Organizer: Douglas Peers, University of Calgary
Chair: William R. Pinch, Wesleyan University
Scholarship drawing to varying degrees on what can be broadly termed post-orientalism has made a tremendous impact on South Asian historiography. As power and knowledge have become indistinguishable from each other, novels and historical works about the lands of the ‘other,’ censuses, district reports, and all other forms of colonial knowledge are now seen to be as important, if not more so, than modern firearms and/or capitalism in accounting for British domination. Yet we cannot escape the fact that British rule ultimately relied upon its monopoly, or near-monopoly, over the means of coercion, of which the principal means was the army. Acknowledgment of this has led to a surge of interest in the military, and particularly as to how the military influenced the nature, operation, and even the motives of colonial rule. Yet the relationship between colonial knowledge, orientalism, and the army has scarcely been commented upon, which is rather startling considering the huge numbers of military officers and surgeons who were at the forefront of information collection in India. There were obvious military benefits to be gained from such knowledge—in planning and conducting military actions, in identifying prospective recruits and in fashioning codes of discipline. But the information which the army and its personnel collected was not always for immediate or obvious military use. Officers and surgeons collected, sorted and analyzed data on a very wide range of topics, including health, the environment, local customs and practices, and India’s scientific and literary history. This led one writer to insist that "nowhere, within the wide circle of civilized society, will we meet with individuals more mild, more unassuming, more refined, more intellectual, in one word, more completely gentlemen, than the officers of the Indian army."1 Notwithstanding the hyperbole, this vision of the gentleman-soldier was one to which many officers and surgeons of the Indian army aspired. Yet while their interests were broad-ranging and often eclectic, these officers did share certain commonalities of background, training, and experience, and these did help frame their analyses and conclusions. By looking at how military officers and surgeons like James Ranald Martin, Richard Burton, Robert Orme, J. W. Kaye, James Tod, John Malcolm, and James Grant Duff contributed to the formation of colonial knowledge, the papers in this panel will provide fresh perspectives on the character and methods of imperial rule in India.
1. Anon, "The Anglo-Indian Army," Foreign and Quarterly Review, 33 (1844): 388.
Noble Rajputs and Plundering Marathas: History, Conquest, and Rule in British India
Lynn Zastoupil, Rhodes College
This paper examines the construction and employment of historical interpretation in early nineteenth-century British India. The manner in which historical interpretation was fashioned in a dialogic encounter between British officials and their Indian informants is explored, as are the administrative policies that were developed on the basis of this interpretation of India’s historical record. In other words, the extent to which British conquest and rule were bound up with—and informed by—the intellectual pursuit of historical knowledge forms the heart of this paper.
This paper seeks to uncover the process by which the linked concepts of "noble Rajputs" and "plundering Marathas" were created. Military officers such as James Tod, John Malcolm and James Grant Duff wrote influential histories that, to varying degrees, advanced the notion that India’s historical record demonstrated both the antiquity and nobility of Rajput lineages and the lowly social status and predatory nature of the Maratha powers who threatened the British and the Rajputs equally. The self-serving nature of these depictions is self-evident; less obvious is the extent to which Tod and Malcolm relied upon Rajput informants to construct influential images of ancient Rajput dynasties withering under the depredations of upstart Maratha rulers.
Also important is the fact that these historical concepts were employed to "settle" the Maraths and the Rajputs after the establishment of British paramountcy. Tod’s use of a controversial understanding of Rajput dynastic and social history to resolve contentious issues in Rajasthan is explored at length, as are the precise ways in which Grant Duff and others employed an acute historical understanding of the rise of Maratha power to ensure that no Shivaji would ever rise again from the ranks of the Marathas. In short, the manner in which history was used to situate Rajputs and Marathas in their "ancient" roles forms a significant part of this paper.
Burton in India: The Making of an Orientalist
Dane Kennedy, University of Nebraska
The famed Victorian Sir Richard Francis Burton came to India as a twenty-one-year-old cadet in the 18th Bengal Native Infantry in 1842. He spent the next seven years as a junior officer in Baroda and Sind, where he discovered that he possessed an exceptional facility for new languages and an intense curiosity about other peoples and cultures. When illness forced his departure from India in 1849, he was still unknown to the British public, but his Indian experience had equipped him with the skills and habits of mind that would establish him as one of the West’s preeminent explorers and interpreters of the nineteenth century non-Western world.
The purpose of this paper is two-fold—to show how the British Indian army’s efforts to "know" India so as to rule it helped to shape Burton’s Indian experiences and to show how these experiences helped to shape the subsequent trajectory of his career. Burton is such an oversized figure that it is tempting to see his life—as his biographers have done—in exceptionalist terms. Yet many of the qualities that seem to set Burton apart can be better understood as arising out of the conditions created by British imperial expansion in India. His remarkable talent for acquiring multiple language skills was nurtured by the colonial government through its language examinations. His informative ethnographic investigations of the peoples of Sind were sanctioned as part of his service with the Canal Department of the Sind Survey. Even his famous translation of the tales of the Arabian Nights, published in 16 volumes in the 1880s, had its origins in his involvement with Bombay’s Orientalist circle in the 1840s. In these and other respects, Burton’s early career in India helps us to better understand the British Indian army’s role in the acquisition and dissemination of colonial knowledge.
Knowing the Country: James Ranald Martin and Medical Topography in British India
Mark Harrison, Sheffield Hallam University
Sir James Ranald Martin (1793–1874) served with the East India Company’s Bengal Army as a surgeon, and saw action in a number of engagements during the 1820s. The most of notable of these was the first Burma War of 1824–26, in which both Bengali sepoys and European troops suffered high rates of mortality and sickness from fevers. The jungles of Arakan seemed inimical to all but the local inhabitants, who appeared to be inured to its pathogenic climate.
These experiences left Martin convinced that the British ought to develop a better understanding of the medical features of their territories, in much the same way as they were being mapped by military cartographers. What he proposed was a ‘medical topography’ of British India that would take into account the environmental, commercial and other factors effecting the health of each locality. The British would thereby gain a detailed knowledge of whether an area—in any given season—was conducive to settlement and economic activity, or to the deployment of troops.
Martin was not alone: during the Burma War, a number of his colleagues in the Medical Department of the Bengal Army wrote topographies of Arakan, and in the following years other Company surgeons began to follow suit, producing detailed medical surveys of their town or district. The Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, of which Martin was a prominent member, and its counterparts in other presidencies, encouraged the publication of such reports in their transactions. Martin was no exception, writing a Medical Topography of Calcutta which was published in 1837.
By examining Martin’s own work as a topographer, I hope to shed light on British attitudes to the Indian environment and on prevailing notions of human difference. Medical topographies were one of the most important sites for the production and dissemination of ideas about ‘race,’ and on the relationship between environment and civilization. The principles of medical topography developed by Martin are also of interest, as they underlay the recommendation for the siting of military cantonments in the wake of the Mutiny/Rebellion. As President of the East India Company’s Medical Board from 1843, Martin was appointed to sit on the Sanitary Commission which considered the Army’s health in India, and had a considerable hand in its report published in 1863.
Soldiers, Historians, and Orientalists: Decolonizing the Military History of Colonial India
Douglas Peers, University of Calgary
Recent studies of colonial knowledge have emphasized how our knowledge of India is indebted to Western ideologies and models of historical explanation. This emphasis on orientalism and how it accentuated differences between India and Europe has yielded a number of fascinating studies of how orientalism, broadly defined, has made itself felt in a range of past encounters between Europeans and Indians as well as in modern-day efforts to analyze such encounters. Yet most of what has been written has neglected the army, and how in the past as well as in the present, certain presuppositions as to military culture and practice have profoundly shaped Western views of Indian armies and their societies. Military personnel and events facilitated and in some cases initiated the process of ‘knowing’ and ‘othering’ India, and it was their impressions and conceptualizations which have frequently reasserted themselves. In particular, writers then and now have turned to the idea of a European ‘military revolution,’ or something similar to it, to help authenticate European exceptionalism. Briefly summarized, the military revolution model attributes European military conquest to better weapons, more rigorous discipline, a more aggressive military tradition, a greater willingness to accept military innovation and to erect a financial infrastructure to maintain a modern weapons systems. The military revolution argument has much to commend it, and certainly historians of South Asia overlook it at their peril. But its very seductiveness can blind us to some serious deficiencies, the major one being the a prioi assumption that Europe is the benchmark against which all other military cultures will be compared. Moreover, if we look at the military revolution argument, we find that it is not simply a theory conjured up by twentieth-century historians; rather, variants of it can be tracked back much earlier and hence it has become encoded into the historiography of colonial rule.
This paper will trace the Indian genealogy of the military revolution argument so as to demonstrate how various manifestations of it were current in the mid-18th century when the British began to break out of their coastal enclaves. Contemporary accounts of Britain’s conquest by writers such as Orme, Williams, Innes, Prinsep, Malcolm, and Kaye interpreted Indian military culture and operations within the broad parameters of what would become the military revolution model, and it is their impressions which have laid the foundation for later writers. Moreover, the criteria with which British writers scrutinized the military capabilities of Indian states—including those informed by notions of race, masculinity, and religion—were readily translated into other sites of colonial encounter.