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Myth, Language, Empire: the East India Company and the Construction of British India, 1757-1857

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Myth, Language, Empire: the East India Company and the Construction of British India, 1757-1857 Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 5-10-2011 12:00 AM Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company and the Construction of British India, 1757-1857 Nida Sajid University of Western Ontario Supervisor Nandi Bhatia The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Comparative Literature A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Nida Sajid 2011 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Asian History Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Cultural History Commons, Islamic World and Near East History Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, and the South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Sajid, Nida, "Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company and the Construction of British India, 1757-1857" (2011). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 153. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/153 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company and the Construction of British India, 1757-1857 (Spine Title: Myth, Language, Empire) (Thesis format: Monograph) by Nida Sajid Graduate Program in Comparative Literature A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Nida Sajid 2011 THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION Supervisor Examiners _____________________ _ ____________________________ Dr. Nandi Bhatia Dr. Angela Borchert Supervisory Committee ____________________________ Dr. David Darby _________________________ Dr. Teresa Hubel ____________________________ Dr. Carole Farber ____________________________ Dr. Chelva Kanaganayakam The thesis by Nida Sajid entitled: Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company and the Construction of British India, 1757-1857 is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ________________ ______________________________ Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board ii Abstract My PhD dissertation investigates the discursive strategies employed by the East India Company during the early colonial period to legitimize mercantile imperialism as an act of preservation for the fast-disintegrating political order that was the Mughal empire in India. By arguing that the interrelationship of myth, history and archive was essential to networks of trade and the establishment of political domination, my thesis offers a new reading of the representations of both the colonizer and the colonized and of the political debates surrounding the Company’s scandals and imperial ambitions in the English public sphere during the late eighteenth century. It further reveals the discursive role of Mughal constitutionality in defining the contours of some key ideas of Enlightenment thought such as universal sovereignty and vigilant citizenry in Britain, while simultaneously legitimizing mechanisms of colonial control in an overseas empire. In order to expose the proximity of early imperialist discourse about Islamic rule in India to the broader representative structures of European modernity, I revisit via literary and historical texts, public records and archival documents, the following canonized moments of British imperial history: the Battle of Plassey, the Black Hole incident, the Company’s acquisition of the Diwani of Bengal, and the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. I further examine the interpretations of these events during the nineteenth century in order to trace the genealogical connections between the early representations of colonial encounters and the later writings of high imperialism. Looking simultaneously at these two discursive moments of the British empire in India, I demonstrate how a mythical modality based on the aesthetics of the sublime emerged in the colonial archive and how this mode of representation came to inform history-writing, making the broader representative structures of Enlightenment thought complicit in the construction of a narrative continuity for the British empire. In so doing, I reveal the fallacy of current theoretical positions which inadvertently ignore the role of colonized cultures in the construction of modern democratic concepts like citizenship and civil society in both South Asia and Europe. Keywords: British Empire, India, East India Company, Mughal Empire, Long Eighteenth Century, Nationalism, Colonialism, Enlightenment, New Imperial History, Postcolonial Theory iii For Irene and Sajid, and an imaginary place called home … iv Acknowledgements Far more than the thesis that follows, I find writing this acknowledgment to be a pleasurably difficult task. Many debts have been accrued both before the conception and during the completion of this project. I begin with thanking my supervisor, Prof. Nandi Bhatia, for her intellectual guidance and consistent generosity throughout this arduous journey, for her limitless patience with my unformed and unfinished ideas in the last six years, for her characteristic ability to push me towards exploring new ideas and areas of inquiry, for her extreme confidence in my research whenever I doubted my own capabilities, and for entrusting me with academic autonomy whenever I needed it. My indebtedness to her extends way beyond this project because of her exceptional support and unrelenting faith in all my intellectual and professional endeavors. Thank you, Nandi, for being the consummate mentor. You have always been more than a thesis supervisor since the day I met you. I find words falling short of the gratitude I feel towards Prof. Teresa Hubel, member of my supervising committee, for reading this dissertation many times over and providing valuable feedback each time. Whenever I got my drafts back, I saw my own shortcomings as a scholar but, more importantly, I saw Teresa’s tireless efforts at pushing my boundaries to become the best I can be both as a researcher and as a writer. Her acute and insightful observations were instrumental in giving shape to this project, forcing me to dig into archives even further to find answers to questions which were not even on my intellectual horizon in the initial stages of writing. Thank you, Teresa, for being so patient with my tardiness and giving such relentless attention to my work. I also thank Prof. Angela Borchert for offering a wonderful course titled “Eighteenth-Century Paradigms of v Aesthetics” during the first year of my PhD program. I can safely say that had it not been for Angela’s scholarly expertise in teaching the multiple trajectories of eighteenth- century writings, I would have never got interested in the politics and aesthetics of the period in the first place. In years to come, I hope to emulate Angela’s passion and academic rigor in studying this period in all its complexities. I also feel extremely indebted to Prof. James Miller for his interest in my work. As a teaching assistant for his course titled “Sex and Culture,” I gained a nuanced understanding of Western intellectual history and philosophy. And it is a great pleasure to see James move towards India in his own research recently and enjoy his many trips to the country. I thank the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures for housing this dissertation in their Comparative Literature program. The Department was always supportive of my research and never made me feel anything less than a special PhD candidate. I feel great regard and gratitude towards Prof. Melitta Adamson and Prof. David Darby. As the Department Chair, Melitta was always a pillar of support and responded with great care to all my academic requests. David, as the Graduate Chair, was always there to provide careful guidance while trusting me to choose my own academic path. I also thank Teresa Aconito, Dawn Gingerich and Sylvia Kontra in the Department for attending to my administrative needs. Teresa deserves special appreciation for answering all my long-distance queries with unfaltering patience. The funding for my research was provided by Western Graduate Research Scholarship, Graduate Teaching Assistantship and Graduate Research Assistantship. I also received much needed financial support for my research trips to India through Mary Routledge scholarship, GTA and SOGS bursaries. I thank all the funding agencies at The vi University of Western Ontario for making extensive travel possible during my PhD research. This project would not have been possible without the assistance and resourcefulness of the staff at many libraries. People at the D.B. Weldon library in Western, Robarts and UTSC libraries in University of Toronto, and libraries in Jawaharlal Nehru University can never be thanked enough for their cooperation. The interlibrary loan staff at Weldon deserves special mention for bringing the world to my tiny carrel in the library. It still amazes me to think that there was not a single text or a document, no matter how obscure, that the interlibrary loan services could not procure during the years of my research. I have special thanks for David Murphy in Weldon
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