The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger

Author:Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.

Representing Authority in Victorian India

BERNARD S. COHN

CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF A RITUAL IDIOM

By the middle of the nineteenth century, India’s colonial society was marked by a sharp disjunction between a small, alien ruling group, British in culture, and a quarter of a billion Indians whom the British effectively controlled. The military superiority of these aliens had just been successfully demonstrated in the brutal suppression of a widespread military and civil revolt which had spread through much of Upper India in 1857 and 1858. In the two decades that followed this military action, a theory of authority became codified, based on ideas and assumptions about the proper ordering of groups in Indian society, and their relationship to their British rulers. In conceptual terms, the British, who had started their rule as ‘outsiders’, became ‘insiders’ by vesting in their monarch the sovereignty of India through the Government of India Act of 2 August 1858. This new relationship between the British monarch, her Indian subjects and the native princes of India was proclaimed in all principal centres of British rule in India on 8 November 1858. In the proclamation Queen Victoria assured the Indian princes that ‘their rights, dignity and honour’ as well as their control over their territorial possessions would be respected, and that the queen ‘was bound to the natives of Our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects’. All her Indian subjects were to be secure in the practice of their religions. They were to enjoy ‘the equal and impartial protection of the law’, and in the framing and administration of this law : ‘due regard would be paid to the ancient rights, usages and customs of India’. The princes and her Indian subjects were informed by the queen that all would be done to stimulate ‘the peaceful industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement’, and that they ‘should enjoy that social advancement which can only be secured by internal peace and good government’.1

The proclamation was based on two main assumptions: firstly that there was an indigenous diversity in culture, society and religion in India, and secondly that the foreign rulers had a responsibility for the maintenance of an equitable form of government which would be directed not only to protecting the integrity inherent in this diversity, but also to social and material progress which would benefit the ruled.

The proclamation can be viewed as a cultural statement which encompasses two divergent or even contradictory theories of rule: one which sought to maintain India as a feudal order, and the other looking towards changes which would inevitably lead to the destruction of this feudal order. Each of these theories about British rule incorporated ideas about the sociology of India, and the relationship of the rulers to individuals and groups in Indian society. If India were to be ruled in a feudal mode, then an Indian aristocracy had to be recognized and/or created, which could play the part of ‘loyal feudatories’ to their British queen.

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