A History of Indian English Literature PDF

CHAPTER 2- The Pagoda Tree: From the Beginnings to 1857 The British connection with India was effectively established in the beginning of the seventeenth century, though the first I nglishman ever to visit India did so as early as A.D. 883, when one Sigelm, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes, was sent...

CHAPTER 2- The Pagoda Tree: From the Beginnings to 1857 The British connection with India was effectively established in the beginning of the seventeenth century, though the first I nglishman ever to visit India did so as early as A.D. 883, when one Sigelm, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes, was sent (here by King Alfred on a pilgrimage, in fulfilment of a vow. T he discovery of the sea-route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1498 brought the Portuguese and the Dutch to India long lirfore the British. In early and mid-sixteenth century, British interest in India mostly remained in the formative stage. A petition addressed to King Henry VIII in 1511 reads: ‘The Indies are discovered and vast treasures brought from thence everyday. Let us therefore bend our endeavours thitherwards.’1I inally, the East India Company which was to link India’s destiny firmly with Britain for almost two centuries was granted its first charter by Queen Elizabeth I on the last day of thelastmonth of the last year of the sixteenth century, as if to usher in a new era in the East- West relationship with the dawn of the new century. The East India Company, whose original aim was primarily ommerce and not conquest, however, soon discovered its manifest destiny of filling the vacuum created in the eighteenth century India by the gradual disintegration of the Mughal empire. In Kipling’s words, Once, two hundred years ago, the trader came/Meek and tame./Where his timid foot halted, there he stayed,/Till mere trade/Grew to Empire,/And he sent his armies forth/South and North,/Till the country from Peshawur to Ceylon/ Was his own. After the Battle of Plassey (1757) which made the Company virtually master of Bengal, the British who had come to India to sell, decided also to rule. The business of ruling naturally involved the shaking of the Indian ‘Pagoda tree' of its treasures. (One recalls Clive’s famous reply to his detractors after the sack of Murshidabad in 1757: T stand astonished at my own moderation.’) But those engaged in shaking the ‘Pagoda tree’ were also instrumental in planting the seeds of a modernization process in the eighteenth century Indian Waste Land—seeds which started burgeoning in the nineteenth century. The rise of Indian English literature was an aspect of this Indian renaissance. As Sri Aurobindo points out, the Indian renaissance was less like the European one and more like the Celtic movement in Ireland, ‘the attempt of a reawakened national spirit to find a new impulse of self-expression which shall give the spiritual force for a great reshaping and rebuilding.’3 The awakening of India, as Jawaharlal Nehru observes, ‘was two- fold: she looked to the West and, at the same time, she looked at herself and her own past.’4 In the rediscovery of India’s past, some of the early officials of the company played a significant role. Many of them were scholars with a passion for oriental culture and it was not unusual in those days to find an East India Company official fully equipped to discuss the Koran with a Maulana Mohammad Ali and a Purana with a Viswanath Sastri with equal competence. Sir William Jones, who founded the Bengal Asiatic Society as early as 1784, H.T. Colebrooke, the author of Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Succession (1797-98), and James Prinsep, the discoverer of the clue to the Asokan inscriptions, were some of the representative white men in India then whose burden was certainly not imperial. While these Englishmen were rediscovering India’s past. (he gradual spread of English education and Western ideas brought forth a band of earnest Indians who drank deep at the fountain of European learning. This consummation was not, however, achieved before the British policy concerning the education of Indians had passed through two diametrically opposed stages. To begin with, for almost a generation after the East India Company had virtually become the de facto ruler of Bengal, the Government had no official education policy, probably because at that time, even in Britain itself, education had not yet been accepted as a responsibility of the Government. But soon, practical considerations stressed the necessity to evolve such a policy. There was a pressing need for suitable pundits and maulvis to help judges in the administration of justice. It was therefore decided to revive the study of Sanskrit and Persian among the Indians. This led to the establishment by Hastings of the Calcutta Madarasa for teaching Persian and Arabic in 1781 and that of the Sanskrit College at Benaras by Jonathan Duncan in 1792. The Orientalists among the Company officials naturally supported this policy enthusiastically. By the turn of the century, however, second thoughts began to prevail. First, there was an equally pressing need for Indian clerks, translators and lower officials in administration and a knowledge of English was essential for these jobs. Furthermore, with the rise of the Evangelical movement in Britain, the ideal of spreading the word of Christ among the natives assumed vital importance for some Englishmen. Even before the close of the eighteenth century, Mission schools which taught English besides the vernacular had already been functioning in the South, while the beginning of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of similar schools in Bengal and Bombay. The missionaries believed that in imparting Western education to Indians, every teacher was ‘breaking to pieces with a rod of iron the earthenware vessels of Hinduism.1 The imperialists also championed the cause of English, which for them was a potent instrument to civilize ‘the lesser breeds without the law'. They also thought that the spread of English education among the natives would lead to the assimilation of Western culture by the Indians and that this would make for the stability of the empire—a view strongly advocated by Charles Grant, who argued: ‘To introduce the language of the conquerors seems to be an obvious means Of assimilating a conquered people to them.’ The Orientalists were seriously alarmed at this growing support to English. Their stand was forcefully expressed by H.H. Wilson, who observed: ‘It is not by the English language that we can enlighten the people of India. It can be effected only through forms of speech which they already understand and use.... The project of importing English literature along with English cotton into India and bringing it into universal use must at once be felt by every reasonable mind as chimerical and ridiculous.’7 It was however, obvious that the Orientalists were fighting a losing battle. As K.K. Chatterjee notes, ‘The Home Office despatches from 1824 onwards went on being increasingly insistent on re-orienting Indian education to teach the useful science and literature of Europe.... All the presidencies in the 1820s were headed by Governors who were generally inclined to English education, though with varying emphases (Elphinstone in Bombay, Thomas Munro in Madras, and above all the reformist Bentinck in Bengal).’ As for the Indians themselves, ihere was no doubt in the minds of most of their intellectuals as to which way the wind was blowing. Perhaps the most adaptable of people, they had whole-heartedly taken to Persian some centuries earlier, with the Muslim conquest, and had mastered that language. It was obvious to them that a similar strategy with regard to English was now called for. As early as 1816, we find a Calcutta Brahmin named Baidyanath Mukhopadhyaya telling the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court that ‘many of the leading Hindus were desirous of forming an establishment for the education of their children in a liberal manner,’ meaning obviously English education. A strong prejudice against Western education was indubitably rampant in the conservative circles. It is on record that the office of the Inspector-General of Schools at Patna was at one time popukrriy known as ‘Shaitan ka daftarkhana’10(i.e., the Devil’s Office). Nevertheless, the more forwar