W. V. HARRIS
Phiroze Vasunia
THE CLASSICS AND COLONIAL INDIA
416pp. Oxford University Press. £85.
978 0 19 920323 9
"They fatten on the exploitation of the many. But there is one other strong resemblance between the Romans and the English people – they are both singularly devoid of imagination!" So wrote Jawaharlal Nehru (educated at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple) while in prison in 1934. Yet it depends what you mean by imagination; it might be argued, for example, that there can be no empire-building without imagination. And two immense imperial conquests from prior ages took hold of the imagination of the more educated among the British rulers of India, and made an impression on educated Indians, too – the eastern excursions of Alexander of Macedon and, more importantly, the imperialism of Rome.
How the classical works that discuss these two empires resonated with, and served the interests of, the British imperial rulers – but also sometimes of their opponents, both domestic and Indian – is the subject of Phiroze Vasunia's enjoyably informative book, The Classics and Colonial India. As an Indian with a doctorate in classics, who has now been resident in Britain for several years, he is admirably equipped to write it. But what raises it to a high level is the author's fine sense of historical context and his ability to summon up the right degree of detachment. The book ends with a proud chapter about Gandhi and Nehru (both of whom were, as it happens, knowledgeable about Roman history), but at the same time he recognizes, for instance, Gandhi's "excess of national self-pride". And the British, even when expressing a sense of ineffable superiority over their Indian subjects, are treated with forbearance.
From John Seeley to James Bryce and Evelyn Baring, the moulders of Victorian and Edwardian opinion about the British Empire harped on the Roman imperial precedent. Partly, one may suppose, this was to soothe the uneasy feelings that sometimes accompanied their sense of mission. Vasunia quotes the famous words of Charles Napier: "We have no right to seize Scinde, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be". In the same spirit Bryce wrote that "the government of India by the English resembles that of her provinces by Rome in being thoroughly despotic", and though he claimed that it was a justified and benevolent despotism, the word, or rather the fact, certainly generated unease. The correlate of the ancient despotes, as Bryce knew very well, is the slave.
But that saying of Napier's points to a serious obstacle in the way of Vasunia's project: the Britons who conquered and ruled India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had other aims in mind a great deal more urgent than emulating the Romans. Most obviously, they sought profits and jobs – still a consideration when Cyril Fielding is explaining his presence in India to Dr Aziz and his friends in A Passage to India. And – to a degree that is now hard to imagine – many also wanted to spread Christianity. Even the radical Shelley thought that the missionaries could be the source of "beneficial innovations" in India, as Vasunia points out. And some think that it was militarism itself that drove the British forward.
Such topics are not to Vasunia's taste – he is above all a scholar of literature, Greek, Latin, Gujarati, Bengali. But the virtual absence from The Classics and Colonial India of the real motive forces of British rule produces a certain imbalance. To understand Seeley, Bryce and Baring, and also the avant-la-lettre nationalists, it is essential to study the soldiers, too, a number of whom wrote revealing memoirs. Vasunia does not mention "Roberts of Kandahar", but Roberts's long-winded book Forty-One Years in India: From subaltern to commander-in-chief is a valuable counterweight to the effusions of Seeley, who never left Europe.
There is, however, much for a British reader to learn from Vasunia's discussion of nineteenth-century Gujarati and Bengali writers who were enthralled by the Greek and Roman classics. The most extraordinary of these figures was perhaps the precocious Calcutta poet Henry Derozio (partly Indian, partly Portuguese and partly English), who, before dying of cholera at the age of twenty-two in 1831, showed what might happen when a patriotic Indian – for that was his identity – was swept off his feet by the Greco-Orientalism of Byron and Shelley. Derozio was prolific and polished and an inspiration to Bengalis who came afterwards; and he equated the Persians defeated at Marathon with the hated Muslims.
A large part of the trouble, from the point of view of British power, was that the acculturation of Indians inevitably brought with it a wider idea of freedom than the Romans ever preached or practised. In addition, the rulers would probably have been well advised to imitate the Romans by bringing Indians into the real circles of power faster than they did (only twentyseven of the 528 men who entered the Indian Civil between 1904 and 1913 were Indian); but it is hardly surprising, given the racism then prevalent in Europe, that it did not happen. George Nathaniel Curzon – admittedly not a representative Briton or the most intelligent of viceroys – was horrified that "the superior wits of the Native" were allowing Indians to gain a foothold in government.
Later, the Government of India Act of 1919 introduced a system of "dyarchy", much talked of (at least by the British) for the next twenty years. Here Vasunia might have detected a genuine echo of Roman history, since it was in effect Theodor Mommsen's famous history of Rome that had introduced the concept of dyarchy, applying it to the supposed division of power between the emperor Augustus and the Senate.
Vasunia does not deal systematically with the way in which the ideology of empire coloured scholarly interpretations of ancient history. He sees that the long-authoritative view of Alexander of Macedon taken by W. W. Tarn (1869–1957) was partly inspired by his perception of contemporary imperialism, but that is a familiar tale. Idealizing, disingenuous and downright blinkered claims about what the nineteenth-century British were up to in India and elsewhere (Seeley is one of the main culprits) had a much deeper and more long-lasting effect on the historiography of Roman imperialism, and it can still be felt. This is no simple story, since some of the most influential historians in question were, or are, not British but German, French or American; but it is a certainly a classic case of history, ideology and intellectual fashion interacting, and worthy of attention.
The main impact of the classics on Gandhi might be said to be moral: he took Socrates as an exemplar of fortitude in the face of oppression, depicting him as a satyagrahi who undertook the improvement of his own people. Nehru's respect for the Greek classics was a more complex affair, embracing Attic tragedy and anti-democratic Plato. As for the ICS administrators who had read Greats, how did the classics really affect them, how did studying Greece and Rome really impinge on their gentlemanly upbringing? Were the effects on them mainly moral rather than intellectual in any strict sense? Vasunia leaves the question open, understandably.
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