In chapters “Improvement, Development, and Consumer Culture in Jane Austen and Popular Indian Cinema” and “Moral Management: Spaces of Domestication in Jane Eyre and I Walked with a Zombie”, I focused on the relationship between time, space, and improvement ideology. I argued that in the British domestic context, a belief in teleological development—of the future as the repository of progress—and adherence to enclosed and regulated space to manage unruly elements both environmental and psychological provide the foundation for a coercive and restrictive form of improvement linking progress to capitalism that carries over into the twenty-first century. Non-teleological forms of beneficial and just change, as well as self-determined and decentralized systems of labor and authority, are excluded from an understanding of what it means to improve, progress, or become “better.”
In this chapter, I explore what happens when domestic improvement ideology moves out into the Empire. Focusing on Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) and John Huston’s film adaptation of the same title (1975), the chapter looks at one of the most important challenges that improvement ideology faced in the nineteenth century when it was exported to British India: the need to reconcile it with, but also distance it from, conquest. I trace a history of how different figures and texts tried to turn the conflict between conquest and improvement into a productive dialectic for imperial policy. I examine the argument between eighteenth-century Orientalists and Anglicists about India’s present and future development along improvement’s stages of progress, the use of Alexander the Great as a model of how conquest and improvement could work together, and Kipling’s redirection of improvement discourse back on the imperialists themselves. Finally, I place Huston’s film at the end of this conversation as a text that restages Kipling’s story as an allegory for the fate of the American empire in the Vietnam War. Contextualizing the film among other Vietnam-era films, I argue that Huston uses Kipling’s redefinition of improvement’s purpose to justify the continuation of western imperial ventures.
Kipling’s story portrays India’s potential arrival in the modern era as inextricably bound to, and dependent on, the success of the British imperial project of improvement. Improver and improved were thought to operate on different but intersecting trajectories of time: Britain’s destiny as an empire hinged on pulling its crown colony into modernity, and Britain’s present state of advancement served as a model for India’s future. In what follows, I explore improvement ideology’s implication of colonizer and colonized in a shared destiny. I look specifically at how the improver’s dependence on his own improving labors for his moral progress formed the basis for how the British conceived of their role in nineteenth-century British India, and how self-improvement continued to inform American humanitarianism in the twentieth century.
The tension between conquest and improvement lay at the heart of the question of proper conduct and governance in the British Empire in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Standard accounts of British India suggest that a definitive shift in imperial policy took place at the turn of the nineteenth century: the conquest-centered ideology that dominated the eighteenth century gave way to a more enlightened, improvement-centered attitude of imperial paternalism at the start of the nineteenth century.1 Eighteenth-century imperial leaders such as Robert Clive and Warren Hastings had established the East India Company’s dominance in Bengal through the sheer military might of the Company’s armed forces. These early imperialists concerned themselves mainly with their own interests and were willing to do what was necessary—through force, bribery, or other coercive means—to maintain it. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the Clive-Hastings model of bad imperial behavior came under close scrutiny by Parliament and the British public. Edmund Burke’s vilification of Hastings during the Governor-General’s impeachment trial (1788–1795) stimulated public outcry against the Company’s mismanagement. Nicholas Dirks (2006) writes that Burke’s energetic prosecution of Hastings, and the eighteenth-century model of colonial corruption he exemplified, was largely responsible for setting the Empire’s nineteenth-century agenda as one of reform—of the British themselves, no less than their colonized populations. Imperialism as self-improvement and improving others won the day over conquest and violent subjugation.
Other scholars have argued, however, that improvement as an imperial policy amounted to little more than putting a benign face on what continued to be a conquest-oriented empire. Gauri Viswanathan (1989), for instance, sees improvement as a new form of conquest in the case of Indian education. By the time Parliament passed the East India Company’s charter in 1813, public sentiment was ripe to chart a new course for the British Empire in India by absolving its own sins through cleansing the sins of others. The charter of 1813 concretized this sentiment by enjoining the Company to assume a new responsibility for Indian education and relaxing the restrictions against missionary activity. Viswanathan (1989) argues that although the charter was meant as a sort of secular atonement for the Company’s history of depredations, a way to “remedy the wrongs committed against the Indians by attending to their welfare and improvement” (p. 24), underneath the rhetoric of reparations was the understanding that the civilizing mission would bind Indians to British rule more effectively, more permanently, and at less cost than violent conquest. By the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the Liberals had convinced government and the public that a policy of assimilating the natives to English institutions, laws, manners, and the English language was indeed the best way to serve the people of India and to create a long-lasting economic dependency on the home country (Stokes 1959/1982, p. xiii–xiv). Improvement was the new-and-improved version of conquest, and although less violent, enacted a cultural imperialism all the more insidious for its low profile.
I argue, however, that the relationship between conquest and improvement in British India was more complicated than either the standard or critical narrative proposes. As Viswanathan (1989) suggests, the Empire’s turn to improvement in the nineteenth century did not make a clean break with its eighteenth-century roots of conquest. However, I propose that this was due more to the debate over the nature and implications of improvement’s historical and moral relationship to conquest than a purposeful design of veiled coercion. Nineteenth-century British imperialists understood improvement not only as a new kind of conquest; some also understood conquest as the most effective form of improvement. Others understood the two as different but related aspects of a single project, each necessitating the other. And most importantly, many defined that single project as a world-historical fiat linking Britain with the imperial ambitions of the ancient West. In nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan, Britons found their opportunity—and obligation—to resurrect from the “graveyard of empires”2 Alexander of Macedon’s campaign to rule the near East and Central Asia. In the following section, I trace a history of how different figures and texts tried to turn the conflict between conquest and improvement into a productive dialectic for imperial policy. Kipling’s story highlights the unsettled relationship between these approaches to imperial rule and overturns the major assumption held in common by nearly all positions in the debate.
New Britons and Old Greeks: Conquest and Improvement in India and Afghanistan
The figure of Alexander the Great and the many ways in which British imperial discourse invoked him illustrates the unsettled relationship between conquest and improvement in the nineteenth century. Alternately read as a violent, selfish brute and a great man with a master plan, Alexander was used at times to justify Britain’s own conquest-oriented ideology, and at other times to exemplify how conquest and improvement could work together as two parts of the same project, each necessitating the other. The lore surrounding Alexander and his imperial activity in India and Afghanistan was crucial to the way British imperialists understood their role in subjugating and civilizing South and Central Asian populations. Nineteenth-century Indian Civil Servants and Company operatives were encouraged to interpret Alexander’s empire as the first stage of their own, and to see the lands and peoples of Asia as having lain dormant since Alexander’s departure from the area over two thousand years earlier. For these imperialists, the later civilizing phases of the West’s long and arduous task of improving Asia justified its early, violent stage. This grand narrative of improvement, which encompassed conquest as a necessary first step, coincided with Britain’s own transition from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century imperial leadership style.
A central question surrounding Alexander was whether he merely lusted after conquest or wanted to spark the development of the East. The conflict between these two styles of rule, as illustrated in competing interpretations of the ancient leader, manifested itself in a variety of ways, but few more telling than the curriculum developed to train aspiring young imperialists. As part of its turn from eighteenth-century plunder and profit to nineteenth-century civilization and management, the East India Company established professional training colleges for the young men who would be dispatched to India to handle its affairs. The East India College settled at Haileybury in 1809, with a curriculum including “Classics, Arithmetic and Mathematics, Elements of General Law, &c, and Oriental learning” (Danvers et al. 1894, p. 15). Haileybury “produced a breed of officials very different from the old, most of whom had come to India in early adolescence and grown up amidst the violence of the Company’s conquests” (Washbrook 1999, p. 400). These new officials spent their formative years at home “receiving instruction on the scientific principles of political economy from the likes of Thomas Malthus, and imbibing the atmosphere of British evangelical revival” (Washbrook 1999, p. 400).
The Haileybury curriculum included examination questions that revealed the difficulty in defining Alexander as either conqueror or improver. The questions encouraged students to respect Alexander’s unparalleled courage in battle and his consideration of valor as sufficient reward for victory, suggesting that excessive gloating or celebrating after victory was unbecoming. For example, one such question reads:
Conquest, by this reading, attends Alexander almost as his moral due: being conquered by such a paragon would itself constitute a kind of improvement for the Asians he defeated. His noble performances during and after war exemplified the moral dignity to which his opponents should aspire. Yet, the same question also implies that Alexander enjoyed the excitement of violent conquest more than the colonial administration required after one’s victory to stabilize an empire. It takes hard work and constructive effort not to leave Asia a desert after one has made a desert of it. This reading implies that conquest interested Alexander more than the larger project of improvement to which conquest was supposed to lead.What circumstances made Alexander anxious to commence his expedition to India? What was the extent of his views? Quote any passages of Quintus Curtius that bear upon this point. Examine the statement of this author with regard to Alexander, that he was “semper bello quam post victoriam clarior” (“being always more illustrious in war than after victory”). (qtd in Hagerman 2009, pp. 348–349)
Whether by design or accident, the Company’s use of Alexander in its curriculum ultimately served two important functions. The first was to use the descriptions of indigenous lands and peoples of Central and South Asia that appeared in the classical sources on Alexander to promote the idea that Indians represented a stagnant or retrograde race. Using ancient sources to interpret modern India, many servants of the Empire concluded that the civilizations of India had made no progress or had actually declined since Alexander encountered them. This interpretation led to the second function of the Company’s classical curriculum, the establishment of the belief that Alexander was a leader uniquely endowed with the requisite military genius, courage, and personal charisma to conquer and then improve this stagnant race and its lands. However, his world-historical mission of uniting East with West was cut short due to the inability of his men to bear the burden of such a vast undertaking. Thus, it was the British Empire’s task to carry on his mission, and doing so would require both an eighteenth-century imperial style of individual despotism and a nineteenth-century reorientation of empire toward benevolence and improvement.
Throughout the nineteenth century, ancient texts were seen as scientific and anthropological sources of information on India, both for those who never saw it and the civil and military personnel who spent much of their careers there. Hagerman writes that the belief that ancient accounts of India written by Quintus Curtius, Arrian, Plutarch, and Diodorus Siculus provided accurate and important modern information on the subcontinent stems from the writings of the first Orientalist scholars, who lamented the dearth of “reliable” Indian sources on the history and anthropology of the region. In his “Third Anniversary Discourse,” William Jones (1799) writes that the indigenous histories of India he had come across were “involved in a cloud of fables” (p. 25), that is, too fictional, mythical, and based on narrative, rather than factual, rigorous, or sci...