Greek "Religion"

The very beginning of Balu's The Heathen in His Blindness has this:


Sir Moses Finley would quite sympathise with Gill’s difficulty.  {Sam Gill's difficulty in finding religion among native Americans}  He too confronts a similar problem regarding the Ancient Greek religion, which appears “fundamentally alien to our eyes”. How fundamentally alien it is, says Sir Finley (1985: xiv-xvi), can easily be shown by a simple listing: 

(1) Greek religion had no sacred books...no revelation, no creed. It also lacked any central ecclesiastical organization or the support of central political organization...
(2) Although large numbers of men and women were involved in the administration of religion, in the case of temples and altars or sacred sites, in the conduct of festivals and sacrifices, and so forth, and though we call them ‘priests’ in the modern languages, a priesthood as that vocation is understood in many post-ancient religions simply did not exist.The great majority of the so-called priests were simply public officials whose duties in whole or in part, usually the latter, included some responsibility for some portions of the religious activity of the community. More often than not, they were selected by lot and they held office for only a year or even six months...There was no special training, no sense of vocation.
Greek ‘priests’, in sum, were customarily not holy men; they were also not particularly expert or qualified in matters pertaining to their duties in office...
(3) It follows as a matter of simple logic that places of worship were also radically different from anything known in later ages – despite the fact that the temple was the most extensive and imposing building of the Greek city...the temple was hardly ever ‘a place for congregational worship.’

In other words, Greek religion does not look as though it were a religion; nonetheless, it requires to be made sense of, says Sir Finley. Need one add, as a religion?

John Gould (1985: 7-8) attempts to do precisely that and he does so by suggesting, of all things, that it is easier to understand Greek religion if we look at the Dinka religion – the religion of a tribal people in southern Sudan – but not at the ‘better-known’ religions.Why?

Greek religion is not ‘revealed’ as Christianity is; there is no text claiming the status of the ‘word of God,’ not even of His prophets; no Ten Commandments, no creed, no doctrinal councils, no heresies, no wars of religion in which the ‘true believers’ confront the ‘infidel’ or heretic. Central terms of our religious experience such as ‘grace,’ ‘sin’ and `faith’ cannot be rendered into the ancient Greek of the classical period: the central Greek term, theous nomizein, means not ‘believe in the gods,’ but ‘acknowledge’ them, that is, pray to them, sacrifice to them, build them temples, make them object of cult and ritual.There is never an assumption of divine omnipotence, nor of a divine creation of the universe, except in philosophical  ‘theology,’ nor any consistent belief in divine omnipresence. There is no church, no organized body persisting through time comprising those with dogmatic authority, able to define divinity and rule on what is correct and incorrect in religious belief...Greek religion is not theologically fixed and stable, and it has no tradition of exclusion or finality: it is an open, not a closed system. There are no true gods and false, merely powers known and acknowledged since time immemorial, and new powers, newly experienced as active among men and newly acknowledged in worship (italics in the original).

Even if one does not take exception to this description of the Greek religion, our problem is not solved. The Dinka religion, according to Rinehardt who studied it and upon whose material Gould bases his analogy, does not look like religion either. 

For a more succinct summary of our problems regarding the Ancient Greek religion (for longer discussions, see Guthrie 1955; Burkert 1977), one need go no further than Adkins (1969: 377). Discussing the nature of Greek religion in the multi-volume Historia Religionum, he writes

Greek religion was a phenomenon far different from the religions called to mind (by the categories that reflect the questions which the modern reader naturally asks)...The data of Greek religion do not fit into any given category (italics mine).

Even though the data of the Greek ‘religion’ do not fit into any given category, we are to assume that this phenomenon fits into the category of religion. However, this category of ‘religion’ contains, as Adkins tells us, such subcategories as the existence of a creed, the existence of God and such like. Even when some practice (or a set of practices) does not fit any of the subcategories of religion (and thus, one would have thought, the category ‘religion’ itself), Adkins tells us that this should not “prevent the exposition of the nature of Greek Religion”. He goes on to do precisely that in the rest of the article. Again, we are left with puzzles regarding the identity of the subject matter.What phenomenon is being described here? Is it one phenomenon (the ‘Greek religion’) or sets of phenomena unrelated to each other? If the former, what is the difficulty in saying what Greek religion is? If the latter, how can we understand religion better by studying what does not look like religion? Perhaps, the Greeks had no religion at all...

---------
Understanding why we are in this difficulty requires a good bit more of reading of the book.

M.J. Akbar at Simon Fraser University, 2012

M.J. Akbar's talk at Simon Fraser University, July 12, 2012.
This is about 1.5 hours long.  Akbar's main talk occupies around 13:30 - 48:20.  The conversation continues after that.   One of the important ideas is that Pakistan is at the epicenter of the fourth World War, which is not captured in the snippets below the fold. M.J. Akbar likens the Pakistani establishment in the war against terrorism to the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government of France in World War II.  One problem with that comparison is that M.J. Akbar does not identify the Resistance.  Indeed, the world's problem is that there is nothing that can be identified as the Pakistani de Gaulle.

Can non-Europeans think?

Hamid Dabashi asks: What happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical 'pedigree'?

......
Why is European philosophy "philosophy", but African philosophy ethnophilosophy, the way Indian music is ethnomusic - an ethnographic logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History (popularised in Shawn Levy's Night at the Museum [2006]), you only see animals and non-white peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages, but no cage is in sight for white people and their cultures - they just get to stroll through the isles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans, etc, all in a single winding row.
....
The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blase. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not? They are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires and they think their particular philosophy is "philosophy" and their particular thinking is "thinking", and everything else is - as the great European philosopher Immanuel Levinas was wont of saying - "dancing". 

The question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at large, but for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived experiences of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America - counties and climes once under the spell of the thing that calls itself "the West" but happily no more.
...

What we eat is bankrupting the country!

The main threat to both middle-class family budgets and to the Federal budget is the ever-rising cost of health care. It seems that the main driver of health care costs is the soaring incidence of diabetes; and this is in turn linked to the increasing amount of sugar, white flour and such in the American diet. Diabetes presents a complication in the treatment of almost every other disease.

There is also a growing incidence of Alzheimer's disease, and while its cause is still a mystery, it may just may turn out to be type 3 diabetes, also exacerbated by an excess of sugar in the diet. That disease ruins a person's final years, and also costs a lot in care.

So, it would seem that America is eating itself into bankruptcy. It seems budget discipline does begin at the kitchen table, just in a way different than one might have thought.

Niall Ferguson v. Paul Krugman

Ferguson:

In my view Paul Krugman has done fundamental damage to the quality of public discourse on economics. He can be forgiven for being wrong, as he frequently is--though he never admits it. He can be forgiven for relentlessly and monotonously politicizing every issue. What is unforgivable is the total absence of civility that characterizes his writing. His inability to debate a question without insulting his opponent suggests some kind of deep insecurity perhaps the result of a childhood trauma. It is a pity that a once talented scholar should demean himself in this way.

Krugman:

What a pathetic response. Notice that he is doing precisely what I never do, and making it about the person as opposed to his ideas. All I have ever done to him is point out that he seems to not know what he is talking about, and that he has been repeatedly wrong. I would never stoop to speculating about his childhood! If he can't handle professional criticism -- which is all that I have ever offered -- he should go find another profession.

Three cheers!  Ferguson should go into retirement and never utter a word in public again.

This morning!

March snow.

Das Professional Model S Mechanical Keyboard

For a touch typist,  the Das Professional  Model S Mechanical Keyboard is like chocolate for the fingers.

• Mechanical keyboard FAQ, and the Cherry MX keyswitches.
• A review of mechanical keyboards.

PS: I now have two of these - the Windows version at work and the Mac version at home.

Macaulay in Calcutta

The Dark Blue, Vol 3, March-August 1872, edited by John C. Freund, (Google books) contains this (starting on page 633)

Let us now turn to the 'Calcutta Literary Gazette', which brings us to think of the literary labours of Capt. D.L. Richardson.   This periodical was established upwards of forty years ago {1830}, was tolerably successful for some years, when it declined and became merged into the Saturday Edition of the 'Bengal Hurkaru' (messenger), the old Calcutta journal, which had previously swallowed up and attached to its popular name the old 'India Gazette'. ......Richardson's literary fame commenced with the 'Literary Leaves'.  His 'Selection from the British Poets', with notices biographical and critical, were compiled and collected for the use of the Government Educational Institution of Bengal. ....We recollect the literary 'Chit-Chat', while it was being published in the 'Literary Gazette' of the 'Hurkaru', in 1847; ...... As a volume, the lively and earnest 'Chit-Chat' was reviewed, along with his other works, in the 'Calcutta' of September, 1848.   And a most elaborate and learned review it is—one hundred and twenty pages on the 'Literary Labours of D.L. Richardson'.
The reviewer brings out Macaulay in an arrogant light, hinting that 'D.L.R.' wished the 'mighty member of the Council', the Whig and Edinburgh Reviewer, the 'monopoliser' of all conversation, the idol for the hour in Calcutta, to write for him.  What a catch he would have been!  But fancy the brilliant man of genius, who had read every book and knew everything, fancy him 'condescending to write one line for a "Calcutta Annual", or "Literary Gazette"!'

A quote from Claudius Buchanan on the Hindoos

Per Wiki,Claudius Buchanan (12 March 1766 – 9 February 1815) was a Scottish theologian, an ordained minister of the Church of England, and an extremely 'low church' missionary for the Church Missionary Society.

From his works, we collect this gem:

Sheelam

Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan journal had a very nice telling of the story that follows. It is one of the stories I remember from my childhood.  I found this narration on the web, there is a lot more commentary here,  but I just excerpt the story, with one or two minor modifications.

Oriental licentiousness

First an excerpt from Balu.  He examines the question of whether Hindus are moral cretins, as so many Western analyses seem to show.  He dodges one bullet, and then continues:

Too soon to feel relieved, I think. At least that is how it appears, if we follow Van Den Bossche and Mortier (1997), in their exposé of a Jain text. (The Vajjalaggam, VL for short.) Composed anywhere between 750 and 1337 CE, the author of this text is a Jain poet – a certain Jayavallabha by name. The text itself, Van Den Bossche and Mortier tell us, belongs to the Subhashita literature and thus could be called an ‘ethical text’ and is a challenge of sorts:

“One problem with the study of Indian ethics is that the ancient Indians themselves did not make a clear-cut distinction between the ‘moral’ and other spheres. They did not have a word for our term ‘ethics’ at all.” (p. 85).

Macaulay's estimation of Ram Mohun Roy

This is from "A speech delivered at the opening of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution on the 4th of November, 1846", by Macaulay.  This can be found in Volume 8 of The works of Lord Macaulay complete, 1897, page 380.  The speech is a toast to the literature of Great Britain which among other things, is "that literature before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the banks of the Ganges" -  if only he had known, Macaulay could have composed an ode to the cruel fate that has dispelled the empire before dispelling those impious and cruel superstitions!  Maybe global warming will put paid to the glaciers of Tibet and thus to the Ganga, the "superstitions" live on, and Britannica turned to be an empire of tin.

Macaulay talks about men who "are haunted" "by an unreasonable fear of what they call superficial knowledge".  Knowledge, to be meaningful,  they think, must be profound.  But what little we know is very small compared to what remains to be known, and we are then always shallow.

"It is evident then that those who are afraid of superficial knowledge do not mean by superficial knowledge, knowledge which is superficial when compared with the whole quantity of truth capable of being known. For, in that sense, all human knowledge is, and always has been, and always must be, superficial.   What then is the standard?  Is it the same two years together in any country? Is it the same, at the same moment, in any two countries?  Is it not notorious that the profundity of one age is the shallowness of the next; that the profundity of one nation is the shallowness of a neighboring nation?  Ramohun Roy passed among Hindoos for a man of profound Western learning; but he would have been but a very superficial member of this institute.  Strabo was justly entitled to be called a profound geographer eighteen hundred years ago.  But a teacher of geography, who had never heard of America, would now be laughed at by the girls of a boarding-school.  What would now be thought of the greatest chemist of 1746, or of the greatest geologist of 1746? The truth is that, in all experimental science, mankind is, of necessity, constantly advancing.  Every generation, of course, has its front rank and its rear rank; but the rear rank of a later generation occupies the ground which was occupied by the front rank of a former generation."

It is evident to me that Einstein too, would be laughed at by the girls of a boarding-school, but perhaps because of his hair.  It is equally evident that what Rammohun Roy knew of Sanskrit and Arabic literature, was not considered to be knowledge of any kind.   Lastly, it does not appear to be available online, who was in the audience for this speech, except people mentioned in the footnotes to the speech itself (Lord Provost Mr. Adam Black, and Archbishop Whately) and so the above is superficial knowledge onlee.

The rebel bureaucrat: Frederick John Shore

Following once again the trail that begins in Reginald Reynolds' "The White Sahibs in India", arrive at Notes on Indian Affairs (1837) by Frederick John Shore, in two volumes, only the first of which is available in Google books.  If there is a Wiki page for Frederick John Shore,  I've missed it.  There is this out-of-print title on amazon.com, The rebel bureaucrat: Frederick John Shore (1799-1837) as critic of William Bentinck's India.  { His brother, John Shore, 1st Baron Teignmouth (1751-1834), was a governor-general of India; a friend of Sir William Jones, and a prominent member of the Clapham sect that included the Macaulays.   Per Wiki, "towards the close of 1768 he sailed for India as a writer in the East India's Company's service".   When Macaulay wrote that about his time, when a fortune such as Clive's was no longer possible, but a writer could expect to amass a fortune of £30,000, I wonder if he was thinking of Baron John Shore. }

One arrives then at the Eclectic Review, Vol VII, January-June 1840, page 304, where four works dealing with India are reviewed, the third one being Notes on Indian Affairs, by aforementioned Frederick John Shore.  It turns out to be quite a damning indictment of British rule in India.

The discretion of a critic

Once again, we draw on Reginald Reynolds, "The White Sahibs in India" — several of my posts owe to tracing sources from his footnotes— for the following: writing about what William Jennings Bryan termed as the legalized pillage of India, (and, in my opinion, that Romesh Chunder Dutt could not term so, whatever he might have believed)

Quote: (emphasis added)

There could be no more fitting conclusion to this chapter than the words of Bishop Heber, whose praise for the administration and general prosperity in one of the Indian native states has already been cited. Once more we are reading the words of a writer of the early part of the century; but it must be remembered that after 1858 criticism of the British administration became more difficult and more rare, for reasons which we shall consider later.  Bishop Heber's words refer to a system which continued in all its principal aspects to be the administrative system of India; and those who have followed the instances we have selected will recognize the symptoms which alarmed the Bishop and the results which he feared. [64]

Bishop Heber toured the country extensively during three years from 1824 to 1826.  He inquired carefully into social conditions and was gravely disturbed by the heavy land-tax which then, as in later years, was the main source of supply for the growing tribute to England.  In a letter written in 1826 Heber tells how "half the gross product of the soil is demanded by the Government," and comments that such a rate of taxation (which still obtains throughout the greater part of British India) "keeps the people, even in favourable years, in a state of abject penury." [65]  He finds such excessive taxation, employed for a tribute to a foreign country, with no return to the cultivator, "an effective bar to anything like improvement," and notes that the tardy remissions made in times of scarcity "do not prevent men, women and children dying in the streets in droves, and the roads being strewed with carcasses." [66]

[64] Memoirs and Correspondence, London, 1830, Vol II, p. 413.  Letter to the Rt. Hon. Charles Wyndham Wynn, dated Karnatic, March, 1826.  Quoted by Dutt, Vol I, pp. 369-370.  Dutt points out that the Bishop avoided expressing himself on this subject in his journal, which was written for publication: even greater discretion was to become even more common in later years.  Dutt says that there was a reduction in the land tax in Bombay and Madras after Heber's time, but that it was "still excessive".

[65] According to H.H. Wilson (Mill, Vol VII, pp. 299-300) the Hindu law enacted that the King should have a twelfth, an eighth or a sixth of the produce, but in time of war he might take one-fourth. Assessments varied according to the quality of the land, and were taken in kind, which made the peasant less concerned with price variations.  Moslem rulers demanded more, but Akbar limited the land-tax to one-third of the produce.

[66] Mr. W.S. Lilley in India and its Problems gives a similar and equally gruesome description of famine in the latter half of the century.

End quote.

An American assessment of the British Raj, 1906

William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) is probably most remembered today by people like me for his attacks on Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and more specifically, the Scopes Trial in 1925.

Wiki tells us that Bryan

was a leading American politician from the 1890s until his death. He was a dominant force in the populist wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as its candidate for President of the United States (1896, 1900 and 1908). He served in Congress briefly as a Representative from Nebraska and was the 41st United States Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1915), taking a pacifist position on the World War. Bryan was a devout Christian, a supporter of popular democracy, and an enemy of the gold standard as well as banks and railroads. He was a leader of the silverite movement in the 1890s, a peace advocate, a prohibitionist, and an opponent of Darwinism on religious and humanitarian grounds. With his deep, commanding voice and wide travels, he was one of the best known orators and lecturers of the era. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, he was called "The Great Commoner."

In 1906, Bryan wrote a pamphlet "British Rule in India", after a visit to India.  It is available online.
This pamphlet is contemporaneous with Romesh Chunder Dutt's Economic History of India, which contains some praise for British accomplishments that fools the unwary. I expect Bryan's clear-eyed condemnation of British rule in India will be dismissed because he was also an anti-Darwinist.

As per "Indian Proscribed Tracts, 1907-1947", from Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, William Jennings Bryan's pamphlet was banned in India by the British government.

Freedom of the Press, India, 1934

In 1934, Bihar suffered a huge earthquake.  Of this episode, Reginold Reynolds writes, in "The White Sahibs in India" (1937):

Writing from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, a Second Lieutenant of the East Yorks Regiment described with pride in an English paper how his regiment had cleared the roads

"by getting four men of the platoon to stop every native that comes along the road and making him work for ten minutes.  It has been most effective.  If they refuse to work a bayonet is stuck in them." [*]

For criticising such aspects of the Government's policy after the earthquake, fifteen newspapers were penalised and obliged to cease publication. [**] 

[*] Letter from 2nd Lieut. C.M.S. Marsden in the Farnham Herald, Feb. 17th, 1934.
[**] Official statement on the operation of the Press Ordinances, circulated in the Legislative Assembly in 1935.

It might be possible to get more context about the shutdown of the fifteen newspapers. The Farnham Herald still seems to exist, but of course, its archives cover only the Internet Era. Few newspapers can digitize their archives like the New York Times has done, I suppose.

Conversion corrupts?!

Back in 1993, I had posted this on soc.culture.indian, thinking it to be a joke.  Yet, there appears to be a recurring minor theme in 19th century literature about India that conversion to Christianity by Europeans resulted in a corruption of the natives.  

Title: In the spirit of the Maharaj :-)  {Jai Maharaj was a poster on s.c.i., considered by many to be a joker}
"The British census of 1881 gives the record of {criminal} convictions:
        Europeans                1 in 274
        Eurasians                1 in 509
        Native Christians        1 in 799
        Mahommedans                1 in 856
        Hindus                        1 in 1361
        Buddhists                1 in 3787 

These statistics were reprinted in the leading Catholic organ
in Britain, The Tablet, with the comments: 

"The last item is a magnificent tribute to the exalted purity
of Buddhism...It appears from these figures that while we effect
a very marked moral deterioration in the natives by converting
them to our creed, their natural standard of morality is so
high that however much we Christianize them, we cannot succeed
in making them altogether as bad as ourselves."" 

(From an introduction to "The Light of Asia", for original reference,
see Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery, compiled and edited by
Joseph Head & S.L. Cranston, 1977, Warner Books).

English & Vernacular - 1835-1840

The following is mostly based on A Review of Public Instruction in the Bengal Presidency, from 1835 to 1851, by James Kerr (1852).

Macaulay's Minute on Education was dated February 2, 1835.  On March 7, 1835, Lord Bentinck issued the resolution that the funds that had been spent on oriental education cease, and those funds be devoted to English education only.  After that, the President of the Educational Committee, a Mr. Shakespeare, resigned his office, and Macaulay was appointed to succeed him.  Macaulay remained President from 1835 through 1837 till he left India in December 1837. From 1838 into 1842, the president was Macaulay's friend, Sir Edward Ryan.

Kerr tells us -

Vindicator of the Hindoos - Maj. Gen. Charles Stuart

Read about Maj. General Charles Stuart (1758-1828), whose work "Vindication of the Hindoos" attracted vitriolic replies by the missionaries of his day.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to obtain Part I of his work; only Part II, his reply to the attacks on his first work, seems to be available on the web.

PS: since I wrote the above, I have obtained a digitized version of part I, but I'm not sure all the pages are present.

Macaulay's Child no more

One perspective in reading Mahatma Gandhi's My Experiments with Truth is to see in it his manifold attempts to be an Englishman - one of "a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect".  This was a project that simply would not work, the psychic violence that Gandhi would have to inflict on himself was too much, and it failed.

One can mark Gandhi's Hind Swaraj  (1908), when Gandhi was 39, as a key marker in the evolution of his thinking.  (Without endorsing all that in this essay on interpreting Hind Swaraj, I nonetheless recommend it as an essential shortcut to understanding it.)   Even so (chapter 15) - and you can read this  in many ways -

By patriotism I mean the welfare of the whole people, and if I could secure it at the hands of the English, I should bow down my head to them.

Gandhi, on languages

In his autobiography "My Experiments with Truth" (1927), Mahatma Gandhi wrote:

It is now my opinion that in all Indian curricula of higher education there should be a place for Hindi, Samskrit, Persian, Arabic and English, besides of course the vernacular. This big list need not frighten anyone. If our education were more systematic, and the boys free from the burden of having to learn their subjects through a foreign medium, I am sure learning all these languages would not be an irksome task, but a perfect pleasure. A scientific knowledge of one language makes a knowledge of other languages comparatively easy. In reality, Hindi, Gujarati and Sanskrit may be regarded as one language, and Persian and Arabic also as one. Though Persian belongs to the Aryan, and Arabic to the Semitic family of languages, there is a close relationship between Persian and Arabic, because both claim their full growth through the rise of Islam. Urdu I have not regarded as a distinct language, because it has adopted the Hindi grammar and its vocabulary is mainly Persian and Arabic, and he who would learn good Urdu must learn Persian and Arabic, as one who would learn good Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, or Marathi must learn Sanskrit.

Missionary mentality

Europeans have had a hate-love relationship with India.  The source of the hostility?

Balu wrote:

From the 16th to the 21st century, the Christians have viewed their encounter with the Hindu traditions as a battle between Christianity and idolatry. This theological framework attributes certain characteristic properties to religion: it is conceived of as a struggle between the true and the false. The struggle has different aspects to it. Firstly, it involves rivalry between religions with regard to the truth of doctrines. Insofar as different religions are either true or false, they revolve around a set of doctrines or beliefs. Therefore, the Christians oppose the Hindu traditions to the Christian religion in terms of the beliefs these ‘rival religions’ proclaim. The main issue of religion is to make a choice between these different sets of beliefs – the message of the atoning death of Jesus Christ and the related precepts on the one hand or the errors of false religion on the other. Secondly, the competition between religions revolves around the gaining of converts. The true religion strives to save the souls of men and women, while false religion keeps them in the command of the devil. This can also be put in terms of their respective ends. The true religion is the only path to salvation. Hell is the fatal destination of all other religions. Thirdly, the rivalry does not only concern the life to come, but is also expressed in the conduct of the followers of the different religions here on earth. As false religion, Hinduism embodies immorality.  And the true religion of Christianity exemplifies morality.

It is this ideology of Hindu immorality that underlies much of the attitude behind the British "we must reform, enlighten the natives".  We shall see the truth of this in the 19th century Britishers who wanted to Christianize India, some of whom I may quote on this blog.

The Gap between Text and Practice

There is often a huge gap between text and practice.  This is seemingly true even of such a relatively simple thing as the policy instituted by Macaulay and his minute of 1835.  Though Macaulay and his Committee on Education recorded in their report for 1835 that they were for the vernaculars and only against Sanskrit and Arabic, it was not during Macaulay's stay in India - when he was available to clarify policy - and only after Macaulay's departure from India that Lord Auckland took up the question in 1839, and allowed vernacular schools.  

Christian critics of Hindus who rely on the "Hindu scriptures" often make a mistake by overlooking this.  (Moreover, the more fundamentalist of them get upset when Hindus don't follow their "scriptures".)

An amusing case of the gap between what is in the texts (in this case the French law books) and practice was brought up in Fareed Zakaria's GPS program on CNN last Sunday.  Here is the item from elsewhere on the web:

France Revokes 214-Year-Old Law That Made It Illegal For Women To Wear Pants

Though long unenforced, women have been legally forbidden from wearing pants in the French capital since 1799 – a law that came out of the French Revolution, when female renegades would wear long trousers in opposition of the wealth’s fashionable knee-length culottes—instigating a political movement named, ‘sans-culottes.’ Government-obtained permission was required for a woman to wear any form of menswear in public, with a translated excerpt of the law reading: “Any woman who wants to dress as a man must come to police headquarters to get permission.” ...

In the century after the Revolution, France only has only amended its menswear law twice, to accommodate horseback riding and bicycles, the 19th century’s more fashionable forms of exercise. In this iteration, women could wear “pantalons” only if they were “holding the handlebars of a bicycle or the reigns of a horse,” reports French national news outlet France 24.

But last week, the law was finally declared “null and void,” with French officials calling the piece of legislature a “museum piece.”

Masks of Conquest: Gauri Viswanathan

This passage from Gauri Viswanathan, The Masks of Conquest, I think is as brief a explanation as is possible of what allows people as varied as Niall Ferguson and Zareer Masani to claim that the British did some good in India, and for a lot of smart people to buy into it.  This is what the whole Macaulay episode is about; it is a key event "in the progressive refinement of the rapacious, exploitative and ruthless actor of history into the reflective subject of literature".  We are asked to look at what the English colonialist professed, most significantly through his literature, and not at how he actually behaved.

The affirmation of an ideal self and an ideal political state through a specific national literature—English literature—is in essence an affirmation of English identity.   But that identity is equally split along the lines of actual and ideal selves, and the Englishman actively participating in the cruder realities of conquest, commercial aggrandizement, and disciplinary management of natives blends into the rarefied, more exalted image of the Englishman as producer of the knowledge that empowers him to conquer, appropriate, and manage in the first place. 

The self-presentation of the Englishman to native Indians through the products of his mental labor removes him from the place of ongoing colonialist activity—of commercial operations, military expansion, and administration of territories—and deactualizes and diffuses his material reality in the process.   In a parodic reworking of the Cartesian axiom, the Englishman's true essence is defined by the thought he produces, overriding all other aspects of his identity—his personality, actions and behavior.  His material reality as subjugator and alien ruler is dissolved in his mental output; the blurring of the man and his works effectively removes him from history. 

The introduction of English literature marks the effacement of a sordid history of colonial expropriation,  material exploitation, and class and race oppression behind European world dominance.  The English literary text, functioning as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state, becomes a mask for economic exploitation, so successfully camouflaging the material activities of the colonizer that one unusually self-conscious British colonial official, Charles Trevelyan, was prompted to remark, "[The Indians] daily converse with the best and wisest Englishmen through the medium of their works, and form ideas, perhaps higher ideas of our nation that if their intercourse with it were of a more personal kind." 

The split between the material and the cultural practices of colonialism is nowhere sharper than in the progressive refinement of the rapacious, exploitative and ruthless actor of history into the reflective subject of literature.

Natives in the General Committee of Public Instruction - 1835

When Macaulay became the president of the General Committee of Public Instruction, two Indians, Radhakant Deb and Russomoy Dutt, were added to the committee, and much is made of this in some places.    A fuller view would place this in the context of Lord Cornwallis's actions as Governor General (1786-93), when "all high Indian officials were dismissed and all posts worth more than £500 a year were reserved for Europeans".

Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, tells us:

To Cornwallis, the abuse of power was the most serious of evils afflicting the East India Company, not only jeopardizing the British hold over India, but, worse still, dividing the English nation on the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise.......Convinced that contact with natives was the root cause of declining European morals, he resolved to excluded all Indians from appointment to responsible posts, hoping by this means to restore the Englishman to his pristine self and rid him once and for all of decadent influences....One historian, Percival Spear, has gone so far as to suggest that this event marks the point at which there developed "that contempt for things and persons Indian.....and which produced the views of a Mill or a Macaulay."  Denied all opportunities for expression as a result of the harsh measure, public ability declined steadily.  But curiously, when this occurred it was taken to mean that civic responsibility had never existed in India, thus giving rise to one of the most durable legends of British rule: that the Indian mind was best suited to minor pursuits of trade, but not to government or administration.

There is a further story to tell of how Indians were added to the committee, but that is for some other time.



 

Proposed Constitutional Amendment

https://movetoamend.org/wethepeopleamendment

Comment: The amendment may prevent the rise of our future robot overlords.

Section 1. [Artificial Entities Such as Corporations Do Not Have Constitutional Rights]The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only. 

Artificial entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law. 

The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law, and shall not be construed to be inherent or inalienable. 

Section 2. [Money is Not Free Speech]Federal, State, and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate's own contributions and expenditures, to ensure that all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process, and that no person gains, as a result of their money, substantially more access or ability to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure. 

Federal, State, and local government shall require that any permissible contributions and expenditures be publicly disclosed. 

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

Puzzle: outsized influence of a lakh of rupees

The East India Company Act of 1813 [1] set aside a sum of not less than a lakh of rupees per annum to be applied to the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India.  

This munificent sum of one lakh of rupees corresponded to £10,000.  This was Macaulay's annual salary in India - a huge sum for an individual, to be certain.  In 1834-35, the year when Macaulay arrived in India,  the Haileybury College where British recruits to the company were sent for training cost the Company that year £9914 1s. 1d.;  "Maintenance of Lunatics formerly of Civil and Military Services of the Company" were that year a charge of £4991 13s. 9d. [2] Compare that to one lakh of rupees for promoting education in the whole of the Bengal, Madras and Bombay Presidencies.

That year, the proprietors of the East India Company paid themselves dividends of  £636,825 17s. 5d. [2].  The land revenue of Bengal & Agra alone was £11,601,350. [3]  {That year, the East India Company had a revenue of around £4.4million from the trade of opium.}

Why was this minuscule 0.09% of the land revenue of Bengal & Agra dedicated for education so significant?  It can only be because all the traditional systems of patronage of education - via lands whose revenue was dedicated to education, via the traditional rulers, via village revenues - had been destroyed by the East India Company. 

Mystery novels: Keigo Higashino

Keigo Higashino is a Japanese novelist, winner of numerous awards.  I've read a couple of his books that have been translated into English by Alexander O. Smith - The Devotion of Suspect X, and Salvation of a Saint.  Clever murder mysteries, and the chief detective brain is a physicist, Professor Manabu Yukawa - so what is not to like? If you like mystery novels, I recommend these.

Macaulay's Finances

This page provides some information about Macaulay's money situation.

Thus distinguished, and justifiably conscious of his great powers, Macaulay began to aspire to a political career. But the shadow of pecuniary trouble early began to fall upon his path. When he went to college his father believed himself to be worth £100,000. But commercial disaster overtook the house of Babington & Macaulay, and the son now saw himself compelled to work for his livelihood. His Trinity fellowship of £300 a year became of great consequence to him, but it expired in 1831; he could make at most £200 a year by writing; and a commissionership of bankruptcy, which was given him by Lord Lyndhurst in 1828, and which brought him in about £400 a year, was swept away, without compensation, by the ministry which came into power in 1830. Macaulay was reduced to such straits that he had to sell his Cambridge gold medal.

 .....Macaulay was thus prepared to accept the offer of a seat in the supreme council of India, created by the new India Act. The salary of the office was fixed at £10,000, out of which he calculated to be able to save £30,000 in five years. His sister Hannah accepted his proposal to accompany him, and in February 1834 the brother and sister sailed for Calcutta.

Macaulay's annual salary in India, £10,000, translates to 1 lakh of rupees, which is the precise amount that the Charter Act of 1813 required the British East India Company to promote education each year.

For purposes of comparison, via Google Books, one is told that around 1830, a typical British lower-middle class income was in the range of £60 to £200 per annum. (Religion in Victorian Britain: Traditions, edited by Parsons and Moore).   Bankey Bihari Misra tells us in The Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773-1834, that around 1830, the "average income of munsiffs in Patna Division amounted to only rupees 21 per month", i.e., about £25 per year.

In 1901, Lord Curzon said in a speech that the average Indian agricultural income was Rupees 20 a year - so after seven decades of wonderful British-wrought improvements that Niall Ferguson boasts about, this £2 a year is an upper bound on what the peasant's income was in 1830.

For further comparison, the Huffington Post points out in modern USA: Income inequality between CEOs and workers has consequently exploded, with CEOs last year {i.e., 2011} earning 209.4 times more than workers, compared to just 26.5 times more in 1978.

NNDB : NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts.)

But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been associating with.

A History of the Dept. of English, University of Calcutta

Worth a read.

For those writing a modern history of English in India, the following is noteworthy regarding college/university English (primary/secondary school English is a different story):

The Department went through a period of slump starting from the 1940s and ending in the 1960s.  Three major historical factors contributed towards it – reactionary attitude towards English language  and literature at the wake of nationalism and political independence, and the resultant growth in interest in the vernacular languages; a temporary shift in significance from English towards Political Science and  Economics in the 1950s within the humanities; and the flourishing and coming into beings of other  universities within West Bengal and in other parts of India.

....
By the end of the 1960s, interest in English was again growing. Two reasons contributed towards its  resurgence – first, the acceptance of English as one of the best linguistic means of communication  throughout the length and breadth of India; and second, the growing importance of the United States  and other English-speaking nations in terms of the control of global economics and politics.

Sanskrit - some 180 years after Macaulay

Via the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, see this rather large PDF report (I've barely scanned it).  The battle is ongoing, let us see if India is able to bridge over the colonial discontinuity in Sanskrit studies.

Rohit Pradhan: Confessions of an Indian Hawk

Part 1.

... if there is a genuine Pakistani desire for peace with India, why don’t we see its effects on the ground?....

,,,,{it is} Pakistan where liberals remain a scared and scattered bunch who have little influence outside social media and op-ed columns in the English media. Forget India, their inability to influence Pakistani domestic policies have been repeatedly demonstrated.

 

Masani's Father

CIP is reading London-based author Zareer Masani's panegyrics on Macaulay, I think.  I mention it only because the author's illustrious father, Minocher Rustom Masani (or Minoo Masani) who was not such a lickspittle, finds mention in Reginald Reynold's "The White Sahibs in India" (1937), as follows, but before you read that, read this brief biographical note.

Girls lead in Science Exam

As per the New York Times, in an international science exam given to 470,000 students in 65 nations, girls outperformed boys in most nations. Eyeballing their chart, I think girls outperformed boys in general in Eastern and Southern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific Islands; while boys outperformed girls in Western and Northern Europe and the Americas.

This is only an examination, not performance in a research career.  Nevertheless, don't you think it is premature to look for (or take any findings as definitive) evolutionary or biological reasons for the current male domination in science?

Exchange rates: 1800 - 1850

In [1], Edney tells us that one pound sterling (£1) contained 20 shillings, and one shilling contained 12 pence. A rupee, as Indians know, is made of 16 annas.

Edney tells us that in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, rupees were coined in silver. The freshly minted version was the sicca, and the coins with wear and tear were sonat, worth only 15 sicca annas (instead of 16).

Edney tells us that the conversion of rupees to pound sterling equivalent depended on the going rate for silver (with respect to gold, I suppose) in London. He tells us that Coins, Weights and Measures of British India, part one of Useful Tables, forming an Appendix to the Journal of the Asiatic Society (Calcutta, 1834) gives an approximate conversion of one shilling, ten pence (£0.092) to a sonat rupee and two shillings (£0.1) to a sicca rupee.  Unfortunately, he ruins my confidence in him by confidently stating that "one lakh contained ten thousand rupees"; this in the second edition of his book.  Sorry, one lakh is one hundred thousand.

In [2], we are told that around 1806, the East India Company fixed the sikka rupee to be 180 grains troy of silver, 11/12 fine, 1/12 alloy. That is, they tell us: one rupee was 165 grains fine silver and 15 grains of alloy.  The Wiki article [3] on the great recoinage in Great Britain in 1816, tells us at at that  1 Dtroy pound which is 5760 grains of silver (0.925 fine silver) was set by definition to 66 shillings.

You can do the arithmetic, it turns out that 1 rupee =  £0.1 is reasonable based on the weight of silver.  In various other documents of the time, 1 rupee = 2 shillings (i.e.,£0.1) is the exchange rate that is used, so Edney is validated.

[1] Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India 1765-1843, Mathew H. Edney, (1997)

[2] Note on the history of the East India Coinage from 1753-1835, Edgar Thurston,  (1893).

[3] Wiki: Great Recoinage of 1816

A review of Sullivan's Macaulay : The Tragedy of Power

Seems that being kind is good policy, too, apart from being good for the character.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Better-served-cool-5257

Leslie Stephen on Macaulay

A criticism.

Education in England 1800-1850

(Posting from iPad) To be read in context of Rammohun Roy's 1823 minute to Lord Amherst asking for education in mathematics and science, and Macaulay's minute of 1835.  Roy's request, if it were made on behalf of Englishmen would be just as revolutionary.  Since the British upper classes were also primarily engaged in the study of Latin and ancient Greek, languages as alive or dead as Sanskrit, the proposal for an English education was quite revolutionary, too.  Please follow the link to Derek Gillard's page and read all of that, too. We have to examine what education might have meant to Macaulay, did it mean science and mathematics?  Apart from the English language itself, what is the evidence that Macaulay's idea of education matched that of Roy?  England was rife for educational reform, what were Macaulay's views in that regard?

Wiki tells us, regarding education in England,

In 1840 the Grammar Schools Act expanded the Grammar School curriculum from classical studies to include science and literature. 

The Grammar Schools Act 1840 made it lawful to apply the income of grammar schools to purposes other than the teaching of classical languages, but change still required the consent of the schoolmaster. 

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_School and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_England )

Derek Gillard provides this:

http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/chapter02.html

The 'great' public schools were the least willing to adapt and modernise. The following description of attitudes to the curriculum at these schools in the 1820s was given by James Pillans (1778-1864), Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh University, who was for some time a private tutor at Eton. In Contributions to the Cause of Education (1856:271) he wrote:

In the great schools of England - Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow, where the majority of English youth who receive a liberal and high professional education are brought up - the course of instruction has for ages been confined so exclusively to Greek and Latin that most of the pupils quit them not only ignorant of, but with a considerable disrelish and contempt for, every branch of literature and scientific equipment, except the dead languages. It may be said that there are in the immediate neighbourhood of the College, teachers of Mathematics, Writing, French and other accomplishments to whom parents have the option of sending their sons. But as these masters are extra-scholastic - mere appendages, not an integral part of the establishment - and as neither they nor the branches of knowledge they proffer to teach are recognised in the scheme of school business, it requires but little acquaintance with the nature of boys to be aware, that the disrespect in which teachers so situated are uniformly held extends, in young minds, to the subjects taught and is apt to create a rooted dislike to a kind of instruction which they look upon as a work of supererogation. And this, we venture to say, is all but the universal feeling at Eton. (quoted in Spens 1938:18)

 He went on:

If we find in the country and town schools little preparation for occupations, still less for the future agriculturalist or mechanic, we find in the Grammar Schools much greater defects. The middle class in all its sections, except the more learned professions, finds no instruction which can suit its special middle class wants. They are fed with the dry husks of ancient learning when they should be taking sound and substantial food from the great treasury of modern discovery. The applications of chemical and mechanical science to everyday wants - such a study of history as will show the progress of civilisation - and such a knowledge of public economy in the large sense of the term as will guard them against the delusions of political fanatics and knaves, and lead to a due understanding of their position in society, are all subjects worth as much labour and enquiry to that great body, as a little Latin learnt in a very imperfect manner, with some scraps of Greek to boot - the usual stunted course of most of our Grammar Schools. (quoted in Spens 1938:19)

Be kind to the Fat Boy!

The old saw recommends before saying anything, consider whether it is true, whether it is necessary, whether it is kind.

Which leads to the thought, if one cannot be kind to long-dead and mostly forgotten people, then how can one be kind to the annoying and exasperating living ones?

In that spirit, I can say that Macaulay was a very smart man, and liberal for his times.  He had some mistaken notions about the Indians of his time, fuelled by works such as James Mill's History of India.  He therefore was on a civilizing mission and was quite sincere about it.  The unfortunate consequences of the British rule that he supported was the impoverishment of India; a draining of rural India of its vitality, which was already attenuated by a century of political disorder; famines during which no respite was given on land revenues, and which resulted in the deaths of millions.  Macaulay, perhaps more than most Britons of his time, was aware of these, but still thought that British rule for India was an overall good.

Macaulay is of interest today, because some of his prescriptions are still in force today.  He cannot be blamed for that because everyone has a choice to try to rise out of the prejudices instilled into them in childhood.   Indians internalized Macaulay's judgment of them, and arrived at an  attitude that Indians are basically second-class, no matter how much they strive and how much they excel.  Earning pats on the head from the West was about the best they could do. (If you read Allen Drury's novel, Advise and Consent, set in Washington, D.C., some particular comments about the character of the Indian ambassador, Krishna Khaleel, I think, are the other side of the coin.)   I remember  this attitude of despair very well from my childhood, my parents were the chief antidote.  My parents were ahead of their time; Indians in recent years are more confident.  However this confidence is in the spheres of business, technology, science and such, not in the area of arts and humanities.  Bollywood still craves for Hollywood acceptance; the good writers and artists are only those recognized by the West, and so on.

Symptomatic, I think, was that Jawaharlal Nehru University taught Arabic, and French and Persian, but not Sanskrit - until around 2001.

This negative attitude was imposed on Indians, to be sure, but to accept it and to perpetuate it, is a choice. 

Updated: April 11, 2022 -- I think most Indians could care two bits now what the New York Times or the Washington Post says about them or Indians.

S'more Reginald Reynolds+

Reginald Reynolds, “The White Sahibs in India”, (1937)

Excerpt from the Author’s Preface

Impartiality is the virtue of a knave or a fool’s wisdom.  I desire neither.

Reginald Reynolds on the impact of the British

"“Ronald Ross, “ writes Mr. Brailford, “has drawn a mordant picture of a class of children, all with enlarged spleens, struggling to learn by rote a table of the Plantagenet Kings.”

Reginald Reynolds, The White Sahibs in India, 1937:

Culturally the net effect of the British occupation has been aptly summed up by Graham Wallas in Human Society:

What has not changed from 1835

What has not changed from 1835 is the production of idiots.  I've previously quoted Makarand Paranjpe on some of the characteristics of this species, so I won't quote it in full. A distinguishing  characteristic of this species is that they have no independent judgment, for something to be worthwhile it must be blessed by the West.

It is also evident that these elite idiots still hold India in thrall - but I am confident that their days at the top are numbered.

From the Despatch of 1854

The historian draws a picture by selection of elements - including everything is not possible.  One should always be aware that there is a larger picture, both in space and in time.  One has to remember that while Bengal was the capital of intellectual ferment, and Calcutta was the capital of the British Raj, there was a vast other space of activity.  Perusing the history of education in the Madras Presidency is both instructive and a good balance to Bengal and Rammohun Roy.  (E.g., Lord Auckland commented that the Madras Presidency had done well in the spread of the "mere" English language, but had done poorly in imparting any knowledge along with the language.)

There is also the dimension of time.  If anyone imagines Macaulay's minute of 1835 is what has come down to India in 2013, let them be disabused of that notion.

The East India Company's Despatch of 1854 declared, among many other things:

It is neither our aim nor desire to substitute the English language for the vernacular dialects of the country.   We have always been the most sensible of the importance of the use of the languages which alone are understood by the great mass of the population.  These languages, and not English, have been put by us in the place of Persian in the administration of justice, and in the intercourse between the officers of Government and the people.  It is indispensible, therefore, that in any general system of education the study of them should be assiduously attended to........

In any general system of education, the English language should be taught where there is a demand for it; but such instruction should always be combined with a careful attention to the study of the vernacular language of the district, and with such general instruction as can be conveyed through that language.....We look therefore, to the English language and to the vernacular languages of India, together as the media for the diffusion of European knowledge.....

"History of Education in the Madras Presidency" says that the Despatch of 1854 was "called the Magna Carta of English education in India".    (I think here English means British rather than the language.)   Quite a different tone from Macaulay; though historians note that the Company's purpose, just as in 1835, was still to reduce the Company's labor costs by being able to substitute cheaper Indians for more expensive Englishmen, if only Indians had the qualifications.

Contrasts

In a history that only talks about Hindu orthodoxy versus a Rammohun Roy's line of thought, Rammohun Roy looks like someone who would endorse fully and wholeheartedly Macaulay's 1835 minute, be very much for the construction of "a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect".

But a picture is made of contrasts, and the historian, just like the photographer provides a selective view of the scene.  Except in photojournalism, this is simply part of the art of photography.   For history, well, it is typically constructed with some political end in mind - it does not rise even to the standards of photojournalism.

We are told by Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas, in Social Change in Modern India, that

"Calcutta had, by 1830, an influential group of rationalists who were notorious for their total rejection of the indigenous society and who accepted in its place everything Western, including Christianity.  It is only apt that they symbolized their acceptance of the West with a meal which included beef.   Raja Ram Mohan Roy was too deeply committed to his religion, culture and country to have any sympathy with the Occidentalists and he founded in 1828 the Brahmo Samaj....."

The cited authority for the existence of the group of rationalists mentioned above is the historian Percival Spear. 

With this in the picture, Rammohun Roy looks rather different, doesn't he?  This Calcutta group was seeming already the "class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" - all Rammohun Roy had to do was to join them.....

Alissa Caton on Macaulay, etc.

http://journals.chapman.edu/ojs/index.php/VocesNovae/article/view/202/535

Provides some more context.

Macaulay's unique imperial discourse found in his "Minute" can be better understood by exploring Macaulay as an historian. His most famous historical writing was his History of England published in 1848. Even though this came after the "Minute on Education," the History was a process and a goal of Macaulay during his time in India. His knowledge and opinions of England combined with his experiences of empire in India influenced Macaulay's overall view of history and the role it should play in every nation as well as answering why England was so exceptional compared to every nation. By understanding Macaulay's opinions on England and its history, it becomes clear why he so fiercely advocated for Anglicist reform in the "Minute".

Some little bit more about Rammohun Roy

After reading Makarand Paranjpe, you might get to thinking about Rammohun Roy, "he's a total rejectionist of the Indian traditions". 

At that "first," even "originary" moment of contact between "modern" India and Europe, Rammohun Roy, in his address to Lord Amherst, pleaded for "a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy, with other useful sciences," (Tradition Modernity & Svaraj 98). But in the process, Rammohun also denigrated "Byakjurun," "Vedant," "Meemangsa," and "Nyaya Shastra." Whether such self-ridicule was tactical or serious is not clear. To all appearances, Indians wished to welcome modernity, even as they wished not to give up their traditions entirely. The earliest case of this attempted synthesis is Rammohun himself, with his Brahmo Samaj, a sort of modernized version of Vedanta.

Yet, when Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his Minute of 2 February 1835 in favour of English education, he made ample use of Rammohun's address to Lord Amherst: "I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia" (ibid 101). In places, his text echoes the very words of Rammohun, as when he cites the procedures laid down for expiating the sin of killing a goat (106), as an example of the uselessness of traditional Indian knowledge.

However, perusing "The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy" (edited by Sophia Dobson Collet, Calcutta, 1914", one finds otherwise. 

A quote from Sir Thomas Munro

"I do not understand", said Sir Thomas Munro in 1813, "what is meant by the civilisation of the Hindus. In the higher branches of science, in the knowledge of the theory and practice of good government, and in education which, by banishing prejudice and superstition, opens the mind to receive instruction of every kind from every quarter, they are much inferior to Europeans.

But if a good system of agriculture, unrivalled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing and arithmetic, the general practice of hospitality and charity among each other, and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect and delicacy are among the signs which denote a civilised people, and if civilisation is to be an article of trade between England and India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo." (Quoted in Reginald Reynolds, "The White Sahibs in India")

The aftermath of the 1857 Revolt

The aftermath of the 1857 Revolt was that the British Government abolished the East India Company and took up the task of governing India. By the statistics, and by the consequences, it seems that the British Government was an even greater blood-sucker than the Company.

More Laissez-Faire!

American financiers today are merely following in the footsteps of their British Brethren from a century and more ago.

(Reginald Reynolds, "The White Sahibs in India")

By 1931 the total capital expenditure by the State on railways stood at nearly £600,000,000. According to Sir John Strachye's Finance and Public Works of India the railways built by State enterprise between 1869 and 1881 involved a total outlay of £26,689,000. The rest of the railways were, in the great majority of cases, built by Guaranteed Companies, most of them having since been purchased by the Government.

The nature of the contracts by which these Guaranteed Companies built Indian railways is probably unique in the history of financial operations.  The Company would be guaranteed an interest on its capital by the Indian Government at a rate which was itself excessive when compared with the prevailing market rates.  Free land would be granted by the Government thus obviating the principal difficulty with which the railway speculator usually has to contend.   If and when the railway showed a profit, that profit was the property of the Company; but when there was a loss the Company's dividends would be paid from the Indian taxes.   Thus with the minimum of cost to themselves, a group of financiers could, without any of the normal risks of speculation, invest their capital with the certainty of a minimum dividend and the hope of a surplus.  The people of India, who were their sleeping partners in this astonishing arrangement were compelled to balance the shareholder's losses and to produce, in addition, substantial dividends for them out of their taxes.

 The result, as per British government committees' own reports, is that the government in India found that it itself could construct railway lines at £4000 per mile in identical terrain that the private parties spent £18,000 per mile.

Let us recall that the contractors to the US Government of Occupation in Iraq had similar deals - cost-plus contracts - and the Iraqis were going to pay for these.  The Iraqis, however, were uncivilized enough to blow up Americans and Iraqis alike, and I think it is the American taxpayer who has had to foot the burden for the Bush fat-cats.

PS: the British added all of this to the Indian debt; the interest on the railways alone amounted to £40,000,000 per year. Most of Britain's Asiatic wars were also charged to India and paid for by the Indian peasant.

From a commentary on Macaulay

Reginald Reynolds has this in a footnote:

"Macaulay was in the long line of British statesmen who found in the administration of India a cure for their financial difficulties.   "No doubt prudential motives", wrote H. H. Milman, " and those of no ungenerous prudence, influenced his determination.   By a few years of economy, careful but not illiberal, he might make a provision for his future life." (Milman's biographical note to Macaulay's History of England.)  He had formerly earned only £200 a year and went to India on account of his father's failure in business.

Free trade!

Reginald Reynolds tells us that the Indian ship-building industry "was also doomed, for we read how "the arrival in the Port of London of Indian produce in Indian-built ships created a sensation among the monopolists which could not have been exceeded if a hostile fleet had appeared in the Thames.  The ship-builders of the Port of London took the lead in raising the cry of alarm.....An obliging Government saw to it that the Indian industry perished."{A Popular History of British India,  W. Cooke Taylor, 1842}

Bengal Famine 1770

In the Bengal famine of 1770,  the official East India Company figures were that one-third the population of Bengal perished  (today estimated to be about 10 million people).  The East India Company did not, however, relent on taxes, specifically the land revenues on agricultural lands.

It is because these blighters write the history, that they are supposedly better than Hitler and the Nazis.  Make no mistake, they were just as murderous.   The number of Satis they prevented were a few hundred a year, this makes them humanitarian - just remember that.  Oh, and a few guys gave some liberal but ineffectual speeches in the House of Commons.  Hitler was not so smart, he should have loved his victims in his speeches, and I'm sure the world would think of him as highly as they do of the English.

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PS:  "A Captain Edwards who visited Oudh in 1774 reported it to be "flourishing in manufactures, cultivation and commerce."  After the kind attentions of the East India Company, "Nine years later he found the country 'forlorn and desolate'.   Others confirmed his report, and Parliamentary Reports have recorded their verdicts."  (Reginald Reynolds, "The White Sahibs in India").

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PPS: The worst scum on earth today, fit fellows of the East India Company,  are those who try to justify that imperialism today.

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PPPS: Let us not forget the class of Indians that was raised by the Company as collaborators.

The Prayer of the East India Company's Servants, 1689

Reginald Reynolds, gives us this, in "The White Sahibs in India": "[This prayer, used by the Company's servants, is given as quoted by the Rev. John Ovington, sometime chaplain to the Company's factory in Surat, in his book, A Voyage to Suratt in the Year 1689. (Published in London, 1696.) Three such prayers were in 1698 "approved by His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Bishop of London."]

THE PRAYER OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY'S SERVANTS

O Almighty and most Merciful God, who are the Sovereign Protector of all that Trust in Thee, and the Author of all Spiritual and Temporal Blessings, we thy unworthy Creatures do most humbly implore thy goodness for a plentiful Effusion of thy Grace upon our Employers, thy Servants, the Right Honourable EAST INDIA Company of ENGLAND.  Prosper them in all their publick Undertakings, and make them famous and successful in all their Governments, Colonies and Commerce both by Sea and Land; so that they may prove a publick Blessing by the increase of Honour, Wealth and Power to our Native Country, as well as to themselves.  Continue their Favours towards us, and inspire their Generals, Presidents, Agents and Councils in these remote parts of the World, and all others that are entrusted with any Authority under them, with Piety towards Thee our God, and with Wisdom, Fidelity and Circumspection in their several Stations;  That we may all discharge our respective Duties faithfully, and live Virtuously, in due Obedience to our superiors, and in Love, Peace and Charity one towards another;  That these INDIAN Nations among whom we dwell, seeing our sober and righteous Conversation, may be induced to have a just esteem for our most holy Profession of the Gospel of our Lord, and Saviour Jesus Christ, to whom be Honour, Praise and Glory, now and for ever.

AMEN.

 

John Bright, continued

Bright's speech in the House of Commons, June 3, 1853: (emphasis added)

Now, with reference to education, so far as could be gathered from the Returns before the House—he had sought to obtain Returns of a more specific character, but to no purpose, having received the usual answer in these matters, that there was no time for preparing them—but from the Returns they had before them he found that while the Government had overthrown almost entirely the native education that had subsisted throughout the country so universally that a schoolmaster was as regular a feature in every village as the "potail" or head man, it had done next to nothing to supply the deficiency which had been created, or to substitute a better system.

Out of a population of 100,000,000 natives we instructed but 25,000 children; out of a gross revenue of 29,000,000 £ sterling, extracted from that population, we spent but 66,000£ in their education. In India, let it be borne in mind, the people were not in the position with regard to providing for their own education which the people of this country enjoyed, and the education which they had provided themselves with, the Government had taken from them, supplying no adequate system in its place. The people of India were in a state of poverty, and of decay, unexampled in the annals of the country under their native rulers. From their poverty the Government wrung a gross revenue of more than 29,000,000£ sterling, and out of that 29,000,000£, returned to them 66,000£ per annum for the purposes of education!

No doubt Macaulay and Niall Ferguson and the like would think that the 66,000£ was adequate, and that displacing the universal native education system in favor of a vacuum was greatly civilizing for India.  Of course, to balance this imposed universal illiteracy they abolished Sati, and that justifies it all for the benighted latter day disciples of such Apostles of Empire.

John Bright was a Quaker, and I think it is among Quakers that one finds the most humanism, compared to alleged liberals like Macaulay.