How useful is the extract from Rammohun Roy’s Memorial to the Supreme Court (reproduced

in the Assignment Booklet on pp.12-13) when considering the significance of the interaction
between Britain and India during the early 1800s?
Your answer should show that you clearly understand the content of the passage and can analyse
its language and form. We want you also to demonstrate you understanding of Chapters 1-2 of
Literature and Nation by placing the passage in its historical context.

[As to question of the free press in India], I can hardly argue it gravely; it appears to be so full of danger and extravagance.

RANDLE JACKSON 1 ,2

When a constitution shall be established in India, such as has been the growth of ages in England; when a public shall have been
formed in that country corresponding in its nature and composition with a British public; then let the Press be free from the controul
of the governing power.

Asiatic Journal, XII, p.339 3

I. Context: Following the departure of Lord Moira in 1823, under whose governor-generalship
Wellesley’s system of ‘preventive’ restrictions upon the English press in Bengal was abolished
(1818) and replaced by a set of loosely enforced recommendations,4 ‘privately circulated’ to
individual editors and containing a number of rules prohibitory of publications treating of certain
topics,5 the then Acting Governor-General, John Adam, attempted to reinstate the system of
‘indirect restraint’ through the exercise of the discretionary power of banishment of British subjects
from Indian territory, while at the same promulgating a set of ‘gagging and licensing’ regulations
(the Press Ordinance of 1823), so as to end the ‘anomaly’ of the indigenous press being ‘subject
only to the English law of libel’.6 Since no regulations passed in Council could acquire the force of
law in Calcutta7 unless sanctioned by the Supreme Court, Sir F. Macnaghten, ‘sole acting Judge’ of
the Court, invited representations against the proposed measure, whereupon Rammohun Roy,
proprietor of the Mirat-ul-Akhbar, the Sambād kaumudī and The Brahmmunical Magazine,8
1 Qtd in The Oriental Herald, Vol.III, ed. by James Silk Buckingham (London: Richardson, 1824), pp. 111,125 n.(c).
2 (1757-1837), barrister and parliamentary counsel of the East India Company and the corporation of London ( Dictionary of
National Biography, Vol.XXIX, ed. by Sidney Lee (London: Macmillan, 1892), p. 103) .
3 Qtd in Leicester Stanhope, Sketch of the History and Influence of the Press in British India (London: Chapple, 1823), p. 92.
4 James Silk Buckingham, Letter to Sir Charles Forbes, Bart. M.P. on the Suppression of Public Discussion in India, and the
Banishment without Trial of Two British Editors from that Country by the Acting Governor-General, Mr. Adam (London:
Richardson, 1824), pp. 7–19 (First Letter).
5 The Oriental Herald, Vol.III, ed. by James Silk Buckingham (London: Richardson, 1824), pp.100n.(u), 108n.(w).
6 Buckingham, Letter to Sir Charles Forbes, pp. 14–16 (First Letter, ¶¶20–23); Stanhope, pp. 52, 82.—For a general account
regarding the legal framework on press freedom for the period 1799-1835 in British India, Muniruddin, History of Journalism
(New Delhi, India: Anmol Publications, 2005), pp. 24–26; cf. C.A. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional
Liberalism in India, 1800–30’, Modern Intellectual History, 4:1 (2007), 25–41 (¶¶27–34 (no pagination/html file)), and David
Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian modernization, 1773-1835 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969), pp. 45-46, 145(n.2), 189–91.
7 As to the differences among the Presidency towns as regards press restrictions Buckingham, Letter to Sir Charles Forbes, pp.
18–19 (First Letter, ¶26); also, Stanhope, pp. 101-08 (with reference to the Licenser/Censor system operating in Madras under
Munro).
8 According to Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30’, p. ¶26 (although, no
specific reference is given in his article), Rammohun also ‘appears as co-proprietor with J.S. Buckingham of the Calcutta Journal.
By 1823 the publication of all three papers mentioned above had been suspended (Muniruddin, pp. 48–49). It should be noted
that circulation of indigenous newspapers during this period was limited, no title ‘enjoying any great degree of support, ranging
from considerably under a hundred to two hundred Subscribers’ at most, (Jatindra Kumar Majumdar, Raja Rammohun Roy and
Progressive Movements in India: A Selection from Records (1775-1845) (Calcutta: Art Press, 1941), p. 318); however, communal
reading of indigenous newsletters (akhbarats) and later of newspapers was widely practiced (C.A. Bayly, Empire and
Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870, Cambridge studies in Indian history and
society: 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 204; cf. Sophia Dobson Collet and F. Herbert Stead, The Life and
Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, ed. by Dilip Kumar Biswas and Prabhat Chandra Ganguli, 4th edn (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo
Samaj, 1988), p. 416).
prepared the text of the Memorial,9 duly submitted to the Court, and, following the sanctioning of
the Ordinance by the judge, an ‘Appeal to the King in Council’ against that Court’s decision. 10
While there was little difference between the topics contained in the original ‘private circular’
addressed to British editors and the list of offences published in the Calcutta Government Gazette (5
April 1823) following the enactment of the Ordinance 11— indeed, in either case, certain of the
topics prohibited thereby may be classified as instances of ‘seditious libel’ tending to produce a
‘breach of the public peace’,12 and, in this sense, the restraints applicable in the Indian dominion
and the ‘Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act’ of 1819, in force in the metropolis, 13 were
comparable in degree of severity—, the press regulations however introduced an absolute
prohibition of all ‘periodical printing, without previous licence, revocable at pleasure’, under pain
of ‘heavy, summarily inflicted, pecuniary penalties’ (Rs. 400 for each unlicensed publication),
and/or imprisonment.
It was this last element that was roundly assailed by liberals and radicals, one of whom, J.S.
Buckingham, bitterly commented that the Six Acts, ‘this severe body of law 14, would be received
with thanks and rejoicings as the Press-Code of India, [...] in exchange for the illegal violence of
revocable licences and the terrible Star-Chamber mode of arbitrary banishment without trial’. 15
However, the Memorial’s structure of argument—besides the use made of the ‘motif’ of the British
conquest having brought about deliverance from Mughal tyranny,16 the (‘quakerly’)17 objections
raised against oath-taking, and its (‘Benthamite’-utilitarian) demand for ‘publicity’, 18 i.e. public
scrutiny of official conduct through the press—apparently relies on the stipulations contained in the
1813 Charter Act, which declared ‘the duty’ of British rule in India to be the promotion of ‘the
interest and happiness’ of its native subjects and ‘the introduction among them of useful knowledge,
and of religious and moral improvements’. 19 For even though Rammohun makes no appeal to the
Act itself, the insistence with which his text speaks of a deprivation of entrenched rights,

9 Regarding the attribution of the text to Rammohun’s authorship, Collet and Stead, p. 206.
10 Ibid., pp. 179–84, 206–07; for complete text of the petitions, ibid., pp. 387–419; also, Majumdar, pp. lvii–lxii; cf. Kopf, pp.
189–91.
11 These include ‘animadversions on the character, measures or orders of the Court of Directors and the Indian Governments’,
‘contumelious remarks against the Governor-General, Members of Council, the Bishop of Calcutta’, etc.; i.e. anything that
members of the Indian (or home) government may deem personally/politically objectionable. (cf. Stanhope, p. 83; Collet and
Stead, p. 401).
12 Cf. Francis Holt, The Law of Libel, 2nd edn (London: Butterworth, 1816), pp. 38–39; for discussion, Kevin Gilmartin, Print
Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England, Cambridge studies in Romanticism: 21
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 117-21, 145–46.
13 60 Geo. III, cap.8.—This was one of the ‘infamous’ Six Acts aiming at containing radical publications in Britain (Elie Halévy,
The liberal awakening 1815–1830, trans. by E.I. Watkin (London: Benn, 1961), p. 71).
14 As to its severity, let it suffice to say that the truth of an alleged libel was no ‘sufficient defense against indictment’ (for
references, note 9 above).
15 The Oriental Herald, Vol.III, ed. by James Silk Buckingham (London: Richardson, 1824), p. 121—Buckingham himself was
banished from India, on the basis of 53 Geo. III s.131, ‘having forfeited his claim to the countenance and protection of the
Supreme Government’, as a consequence of a series of press-related ‘violations’, the last of which was publication of critical
comments on Revd Bryce’s securing the ‘sinecure post of Clerk to the Calcutta stationery department’ (Iqbal Singh, Rammohun
Roy: A Biographical Inquiry into the making of modern India Vol.I, 2nd edn (Bombay: Asia Publishing House), pp. 300–01;
Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30’, ¶31 (no pagination)).
16 Collet and Stead, p. 388¶1,
17 Ibid., pp. 181–182, 391¶2.
18 Ibid., pp. 393¶1; cf. Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism., trans. by Mary Morris (London: Faber and Faber,
1949), pp. 410-11; James Mill, Liberty of the Press, Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica (London: Inness, 1825) (esp. §
III); also Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959; repr. 1963), p. 74.
19 Cf. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India (London: Faber, 1990), pp. 23-24; Javed
Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.
80; The Oriental Herald, Vol.III, ed. by James Silk Buckingham (London: Richardson, 1824), p. 96; and especially Majumdar, p.
315 (No.175; Calcutta Journal, 14 February 1823), where a similar argument is elaborated prior to the preparation of the
Memorial (‘not ready to be circulated until the 30th of March’ (1823) (Collet and Stead, pp. 180, 398)).
consequent upon the enactment of the proposed measure, and attempts to demonstrate the supposed
error (or self-defeating logic) of the overall policy pursued, which it is argued would lead to a
cessation in the ‘diffusion of knowledge’ and the process of the social ‘amelioration’ already
underway,20 acknowledges the direct assumption by the colonial administration of the responsibility
for the moral welfare of its Indian subjects in pursuance of the provisions of the Act.
That the question of press freedom in India was not only perceived to be intimately associated
with this ‘obligation’ enjoined on the Indian administration by Act of Parliament’, but, in addition, a
source of considerable frustration and circumspection, is evidenced, for instance, by the verbal
exchanges between J. Hume and R. Jackson in the debate held at the East India House, on July 23
1824, where Hume interprets the act’s provisions as implying a wider conception of ‘morally
responsible’ government arising from its ‘subjection to the tribunal of public opinion’—hence the
greater emphasis placed on the reporting by the periodical press of the proceedings of public
authorities and his confidence that, in an openly contested sphere of publicity, ‘truth must ultimately
triumph’;21 while, on the other hand, R.Jackson sees the restrictions on the freedom of the press as
necessary for the containment of radical ideas and the prevention of disaffection spreading both
among the ‘native’ population and the Indian army and civil service personnel, without such legal
restraints necessarily having an adverse effect on the dissemination in India of European literary
and scientific works.22
The issue was also well aired in a number of near contemporary liberal-radical pamphlets and
articles which recapitulated the by then familiar panoply of Millite-Benthamite arguments 23 against
the ‘autocratic’ Indian rule as an ‘inefficient’, wasteful political formation, similar in nature to
metropolitan ‘old corruption’, manned by a closely knit ‘cognominal’ class of self-conceited and
egotistical ‘place-men’, ‘a privileged circle’ closed to ‘native talent’, 24 whose members were
‘responsible to one another alone’ and deprived of ‘that most potent of all checks and restraints’ on
arbitrary power: ‘a public opinion freely and safely vented’. 25 But what is more interesting is that,
while not going so far as to assert a ‘contractarian’ right of resistance, a right ‘to cashier [despotic]
rulers for misconduct’,26 some of the contributors to this particular debate invoke a ‘universal law’
of political conduct to the effect that ‘the violence which finds vent’ is less of a threat than that
which ‘repressed’, so that ‘a well-governed people’, who are thus able to express and seek redress
for their grievances, will rarely rise in revolt against ‘their benefactors’. 27 This whiggish theme,
which according to R.Guha is largely alien to any Indian tradition, 28 is taken up and reworked by
Rammohun in the two texts occasioned by the 1823 press regulations, the Memorial and the Appeal
to the King in Council, where it makes its appearance under a double aspect: first, forming part of
20 Collet and Stead, pp. 391¶3, 392¶2.
21 The Oriental Herald, Vol.III, ed. by James Silk Buckingham (London: Richardson, 1824), pp. 84, 93 (where he quotes a passage
from Wakefield’s Memoirs (cf. Stanhope, p. 188); for this belief, often ‘invoked by reformers, that truth would prevail in a fair
fight’, and for the related notion of the public as the ‘highest tribunal’, see Gilmartin, pp. 143, 153, and references therein; also,
Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism., p. 411 (on Bentham’s ‘public-opinion tribunal’).
22 Ibid., pp. 104-05, 111–12; cf. The Westminster Review, Vol.IV (London:Baldwin, 1825), p. 288.
23 Cf. n.15 above.
24 cf. Collet and Stead, p. 414.
25 The Westminster Review, Vol.IV (London:Baldwin, 1825), pp. 275–276, 278, 291–203; cf. Buckingham, Letter to Sir Charles
Forbes, pp. 42–43 (Second Letter, ¶81); also, brief discussion in Majeed, pp. 158, 163 (on Mill’s and Bentham’s views on
colonial government; but cf. ibid. 124 (on Bentham’s negative answer to the question whether India was ‘ripe for
self-government’); and Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism., p. 510.
26 Cf. J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancient Regime
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; repr. 1991), p. 332; Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism., p. 136.
27 The Westminster Review, Vol.IV, pp. 269, 283–84.
28 Ranajit Guha, ‘Colonialism in South Asia: A Dominance without Hegemony’, in Dominance without Hegemony: History and
Power in Colonial India, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 1–99 (pp. 56–57).
an evolutionary scheme for the relationship between governors and governed, in which the degree
of liberality exhibited by the ruler advances in tandem with the critical capacities—and political
acquiescence—of a reasoning reading public; and, secondly, as a (self-cancelling) 29 assertion of a
right of resistance in ‘the last resort’.30
II. Significance: In the above discussion I have attempted to provide a perhaps overly localised
context for addressing the question of the extract’s significance for an understanding of the nature
of the ‘interaction between Britain and India’ in the early years of the nineteenth century. Although
B. Anderson’s thesis as regards modern national consciousness emerging in the confluence of the
capitalist mode of production, print technology and the fact of ‘human linguistic diversity’ initially
appeared to provide a promising avenue for considering the text as a specimen of ‘proto-nationalist’
discourse,31 P. Chatterjee’s misgivings about the possibility of directly transposing this model to the
particularity of the Indian colonial society succeeded in dissuading me from doing so. Indeed, as he
argues, apart from the fact that in Bengal, between the 1780s and 1820s, ‘when power was
restrained by little more than brute force and intrigue, the press not unexpectedly provided yet
another means for carrying out factional feuds within the small European community’ 32—and, I
should add, the colonial administration would consequently deny the very existence of a ‘European
public’33—, the establishment of printing presses and the process of language standardization, as
well as literary production in the Indian vernaculars, occurred, initially at least, under British
patronage34 and were intended both as crucial ‘support systems’ for the functioning of the
administrative apparatus and as means for imparting legitimacy to the regime through the
recruitment of ‘learned pundits’ as collaborators in the project of unification and centralization of
‘localised knowledges’ and through the expression of admiration for and deliberate encouragement
of the ‘traditions of the conquered’.35 In short, language had yet to become a domain ‘over which
the [Indian] nation would declare its sovereignty and then transform’ in such manner as to accede to
the ‘civilized’ comity of modern nations. 36 The triumph of the ‘Anglicist programme’ and the
abandonment of Persian as the official language of the administration (1835), with English thus
becoming a potent vector for the ideological reproduction of the indigenous élite, 37 only add to the
force of this line of argument.
Further, there is also the more specific question of whether Rammohun Roy may have assumed
the position of an ‘organic intellectual’ who sought to articulate the ‘national’ aspirations of a
supposedly forward-looking indigenous bourgeoisie.38 As A.Sen, S.Sarkar and others have argued,
29 One ought to consider, in this respect, the texts’ addressees and ‘genre’. Evidently, they were not intended as radical pamphlets.
30 ‘[I]n countries which have made the smallest advance in civilization, anarchy and revolution are most prevalent—while, on the
other hand, [...] the resistance of a people advanced in knowledge, has ever been—not against the existence—but against the
abuses of the Governing power’ (Collet and Stead, p. 410); see, also, The Westminster Review, Vol.IV, p. 284¶5; cf. ‘[T]he right
of resistance was conceived as lying wholly outside the general run of politics’ (Clark, pp. 48, 207); also Mill, p. 14¶5.
31 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983; repr.
1990), p. 46.
32 Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nation and its Fragments’, in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (Part II), (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 1–272 (pp. 7, 22)
33 Cf., e.g., ‘[T]his notable piece of legislation [the 1823 press regulations] had its origin solely in spite against one [...] Is it not
monstrous that the whole population of India should be degraded, in order to enable a fugitive Governor-general to wreak his
vengeance on a banished Englishman’ (The Westminster Review, Vol.IV, p. 272); cf. note 12 above; also, Buckingham, Letter to
Sir Charles Forbes, pp. 45–57 (on whether ‘there is no public in India’).
34 See, e.g., Kopf, esp. pp.114–15 (support given to missionary activities by the College of Fort William); also, ibid., pp.20, 93 (on
N. Halhed’s Bengali Grammar and W. Carey’s Dialogues or Kathopakathan).
35 Bernard Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, in The Bernard Cohn Omnibus (Part II), (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 16–56, esp. pp. 21, 46; Viswanathan, Ch.1 (esp. pp. 28-29); .
36 Chatterjee, ‘The Nation and its Fragments’, p. 7.
37 Ibid.; cf., e.g., Bayly, Empire and Information, pp. 284–87; Kopf, pp. 246–50.
38 For this Gramscian notion, see, e.g., E.W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), pp. 15,
his agenda of social reform, including the attempt to establish a ‘rational’ religion on the basis of a
monotheistic reading of the Vedanta informed by a ‘this-worldly’ orientation and a utilitarian ethic
and his numerous campaigns for the abolition of sati and the diffusion of European scientific
knowledge, must be placed in the context of the socio-economic conditions imposed by colonial
rule.39 According to this critical reading, Rammohun, having embraced unquestioningly the doctrine
of free-trade liberalism, inevitably succumbed to the ‘absurd illusion’ that ‘a kind of dependent but
still real bourgeois development in Bengal in close collaboration with British expatriates’ presented
a feasible prospect40—and this, during a time of general decline in the indigenous cottage industries
and handicrafts due to preferential tariff treatment enjoyed by British manufactures, 41 massive
unemployment, diversion of indigenous capital to unproductive sectors (‘land and rural
moneylending’), peasant immiserization through rack-renting and overassessment; in short, a time
of ‘complete disruption’ in Bengali socio- economic life.42 It is also worth noting that Rammohun
gave his wholehearted support to large-scale European settlement—and even envisioned the
eventual success of a type of ‘creole’ national independence movement—and to the expansion of
indigo cultivation, and generally export-oriented agriculture, financed through the Agency House
system, seemingly oblivious not only to coercive practices common in this type of trade, its
vulnerability to world market fluctuations and the precarious position into which peasant cultivators
were thus forced, but also to the need ‘to direct resources to lines of [inward] investment conducive
to industrial recovery’.43 In brief, as Chatterjee aptly observes with reference to the initiatives taken
by early nineteenth-century Indian reformers, ‘the attempt to achieve through education [but also
through campaigns for moral regeneration and ‘constitutional liberal’ agitation 44] what was denied
to the economy by the structure of colonial domination’—namely, the revolutionary transformation
of the ‘pre-capitalist’ relations of production—ought to be judged as ‘utterly anomalous’.45
III. In the first part of this essay, by locating the extract in its relation to contemporary
controversies over the freedom of the press in India, I attempted to provide evidence for the
observation made by commentators such as Barun De that Rammohun Roy, in his ‘reformist
political activity’, adapted ideas associated with the ‘Whig philosophy of the pre-Reform Act era’
(1832).46 In the second part, I discussed how the content of this ideology might have been inflected
under conditions of ‘colonial subjection’ and the implications for the question of the emergence of a
‘nationalist discourse’ in India.

82–83.
39 Asok Sen, ‘The Bengal Economy and Rammohun Roy’, in Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, ed. by
Vijaya Chandra Joshi (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), pp. 103–35 (pp. 106–07); Sumit Sarkar, ‘Rammohun Roy and the Break with the
Past’, in Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, ed. by Vijaya Chandra Joshi (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), pp. 46–68
(pp. 51, 55–56); Partha Chatterjee, ‘Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse’, in The Partha
Chatterjee Omnibus (Part I), (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–176 (p. 24); cf. Richard King, Orientalism and
Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 123, 132; also Lynn Zastoupil,
‘Defining Christians, Making Britons: Rammohun Roy and the Unitarians’, Victorian Studies, 44 (2002), 215–44.
40 Sarkar, p. 62.
41 P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106–07, 160;—for ‘the
theme of deindustrialization in late-nineteenth-century India’, Stanley A. Wolpert, A New History of India, 5th edn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 246–48; and Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political
Economy (London: Routledge, 1998; repr. 2001), pp. 102–03.
42 Sen, pp. 115–17, 123–28.
43 Ibid., pp. 130–33; cf. Bose and Jalal, pp. 71–72; Marshall, p. 109.
44 Sarkar, p. 59; cf. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30’.
45 Chatterjee, ‘Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse’, pp. 24-25.
46 Barun De, ‘A Biographical Perspective on the Political and Economic Ideas of Rammohun Roy’, in Rammohun Roy and the
Process of Modernization in India, ed. by Vijaya Chandra Joshi (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), pp. 136–48 (pp. 145, 147); cf. Bayly,
‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30’.
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