 5
process of separation that was then further racialised and renewed with
a vengeance after the Rebellion of 1857.12 For most of the eighteenth
century, however, an aristocratic and fluid Mughal culture of diplomacy,
communication and governance had crossed between north Indian
regions. Adopting the primary linguistic medium of Persian, its Mughal
personnel and forms of infrastructure, the English East India Company
had initially and superficially sought to legitimise itself as a local political
player among the successor states of the Mughal empire, those regional
kingdoms in the Deccan and North India that had over the course of the
century gradually broken away from the influence of Delhi.13 After major
military victories at Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1765), the Company
secured formal recognition from the Mughal emperor in a firman grant-
ing the Diwani (or rights of revenue collection) for Bengal in return for
tributary payments and professed if nominal, allegiance. No sooner had
that political détente been achieved, however, than efforts in London
were redoubled to bring the Company administration and revenue more
firmly under the direction of Crown and monarchist government. The
scandal of a ‘company acting in disguise of a sovereign’—debated since
the late seventeenth century—had seemed to take on a new and worry-
ing constitutional form. The problem of a ‘distant’ Crown sovereignty
managed through commercial monopoly and idioms of Oriental des-
potism would occupy the next three decades of Parliamentary inquiry,
reformist legislation, and public trials for corruption (Sen 2002).14
All of these issues were brought to a head and as it were, lanced, in
the public impeachment trial of the first Governor General Warren
Hastings, held in the House of Lords between 1787 and 1795, and
reported on in sensational detail throughout the British media. It would
be hard to overestimate the importance of this very public event for the
future self-perception and legitimation of British rule in India. Led by
Edmund Burke and the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the Whig
prosecution sought to defend a future ‘empire of liberty’ (as Burke put
it), one conducted under due constitutional restraint by Parliament,
against the worst despotic excesses of what they saw as the current
unholy alliance of a peculating mercantile company overseen (and its
sins often overlooked) by the King’s placemen. Burke’s strategy was to
focus the prosecution through the figure of Hastings’ himself, initially
in twenty-two articles of charge that ranged from personal corruption to
judicial subversion, and unsanctioned regime-change.15 Here was a des-
pot, to Burke’s mind, acting far beyond any known rule of law or local