Interesting Extract From White Mughals By William Dalrymple

[dalsingh101]

It's very interesting to read the following extracts from the above book in that it seems to give a time line for the development of certain colonial policies and attitudes towards India and its inhabitants. From a Sikh perspective it allows us to gain a window into what British colonialists were doing in the rest of India whilst they were eying up the then independent Sikh empire. To place the narrative in context one could read Madra and Singh's, Sicques, Tigers and Thieves, which contain many first hand observations of Sikhs and their empire from the very period referred to in the text below. The text here paints an interesting picture which claims that prior to the dominance of the East India Company (EIC) in the subcontinent, Europeans held very different attitudes towards the 'natives' to after their ascendancy. I think it may well provide a blueprint and explanation of the development of institutional racism in British society:

White Mughals, by William Dalrymple, published by Harper Perennial 2004 – extracts from pp 46-54:

“Most powerful of the critics was one of the Company’s Directors, Charles Grant. Grant was amongst the first of a new breed of Evangelical Christians, and he brought his fundamentalist religious opinions directly to the East India Company boardroom. Writing ‘it is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions’, he proposed in 1787 to launch missions to convert a people whom he characterised as ‘universally and wholly corrupt…..depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’. Within a few decades the missionaries – initially based at the Danish settlement of Serampore – were beginning fundamentally to change British perceptions of the Hindus. No longer were they inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom,….but instead merely ‘poor benighted heathen’, or even ‘licentious pagans’, some of whom, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion, and with it the path to Civilisation.

….It was to combat the intolerance of these Evangelicals that [the more enlightened British General] Stuart anonymously published a pamphlet called A Vindication of the Hindoos. In this text he tried to discourage any attempt by European missionaries to convert the Hindus, arguing that, as he put it, ‘on the enlarged principles of moral reasoning, Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilised society’…..The reaction that Stuart generated by writing his defence of Hinduism is a measure of how attitudes were beginning to change at the close of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth century. A full-scale pamphlet war broke out, with furious attacks on the anonymous ‘Bengal Officer’ who produced the work, denouncing him as an ‘infidel’ and a ‘pagan’.

….[General] Stuart was not alone in facing criticism. All over India, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, attitudes were changing among the British. Men who showed too great an enthusiasm for Hinduism, for Indian practices or even for their Indian wives and Anglo-Indian children, were finding that the climate was growing distinctly chilly.

David Hare, a Scottish watchmaker who founded the Hindu College in Calcutta, was actually denied a Christian burial when he died of cholera, on the grounds that he had become more Hindu than Christian. Many more found that their Indian ways led to a block on their promotion. When Francis Gillanders, a British tax-collector stationed in Bihar, was found to be involving himself too closely with the [buddhist] temple at Bodh Gaya, to which he donated a bell in 1798, the Directors of the Company back in London wrote to the Governor General expressing their horror that a Christian should be, as they put it, administering ‘heathen’ rites. A little later Frederick Shore found that his adoption of native dress so enraged the increasingly self-righteous officials of Calcutta that a government order was issued explicitly forbidding Company servants from wearing anything other than European dress. The following year the army issued similar orders forbidding European officers from taking part in the [Hindu] festival of Holi….The shutters were beginning to come down.”

[dalsingh101]

“Ideas of racial and ethnic hierarchy were also beginning to be aired for the first time in the late 1780s, and it was the burgeoning mixed-blood Anglo-Indian community which felt the brunt of the new intolerance. From 1786, under the new Governor General, Lord Cornwallis, a whole raft of legislation was brought in excluding the children of British men who had Indian wives from employment by the Company. Cornwallis arrived in India fresh from his defeat by George Washington at Yorktown. He was determined to ensure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America.

With this in mind, in 1786 an order was passed banning the Anglo-Indian orphans of British soldiers from travelling to England to be educated, so qualifying for service in the Company army. In 1791 the door was slammed shut when an order was issued that no-one with an Indian parent could be employed by the civil, military or marine branches of the Company. In 1795, further legislation was issued, explicitly disqualifying anyone not descended from European parents on both sides from serving in the Company’s armies except as ‘pipers, drummers, bandsmen and farriers’, Yet, like their British fathers, the Anglo-Indians were also banned from owning land. Thus excluded from all the most obvious sources of lucrative employment, the Anglo-Indians quickly found themselves at the beginning of a long slide down the social scale. This would continue until, a century later, they had been reduced to a community of minor clerks and train drivers.

….It was not just the Anglo-Indians who suffered from the new and quickly-growing prejudices in Calcutta. Under Cornwallis, all non-Europeans began to be treated with disdain by the increasingly arrogant officials at the Company headquarters of Fort William….These new racial attitudes affected all aspects of relations between the British and Indians. The Bengal Wills show it was at this time that the number of Indian bibis [wives or consorts] being mentioned in wills and inventories began to decline: from turning up in one in three wills in 1780 and 1785, the practice went into steep decline. Between 1805 and 1810, bibis appear in only one in every four wills; by 1830 it is one in six; by the middle of the century they have all but disappeared. The second edition of Thomas Williamson’s East India Vade Mecum, published in 1825, had all references to bibis completely removed from it, while biographies and memoirs of prominent eighteenth-century British Indian worthies which mentioned their Indian wives were re-edited in the early nineteenth century so that their consorts were removed from later editions;

….Two words were growing apart…..If that gap widened into an abyss during the first years of the nineteenth century, it was largely due to the influence of one man….On 8 November 1797, Lord [Richard] Wellesley [elder brother of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington], a minor Irish aristocrat, set out from England to take up his appointment as Governor General of Bengal and head of the Supreme Government of India. For nearly three hundred years Europeans coming out to the subcontinent had been assimilating themselves to India in a kaleidoscope of different ways. That process was now drawing to a close. Increasingly Europeans were feeling they had nothing to learn from India, and they had less and less inclination to discover anything to the contrary. India was perceived as a suitable venue for ruthless and profitable European expansion, where glory and fortunes could be acquired to the benefit of all concerned. It was a place to be changed and conquered, not a place to be changed or conquered by.

This new Imperial approach was one that Lord Wellesley was determined not only to make his own, but to embody. His Imperial policies would effectively bring into being the main superstructure of the Raj as it survived up to 1947; he also brought with him the arrogant and disdainful British racial attitudes that buttressed and sustained it.”

[amardeep]

Many thanks i'll read it later totnight