Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India

MASKS OF CONQUEST

GAURI VISWANATHAN

MASKS OF CONQUEST

Literary Study and British Rule in India

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS           NEW YORK

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through a special grant, has assisted the Press in publishing this volume.

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Cover image and frontispiece: Muhammad Ali, A Youth Reading, from the Nasiruddin Shah Album, c. 1610, reign of Jahangir, India. Opaque color, ink, and gold on paper. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase, F1953.93 Cover designer: Jordan Wannemacher

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FOR MY PARENTS

Now we are to behold a literature so full of all qualities of loveliness and purity, such new regions of high thought and feeling … that to the dwellers in past days it should have seemed rather the production of angels than of men.

—Madras Christian Instructor and Missionary Record (1844), 2 (4): 195

We are not afraid of what we do see of British power, but of what we do not see.

—Tipu Sultan’s minister, quoted in Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53, 29:42

Contents

PREFACE TO THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

1.   The Beginnings of English Literary Study

2.   Praeparatio Evangelica

3.   One Power, One Mind

4.   Rewriting English

5.   Lessons of History

6.   The Failure of English

7.   Conclusion: Empire and the Western Canon

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

THE CONTENT of English studies has changed so significantly in the last twenty-five years that it is almost embarrassing to revisit some of the assumptions that shaped my doctoral dissertation, which I subsequently revised as Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. At that time, the studies available for engagement were largely triumphalist and insular, describing the rise of English studies exclusively from within the national boundaries of England.¹ That, happily, is no longer the case. Perhaps the most significant effect of postcolonialism—with all its shortcomings, blind spots, and metropolitan evasions—is that the curricular study of English can no longer be studied innocently or inattentively to the deeper contexts of imperialism, transnationalism, and globalization in which the discipline first articulated its mission. It is no small matter that Caliban competes de rigueur with his creator Shakespeare as the canonical expression of present-day English studies. The archetypal figure of colonial subjugation and subversion underwrites a revisionist view of English studies as a composite of discordant voices, rather than the sweetness and light that Matthew Arnold envisaged as the ultimate triumph of English culture. Yet, as I shall argue here, even Caliban has marked his limits in driving English studies into a revisionist mode, as other forms of imaginative expression beyond reactive resistance are explored in the process of self-definition.

As a number of critics have noted, English studies is a relatively young discipline with barely a hundred and fifty years behind it. But despite its youth, its beginnings have always seemed somewhat opaque in the popular memory, as if English studies stretched back languidly to an origin identical with that of England’s. Genealogies that confine the discipline of English to England are belied by the transcontinental movements and derivations of the discipline. English has not one but multiple genealogies, which reveal that the discipline’s origins are as diffuse as its current (and future) shape. There is a persistently shifting focus in the sites of cultural production and institutionalization, and distinctions between center and periphery dissolve, leaving huge question marks around the national attributes of literature. This leads one to question the appropriateness of even such commonly accepted designations as English studies or American studies. As Isabel Hofmeyr reminds us in The Portable Bunyan, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress became a canonical text in Britain only long after it had already circulated in Africa, initially for conversion purposes by Christian missionaries but subsequently as a reference point for African writers, who adapted Bunyan’s work to allegorize the condition of their own postcolonial societies.² Not only did The Pilgrim’s Progress arrive late in the English curriculum, but it was also deuniversalized and remade as exclusively English—thus no longer available for appropriation elsewhere. Interestingly, The Pilgrim’s Progress, in becoming wholly English, was further de-allegorized by being read as a geographically specific story set in southern England. The claims to universality overlapped with those of English humanism. The key revisionist understanding that emerges from Hofmeyr’s study is that the international precedes the national, or to put it another way, the national is an aftereffect of the international.

The denationalizing of English or American studies raises an intriguing question about nomenclature. Particularly in decolonizing societies but no less relevant in the Anglo-American academy, it is worth asking whether in the foreseeable future English studies will become indistinguishable from world literature. Or will the now ubiquitous term global studies be the name by which English studies will henceforth be known? Lest we get overly excited about future prospects, we would do well to remind ourselves that, even as there are concerted attempts to engage in postnational reorganization of the discipline, English and American studies seem incapable of escaping the organizing rubric of nationhood. More often than not, one of the strongest challenges has come from postcolonial studies in its questioning of the sites of literary production as a necessary first step toward disentangling literary studies from nationality.

At the same time I am wary of claiming that any one field has greater instrumental power than another in denationalizing English or American studies. I think, for instance, of a volume like Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, which is edited by two scholars of early modern Europe who use postcolonial theory as a tool, rather than as an end, to excavate the complexities of the premodern in order to reckon with the modernity that wrought colonialism.³ By refocusing attention on the linguistic, literary, and cultural hegemonies that establish the terms of colonial identity and difference, this volume succeeds in disrupting some of the national geographies and periodizations that generally structure disciplinary identifications. The broader implications have less to do with viewing earlier literary periods through the postcolonial lens, which can sometimes lead to reductive conclusions. Rather, this kind of scholarship questions the assumptions that locate colonialism, nationalism, and globalization squarely within the framework of modernity but refuse to acknowledge the extent to which the nonmodern or the premodern is implicated in such things as the formation of national categories. In some respects this backward glance at early modern Europe also broadens the European metropole to include the colonies, both moves paying due heed to the multiple sites and historical periods from which the idea of the nation is forged.

The new research prompts one to ask with renewed vigor: Precisely where is English literature produced? Two or three decades ago this question might have been answered with numbing certainty: in England, of course. But the scholarship since then has produced startling new insights that challenge such self-evident conclusions and force a larger, global perspective into view. If, as Salman Rushdie once remarked, Britons remain oblivious of their own history because so much of it occurred elsewhere, much the same can be said about English studies. The intertwined genealogies of the discipline invariably begin and end at a point extending far beyond England’s national borders. Often they involve three-way movements. Take, for instance, the history of English in Canada, in which the migration of Scots plays a crucial role. Fueled by a desire for autonomy from England, these Scots also sought to deprovincialize themselves in the North American colony by assimilating English cultural norms. As Sarah Phillips Casteel shows, the Scots’ avid pursuit of English literature to break out of a deadening cultural isolation, which was even more extreme in Canada than in Scotland, contributed to an earlier Arnoldian emphasis on culture in Canadian English studies, in contrast to the situation across the border in the United States where the emphasis was on rhetoric.⁴ The Scottish intervention illustrates how difficult it is to explain the different emphases in curriculum and pedagogy exclusively in terms of internal developments in the United States and Canada. England remains a point of reference, to be sure, but always in relation to other social and religious groups brought within its orbit of influence, be they the Irish, Scots, and Welsh reorganized by the acts of unification;⁵ the Jews, Dissenters, and Catholics incorporated into the nation by the lifting of restrictive disabilities legislation;⁶ or colonial subjects inducted into the colonial administration through English education.⁷ These various assimilations unify the concept of England and English studies, but the point I want to emphasize is that this effect is achieved primarily through the impact of groups considered external to England. The history of English studies needs to be reexamined and reconstituted from this other site of religious dissent, border nations, and colonies. This demand extends to a consideration of the literatures and cultures of the other places that go into the making of English studies, challenging their basis in European humanism.

IT IS never easy charting the transformations in English studies, as the very nature of change is to produce new forms whose relation to earlier ones is sometimes so opaque that one would be hard pressed to find systematic development. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the multiple histories of English literary study are effaced at the moment when English enters the syllabus, becomes part of the credentializing of citizens and subjects, and is established as the certifiable basis of heritage and competence.

A cherished myth of education, with a long shelf-life in modern Western liberal theory, perceives the development of individual personality and creativity to be the ultimate goal of schooling. John Dewey and Friedrich Fröbel left a lasting mark on education through their child-centered philosophy of individual growth, emphasizing elementary education as the crucial stage of character formation. Language skills, storytelling, and other forms of imaginative exercise constituted important goals of educational reform in societies considered to be steeped in rote learning and memory exercises. This certainly underscored the British colonial critique of the Indian educational system and its corollary effort to inculcate reflexivity and individuality as a necessary corrective to suppressed personal growth.

Celebrated works like John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762) have immortalized autonomous conceptions of self, romantically associating education with the development of personality set apart from a foundational prior community. So persistent has this understanding been that less attention has been given to whether modern Western education has historically concerned itself with the development of personality in the first place and whether it is not the case that the obverse pertains: namely, that modern Western education has always been in the business of a certain amount of standardization, indeed from the time it took over from the family the task of preparing youth for the world. By the same token, it is also worth asking whether the management of disparate social groups, with contending desires, aims, and interests, would have ever been possible without experiments in colonial education.

In debating whether education aimed primarily to develop personality without a prior foundational community or to participate in social management, we can begin to draw some answers by looking at the fate of the bildungsroman, the novel form that narrates the development of the individual from inchoate identity to civilized maturity. The bildungsroman has a canonical status in modern education precisely because it accommodates individuals to emerging class formations, so that even though the bildungsroman’s focus is on personality development, it does so with a view to inserting the mature individual into the accepted social spaces of the modern nation-state. Histories of the mass-reading public clearly show the novel’s role to be one of mediating the individual’s presence in a mass democracy, obliterating the wild, unmanageable distinctions between personalities and moving individuals toward normative social desires.⁸ Social mediation brings the bildungsroman as close as any literary form to what we would describe today as organized mass culture. Lisa Lowe finds useful links between the dissemination of popular nineteenth-century English novels (particularly the bildungsroman) and the reach of modern media.⁹ Thus, Jane Austen’s narrative divisions, complexities, and resolutions had wide-reaching effects, whereby the nineteenth-century English public is extended to include globalized readers and recipients of popular culture in the twenty-first century. The educational system’s canonization of the bildungsroman makes it possible for novels of personal development to enter the domain of mass culture, and these works grow in influence across time and place in proportion to their continuing presence in the standard curriculum. The novel of personal development has a special status in modern education because it elicits the reader’s identification with the bildung narrative of ethical formation, which itself is a narrative of the individual’s loss of particularity and difference through identification with an idealized national form of subjectivity.

Not only does the novel have a special status in literary education but it has also played a hegemonic role in the formation of the Western literary canon. Heralded as a uniquely Western form that catalyzed print culture to serve the interests of the rising European bourgeoisie, the novel has always been regarded as alien to non-Western societies and therefore as much an agent of European colonialism as law, education, and other cultural institutions. However, this fails to acknowledge the extent to which colonial societies, in turn, colonized the novel by adapting it to indigenous forms. When the adaptations recirculate in global literature, the altered sensibilities act as a brake upon the undiluted dissemination of European class interests, whether the adaptation is a direct postcolonial revision (such as Tayib Salib’s Season of Migration to the North, a modern Arabic update of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a Caribbean rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre) or a completion of a novelistic arc (such as Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, which reworks two Victorian novels, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, into a wholly new composite). The cultural work performed by novels in various international contexts and histories does not accord with the dominant accounts of the development of bourgeois sensibility. The discrepancy between the received history of the novel—as serving Western bourgeois interests—and its global dissemination is due to the complex histories of reception, adaptation, and revision in the non-Western societies where the novel has grown. Indeed, the productive power of novels in culture to negotiate transnational identities uniquely makes the novel a site of transnational exchange, allowing for the form’s global dissemination. In its global aspect, the novel is transformed into a discursive site where the relations among nations are brokered.

Notwithstanding the bildungsroman’s association with moral and personal development, Joseph Slaughter’s corrective reading of the genre as committed to charting the process of individuation as an incorporative process of socialization, without which individualism itself would be meaningless,¹⁰ reinforces the point I am making about the reshaping of the curriculum to serve national ends. Liberal theory’s keen pursuit of individual presence, or what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo calls the need to invent personal interpretation,¹¹ presumes continuity between the classical and modern phases of education—between the Aristotelian emphases of character formation and the utilitarian accent of goal-oriented education. What cannot be ignored, however, is that the emergence of the bureaucratic, rational state by the time of high colonialism ruptured such continuity by redefining education no longer as an instrument of character development in an older, aristocratic sense. Rather, education became the means for the state’s absorption—through acculturation—of citizens and colonial subjects. While such absorption is admittedly uneven and disproportionate across class and gender, the presumably noncoercive nature of education to enact the state’s desires allows for assimilation by consent. When the focus of instruction shifts from individual regeneration to self-consciousness as national subjects, morality can no longer be a matter of individual will and conscience, but rather merges with national loyalty and public affirmation.¹²

This pattern is borne out by the spread of Western education in the colonies. Although commerce was the means by which England expanded internationally into distant outposts, education was effectively the site on which its reach was consolidated. Since the imperatives of assimilating colonial subjects to a mission of management were better served by cooperation rather than conflict, education gained an exalted position in the hierarchy of interests claiming British administrators’ attention. As the unending volumes of colonial correspondence indicate, the curriculum engaged official discussion at a level of intensity matching the deliberations about military matters. If educational theory entered into administrative discussions as insistently as principles of colonial management, it is a salient reminder of the crucial role of education in adapting norms of ideal conduct to practical conditions of governance.

Continuous with a tradition of humanistic training for rulership, yet redefining humanism for broader international uses, colonial educational philosophy amply drew on an eclectic blend of classical and contemporary sources. By 1724, when kings’ scholarships were established at universities to promote the study of the many languages required for service in foreign courts, humanistic education was inseparable from the demands of a bureaucratized English state.¹³ Indeed, already by the early decades of the seventeenth century, British educational theory had moved in the direction of training for rulership. Humanistic ideas became powerful elements in the predominant belief in a social hierarchy that it was the duty of the ruler and the aristocracy to maintain and in which every man had his place, high or low. From its inception, classical literary education in England had been closely associated with practical functions serving the state.

Thus, while it is true to say that the humanities prepared England as it expanded its global reach, it would be less accurate to describe humanistic goals as having changed course midstream to serve emerging imperial objectives. This line of thought suggests a genealogy that exceptionalizes colonialism as an agent of education’s redefinition. That is to say, it presupposes that colonialism rudely disturbed what would have otherwise been an otherworldly, apolitical focus quite unconcerned with matters of state. Although this premise acknowledges the many historical changes to which education responds as it adapts to new conditions and circumstances, it begs the question of whether changes in educational theory are always driven by external events or whether indeed they are internal to the structure of education as it balances out the contradictions of its own philosophical expectations. On the contrary, the English deployment of classical training to accommodate the demands of efficient governance had begun well before the great era of empire-building and indeed prepared the way to its consolidation. Despite a lingering religious motivation, the utilitarian reform of education pressed the way toward a more expansive role for the English state, which resulted in a vast administrative structure built around dutiful citizenry and obedient servants of the state. Whether the purpose of education was, as Milton declared in 1644, to repair the ruins of our first parents, or, again in Milton’s words, to enable a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war, the instrumental focus of education never wavered or waned.¹⁴

HUMANISM’s CHERISHED notion that literature promotes the development of personality meets its challenge in today’s multicultural world. Who sets the norms—the ideals—to which individual growth should aspire? Globalization appears to mark a new phase of modern education. Since globalization challenges the power of education to assert the values of a single class, it forces education to be more multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious. Analogously, this should make it equally difficult for formerly colonized societies to revert to tradition as a viable alternative to globalization. If we are right to assume that mass culture has a heterogeneous composition, then what is being absorbed is not the culture of a single group. But to say that eclecticism is intrinsic to the nature of mass culture and incorporates ethnicity as well as race should not be taken to mean that ethnicity remains unappropriated or unchanged. It is safe to say that the ethnicity claimed by the family or the community is not always the same ethnicity marketed in retail stores or the media. Yet we seem to have so much more trouble recognizing the ethnic basis of today’s multicultural curriculum or media as essentially a manufactured one. Ethnicity blends into nationality, as the features that mark off distinct groups are blurred in the name of a representative type. The mix of cultures that we find in media and education is not without regulation, nor do they all occupy the same space in the cultural hierarchy.

A growing body of critical theory locates mass culture as one of the possible sources of individual development—through the possibility of personal interpretation arising from multiple stimuli, to refer again to Vattimo. Would mass culture thus make education less potent, less critical, if not altogether redundant? If the mass culture of today is eclectic, relativistic, and self-aware across different social classes, are calls for a return to community also a return to an earlier social configuration? It is telling that globalization should be most threatening to the privileged classes, since culture is no longer their exclusive preserve. So we now discern two contradictory pulls in the argument about literary education as bildung, or development: the first calls for an education that restores the stability of community; and the second urges resistance to protectionism against globalization of all kinds, even if such protectionism is to be found only in community, for the presumed goal is to recuperate the primacy of individual development. This residual tension can be understood as a colonial legacy whose reach extended into the transformation of European education well into the twenty-first century.

To explore the historical and ideological conditions in which the study of English literature emerged is also to understand the production of new forms of knowledge. Because colonial educational policies continually wavered between aesthetic and utilitarian rationales, the indecision contributed to a longer life for English as a humanistic, civilizing branch of study, even as English was projected as a language of material advancement. However, it is also possible to see this deliberate oscillation as the source of English studies’ hold over decolonizing societies like India. For if the high-minded values of English humanism no longer pertain, the utilitarian importance of English as the language of globalization and economic expansion consolidates its presence in postcolonial societies, acting as a sturdy backup to a failed cultural mission. Vernacular languages and literatures often have to struggle to catch the attention of the world at a time when literature written in English is able to enter the marketplace more easily in the West.

Postcolonialism is often understood to be grounded in a politicized subjectivity. Yet for all the revisionist understanding of postcoloniality, its impact on English studies has yet to be fully fleshed out from a perspective that examines the emergence of new notions of literary subjectivity. These new conceptions cannot simply be understood in the reductive terms of Caliban writing back, nor of hybridity, mimicry, or other such notions of secular, urban cosmopolitanism that still imply an anchoring in the institutional spaces created by colonialism. If, for the sake of argument, one defines subjectivity as a return to the past and to the self, one might in fact see that English studies retains a commitment to literary subjectivity that is not encompassed by political criticism, as borne out by the continually evolving field of postcolonial studies. To talk about literature as a retreat into self-scrutiny might appear a regressive move, at odds with the political agenda of postcolonial studies.¹⁵ After all, the traditional view of literature as apolitical has given humanism its abiding exclusivity, with its premise that literature influences public life when it is most withdrawn from politics—public life being defined in terms of morality and civility. Of course, it goes without saying that, translated into colonial employment, the moral state is also the sphere of (apolitical) public access to which the British administration wished to restrict its subjects through English education.

Does an apolitical literature then signify a return to the values of humanism? That would seem to be the obvious conclusion. Yet Simon During has shown otherwise in his insightful reading of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, in which humanism is effectively turned on its head.¹⁶ During argues that when literature retreats from politics and is marginalized because it is presumably ineffectual and devalued in society, what it loses is not so much an engagement with the world but rather its institutional base. The formalized world of the institution contains a paralyzed politics, even as it appears to open up a space for asserting the claims of identity through its agency. Marginalized and devalued, literature paradoxically reinforces literary subjectivity in the fantasy space of wonder. Wonder, unlike tradition, has no institutional home, no anchoring mechanism that channels its expression in determinate ways. Wonder does not require a structure of reference and intertextuality to reveal meaning—indeed, it thwarts all identification with systematized forms of knowledge. It is from this noninstitutional site that postcolonial criticism can perhaps be at its most vigorous and emancipatory, its driving force being an imagination put in the service of crafting a new literary subjectivity that includes, but simultaneously goes beyond, ideological critique.

This may seem a surprising conclusion after the confrontational polemics of the past two or three decades, which have produced significant changes involving a rethinking of English studies. It might even appear reactionary after the interventions made in the academy, which have resulted in a widening of the curriculum to include the works of hitherto excluded groups. Yet in the dozen or more years of the twenty-first century, what I see occurring is an attempt to disengage literature from humanism, while at the same time resisting the reduction of literature to a purely sociological entity subordinate to the compulsions of identity politics. The search for a postcolonial subjectivity beyond the recalcitrant Caliban is certainly part of that attempt. But even more insistent is a will to repair the divide between imagination and criticism that has split the field of postcolonial studies. It is worth recalling that the psychological scars postcolonial studies now bear are similar to those borne by English studies in its formative years, when literary function vacillated between society and self as the primary