This book
seeks to appreciate the trends of imperial perceptions of India and her
institutions. By perception I mean that particular action of mind that refers
to its sensation to external objects as its cause. Distinct from conception,
imagination, judgement and inference, per- ception denotes the faculty that
takes note of the sensible and quasi-sensible objects. It involves taking
cognizance of the objects in general and recognition of their moral and
aesthetic qualities. Throughout the essay I have endeavoured to approximate
this broad appreciation of the term. There is no claim of finality in it. Much
of what could have been brought within the ambit of the work has been left out.
It is but an introductory assessment of imperial sensibility on lines that
might discomfort casual readers owing to the work’s apparent indefiniteness. I
should think that readers would do well to approach the book without succumbing
to the lures of colonial scholarship on imperial perceptions.
Thematically, the drift and
propensities of imperial perceptions etched out here are valid for the whole
period of Raj which was initiated with the assumption of authority by the
British crown from the East India Company. The Delhi durbar of 1877 signified the frank and unambiguous demonstration by
the Raj of its determination to hold India. The book attempts to capture the
broad parameters and intricate detours of imperial perceptions of India
especially since the over-confident days of the adolescent Raj in the
mid-seventies of the nineteenth century. Some might feel disconcerted by the
nature of the source material used here. But then, perception and sensibility
are by their very nature multi-dimensional. Some others might object to the
irreve- rential attitude of the author towards the ‘prophets’ of human
understandings and feel irked by the casual treatment of number of laymen and
missionaries and their liberal positions. It may not be amiss here to state
that I believe that matters and ideas have a dialectical relationship and both
in social and intellectual movements there are the dominant strands and the
subsidiary forces. In the final analysis, the dominant trends subsume minor
dissenting underpinnings of perceptions.
The Raj was the central piece of the
British empire. Its influence in imperial strategy was enormous. Economic
power, military authority and diplomatic ascendancy of the empire were
sustained by the centrality of the Raj in British imperial psychology. The Raj
was almost a national obse- ssion in Britain. Its demise caused an equally
compelling neurosis. India deposited in British national consciousness layers
of racial silt. British sensibility with regard to the Raj, therefore,
displayed an arrogant and an authoritarian prog- ramme which was quite
different from the fraternal fellow-feelings which were displayed towards
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia.
For nearly a century, the Raj
continued to create its myths and legends. It sparked off its various imperial
stereotypes; fashioned the objects of its ‘investigative modalities’; tinted
the imperial looking glass; ensued in official and public debates different
strategic discussions; encouraged and app- lauded soldiers, administrators,
publicists and missionaries; animated its extrovert troubadours and comforted
its patient and plodding reconciliers. The experience of the Raj was put in
practice by administrators and soldiers in Nigeria, Ghana, Sudan, Egypt and
Rhodesia alike. It offered a blue-print to European powers elsewhere in their
mission abroad. Between the definite perceptions of the Raj of itself and the
remarkable flamboyance of imperial braggadocio on the one hand and the
consistent line of thought about the ‘contem- ptible’ India and its so called
inevitable failure to graduate in the school of self-government on the other,
imperial sensibility gathered a wide and an influential audience. It was not
merely an upper class affair. Even the British working class was attracted by
the seductive prospects of a colonial overclass. If Rudyard Kipling and Maud
Diver stood at the one end of the imperial spectrum signifying unflinching
imperial will and determination, E. M. Forster and Edward Thompson stood at the
other end of the same world-view upholding various sentiments to buttress the
imperial logic. If the extravagant Round Table Group inherited in full measure
the self-righteous authoritarianism of
John Strachey and James Fitzjames
Stephen, the Fellow- ship of reconciliation and various sympathizers of an
amorphous British Left of the 1930s and Forties sought to explore, along an
uncertain path across a racial chasm, a humane partnership between the ruler
and the ruled within a haughty empire.
Despite tactical differences, there
was a strategic con- sensus that upheld imperial sensibility. That strategic
accord was sustained all through our period notwithstanding the insistence of
informed scholars that liberal England stood mortally scared in front of its
own tormented conscience. Sympathy for the Raj was by no means universal and
there were many in Britain who actively opposed it. But at no times could they
develop an organized body of thought inspiring concerted actions against the
powerful Raj Synd- rome. The primary object of the work is to weave a pattern
and discover a meaning in imperial sensibility.
