“A GRAND ASIATIC EMPIRE”: THE EXPANSE OF BHARAT IN HINDUPORE: A
PEEP BEHIND THE INDIAN UNREST: AN ANGLO-INDIAN ROMANCE AND
THE PRINCE OF DESTINY: THE NEW KRISHNA
“…I am a child of Asia; her sorrows are my sorrows, her joys are my joys…As an Asiatic, representing a vast constituency, I feel as I never did feel, never can feel as a mere Indian. From one end of Asia to the other, I boast of a vast home, a wide nationality, an extended kinship. Nay, I not only stand upon higher and larger ground, but I stand upon sacred
ground…To me the dust of Asia is far more precious than gold and silver.”
– Keshab Chandra Sen1
“You cannot awaken and appeal to the spirit of nationality in India and at the same time profess loyal acceptance of British rule.” – George Nathaniel Curzon2
In September 1890, a short story called “The Enlightenments of Pagett, M.P.” appeared in The Contemporary Review. It was written by the up-and-coming British author, Rudyard Kipling, whose imperialist literature would eventually earn him the moniker “Bard of Empire.”3 Kipling, born in India and having returned to London just a year before the story’s publication, exploited his position as an insider of the Raj to address British curiosity about the recent emergence of the Indian National Congress in 1885. As suggested by its title, “Enlightenments” centers on the many lessons learned by a British member of Parliament named Pagett who, weary from several years of empty politicking and paper- pushing at the seat of colonial power, travels to India in order to “address himself to the problems of Imperial administration with a firmer hand.”4 This is his first trip outside of England and Pagett visits his old schoolmate Orde, a Deputy Commissioner with the Raj, who is stationed in north India. The narrator suggests that while Orde and Pagett may have once been close friends, all that they have in common now is a shared past. While the
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1 Keshab Chandra Sen, “Asia’s Message to Europe,” 52-53. See also Birendra Prasad, “Keshab Chandra Sen: Prophet of Pan-Asianism,” 123.
2 Qtd. in Jonathan Schneer, London 1900, 188.
3 Robert Thurston Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Appreciation, 8.
wealthier Pagett had the good fortune to become an M.P. at home, Orde had quit college in order to “become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great Indian Government.”5 Though
the men are approximately the same age, Orde’s lengthy residence in India has clearly taken a toll on him, as his appearance is “harder and more square” and his face is “worn and
wrinkled about the eyes.”6 The disparate paths of the two are affirmed as the narrator
remarks that Orde looks “with something like envy at the comfortable outlines of Pagett’s blandly receptive countenance, the clear skin, the untroubled eye, and the mobile, clean- shaven lips.”7
“Enlightenments” contains little action but plenty of discussion as Pagett asks Orde and numerous other individuals, Indians and Britons alike, for their thoughts on India and the Indian National Congress in particular. Over the course of a morning, Pagett is steadily disabused of his many erroneous impressions about the state of affairs in the British Crown Jewel. The primary exchange between Pagett and Orde regarding “what popular feeling in India is really like y’know, now that it has wakened into political life” is interspersed with several short yet equally pointed conversations that Pagett strikes up with the various people who come to see the Deputy Commissioner.8 The native Indians Pagett encounters include
Bishen Singh (a carpenter), Rasul Ali Khan (a Muslim landowner), “old Jelloo” (a respected villager and farmer), and Dina Nath (a young English-educated college student). Pagett also has the opportunity to speak with fellow Britons including Mr. Edwards (a mechanic and master of the Orde’s lodge), Reginald Burke (a manager of a local bank), and Dr. Eva McCreery Lathrop (the chief of a new women’s hospital). As a result of his exchanges with !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5 Ibid., 333. 6 Ibid., 334. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 335.
all of these figures, most importantly Orde himself, Pagett is steadily “enlightened” that the rise of the Indian National Congress, despite what he may have heard or surmised back in London, has not been a positive development. Not only does the organization overlookthe wishes and desires of the vast majority of Indians, it stymies the progressive operations of the colonial government.9
Through both direct conversation and translation, Pagett’s exchanges with the Indians substantiate Orde’s assertion that the Congress has in no way inspired any “great excitement among the masses.”10 The M.P. is dismayed to learn that Singh, Khan, and Jelloo
have never heard of the Congress, and even when they come to learn about it from the conversation at hand, they are unmoved. Only the English-educated student Dina Nath is aware of the organization but Pagett’s encounter with him also proves disappointing. Despite his education, Nath is unable to articulate clearly the Congress platform or explain satisfactorily the few examples of its goals that he is able to muster, such as repealing the Arms Act or shrinking the Indian Army. A gross caricature of the privileged Indian members of the Congress, Nath comes across as woefully naïve if not presumptuous in his parroting of its lofty aims: “…we should at once gain the same position [as England] in scale of nations. Sir, we wish to have the sciences, the arts, the manufactures, the industrial factories, with steam engines, and other motive powers, and public meetings, and debates….”11 When
pressed by Pagett, Nath awkwardly confirms what the M.P. himself has only recently learned: the Congress is indeed an exclusive organization composed solely of Indian elites, one that is directed to “the educated young-man” and in which Muslims, Christians, the
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9 Ibid., 347, 351. 10 Ibid., 335.
working classes, peasants, and the poor have no place.12 After Nath leaves, Pagett admits to Orde that he is disenchanted with the youth’s “crudity of views,” finding the blind ambition of this particular cadre to be “curious, very curious—and callow.”13 In a story in which all “natives” come across in an unflattering light, it is no irony that once Pagett finally meets an English-educated, worldly Indian who is familiar with the Congress—and with whom he can speak directly without a translator—the youth succeeds only in confirming negative opinions about the body and its leaders.
If Pagett’s encounters with ignorant, unsophisticated Indians reveal that the Congress has in no way inspired a spontaneous groundswell among the masses, his interactions with Orde and the other Britons illuminate why. Orde explains that the vast majority of the Indian population is illiterate and poor, a people whose primary concern is eking out a “mere existence,” which is only then followed by “a series of interests, pleasures, rituals, superstitions, and the like, based on centuries of tradition and usage.”14 As Singh and Jelloo had indicated, as poor men, they had never heard of the Congress and have no concern with politics whatsoever.15 Above all, Pagett learns, the ill-conceived venture that is the Congress is doomed to fail since there is no Indian nation that it could ever hope to represent or lead. As Orde impresses upon his guest, “pride of race, which also means race- hatred, is the plague and curse of India and it spreads far,” an assessment that is
substantiated by the Punjabi Singh’s scorn of Bengali Babus, Jelloo’s feud with his
neighboring village, and Khan’s disenchantment with politics after the election of “a menial
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12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 347. 14 Ibid., 342. 15 Ibid., 339, 344.
servant, an orderly” to a local post.16 Kipling further reinforces the widespread belief of a deep-seated animosity between Hindus and Muslims when he explains to Pagett that Khan’s hatred of “the elective system” is rational given his position as a Muslim.17 Belonging to “the most masterful and powerful minority in the country,” Khan is understandably loath to participate in a process that is sure to marginalize him.18
As the story draws to a close, it seems that Pagett has been successfully disabused of his starting assumption that the rise of the Congress is a notable or positive development for India. Through the naïve M.P.’s many “enlightenments” about the real state of affairs in the country, Kipling recommends that Britons at home moderate any optimistic impressions they might have of the Congress because such views rely upon mistaken beliefs. 19 Despite all of its bombast and the word “National” in its title, Pagett and the reader discover that the Congress is fundamentally misguided because its lofty initiatives centered on equity and representation could never take root in a land whose peoples are so ignorant, so backward, and so divided. As Orde tells Pagett, “…if, in short, India were a Utopia of the debating- room, and not a real land, this kind of talk might be worth listening to, but it is all based on false analogy and ignorance of the facts.”20 Kipling adds insult to injury by indicating that the Indian men of the Congress are, moreover, not even worthy of the liberal ideals that they champion given the deplorable condition of Indian women. For Dr. Eva Lathrop, the last person whom Pagett encounters and the only woman in the story, the very idea of the Congress is ridiculous when considering that India is plagued by “an all round entanglement
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16 Ibid., 339, 344, 341. 17 Ibid., 341.
18 Ibid.
19 Among several other damning revelations, Orde informs Pagett that Congress leaders are not Indian at all but Britons like Allan Octavian Hume and Charles Bradlaugh. For Orde, Congress supporters like Hume and Bradlaugh are arrogant and foolish men who are incapable of distinguishing between “the ambitions of a new oligarchy and the real wants of the people of whom [they] know nothing” (354).
of physical, social, and moral evils and corruptions, all more or less due to the unnatural treatment of women.”21 Far more than frivolous elections, India is in dire need of medical services for women, basic infrastructure such as hospitals, and numerous social reforms to uplift a population of which half is “morally dead.”22 Turning the inquisition upon Pagett himself, Dr. Lathrop poses the following question in a manner that is at once accusatory and
exasperated: “You are a member of the English Parliament. Can you do nothing?”23
Published at a moment in which the colonial government had solidified its base of power in India but whose officials were becoming increasingly aggravated by the grievance- filled petitions and pleas from the actual Indian National Congress, Kipling’s “didactic fable” is illustrative on a number of fronts.24 A long-time resident of India, Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, had collaborated with his son on “Enlightenments,” a story that
reflected the views of the broader “Anglo-Indian” community of which they were a part.25
As indicated by Kipling’s unfavorable portrayal of the simple Pagett who presumes a great deal about the Congress and India but in truth knows absolutely nothing, Anglo-Indians were scornful of meddlesome “instant experts” whose overconfident inquiries and veiled critiques of the Raj were neither welcome nor appreciated.26 Such disdain resulted from the community’s perception that Britain’s ostensibly “honorable” endeavors in India—not to mention the overarching mission of the colonial regime—were being questioned by those least qualified to level judgment. As Steven Patterson observes, this defensive, contemptuous posture towards outsiders betrayed “an ideological blindness on the part of the Anglo-Indian
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21 Ibid., 352. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 353.
24 “Didactic fable” is Peter Havholm’s term; see Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction, 84.
25 Kipling would remark later in life that “[the story] has a certain amount of perfectly good fact in it,” though, of course, the difference between “fact and “belief” is key here. See Rudyard Kipling, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 127.
community… an unwillingness to face up to the consequences of imperial exploitation.”27
Such purposeful blindness was, of course, part and parcel of British imperialism, which justified its existence in India and elsewhere as a laudable “civilizing mission” that necessarily benefitted the lives of its subject populations. Kipling’s propaganda piece about a
presumptuous M.P.’s endless epiphanies about the true nature of India—over and against the emergence of the first indigenous political body that claimed to represent all Indians— was among many works in this period that reified the perception of a providential, beneficial British Empire for all.
Yet this falsehood would not be sustained for much longer as those of the “literary caste” that Kipling so derided began to respond to these one-sided, disparaging portrayals about India and its inhabitants.28 This chapter examines how Siddha Mohana Mitra and
Sarath Kumar Ghosh punctured the myth of benevolent British rule and offered their own perspectives on the relationship between Britain and India in their novels Hindupore: A Peep Behind the Indian Unrest: An Anglo-Indian Romance and The Prince of Destiny: The New Krishna, both of which were published in London in 1909. Writing at the heart of empire towards the end of a tumultuous decade that witnessed profound upheavals not just in India but in broader geopolitics, both Mitra and Ghoshproffered diagnoses, explanations, and recommendations regarding the ever-worsening state of “unrest” in India. The cultural imagining of India as Bharat, I will demonstrate, was central to their highly nuanced, complex advocacy for increased “sympathy” between colonizer and colonized at a moment in which the connection between the two polities was being scrutinized on all sides.
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27 Ibid.
Both Hindupore and Prince are set in the fictional Indian princely states Hindupore and Barathpur, microcosms of a fundamentally Hindu India. In these highly autonomous,
otherworldly Hindu kingdoms, idealized British (and Irish) characters learn meaningful lessons from their equally romanticized Indian counterparts, misconceptions about Hinduism and its practices are clarified, and numerous cross-cultural bonds and alliances (e.g., kinship, friendship, and marriage) are forged or fortified. Jacques Derrida’s theories on hospitality and cosmopolitanism, I will suggest, elucidate the way in which these excessively saccharine exchanges between travelling Hindu heroes and their gracious foreign hosts epitomize the benevolence with which these authors thought that Britain ought to treat India. A clear riposte to Kipling’s “Enlightenments,” Mitra’s Hindupore centers on the all-too- pleasant experiences of the gracious Irish M.P. Lord Tara in the eponymous Hindu kingdom and its surrounding regions. Through his various interactions with his Indian hosts and his metropolitan peers, Lord Tara comes away with a deep understanding of the “true” causes of the Indian unrest. In my reading, I will emphasize the way in which Lord Tara’s instant affinity and appreciation for all things Indian/Hindu culminate in his quite literal
transformation into a bona fide Hindu hero and symbolic marriage with the equally splendid princess of Hindupore, Kamala. In Ghosh’s more solemn text, the singular Prince Barath— prophesized from birth to be the divine liberator of Barathpur from the colonial yoke— ultimately decides not to lead a major armed revolution against the British authorities in his kingdom. This decision results from his immense respect for his surrogate British parents, his passion for a British woman, and, most importantly, his ardent love of Britannia herself. As Britain’s professed “sincerest friend” and champion of its cause in India, Barath is shocked to discover an imminent revolt against the British brewing in Barathpur and adamantly refuses to serve as its leader; this apparent rejection of his “destiny” is deemed a
profound betrayal and results in his banishment from the kingdom.29 The prince’s decision to side with Britain rather than Barathpur/India at the critical moment is cast as a significant sacrifice, an incredibly generous gift to Britain that enables colonial rule to continue.
Building upon recent scholarship about civis Britannicus [British subjecthood] or imperial citizenship, I will argue that Mitra and Ghosh’s advocacy of greater understanding and amity between colonizer and colonized reflected a much broader desire on the part of Indian elites that Britain fulfill its promises of liberal governance towards the country.30
Hindupore and Prince’s portrayal of exemplary affective ties between colonizer and colonized has led critics to view these works as indicative of the early Indian English novel’s treatment of the “East-West” encounter.31 Though this is certainly the case, I seek to
complicate the rather summary manner in which these two texts have been categorized and discussed in Indian, British, and American literary scholarship. Mitra and Ghosh’s
appropriation of the idea of India as Bharat, I argue, resulted in a persuasive if not somewhat ironic case for greater “sympathy” to a targeted readership made up of Britons and their fellow Indian elites.In my reading, I point out how Mitra and Ghosh’s overarching appeals for greater harmony between colonizer and colonized coexist uneasily alongside a
provocative concluding message in both novels: not only is improving relations with India a morally appropriate action for Britain, it is also a strategically wise move. As I will show at greater length, while on one level Mitra and Ghosh’s depiction of transcendent Hindu kingdoms and their remarkable inhabitants suggested that India’s earlier condition as Bharat
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29 Sarath Kumar Ghosh, The Prince of Destiny: The New Krishna (London: Rebman), 538.
30Civis Britannicus may described as the emerging ideal at the turn of the twentieth century that all subjects of
the British Crown, no matter their birth, color, or creed, were both entitled to, and deserved, equal recognition and treatment. See Mrinalini Sinha, “The Strange Death of an Imperial Ideal: The Case of Civis Britannicus,” (2011) and Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (2010).
warranted British respect, the authors also departed from this logic in a striking way. Laying claim to the stunning victory of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, both Hindupore and Prince posit the existence of a potent Pan-Asian bloc of countries composed of India, Japan, and sometimes China that stands ready to overtake Western hegemony. The idea of India as a fundamentally Hindu space powerfully informs this geopolitical configuration as its member nations are united by a shared “Hindu” cultural heritage and India/Bharat is