Narrating Cultural Encounter

Representations of India by Select Enlightenment Women Writers

Arnab Chatterjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000460162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

This book interrogates and historicises eighteenth-century British women writers' responses to India through the novel and travel writing to bring out the polyvalent space arising out of their complex negotiation with the colonial discourse.

Though British women enjoyed their privileged racial status as the utilisers of colonial riches, they articulated their voice of dissent when they faced the politics of subordination in their own society and identified them with the marginalised status of the colonised Indians. This brings out the complicity and critique of the colonial discourse of British women writers and foregrounds their ambivalent responses to the colonial project.

This book provides detailed textual analysis of the works of Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lady Morgan, Jemima Kindersley and Eliza Fay through critical insights from the idea of the Enlightenment, postcolonial theory and feminist thought. It also foregrounds new perspectives to colonial discourse vis-à-vis the representation of India by locating the dialogic strain within the British narratives about India.

1 British Women Writers and India Vis-à-Vis the Context of the Enlightenment

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152125-2

India had caught the attention of the women writers who felt the need to give vent to their opinion and perspective on the East India Company’s involvement with India and embroiled in the debates regarding colonial rule. There was a huge cultural and political upheaval in the English public sphere on India which led to the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. The long eighteenth century witnessed many significant moments of British imperial history like the Battle of Plassey, the Black Hole Incident, the Company’s acquisition of Dewani of Bengal, Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773, the attempt to introduce Fox’s East India Bill in 1783, Pitt’s India Act of 1784 and the impeachment trials of Warren Hastings. The acquisition of Dewani in 1765 marked an important phase of British rule in India. Though there were many admirers of Lord Clive’s step, everybody did not support his initiative to take over the administration of Bengal and to interfere in the indigenous system of administration. The famine that Bengal faced after restructuring the administrative system of Bengal marked a failure on the part of British rule and Clive became an object of satire. Due to the successive India bills and the impeachment proceedings of Warren Hastings, India was imagined and discovered in multifarious ways by the British.

The adverse effect of colonialism in both India and England was articulated by Horace Walpole in a letter during the House proceedings:

Here was Lord Clive’s diamond house . . . They starved millions in India by monopolies and plunder, and almost raised a famine at home by the luxury occasioned by their opulence, and by that opulence raising the prices of everything, till the poor could not purchase bread. (Lewis et al. 400)

In the first volume of Raynal’s A Philosophical and political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, Dennis Diderot denounced the English rule in India and argued that the Bengal famine happened due to the “pernicious and destructive administration” (432). He depicted the devastating sight of the Bengal famine 1769–1770:

During this whole time the Ganges were covered with carcasses; the fields and highways were choked up with them; infectious vapours filled the air, and diseases multiplied; and one evil succeeding another, it was likely to happen, that the plague might have carried off the remainder of the inhabitants of that unfortunate kingdom. It appears, by calculations pretty generally acknowledged, that the famine carried off a fourth part; that is to say, about three millions. (437)

The public attitude towards the people who accumulated wealth through perfidious means in India can be gauged in the plays like Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772). Foote’s play provides us the archetypal figure of the returning corrupt Company officer through the representation of Sir Mathew Mite and Lady Oldham sums up the contemporary attitude towards the returned nabobs when she says: “With the wealth of the East, we have too imported the worst of its vices” (17). The vast extent of the possessions of colonial riches led to the fear of spawning domestic corruption and enervation epitomised by the nabob figure. Matthew Bramble in Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) expresses dissatisfaction for the clerks from the East Indies at Bath “loaded with the soil of plundered provinces” (39). In The Scandal of Empire, Nicholas Dirks rightly comments: “Empire was always a scandal for those who were colonized. It is less well known that empire began as a scandal even for those who were colonizers” (7).

There were huge public debates regarding the modalities of functioning of the Company and the ethical positions of the Company officers. This is known as India Question of the long eighteenth century. Lord North’s regulating Act of 1773 had little impact in the activities of India and the reports of the Company’s aggressive policies in India increasingly came to the British government, which in turn, led to the introduction of Fox’s East India Bill in 1783. Though defeated, many of its recommendations were included in Pitt’s India Act of 1784. Finally, Edmund Burke was successful in persuading the House to impeach Warren Hastings. Women’s responses to India began with the impeachment trials of Hastings. In Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution, Anna Clark notes that Hastings’s impeachment was the only political event that the Ladies Magazine brought out extensively in the 1780s (96). The remarkable aspect of Hastings’s impeachment trial is perhaps the presence of women. Daniel O’Quinn observes in Staging Governance: “The incursion of women and of new forms of sociability into Parliament was arguably the most spectacular instance of the incremental infusion of women into the public sphere more generally” (117).

Most of the British women writers responded to the impeachment trial of Hastings. Phebe Gibbes’s novel, Hartly House, Calcutta, one of the earliest novels about India, directly addressed the controversial issue and engaged in a dialogue with Edmund Burke. Eliza Fay and Elizabeth Hamilton also referred to the India under Hastings’s rule and articulate their admiration for Hastings. Phebe Gibbes and Jemima Kindersley brought out the British attitude towards the Black Hole incident. It is important to note that Gibbes’s heroine, Sophia came in India in 1784 and left in 1786. Both these years are significant as in 1784 Pitt’s Indian Act started to implement moderate checks on the company’s authority and in 1786 Burke called for Hastings’s impeachment in the House of Commons. Lady Morgan’s novel The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) provides us a glimpse of the debate whether the Company should allow the missionaries project of proselytising in India prior to the renewal of the East India Company’s Charter in 1813. All these eighteenth-century texts that the book attempts to interpret help us to explore the intricate interface between colonial history and literature.

European colonialism and the Enlightenment are inextricably interlinked. One can face some problems to blame the Enlightenment altogether for the hegemony perpetuated by colonialism as the literature of the long eighteenth century provides us an insight to look into the heterogeneity of the colonial discourses of the period. Maya Jasanoff contends in Edge of Empire that “the broader trajectory of British imperialism in the East was a more complex and uncertain process than traditional narratives suggest” (8) and the racist ‘white man’s burden’ attitude of the nineteenth century should not be imposed over the “earlier, denser, more complicated entangling of human experiences” (11). Some of the Enlightenment texts embody the fissures and ambivalences of colonialism that Postcolonial theory tries to explore. Sankar Muthu in his book Enlightenment against Empire claims:

while imperialist arguments surface frequently in eighteenth-century European political debates, this period is anomalous in the history of modern political philosophy in that it includes a significant anti-imperialist strand, one moreover that includes not simply marginal figures, but some of the most prominent and innovative thinkers of the age. (5–6)

He shows strands of anti-imperialism in the writings of Kant, Herder and Diderot. I do not only claim that the Enlightenment was in complicit with empire but seek to explore the various ways in which the eighteenth-century women writers problematised colonial discourses and power structures through the representation of India. This will perhaps make us aware of the heterogeneity of colonial discourses during the Enlightenment.

Debates on the Enlightenment in Postcolonial Parlance

It seems highly important to address the conflicts and contradictions embedded within the Enlightenment and bring to the fore how they have sparked off acrimonious debate in contemporary postcolonial parlance. The Enlightenment has become a fascinating field for critical analysis both as a periodic term and as a cultural phenomenon. Some thinkers trenchantly critique the discourses associated with the Enlightenment and underline its hegemonic nature, while others attempt to argue in favour of the Enlightenment. A wide range of discourses often conflicting with each other jostles for space and complicate the possibility of simply being for or against the Enlightenment. The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a marked tendency to critique and to question the principles of the Enlightenment. The self-defeat of the Enlightenment discourse of modernity, the limits and hegemony of the paradigm of rationality, the Enlightenment notion of universalism become the subject matter of critical scrutiny with the rise of High Theory. Theorists like Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jean Francois Lyotard have put forward a vehement critique of the Enlightenment. Jurgen Habermas is perhaps the only major critic who defends the Enlightenment from the ongoing vituperative attack from different theoretical positions. Thus, the Enlightenment becomes one of the most debated conceptual categories in contemporary intellectual discourse. James Schmidt rightly gives the title of her book What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions.

It is interesting to begin with how Immanuel Kant answered what the Enlightenment is. According to Kant, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity” (58). Foucault in his essay “What is Enlightenment” (1984) decentres the Kantian notion of reason and finds difficulty in Kant’s use of the word ‘mankind’. He raises the question whether the entire human race is caught up in the process of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment as a historical change affects the political and social existence of the people all over the world. He asks: “Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of Enlightenment? . . . Or are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings?” (35). But he does not provide a sustained a critique of the Enlightenment for gender and racial omissions. The issue of colonial expansion (though obliquely hinted) remains, by and large, untouched in Foucault’s interrogation of the Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment argues how the Enlightenment ushered in bourgeois domination and the mere championing of instrumental reason ultimately paved the path of Auschwitz. Adorno and Horkheimer point out: “In the most general sense of Progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (3). They also proceed to refer to the colonial aggression: “The program of the Enlightenment was the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy. What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim” (4). Thus, the Enlightenment notion of the human progress and knowledge are marked by strong sense of power relations and a pattern of domination.

The grand narrative of progress of the Enlightenment has been debunked by Jean Francois Lyotard who argues that Postmodern condition is marked by “incredulity towards metanarratives” (xxiv). Foucault in Madness and Civilisation shows how ‘unreason’ was systematically silenced to foreground the Enlightenment reason. Though the Postmodernists overturn the Enlightenment’s faith in progress and reason, Jurgen Habermas considers modernity as an ‘incomplete project’. He holds the view that the problem lies with the tendency to champion the instrumental reason which divides life world into three distinct spheres – the scientific technological, the legal moral and the aesthetic expressive. The rapid increase in specialised field of knowledge gradually gets detached from its moorings in everyday life. In “Modernity: An Incomplete Project”, Habermas strongly advocates for communicative rationality: “In everyday communications, cognitive meanings, moral expectations, subjective expressions and evaluations must relate to one another. Communication processes need a cultural tradition covering all spheres – cognitive, moral-practical and expressive” (1756).

Postcolonial theory has put forward a staunch critique of the project of colonial aggression closely allied with the Enlightenment. Frantz Fanon argues that “the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races” (81) have led to the opulence and luxury of Europe. Edward Said unmasked the pattern of colonial domination behind the attempt of discovering the Orient. Gayatri Spivak has challenged Kant’s Enlightenment universalism as exclusionary. In her analysis of Kant’s The Critique of Judgement, she shows how the natives of new Holland or Argentina “cannot be the subject of speech or judgement in the world of the Critique” (26). The Enlightenment is accused of excluding the other belief systems through the process of championing reason. In Postcolonial thought, all discourses associated with the Enlightenment directly or indirectly get implicated within the structure of imperialism and seem Eurocentric. It is pertinent to note that many of the accusations brought against the Enlightenment by Postcolonial theory can be traced back to the Enlightenment. In a debate between Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the latter clearly states that “to acknowledge our debt to the ideas of the Enlightenment is not to thank colonialism for bringing them to us” (147).

No one can deny that that the catchword of the Enlightenment was reason. But we should also keep in mind the dialectical movements associated with unreason. Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) shows that man is not “animal rationale” but “rationis capax” (262). Imperialism is intricately associated with the Enlightenment. But it cannot be the only defining aspect of the age; we can in fact find a substantial body of anti-imperial discourses within the Enlightenment. In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert Young points out:

contr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 British Women Writers and India Vis-à-Vis the Context of the Enlightenment
• 2 “Enchanting Quarter of the Globe”: Representation of India in Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta
• 3 “A Presumptuous Effort”: Representation of India in Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah
• 4 “My Indian Venture”: Representation of India in Lady Morgan’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale
• 5 Mapping the Gaze of the British Women Travellers: Representation of India in Jemima Kindersley and Eliza Fay
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index