Colonial India in Children's Literature

Supriya Goswami

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136281426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Colonial India in Children's Literature is the first book-length study to explore the intersections of children's literature and defining historical moments in colonial India. Engaging with important theoretical and critical literature that deals with colonialism, hegemony, and marginalization in children's literature, Goswami proposes that British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali children's literature respond to five key historical events: the missionary debates preceding the Charter Act of 1813, the defeat of Tipu Sultan, the Mutiny of 1857, the birth of Indian nationalism, and the Swadeshi movement resulting from the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Through a study of works by Mary Sherwood (1775-1851), Barbara Hofland (1770-1844), Sara Jeanette Duncan (1861-1922), Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), Upendrakishore Ray (1863-1915), and Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), Goswami examines how children's literature negotiates and represents these momentous historical forces that unsettled Britain's imperial ambitions in India.

Goswami argues that nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children's texts reflect two distinct moods in Britain's colonial enterprise in India. Sherwood and Hofland (writing before 1857) use the tropes of conversion and captivity as a means of awakening children to the dangers of India, whereas Duncan and Kipling shift the emphasis to martial prowess, adaptability, and empirical knowledge as defining qualities in British and Anglo-Indian children. Furthermore, Goswami's analysis of early nineteenth-century children's texts written by women authors redresses the preoccupation with male authors and boys' adventure stories that have largely informed discussions of juvenility in the context of colonial India.

This groundbreaking book also seeks to open up the canon by examining early twentieth-century Bengali children's texts that not only draw literary inspiration from nineteenth-century British children's literature, but whose themes are equally shaped by empire.

Chapter One

(En)countering Conversion

Missionary Debates and Colonial Policy in Mary Sherwood’s The History of Little Henry and His Bearer

The rapid disintegration of the powerful Mughal Empire after the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 provided European trading establishments in India with an unparalleled opportunity to intervene in local Indian affairs, with a view towards consolidating their own commercial interests. The British East India Company, in particular, under the leadership of Robert Clive, engaged in an aggressive military campaign against the French and regional Indian rulers in the mid-eighteenth century to stake economic control over large sections of southern and eastern India, which in turn resulted in territorial acquisitions that were to become the foundation of Britain’s empire in India. The issue of how to govern these newly acquired regions was to emerge as one of the leading concerns of the time and is, perhaps, best reflected in Edmund Burke’s impassioned parliamentary speeches, made during Warren Hastings’s impeachment for crimes and misdemeanors committed in India, about responsible governance. As a trading house that had commercial interests in India since the early 1600s, the Company’s official policy in the mid- to late eighteenth century was to stay away from meddling with the religious, cultural, and social practices of Indians. In reality, however, as historians of the British Empire such as Ronald Hyam contend: “The empire was unified by no coherent philosophy, nor by any coercive policy. Local administrators defined the strength of imperial rule” (16). Thus, on the one hand, Warren Hastings, governor-general from 1774 to 1785, championed inclusive Orientalist policies which privileged the languages, laws, and traditions of the newly colonized Indian subjects; on the other hand, his successor, Lord Cornwallis, governor-general from 1786 to 1793, was dismissive of Indian principles and practices and sought to Anglicize Company rule in India.¹

Back in England, the ever-increasing economic and political might of the East India Company, its monopoly over Indian trade, and the lack of accountability of Company officials to the British Parliament were becoming increasingly worrisome for the British government and it looked for ways to curtail the powers of the Company. In particular, the level of corruption and greed among Company servants, embodied most spectacularly in Warren Hastings’s ability to amass a personal fortune, compelled the British government to intervene more aggressively in Company affairs. Ironically, the missionary question—or the right to proselytize in India—spearheaded by pro-missionary factions in Britain and India—gave the British government the excuse it was looking for to intervene more forcefully in Company affairs. It used the missionary question as a cover for other concerns such as the unbridled behavior of the East India men and the increasing need, in the wake of the industrial revolution, to open the markets in India to free-trade practices. Thus, the Charter Act of 1813 passed by the British Parliament to renew the Company’s charter for another twenty years not only curtailed the powers of the East India Company by taking away its monopoly over trade in India, but it also included a clause licensing missionaries to proselytize in British-controlled India.² The debates leading up to the Charter Act of 1813—both in the metropolis and in the colony—were historically significant as they brought to the fore the issue of responsible governance in the colonies. Till this point the Company servants held on to the view that British missionaries (who were clamoring to set up missions in British-controlled India) could potentially get in the way of their economic endeavors by offending Indian religious beliefs. However, the idea that British principles were inherently superior to Indian ones, and the belief that it was the responsibility of the British to morally uplift its so-called heathen populations, began to take shape as a result of these missionary debates. Colonial enterprise, which up until then had been largely rooted in economic exploitation, was thus reconceptualized as a civilizing mission, whereby it was the duty of the British, as responsible colonizers, to enlighten and ameliorate the colonized races.

Mary Sherwood’s The History of Little Henry and his Bearer, a tale of charity, loyalty, and kindness, which traces the deep bond between an English boy and his faithful Indian bearer, emerges from the theological debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century on the propriety of missionizing India. Written in India around 1810, and sent by Sherwood to England for publishing three years later, the work responds to one of the most pressing debates of the time and intervenes in the moral and historical crises that the British colonial project faced while negotiating the delicate issue of religious conversion in early nineteenth-century India.³ The missionary debates (among Company servants, members of Parliament, and powerful pro-missionary factions in India and England) leading up to the Charter Act of 1813 focused on whether it was prudent to encourage missionary activity in India, and whether religious and moral conversions were ideal ways to effect change in India. In this chapter, I suggest the burden to ‘civilize’ and convert Indians is borne by Henry, a little English boy, who attempts to Christianize Boosy, his native bearer. In this novella in which the religious conversions of a young English boy, and subsequently his loyal bearer Boosy, are played out, the English child is not only given the responsibility to effect the moral transformation of spiritually bereft ‘heathens,’ but is also seen as an active participant in Britain’s colonial enterprise in India. Far from being subalternized, Henry is portrayed as the little savior who is initially contaminated by his Indian upbringing, but ultimately has the ability to redeem his skeptical bearer and show him the true path to Christian enlightenment. Thus, he is deployed as the catalyst who can bring about the spiritual and moral awakening of a land that is in dire need of the right kind of British intervention. However, it is also my contention that although Little Henry is overtly triumphalistic, it is covertly doubt-ridden, since the figure of the English child is deployed on a potentially impossible and dangerous mission to combat both native resistance and the hostility of the East India Company servants towards missionary activity. In a sense, the weakness of the little boy (he is sickly and frail) reflects the weakness of the missionary project in the face of powerful opposition from the Company servants and local Indians. Thus, echoing the arguments that Sherwood would have encountered as a religious writer at the time both in India and Britain, Little Henry also presents the fissures, fears, and contradictions in British missionary conceptions of India and Hinduism, and simultaneously reveals the mixed and often incredulous Indian response to British missionary zeal.

Sherwood in India

Although largely overlooked as an influential children’s author today, Sherwood’s works—numbering more than four hundred titles written over a fifty year period—went a long way in introducing the idea of an Indian empire to Britain’s youth in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁴ Long before Rudyard Kipling penned his lively descriptions of daily life in colonial India, Sherwood, the wife of a British army officer, who lived in India from 1805 to 1815, delineated for her young readers what it was like for English children, in particular, to be born and raised in India. M. Nancy Cutt describes Sherwood as an immensely influential and prolific nineteenthcentury children’s author whose “readers [not only] grew up to shape the Victorian world,” but were also “members of the ruling class at home and in the colonies” who went on to become prominent statesmen, businessmen, officers in the armed services, clergymen, missionaries, and writers (ix). Echoing Cutt, Ketaki Kusari Dyson also portrays Sherwood as a “prolific author of stories, tracts, and pamphlets, all strongly religious in message and mostly meant for young readers,” who was so popular in the nineteenth century that her books “were read throughout the English-speaking world” (169). Similarly, Naomi Royde Smith has noted that Sherwood’s works for children flooded British nurseries until the publication of Lewis Carroll’s successful Alice books. In fact, in her autobiography, The Life of Mrs. Sherwood (1854), Sherwood shows a keen awareness of her own burgeoning literary reputation soon after the publication of Little Henry: “Its success was great, and I suddenly found myself … within reach of high literary honour as a writer for children” (513–14).⁵

The daughter of a clergyman and a devout evangelical Christian, Sherwood accompanied her officer-husband, Captain Henry Sherwood, to India at a time when the debates about the status and role of Christianity in India were at their peak both in India and England. However, even before she set foot on Indian soil, like most British Evangelicals of her time, she was deeply convinced about the moral superiority of British principles and Christianity, a belief that was further strengthened during her decade-long stay in India. Sherwood’s Indian experiences are well documented in her autobiography, and it is evident that her Indian sojourn was marked by deep personal tragedy as two of her children born in India—Henry and Lucy—died in infancy after succumbing to illness. Her autobiography also reflects her anxiety about the strong attachments that were forged between English children and their Indian servants, her desire to educate and Christianize the neglected children of British soldiers, her rejection of the irreligious ways and mercenary excesses of the Company officials, and her sympathetic attitude towards missionary activity in India. Her experiences in India, which are etched so sharply in her autobiography, and her strong religious convictions form the narrative backbone of several of her works, some of which—such as Little Henry; Stories Explanatory of the Church Catechism (1817), an accessible children’s version of the Catechism which alludes to life in the Indian barracks; and The Indian Pilgrim (1810), an Indian version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—were written while she lived in India. In fact, one can go so far as to infer that the British reading public—children and adults alike—must have displayed a keen interest in Sherwood’s Indian tales as she continued to publish stories that draw upon colonial India as a setting—The History of George Desmond (1821); The History of Little Lucy and her Dhaye (1823); Arzoomund (1929); and The Last Days of Boosy (1842), to name some of the more popular titles—even after she returned to England for good. Rosemary Raza has persuasively argued that texts written by British women who had actually lived in India went a long way in fashioning late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century popular perceptions and opinions about British rule in India. And, perhaps, no author in the first half of the nineteenth century was as prolific and well received as Sherwood as a purveyor of Indian tales.

The Missionary Debates in Colonial India

In order to understand the complex cultural and moral configurations of Christianity within the British colonial enterprise in India and mirrored in Little Henry, it is vital to take a look at the historical background of the missionary debates leading up to the Charter Act of 1813. These debates produce a richer and fuller understanding of Little Henry, as they shed light on the issues that Sherwood was most certainly aware of as a religious writer living in colonial India. The missionary debates not only underscored the necessity of converting the ‘heathen’ populations of India, but they also emphasized the nobility of the British efforts to convert resistant natives. At the same time, there was an awareness that overcoming Indian opposition—and to some extent British hostility (from the old India hands)—to the idea of Christianizing India was not going to be an easy or uncomplicated task. And as I will show later in this chapter, Sherwood addresses and documents all aspects of the missionary debates for her young readers—many of whom would go on to seek their fortunes in India—in painstaking detail.

Although modern missionary activity in India began towards the end of the fifteenth century with the arrival of the Portuguese, it was some time before British missionaries set foot on Indian soil. As E. Daniel Potts remarks in his meticulous study of the British Baptist missionaries, the English who initially come to India “generally evidenced no desire, nor apparently felt much obligation, to spread their faith. Trade was their goal” (4). Thus, from its inception in 1600, the East India Company was chiefly a trading enterprise whose officials appeared to exhibit very little desire to meddle in the religious affairs of the Indians. For instance, in his Memoir of William Carey (1836), Eustace Carey, reflecting upon the contributions of his uncle William Carey, one of the most prominent missionaries in India in the early nineteenth century, writes:

The conduct of the British authorities in India, upon the subject of religion, was strangely anomalous and absurd; arising partly from the ignorance of the true genius of christianity, and the legitimate means of diffusing it; and partly from a profane indifference to the spiritual welfare of the millions they governed, and a repugnance and hostility to whatever might seem only to interfere with their own secular ambition and cupidity.(350)

While Eustace Carey may be excessively pro-missionary in his views, what is of interest to me is the fact that he highlights the antagonistic attitude of the East India Company towards missionary activity, especially when it comes into conflict with its “secular ambition[s].” In fact, the Company’s open hostility towards British missionaries made it almost perilous for them to set foot on British-controlled territory towards the end of the eighteenth century. As Potts has shown, the Baptists were arguably the most enterprising and pioneering British missionaries in India as they braved the ill will and animosity of the East India Company to establish the Baptist Missionary Society in Danish-controlled Serampore. William Carey, for instance, the most renowned missionary of this group, who, not unlike St. John Rivers in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), arrived in India in 1793 with a burning zeal to spiritually enlighten people who had “no Bible … no ministers, no good civil government” and to “introduce the Gospel amongst them” (quoted in Potts 2). However, his early years as a missionary in India, as H. P. Thompson narrates in Into all Lands, proved to be challenging as he was not granted permission by the East India Company to reside in Calcutta. Carey had to work undercover as an indigo planter for the next six years in Dutch-controlled territory before he was allowed to re-enter British India.

What, then, led to a change of heart and policy towards the missionaries in 1813? Missionary activity in India, ironically, got a boost because the British Parliament, anxious to disrupt the East India Company’s monopoly on Indian trade and unchallenged power base in Bengal and the South, played the reformist card in an attempt to intervene in Indian affairs. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the British Parliament had passed several measures such as the Regulating Act of 1773 and Pitt’s India Bill in 1784 in an attempt to acquire greater administrative control over British-controlled India; however, it largely tended to leave commercial matters in the hands of Company officials. The policy of allowing the East India Company a free hand to pursue its commercial interests began to unravel as the call to open Indian markets to all British traders became increasingly vociferous in a country that was on the verge of an industrial revolution. Ironically, the attempt to give free-trade a boost found an unlikely ally in the Evangelical movement—an increasingly powerful force in British domestic affairs—which, along with its domestic agenda of making the lower classes more tractable and devout, was also calling for the moral and spiritual salvation of non-Christian people. Furthermore, in India, the British missionaries were direct beneficiaries of Lord Wellesley’s (governor-general from 1798 to 1805) vision to establish a college to educate and acculturate newly arrived Company recruits from England. The East India Company was compelled to soften its stance towards British missionaries as the College of Fort William, founded in 1800, needed the services of missionaries who had become fluent in local Indian languages. While eminent Orientalist scholars like Neil Edmonstone, Henry T. Colebrooke, John Baillie, and John Gilchrist developed the departments devoted to ‘high’ languages such as Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, and Arabic, William Carey, who was proficient in Bengali, was recruited to head the department that would be responsible for teaching ‘popular’ Indian languages. It has been observed by David Kopf in his laudatory analysis of British Orientalism, and by Potts, that Wellesley, in keeping with the distaste that Company servants exhibited towards missionaries, displayed a remarkable disinclination to hire a missionary, and Carey was given a much lower rank and salary than his more revered colleagues.

One of the key supporters of the missionary cause, and the chief architect of the theory of moral duty being the ultimate rationale for British rule in India, was Charles Grant, a high-ranking Company official who had spent a considerable number of years in India, eventually becoming a director of the East India Company in 1794 and a Member of Parliament in 1802.⁶ He belonged to the pro-missionary Clapham Sect and, as Gauri Viswanathan contends, along with fellow-members Zachary Macaulay, Samuel Thornton, and William Wilberforce, was responsible for “supplying British expansionism with an ethics of concern for reform and conversion” (Masks of Conquest 36). A staunch Evangelical, who had acted as an advisor to Cornwallis—the governor-general whose Anglicist policies were largely responsible for creating the first significant ruptures between colonizer and colonized—Grant, unlike most other Company servants, was convinced that India was in dire need of moral reform, and was an unwavering advocate of British missionary endeavors. In his treatise, entitled Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, largely written in 1792 to influence colonial policy before the Company’s charter came up for renewal in 1793, Grant advocated for missions to be established in India in order to bring about the so-called amelioration of morally bereft colonial subjects. Although the missionary cause was defeated in 1793, Grant persisted with his vision of a Christianized and Anglicized India, and presented his treatise to the Court of Directors in 1797. In it he proclaimed: “The true cure of darkness, is the introduction of light. The Hindoos err, because they are ignorant; and their errors have never been fairly laid before them. The communication of our light and knowledge to them, would prove the best remedy for their disorders” (Grant 83). As Eric Stokes points out in his seminal work, English Utilitarians and India, Grant not only “condemned the religions of India but everything which might claim a civilized status for its people—their laws, arts, agriculture and handicrafts, and their personal manners and habits” (31). However, to gain official support for his position, Grant was careful to couch his views in the language of commerce: “In every progressive step of this work, we shall also serve the original design with which we visited India, that design is still so important to this county—the extension of our commerce” (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 34).⁷ Further, he proposed that British manufactures would find a huge market in India with the spread of British ideas and Christianity, for “wherever our principles and la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Children’s Literature and Colonial India
• 1. (En)countering Conversion: Missionary Debates and Colonial Policy in Mary Sherwood’s The History of Little Henry and His Bearer
• 2. Resisting Tipu: Taming the Tiger and Coming of Age in Barbara Hofland’s The Captives in India
• 3. The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero: Bridging Cultural Divides in Sara Jeanette Duncan’s The Story of Sonny Sahib
• 4. ‘Macaulay’s minutemen’: The Mimic Men and the Subversion of Law in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books
• 5. Trivializing Empire: The Topsy-Turvy World of Upendrakishore Ray and Sukumar Ray
• Conclusion: The Postcolonial Legacy
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index