Colonial exchanges

Political theory and the agency of the colonized

Burke A. Hendrix, Deborah Baumgold

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526105660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Recent scholarship in political thought has closely examined the relationship between European political ideas and colonialism, particularly the ways in which canonical thinkers supported or opposed colonial practices. But little attention has been given to the engagement of colonized political and intellectual actors with European ideas. The essays in this volume demonstrate that a full reckoning of colonialism's effects requires attention to the ways in which colonized intellectuals reacted to, adopted, and transformed these ideas, and to the political projects that their reactions helped to shape. Across nine chapters, a mix of political theorists and intellectual historians grapple with specific thinkers and contexts to show in detail the unpredictable, complex and sometimes paradoxical impact of European ideas in an array of colonial settings.

1

Intellectual flows and counterflows: the strange case of J. S. Mill

Lynn Zastoupil

Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori recently argued that there are many ways to explore global intellectual history. One approach addresses the circulation of ideas and the factors that facilitate or hinder this. Attention to individuals who traverse(d) cultural borders was an early contribution. A large body of scholarship is now available on the travellers, intermediaries, translators, and go-betweens who, in ‘crossing seemingly insurmountable borders[,]‌ learned how to make intellectual cultures mutually intelligible’. Related to this are studies of the role of translation itself in ‘forging a global concept history’. As with go-betweens, issues of incommensurability and misunderstanding arise here, as does the more specific question of what gets lost in transmission. These problems, however, cannot obscure the ‘circulation of concepts and their material vehicles’ that has long taken place across the world. Scholarship on transnational intellectual networks forms the final piece of this approach to the globalisation of ideas, according to Moyn and Sartori. These studies have examined different types of networks such as those forged by religious groups or those devoted to the propogation of philosophical systems or economic theories. This scholarship tends to emphasise the specific conditions – book markets or intellectual networks, for instance – that make possible the transnational circulation of ideas. Studies of an early modern European ‘republic of letters’ anticipated this line of investigation.¹

What Moyn and Sartori outline here is familiar to scholars of colonialism. One of the important features of modern empires was the circulation of people, ideas, and texts between Europe and the world. These ‘circuits of knowledge and communication’, as Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper noted, were multidirectional, creating networks of exchange and influence that linked the world in multiple, complex ways.² Gandhi provides ample confirmation of this. A colonial subject for nearly his entire life, Gandhi lived in British territories spanning three continents. He moved freely among India, South Africa, and Britain and formed transnational friendships, intellectual bonds, and activist networks. Influenced by campaigns, writers, activists, and texts from across the British Empire and beyond, Gandhi came to wield a global influence, fuelled partly by his personal travels but more so by the circulation of his ideas and news of his campaigns. His doctrine of non-violent resistance exemplifies all this. Inspired in part by the passive resistance of British suffragette hunger strikers, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You (which he read in South Africa), Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, and Indian traditions such as hartals, dharna, and peasant desertions – and inspiring in turn civil rights and non-violent resistance movements in South Africa, the United States and elsewhere – satyagraha is testament to the flow and counterflow of ideas engendered by modern imperialism.³

Intellectual exchange was part of the colonial enterprise from the start. European expansion led to encounters with foreign societies that rendered necessary cross-cultural understanding. Cultural brokers became an integral part of the early colonial landscape, transmitting information and fostering sensitivity between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Often they were local women who entered into intimate or familial relationships – real or fictive – with European men. These ‘go-betweens’ relayed everything from basic linguistic skills to vital cultural and religious information to complex ideas about social and political organisation. In the process they shaped as well as facilitated the exchange of ideas.⁴

In British India these intellectual encounters were intensified by many factors. For one, India was home to an ancient, complex, and evolving civilisation with ‘a brilliant and enduring tradition of indigenous scholarship’.⁵ Also important were the highly developed precolonial political system – which thrived on gathering and disseminating information – and the equally vibrant public arena where religious and political debating skills, as well as other intellectual talents, were prized.⁶ The introduction of Western education by the British was another factor, as was the manner in which Indians embraced this education both in India and in Europe. The unusual nature of imperial rule played a role too. The British East India Company (EIC) evolved from a mere trading venture into the paramount power in India by the early nineteenth century in large part because it drew upon the talents of countless Indians. Among those who entered its service were learned elites, intellectuals, and others with knowledge and skills related to the local information order or venerable scholarly traditions. These knowledge-rich individuals and groups grew in importance as the expanding British Raj required ever more knowledge of regional languages, dynastic matters, political affairs, revenue sources, local history, religious customs, popular culture, and the like. Many of these knowledge brokers became part of what Bernard Cohn appropriately described as the veritable army of Indians who ‘ran the everyday affairs of the Raj’.⁷

A vast and growing body of scholarship exists on the flow and counterflow of ideas spawned by these circumstances. The Raj’s long duration and the intense exchanges it created means that there is an almost inexhaustible list of Britons and Indians who can be studied for how ideas were borrowed, adopted, embraced, altered, challenged, contested, or rejected. The literature on these encounters resists categorisation, although Shruti Kapila recently suggested that much of the recent scholarship tends to fall into one of two competing schools of interpretation, one investigating ‘the power of colonial knowledge’, and the other stressing the vigor of Indian agency. Representative of the two schools are important works by Cohn and C. A. Bayly.⁸ William Pinch has highlighted the key differences in their interpretive frameworks. Cohn saw the British colonising Indian forms of knowledge and inventing ones of their own useful for the imperial project. Bayly meanwhile stressed the British ability to adapt to their own purposes Indian means of gathering and disseminating information, although these were later subverted by the use of new, scientific forms of intelligence gathering. Cohn’s argument leads to the conclusion that ‘the colonial state [was] the main author of politics and political meaning’, whereas Bayly’s emphasises the vitality of Indian processes and local agency.⁹ Kapila and Pinch both make a case for moving beyond these interpretive frameworks, each pointing in the direction of the emerging field of global intellectual history.

In fact, significant work has already been done on British–Indian intellectual encounters that anticipates this call for a transnational approach. These studies have tended to reject the notion that colonial encounters were one-sided affairs in which Britons imposed their intellectual will and that Indian intellectuals were passive victims or mere informants marginalised by a colonial state that invaded their epistemological space.¹⁰ In 1994, for instance, Eugene Irschick explored the dialogic process of cultural formation and knowledge construction in colonial south India. This process involved both British administrators and Indian interlocutors, Irschick insists, who ‘participated equally in constructing new institutions with a new way of thinking to produce a new kind of knowledge’. The result was cultural formations that were neither European nor Indian, but heteroglot constructions so multi-authored that it is ‘impossible to locate any real provenance for them’.¹¹ Norbert Peabody makes similar claims about early British censuses in Rajasthan. These were similar to precolonial surveys because colonial officials relied upon local informants who used household lists prepared for previous rulers. Colonial discourse, in other words, involved Indian agency and was formed ‘by way of bricolage’.¹²

Suggestions of transnationality are also rife in scholarship on early British engagement with Sanskrit studies. Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher eschew notions of colonial impositions and stress the interactions between EIC officials and Indian pandits that led to the foundation of modern Indology.¹³ Along with others, they note how early British Sanskritists worked closely with pandits and were deeply indebted to the Indian scholarly tradition, defending both against German Sanskritists. The latter favoured the classical philological methods developed in Europe and most had only limited use for indigenous Sanskrit studies.¹⁴ It is thus fair to speak of an Indo-British school of early Indology. H. H. Wilson became its chief exponent in Europe after returning from India in 1833 to become the first Boden professor of Sanskrit at Oxford. He criticised European scholars who undervalued Indian authorities on Sanskrit and argued that the Boden chair must be held by someone who had learned Sanskrit in India and was familiar with classical Sanskrit literature and its grammar as studied in India.¹⁵

A word of caution is in order, however. Although colonialism produced exchanges that enabled a global intellectual culture to emerge, the transmission and reception of ideas was uneven, ambiguous, and not always fruitful or long-lasting. George Orwell’s critique of empire, for example, owes a deep debt to his experiences as a police officer in Burma. Yet, in his famous essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and the autobiographical passage on his imperial service in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell displays little interest in and perhaps even less sympathy for Burmese views on British rule. Cases easily come to mind, too, of individuals who came into contact with foreign ideas, texts, or individuals and were seemingly unchanged intellectually by those encounters. Thomas Macaulay’s infamous comment on South Asian literature and learning – ‘a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’ – suggests that nearly a year in India had done nothing to alter his confidence in the ‘intrinsic superiority of the Western literature’.¹⁶

There are instances as well where intellectual exchange never transpired despite very favourable circumstances. This essay will examine one notable case of this: J. S. Mill’s neglect of the Bengali reformer, Rammohun Roy. Mill’s silence about this transnational celebrity renowned on three continents is striking, given the opportunities they had to meet, their shared networks of intellectuals and activists, and their similar views on key political and social matters. This neglect is even more remarkable when one considers Mill’s embrace of Einfühlung, an underappreciated intellectual move on his part that reflects the influence of his colonial career. Although he owed a manifest debt to an EIC ethos promoting sympathetic understanding of Indians, Mill apparently remained unsympathetic to the famous Rammohun Roy who captivated many people that Mill knew and admired.

J. S. Mill’s Einfühlung

During his period of intellectual ferment in the 1830s, J. S. Mill wrote as if he had imbibed Herder’s influential notion of Einfühlung. In 1832, he indicated the benefits of transporting oneself into the minds of other people in order ‘to know and feel’ what they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: when ideas travel: political theory, colonialism, and the history of ideas
• 1 Intellectual flows and counterflows: the strange case of J. S. Mill
• 2 Rethinking resistance: Spencer, Krishnavarma, and The Indian Sociologist
• 3 The other Mahatma’s naive monarchism: Phule, Paine, and the appeal to Queen Victoria
• 4 The New World ‘sans-culottes’: French revolutionary ideology in Saint-Domingue
• 5 Confronting colonial otherness: the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the limits of imperial legal universalism
• 6 The indigenous redemption of liberal universalism
• 7 Troubling appropriations: Pedro Paterno’s Filipino deployment of French Lamarckianism
• 8 Colonial hesitation, appropriation, and citation: Qāsim Amīn, empire, and saying ‘no’
• 9 Marxism and historicism in the thought of Abdullah Laroui
• Index