Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
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capita income of Britain was approximately £30, that of India was a mere
£2. Yet where Britons were taxed at a rate of 8 percent, the far poorer
Indians were taxed at a rate of 15 percent. Such figures put the relation-
ship between taxation and representation in a novel light. They called
into question the central British claim that theirs was a benevolent
dictatorship, and that they were providing t he Indians with good,
cheap government that was of far higher quality than anything the
Indians had hitherto provided for themselves.
71
What did India really obtain from the British government, in return for
the £50,000,000 that was annually collected in taxes? A system of rule that
was overly expensive and ill suited to Indian needs and cond itions.
A system that was tailored to the desires of British aristocrats, who looked
to India to pay for Britain’s global political and military ambitions.
A system which transferred huge sums of money into the pockets of
British officials, investors, and entrepreneurs, who would spend it in the
metropole. Adding up all the figures that he obtained from a multitude of
sources, Naoroji calculated that every year some £30,000,000 to
£40,000,000 was drained away from India. Both Naoroji’s numbers
and his logic were questioned by Raj apologists, but it was dif ficult
to dispute either the originality or the analytical force of his research.
His theory of the “drain” blasted a huge hole in the rhetoric of liberal
imperialism. By casting doubt on the vaunted benevolence of
British rule, it raised fundamental doubts about the progressive char-
acter of the entire Anglo-Indian epoch. To be sure, Naoroji did not
dispute the benevolent intentions of Britain’s liberal imperialists, and he
repeatedly acknowledged that India had gained important benefits
from her rule. Inde ed, it was the very promises made that had raised
expectations, and insured that British performance would be rigorously
judged.
It is useless for the British to compare themselves with the past native rulers. If the
British do not show themselves to be vastly superior in proportion to their enlight-
enment and civilization, if India does not prosper and progress under them far
more largely, there will be no justification for their existence in India ... It is
useless and absurd to remind us constantly that once the British fiat brought order
out of chaos ... The natives of the present day have not seen that chaos, and do
not feel it.
72
What they had se en, and did feel, according to Naoroji, was the expe-
rience of political disenfranchisement combined with economic drain.
Precisely because this drain was a genuine product of wealth-enhancing
71
NUBR, 60.
72
NUBR, 218, 222; see also 381, 458–61.
Dadabhai Naoroji 295
economic development, Indians would become all the more resentful as
they saw the benefits diverted into England’s purse.
In the case of former conquests, the invaders either retired with their plunder and
booty, or became the rulers of the country. When they only plundered and went
back, they made no doubt, great wounds: but India, with her industry, revived
and healed the wounds. When the invaders became the rulers of the country,
they settled down in it ... Whatever the country produced remained within the
country ... With the English the case is peculiar .. . those wounds are kept
perpetually open and widening, by draining away the life-blood in a continuous
stream. The former rulers were like butchers hacking here and there, but the
English with their scientific scalpel cut to the very heart, and yet, lo! There is no
wound to be seen, and soon the plaster of the high talk of civilization, progress and
what not, covers up the wound!
73
The problem for Naoroji (as for all the figures treated in this chapter) was
that they genuinely believed the high talk of civilization and progress.
They were themselves the products of this talk, and could not exist in its
absence. Yet the wounds hurt all the more for this being so. Naoroji had
discovered something profoundly important about the progress narrative:
it suffered from internal contradictions. The very forces that propelled it
forward also undermined it, at least in the form in which it was experi-
enced by imperial capitalism’s subaltern groups. Initially at a loss to know
what to do with this discovery, Naoroji convinced himself that it was a
correctable error. The contradiction was not inherent in British imperia-
lism. It was the result of bad policies by ill-informed policy-makers,
who needed to be convinced that they were besmirching the true British
traditions of progress and liberty. For this reason, he ent itled the collec-
tion of papers in which he developed the drain theory Poverty and
Un-British Rule in India, with its implication that true British rule was
bringing progress and plenty, whereas poverty eventuated only because of
the drain.
True British rule will vastly benefit both Britain and India. My whole object in all
my writings is to impress upon the British People, that instead of a disastrous
explosion of the British Indian Empire, as must be the result of the present
dishonourable un-British system of government, there is to be a great and glorious
future for Britain and India to an extent unconceivable at present, if the British
people will awaken to their duty, and will be true to their British instincts of fair
play and justice.
74
This belief that the vast majority of the British people were losers by
the drain was key to Naoroji’s political calculations, if not to his
73
NUBR, 211.
74
NUBR, xii, xiii.
296 Indian liberals and Greater Britain
historiographical claims. Again and again, he argued that a prosperous
India would provide markets for more British products, repeatedly quot-
ing Macaulay on the absurdity of the policies that “would keep a hundred
millions of men [now more than 200] from being our customers in order
that they might continue to be our slaves.” The enslavement of Indians, he
implied, might be inconsistent with the long-term survival of liberty in
Britain. Leaving aside a small sector of aristocratic elites, he did not
believe that the vast bulk of Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen really
benefited from the drain. They had an interest in resolving the contra-
diction, since allowing it to fester would prevent their own progress
narrative from proceeding.
75
While Naoroji hoped to make his drain theory an effective bargaining
card with the British, he also recognized its effectiveness in promoting
Indian unity. Unlike the versions of nationalism purveyed by Keshub and
Bankim, it promised to draw Indians of every caste and religion away from
their differen ces, and toward the common grievances against Britain that
they shared. It appealed to the educated urban middle classe s, while
focusing on the plight of the lower classes, and the poverty of the rural
peasantry. Yet in appropriating the drain theory to their cri tique of the
British Raj, the overwhelming majority of these men continued to insist
that their criticisms were meant to be constructive. It aimed to strengthen
rather than to destroy the British–Indian union, by negotiating an end to
political misgovernment and fiscal inequity.
76
7 R. C. Dutt and the riches of ancient Hindu civilization
When Naoroji published his first paper on the drain, he was already fifty-
three years old. When Poverty and Un-British Rule was fully compiled, he
was seventy-six. Under these circumstances, a major focus from the 1860s
onward was to mentor new generations of Indian students who came to
London to study for government or legal careers. Indeed, Banerjea and
Dutt were only the first in a long line of young men who had open access to
Naoroji’s larder, company, and sage advice.
77
Clearly, Naoroji hoped that
the younger generation would be able to achieve many of the goals that
had eluded him, and that as Indians such as Dutt moved into positions of
75
“After having a glorious history of heroic struggles for constitutional government,
England is now rearing up a body of Englishmen trained up and accustomed to despot-
ism – Is it possible that such habits of despotism, with which Indian officials return from
India, should not, in the course of time, influence the English character and institutions?”
(NUBR, 214). MMW, 571.
76
Mehrotra, Indian National Congress,I:28–30.
77
GLD, 1–38; R. C. Dutt, Romesh Chunder Dutt (New Delhi, 1968), 1–19.
R. C. Dutt and the riches of ancient Hindu civilization 297
authority, they would be able to reverse the bad policies that were respon-
sible for the drain. During his early years in the ICS, as we have seen, Dutt
also hoped that this would be the case. When he ran into resistance as a
bureaucrat and as a thinker, he began to see that the problem ran deeper
than mere differences over policy. Britons and Indians viewed the world
differently, and needed an intermediary – someone with a foot in both
camps – who could interpret the one group to the other. Given the vast
economic, cultural, and physical distances between the two societies,
much translational work (both literal and figurative) would be required.
Before any headway could be made on the question of the drain, cultural
communication had to be substantially improved.
Even after he resigned himself to the likelihood that he would never gain
a “European reputation,” Dutt recognized that there was much intellec-
tual work that he could usefully do. As the product of both a London and a
Bengali education, invested with official status and indigenous authority,
he was perhaps the one man who might bring imperial masters, English
readers, and Bengali babus (literally) together on the same page. Thus, in
1877, he published The Literature of Bengal,thefirst historical survey of its
kind to be written in English. Locating the origin of Bengali literature in
Kasiram Das’s fifteenth-century translation of the Mahabharata, Dutt was
inspired to re-translate it into English. So impressed was Bankim with
these efforts that he persuaded Dutt to write four Bankim-style historical
novellas, published together in 1879.
78
In all this shuttling back and forth
between En glish, Bengali, and Sanskrit, Dutt was groping his way toward
a new kind of intellectual bordering that would simultaneously contribute
a peripheral perspective to European social science, help develop modern
Bengali as a literary language, and recover ancient Sanskrit texts for an
English reading audience, while bringing British socio-economic know-
ledge to the people of his native land. Although Dutt did not belabor the
difference, the whole point of this effort was to demonstrate (contra
Keshub) that the Indian and British progress narratives ran together,
rather than in separate spiritual and material tracks. To draw out these
connections, Dutt entangled himself in thickening webs of intertextuality,
as ancient epics were interlea ved with modern manifestoes, and adven-
tureful historical romances were converted into the coin of analytical
history.
Belatedly promoted to District Officer in 1883, Dutt became the first
Indian to have full executive charge of an entire province. Yet officialdom
78
I have been unable to obtain this edition. Instead I have used a later edition,
which was titled Cultural Heritage of Bengal (Calcutta, 1962); GLD, 40–4, 51–77; Dutt,
Dutt,20–34.
298 Indian liberals and Greater Britain
was not without its frustrations, since he could not intervene in the Ilbert
crisis, nor could he do anything openly to help his friend Banerjea.
Scholarship was the one thing that Dutt could always contribute, and, in
1885, he risk ed the ire of Brahman fundamentalists by translating the Rig
Veda into Bengali. It was left to Banerjea, now back at the helm of The
Bengalee, to draw out the connections between Du tt’s translation and the
imperial politics of the late Victorian age. “We have fallen very far from
the high ideal,” the paper acknowledged, referring to the Hindu Aryans of
the Vedic Age. In the Veda, the paper continued, “our Indian patriots are
straining every nerve, and are preparing themselves to make every sacrifice
to further the interests of Indian unity.”
Only in December last, all India met ... in solemn Congress assembled. They met
in response to their own patriotic aspirations, and to the great lesson that the west
has taught them; but they also met in obedience to a still higher call – that which
comes to them from their sires of olden times ... The translator of the Vedas
has rendered a public service by calling attention to this passage, and we join with
him [Dutt] in the appeal which he makes that these slokas should be graven on
the heart of our people.
79
While this engraving on the nat ional body politic was being etched,
Dutt was on his way to a furlough year in the imperial metropolis, where
he hoped to recharge his intellectual batteries. It had been eighteen years
since he had first come to London, as a brash young aspirant on the
seemingly impossible mission of breaking the racial barrier of the Raj.
Now he returned as an established civil servant, with a wife, four children,
and a brother in tow. Happy to be back, he took his family on the round of
tourist sites, marveling at, among muc h else, the “small and obscure
corner of [Westminster] Abbey” where “the House of Comm ons held
its sittings for three hundred years up to the time of the Tudors and the
first foundations of the free and noble English constitution were laid.”
80
Yet Dutt had to acknowledge that England had changed. In 1868, he
had witnessed “an election in which the Liberal party triumphantly came
into office, beating the Conservatives on an Irish Question.” In 1886, to
his regret, the Liberals were “signally beaten” on the even more divisive
question of Irish Home Rule. When the Indian candidate Lal Mohan
Ghose was defeated by the defection of Unionist voters, Dutt noted the
connection between Ireland and India, whose fortunes he now saw as
intertwined. In the end, Dutt believed, Home Rule would triumph in both
places, and politicians of all stripes would learn that they could not
79
GLD, 78–112, quotes on 117–18.
80
Romesh Chunder Dutt, Three Years in Europe (Calcutta, 1986), 97–113.
R. C. Dutt and the riches of ancient Hindu civilization 299
“govern any people ... without some kind of representative institutions.”
“The divine right of conquerors will be as obsolete a phrase in the political
dictionary of the twentieth century, as the divine right of kings is in the
nineteenth, and the people of India will be proud of their connection with
England as the sons of Englishmen in Australia or Canada.” Yet, as he
attended a Colonial Institute dinner, Dutt could see that the Australians
were using their Home Rule to erect restrictive tariffs, protecting their
nascent industries and keeping out cheap British goods. In truth, British
industry was suffering, and two million workers were unemployed. In
the new climate of cut-throat international competition even the safety-
valve of emi gration was in danger of being closed.
81
Asked to participate in
the work of the Colonial Reception Committee, Dutt was struck by all the
talk about imperial federation, and saw it as a potential solution to
England’s woes.
The idea of a sort of federation of all these colonies and dependencies with
England was in the heart of hosts and guests alike, and was expressed forcibly in
many an eloquent speech ... Of course there are practical difficulties in the way of
such a federation, for free nations will not tax themselves to help England in a
European war in which they have no interest – and a federation which does not
mean co-operation in war and peace, is scarcely worthy of the name.
The inclusion of India, as a constituent in this federation, was seen by
Dutt as the precondition for making such a project work: “Every true
Indian hopes and trusts that India too will be admitted into this noble
federation with England on the same terms, or as nearly the same terms as
the other colonies as possible, and that the day is not far distant when she
too will have a voice and a hand in the management of her own affairs.”
82
With his mind perhaps focused on India’s relation to such a federal
imperial union, Dutt paid a visit to the aging Max Müller in Oxford. A few
years earli er, Müller had published his most extensive excursus on the
political value of oriental studies to Britain, in a series of lectures entitled
India: What can it Teach Us? Here he railed against the pernic ious influ-
ence of Mill (still assigned to ICS applicants) and made an eloquent plea
that the study of Sanskrit afforded a better window into the origins of
British civilization than the study of either Latin, Hebre w, or Greek.
Sanskrit scholarship, he contended, “ has imparted to the whole ancient
history of man a reality which it never possessed before.” Even more
importantly, perhaps, it had “taught us to embrace millions of strangers
and barbarians as members of one family.”
83
As so often in the past with
81
Dutt, Three Years, 131, 134–6; GLD, 464.
82
Dutt, Three Years, 127–9, 145–60.
83
Friedrich Max Müller, India: What can it Teach Us? (London, 1883), 1–113, quote on 30.
300 Indian liberals and Greater Britain
Indians, Müller’s words had an authorizing and empowering effect on
Dutt. He had long made an avocation out of following oriental scholar-
ship, and had admired the original monographs of Müller, Monier
Williams, Bernouf, and many others. If there had remained any doubt,
the research of these men proved conclusively that the most objectionable
practices of nineteenth-century Hindus – caste oppression and the sub-
jugation of women – had not been part of the original Hinduism of the
Vedic Age. Unfortunately this gold-mine of erudition was scattered in
recondite scholarly journals to which the British and Indian reading
publics had no access. There was need for “a clear historical account of
the civilization of Ancient India, based on ancient Sanskrit literature, and
written in a sufficiently popular manner to be acceptable to the general
reader,” Dutt mused. If such a work were driven by a strong, connected
narrative, it might convince metropolitan rea ders that the ancestors of the
Indians were people of consequence: a progressive people who had pio-
neered civilization and were worthy of descendants who could also act in
history. On the Indian side, the need was even more imperative since most
Indian students knew nothing of the pre-Muslim period of their peoples’
history. “Such things,” Dutt thought, “should not be.”
For the Hindu student the history of the Hindu Period should not be a blank, nor a
confused jumble of historic and legendary names, religious parables, and Epic and
Puranic myths. No study has so potent an infl uence in forming a nation’s mind
and a nation’s character as a critical and careful study of its past history. And it is by
such a study alone that an unreasoning and superstitious worship of the past is
replaced by a legitimate and manly admiration.
84
So during the period 1887 to 1890, after he returned to India, Dutt
worked feverishly to produce a massive 240,000-word History of
Civilization in Ancient India. The book begins with an aphorism, taken
from Max Müller, invoking the Anglo-Indian union at the deepest
stratum, rooted in the equation of the Aryan tongues: Dyaush Pitar
(Sanskrit) = Zeus Pater (Greek) = Jupiter (Latin) = Tyr (Old Norse). The
Rig Veda, where these names originated, is no mere relic of Indian history,
for it is the joint possession of all Indo-European peoples, “the oldest work
in the Aryan world,” a window into that primal aboriginal culture from
which both Hindu and Anglo-Saxon civilizations had sprung.
85
Long before
there were Greeks, Romans, Hindus, or Teutons, the ur-Aryans began to
compile the oldest elements of a common culture, and it was the barbarians
who gathered four thousand years ago on the plains of Punjab and who left
such traces of ur-Aryanism as had survived into the modern world.
84
DHAI, I: vi–xix, quotes on xiii–xiv, xv.
85
DHAI, I: vii.
R. C. Dutt and the riches of ancient Hindu civilization 301
As one might expect, Dutt’s Indo-Aryans are bold, manly warriors,
worthy cousins to the blond-haired, blue -eyed devotees of Zeus. Con-
quering, courageous, meat-eating horsemen, these freedmen-farmers
were as yet untainted by effeminizing vices or Brahminical obsessions
with ritual purity. Caste was an open, flexible classification without
restrictions on occupation or access to spirituality. Child marriage was
rare, wi dow re-marriage was common, and the seclusion of women was
unknown. Yet from an early point, Dutt acknowledges a subtle difference
between the Aryans of the east and west. While the latter may have
remained obsessed with racial purity, the former mixed with the darker-
skinned aborigines whom they conquered as they pressed southeastward
down the Gangeatic plain. As Hindu civilization advanced from the Vedic
Age (2000–1400 BC) to the Epic Age (1400–1000 BC), the Aryans did try
to herd the races they subordinated into an inferior Sudra caste. However,
Hindu history was “not just a story of conquests,” but also “of the spread
of Hindu civilization among hitherto unknown countries and aboriginal
nations ... The Gift was accepted and cherished, and henceforth the
Dravidian and other tribes of southern and eastern India bore the livery
of Aryan religion, Aryan language and Aryan civilization” through the end
of the “Rationalistic Period” (1000–320 BC).
86
As Dutt’s narrative proceeds through the first millennium BC, he
periodically renew s his juxtaposition of the Aryans, east and west.
Although he never explicitly links Hindu achievements to their propensity
for race-mixing, he repeatedly demonstrates that the precocity of Hindu
civilization was connected to the eastern Aryans’ ability to achieve higher
levels of social organization and their more robust capacity for cultural
hybridity. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana bore many resemblances
to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yet where Bankim would simply ransack
the former for tales of manly valor, Dutt emphasized their multilayered
character. Suffused with sentiments of a higher ethic, they caught a
moment in a complex civilization that was rapidly evolving beyond the
primitive warrior stage.
87
So long as ancient Hinduism did not degenerate
into an exclusive Brahman caste possession, it was able to ward off the
danger of effeminacy. In particu lar, the active participation of Kshatriyas
in framing practices of worship and devotion kept religion firmly tethered
to reality. Where Hinduism had been a narrowly spiritual creation for
Keshub, Dutt depicted it as the foundation of an entire civilization. As the
formulaic Brahmanas gave way to the philosophical sublimity of the
Upanishads, Dutt’s Hindus opened up a new epoch in human history.
86
DHAI, I: 1–390, quotes on 212–13, 127.
87
DHAI, I: 120–43.
302 Indian liberals and Greater Britain
Pioneers of monotheism, pantheism, and reincarnation, they were also
the inventors of astronomy, mathematics, decimal notation, and geome-
try. Indian imports were the basis of the Chinese zodiac, Dutt contends,
while Pythagoras transmitted metempsychosis and triangular calculation
to the west.
88
The ultimate triumph of early Hindu civilization, according to Dutt,
came with the metamorphosis of this esoteric elite culture into a more
open, democratic, and ecumenical form. The motive force in this great
transformation was Gautama Buddha, who preached the most compre-
hensive gospel of universal love and salvation, a full five centuries before
the appearance of Christ. Two centuries later, the great Emperor Asoka
renounced the use of violence, embraced the path of Buddhism, and
spread the gospel of peace and justice throughout the Asian world.
Although Dutt depicts Buddhism as the world’s first experiment in egali-
tarianism, after the third century BC he feels compelled to hand the baton
of human progress on to the west.
89
Plato and Aristotle broke new ground
in philosophy, while the armies of Alexander left India suddenly exposed
to the encroachments of the Bactrian Greeks. Since the immediate threat
was successfully resisted for several more centuries Hindu civilization
seemed, on the surface, to retain its vitality. Dutt sees many parallels
between the slow erosion of ancient Hinduism and the protracted decline
and fall of the Roman Empire. The difference, of course, was that where
Europe eventually recovered from its dark ages, in India, the first wave of
barbarian invasions was but a prelude to the bondage of a more enduring
foreign rule. Dutt does not attribute this outcome to any inherent inferi-
ority in Hindu culture but, rather, to the slow strangulation of caste
privilege and prejudice.
90
“The caste system in India has much to answer for,” Dutt concludes,
but its “wors t and most lamentable result” was to separate Indians from
one another and to create “this permanent breach and disunion where
there should have been fusion and union.” Gradually, but inexorably, it
strangled one vital dimension of national life after another. The exagger-
ation of Brahman patriarchy even tuated in the degradation of Hindu
women, child marriage, and private seclusion, finally issuing in the ulti-
mate horror of sati. Radiating outward from the family, infecting every
aspect of public life, caste gained a hereditary stranglehold on trades and
occupations, undermining national prosperity and impeding economic
88
DHAI, I: 136, 180–98, 269–404. In making the argument that ancient Indian civilization
was more advanced than that of the Greeks, Dutt is careful to cite the evidence of the
Greek traveler Megasthenes. DHAI, I: 210–30, 250–3.
89
DHAI, I: 305–90.
90
DHAI, II: 1–123.
R. C. Dutt and the riches of ancient Hindu civilization 303
advance. Yet if all these late developments represe nted the antithesis of
Hindu civilization at its peak, then the British efforts to extirpate them
need not be represented as attacks on true Hinduism. The progress that
the British connection brings is not a separate western tradition for Dutt,
but an opportu nity for India to reconnect with its own past, to restore all
that was best in ancient Hinduism, now adapted to modern political and
technological realities. “It may be England’s high privilege,” Dutt pro-
claims at the end of his book, “to restore to an ancient nation a new and
healthy life.” But “If the scienc e and learning, the sympathy and example
of modern Europe help us to regain in some measure a national con-
sciousness and life, Europe will have rendered back to modern India that
kindly help and brotherly service which India rendered to Europe in
ancient days – in religion, science and civilization.”
91
8 R. C. Dutt and the history of modern Indian poverty
Dutt’s assault on caste and patriarchy as inauthentic un-Hindu institu-
tions was of course nothing new. Rammohun, Keshub, and even Bankim,
in certain moods, had already made similar points. In its erudition and
sophistication, however, Dutt’s magnum opus was unmatched. Even more
novel was his belief that the British connection might bring not only
the benefits of modern progress, but also a reawakening of the true
Hindu traditions, painstakingly discovered through orientalist research.
Indians – both Hindu and Muslim – could exalt in their aboriginal Aryan
status, while also recognizing that the high civilization of their ancestors
had been the product of racial mixing and the repudiation of an arrogant
racial exclusivity.
Given the enormous effort that Dutt had put into this scholarly under-
taking, he could not but be somewhat disappointed at the lukewarm and
uneven reception of his book. Among Hindus it was, as he hoped, appre -
ciatively acknowledged, becoming something of an instant classic and an
enduring reference work. Yet Dutt’s attacks on the authenticity of patri-
archy and the evils of caste were bitterly resented by the Hindu fundamen-
talists. To envision the road back to original Hinduism as running through
the detour of British modernity was widely doubted. It was even dismissed
as the idiosyncratic crotchet of one who had a strong personal need to
reconcile the patriotic sentiments of his leisure with the imperial obeisance
required at work. In Britain, the book was tepidly praised, but broadly
ignored. It was reviewed in none of the leading monthlies or quarterlies,
91
DHAI, II: 124–334, quote on 334.
304 Indian liberals and Greater Britain