On Reading Beveridge’s History of India

By J.P. Guha

Alike to those who are anti-imperialists and to those who grieve for the absence of British rule in India, it may not seem unjustified if I say that there was a radical change, a volte-face in British historical writing on India after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. I shall therefore judge Beveridge’s History in the light of this assumption and, consequently, I should like to compare him with James Mill who wrote before 1857 and Vincent Smith who wrote after. Beveridge’s own book on Indian history was published five years later than 1857.¹ I have chosen these historians for comparison not because their works were the standard text-books in India and outside but because their ideas were very often used as a fulcrum for most later discussion by writers of the most diverse schools.

Before I do so let me deal with the starting point first. The annexation of India was virtually complete before the outbreak of 1857, and with it the concept of “commercial” empire came to be replaced by the concept of “political” empire. Although the beginnings of this concept may be seen when the “battle” of Plassey was won, and although it grew steadily between 1757 and 1857, it may be said that there was a certain demure reserve in the attitudes of the British historians towards the concept before 1857, the radicals becoming increasingly influential in English politics. But the reserve gave way after the Sepoy Mutiny and the concept of “political” empire was firmly planted. Ever after the British historians seldom questioned the concept. Rather they treated it with great gusto and, more often than not, one would notice an element of grandeur in their exposition. At the same time it must also be acknowledged that the concept of imperialism did not exclude moral responsibility, but often it reminded the historians of the pax Romana, the ideal embodied in Virgil’s Aeneid—Tu regere imperio populos…² The literary expression of this ideal came of course from Kipling and when he wrote “the White Man’s Burden” (1899)

Take up the White Man’s Burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

the concept of “political” empire became a reality.

The current of ideas before 1857 were not what they were after. The concept of “political” empire was still nascent and beginning from the seventeenth century both historians and others thought of India not infrequently as a rich field of commercial pasture. Milton took India to be a country where “with richest hand” “Barbaric Pearl & Gold” were showered on her kings.³ As early as 1666 the idea of commerce caught Dryden’s attention. In Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders he wrote:

The Ebbs of Tides and their mysterious Flow

We, as Arts Elements shall understand,

And as by Line upon the Ocean go,

Whose Paths shall be familiar as the Land.

Instructed ships shall sail to quick Commerce,

By which remotest Regions are allied;

Which makes one City of the Universe;

Where some may gain, and all may be supplied.⁴

A century later when Julius Mickle brought out a translation of the Portuguese national epic Os Lusíadas by Camoens, he interpreted the epic as “the birth of commerce, and, in a particular manner, the epic poem of whatever country has the control and possession of the commerce of India.” Mickle therefore thought little of interpolating a 300-line naval engagement of his own invention to suit the needs of his prospective readers.⁵

It is true that neither Camoens nor Dryden was an historian though the latter was the royal historiographer in the court of Charles II but the ideas they expressed were also the ideas held by the historians of the time. That Dryden and Camoens should use them do only prove how common those ideas were. Till the eighteenth century then India was to the British only a colonie d’exploitation. As Professor Holden Furber has said, “the words ‘colony’ and ‘colonial’ were almost never used of Bengal or India” during this period “and the word ’empire’ seldom”.⁶

Professor Holden Furber remarks in the same essay from where I have quoted his words that between 1757 and 1800 there was a steady growth not only of the theme of imperialism in the British historical writing on India but also of anti-imperialism. If Robert Clive’s famous letter⁷ to William Pitt is a frank expression of imperialism, then Burke’s speech on Warren Hastings is an eloquent defence of anti-imperialism. The two themes therefore coexisted during the period and often in the same writer. This is true of the other periods as well. Thus Kipling who typified the prideful confident imperialism did not always praise the British raj. In the writings of Carlyle, Froude, Dilke and Seeley the themes of imperialism and anti-imperialism are found close together. In face of these facts cited by Professor Furber, can we say that the British historians changed their outlook after 1857? In other words, can it be said that the theme of imperialism predominated over the theme of anti-imperialism in the historical writing after 1857?

It will be evident from the essay of Professor Furber that he does not deny the existence of books that are frankly imperialistic but, according to him, such books appeared not after 1857 but “only after the first wave of Indian nationalist writing had put the raj definitely on the defensive”. The difficulty in accepting Professor Furber’s thesis is this that in his essay, admirable as it is, the term “anti-imperialism” remains the anexastastos logos, the unexamined word. It undergoes an infinite series of gradation of meaning. As a consequence, you can hardly say who is an imperialist and who is not. It will appear from Professor Furber’s essay that Burke and Mill were anti-imperialists. So were also the Little Englanders and the Evangelists. But we know Burke to be a romantic conservative and Mill to be a Utilitarian. Little Englanders were Little Englanders who argued but never stated their principles. And the Evangelists were like the Roman god Janus: they had two faces and sought justification for the pax Britannica in India. A detailed examination of the historical works of the so-called anti-imperialists after 1857 (not possible in this introduction) would indicate that the predominant note which these historians sounded was the note of imperialism, the “new” imperialism tempered by caution, reflection and doubt. If Carlyle was troubled by the thought of the impermanence of Indian empire, or if Kipling was sometimes critical of the British doings in India, it is not that they were not imperialists but that they could not be impervious to criticism.

Let me now say why the British historians turned imperialists after 1857. It is not always realized that the Mutiny of 1857 caught the British unawares.⁸ However when the flame had been stamped out and the news of the gallant deeds of the British soldiers reached England, the prestige of Britain grew and India and Indian affairs engaged the attention of the public as it did never before. There was a renewed awakening of British interest in imperial expansion. The creation of the Royal Colonial Institute in 1868 is symbolic of this aspiration. Sir Charles Dilke’s Greater Britain came out next year—to all intents and purposes a significant publication—which showed the way the wind was blowing. Sir John Seeley’s lectures (1883) on the expansion of England, though critical of the Whig interpretation of Indian history, were none the less defence of imperialism. John Ruskin whose Unto This Last made Gandhiji to lachrymose said in a lecture at Oxford, where Cecil Rhodes was among the undergraduate listeners, that Britain should “found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on”. These examples have been chosen at random only to indicate that the prevailing mood in England after 1857 was one of an unalloyed imperialism. The mood can be summed up in the words of Disraeli’s famous declaration in 1872 that the “Empire shall not be destroyed”.

British historians could not therefore turn back the movement of time. But in saying that they adopted imperialistic posture after 1857 in their writings on India, I do not wish to suggest that the Sepoy Mutiny was the sole cause of it. Every school-boy knows—if he is a Macaulay’s school-boy—that historical ideas are formed not due to one cause. The causes are many and various. And, consequently, it may be pointed out in passing that during the last three decades of the nineteenth century Britain’s urge to dominate over “palm and pine” received a new impetus. Nor was Britain alone in this field, for who can overlook the achievements of Jules Ferry, the political high priest of imperialism and his impact in the eighteen-eighties. These causes could not but help the formation of imperialistic ideas and I am justified in my assertion that the major theme that the British historians exhibited in their writings on India in the nineteenth century was imperialism and its enunciation.

I must now give greater precision to this statement by giving an illustration. The theme of imperialism and, its natural ally, benevolent despotism is explicitly set forth in Vincent Smith’s Early History of India, first published in 1904. Vincent Smith is right in supposing that the numerous problems of modern India can only be understood if “we have a sound knowledge of ancient India”. But a sound knowledge of ancient India or of any India can only be acquired if we relate facts with impartiality and discuss the problems of history in a judicial spirit. Vincent Smith is not unaware of the twin demands that the writing of a history usually makes on an historian for he makes these claims himself in the Preface to his book. But when it came to the actual writing of ancient Indian history, Vincent Smith exercised neither of these tools. He adopted an imperialistic attitude as the special legatee of British imperialism. Thus speaking about the political unity of all India, he says that although India never attained it perfectly, nevertheless it “always was the ideal throughout the centuries. . . The immemorial persistence of that ideal goes a long way to explain the acquiescence of India in British rule, and was at the bottom of the passionate outburst of loyal devotion to the King-Emperor so touchingly expressed in many ways by princes and people in 1911”. Vincent Smith is therefore led to the conclusion that the political unity in ancient India was achieved by the exercise of despotism. A despot alone can bring about political unity in India. Hence Chandra Gupta Maurya was a man of blood and iron, according to Smith; so was Asoka, “a masterful autocrat ruling church and state alike with a strong hand”. Samudra Gupta was the “Indian Napoleon” who “made no scruple about setting his own ruthless boasts of sanguinary wars by the side of the quietest moralizations of him who deemed ’the chiefest conquest’ to be the conquest of piety”. But Oriental despotism and British despotism are not identical. It would be easy to show by citing quotations how Vincent Smith scorned Oriental despotism. After referring to Kalhana’s description of the great famine of 917-18 Smith says: “This gruesome picture may cause for reflection to some critics of modern methods of famine relief.” In other words, Oriental despotism is inferior to British despotism because the latter shows more concern for the people it rules. The same point of view is found in the following passage which describes the political anarchy that set in after Harsha’s death in the northern India:

“Harsha’s death loosened the bonds which restrained the disruptive forces always ready to operate in India, and allowed them to produce their natural result, a medley of petty states, with ever-varying boundaries, and engaged in unceasing internecine war. Such was India when first disclosed to European observation in the fourth century B.C., and such it always has been, except during the comparatively brief periods in which a vigorous central government has compelled the mutually repellent molecules of the body politic to check their gyrations and submit to their grasp of a superior controlling force. . .

“The three following chapters, which attempt to give an outline of the salient features in the bewildering annals of Indian petty states when left to their own devices for several centuries, may perhaps serve to give the reader a notion of what India always has been when released from the control of a supreme authority, and what she would be again, if the hand of the benevolent despotism which now hold her in its iron grasp should be withdrawn.”

What a striking contrast awaits us when we open Beveridge’s book! In comparison with Vincent Smith, Beveridge is less imperialistic in his appraisal of the Indian scene. Though he brings to bear upon his interpretation of ancient India a little knowledge compared with Vincent Smith, Beveridge’s interpretation is less subjective than Vincent Smith’s. Nor is Beveridge biased like James Mill. Take, for example, the following excerpt from the Preface to his Comprehensive History of India: “Hinduism, though little better than a tissue of obscene and monstrous fancies, not only counts its domination by thousands of years, but can boast of having had among its votaries, men who, in the ages in which they lived, extended the boundaries of knowledge, and carried some of the abstrusest of the sciences to a height which they had never reached before.”

The passage was written a century after Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, even after Colebrook, Wilson and Burnoff had made the Europeans acquainted with ancient India. It was written, I may add, after Max Mueller had written his History of Sanskrit Literature (1859) and Christian Lassen had completed his monumental work Indische Alterthumskunde (Knowledge of Indian Antiquities).[^9] Obviously, Beveridge did not profit by these books and all that we can say of this passage is that Beveridge was ill-informed. But we cannot say, as we can say of James Mill, that Beveridge saw Hindu civilization through a fixed and definite assemblages of ideas. As a result, it was possible for Beveridge to be more impartial and more objective than either Mill or Vincent Smith.

Beveridge’s objectivity can be best illustrated if we compare his treatment of Alexander’s Indian campaign with that of Vincent Smith. The latter devotes some sixty-six pages in the third edition of Early History of India which consists of 478 pages. Vincent Smith lionizes Alexander and therefore his “criticism is silenced in admiration”. Not so Beveridge’s. He writes some six pages and what he writes is balanced and judicious, apparent from the following passage: “The Indian expedition of Alexander cannot be justified on moral grounds. It was dictated by a wild and ungovernable ambition; and spread misery and death among thousands and tens of thousands who had done nothing to offend him, and were peacefully pursuing their different branches of industry, when he made his appearance among them like a destroying demon. Such exploits, once deemed the only avenues to fame, are now judged more wisely; still it is impossible to deny that conquerors were often in early times pioneers of civilization, commerce following peacefully along their bloody track and compensating for their devastation by the blessings which it diffused. Such was certainly the result of the Indian expedition of Alexander.”

Though more objective and impartial than Vincent Smith, Beveridge is none the less an imperialist but he speaks with a voice that is less aggressive and less “Prussian”. He did not, like Vincent Smith, make out a case for despotic rule for achieving political unity in India. This is evident from his condemnation of Warren Hastings about whom he wrote articles in 1877-78. In this he was in the company of Mill and Macaulay. Mill said, “No transaction, perhaps, of his whole administration more deeply tainted the reputation of Hastings than the tragedy of Nun Comar”. Macaulay thought that though the case against Nanda Kumar was instituted by another man, “it was then, and still is, the opinion of everybody, idiots and biographers excepted, that Hastings was the real mover in the business”. All the same Beveridge’s Whiggism was of quite different mould. Whereas to James Mill the solution to India’s problem lay in the application of government and law on utilitarian principles, to Beveridge it lay elsewhere—in metahistory, if I may say so, for Beveridge desired to see India one day converted to Christianity. “Should the day ever come”, he declared in his Comprehensive History of India, “that India in consequence of the development of her resources by British capital and the enlightenment of her people by British philanthropy shall again take rank among the nations as an independent state, then it will not be too much to say that the extinction of our Indian empire by such peaceful means sheds more lustre on the British name than all the other events recorded in its history.” At this distance of time, then, when we read the reprints of Beveridge and Mill we are right in concluding that both Beveridge and Mill were wrong, the latter in holding the view that human nature is alike in all parts of the globe, the former in prescribing for India the continuance of mission civilisatrice.