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Organic Conservatism,
Administrative Realism, and the Imperialist Ethos
in the 'Indian Career'
of John Stuart Mill
a review-article by
Vinay Lal
*
Lynn Zastoupil.
John Stuart Mill
and India
. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994.
viii + 280 pp.
"I was born in London, on the 20th
of May, 1806," wrote John Stuart Mill in his autobiography, "and was the
eldest son of James Mill, the author of the
History of British India
."
James Mill had acquired considerable fame as a philosopher of utilitarianism
and as an authority on India; and if it is remarkable that John Stuart
Mill, who would eclipse his father, described himself, on the opening
page of his autobiography, as the son of the "author of the
History
of British India
", it is just as revealing that he virtually obscured
his own life-long association with India. It is not commonly known that
John Stuart Mill, philosopher of classical liberalism, theorist of political
economy, proponent of women's rights, and one of the shapers of modern
English prose, spent nearly the entirety of his adult working life drafting
"despatches" or official documents on British policy in India. A few terse
lines, to which he had practically nothing else to add in his autobiography,
describe his association with India: "In May, 1823, my professional occupation
and status for the next thirty-five years of my life, were decided by
my father's obtaining for me an appointment from the East India Company.
. . immediately under himself." Thus was John Stuart Mill's connection
with India assured until the demise of the East India Company in 1858.
Having entered "East India House"
in 1823, when he was only seventeen years old, John Stuart Mill was placed
in the office of the Examiner of Indian Correspondence. It was in this
office in London that the East India Company prepared the policy documents
that, once they had been approved by the Court of Directors of the Company
and the Board of Control, were sent to the Governor-General in India,
and it was through this office that the entire correspondence between
India and London was funnelled. Though employed initially as a junior
clerk, Mill was, owing to his unusual intellectual attainments, very soon
allowed to partake in the preparation of "Despatches", and in 1828 he
was made one of the assistants to the Examiner. Hitherto he had drafted
despatches mainly in the Public Department; after 1828, he was attached
to the Political Department, and from 1836 to 1856 he was almost single-handedly
responsible for the vast correspondence pertaining to the Company's relations
with the Native Indian States. Though Mill did not attain the position
of the Examiner until 1856, the trust reposed in him by the Company is
suggested by the fact that he was chosen to represent the Company when
it was asked to appear and furnish evidence before a Parliamentary Select
Committee in 1852 on the occasion of the renewal of the Company's charter.
When the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58 compelled the Prime Minister, Lord
Palmerston, to place a bill before Parliament seeking the dissolution
of the Company and transferring the responsibility for India directly
to the Crown, Mill was assigned the unenviable task of defending the Company's
interests. Mill then prepared a extensive historical defence of the Company's
achievements in the form of a
Memorandum on the Improvements in the
Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years
, and this was
followed by several other petitions. Though the Company's dissolution
was unavoidable, no trading organization was ever sent to its grave with
a better epitaph. Mill left India House when the East India Company was
wound up on 2 September 1858, having "given enough" of his life, as he
said, "to India". He was then offered a seat on the India Council, a decision-making
and advisory body headed by the Secretary of State for India, but this
proposal he declined: as he put it, "the conditions of Indian government
under the new system made me anticipate nothing but useless vexation and
waste of effort from any participation in it". He never again took up
any employment, other than occupying a seat in the House of Commons.
It is not only Mill but his biographers,
and many scholars as well, who have been loathe to recognize that Mill's
35-year tenure at the India Office may have something to say about his
life and work, his views on political liberty and subjection, the idea
of representative government, British imperialism (with particular reference
to India), and many of the large number of other subjects on which he
penned his thoughts. The standard biography of Mill makes no mention of
his time at the India Office, and Bruce Mazlish, in his
James and John
Stuart Mill
, an intellectual psychobiography of father and son, is
constrained to admit that "India represents a curious lacunae in John
Stuart Mill's intellectual life". The scholarship on Mill, which is very
considerable, is predicated largely on the supposition that Mill's work
at the India Office was merely a diversion, and that it could not have
had any bearing on his work as a well-known public philosopher and political
economist; and so a recent assessment maintains the distinction between
Mill's career at the India House and his "theoretical priorities in economics
and social organisation". Most pointedly, Eric Stokes, in his authoritative
study on utilitarianism as an aspect of Britain's policy in India, justified
the omission of a serious consideration of John Stuart Mill's role in
the creation of Indian policy with the argument that the younger Mill
had "neither his father's opportunities nor his bent for the practical
realization of the Utilitarian theories".
It is the career of John Stuart
Mill at the India Office, and its possible relation to his more widely
known career as a philosopher of liberty, theorist of government, and
political economist that is the subject of Lynn Zastoupil's study, which
is uniquely based on the 1,713 despatches (and most certainly some more)
that Mill wrote in the Examiner's Office at India House. It is scarcely
possible, as Zastoupil reasonably maintains, that Mill's work for the
Company left no impression on his mind or that he effected a complete
divorce between his intellectual interests and his working life. John
Stuart Mill is supposed to have been part of the "utilitarian deluge"
that engulfed Indian administration, and in consequence he is seen as
having done little else except to follow his father. Zastoupil disputes
this conventional reading and suggests that "at India House Mill found
both ample reinforcement for and significant opportunity to employ the
ideas that mattered most to him" (p. 5). Far from maintaining a consistently
utilitarian or liberal position on Indian affairs, or following the views
associated with his father, Mill adopted independent views and was swayed
by numerous other intellectual considerations. Thus, for example, the
teachings of Herder, Coleridge, and Saint-Simon, though they seem to be
at great remove from Indian affairs, were to have an extraordinary impact
on Mill's Indian despatches; and Mill's Indian writings "owed more to
the [eighteenth-century] Whig tradition" than has been commonly allowed;
on the other hand, Zastoupil is also prepared to argue that Mill's more
general political positions may have been considerably impacted by his
knowledge of British India.
Though Zastoupil appears to be
offering a more complex reading of Mill's Indian writings, his thesis
is a rather simple one -- indeed, not merely simple, but unfortunately
simple-minded. The brunt of his argument is easily encapsulated in a few
formulations. As long as his father was alive, the younger Mill could
not but espouse his father's views, and the radical change in John Stuart
Mill's views on Indian policy in 1836 coincides with the death of his
father that year . This argument is repeated
ad infinitum
and seems
reasonable enough (p. 31, 40, 49, 93, 95, 98,
passim
). A case in
point is the well-known Anglicist-Orientalist debate over Indian education
in the 1820s and 1830s. The Anglicists proposed that the government's
funds be used exclusively for the propagation of English-language education;
the Orientalists insisted that money also be spent on reviving and supporting
classical Indian learning in Sanskrit and Arabic: and the issue was resolved
when Governor-General Bentinck, influenced in part by Macaulay's now-infamous
"Minute on Indian Education", where the languages and literatures of India
are summarily dismissed as worthless, scarcely worthy of the attention
of even children, ruled in favor of the Anglicists. James Mill, however,
while he harbored nothing but contempt for classical Indian learning,
was none too enthusiastic about English literary texts either: the aim
of education, as of government, was to promote 'usefulness', and he thought
that 'useful knowledge' was best spread through vernacular Indian languages.
That seems consistently to have been the position of both James and John
since 1824. But, in 1836, when John Stuart Mill was asked to prepare a
response to Bentinck's decision, he unabashedly and rather surprisingly
took up the Orientalist cause. Mill decried the attempt to denigrate Indian
learning and demean the integrity and knowledge of the country's traditional
intelligentsia. "The testimony of the most competent witnesses", Mill
wrote, "affirms that the lettered classes are still held by the people
of India in high estimation, and their degradation and extinction cannot
be received with indifference by their countrymen nor submitted to without
resentment by themselves" (p. 42). Mill took the view, in the words of
the Orientalist H. H. Wilson, that "a command of the English language,
sufficient for the ordinary purposes of life, is quite compatible with
gross ignorance and inveterate superstition" (p. 45). The President of
the Board of Control, John Hobhouse, was not prepared to tolerate the
defence of an unseemly cause, and refused to send Mill's despatch to India
(p. 40); when at last a despatch was sent, it bore so little the impress
of Mill's views that Mill crossed it out from the list of his despatches.
What might have moved Mill to
so radically change his views? Zastoupil rightfully notes that Mill had,
by 1836, absorbed for nearly a decade "the views of romantics, conservatives,
Saint-Simonians, and others" (p. 40). In 1826, as Mill was to detail in
his
Autobiography
(chapter 5), he experienced an extraordinary
crisis in his mental life, and thereafter slowly came to the realization
that the education received at the hands of his father had been, while
intellectually strenuous and fulfilling, wholly deficient -- indeed reprehensibly
narrow -- in many other respects. His father had not enough of an appreciation
of art, poetry, and literature; nor did he recognize that ratiocination
is no substitute for sensibility, or that the relentless and exclusive
focus on reason and logic is detrimental to the development of the life
of emotions. Mill increasingly turned to the romantics, particularly to
Coleridge, for intellectual and emotional sustenance. He was now to believe
that the sentiments of a people, however fanciful and seemingly opposed
to rational and pragmatic plans for governance, were not to be ignored,
and thus utility could not be the end of all government and social reform;
he also came to hold the view that reform was best effected by working
with, not against, the social customs and institutions of a people, and
that in this endeavor it was imperative "to enlist the support of those
learned classes to whom Indians customarily looked for leadership in intellectual
matters" (p. 41). Some people exercised a "natural influence over the
minds of their countrymen" (p. 37), having something of an organic bonds
with the masses, and their leadership was more easily accepted than the
rule of foreigners. This is one view that Mill was to maintain with tenacity,
and if anything Zastoupil does not emphasize enough its importance in
providing a cornerstone to British policy in India, which particularly
after the Rebellion of 1857-58 was rooted in the assumption that the safety
of British rule in India was no better assured than by seeking out the
'natural leaders' of Indian society and maintaining good relations with
them. It is for these reasons that, as Zastoupil holds, John Stuart Mill
came to espouse the Orientalist cause, thereby repudiating the views that
both he and his father had held since 1824. But that was not all: "perhaps
most important[ly]", Zastoupil argues, "James Mill was dying and away
from his India House desk, leaving his son with considerably more freedom
to express new views on India that he might have been developing" (p.
40).
It is remarkable and almost incredulous
that the younger Mill was so firmly in the grip of his father's influence
that he should have been subservient to his father's ideological platform,
while in private adhering to views that James Mill would have treated
with contempt. This tyrannical relationship should pose considerable problems
for how we are to understand a philosopher known principally as the exponent
of liberty, much as it also compels us to attempt to reconcile Mill's
intellectual prowess with what can only be described as moral cowardice.
This is not only a conundrum for psychologists and psychoanalysts, but
a problem in English intellectual history. What was the general tenor
of father-son relationships in nineteenth-century England, and what relation
do private histories have to public life? How did John Stuart Mill himself
keep apart the public from the private, and how did he reconcile reverence
with opposition? What can we say about Victorian intellectual practices
from the relationship of James and John Mill? Zastoupil does not allow
any of these questions to enter into his discussion, and it merely becomes
axiomatic for him that John Stuart Mill's radically altered views after
1836 about Indian society and the nature and progress of British rule
in India are accounted for by the death of his father. He needs to take
a more nuanced view of this famous relationship: if James Mill represented
the dominant phase of imperialism, John Stuart Mill represented its hegemonic
phase. Where Zastoupil sees opposition, he might also try to seek complementarity:
in Ronald Inden's phrase, father and son constituted the "loyal opposition",
sharing numerous underlying assumptions about Indian society.
To complement his argument, Zastoupil
advances the claim that Mill increasingly came under the influence of
what he calls the "empire-of-opinion" school of Indian governance, and
that he allowed this influence to flow freely after the demise of his
father. James Mill throughout had argued vehemently for direct rule by
the British in India. The object being to promote good and useful government
as soon and effortlessly as possible, he saw no reason why the British
should not directly take over the reins of administration in territories
that came under their jurisdiction, stripping native rulers, whom he thought
of as despicable and squalid despots, of their power. His son, predictably,
adopted a similar line of argumentation, and as late as 1832-34, had drafted
three despatches on Mysore where he objected to allowing the Indian prince
to retain his throne on the promise of delivering good administration
to his subjects. How is it then that in January 1837, six months after
the death of his father, John Stuart Mill was to draft a despatch on the
troubled native state of Jaipur in which he advocated that the British,
despite the murder of one of their officials, adhere to a policy of non-intervention?
Though John Stuart Mill was emboldened
by his father's death to repudiate views with which he did not wish to
be associated, Zastoupil additionally points to the influence on him of
certain administrators who proposed that the opinions, habits, and prejudices
of a people constituted the very basis of a stable civil society. This
clumsily termed "empire-of-opinion" school, whose most well-known proponents
were four highly-placed Scotsmen -- Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras (1820-26);
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay (1819-27); John Malcolm, Governor
of Bombay (1827-30); and Charles Metcalfe, Resident at Delhi (1811-19)
and Hyderabad (1820-5), and Acting Governor-General (1835-36) -- felt
it bound to preserve native Indian institutions, pay heed to the opinions
of Indians, show "a generous consideration of the feelings [most evidently
among Muslims] of fallen greatness", conform to native usages, abstain
from innovation (which Munro described as "the ruling vice of our government"),
and involve Indians in the administration of their country by cultivating
the association of India's 'natural' elite. Viewing India as a collection
of village communities, deemed to have existed from time immemorial, these
'romantics', while not condoning social evils, were concerned about the
possible effects of modernization and Westernization upon Indian society,
and feared that rapid changes would render Indians hostile to British
rule (pp. 56-86).
John Stuart Mill, Zastoupil argues,
likewise "came to believe that Indian participation in government was
an essential component of lasting improvement in that part of the world"
(p. 87). Mill was responsible for correspondence pertaining to the affairs
of native Indian states, and for many years after 1836, he advocated non-intervention
and indirect rule by the British. Native princes were to be allowed to
govern their states, and only in the most extreme circumstances was intervention
conceivable, though even then Mill counseled restraint. Zastoupil summons
the case of Awadh: by the terms of a treaty signed in 1801, the British
agreed to protect the Nawab from internal and external threats, while
extracting from him a promise that he would work for the welfare and security
of his people. The Company's relations with the Nawab over the next five
decades were a constant point of tension, and the alleged negligence of
the various Nawabs (later Kings), who were said to be more interested
in nautch girls, music, poetry, and minor amusements such as kite-flying,
towards their subjects sorely tempted the British to intervene on many
an occasion and annex the kingdom to their territories. At first, as one
might expect, John Stuart Mill displayed resentment that the British were
allowing a native despotism to flourish, and even lending it their support;
and in 1834 he went so far as to draft a despatch that authorized Bentinck
to annex Awadh on the grounds that its inefficient administration was
imposing an intolerable burden on the people (pp. 93-96). But in 1838,
Mill expressed "concern about [the] erosion of royal authority" in Awadh,
and he was willing to allow that the King of Awadh was doing all in his
power to ameliorate the situation. Mill would have agreed with the opinion
of John Low, Resident at Awadh in 1842, that "the general system of the
Native Govt. is in its theory well suited to the genius and habits of
the people of Oude" (p. 102). Mill took this position not only on Awadh,
but also on Kathiawar and other Native States (pp. 104-117).
By the mid-1840s, Zastoupil argues,
Mill had moved to a more moderate position, one that characterizes the
most 'mature' phase of his thinking. For a number of reasons, he was to
come to the recognition that he had erred in uncritically embracing the
views of Coleridge, Herder, and other romantics, much as he had mistakenly
disowned rather too much of his father's teachings. The more crucial point,
which Zastoupil acknowledges but rather inadequately, is that Mill --
much like many other nineteenth-century European and American thinkers
-- readily adopted the openly racist doctrine that all civilizations were
to be judged along an evolutionary scale. On this scale, some civilizations
were advanced, others primitive or (in today's jargon) 'under-developed':
and progress lay in having the primitive nations trod the path that aeons
ago had been followed by certain European nations with evident success.
Mill diluted, when he did not abandon, the teachings of the empire-of-opinion
school, certainly for pragmatic if not ideological reasons, and took on
the mantle of a radical reformer. He came to attack the principle of indirect
rule, urged intervention in despotic states, and saw in rapid modernization
a panacea for India's social and political evils. While still eager that
British officials work with the 'natural' elite of India, Mill approved
of Dalhousie's doctrine of lapse, which allowed the British to take over
a state where there was no biological heir to the throne, and he supported
the British annexation of Satara, Awadh, the Punjab, and other Native
States. In one fundamental respect he continued to adhere to the principle
of indirect rule and even non-intervention. Eager to explain why he had
not approved of Dalhousie's annexation of Kerouli, while allowing all
others, Mill wrote in a private letter to John Morley in 1866: "My principle
is this. Wherever there are really native states, with a nationality,
& historical traditions and feelings, which is emphatically the case
(for example) with the Rajpoot states, there I would on no account take
advantage of any failure of heirs to put an end to them." But "in modern
states created by conquest", such as the "Mahomedan" and "Mahratta kingdoms",
or the "foreign dynasties" of Scindia and Holkar in central India, Mill
"would make the continuance of the dynasty by adoption not a right nor
a general rule, but a reward to be earned by good government . . ." (pp.
153-54). Why should Mill, however, at all have maintained the invidious
distinction between 'real' native states and others, and would we not
have to know what Mill meant by a 'nation' before we can reasonably infer
what he might have meant by "really native states"? Is there an implied
distinction between the 'organic' and the 'inorganic' here in Mill's adumbration
of the 'real', and if so, what is the intellectual history of that distinction?
Unfortunately, these queries form no part of Zastoupil's study.
In his final chapter on "J. S.
Mill and the Imperial Experience", Zastoupil attempts to take on some
larger and mainly unresolved questions. One might have expected that he
would say something of how influential, if at all, Mill's despatches were
in the formulation of Indian policy, but he is surprisingly silent on
this point. One scholar, as far back as 1964, came to the conclusion that
"all the important principles for governing the great dependency of India
were laid down by Mill in the documents he drafted for the Company", but
Zastoupil does not hazard so bold a judgment. The English imperial enterprise
in India was of such a magnitude that some measure for stating just how
important the "important principles" were would have to be stipulated.
The more difficult point, as Zastoupil of course recognizes, is that the
despatches prepared by Mill were amended by the Court of Directors, and
it remains uncertain how far Mill actually helped to shape British policy
on India. But that is no reason why we ought to be precluded from attempting
to assess Mill's writings as furnishing tropes that were to become critical
in the formulation of colonial discourse. British administrators, particularly
in the period of the Raj after the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, came to
hold the view that critics in England were in no position to understand
the difficulties faced by what came to be called the men-on-the-spot.
The excesses committed by the British in putting down the Rebellion and
in subsequent 'disturbances' (such as in the Punjab in 1919) were easily
criticized by arm-chair critics, but -- it was claimed -- often administrators
had no choice except to put down rebellions by a display of brute force.
The man-on-the spot always knows best, or so the maxim proclaimed. Mill
himself did not use this phrase, but there can be little doubt that he
was likewise inclined to this view; he also insisted that the administration
of the country was to be turned over to professionals, and not to be left
to mere amateurs or gentleman-politician types. Arguing against Crown
rule in India, Mill suggested that the administration of India was best
left in the hands of the Company, "chiefly composed of persons who have
acquired professional knowledge of" Indian affairs. Mill was, in other
words, one of the earliest exponents of the man-on-the-spot theory. That
is easily understood, given the English predilection for a crude kind
of empiricism; yet this quintessential form of Englishness does not sit
easily with English politics' self-representation of itself as an affair
of amateurs. The distinction between amateurism, one of whose iconic heroes
was to be the figure of Sherlock Holmes, and professionalism, which the
English came to associate with the greatly loathed Germans (and particularly
Prussians), lay at the heart of the British empire. These are the larger
questions that merit attention, but Zastoupil shows no awareness of their
centrality or, at times, even presence.
It is to the question of imperialism
that we must return. Though Zastoupil takes a few digs at Said, after
the conventional acknowledgment of the undisputed importance of his work,
as well as at those -- Bernard Cohn, Ron Inden, Gauri Viswanathan, among
others -- whose work has done most to show the hegemonic processes through
which the British established themselves as the paramount power in India,
he has little to say on Mill's imperialism or on its epistemological constructs
and imperatives. He conflates imperialism with Orientalism, and gets mired
in the rather unnecessary enterprise of arguing that Mill was not a complete
Orientalist, and most likely not a bad or ill-intentioned one (pp. 173-89).
There could have been no more Orientalist proposition than Mill's articulation
of India as the raw data, with Europe being the fount of theory: as a
"theoretical reformer of the opinions and the institutions of his time",
Mill had noted, he appreciated the insights into the "practical conduct
of public affairs" that his service with the Company brought him. Zastoupil
provides a valuable commentary on how Mill's views on land reform in Ireland,
and most particularly his arguments against the prevailing consensus in
favor of the landed aristocracy, were shaped by his Indian experience
(pp. 183-88). However, he has absolutely nothing else to say about Mill
as a spokesman for the British empire, or about the relation of Mill's
Indian writings to his other writings on imperialism or imperial affairs,
and to the end he remains fixated on the 'influence' (an intellectually
lazy word) of the 'empire-of-opinion' school on Mill. Mill did have a
great deal to say about imperialism and about British imperial practices,
and it is surprising that Zastoupil does not seek to explore the relation
between Mill's defence of the Company and his endorsement of professional
bureaucrats, and such imperialist events as the notorious repression by
Governor Eyre of the Jamaica Rebellion of 1865. Nor does Zastoupil recognize
that Mill was the most important player, as one student of Mill puts it,
"in transforming English liberalism from a dominantly anti-imperialist
theory to a very sophisticated defense of an expanding British empire."
Zastoupil's study, nonetheless,
provides the necessary backdrop to Mill's Indian career and thus paves
the way for more complex studies. Mill's writings encapsulate those central
tropes of imperialist discourse, such as 'natural leaders', 'fair play',
and the 'man-on-the-spot', but the contours of their operation in his
discourse have barely been articulated. Mill was an advocate of free trade
and an opponent of monopoly, but he defended a trading company which had
forcefully to be divested of its monopolistic practices. He is remembered
as the philosopher of liberty, but rather unimaginatively, in keeping
-- as they say -- with the times, used a primitive evaluative scale to
judge civilizations. He is loudly cheered as one of the principal theorists
of parliamentary democracy, but it is indubitably certain that he was
willing to countenance certain forms of despotism. Mill attempted, not
uniquely, to reconcile a universalist reading of liberty with a particularist
reading of Indian 'despotism'. These paradoxes, and numerous others, have
to be unraveled so that we might all the more successfully probe the received
conception of Mill as the philosopher of liberty. India was the grave
of many British officers, but it may also turn out to be the grave of
one whose stellar place in the intellectual history of the West has so
far been assured.
Originally published as:
"John
Stuart Mill and India", a review-article.
New Quest
, no. 54
(January-February 1998):54-64.
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