History Optional by Piyush Kumar

Model Answer

Question #1. “Various ideologies in Britain played very important role in shaping the administration in India.” Evaluate.   

British East India Company acquired its foothold firmly in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa by its victories in the battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1765). Since then, the British East India Company adopted a threefold strategy of ideological, military and colonial administrative apparatus to expand and consolidate the British Indian Empire. British East India Company tried to justify its policy of acquiring political power through its ideological bases of mercantilism, orientalism, utilitarianism, evangelicalism and Anglicism.

The British knew what they did was morally and ethically incorrect and to justify their action, they used ideological bases to brainwash the natives of India and the world that what they did in India was in the interest of the progress and development of India and it was their ‘white man’s burden’ to ‘civilize India’ from a historical barbarian rule of the earlier centuries of Indian polity and culture. Romila Thapar rightly observes that the historical writings produced by the European scholars, beginning in the 18th century, were formulated in terms of the ideological attitudes then dominant in Europe.

Mercantilism:

Mercantilism presupposes the volume of world trade as more or less fixed, precious metals silver and gold form the desirable national wealth, balance of trade should be the norm and for that purpose should impose high tariffs on imports.

Colonization should be adopted and if necessary, rival powers should be curbed by force of arms and finally colonial trade should be a monopoly of the mother country.

Orientalism:

Orientalism is a concept that stresses the uniqueness of the culture and civili­zation of the Orient. But Romila Thapar is of the view that the term ‘Orientalist’ was used in the wider sense of scholars interested in Asia and the term Ideologists referred to those interested only in India.

Warren Hastings, the Governor General of Bengal not only patronized Asiatic Society but desired to reconcile the British rule with the Indian institutions. The British followed the policy of learning about the Indian society to the extent that knowledge enabled the administrators to be conversant with laws and customs of Indians of various localities but never disturbing the Indian society by mediation or intervention.

Evangelicalism:

Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement of England of the 18th century. While some Christian missionaries attempted to reform the ‘degenerate Indian society’ quietly, the evangelists were openly hostile to ‘Indian barbarism’ and desired to ‘civilize India’.

The influential members of the Evangelicalism were Wilberforce, the confidant of Pitt, Charles Grant, a chairman of the directors and his son who was a cabinet minister. They advocated bringing Christian West to the East and “India will reform herself as a flower to the Sun” Charles Grant propagated the policy of assimilation of India into the great civilizing mission of Britain.

Thus, in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries the idea of ‘improvement’ became a part of the civilizing process. The then Governor General Cornwallis introduced permanent settlement in Bengal as a part of his vision of improvement as the magic touch of property would create capital and market in land.

Munro was critical of the permanent settlement idea as it was an alien concept of English rule of law with its strict division of judiciary and executive. Munro argued for the preservation of the stable heritage of village committees by introducing Ryotwari settlements.

When Wiliam Bentinck became the Governor General of India, liberal minded Macaulay suggested that Indians should be civilized through the Western education system. There arose a debate between the orientalists who insisted that the old system of education be continued and the Anglicists who supported the move of Macaulay. Finally, the Western education system was introduced with the cooperation of the reformer, Raja Ramohan Roy.

The Utilitarians:

They advocated that introducing reforms into the problem of law and landed property they could attain the Benthamite principle of the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’. They believed that law could be an instrument of change and through enactment of laws; Indian society could be transformed into a modern society from that of superstitious society. The utilitarian philosophy also influenced the views of Dalhousie in creating all-India depart­ments with single heads.

In the span of a hundred years (1757-1857) in this process of expansion and consolidation of the British power, the mission of the British was to civilize and improve India from a society of historical unchanging barbarian image by providing a unity of action in spite of differences in the perception of the orientalists, evangelicalisms and the utilitarian. An objective analysis of the process reveals that these ideological bases and advocates of these ideologies were responsible in building the British Empire in India.

Question #2. What factors contributed to the disappearance of the women’s question, so central to the concerns of the reformers, from the agenda of the nationalists towards the ends of the 19^th century?

The whole social reformation movement in 19^th Century India was mostly revolving around women question. But this remains true mostly for the first half of the 19^th Century, as these questions were becoming vague in the second half of the same century.

Partha Chatterjee observes that there is a disappearance of the 'women's question', so central to the concerns of the reformers, from the agenda of the nationalists towards the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that practically the first major nationalist mobilisation took place around the Age of Consent Bill of 1891, where the nationalists argued that this was gross interference in the affairs of the nation and that Hindu society would be robbed of its distinctiveness if this were allowed to pass.

In the past, most reformers had in fact solicited colonial legal intervention in the prohibition of certain practices, even when these supposedly intervened within the so called 'private' sphere. It should also be remembered that this was a controversy that spread far beyond the borders of Bengal and lay behind the final of ways between Gopal Agarkar and Bal Gangadhar Tilak - the former supporting the cause of social reform and the latter staunchly opposing it.

Chatterjee argues that nationalism began by making a distinction between two spheres: the 'materially and the 'spiritual'. This was a distinction already made by the reformers and even they would, on occasions, claim that they were spiritually superior to the British, even if the latter had made significant material progress.

It conceded that as a colonised nation it was subordinate to the colonisers in the material sphere. But there was one domain that the coloniser had no access’s to: this was the inner domain of culture and spirituality. Here the nation declared itself sovereign.

This meant that henceforth, in this inner domain, it would not allow any intervention by the colonial state.' From now on, the questions of social reform would become an 'internal matter' that would be dealt with after the nation attained freedom in the material domain.

The methods of the moderates like Gokhale and Ranade were in the framework of constitutional reform and very much in line with the position of the early reformers. With the arrival of nationalism, all this changed and soon power within the Indian National Congress passed into the hands of the so-called 'extremists', in particular the Lal-Bal-Pal combine

Unlike the women's question there was resolution here with regard to caste reforms; they were simply deferred "in the larger interests of anticolonial unity". All issues of social reform were henceforth to be considered "divisive" of national unity. As it happens, there is one more thing that happened here:  the demarcation of the 'inner' sphere as a sphere of sovereignty, many socially conservative ideas could also now easily inhabit the nationalist movement,

However, with the entry of Gandhi into the political scene, we can see a shift from this framework to some extent. Although Gandhi himself resorted to the use of Hindu symbols, he was acutely aware of the unfinished agenda of social reform and tried to blurred the gap between the public and private sphere.