Across the Colonial Divide: Friendship in the British Empire, 1875-1940 by You-Sun Crystal Chung A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History and Women’s Studies) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Kali A. K. Israel, Chair Professor Adela Pinch Professor Helmut Puff Associate Professor Damon Salesa, University of Auckland © You-Sun Crystal Chung 2014 To my parents, Hyui Kyung Choi and Sye Kyun Chung, My brother June Won Fred Chung, And the memory of my grandmother Junghwa Kim ii Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my committee Kali Israel, Adela Pinch, Damon Salesa, and especially Helmut Puff, for his generosity and insight since the inception of this project. Leslie Pincus also offered valuable encouragement when it was most keenly felt. This dissertation would not have been possible without the everyday support provided by Lorna Altstetter, Diana Denney, Aimee Germain, and especially Kathleen King. I have been fortunate throughout the process to be sustained by the friendship of those from home as well as those those I met at Michigan. My thanks to those who have demonstrated for me the strength of old ties: Jinok Baek, Yongran Byun Bang Sunghoon, Jeeyun Cho, Kyungeun Cho, Hae mi Choi, Hyewon Choi, Soonyoung Choi, Woojin Choi, Sue Young Chung, Yoonie Chung, YoonYoung Hwang, Jiah Hyun, Won Sun Hyun, Hailey Jang, Claire Kim, Kim Daeyoung, Max Kepler, Eun Hyung Kim, Hyunjoo Kim, Hye Young Kim, Jiwon Kang, Kim Jeongyeon, Jungeun Kim, Minju Kim, Minseung Kim, Nayeon Kim, Soojeong Kim, Woojae Kim, Bora Lee, Dae Jun Lee, Haeyeon Lee, Philip W. Lee, Seuyeun Lee, Woo Mi Lee, Angela Ng, Minjeong Oh, James L. Park, Jong Min Park, Jungwon Park, Hayoung Rhee, Jinhee Rhew, Shin Jieun, Ji- Hye Shin, JiYoung Son, Pacharee Sudhinaraset, and Song Wook. Michigan has been no less forthcoming in the friendship I have found: Meg Ahern, Mandy Davis, Jacqueline Doremus, Elizabeth Ela, Sherry Funches, Molly iii Hatcher, Ann Hernandez, Susan Hwang, Olivera Jokić, Kumiko Kobayashi, Jaymin Kim, Sang Woo Kim, Suzi Linsley, Jeffrey Lloyd, Diana Mankowski, Elspeth Martini, Nilanjana Majumdar, Mercedes Mejia, Carrick Rogers, Sarah McDermott Thompson, Navaneetha Mokkil-Maruthur, Patrick Parker, Thida Sam, and Jamie Small. I owe special thanks to my writing group friends, who have been invaluable in these final stages: Rebecca Grapevine, Jeremy Ledger, Yan Long, Emily Merchant, and Lenny Ureña Valerio. Hyunchul Park has been an unfailing source of support throughout. Finally, I would like to thank my ever patient parents and brother as well as my extended family. iv Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………….......iii Abstract…………..………………………………………………………………………v Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter One The Solicitor and the Detective Novelist: Conan Doyle and the Curious Case of George Edalji……………………………………………………………………………27 Chapter Two “The One Romantic Incident in My Life:” The Mathematician and the Clerk……………………………………………………………………………………108 Chapter Three The Poet and His Critic: Rabindranath Tagore and Edward John Thompson…..201 Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………….….243 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...251 Abstract This dissertation explores how “colonial friendship” in the form of collaborations and affinities forged across colonial lines of power and culture within the British Empire signified publicly and privately. Examining three cases in which British men aligned themselves with men of South Asian backgrounds in a period spanning from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century brings into focus a kaleidoscope of meanings— ethical, affective, and professional—marshaled under the conceptual umbrella of friendship. Colonial friendships clearly resonated in the public sphere because those involved were designated differently with regard to the nation and Empire. I explore how individuals understood themselves as “friends” in the context of racial and cultural differences as they played out in such realms as public opinion, the academy, and cosmopolitan circuits of cultural exchange. These relationships were informed by exhortatory notions of guardianship as well as egalitarian aspirations and reflected multi- layered asymmetries—most prominently of race, class, and educational background among others. As such, they serve as a springboard for the central question of this dissertation: what meanings were generated by these friendships and how were they used? This question and a consideration of contexts of public, colonial, and national contestations motivate three case studies. Chapter 1 uses Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1907 v public campaign to exonerate the biracial George Edalji as a lens through which to explore the inclusionary and exclusionary impulses of empire-building. Chapter 2 considers the affective dimensions of the mathematical collaboration of Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy to interrogate the disparity of expressions of feeling between the former’s reticence and the latter’s volubility. Chapter 3 examines as a window into the limits of cosmopolitan thought in a period of ascendant nationalism the relations between poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and Edward John Thompson, who started his career as a missionary before becoming a writer on the subject of India. People from various walks of the colonial order invested in elective affinities with those of divergent national, cultural, or racial affiliations, motivated by the perceived advantages of bridging those gaps. On one hand, material exigency often animated the experience of colonial subjection. Aligning oneself with those in more powerful positions might yield such practical advantages such as professional advancement. On the other, for the British, the empire fostered a sense of self invested in enacting liberal universal visions of the world through amical associations such as those examined here. The asymmetries particular to each case, however, resist schematization, as evidenced by the multiple ways in which friendship could be used to both justify and challenge the British imperial project. I argue that friendship served as a representative mode of colonial relationality in the British Empire. Both an alternative and complement to liberal paternalism, friendship as practiced in the domain of Empire highlighted the multivalence of the imperial project. vi Introduction In 1936, at the Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences, G. H. Hardy, prominent mathematician and professor at Cambridge, delivered two lectures on Srinivasa Ramanujan. Sixteen years had passed since the mathematical genius, formerly a low-level clerk in Madras, India, fell ill and met his untimely death. But he remained omnipresent in Hardy’s consciousness. As a participant in the symposium on mathematics and the physical sciences, Hardy contributed a paper on a topic of his choice. He chose Ramanujan as his subject— the man himself as much his work as a mathematician. For Hardy, the two were intertwined. In fact, Hardy’s first lecture bears the title of “The Indian mathematician Ramanujan,” referring solely to the man.1 The conference was intended as “a major international scholarly event.” 2 In principle, it promoted the pursuit of common truths in the face of interwar political conflict. It was one of many efforts through which those who looked toward universalist visions of a world hoped to combat the divisions that had recently exacted a heavy price. Hardy’s lecture, however, highlighted the difficulties of realizing such a vision. He told the story of “a poor and solitary Hindu pitting his brains against 1 By way of comparison, his second lecture is entitled “Ramanujan and the theory of prime numbers,” in which case Hardy more directly addresses the substance of Ramanujan’s work. 2 Clark A. Elliott, “The Tercentenary of Harvard University in 1936: The Scientific Dimension,” Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 14, Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory (1999), 159. 1 the accumulated wisdom of Europe.”3 On one hand, Hardy signaled Ramanujan’s contribution to the conference’s global academic project by choosing Ramanujan as the subject of his lecture. On the other, he characterized the process of Ramanujan’s work in combative—rather than cooperative—terms. Hardy’s construction of Ramanujan’s achievement as a struggle against Europe gestured to the amplified challenges that colonial disparities posed for those disadvantaged by them—such as the former clerk from Madras—to make themselves understood across divisions of race, power, and culture. This was true even for Ramanujan, whom the European math world eventually acknowledged as a genius. Indeed, in 1918, five years into his collaboration with Hardy, Ramanujan achieved Royal Society membership, foreshadowing a legacy that extended decades after death as his work continued to fuel mathematical research into the present. And while the ultimate recognition afforded by this ongoing relevance came much later, Hardy’s designation of Ramanujan as a “genius” was contemporaneous. Nevertheless, Ramanujan encountered substantial hurdles—in the ostensibly objective discipline of mathematics, no less—making the truth of his mathematical aptitude known across the divide that separated colonizer from colonized. Hardy and his cosmopolitan peers at the conference assumed the truth they sought to be