Orientalist Scholarship, the Conquest of India and the Events of 1857

Extract

[...] Until the Subaltern (relating to marginalized groups) Studies of the 1980s in India, the dominant belief among both Nationalist and British historians was that peasant hatred towards moneylenders (banias) and absentee landlords was the cause of the revolt spreading beyond the army. This ignores the fact hat the revolt spread most in areas that were the least touched by moneylenders and that a variety of agricultural classes (including landholding Zamindars) participated in the revolt. Recent scholarship has shown that the causes of this peasant discontent, which did so much to broaden the Revolt of 1857, stemmed from abuses in the British tax system, in which revenues extracted from farming communities kept growing, pushing many families off the land and into penury. [...]

[...] In instances such as this, we can see how the project of Oriental scholarship made the conquest of India possible, in giving the British the knowledge to take over India, in creating an idea of Indianess that could be manipulated by the British, and in producing the myth of a fallen India, justifying colonial despotism to the citizens of a “rational” constitutional monarchy which prized civil rights liberties. The Events of 1857 The events of 1857 have traditionally fallen under two separate interpretations. [...]

[...] The Imperial masters of India, the British, needed to make sense of the events of 1857 for two main reasons, first they had to understand the nature of the events in order to prevent them from happening again, and more importantly, they had to re-justify their rule of India in the face of mass discontent with their rule. The British primarily learned from their previous mistakes by restructuring the army, since they viewed the uprising simply as Sepoy Mutiny.” The ratio of Indians to British in the armed forces was never to exceed only the British could command the artillery and communications divisions, and sepoy (Indian) units were to consist of different groups so that not one caste, religion, or ethnicity could have total control over the unit. [...]

[...] The wearing of the Gandhi cap in the 1930s became illegal because it was a direct challenge to the India created by Britain for the Indians. The cap, like Gandhi's weaving of cloth, was symbol of nationalist protest, an attempt to create an alternative concept of Indian nationhood. Oriental Scholarship also was of importance to the British in justifying colonial rule to the British themselves. Knowledge of India was constructed to make it appear barbaric and depraved, in need of a strong English hand to life it up to a place among the civilized nations of the world. [...]

[...] To support their demand for an independent India modeled on the secular nation-states of Europe, the Nationalists construed the events of 1857 as a stepping stone to the struggles for independence in the 20th century. The participants in the revolt were painted in a more secular and unified light under Nationalist interpretation. This ignores the strong influence of Hindu and Islamic millenarianism and the fact that the failure of the Revolt largely stemmed from regional divisions among Indians, with the Punjab siding with British and several regions not joining the uprising because they didn't want to see a return of the powerful Maratha states. [...]