Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947

Alex Tickell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136618406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study of terrorism, insurgency and the literature of colonial India, Alex Tickell re-envisages the political aesthetics of empire. Organized around key crisis moments in the history of British colonial rule such as the 'Black Hole' of Calcutta, the anti-thug campaigns of the 1830s, the 1857 Rebellion, anti-colonial terrorism in Edwardian London and the Amritsar massacre in 1919, this timely book reveals how the terrorizing threat of violence mutually defined discursive relations between colonizer and colonized.

Based on original research and drawing on theoretical work on sovereignty and the exception, this book examines Indian-English literary traditions in transaction and covers fiction and journalism by both colonial and Indian authors. It includes critical readings of several significant early Indian works for the first time: from neglected fictions such as Kylas Chunder Dutt's story of anticolonial rebellion A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 (1835) and Sarath Kumar Ghosh's nationalist epic The Prince of Destiny (1909) to dissident periodicals like Hurrish Chunder Mookerji's Hindoo Patriot (1856–66) and Shyamaji Krishnavarma's Indian Sociologist (1905–14). These are read alongside canonical works by metropolitan and 'Anglo-Indian' authors such as Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839), Rudyard Kipling's short fictions, and novels by Edmund Candler and E. M. Forster. Reflecting on the wider cross-cultural politics of terror during the Indian independence struggle, Tickell also reappraises sacrificial violence in Indian revolutionary nationalism and locates Gandhi's philosophy of ahimsa or non-violence as an inspired tactical response to the terror-effects of colonial rule.

1 The Highlands of Orissa

Ritual Terror and Reform in
Colonial India

It must be a source of unfeigned satisfaction to know that [. . .] blood-thirstiness has ceased to disgrace the people of the East, as far at least as English influence prevails amongst them. The rite of Suttee has been abandoned for nearly thirty years. This great revolution was effected when Lord William Bentinck was Governor-General of India, and will ever be regarded as the brightest act of his reign. The colossal chariot-wheels of Juggernaut have not rolled over a human victim for a quarter of a century; and, thanks to the late Sir William Sleeman, and a devoted band of colleagues, the Thugs have been regularly hunted down [. . .] It was not till long after Colonel Sleeman had commenced his most successful crusade against the Thugs, that it became known to the Government that other forms of this sanguinary superstition, as we have already described, were flourishing to a frightful extent in an almost inaccessible mountainous district stretching along the coast, part lying within the Bengal, and part within the Madras territory. Our little war with Goomsur, in 1836, may, therefore, so far be considered fortunate, inasmuch as it first made the government acquainted with the fact that in the hill tribes of Orissa there were two forms of cruel superstition, exemplified, first, in the murder of female infants, and secondly, in the slaughter of human victims under circumstances of intolerable barbarity, thus rendering it imperative that immediate measures should be taken for the suppression of cruelties at which the human mind revolted. (John Campbell A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service Against the Wild Tribes of Khondistan for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice 1864: 158–59)

All these [aboriginal] tribes hold themselves distinct and aloof from the people of the plains [and . . .] they are all fit denizens of the places they occupy—namely, the hills and forests of their respective provinces, which, left to themselves, would in a short time be overrun by wild beasts [. . .] It is true that many of these tribes live very much like the wild beasts themselves, but still free—free at least as those wild beasts are. The hatred of tyranny which drove their ancestors to their present retreats survives yet in them, the one redeeming feature in their character being their utter abhorrence of thraldom and despotism. (Horatio Bickerstaffe Rowney [Shoshee Chunder Dutt] The Wild Tribes of India 1882: xiv–xv)

Early in November 1835, as the monsoon ended and military operations became easier, the East India Company at Madras sent one of their Revenue Board officials, G. E. Russell, accompanied by an army unit, on a special mission into the densely forested eastern ghats or mountain ranges of Orissa to annex the territories of the local ruler, the Rajah of Goomsur. The British had been concerned about the Goomsur zamindari [landholding] for some time, and had been wavering over whether to recognize the existing Rajah or his son as the representative power. Under the latter, revenue payments had become erratic and the collector, a Mr Stevenson, had complained that ‘Government is not perhaps aware that its authority is, and has, I believe, ever been little more than a shadow in these districts’ (quoted in Macpherson 1865: 44). Intent on reinforcing Company authority and making up the lost revenues, Russell and his expeditionary force arrived in the district only to find that the Goomsur Rajah had escaped into the hills. He and his family had taken shelter with the Rajah's allies, the Khond people, who immediately started attacking the newly arrived colonial force and quickly drew it into a vicious jungle war. The Khonds were a pre-Hindu adivasi [aboriginal] group who inhabited the almost impenetrable highlands on the northernmost border of the Madras presidency. Faced with such concerted resistance, Russell declared martial law¹ in the district and started a policy of burning down villages suspected of harbouring Khond rebels. However, the Khonds knew their terrain and were redoubtable warriors, and Russell's badly equipped troops soon got into trouble, running out of supplies and becoming debilitated by fever.

The following year a new expedition was sent to the region to suppress the Khonds and, writing home, one of the commanding officers, Samuel Macpherson, made the following, confident prediction of success: ‘if there be no very great mismanagement, perhaps all may be concluded soon, for I am ashamed to tell you, our poor enemies, a mere wild hill tribe, are not far enough advanced in civilisation to use gunpowder’ (Macpherson 1865: 48). He added, however, that the Khonds fought bravely ‘with battle-axes of the most trenchant shapes’ and admitted that they had not been particularly backward in learning the use of firearms, captured from Company soldiers whom they had ambushed in a mountain ravine. A month later, Macpherson's narrative tone seems considerably less jaunty, and a strangely contemporary note starts to sound in his wearied recognition that he was caught in a guerrilla conflict against an elusive, highly mobile enemy: ‘The war still drags out its weary length’, he complained from his camp in Goomsur where his men were sickening and conditions were ‘pestilential beyond all measure’ (ibid.: 49). ‘It is a war in which there has been no enemy, and it has long been reduced to a mere personal contest of speed, skill, and endurance, betwixt a mountain chief who darts through the jungles of this forest-laden and difficult country with from ten to fifty fugitive followers, and one of our oldest civilians, backed by eight regiments of the Madras army’ (ibid.: 49). The Goomsur jungle war dragged on until 1837, when the British apprehended the Rajah's main supporter, the Khond chief Dora Bissye, and imprisoned him at Madras (Campbell 1864: 33). The Goomsur Rajah had died early in the conflict and Dora Bissye's capture had an important strategic effect. Under the special powers promulgated by Russell at the start of the war, the British court-martialled thirty-two other Khond and Hindu hill-chieftains who had allied themselves with the Rajah, executed all but three, and replaced them with chiefs loyal to the Company (Brandstadter 1985: 93).

The remoteness and impenetrability of the region meant that this was the first time that the British had properly encountered the Khonds,² and it soon became apparent that while flagrantly disregarding the authority of the Madras government, these ‘wild hill-tribes’ had also been involved for years in horrifying practices of female infanticide and human sacrifice. The latter ritual involved individuals procured as children from low-caste communities along the Orissa coast, who were then raised as favoured sacred beings (or meriah) amongst the Khonds to be sacrificed, eventually, in their agricultural fertility rites. The East India Company's administration (referred to hereafter as the EIC) was so appalled at the existence of these sacrificial rituals that in 1845 a special law was passed, Act XXI, founding the new administrative role of ‘Agent for Suppression of Meriah’ responsible for eradicating ‘crimes arising out of [. . .] superstition’ (Patnaik 1992: 260) and designating the Orissa highlands a special zone under the agent's jurisdiction. Keen to reform the Khonds through diplomacy rather than force, the Company invested its meriah agents with special powers, making them accountable not to the usual regional governors at Madras or Calcutta, but to the Governor-General himself. Because of his Goomsur war experience, Macpherson was appointed the first chief administrator of the Khond agency, and was succeeded in 1847 by another veteran, John Campbell. By 1862, they and successive administrators of the agency had used political pressure and forced economic change to all but eradicate sacrifice amongst the Khonds.

This minor episode in the history of India's encounter with British colonialism is my starting point here because, in abolishing meriah sacrifices, Macpherson and Campbell acted on a set of progressive assumptions that were shared by the new liberal-colonial administration of Sir William Bentinck. The continuity of their aims is especially clear in Campbell's memoir of the meriah agency, quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, in which he indicates how the Goomsur war ‘providentially’ fitted into a grand narrative of subcontinental reform against various forms of ‘sanguinary superstition’, including rituals such as sati and thagi (which will be discussed shortly). Campbell's personal account of his work amongst the Khonds thus accrues a considerable moral weight as he identifies himself with a generation of heroic colonial administrator-reformers whom he believed had effected a ‘great [social] revolution’ in India. In making these initial observations I am not, of course, condoning sacrifice and infanticide or questioning the ethical necessity of their abolition, nor am I interested in formulating a cultural-nativist argument in which ritual violence is somehow justified as the expression of an embattled ethnicity. Rather, my point is that in tracing the EIC's increasing involvement in Indian society it is necessary to be especially attentive to those areas that are deemed exceptional and therefore represent a moral and political imperative for direct colonial intervention. Remarking on the new governmental priorities of British rule in the 1830s, David Scott argues that in this period ‘colonial power came to depend, not merely upon inserting English ideas here and there, but upon the systematic redefinition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the colonised was lived’ (Scott 1995: 205; italics in the original). And indeed we soon realize, reading the meriah agency archive, that practices like ritual sacrifice were not just unacceptable to colonialism's ‘civilizing’ mission and its Evangelical moral framework (countermanding Christ's redemptive, merciful self-sacrifice); they were also indicative of a dangerous rebellion against the very political rationality of colonial government (Brandstadter 1985: 102).

In the following pages I will reflect on some key points at which the British colonial administration redefined the societal and cultural terrain of colonized life through its identification of an antagonistic terror and ‘monstrous’ violence in Indian society during the 1830s and 40s. Surveying the new colonial governmental reliance on the rule of law, and noting colonial decisions to except certain groups and zones from normal legal procedure, my analysis will concentrate on ‘sacrificial’ practices including sati, in which Hindu widows ritually immolated themselves after their husbands’ deaths, and thagi, a type of organized, homicidal highway robbery which became the basis for new colonial policing methods premised on the concept of the ‘criminal community’. In this section I will also examine a literary counterpart to the official narrative of the anti-thagi campaign in Philip Meadows Taylor's novel Confessions of a Thug ([1839] 1998), and assess how this text disturbingly transposes the logic of colonial sovereignty in a series of reflections and cross-projections between colonizer and colonized. Finally my critical focus will move from the terrors located in Indian society by colonial liberal-Utilitarianism to the Jacobin Terror of the French Revolution, and its distant, transcultural influence on the Indian-English writing of Young Bengal, a radical group associated with Calcutta's Hindu College. Here my analysis will return to the adivasi hill communities of Orissa, not as a focal point of reform, but as the basis for an early Indian-English literary fantasy of insurgency and proto-national liberty. As this section will show, the defiant violence of the Orissa highland-communities represented a shared reference point between colonizer and colonized, across which the discourses of counter-insurgency and dissident claims to liberty and revolutionary legitimacy were negotiated.

Legal Codification and the Exception

It was not until the Governor-Generalship of Lord William Bentinck (1828–35) that the Company consolidated its role as a political power and a revenue-collecting authority in the presidencies of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras (Stokes [1959] 1989: 151). Influenced by the Utilitarianism of his acquaintance and mentor, Jeremy Bentham, Bentinck's governmental priorities focused on ‘improvement’ and reform. In the EIC's London headquarters, these aims were endorsed by another of Bentham's disciples, the historian and administrator James Mill, and the Company's emerging programme was also morally reinforced by a strong Evangelical lobbying group led by Charles Grant (Hutchins 1967: 10). The new liberal-Utilitarian colonial ethos echoed contemporary pressures for reform in Britain, but in India Bentinck was unconstrained by the demands of an electorate and he could thus treat the subcontinent as something of a ‘laboratory for the creation of the liberal-administrative state’ (Metcalf 1995: 29). Bentinck's immediate challenge was to rationalize administration, and under his direction colonial government became more centralized, systems of inspection and auditing were introduced, and financial deficits cleared. A few years later the 1833 Charter Act ended the Company's monopoly on all goods except opium and salt, and the revenue system was overhauled so that agricultural rents were levied directly from landowners, rather than from landlords. Although planned as social improvement measures, the reforms were far from beneficial for Indians, and combined with poor harvests, severely destabilized local economies in North India (Bayly 1983: 265–67).

Where earlier administrations had often sought to become acquainted with and learn from Indian social and political systems, Bentinck's government broke with orientalist tradition and showed relatively little interest in the historical and social complexity of the subcontinent. In his highly influential work The History of British India ([1817] 1840), Bentinck's colleague James Mill made a virtue of his lack of personal experience of India, and famously condemned its cultural history as a void (Mill 1840: I.xxi). But although it is easy to caricature Mill's History as an act of ‘spiritual violence’ (Guha 1997a: 78), it was, as Javed Majeed notes, more an attempt by Mill to measure India against a universal albeit ethnocentric criterion of utility, than a direct condemnation of the cultures of the subcontinent. (Mill did not, for instance, share the Anglicizing educational views of some of his contemporaries.) Like Bentham, Mill saw India as an important test-site for the wider applicability of legal-governmental reform in Britain (Majeed 1992: 132) and his lack of interest in Indian culture, as well as his scepticism of orientalist accounts of the greatness of Indian ancient civilizations, must be understood as a reflection of his intellectual opposition to contemporary metropolitan theories of constitutional legitimacy. In Britain, legislators and thinkers like William Blackstone and Edmund Burke saw political rights as an ancient constitutional inheritance, linked to English common law, and bound by custom and usage (ibid.: 146). In stark contrast, Bentham's and Mill's shared belief in a socially transformative Utilitarian politics developed from a priori principles could not, if it was to remain viable, admit the legitimacy of pre-existing political institutions.

The Bentinck administration, as it re-envisaged the Company raj as a liberal-Utilitarian state, wanted to be seen to act in the best interests of the Indian people, even if it could not be held accountable by them. An awareness of the perils of unfettered governmental power was part of the Company's political inheritance, and colonialism's potentially ‘despotic’ tendencies had already been exposed in detail at the impeachment trial (lasting from 1788 to 1795) of an earlier governor-general, Warren Hastings. Thus, while Bentinck's administration sought to differentiate itself from ‘despotic’ Indian forms of sovereignty, it also tried to distance itself from the Company's historical record of corruption and mismanagement and legislated with a keen sense of the potential political alegality of colonial rule (Suleri 1992: 55). Registering these fears, the 1833 Charter Act had even asserted the right of Indians to participate in the administration of the colonial government, but it was widely understood that this was a political gesture, and would not involve actual changes in the running of Company affairs. Instead, administrators like Bentinck and Mill saw a simplified, efficient code of law as India's main safeguard against misrule. Under Indian kings, claimed Mill, there had been a fundamental lack of protection of individual rights, particularly property rights, which had sapped Indians of any motive to constructive labour (Stokes 1989: 68). As a corrective, a benevolent rule of law which would be accountable to the British parliament would better protect individual subjects, their property and the products of their labour. The liberal-Utilitarian conception of colonial sovereignty thus invested the law with much more than an instrumental regulative force; the law would stand for and provide many of the safeguards of a constitution (Majeed 1992: 147–48).

The task of implementing colonial legal reform and devising a Penal Code fell to the legislator Thomas Babington Macaulay, who drew up new civil and criminal law codes to replace the mixture of English common law, local regulations and Hindu and Muslim jurisprudence which comprised the law in British territories. Before the 1833 Charter Act founded a centralized legislative council, all three presidencies had been empowered to pass new laws, which were enforced alongside law derived from Hindu legal texts (Banerjee 1984: 106–10). This amalgamated body of law was the practical result of early colonial concerns that ‘the imposition of an alien legal system would be regarded as tyrannical by indigenous people’ (Mani 1998: 16). Originally, the Company had sought to formalize pre-existing Hindu law in translations such as N. B. Halhead's Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) and William Jones and H. T. Colebrooke's The Digest of Hindu Law (1798), and these early codification projects shared a broad aim of streamlining administration and revenue-collection, breaking the knowledge-monopoly of Brahmin legal experts, and standardizing legal procedure. The result was a reconstructed body of law which started as an attempt to find the earliest origins of Hindu jurisprudence in various sacred texts,³ but eventually developed into a body of case law resembling English common law in its emphasis on precedent (Cohn 1996: 75). In administering the law, the Company had also inherited a Mughal judicial system which comprised two courts: one for revenues and civil litigation, called the Dewani court, and the other for criminal law (originally a form of military tribunal), called the Faujdari or Nizamat court (ibid: 62). In turn, these were backed by high courts of appeal (the Sadr Dewani Adalat and Sadr Nizamat Adalat). In the provincial Dewani courts, cases were administered with the help of a pandit to adjudicate Hindu law if the case involved Hindus, and a maulavi, trained in Islamic law, if the case concerned Muslim litigants (ibid.).

The new Penal Code, completed in 1837 but not officially implemented until 1862, ensured procedural uniformity between courts in the different presidencies, but it had an important symbolic role too: promoting an indivisible sovereignty, wielding power over an abstract, universal legal subject and defining violence as the exclusive prerogative of the colonial state (Singha 1998: viii–ix). The Code sought a binding authority over ‘persons of different races and religions’ and enshrined the ideal, highly problematically as this book will show, that ‘exception is an evil [. . .] it is an evil that any man should be above the law’ (Macaulay [1837] 1946: 270). In fact, the universal application of liberal-Utilitarian colonial law was still limited by the practical constraints of its Indian contexts (Raman 1994: 740), and it was also rarely as impartial as official policy-statements suggested. Macaulay himself soon realized that the ambitious jurisdiction of the new law code would, inevitably, be countermanded by the European colonial community, which resented and frequently challenged the idea of their legal equality with Indians (Mukherjee 2003: 98).⁴ Moreover, the overriding colonial need to maintain control during emergencies and insurrections me...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830–1947
• Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Orthography and Chronology
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Empire and Exception—The ‘Black Hole’ of Calcutta
• 1 The Highlands of Orissa: Ritual Terror and Reform in Colonial India
• 2 The Bibighar: Mourning the 1857 Rebellion
• 3 The Angel of Cawnpore: Remembering the 1857 Rebellion
• 4 The Hostel in Highgate: Revolutionary Nationalism and Colonial Counter-Terrorism
• 5 Jallianwala Bagh: Gandhi, Terrorism and Non-Violence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index