Traditional histories of the emergence of Indian nationalism conventionally counterpose Christian Europe to Hindu India, an exclusive pairing that admits a number of variations. The predominantly literary quality of the model of the Brahmannical/Christian encounter excludes the unlettered discourses of debt-bonded subalterns. It also effaces the generality of Muslims. In particular, the image of British foreigners taking over from Mughal foreigners suggests that Indian Muslims had somewhere to go back to. It does not matter where. Their effective disappearance is the practical outcome.
The same exclusion operates in a variety of historiographical guises. Some are obvious. It is only to be expected, for instance, that a Christian account should play down the consequence of Islam and emphasise that of Christianity. Sophie Dobson Collet’s The Life and Letters of the Raja Rammohun Roy[82] was a pious exercise designed to demonstrate the virtues of a colonial subject to an English readership. It remains the most widely cited secondary source on Rammohun. Collet did not question the Tuhfat’s manifestly Islamic provenance; she simply discounted its significance for Rammohun’s later career. Nonetheless, as a Unitarian convert to Trinitarian Christianity, she remained able to acknowledge that it was ‘indubitable that Rammohun always retained a large amount of sympathy with Islam for the sake of its cardinal doctrine of the unity of God, and that he warmly appreciated the good which had thence resulted in counteracting Hindu idolatry’.[83]
Though a Hindu nationalist is as likely as a Christian to discount Islam, the situation is complicated by Rammohun’s having a foot in two camps – how to relegate the Muslim part without jeopardising the nationalist part? This dilemma found serial realisation in the work of Romesh Chandra Majumdar, the doyen of Hindu-nationalist historians. Majumdar consistently stressed Hindu/Muslim dividedness and cast Islam as antithetical to the nationalist (‘freedom’) movement.[84] In keeping with this view, Majumdar divided British domination into two phases, a benign one (the suppression of Muslim power) and an oppressive, subsequent one. From a communal perspective such as this, it would be unthinkable that a major restatement of Hindu ethics should have sprung from Islamic precedents. Thus Rammohun must have got his ideas from the West. Majumdar did not shrink from iconoclasm; this made Rammohun the first great comprador.[85] Yet this evaluation marked an extraordinary turnabout. Ten years earlier, in his History of the Freedom Movement in India, Majumdar had represented Rammohun as the ‘first and best representative’ of the new spirit of rationalism.[86]
In a manner reminiscent of European Orientalism, the earlier Majumdar had singled out Rammohun’s opposition to ‘medieval’ forces for particular credit, medieval and Mughal being readily interchangeable. Thus Rammohun could enlist British inspiration to rouse India from a period of medieval decay without unduly compromising the Hindu nation’s credentials. Despite their incongruity, Majumdar’s ambivalent versions of Rammohun consistently sustained a Hindu-nationalist agenda. Since the Mughals were no less foreign than their British conquerors, the early phase of British domination could figure as the lesser of two evils in a way that did not have to compromise nationalist memory. The contrasting depictions of Rammohun do not affect this outcome. All that changes is the periodisation: the earlier depiction makes him part of the benign phase of British rule, while, in the revised version, the same actions, displaced into its oppressive phase, become compradorship. Either way, Islam is excluded from a nationalist version of the colonial duality.
The exclusion of Islam does not require a religious basis, however. A secular dichotomy – especially the modern liberal assimilation of East/West to traditional/modern – is no less solidifying within its poles. David Kopf’s bifurcated title, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance, belies his attempts to complexify the two parties to the colonial encounter. For, although he went to considerable lengths to show how the category ‘British’ split up into conservative/liberal, Orientalist/Anglicist and so on (with the bhadralok correspondingly divided into orthodox/progressive, etc.), Kopf failed to avoid the familiar dualism of penetration and response.
From its title on, Kopf’s subsequent book, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind,[87] makes even grander claims for Rammohun’s legacy. This book’s manifest pretension is to the reconstruction of a quantity known as ‘the modern Indian mind’ from the evidence of a small association of Bengali bhadralok, without regard either to the whole of Muslim society or to the rest of the Hindu population (or, for that matter, to the rest of India). In it, Kopf returns to the European division between Orientalists and Anglicists, reaffirming Rammohun’s encounter with Orientalism as the model for the rest of the century (and, presumably, for the entire ‘modern Indian mind’).
Kopf’s Orientalist-Anglicist controversy corresponds to Majumdar’s chronological division of British colonialism. The era of Orientalist predominance, of which Kopf approves, accords with Majumdar’s early benign period, while the ensuing Anglicist ascendancy is for both scholars a victory for racial suprematism. Regardless of their doctrinal differences, both require a division whereby British rule has an early, relatively benevolent phase, since they use this phase to graft Europe’s ideological import onto a Hindu version of indigenous tradition.
The notion of colonialism having a positive initial phase is also stamped on Indian Marxism, where it has caused any number of problems. Without embarking on a resuscitation of the Asiatic Mode of Production, we should at least recall in this connection that the Marx of the New York Daily Tribune articles saw British incursion, for all its violent rapacity, as injecting the historical germ necessary to disrupt the stagnant balance of Indian society and let loose the dynamic tensions which would eventually propel India into the capitalist era and thence on to its own socialist revolution.[88] In conformity with this perspective (and with his Comintern line that the revolution would flow from the colonies), the pioneer Indian communist M. N. Roy contended that the iron hand of British rule provided the objective conditions for an Indian act of emancipation,[89] while Palme Dutt maintained that the ‘objectively progressive’ aspect of British colonialism was its destruction of village economies that had prevented people from rising above subsistence preoccupations.[90]
In a colonial context, one of the drawbacks of orthodox Marxism is that the category ‘class’ is blind to ethnic differences. The religious and colour-coded nature of colonial domination seems incidental.[91] Thus we should not expect that an Islamic increment should significantly affect a Marxist critique of bhadralok ideology. The issue is not the etymology of comprador thinking but its conformity with colonial relations of production. In a careful analysis of the material conditions of Rammohun’s thought, S. N. Mukherjee did not erect the usual barrier between the Tuhfat, to which he attached considerable importance, and the rest of Rammohun’s ideas. He also allowed the possibility of looking on Rammohun as a tantric opponent of Bengali Vaishnavism and/or as ‘the last prophet of the Indo-Islamic syncretic movement carrying on the tradition of Kabir, Dara Shikoh [Akbar’s son] and many others’.[92] Ultimately, however, the dual encounter – in this case, East versus West as feudal (or Asiatic) versus capitalist – was bound to eclipse such heterodox inspirations:
Rammohun’s faith in individualism was inspired by Western political philosophy, more particularly by the works of Locke and Bentham, but individualism was also part and parcel of the social, religious and economic aspirations of the Bengali middle class. Moreover, the social model of Rammohun – a competitive market society – corresponds to the social reality of Bengal in the early Nineteenth Century.[93]
I am not suggesting that Rammohun was impervious to Bentham (he was not). The point is, rather, that ‘individualism’ is not dependant on Bentham (read Europe). It can select other notations. For instance, Maxime Rodinson argued cogently that the Neoplatonic tradition in Islam provided a model for individualistic philosophy that was as capable as its Western-Christian counterpart of subtending an emergent local capitalism.[94] The issue is important because the one-to-one correlation between ‘market society’ and certain European philosophers makes individualism (among other things) impossible without European invasion. This, in turn, subordinates Indian history to the global narrative of European capitalist expansion as surely as missionary ideologues subordinated it to the coming of universal Christianity. Mukherjee’s account is built on what Partha Chatterjee terms ‘the condition of discursive unity’:
This condition is nothing other than the assumption that the history of Europe and the history of India are united within the same framework of universal history, the assumption that made possible the incorporation of the history of India into the history of Britain in the nineteenth century: Europe became the active subject of Indian history because Indian history was now a part of ‘world history’.[95]
In substantially ruling out an Islamic contribution to the enunciation of colonial nationalism, however, Chatterjee himself might be seen to have subscribed to a global incorporation. In his influential postcolonial account, which merits more extended consideration, Chatterjee scrupulously and regularly registers Indian nationalism’s dependence on the exclusion of Islam.[96] Yet there is a tension between this acknowledgement and the structuring of his narrative. In his account, the predicament of derivation produced a powerful dual agenda. On the one hand, Indian nationalism aspired to the technical, material and political advantages that colonialism had made available; on the other, it sought to resist the colonisers’ intrusions into native life. The outcome was a division into discursive domains that resemble the public and private spheres of feminist critique. Thus outer became to inner as material to spiritual, as universal to particular, as economic to cultural and so on, a trade-off whereby nationalists’ rising to the colonial bait in the domain of science, economics and statecraft was counterbalanced by an aggressive particularism, an insistence on irreducible difference in the inner-family world of Bengali language, religion and culture. For Chatterjee, this inner domain, which gave nationalism the autonomous difference from Europe that a self-conscious and self-producing national project required, was prerequisite to the development of political nationalism, conventionally dated from the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. This reversal of the received order of priorities enables Chatterjee to backdate the emergence of nationalism proper to the 1860s, which saw the development of a new, self-regulating internal realm of Bengali language and culture with the confidence to exclude Europeans. Though his prioritising of nationalism’s inner realm enables Chatterjee to date nationalism from the aftermath of the Great Insurrection of 1857 (which the bhadralok had failed to support), it also instals a rupture between the preceding period of reform and the nationalist movement. Nationalist self-sufficiency is distinguished from Rammohun-style reform, which sought to regulate Bengali society by enlisting the support of the colonial masters. The problem here is that Indian Islam also lies on the other side of this rupture. Thus we should consider Chatterjee’s periodisation.
As observed, what interests Chatterjee is not so much the separation of nationalism’s two discursive domains as their mutual effects, the ways in which each ‘has not only acted in opposition to and as a limit upon the other, but, through this process of struggle, has also shaped the emergent form of the other’.[97] This dynamic mutuality leaves behind the static pairings – traditional versus modern, status versus contract, feudal versus capitalist, etc. – that colonial discourse has made familiar. Thus subalternity is not simply a feudal throwback, and the nationalist elite are more than merely an incomplete version of the capitalist moderne. Rather, together and singly, in their ceaseless co-formation, they are historically specific. This interpenetration of the two poles, a Saussurian procedure inherited from Ranajit Guha, performs a crucial methodological function. It is the basis on which the Subaltern Studies group insists that Hindu–Muslim antagonism is not some atavistic residue from a superseded era but an active constituent of colonial modernity. This structuralist element, shared with the earlier Foucault, is conducive to abruptness of periodisation (Chatterjee terms his version of Foucault’s episteme shift a ‘narrative break’).[98]
In before-and-after mode, Chatterjee reads Mritunjay Vidyalankar’s history of India, published in Bengali in 1808, to show how the inculcation of European narrative forms modernised the historical consciousness of educated Bengalis. Mritunjay’s[99] narratology, which Chatterjee memorably dubs ‘entirely pre-colonial’, is shown to lack the distinguishing features of the first criterion of nationalist history writing, a consciousness of the nation as historical agent and of the historian as forming part of it. Rather, the agents in Mritunjay’s chronicle are gods and kings.[100] Moving forward half a century, Chatterjee then finds the requisite national agency, and historians identifying with it, in Bengali textbooks of the 1860s and 1870s:
History was no longer the play of divine will or the fight of right against wrong; it had become merely the struggle for power. The advent of British rule was no longer a blessing of Providence. English-educated Bengalis were now speculating on the political conditions that might have made the British success possible.[101]
This is no doubt the case, but consider the following statement, which could well be the implicit referent of Chatterjee’s ‘blessing of Providence’. It was made by a Bengali in an appeal to the King of England in 1823, around four decades before the origin of nationalist historical consciousness as Chatterjee dates it:
Divine Providence at last, in its abundant mercy, stirred up the English nation to break the yoke of those tyrants [the Mughals] and to receive the oppressed natives of Bengal under its protection ... your dutiful subjects consequently have not viewed the English as a body of conquerors, but rather as deliverers, and look up to your Majesty not only as a Ruler, but also as a father and protector.[102]
This appeal has been taken by Majumdar to show that Rammohun, who penned it, was so anxious to celebrate the replacement of the Mughals by the British that he repudiated India’s Islamic inheritance.[103] Yet it was actually a none-too-subtle serving of what his audience wanted to hear. The excerpt is part of an indignant demand that recently introduced press regulations be withdrawn. The flattering comparison between the British and the Mughals allows the regulations to be depicted as incompatible with the qualities that had enabled the British to defeat the Mughals in the first place.[104] As Rammohun’s strategy unfolds, however, the self-same comparison produces the possibility that continued abuses of British power would be resisted violently. In stark contrast to Mritunjay’s version of ‘Divine Providence’, therefore, Rammohun’s conduces to anti-colonial agency on the part of Indians. The initially favourable comparison with the Mughals being agreeable to his English audience, Rammohun goes on to suggest a corollary whereby much less pleasant consequences would follow if they continued with the press regulations – consequences which conspicuously involved conscious historical agency, including the establishment of independence on the part of the subjected:
The greater part of Hindustan having been for several centuries subject to Muhammadan rule, the civil and religious rights of its original inhabitants were consistently trampled on, and from the habitual oppression of the conquerors, a great body of their subjects in the Southern Peninsula (Dukhin), afterwards called Marhattahs, and another body in the Western parts now styled Sikhs, were at last driven to revolt; and when the Mussulman power became feeble, they ultimately succeeded in establishing their independence.[105]
As this example shows, Rammohun himself was not above tactically acquiescing in the characterisation of the Mughals as foreigners. A more important point is the extent to which his campaigning anticipates characteristics that Chatterjee confines to the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, might we not be forgiven for discerning a tacit admission on Chatterjee’s part that the supposedly European-derived nationalist mode of historical memory, the one that was lacking in Mritunjay, might be found (if only we were allowed to look) in Persian and Arabic?:
This [Mritunjay’s] was the form of historical memory before the modern European modes were implanted in the minds of the educated Bengali. In Mritunjay, the specific form of this memory was one that was prevalent among the Brahman literati in eighteenth-century Bengal. What, then, was the form followed by Bengali Muslim writers? The court chronicles of the Afghan or the Mughal nobility are not of concern here because these were never written in Bengali.[106]
Or consider the following:
Another source often acknowledged in the Bengali textbooks is the series called The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians ... these eight volumes comprise translated [into English] extracts from over 150 works, principally in Persian, covering a period from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries. It was a gigantic example of the privilege claimed by modern European scholarship to process the writings of a people supposedly devoid of historical consciousness and render into useful sources of history what otherwise could ‘scarcely claim to rank higher than Annals’.[107]
The problem with this, of course, is that, having excluded Persian works from our concern, Chatterjee is not in a position then to reassimilate them to the entirely pre-colonial status that he assigns to Mritunjay. Not, that is, unless ‘entirely pre-colonial’ is a condition of discursive unity. Chatterjee nowhere argues, let alone shows, that Indian Islamic discourse in Persian lacked historical protocols to distinguish it from Mritunjay’s epistemology.[108] The periodisation that Mritunjay’s missing modernity sustains requires suppression of the counter example of Rammohun Roy, whose narratology was as nationalist, on Chatterjee’s own criteria, as was his establishment of that native self-improvement organisation the Brahmo Samaj.
Despite their substantial differences, therefore, these various historical approaches agree on endorsing a recalcitrant Hindu/European binarism in which the two parties are contrapuntally homogenised. Whether or not the category ‘nation’ is altogether appropriate to this situation, transnational history’s insistence on a wider global perspective provides a basis for unravelling such homogeneities.