Abstract
The nature of sympathy, especially as it applied to the subjects of the newly designated Empress of India, was of some concern for Victorian Britons.1 An article in The Spectator on 6 January 1877 neatly encapsulated the question of the limits of sympathy—‘What are the causes of the breaks, or hiatuses, or failures in the human capacity of sympathy?’ Sympathy, as political scientist Sharon R. Krause argues, is of course limited by our capacity to be aware of other peoples’ sentiments, and the more powerful are generally less cognisant of the lives of the powerless.2 Krause addresses the role of affect in combating unjust laws in her argument for the proper role of the passions in moral judgement. The relationship of the citizen to the rule of law, she maintains, should not just draw on blind allegiance. In this relationship, there is indeed a role for affect, passion, desire, feeling, as well of course for thinking, rationality and cognition: ‘our minds are changed when our hearts are engaged’.3
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Notes
For a discussion of the limits of sympathy in relation to depictions of the 1876–78 Indian famine, see Christina Twomey and Andrew J. May, ‘Australian Responses to the Indian Famine, 1876–78: Sympathy, Photography and the British Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, 43, 2 (2012), 233–52.
Sharon R. Krause, Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 113.
Douglas Kerr, ‘Colonial Habitats: Orwell and Woolf in the Jungle’, English Studies, 78, 2 (1997), 157.
For a recent articulation of what is at stake in this discussion see for example Will Jackson, Madness and Marginality: The Lives of Kenya’s White Insane (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 34–35.
Ranajit Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, Critical Inquiry, 23, 3 (1997): 492.
Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’ in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 15.
Lord Alexander William Crawford Lindsay (ed.), Lives of the Lindsays (London: John Murray, 1849), 179.
For a more detailed discussion of Scott’s role in colonial visions of northeast India, see Andrew J. May, ‘Homo in Nubibus: Altitude, Colonisation and Political Order in the Khasi Hills of Northeast India’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42, 1 (2014), 41–60.
A. White, ‘A Memoir of the Late David Scott, Esq.’ in Archibald Watson (ed.), Memoir of the late David Scott, Esq. Agent to the Governor General, on the North-East Frontier of Bengal, and Commissioner of Revenue and Circuit in Assam, &c. &c. &c. (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1832), 34;
Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 84.
B.R. Tomlinson, ‘From Campsie to Kedgeree: Scottish Enterprise, Asian Trade and the Company Raj’, Modern Asian Studies, 36, 4 (2002), 770.
Tiplut Nongbri, ‘Sociological Impact of the Movement: Its Conformity with the Consistent Role of the Khasi Standards of Statesmanship and Review of Other Social Changes’, in H. B. Sohliya, R. Lyngdoh and Hamlet Bareh (eds), Celebration of 150th Death Anniversary of U Tirot Singh (Khasi Cultural Society: Shillong, 1984), 63–72.
Gergana Markova and Robert Folger, ‘Every Cloud has a Silver Lining: Positive Effects of Deviant Coworkers’, The Journal of Social Psychology, 152, 5 (2012), 586–612.
Thomas H. Lewin, A Fly on the Wheel, or How I Helped to Govern India (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1885), 229–30.
T.H. Lewin to Mary Lewin, 28 August 1864, British Library, MS EUR C79. See also John Whitehead, Thangliena: A Life of T.H. Lewin Amongst the Wild Tribes on India’s North-East Frontier (Gartmore: Paul Strachan, Kiscadale Publications, 1992), p. 139.
Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Pjrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1968, first published 1886), 470.
For a recent discussion of shifting political understandings in the north-east of jungle as wasteland to jungle as potentially productive and therefore revenue-producing land, see Gunnel Cederlöf, Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 138–39.
Mark Harrison, ‘“The Tender Frame of Man”: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70, 1 (1996), 68–93.
William Wilson Hunter, The Thackerays in India and Some Calcutta Graves (London: H. Frowde, 1897), 126.
Kathleen Steele, ‘Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock’, Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, 20 (2010), 33–56;
Brenda Cooper, ‘Landscapes, Forests and Borders within the West African Global Village’ in Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley (eds), Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2001), 275–93;
Roger Luckhurst, ‘Gothic Colonies, 1850–1920’ in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds), The Gothic World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 64–65. See also Jackson, Madness and Marginality, 34.
Julia Wardhaugh, ‘The Jungle and the Village: Discourses on Crime and Deviance in Rural North India’, South Asia Research, 25, 2 (2005), 131–32.
George Orwell, Burmese Days (London: Penguin Books, 2009, first published 1934), 56.
T.H. Lewin (ed.), The Lewin Letters: A Selection from the Correspondence & Diaries of an English Family 1756–1884 (London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd, 1909), volume 1, 253.
Andrew J. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-East India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
Natasha Erlank, ‘Sexual Misconduct and Church Power on Scottish Mission Stations in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the 1840s’, Gender & History, 15, 1 (2003), 79.
See for example Diana Wylie, ‘Norman Leys and McGregor Ross: A Case Study in the Conscience of African Empire 1900–39’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 5, 3 (1977), 294–309.
Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), e.g. 98.
See for example Angela Wanhalla, Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013);
Damon Ieremia Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011);
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Carole Gerson, ‘Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill’, Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’Études Canadiennes, 32, 2 (1997), 7.
Corinne Bigot, ‘Did they Go Native? Representations of First Encounters and Personal Interrelations with First Nations Canadians in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 49, 1 (2014), 99–111.
George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 14.
See also Stephen Ahern (ed.), Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), ‘Introduction: the bonds of sentiment’, 1–2.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000), 93–94.
Heather Davis-Fisch, Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 91.
Samuel Moyn, ‘Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity’, Review Essay, History and Theory, 45 (2006), 408.
Elspeth Tilley, ‘A Colonising Paradox: White Presencing and Contamination Politics in the Australian White-Vanishing Trope’, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 7 (2011), 3.
See for example Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 30.
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May, A.J. (2015). ‘The Starched Boundaries of Civilization’: Sympathetic Allegiance and the Subversive Politics of Affect in Colonial India. In: Jackson, W., Manktelow, E.J. (eds) Subverting Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_4
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