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The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

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The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:39947190 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge A dissertation presented by Joshua Ehrlich to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2018 © 2018 Joshua Ehrlich All rights reserved ii Dissertation Advisor: Professor David Armitage Joshua Ehrlich Abstract The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge This study shows that debate over the relations among companies, states, and knowledge is not new, but rather was integral to the politics of the British East India Company. Reconstructing such debate among Company officials and critics from the 1770s to the 1830s, the study makes several further interventions. It argues against what has been perhaps the dominant narrative about Company and British-imperial ideology in this period, a narrative of reorientation from “Orientalist” to “Anglicist” cultural attitudes. It shows instead how the Company shifted from a commercial idiom of sovereignty, concerned with conciliating elites through scholarly patronage, to a territorial idiom, concerned with cultivating popular affection through state-sponsored education. Whereas the field of the history of knowledge has largely developed as a history of structures of knowledge, meanwhile, this study argues for a history of ideas of knowledge. Such an approach is needed to elucidate the category of knowledge and its discursive uses past and present. iii Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1, “Warren Hastings, Knowledge, and the Company State” Chapter 2, “The Age of William Jones and Charles Cornwallis” Chapter 3, “Richard Wellesley and the Politics of Fort William College” Chapter 4, “Scholar-Administrators and the Company in the Early Nineteenth Century” Chapter 5, “Education and the Ends of the Company State” Bibliography iv Acknowledgments I began work on this project, unwittingly, as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. There Cliff Ando, Charly Coleman, and Fred Jonsson kindled my interests in imperial and intellectual history, and inspired me to pursue a doctoral degree. I owe a great debt to all three, and to the late Nick Phillipson, who read my bachelor’s thesis, helped me develop it into an article, and furnished lambent conversation whenever I visited Edinburgh. Nick was a font of generosity and erudition, and it is consoling to know how many others drank from the stream. I arrived at Harvard seven years ago with some notion to study the place of theology in late-early-modern English and Scottish historical writing. To the extent that my views have expanded since then I have largely David Armitage to thank. David’s contributions to the present study have been too numerous to tally, and have invariably attested the imagination and clarity that distinguish his own work. David always seems to ask the right question; to challenge an argument in ways that help strengthen it; to open up broader avenues of understanding. While I cannot claim to have absorbed these talents, I would be remiss not to acknowledge how much I have profited by them. I would likewise be remiss not to acknowledge some other key influences on this dissertation. Robert Travers’s work first revealed to me the possibilities for an intellectual history of the East India Company. His guidance in subsequent years has been indispensable. Peter Marshall has been another source of enlightenment. Over lunch at the British Library, he has often recalled the details of a decades-old conversation or of a letter v in the India Office Records. Peter Mandler and Sujit Sivasundaram generously read chapter drafts. Sugata Bose and Emma Rothschild served on my committee and offered stimulating remarks at my defense. Arif Abid not only shared a valuable paper on Tafazzul Husain Khan, but gamely negotiated the Cambridge-Karachi time difference to discuss his remarkable ancestor over the phone. Nick Abbott, by email, and Chander Shekhar, in meetings at Delhi University, extended much-appreciated advice on Persian texts. Sunil Sharma introduced me to a fascinating Hindustani poem he had discovered in manuscript and patiently explicated its contents. On several occasions, Richard Delacy and Anand Venkatkrishnan allowed me the benefit of their respective learning in Urdu and Sanskrit. At Harvard I gained much from conversations and exchanges with Sunil Amrith, Dimiter Angelov, Nate Aschenbrenner, Mou Banerjee, Andrew Bellisari, Marysia Blackwood, Ann Blair, Brandon Bloch, John Brewer, Elizabeth Cross, Barnaby Crowcroft, Hardeep Dhillon, Jean-François Gauvin, Louis Gerdelan, Kit Heintzman, Erin Hutchinson, Maya Jasanoff, Tae-Yeoun Keum, Neelam Khoja, Joe la Hausse de Lalouvière, Iain Large, Mary Lewis, Jamie McSpadden, Mircea Raianu, Michael Thornton, and Lydia Walker. For commenting on papers, directing me to sources, and much else besides, I am also indebted to colleagues elsewhere, including Andrew Amstutz, Guillemette Crouzet, Purnima Dhavan, Gianni Dubbini, Ben Gilding, Regina Grafe, Jack Harrington, Simon Macdonald, Daniel Morgan, Diviya Pant, Cleo Roberts, Holly Shaffer, Asheesh Siddique, and Callie Wilkinson. All of the above deserve more particular and fulsome acknowledgment, but here I will simply affirm my deep gratitude for their collective aid, without which the present study could not have been written. vi During my research travels Deepak Cherian, Amit Das Gupta, Kathy and Malcolm Fraser, Lynsey Nairn, and Francesca Orsini furnished hospitality and local knowledge. Alp Esener tolerated me and my exploding coffee apparatus with characteristic bonhomie. Mohit Manohar extricated me from scrapes across India, and allowed me to accompany him on an unforgettable bushwhacking survey of Maratha tombs near Daulatabad. Uroš Zver procured me an invitation to a homecooked Bohra feast in Mumbai—and was kind enough not to disown me when I informed him and our astonished hosts that I did not eat meat. In Lucknow, Basharat Husain Khan told me the best joke that I have ever heard; Syed Ahsanuz Zafar told me another that came close. To the Howrah physician whom I met on Christmas Day: I could not find the orphanage, but I hope the coconut biscuits arrived in my stead. To the Rothesay Fire Brigade: I am sorry. My research was supported by the American Historical Association, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the North American Conference on British Studies, and, at Harvard, the Asia Center, the Clive Fellowship Fund, the Department of History, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and the Minda da Gunzburg Center for European Studies. In addition, archivists and librarians, especially in Harvard’s Interlibrary Loan department and in the British Library’s Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, contributed inestimable time and expertise. I cannot praise them enough. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my family, whose love and encouragement have underwritten my every endeavor. vii Abbreviations AJ Asiatic Journal BL British Library BPP Bengal Past and Present CSSH Comparative Studies in Society and History CPC Calendar of Persian Correspondence, 11 vols. (Calcutta and Delhi, 1911- 69) CUL Cambridge University Library FWIH Fort William – India House Correspondence, 21 vols. (Delhi, 1949-85) GCPI General Committee of Public Instruction GIED Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843 (Richmond, UK, 1999) HC/HL Deb House of Commons/Lords Debate (in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates unless otherwise stated) JAS Journal of Asian Studies JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland MAS Modern Asian Studies MSA Maharashtra State Archives NAI National Archives of India NLS National Library of Scotland PCFW Proceedings of the College of Fort William, National Archives of India PP Parliamentary Papers TNA The National Archives (UK) TNSA Tamil Nadu State Archives viii WBSA West Bengal State Archives ix Introduction In the preface to his Bengali-English dictionary of 1834, the Calcutta entrepreneur and litterateur Ramkamal Sen related the following anecdote. In the seventeenth century, an English East India Company ship proceeded from the Bay of Bengal up the Hooghly River, before anchoring near the future site of the city of Calcutta. The vessel’s commander sent ashore to the leading local businessmen, and requested the assistance of a “dubash.” This word, in the environs of the Company’s southern entrepot of Madras, referred to a mediator, often a power-broker (literally, “one with two languages”). In riverine Bengal, however, where the Company was still a newcomer, the utterance more readily called to mind a dhoba, or washerman. Thus, the local magnates appointed such a man to tender his services to the foreign merchants. The dhoba timidly approached the Indiaman in a dinghy, bearing the customary gifts of “plantains, pumplemusses and sugarcandy,” or the like. To his pleasant bewilderment, he was received on deck with a salute, and presented not with bags of soiled laundry, but “with bags of gold and other precious articles.” Thenceforth, the dhoba was employed as “one of the principal native servants of the Company.” And over time, he acquired the learning and status he had been assumed to possess already. For Ramkamal, “He may be considered the first English scholar among the natives of Calcutta.”1 Ramkamal’s account, however apocryphal, was percipient. Almost since its founding in 1600, the East India Company had sponsored learning in connection with its activities. 1 Ram Comul Sen, A Dictionary in English and Bengalee, 2 vols.
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