| IMPERIAL CONNECTIONS India in the Indian Ocean Arena 1860-1920 Thomas R. MetcalfPublished by PERMANENT BLACK “Hinlayana’, Mall Road, Ranikher Cant, Ranier 26865 mal: perblack@geilcom, Diseribued by ‘ORTENTLONGMAN PRIVATE LIMITED Bangalore Bhopal Bhobanesbwvar Chandigarh Chennai Emakulam Guval withthe University of California Press FOR SALE ONLY IN SOUTH ASIA. (This edition may not be sl outside India, Pakistan, ‘Banga Desh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal and Bhuean) ISBN 81.7824.9005, Fromtspiece: Sikh sentry, Fort Jobnstoa, Nyasaland, by Harry Jotinston. Courtesy ofthe Royal Geographical Socieg;, London Printed and bound by Pauls Press, New Delhi 110020 i Imperial ConnectionsCHAPTER 2 Constructing Identities From the earliest days oftheir rule over India, the British set out to order and define its peoples. In part this task reflected the imperative to make sense ofand come to terms with the land over which they found themselves ruling, As many works written during the las decades under the influence of Michel Foucault have made abundantly clear, knowledge was an essen- tial ingredient of power. Without knowing, authority could not be cffecively exercised, The process may be said to have begun with Warren Hastings’ construction of “Hindus” and of “Muslims” as distinct legal cially asthe Raj consolidated its power made part ofa larger scholarly enterprise the Victorians, as chil- dren of the Enlightenment, sought comprehensive ways of fitting the world around them into ordered hierarchies. Beginning with the photo- graphic collection “The ia” published in 1868, the British in India produced an arra ‘country’s varied castes an ‘groups. Not just intellectual exercises, these ethnographic categories, as they were embedded in censuses, gx- zetteers, and revenue records, shaped the administrative concems of the colonial stare. Further, the persistence of diverse ethnic identities at the |heart of Indian society foreclosed any effective unity among Indic’s peoples, (or s0 the British colonial administrators believed. Divided by caste, reli- gion, and ethnicity, India’s peoples could not rise any conception of ‘unity, As HH. Risley wrote in 191s, there existed in India “no national type and no nation or even nationality in the ordinary sense of these words?! CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES 47 ‘This chapter examines how this process of knowing and ordering India’s peoples shaped British artitudes and assumptions about the soci- ties the British encountered as they extended their empire into Southeast ‘Asia and Africa in the later nineteenth century. I do not claim that the cac- egoties formed in India were transported wholesale overseas — there was ofcourse no caste system in Malaya, Rather I argue that ways of thinking formed during the Indian colonial experience found expression, as the British struggled to come to terms with their new color comparable, if different, forms of knowledge elsewhere. Thi ofthe Raj, with is richly elaborated hierarchies, existed alway ‘whether explicitly cited or not, for how the British ought appropriately to “make sense of” newly conquered colonial societies. India, with Ceylon, also made its presence felt more directly, through immigration, alike in ‘Malaya and East Africa; and so forced the British to controne new prob- Jems inthe ordecing of multiracial societies. I endeavor here, with exam- ples ranging from notions of “indolence” to land tenures to architecture, to show, primarily in elation to Malaya, how colonial knowledge incor- porated Indian precedents and yet frequently challenged them. ‘The “Lazy” Native and the “Industrious” Immigrant ‘The British had entered the Malay voyages of the East India Com as the early trading {tempts to come to Raffies’s conquests yale. “Brom the Raffies's views of Malay abilities were comparatively rude and uncivilized character ofthe nation, earned isquisition is not to be looked for} he wrote. Si were echoed bby John Crawfard, an associate of Raffes and author ofthe fisse extended British ethnography of the East Indies, the History ofthe Indian Archipel ‘yo, Containing an Acount of Manners, Arts, Languages, Religions, Insti- tutions, and Commerce of Is Inhabitants, published in 1820 in so volumes. With respect to ther “intellectual capaciny” Crawfurd wrote, “the Indian equal, in most respects to an individual -d community? Such assertions involved, comparison with India, whose rich and almost certainly, an imp ancient past British Oxientalists were discovering daring these very years Yer there was also, for men like Crawfurd, much thar was artracive about48 CONSraUcTING rDENTITIES candour” ualike the “almost universal disregard of truth which charac- terizes the inhabitants of Hindustan” In similar fashion the Malay pos- sessed a “kindness” and a “sympathy for distress”; hence, unlike the 1874 colonial era. Most authoritative pechaps in its depiction of theicchar- acter was Frank Swettenham's Britis Malaya, frst published in 1905 and reprinted into the 19408, Swettenham (1 tire colonial career in the Straits and. ‘general for the Malay states and governor of Singapore; in his retirement he made himself into a self styled expert on colonial affai ‘Swettenham, as for other officals ofthe time, che “leading characte the body to ease and mind to dreamy contemplation rather than to strenuous and persistent toil? together with the fact that a bountiful nature had done “so much” for the Malay that occasional “fitful exertion” the best?” “Take him on the war-path or any ki ‘expedition through the jungle, Swertenham concluded, “and you will ‘wish for no better servant, no more pleas Clifford, who served in remote Pahang in the ‘iments, “True children of the drowsy land in which they live? Malays ‘were “lazy, indolent, and pleasure-loving” but at the same time “courte- oft of speech, and caressing by instinct”> This personal- ‘complemented the luxuriant wilderness in which the Malays lived —a land of sultry heat, teeming wildlife, and dense jungle. Land and people together, Malaya evoked a romantic vision of an arcadian time before the “boot of the ubiquitous white man” had trampled upon it, ‘tropical landscape, the Malays existed by -were not, and should not be encouraged t0 ‘emulate. The Malay, Swettenham pointedly observed, possessed “an CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES 49. absence of servility, which is unusual in the East” Farther, he wrote, with the example of the educated Indian visibly before him, the Malay is not a person who is always asserting himself, airing grievances, and clam- uring for tights? The contr the Indian Bengalis instructive, Like the Malay, the Bengali, in sh view, was also given over to indo- Jence and lethargy. Like the Malay, he was a product ofa tropical climate. ‘As Macaulay famously wrote the Bengali passed his days ina “con- stant vapour bath? so chat his “phy: ization” was “fecble oven to cffeminacy” But the Bengali “babu: tery of English, appeared in the fearful shape of a caricature Englishman. Byhis mimicry of English manners and opinions, the Bengali represented » that which had to be denied—a challenge to the legitimacy of the Raj. ‘Progress surely had to come to Malaya, but the Malay was not to be re- shaped in the image ofthe babu. Above ll, it was essential, as Swettenham ‘wrote in 1890, that the Malays not be aught English, for that would “only ‘unfit them for the duties of life and make them discontented with any- thing like manual labor” There must be created in Malaya no “imitation, however remote, ofthe occasionally scaring, sometimes grotesque, and often pathetic product of the British Indian schools? Ie was the task ofthe British to secure the Malay in the possession of his simple pleasures and to ensure that he remained as he was.* ‘Such a determination not to follow Indian precede widespread throughout the empire, Even in E; French-educated elite, men like Lord Cromer jn education wes with its sophisticated not to create in Egypt another “superficially educated upper cl instead to encourage elementary and technical education, “T want.” he said, “to create as many carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers, etc. a8 T possibly can Whether in the Malay jungle or on the banks of the Nile, the local people were to be guided into paths far different from those Macaulay had outlined for India. {in place of an English educated elite, the British in Malaya sought to place the Malay sultans, since 187s formed into loyal allies, at the center Of ‘the new political order. As they sought to understand the nanure and posi- tion of the sultans, the British advanced theories devised more than 2 cen- tury before, during the conquest of aia There, in the late eighteenth and carly nineteenth centuries, two visions of indigenous rulership had con- ‘tested for supremacy. One, associated with the writings of Alexander Dow in the 1770s, argu indlia’s rulers were “Oriental despots” participat- ing in an, ‘tradition of unbounded personal authority. The second,