REPRESENTATIONS OF INDIA: 1740 - 1840 Amal Kumar Chatterjee Thesis for the degree of Master of Letters Department of English Literature University of Glasgow June 1993 ProQuest Number: 11007927 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11007927 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 GLASGOW UNIVERSITY LIBRARY REPRESENTATIONS OF INDIA: 1740 - 1840 Amal Kumar Chatterjee University of Glasgow Abstract This is a study of representations of India in English in the period 1740 - 1840. Representations in both fiction and non­ fiction are analysed within their contemporary political and social contexts, revealing that they not only reflected the conflicts within society but were actively involved in them. Reportage, discussion, comment, fiction are seen to be all parts of the same interaction, related to the social, political, economic and ideological trends of the time. The various writings, brought together and analysed in context, demonstrate the interconnected nature of experience, ideas and representation. The thesis begins with an overview of the research methodology and an analysis of the political and economic situation in the period. The study itself is divided into six chapters, the first two dealing with representations of Englishmen in India, the traders and the soldiers and administrators; the next three with the perceptions of Indian religion and the practices of Sati and Thuggee; and the sixth with Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, the kings of Mysore who came to represent all that was evil in India. Finally, an extensive bibliography of material written about India in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is appended. CONTENTS Introduction 1 C h a p t e r 1: T r a d e r s 36 C h a p t e r 2: S o l d ie r s & A dministrators 73 C h a p t e r 3: R e l ig io n 114 C h a p t e r 4: S a t i 149 C h a p t e r 5: T h u g s 169 C h a p t e r 6: P r in c e s & A r c h -V il l a in s : Hy d e r A li & T ip u S u l ta n 195 C o n c l u s io n 253 A p p e n d ix A: B ibliography 259 A p p e n d ix B: T a b le o f EIC S u r p l u s e s 1792 -1838 268 INTRODUCTION SECTION I “For the first time, the history of imperialism and its culture can now be studied as neither monolithic nor reductively compartmentalized, separate, distinct.”1 This study is part of the process wherein the critical focus on colonial writing shifts from individual aspects of texts to the broader field of examination of the material in the context of the multiplicity of political, social and ideological factors that influenced them. It is a study of the period after that which Perara defines as “Colonial”, i.e. the early Imperial: “Colonial refers to the period before the consolidations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when cultural and moral meanings were not yet systematically attached to the fact of conquest.”2 The intial survey of written material of the period after Perera’s “Colonial” period, the early Imperial, 1740 - 1840, revealed remarkable similarities in perceptions and representations in “literary” and “non-literary” writings. The border between the two, always blurred, became meaningless when the representations of English traders, thugs and Indian kings, amongst others, were examined. Meadows Taylor and other writers actively involved in the romantic re-creation of “factual subjects” did not significantly differ from “non-literary” representations of the same subjects in journals and periodicals. It made sense, therefore, to study the greater body of writings of the period simultaneously, examining their similarities and relationship of the the whole corpus to the social and political situation of their creators. This body of writing is similar in character to that which Said examined in Orientalism, where he described his subject matter thus: 1Said, Edward: Culture and Imperialism, London, 1993; p. xxiii. 2Perera, S.: Reaches of Empire, New York, 1991, p. 10. 1 . Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field . nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts . nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot . It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts, it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction . but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is above all, a discourse that . is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with the power political. , power intellectual..., power cultural..., power moral.”1 To a certain extent, the same can be said of the material dealt with in this thesis. It is a complex body of material, for which simple reductive analysis, as “racist/colonial/imperialist” etc., is not sufficient. This is because such tagging presupposes that the creators of the representations possessed the intellectual sophistication to actually comprehend the subjects they dealt with. Ideological and intellectual curiosity and interrogation are as much a product of a political and social climate as imperialism and nationalism: “ . colonial facts are vertiginous: they lack a recognisable cultural plot; they frequently fail to cohere around the master- myth that proclaims static lines of demarcation between imperial power and disempowered culture, between colonizer and colonized. Instead, they move with a ghostly mobility to suggest how highly unsettling an economy of 1Said, Edward: Orientalism, London, 1978; p. 12. 2 complicity and guilt is in operation . ”1 The myth was complex. The writers of the period never “truly” encountered the sub-continent they described - they were limited by the intellectual and political debates that raged around trade, religion and, eventually, race. “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”2 To access this material with the intention of proving bias is, therefore, unproductive as it investigates only part of a complex equation. Since bias is neither monomorphic nor static, analysis of the changing forms of the representations (“biases”) and their roots is necessary to understand the mechanics of these cultural (mis)representations. The premise is:"... all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be.”3 The resistance takes many forms, and resistance within the colonialists’ culture is as relevant to the study of colonial representation as the colonialists’ resistance to the culture of the colonised. It is the analysis of this resistance and conversion that is the purpose of this study. Apropos of earlier analyses, Said remarks, in his study of Orientalism, that “... there is no getting away from the fact that literary studies in general. have avoided the effort of seriously bridging the gap between the superstructural and the base levels in textual, historical scholarship. .”4. My thesis attempts to bridge this gap in the period that saw the rise of the English/British empire in India. The writings of the period expressed and 1Suleri, Sara: The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago, 1992; p. 3. 2 Orientalism, p. 1. 3Orientalism, p. 67. 4Orientalism, p. 13. 3 influenced the opinions of groups of Englishmen who had either had direct contact with India, or indirect contact through their countrymen who returned, greatly enriched, from it. Their perceptions of the region were influenced by, and part of, the “power political. , power intellectual. , power cultural power moral” and this is an examination of the close correspondence between the fictional and non-fictional. Few would argue that representations in colonial writings are in any way “true” depictions. In the words of Homi Bhabha, “Colonial power produces the colonized as a fixed reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible.”1 As their power grew, the English increasingly needed to justify their domination of the sub-continent. If Tipu had not existed, he would have been created, had the thugs been “unreal”, they too would have been invented. And so they were. “Facts” were chosen, and elaborated on, and layer after layer built up, like the skins of an onion. The resultant fiction sustained the English nation’s dreams, ideology and actions in the sub-continent.