Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

had not yet permeated other parts of the subc ontinent, where Briton and

Indian continued to encounter one another on more equal terms. In the

west lay the vast confederation of the Marathas, whose wealth and power

probably exce eded that of British India during the 1790s. Here, a living,

evolving Hindu society remained intact. To the north and south lay the

even more formidable world of Muslim-controlled India. In Delhi, the

Mughal Emperor still sat on his hereditary throne, however much his

actual power and inﬂuence had diminished. By contrast, in De ccan, two

highly militarized Muslim states formed a counterweight to British

coastal rule. Where Hyderabad gradually drifted deeper into the EIC

orbit, Mysore, under its Sultans, Hyder Ali and his son Tipu, was built

up into an armed fortress of anti-British resistance committed to forming

alliances with other native powers with a view to challenging British

subcontinental hegemony.

In these Muslim states, as well as in the

lands of the Marathas, Britons encountered Indians not as masters and

conquerors but as ambassadors, military attachés, allies, antagonists, and

traders – even as suppliants for royal favor and participants in court

intrigues. This was a world where British merchants and envoys found

themselves propelled by strong incentives to engage with upper-class

Indians on terms of mutual respect and equality. The natural result was

that some “went native”–dressing in Indian costume, patronizing

mosques and temples, participating in festivals and pilgrimages, taking

on Indian concubines, and, in a few cases, even marrying the daughters

of highly placed Hindu or Muslim elites. “Progress” remained up for

grabs in such settings, where Britons had not yet foreclosed the possi-

bility that it might be achieved in indigenous terms.

In 1799, the dramatic defeat of Tipu Sultan at Seringapatem radically

altered this state of affairs. The Mysore territories were carved up,

Tipu’s army was disbanded, the French were expelled, and vast acces-

sions were made to the territories directly governed by the EIC. Once

proud, independent principalities, such as Hyderabad, Jaipur,

Travancore, and Oudh, would henceforth be transformed into acquies-

cent British clients: ruled in name by bejeweled maharajahs, but in fact

by British Residents directly outside the palace gates. Progress would

henceforth be ﬁrmly in the hands of the British, and yet the need to cast

it into an Indian idiom gave orientalism a new lease of life. As the

Spear, History of Modern India,37–103; Christopher Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British

Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), 1–74; C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and

the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988), 7–105.

William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

(London, 2002).

Orientalism, old and new 65

process of Raj-con struction that had begun in Bengal, Madras, and

Bombay was now repeated on a subconti nental stage, British India

became a more diverse and complicated place.

Correspondingly, the

character of oriental and historical studies, which underwrote its legiti-

macy, had to be expanded and rearranged. Where the old orientalism

had focused on a few ancient canonical Sanskrit texts, the new orien-

talism cast its net more widely through the mass of archaeological,

anthropological, topogr aphical, historical, and statistical sources that

were piling up. Where the old orientalism had been designed to elicit

the collaboration of the Brahmans in running the Bengali state, the new

orientalism was deployed as a tool for managing the various modern

warlords and potentates whom British arms were defeating, but whose

full acquiescence had yet to be gained. In both cases, orientalism was

conceived primarily as an instrument of liberal imperialism, which had

been designed to justify a British hegemony that had originated in

violence but now needed to be recast in consensual terms.

2 Scottish orientalism and the romance of British India

One of the most striking features of the new orientalism was the extent

to which it was dominated by Scots. Indeed, with the exception of

Colebrooke, all the major contributors to historical scholarship in the

post-Jones generation were of Scottish origins.

To some extent this

simply reﬂected the general over-representation of Scots in the EIC,

which was due to the extensive patronage networks that had been

established during Henry Dundas’s reign as political ﬁxer for Pitt.

Thanks to Scotland’s system of public education these recruits were

likely to be better edu cated than their English counterparts, and more

inclined to intellectualize about imperial affairs.

This was especially

Bayly, Imperial Meridian,75–256.

The Scottish orientalists of this generation included N. B. Edmonstone (1765–1841),

William Erskine (1773–1852), Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824), Colin Mackenzie

(1753–1821), James Mackintos h (1765–1832), William Kirkpatrick (1754–1812),

William Hunter (1755–1812), John Gilchrist (1759–1841), Thomas Munro (176 1–

1827), Mark Wilks (1760–1831, born in the Isle of M an), James Kirkpatrick (1764–

1805), John Malcolm (1769–1833), John Leyden (1775–1811), and Mountstu art

Elphinstone (1779–1859), to who m we may ad d the slightly younger John Crawfurd

(1783–1868) and Vans Kennedy (1784–1846). All have entries in either DNB, ODNB,

or both.

T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London, 1969), 81–8, 421–50;

T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London, 2004), especially 250–70. See also

Jane Rendall, “Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill,” The Historical

Journal, 25.1 (1982), 43–69. For a discussion of Malcolm, Elphinstone, and Munro,

see Diane McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830 (Akron, 2001).

66 Imagining a British India

true of those who had been able to take in a few years at one of the

Scottish universities before their arri val in India. In the classroo ms of

Edinburgh or Glasgow they were exposed to the teaching of John Millar

and Dugald Stewart, with the shades of Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith,

David Hume, William Robertson, and Lord Kames still hove ring in

the atmosphere. Not surprisingly, the four-stage evolutionary model of

societal development made a profound impression on all these indivi-

duals, as it had on Walter Scott. In India, as in Scotland, une ven

development had created dramatic juxtapositions of groups at every

stage of develop ment, from unlettered savages to commercial elites.

On the new imperial frontiers where thes e differences were most pro-

nounced, British administrators faced three urgent questions, each of

which could only be answered in the light of history. (1) How could

British take-over (ei ther formal or informal) be justiﬁed as the only

means of rescuing colonial peoples from chaos and/or setting them on

the road to modernity? (2) What mode of British governance and

indigenous collaboration was most appropriate for each people?

(3) How should law be administered, property be deﬁned, and taxes

be raised? Precisely because there were no universally correct answers to

these questions, they had to be solved in relation to the circumstances of

time and place.

To this end, Colin Mackenzie (1753–1821) was deputed to produce a

survey of Mysore after the defeat of Tipu, so that the British could become

acquainted with the lands that their conquests had gained. Carrying this

assignment far beyond the call of duty, Mackenzie devoted the rest of his

life (and much of his income) to accumulating a vast archive of manu-

scripts, artifacts, inscriptions, and folklore from southern India. On

the basis of this and other material, Mark Wilks (1760– 1831) wrote

his massive Historical Sketches of South India, with the triple purpose of

excoriating the rapacity of Tipu’s administration, justifying the necessity

of a British take-over, and tracing the complexity of Deccan society over

the historical longue durée. Dis missing simplistic notions of an oriental

despotism, Wilks showed how traditional Hindu rulers – for all their

chequered record of internecine conﬂict and periodic plunder – often

ruled with justice, in the interest of their people. Correspondingly,

he disputed the notion that traditional India did not support private

property, thereby laying the foundation for the ryotwari land settle-

ment that would be implemented a decade la ter by Thomas Munro

Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon

(Cambridge, 1997); Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge,

1976), 5–67, 99–229.

Scottish orientalism and the romance of British India 67

(1761–1827) in Madras.

Drawing in part on Wilks’s evidence, Munro

argued that the mistake of 1793 in Bengal need not be repeated. Thanks

to his and other ofﬁcials’ campaigning on the basis of supposed custo-

mary right, the ryotwari peasant cultivator, rather than the zamindari

landlord, was recognized as proprietor of the land through much of the

subcontinent.

By contrast, William Erskine (1773–1852) opened up the study of

Mughal history to English readers by translating and annotating the

memoirs of its founding Emperor, Babur. Working during his service

as a Bombay magistrate, Erskine was fascinated by the history of the

Mongols, a conglomeration of dispersed pastoralist tribes who periodi-

cally erupted out of their central Asian heartland to conquer the greatest

civilizations of Europe, China, and India in succession. What made

the Mongols so formidable in warfare, and yet so reluctant to abandon

their primitive lifestyle? For Erskine, Babur was a critical tran sitional

ﬁgure in the shift from nomadic simplicity to aristocratic polish, since

he retained the barbarian mentality of his ancestors (Ghengis Khan

from his mother, and Tamerlane from his father) while developing a

reﬁned taste for poetry, food, and theolog ical speculation. This unique

combination made him an effective warrior, even as it induced him to

regard settled Delhi as an attractive target for conquest. The stage

was thus set for his gran dson Akbar whose own residue of barbarian

shrewdness brought Mughal power to its ultimate apogee.

It was , however, Jame s Tod (1782–1835) who i mported Walter

Scott’s historical romance most directly into India. Like Mackenzie,

Tod was a s urveyor, and he developed an interest in triangulating local

culture, politics, and history alongside his m aps. Swept up in the north-

west fro ntier wars of the 1 800–19 period, he bec ame a great chronicler

of, and advocate for, the Rajput noblemen a nd princes, whom he saw as

natural allies of the British in their struggles against the Mughal and

Maratha states. To counter those Britons who regarded the Indians as a

people without history, Tod produced a massive compilation, Annals

Cohn, Colonialism,57–105; Kopf, British Orientalism, 127–214; Mark Wilks, Historical

Sketches of the South Indian History, 4 vols. (New Delhi, 1980). For a sensitive examination

of Mackenzie’s archive creation, see Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the

Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001), 63–123.

T. H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras,

1792–1818: The Origins of the “Munro System” (Cambridge, 1966); Nilmani Mukherjee,

The Ryotwari System in Madras, 1792–1817 (Calcutta, 1962); and Burton Stein, Thomas

Munro, the Origins of the Colonial State, and his Vision of Empire (Oxford, 1989).

William Erskine (with John Leyden), Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din Muhammed Báber, Emperor

of Hindustan, 2 vols. (London, 1826), with preface by Erskine. See also Erskine’s two-

volume A History of Hindustan under Báber and Humáyan (London, 1854), esp. 8–77.

68 Imagining a British India

and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829–32). Draw ing on ancient Sanskrit

literature, and the kind of artifacts and manusc ripts ama ssed by

Mackenzie, Tod also found a wealth of information in the bardic epics

that he encountered during his borderings on the marchlands betwe en

British and Maratha territory. As in the Scottish Highland s, he

explained, every clan had its narra tor poet, who purported to recount

several thousand years of loca l history. Although their primary focus

was on the martial exploits of noble families, these bards could also

conveyamorecriticalsubtext,which might chronicle the failures and

shortcomings of the l eading dynasties. “Thereisnotapettystatein

Rajasthan that has not had its Thermopolaye, and scarcely a city that

has n ot produced its Leonidas,” Tod enthused. “But the mantle of

ages has shrouded from view what the magic pen of the historian

might have consecrated to endless admiration.”

Taking it upon himself to raise this historian’s pen, Tod hoped to

convey the Rajput romance to his western readers while convincing the

Rajputs that the next chapter in their annals was to sign on as British

allies. Aware of the difﬁculty inherent in forging this imagined commu-

nity over a distance of so many languages, skin colors, and 8,000 miles,

Tod explored the Anglo-Indian relationship on multiple levels in his

book. The parallel between Hindu Rajputs and Scottish Highlanders

was meaningful because “in the same stages of society the wants of men

must everywhere be simila r, and will produce the analogies which are

observed to regulate Tatar hordes, or German tribes, Caledonian clans,

the Rajpoot Cúla (race) or Jarega Bhyá (brotherhood). ” At considerable

length, and with great ingenuity, Tod argued that the system of social

relations that had evolved in Rajasthan was essentially the same as the

feudal system that dominated medieval Europe for many centuries. Lest

the reader think that this is mere coincidence, or that it was insufﬁcient

to seal the bond of imaginative union between Britain and India, Tod

excavated a deeper historical connection: Rajput legends, cosmologies,

and divinities all bore a striking resemblance to biblical legends,

Germanic folklore, and Greek myths. All were descended from a com-

mon ancestral culture that could be located somewhere back in prehis-

tory if one dug deep enough.

If we can show the Germans to have been originally Scyths or Goths, a wide

ﬁeld of curiosity and inquiry is open to the origin of government, manners, etc. All

the antiquities of Europe will assume a new appearance ... Scandinavia was

James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, 2 vols. [1829] (New Delhi, 2001), I: xviii.

See also Tod’s Travels in Western India (New Delhi, 1971); DNB, XIX: 904–5.

Scottish orientalism and the romance of British India 69

occupied by Scythians ﬁve hundred years before Christ ... In short, we are no

other than a colony of Tatars.

So Britons had to go to India to learn their own hidden history!

Perhaps these long-lost cousins were not retrograde sluggards, but

noble barbarians, who had preserved the virtues that the stay-at-home

metropolitan Aryans had lost. “Extinguish the martial virtues” and “the

Rajputs will soon cease to respect themselves. Sloth, low cunning and

meanness will follow. What nation ever maintained its character that

devolved upon the stronger the power of protection?” The problem, of

course, was that Tod was trying to convince the Rajputs to accept the

protection of (stronger) British authority. He might wax eloquent

about “the struggles of a brave people for independence during a

series of ages sacriﬁci ng whatever was dear to them for the maintenance

of the religion of their forefathers, and sturdily defending to death

and in spite of every tempt ation, their rights and national liberty.”

Unfortunately, in the coming age, the greatest threat to the indepen-

dence of the Rajputs was not to come from their ancient Islamic or

Maratha rivals, but from the British, who would henceforth tell them

how to be free.

Tod wrestled with some part of this dilemma in his diary. “Our

position in the east has been and continues to be one in which conquest

forces herself upon us.” However, “we have the power, however late, to

halt, and not anticipate her further orders to march.” Walter Scott could

get away with romanticizing Scottish feudalism becau se it had been

decisively defeated by capitalist modernity. The romancer, in the very

act of celebrating, reveal ed that it no longer posed any threat in reality.

In Rajasthan, by contrast, the feudal remnant was all too palpably

present. EIC policy-makers were scarcely inclined to glorify warlords

whom they regarded as residual nuisances and potential rebels. Tod’s

rhapsodies on Rajput valor did not go over well with his superiors in

Calcutta. Fearing that he was in danger of “going native,” they recalled

him and accused him of corruption and dishonesty. After clearing his

name, Tod resigned in disgust, devoting the rest of his life, in England

and on the continent, to sifting his ethnographic evidence and preparin g

his Annals for the press. Yet if Tod’s was an extreme case, his romantic

embrace of the manly, Hindu warrior was shared by other early

nineteenth-century British ofﬁcials. Like Scotland’s Highlanders, these

troublesome cavaliers had to be transformed from frontier pests into

Tod, Rajasthan, I: 108, 51. For a critique, see Inden, Imagining India,72–6.

Tod, Rajasthan, I: xix, 104, 107–72.

70 Imagining a British India

loyal imperial soldiers, defending and extending further conquests.

Equally inclined toward the romance, but more committed to its impe-

rial outcome, was Tod’s superior John Malcolm, whom we have already

met at Abbotsford.

3 John Malcolm and the romance of British India

Unlike Tod, Wilks, Colebrooke, and Mackenzie, all of whom came to

India with some higher education, Ensign Malcolm landed in Madras,

in 1783, at the age of thirteen. At the time there was nothing to distinguish

him from the throng of impecunious Scotsmen whose fami lies could

offer them nothing but a passage to India as compensation for the

dearth of employment opportunities at home. For the next eight years

“Boy Malcolm” led the dissolute life of a typical junior ofﬁcer until

war with Tipu exposed him to broader views. Eight years before the

founding of Fort William College, he had the wit to realize that the

road to EIC advancement lay in linguistic pro ﬁciency and the ability

to act as an Anglo-Indian go-between. The bordering propensities

imbued by a Scottish childhood turned out to have value on the Indian

frontier.

So the young man taught himself Persian and Hindustani, and gained

the trust of his native subordinates through his sunny disposition and

sympathetic demeanor. At the court of Hyderabad and in the two sieges

of Seringapatem, Malcolm learned how to play the game of Indian

politics and made a strong impression on his own superiors, who quickly

advanced him through the ranks. In 1798, the new star attracted the

attention of Lord Wellesley and his brother (the future Duke of

Wellington). Inspired by the Wellesleys’ romantic, anti-Jacobin politics,

he ardently embraced their vision of an invincible, globe-spanning British

Empire, which could serve as a bulwark against the radicalism and

fanaticism of revolutionary France. At the same time, Malcolm’sown

experiences in India taught him that while imperial strategy had to be

conceived with a global compass, colonial expansion always advanced in

a local context whose particular actors, issues, and etiquette had to be

grasped in their own frame.

Tod, Rajasthan, I: 101; ODNB, LIV: 885–6; Norbert Peabody, “Tod’s Rajasthan and the

Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth Century India,” Modern Asian Studies, 30.1

(1996), 185–220.

John William Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm,

G.C.B., 2 vols. (London, 1856), I: 1–29; DNB, XII: 848–58.

Kaye, Life and Correspondence of Malcolm,I:30–104; Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: The

Years of the Sword (New York, 1969), 45–105.

John Malcolm and the romance of British India 71

Sent out to Persia on a diplomatic mission in 1800, Malcolm came

back with a treaty that he hoped would provide protection for India’s

western ﬂank. Deputed to the Maratha court, he persuaded the Peshwa

to place himself under British protection against the formidable warlords

who contested his sovereignty. Moving to the rebel camp, he then

negotiated the submission of the great warlord Daulet Rao Scindia,

while simultaneously brokering an agreement between Jeswant Rao

Holkar (the oth er leading Maratha warlord) and the leaders of the

Sikhs. In all these discussions, a connecting thread can be discerned.

First, Malcolm tried to win the conﬁdence of his rival with a carefully

chosen personal gesture in a style that he may have learned from the

young Captain Tod. Unlike Tod, however, Malcolm’s next move was to

issue demands with an iron ﬁst. “Negotiation,” he once quipped, was

best undertaken “at the head of an army.” Finally, when his point had

been gained, as it often (but not always) was, he would depart with

some extravagant ﬂourish of generosity toward his defeated rival, which

usually implicated the EIC in a huge ﬁnancial obligation. While this

noblesse oblige made a good impression in India, it also enraged the EIC

Directors in London, who began to regard Malcolm as an improvident

hot-head, liable to land them in unwise commitments and unnecessary

expense. After a second mission to Persia ended in failure in 1809, his

career began to stall. As he saw younger but better-connected men

promoted over him, Malcolm reckoned that his best hope was to take

up the pen.

Malcolm’s turn to authorship was motivated by a mixture of personal

frustration and political unease over the failure of the British public

(including the EIC establishment) to understand the responsibilities

that they had taken on in India. The seeming ease with which the

British had conquered the subcontinent had led Br itons mistakenly to

view Indians (and Asians more generally) as people of little account.

This was an understandable error. Malcolm later recollected “with

shame” the time when he thought he was “very superior” to the

Indians with whom he worked. “But as my knowledge of them and of

myself improved, the distance between us lessened.” According to

Malcolm, the Indians tolerated (and occasionally welcomed) British

conquest, not because they were weak or inferior, but because two

Kaye, Life and Correspondence of Malcolm, I: 105–512, II: 1–96, quote on I: 313; J. W.

Malcolm, The Political History of India, 1784–1823 [1826], ed. N. Panikkar, 2 vols. (New

Delhi, 1970). This is an expanded two-volume work, the ﬁrst ﬁve chapters of which were

published as A Sketch of the Political History of India in 1811. See also John Malcolm, A

Sketch of the Sikhs (London, 1812).

72 Imagining a British India

centuries of political instability had destroyed their social fabric. British

India, he insisted, was grounded on Indian opinion.

The solution,

Malcolm might have concluded, was to ﬁgure out how to get the

Indians working together. This however would have sent the likes of

him packing back to Scotland, where – as fourth son of a bankrupt

laird – he was likely to join the ranks of Walter Scott’s romantic failures.

Not surprisingly, Malcolm preferred to remain in India, where he could

become an imperial war hero advancing the tried and true strategy of

divide and rule.

In his 1812 publication A Sketch of the Sikhs, we can see Malcolm

wrestling with the question of why Indians were unable to resolve their

own divisions. The book introduces British audie nces to the story of

Nanak, the ﬁfteenth-century reformer who had tried to synthesize Islam

and Hinduism into a single syncretic creed. In principle, this union

might have worked, but Nanak had the misfortune of preaching it on

the Marchlands of the young Mughal Empire, to an audience of ﬁerce

warrior tribes. Malcolm then shows how Sikhism evolved over the next

three centuries from the paciﬁsm of its founder to a violent movement,

which simply added more fuel to India’s internal instability. In

Malcolm’s Political History of India,hereﬂected more directly on the

emergence of the British Raj. Here he discovered an apparent paradox:

the ability of the British to promote stability in India depended on their

willingness to act with a ﬁrm hand. Those Viceroys who, like Cornwallis

or Wellesley, were overtly militaristic brought peace and prosperity to

the land. By contrast, those who, like Sir John Shore, exercised forbear-

ance conveyed a message of weakness, which merely emboldened the

enemies of Britain to act.

Malcolm was disappointed by the poor response to his volumes,

which fell stillborn from the press. Frustrated in his career, he took a

furlough in Britain to grease the wheels of patronage, to visit his family,

and – as we have already seen – to cultivate Walter Scott. Of course,

Malcolm could not know that at the very moment when he was making

Scott’s acquaintance the poet was secretly transforming himself into

the author of Waverley. Nevertheless, when Malcolm was recalled to

John Malcolm, “Notes of Instructions Regarding Intercourse between European Ofﬁcials

and Natives,” in John Briggs, Letters Addressed to a Young Person in India (London, 1828),

190–1, 193–4, quote on 196–7. For a critique of the British belief that eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century India was really politically disordered and unstable, see Bayly, Indian

Society,1–105.

Malcolm, Political History of India, I: 4, 109; Malcolm, Sketch of the Sikhs, 23. See also John

Malcolm, The History of Persia, 2 vols. (London, 1815), II: 622, for his dire assessment of

the negative consequences of Muslim rule.

John Malcolm and the romance of British India 73

India in 1816, he found himself thrust into the midst of Waverley

adventures of his own. Assigned the task of wiping out lawlessness on

the Maratha frontier, Malcolm’s police operations quickly assumed

more Herculean aims. When the warlord Holkar revolted, in what he

perceived to be a moment of British weakness, the Peshwa (Baji Rao II)

joined him in a full-scale anti-British attack. For the British, this was a

perfect pretext for ridding themselves of the Marathas once and for all.

After his success in conducting the military operations at Mehdipur,

Malcolm deposed the Peshwa, while awarding him an £80,000 pension,

which the furious EIC Directors were obliged to honor.

Thwarted in his desire to become Governor of Bombay, Malcol m

learned that his empire-building would be rewarded with another chal-

lenging assignment to pacify the northern portion of the now escheated

Maratha lands. As he surveyed these vast tracts, which still swarmed with

minor robber-barons and petty cattle thieves, Malcolm sent an enter-

taining letter to Walter Scott. “The largest fol ks are quiet, but the difﬁ-

culty is to keep the Rob Roys under.” He then related the story of one

particularly savage local warlord whom he had (he hoped) successfully

enlisted on the British side. Rob Roy, of course, was a criminal and a

marauder. Yet by retelling and romanticizing his story, Scott had been

able to show how the new conditions of commercial capitalism and Anglo-

Scottish Union were transforming such law-breakers into indispensable

mediators and go-betweens. In writing up his two-volume Memoir of

Central India, Malcolm found himself drawn into the bac kground of

Maratha history. Starting out as Hindu guerilla ﬁghters, these partisans

initially depended on popular support for their work. Even as they con-

quered, they remained personally modest and egalitarian, more interested

in the realities than in the trappings of power. No sooner did one set of

leaders establish their authority than a fresh crop of upstarts rose to

challenge their place. Throughout his bold career of conquest and terri-

torial expansion, Mahadji Sindia retained “the manly simplicity of char-

acter which led him equally to despise the trappings and the allurements of

luxury.” His role was “marked by many acts of violence and oppress ion;

but he was nevertheless a man of mild disposition, and particularly desir-

ous of improving the countries he had conquered or usurped.”

From Malcolm’s perspective, Sindia had only two deﬁciencies: (1) he

was not quite capable of actually realizing his dream of central Asian

paciﬁcation without European assistance, and (2) the European power

Kaye, Life and Correspondence of Malcolm, II: 97–298, especially 237–66.

Kaye, Life and Correspondence of Malcolm, II: 299–457, quote on 364–5; John Malcolm, A

Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa, 2 vols. [1820] (New Delhi, 1970).

74 Imagining a British India