Abstract
In 1798, the Court of Directors of the English East India Company (EIC) issued a “General Letter ” to the colonial government in Bengal addressing the growing need for a library to house Oriental manuscripts:1
You will have observed by our despatches from time to time, that we have invariably manifested as the occasion required our disposition for the encouragement of Indian Literature. We understand it has been of late years, a frequent practice among our Servants—especially in Bengal to make collections of oriental Manuscripts, many of which have afterwards been brought into this Country. These remaining in private hands, and being likely in a course of time to pass into others, in which probably no use can be made of them, they are in danger of being neglected, and at length in a great measure lost to Europe, as well as to India, we think this issue, a matter of greater regret, because we apprehend, that since the decline of the Mogul Empire, the encouragement formerly given in it to Persian Literature, has ceased, —that hardly any new works of Celebrity appear, and that few Copies of Books of established Character, are now made, so that there being by the accidents of time, and the exportation of many of the best Manuscripts, a progressive diminution of the Original Stock, Hindostan may at length be much thinned of its literary stores, without greatly enriching Europe, To prevent in part, this injury to Letters, we have thought, that the Institution of a public repository in this Country, for oriental writings, would be useful[.]2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Other studies on land tenure debates are also relevant for understanding the broader changes that were instigated by the transformation of colonial rule:
Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996),
Eric Stokes’s English Utilitarians in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959),
Burton Stein’s Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989),
Thomas Metcalf’s Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and
Uday Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Also see Sudipta Sen, “Colonial Frontiers of the Georgian State: East India Company’s Rule in India,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7, no. 4 (December 1994), Empire of Free Trade: the East India Company and Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002). And, more recently,
Jon Wilson’s The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Macaulay’s Essay on Lord Clive, ed. Eugene D. Holmes (American Book Company, 1912).
Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 9. For more recent discussions on historical precedent being an early EIC concern in Bengal, See
Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and
Jon Wilson The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and David Washbrook, “South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004).
To be fair, Seeley was drawing attention to the fact that English provincialism prevented them from paying attention to the consequences of their own successful imperial/colonial expansion in the New World as well as in Asia. However, Seeley does point out that “Our acquisition of India was made blindly. Nothing great that has ever been done by Englishmen was done so unintentionally, so accidentally, as the conquest of India. (143)” In other words, he implies that the British did not intend to conquer India. In fact, he states that the British did not really conquer India, but rather that India “conquered herself” since it was with the manpower of the Indian sepoy army that Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Seeley goes to great lengths to prove that the British conquest of India was not a foreign conquest, but rather, it was an internal revolution of sorts caused by the power vacuum that had been created as a result of the breakdown of Mughal authority in India. In other words, the British were almost forced to take advantage of the political “anarchy,” which has been described by Seeley, as the ripe conditions for the ascendancy of the British in India. See J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, from the Year 1745 (Madras: Atheneum Press, 1861).
For discussions on the radical proposals for land tenure put forward by the early Company government, See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996); and
Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
See C. P. Brown, ed., Three Treatises on Mirasi Right: by Francis W. Ellis, Lieutenant Colonel Blackburne, Sir Thomas Munro, with Remarks by the Court of Directors, 1822 and 1824. (Madras: D. P. L. C. Connor, 1852) and
Burton Stein, ed., The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India, 1770–190 0 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
For recent scholarship on the rule of the Mysore nawabs, see Irfan Habib, ed., Resistance and Modernization Under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001) and
Kate Brittlebank, Tipu’s Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain (Oxford, 1998).
With the exception of the early generation of Orientalists, most importantly Sir William Jones, who did not condemn Indian traditions as incoherent or depraved. See Raymond Schwab’s The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984),
Wilhelm Halbfass’s India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988) and
Thomas Trautmann’s Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997).
Robert Orme was born in Anjengo in Travencore to a surgeon, John Orme, who was initially stationed in Bombay. See Charles Wilkens’s “An Authentic Account of the Life and Character of the late Robert Orme, Esq. F. A. S. Historiographer to the Honourable the East India Company,” Asiatic Annual Register (1802), 45–55; C.S. Srinivasachariar, “Robert Orme and Colin Mackenzie—Two Early Collectors of Manuscripts and Records,” Indian Historical Records Commission. Proceedings of Meetings. vol. VI. Sixth meeting held at Madras. Jan 1924; and Sinharaja Tammita Delgoda, “‘Nabob, Historian, and Orientalist,’ Robert Orme: the Life and Career of an East India Company Servant (1728–1801),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 2, no. 3 (1992): 363–76.
In 1813, after being appointed governor, Wilks went to the island of St. Helena, to where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled in 1815. He worked there for two-and-a-half years before returning to London where he continued to participate in the activities of the Asiatic Society and the Royal Society until his death in 1831. See M. Hammick’s “A Note on Colonel Mark Wilks” in Historical Sketches of the South of India in an attempt to trace the History of Mysore from the Origin of the Hindu Government of That State, to the Extinction of the Mohammaedan Dynasty in 1799. Founded chiefly on Indian Authorities. First published in 1810. This is a reprint of the edition printed in 1930 edited by Murray Hammick (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1989).
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
The earliest of the surveys was one of the coasts in the early part of the seven-teenth century with the first voyages to India. For a fuller discussion on the variety of surveys conducted by the early surveyors such as James Rennell, William Lambton, and Colin Mackenzie see Matthew H. Edney’s Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). The gradual rise and development of the colonial state relied on statistical knowledge through surveys.
Sir Charles R. Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (London, 1871), 43.
Charles Trevelyan invoked Rome in his On the Education of the People of India (London: Longman, 1838), as did Thomas B. Macaulay in his various writings on India. See Rama Sundari Mantena, “Imperial Ideology and the Uses of Rome in Discourses on Britain’s Indian Empire,” in Mark Bradley, ed., Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
See Peter Robb’s “Completing ‘our Stock of Geography’, or an Object ‘Still More Sublime’: Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of Mysore, 1799–1810.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 8, no. 2 (1998): 181–206 and Edney’s Mapping an Empire.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 199.
Peter Pels “The Rise and Fall of the Indian Aborigines: Orientalism, Anglicism and an Ethnology of India, 1833–1869,” Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 87.
See William O’Reilly, “Nurturing Knowledge: Culture, Science and Empire in the Emerging Global Order 1780–1830.” Paper delivered at Exporting Identities 1750–1830. Cambridge University, UK, September 11 and 12, 2003.
Jennifer Howes, Illustrating India: The Early Colonial Investigations of Colin Mackenzie (1784–1821) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 160–61.
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 80.
Arjun Appadurai writes: “But the less obvious point is that statistics were generated in amounts that far defeated any unified bureaucratic purpose.” Appadurai argues that the colonial practice of statistics resulted in “unintended” consequences, such as new forms of self-representation or that it fueled new forms of communitarian and nationalist identities. See Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, eds. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 316–17.
J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Narratives of Civil Government, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999a), 7. Philippa Levine also argues that before the ascendance of professional history through the establishment of institutions dedicated to historical scholarship and established a community of scholars, there were diverse practices of history. See
Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Susan Manning, “Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the Emergence of Modern Disciplinarity,” in L. Davis, I. Duncan and J. Sorensen, eds., Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 2.
Thomas R. Trautmann, ed., The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Michael Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
V. S. Pathak, a historian of ancient India, has called this the ‘pick and choose’ method: “Like children picking pebbles from the sea-shore, they contented themselves with the extracting of facts from various places in the narrative on no basis other than their predilections.” However, this method involved a distortion, Pathak argued. “First, the facts were torn out of the context” and “secondly, they were given an arbitrary subjective setting by historians.” Pathak was concerned with restoring the integrity of the literary text to its original form prior to its subjection to a positivist historiography that indiscriminately tore out data from its context in order to reconstruct history. For Pathak, the modern conception of history is European and its ascendance in India marked a break with past traditions because those traditions suddenly appeared “monstrous” and “disfigured” in the new conceptual framework of modern historiography. See V. S. Pathak, Ancient Historians of India: A Study in Historical Biographies (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1966). 32.
Copyright information
© 2012 Rama Sundari Mantena
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mantena, R.S. (2012). Conquest and History: The Making of Colonial Archives. In: The Origins of Modern Historiography in India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011923_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011923_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34378-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01192-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)