Lakshmi’s Footprints and Paisley Patterns: Perspectives on Scoto-Indian Literary and Cultural Interrelations [1 ed.] 9781032567433, 9781032567440, 9781003436959

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1: Foreword
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Introduction
Chapter 3: ‘Webs of Significance: Rammohun Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore
Chapter 4: “When you see millions of mouthless dead”: Scottish Poetry of the Great War (1914-18)
Chapter 5: A Cakewalk between Asansol and Dundee: Material Manifestations of A Colonial Thirdspace in a Bengali Industrial Town
Chapter 6: From Alexander Hamilton to Patrick Geddes: New Nature Writing and India
Chapter 7: The Ambivalence of Tolerance: William Wilson Hunter and the Rise of Surveillance Literature in Colonial Bengal
Chapter 8: Telling the Tale of the Garden Zoological: Exploring Scottish Animal Stories of Andrew Lang through an Ecological Lens
Chapter 9: The Scottish Church College and the Scots Missionaries: Continuities and Influences
Chapter 10: The Kinetic Mission of Kalimpong: The Enduring Mission of Rev Dr John Anderson Graham and Dr Graham’s Homes in the History of Scottish Foreign Missions
Chapter 11: Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Scottish Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Bengal
Chapter 12: The Transnational Poet: Re-negotiating the Dichotomy of Homeland and Hostland
Chapter 13: “Disruptions”: Rise of Free Church of Scotland and its Impact on Bengali Intelligentsia in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 14: David Hare and Patrick Geddes: The Scottish Legacy in Bengal
Chapter 15: Of Rights to Expression & Information under the Indian and Scottish Legal Systems: A Comparative Analysis

Citation preview

Lakshmi’s Footprints and Paisley Patterns

Perspectives on Scoto-Indian

Literary and Cultural Interrelations

Edited by Bashabi Fraser

Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay

Levant Books India

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Bashabi Fraser and Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay The right of Bashabi Fraser and Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032567433 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032567440 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003436959 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003436959 Typeset in Typeset in Minion Pro 10.5 by Levant Books

Foreword

In this stimulating volume, Professors Fraser and Bandyopadhyay have gathered a fascinating range of studies, focusing on the last two centuries, of aspects of the interrelationship of India and Scotland. In so doing, they and their contributors offer refreshing insights into the relationship of both nations. These insights move substantially beyond straightforward examinations of colonial and post-colonial history and into a variety of fresh areas and angles of study. They open up issues of exchange and interaction, questions of literary, cultural, religious and even economic and legal influences, parallels and reactions. They explore large questions of the assimilation in both directions of cultural production between both nations. Such interactivity is reflected in the collection’s title: Lakshmi’s Footprints and Paisley Patterns. This refers to Indian influences on the massive cotton industry of Paisley, the large town immediately to the west of the city of Glasgow. This was for two centuries intimately connected with India. The shape of the famous textile design known as ‘Paisley pattern’ has also been designated in the study of textiles as ‘Lakshmi’s footprint’. While the design is an ancient one, found in other cultures, such as that of ancient Persia, it arrived in Paisley from Inida in the early nineteenth century as its cotton industry developed worldwide. The intermingling of titles for the ancient design reflects the wider intermingling of cultures, ideas and influences between India and Scotland. This forms the central conceptual thread which runs through this valuable book’s complex patterns of discussion. Its title is entirely appropriate both in that the Paisley pattern is internationally famed and in that Lakshmi is an auspicious goddess. I congratulate the editors on bringing together this collection of lively and insightful essays. Ian Brown

Contents

1. Foreword Ian Brown

iii

2. Introduction Bashabi Fraser and Debnarayan Bandyopadhyay

1

3. ‘Webs of Significance: Rammohun Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore Kathryn Simpson

5

4. “When you see millions of mouthless dead”: Scottish Poetry of the Great War (1914-18) 21 Argha Kumar Banerjee 5. A Cakewalk between Asansol and Dundee: Material Manifestations of A Colonial Thirdspace in a Bengali Industrial Town Santanu Banerjee, Suvojit Chatterjee Edward Hollis and Hemonta Mondal

35

6. From Alexander Hamilton to Patrick Geddes: New Nature Writing and India Debarati Bandyopadhyay

54

7. The Ambivalence of Tolerance: William Wilson Hunter and the Rise of Surveillance Literature in Colonial Bengal Pritam Mukherjee

71

8. Telling the Tale of the Garden Zoological: Exploring Scottish Animal Stories of Andrew Lang through an Ecological Lens Ritushree Sengupta

89

9. The Scottish Church College and the Scots Missionaries: Continuities and Influences Kaberi Chatterjee 10. The Kinetic Mission of Kalimpong: The Enduring Mission of Rev Dr John Anderson Graham and Dr Graham’s Homes in the History of Scottish Foreign Missions Subhadeep Paul

101

115

11. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Scottish Transactions in

Nineteenth-Century Bengal Nandini Bhattacharya

129

12. The Transnational Poet: Re-negotiating the Dichotomy of

Homeland and Hostland Bashabi Fraser

150

13. “Disruptions”: Rise of Free Church of Scotland and its Impact

on Bengali Intelligentsia in the Nineteenth Century 174

Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay

14. David Hare and Patrick Geddes: The Scottish Legacy in Bengal

Saptarshi Mallick 185

15. Of Rights to Expression & Information under the Indian and

Scottish Legal Systems: A Comparative Analysis 206

Subir Kumar Roy and Jayanta Kumar Saha

Introduction Bashabi Fraser Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay The study of Scottish literature, with its multi-lingual history in Gaelic, Scots and English, and its place in the cultural and political history of modern Scotland, is an astonishingly rich resource for understanding cultural diversity, the underpinnings of political power, and the long trajectory of its historical tradition, especially inflected by its relationship with India in the colonial and postcolonial era. The Scottish literary and political culture has always been suffering from an anxiety of subservience. Scottish cultural and political history studied under the rubric of the United Kingdom shows distinctive contextual specificities embedded in the cultural and political formations and Scotland has remained peripheral in the context of English history. But the Scots have always tried to discover their appropriate space within the United Kingdom. Scottish literature, culture and politics is multi-faceted. Here it would be relevant to look back at the entire Scottish tradition built up by the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow since the mid-18th century, asserting their cultural identity beyond provincial preoccupations. Andrew Sanders once said: The teaching of English began with some ideological intent...The aim of the programme, of the teaching of English Literature was to distinctly shape Scottish intellectuals in an enlightened European mould. Contemporarily Edinburgh was reconstructed as an Athens, and not a London of the north (Sanders 1994, 8). It has been lamented by Scottish Literature critics that Scottish literature and culture, despite its enviable flowering in the 15th century, gradually came to disappear till its reappearance in the 18th century. However, Scottish culture in the post-Chaucerian era seemed to develop a distinctive cultural identity of its own, as is evident in the writings of James Stewart, David Lyndsay, Robert Henryson or William Dunbar. In the 18th century, the Scottish tradition however, comes to be more significantly substantiated through writers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and James Macpherson. While David Hume and Adam Smith concentrated on historical and philosophical writings, Macpherson led to the development of the age of sensibility. In the 19th century, Sir Walter Scott not only brought about a new consciousness of historical romance, but he also

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developed a distinctive sense of Scottish nationalism. Again, R. L. Stevenson in the Victorian period generated a kind of fascination for small town settings and the Scots vernacular, thereby establishing a sense of Scottish place and identity. The Scottish presence in colonial India as administrators, soldiers, businessmen, physicians and engineers was felt at various levels in the Indian socio-economic fabric. But Scots as missionaries and educationists, impacted largely on the Indian cultural formation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This volume is a re-examination of the interface of Scottish and Indian cultural transactions and linkages for over a century and their continuities. What is of prime importance is to recognize the kind of reading/s we are habituated with, especially in terms of what has come to be known widely as English literature. It is curious to see how Scottish literature generally placed under the traditional rubric of English literature is subject to a conscious effacement of Scottish national culture as Scottish Literature has been subsumed under the English literary canon without any indicators to mark its distinctive identity. The study of English Literature in Indian institutions since the implementation of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1835) has resulted in an obfuscation of the reality and recognition of nations within the nation in Britain as Scottish, Welsh and Irish texts were all glossed over as part of a policy of promulgating ‘Englishness’ in the Indian colony. As such, the Indian mind has long been accustomed to a deviative generic confusion which has boxed all Scottish writers (as well as Welsh and Irish) as part of an English literary continuum. So it is time now to re-evaluate the literature and culture of Scotland as a distinctive disciplinary area of study. As part of this project, the Scoto-Indian linkages should emerge as a specific sub-genre examining the literary, cultural, pedagogic and ideological inter­ relations. Research activities in this area have been initiated already. Avril A Powell’s Scottish Orientalists and India (1984) may be regarded as a seminal contribution, though it is [unfortunately] limited to an examination of the activities of the Muir brothers in North-west India. A broader historical and cultural study is available in the significant anthology of critical essays in Scottish Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Continuum of Ideas (2017) which is a re-contextualisation of the inter-relation and coalescing of the impact of Scottish Orientalism on the Bengal Renaissance. There is also the significant publication entitled, Confluence of Minds: The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and Environment (2017) which provides a valuable record and the relationship and exchange between poet Tagore and Geddes in the context of education and environment. These studies show how Scoto-Indian literary and cultural interrelation strides

Introduction

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across boundaries of time and space. Eric Gidal and Michael Gavin, while developing the theme of spatial humanities and its relation to Scottish literary studies, comment: ...both writers and scholars of Scottish literature have long been centrally concerned with questions of place: the texture of Scotland as a nation is inextricable from the topology of its landscapes, the history of its transformations, and the struggles over its representations’ (Gidal and Gavin 2016, 143). Space and boundary therefore address complicated issues related to a modern nation within a nation state which constitutes unitary significations despite multivalent presences. Space is interrelated to multiple forms of transformation and representation, thereby critiquing significant questions of historio- geography, politics, literature and topology as specific spatial forces. As Henri Lefebvre points out, all spaces are political and “social space is a social product” (Lefebvre 1991, 26) or as Foucault has envisioned the ensuing centuries as centuries of geography or “the epoch of space” (Foucault 1986, 22), study of space and boundary increasingly become a complex site of intellectual investment. But space, conjoined with questions of ‘boundary’ as a prevailing normative point of view, further addresses emerging critical issues. How is space produced and how does it posit new problematics of cultural mapping through negotiations of ‘boundary’? How do space and boundary become compatible with the growing insistence on transnationalism and transculturalism? Diasporic presence, influx of immigrants, variables of ethnicities, experiments with new cultural forms inflect on complex re-imaginings of the stability of nation states with their so-called celebrated ideologies of “unum pluribus”. This volume brings together a collection of essays which explore how Scotland and India share their distinctive views on the linkages between divergent spaces and boundaries within the stable mapping of a nation state. Most chapters in this book explore the Scottish-Indian links in a long shared history of literary and cultural exchange which exemplifies the interest this field has for many scholars in both nations. It is this intellectual interest that has led to the establishment of the Indian Association of Scottish Studies (IASS) under the directorship of Debnarayan Bandyopadhyay. The IASS has seen the introduction of Scottish Studies at Bankura University as a popular option on the Master’s Programme of Literature in English, which has subsequently inspired other Universities to incorporate Scottish literary texts on their MA syllabuses and several candidates enrolling on their doctoral programme in Scottish Studies. The result has been a keen reappraisal of Scottish Literature by Indian scholars as evident in Chapters 3 and 8 by Argha Banerjee and Ritushree Banerjee, respectively.

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Moreover, the colonial encounter in the Third Space (Bhabha 2004, 56) has had economic and legal implications, affecting the legal system in both countries, as explored in Chapter 15 by Subir Kumar Roy and Jayanta Kumar Saha, opening up the field for future scholars who wish to move beyond the literary and cultural approaches in Scottish Studies. It is worthwhile to see how discussions on socio-cultural and literary questions related to these two spaces—Scotland and India— may re-configure the nature of their relationships while acknowledging a shared history which has contributed to their transformation(s) in what is, significantly, a long association that forms part of a continuum of socio-cultural exchange as documented in this edition.

References: Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Des Espace Autres”. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring): 22-27. Fraser, Bashabi, Tapati Mukhopadhyay, and Amrit Sen. Eds. 2017. Scottish Orien­ talism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Continuum of Ideas. Santiniketan, Edin­ burgh: Visva Bharati, Luath Press. Fraser, Bashabi, Tapati Mukhopadhyay, and Amrit Sen. Eds. 2017. Confluence of Minds: The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and Environment. Santiniketan, Edinburgh: Visva Bharati, Luath Press. Gidal, Eric and Gavin, Michael. 2016. “Introduction: Spatial Humanities and Scot­ tish Studies.” Studies in Scottish Literature 42, no. 2: 143 – 150. Lees, W. Nassau. 1871. Indian Musalmans: Being Three Letters Reprinted From The “Times” with an Article on the late Prince Consort, and Four Articles on Educa­ tion, Reprinted from the “Calcutta Englishman.” With an Appendix containing Lord Macaulay’s Minute. London, Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. London: Blackwell. Powell, Avril A. 1984. Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire. U.K.: Boydell Press. Sanders, Andrew. 1994. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

‘Webs of Significance’: Rammohun Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore Kathryn Simpson The inter-cultural encounter has often been a monologue, a ‘narcissistic conversation that the West has with itself ’ (Rose 2014, 54). Nineteenth century Bengal was one of the exceptions to this, the subaltern talked back on theirown terms (Fackenheim 1994).Early nineteenth century Bengal was the fulcrum of socio-cultural contact between Indians and the colonial Scottish. The relationship between these two geographically defined groups is interesting in its focus on education as a way to resolve issues from poverty, to political engagement and cultural invigoration. I will show that Raja RammohunRoy (1772 – 1833) and Dwarkanath Tagore (1794 – 1846) promoted the Bengal Renaissance as a site for socio-cultural interaction, one bedded in an intersubjective cross-cultural dialogue with East and West.1Rammohun, who as Fraser notes, ‘spearheaded the public debates that signified a national awakening and a self‐questioning’ and Dwarkanath whose family, the Tagores, ‘bookended the Indian Renaissance, with Prince Dwarkanath Tagore...operating at its initial flowering, and [Rabindranath, his grandson] embodying a culmination of the movement, which exemplifies India’s pluralist history and culture (2015, 161). In this chapter I will explore the socio-cultural environment created by the Bengal Renaissance pioneers, Rammohun and Dwarkanath and their use of the Scottish colonial interloper in its foundation. I do not wish to ventriloquize Bengali history. As a white female postcolonial scholar I am aware that I must situate myself and my scholarship; that I cannot presume to know the site of the inter-cultural encounter from one of the subaltern. I am not Bengali and will never be able to experience the subjective power dichotomy from the side of the colonised. I wish to explore the nuances of a moment in Bengali history, and

1 Dwarkanath has not been served so well in the historical record and although he was the instigator of the Tagore fortune and prolific philanthropist the records pertaining to him are minimal, as such there is not as much information to draw on as there is with Rammohun.

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in doing so, I here acknowledge the work of many Bengali female scholars.2 What I hope to do in this chapter is to look to the Renaissance itself as a site of socio-cultural interaction of which Rammohun and Dwarkanath were involved.I will explore the outcomes of the Renaissance without putting subjective meanings onto the words from the mouths of historical actors or to allocate meaning from unexplained gestures that are two hundred years old. And in doing so, look at what Bhabha calls The anxiety generated within the critical-polemical discourse, enunciated by organic intellectuals as members of an intellectualmoral bloc, it is the emotional or affective tie that accompanies the formation of a counterhegemonic or subaltern solidarity [the Renaissance] from the antagonistic elements—ideologies, identities, interests—that structure any historical conjuncture (2015, 9). Although the Scottish attitude was narrow as it ultimately focussed on using education to encourage the conversion to Christianity by those whose religions were assumed to be ‘savage’, ‘idolatrous’ or ‘heathen’ by their very fact of not being Christianity; Rammohun was able to see that individuals together could engage in a critical polemic which could create an environment conducive to different ways of reading the world; he was able to make ‘confluence possible, and solidarity sustainable’ (Bhabha 2015, 9). Rammohun, with the support of Dwarkanath, was the early figurehead of a cultural movement which sought to redress the colonial experience displacingthe notion that the colonial encounter could not be shaped by those being colonised. In talking about the British empire, there has long been a conflation of English and British as Britain’s first empire was internal; ‘by the early 1800s ‘British’ already signified the unification of the internal colonies with England in the United Kingdom’ (Brantlinger 2009, 18).England was the strongest of the four nations and also the seat of political power; when it came to referring to empire it was as England’s. Scotland was England’s first ‘colony’ as it were and thus the framework within which my research sits is a broader reading of empire which differentiates between Scottish and

2 Scholars such as Begum Rokeya, Bashabi Fraser, Sanjukta Das Gupta, Sharmistha Gooptu, Vina Mazumdar, Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Dipannita Datta.

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English; in which the English as the driving force of imperial expansion were always looking for iterations of their own socio-political networks and the Scots as surgeons and administrators, were the tradespeople of empire. This builds on Philip Constable’s work in which he notes that ‘Scottish cultural influence, forms of political governance, and economic enterprise in empire had an important imperial impact which many academic commentaries on the British Empire have de-emphasised or merged within a wider British imperial perspective’ (2007, 279). The Scots as a people were always ready to travel and seek out economic opportunity in Britain’s fast expanding global dominions. Henry Irving said in a speech to the Pen and Pencil Club in Edinburgh in 1896 that the Scots had a capacity ‘for upsetting the principles of geography by transporting Scotland all over the earth’ (qtd in Mackenzie 1993, 725). And Walter Scott was referring to India when he wrote to Lord Montagu, ‘for truly the Board of Control is the corn chest for Scotland, where we poor gentry must send our youngest sons as we send our black cattle to the South’ (1833, 351). The Scots were going to India to work from the days of Henry Dundas as Lord Advocate in the late eighteenth century. Rev. Sydney Smith said of Dundas, ‘as long as he is in office, the Scotch may beget younger sons with the most perfect impunity. He sends them by loads to the East Indies’ (qtd in Mackenzie 1993, 718). What is surprising is that this relationship would go on in part to be reciprocal: a dialogue. The ‘Council Chamber of Edinburgh yesterday witnessed an event unprecedented in the annals of Great Britain— the presentation of the Freedom of the City to a HINDOO gentleman... the most remarkable man in India of his nation’ (The Scotsman 1842, 3). Dwarkanath was given the freedom of the city of Edinburgh in August 1831 not only due to his important role in the facilitation of international trade, but ‘as a friend of Education’ (‘Presentation of the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh to Dwarkanath Tagore, Esq. of Calcutta.’ 1842). Dwarkanath and Rammohun understood the importance of education and were both inculcated in Scottish educational ideas. Dwarkanath had been educated at Sherbourneschool in Calcutta (1804 -1810) and had had several Scottish teachers including William Adams, J. G. Gordon and James Calder (Fraser 2018). And it had been Rammohun who, having seen the value in a modern ‘more liberal and enlightened system of education’ as well as classical learning, had appealed to the Church of Scotland to send out competent teachers in 1823 (Samaddar 1911, 127; Sen 1946). They saw that education could be used to remediate spaces of imperial power; for

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India to, as Rabindranath Tagore later wrote in a letter to T. L. Vaswani on the 24th of June 1911, ‘assert itself ’ before it was ‘borne away by the tidal wave’ of contact with the West (Tagore 1911). This chapter, whilst explicitly focussing on the Bengali perspective, will show the Renaissance came from the same understanding of freedom as was inherent in Scottish culture. This was an understanding enunciated by a Scot, and founder of the Indian National Congress, Allan Octavian Hume in 1859 when he stated that ‘a free and civilised government must look for its stability and permanence to the enlightenment of the people and their moral and intellectual capacity to appreciate its blessings’ (William Wederburn 1913, 17). The British authorities would eventually fall out with Hume for the very reason of his desire to contribute to Indian education and his disagreement with their policies towards Indian education. The British came to India and in doing so, decided to set up their capital in a flat, waterlogged marshy area surrounded by only a few villages. Therein lies the first somewhat unique aspect of the site of the Bengal Renaissance. Calcutta was an imperial city, the second colonial city of empire fashioned out of the geographical belligerence of colonial endeavour. Chakraborty shows that ‘the city was constructed following the ideology of western materialism and the colonial and Christian missionary reformist movements. Calcutta [...] was at the heart of the colonial “civilizing mission” and the centre of its “modernizing” movements’ (2017, 130). And, as David Kopf notes, by ‘the latter half of the eighteen century, while Calcutta developed as an urban centre, many Bengalis accumulated riches through advantageous associations with the Europeans, profiting by the vacuum created from the deterioration of Mughal authority and the adventurism of European commercial expansion’ (1979, 61). Thus Calcutta was a privileged city which held power, initially financial, yet ultimately political both within and without the British imperial hegemony. Antoinette Burton states that it is dangerous to privilege one contact zone over another, which is ‘part of the seductive legacy of imperialism itself ’ (2000, 655). However, the physical location in which the Bengal Renaissance grew was one of artificial history, a constructed imperial space. What makes the Renaissance even more interesting is the very fact that it was a small elite movement using colonial interlopers in a privileged contact zone, primarily enacted by Hindus, in a small part of India, yet it caused significant and unalterable effects on the Indian nation.Rammohun himself highlights the value of the subject working within the socio-cultural framework of the subjugator; he said

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of Scotland and England’s relationship, ‘that in proportion as a dependent kingdom approximates to her guardian country in manners, in statutes, in religion, and in social and domestic usages, their reciprocal relation flourishes, and their mutual affection increases’ (1901, 30). Rammohun Roy, closely assisted by this ‘affection’, and importantly the financial support and friendship of Dwarkanath Tagore, was at the fulcrum of the Renaissance. The word renaissance itself is a loaded term. In its Western political origin its definition is a movement which ultimately affects the whole society within which it is based. It would be difficult to say that in this instance, as the Bengal Renaissance flourished and then declined leaving no initial discernible nationwide change. In fact Kopf asks if the Bengal ‘[R] enaissance [is] simply a misnomer for the prepoliticized stage of cultural nationalism?’ (1979, viii). I would suggest the Renaissance was politicised and quite astutely, as the indigenous leaders found a way to mould the colonial socio-cultural infrastructure for their own ends. Rammohun and Dwarkanath, possessed the historical sense to comprehend the true significance of the economic & political forces let loose in India by British imperialistic forces. They were aware of the economic exploitation but they understood that it was not expedient to resist the economic revolution in India which would be later beneficial in the transition of India from medievalism to modern. (Samanta 2008, 6) I would also suggest that ‘cultural nationalism’ implies a homogenous cultural outlook, but the Renaissance is striking specifically because it had many different offshoots and cultural paths which emerged from it. A renaissance is a cultural self-fashioning, a reappropriation of a nation’s own beliefs, culture, society and sense of self for its own benefit. In Bengal this Renaissance happened both within and in spite of the British imperial system. Dwarkanath and Rammohun utilised the opportunity that was created in the spaces of the colonial environment, ‘webs of significance’ that were created from their own cultural heritage, which took what they wanted from the colonial interlopers, including a language that could be, and was, used to transcended internal geographical boundaries and societal and caste strictures. In The Interpretation of Cultures Clifford Geertz states that: ‘believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance

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he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore one in search of meaning’ (2000, 5). Max Weber asked: ‘which motives led and continue to lead individual functionaries and members of this “community” to behave in such a way that it comes into being and continues to exist?’ (Weber 1956, 21). What is it about the ‘motives’ or ‘webs of significance’ of the Bengal Renaissance that have endured and what significance is there for our modern understanding of the time? This exploration of the socio-cultural moment that was the Bengal Renaissance is part of the historiographical processes that are constantly being reshaped and readdressed by postcolonial analysis. Such an analysis not only responds to and challenges colonial history, but does not neglect, what Anne McClintock identifies as the issues around the ‘world’s multitudinous cultures’ being marked not by what distinguishes them but by ‘a chronological, prepositional relation to a Eurocentered epoch’ (1995, 11). To return to my earlier point, it is to see dialogue as a ‘decolonising practice leading towards unpredictable outcomes’, which led to an active destabilisation of imperial ontology in colonial India that lends impetus to this current study (Rose 2014, 209). What was the instigation for both Rammohun and Dwarkanath to be at the fulcrum of change? Of Rammohun, P. C. Joshi says that: [He] belonged to a “respectable” family, whose social rise was a relatively recent phenomenon. His family background had been based on the lower rungs of the Nawabi revenue bureaucracy, on land exploitation in collaboration with the East India Company and on the collapse of the political power of the local regional Rarhi lower castes, such as the Sadgopas of Gopabhum or the Bagdis of ChitwaBarda. Rammohun’s respectability was partly gained from his father’s and brother’s participation in the Company’s destruction of the old Mughal economy and its last rural gentry (1975, 140–41). Joshi then goes on to note that to his mind this then ‘explains most of [Rammohun’s] disaffiliation from the Mughal tradition and his attachment to the Permanent Settlement by the British’. Regarding Dwarkanath, Kripalani states that his grandfather’s brother, Anandiram, ‘was reputed to have been the first Bengali to attain proficiency in the foreign [English] language, and in general the Tagore family’s close connection with the Company administration had encouraged its cultivation’ (1981, 41). The

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above quotations evidence that both men were culturally involved with the East India Company and their families’ fortunes were, in both cases, tied into the success of the colonial endeavour. Their role in the colonial endeavour meant that Rammohun and Dwarkanath were culturally hybrid before they had even began to be or do anything which challenged such an environment. Kopf argues that ‘the Bengal experience seems to point to one generalisation: the receptiveness to change on the part of the indigenous [sic] intelligentsia in Calcutta largely depended on their evaluation of the colonialist agent introducing phenomena from abroad (1979, 279). I suggest it is more than that, I see them as taking from both Indian and British culture, and being able to do so within what Bhabha identifies as a ‘third space’, a place within which to challenge traditional thinking and colonial stereotypes. In this instance, between British hegemony and Indian socio-political cultures - an in-between space created by the hybridity of ambiguous cultural mixing and exclusion. The hybridity fostered in a cultural moment of colonial ‘phenomena’ and ‘traditional thinking’ created a third space in which the Western monologue was turned back on itself, manipulated and transformed to become a dialogue in which the colonised could not only speak back to the colonial interloper but find ways, notably through education, to speak across the colonised place. Majumdar argues: If we have to single out the most important contributing factor to the renaissance of Bengal in the 19th century it is the English education and the Western ideas that flowed along with it. Among the other important factors may be mentioned the growth of Bengali prose literature and Bengali journals, social and religious reforms, rise of national consciousness, patriotic feeling and organised efforts to acquire more and more political and administrative rights from the unwilling hands of […] foreign rulers (2003, 20). Majumdar’s niece, the great activist VinaMazumdar sees ‘[e]ducation as a process of ever widening arenas of the mental horizon and social concerns’(Mazumdar 1999, 308). As DipannitaDatta notes, this was something that Dwarkanath’s famous grandson would go on to espouse strongly: Tagore wanted the students to understand the multiple strands of Indian culture so that education would be understood in an

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interrelated way, including the process of interaction comprising diverse elements of colonial encounter including shifting, splitting and rooting of cultures, rather than in an exclusivist and/or a pure sense of the term (2018, 418). These are all facets of the creation of a new cultural understanding which can only exist in a space, a third space, which is neither reliant solely on one or other cultural history. Bhabha says this ‘third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom’ (1990, 211). The histories that constituted early nineteenth century Bengal for Rammohun and Dwarkanath were four-fold, the moribund ancient Hindu history, the recent Mughal empire- recent enough for its socio­ political impact to still be felt, the British East India company - a quasimilitaristic company whose focus had been capital gain forsaking all else, and the Scottish as the colonial administrators with their own understanding of cultural subjugation and the importance of education.3Rammohun and Dwarkanath’s, ‘new structures of authority’ derived from their own family histories. The new authority would be precisely not what had gone before - such as Rammohun’s moving away from his own family’s worship which he saw as idolatrous and antithetical to his own notion of a singular godhead, with ‘new political initiatives’ which were grown in part within and enabled by the establishment of the BrahmoSabha (later to become the BrahmoSamaj) on the 20th of August 1828. The Samaj fostered debate and discussion. Devenedranath, Dwarkanath’s son, stated that 1845 was memorable in the history of the Samaj, for the strenuous efforts put forth by the Brâhmas to defend their religion against the attacks of Christian missionaries. Dr. Duff had published the year before unmerited strictures on the Brâhmas and their religion in his work, India and India Missions. He described the BrâhmaSamaj as a sect of Vedantists who believed in infallibility of the Vedas. This statement led the Brâhmas to a formal consideration

3 For more on this see Simpson, K. 2018 “Understanding the Renaissance in Nineteenth Century Bengal” In Scottish Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance, edited by Bashabi Fraser, Tapati Mukherjee and AmritSen, 88 – 96. Glasgow: Luath Press.

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of their position. [and importantly for my point] It was discovered that, in the Samaj itself, there was wide disagreement as to the degree of authority to be accorded to the sacred books (D. Tagore 1914). Although this disagreement within the Samaj took place after Rammohun’s death, it is fundamental to the ‘third space’ of the Renaissance. New ideas were being explored which the dominant or received wisdom could not comprehend. The missionaryAlexander Duff was attempting to ‘explain’ the Samaj to a Western audience, a process embedded in the power hierarchies of colonial discourse. Aijaz Ahmad expands on this when he states: Description’ has been central, […], in colonial discourse. It was by assembling monstrous machinery of descriptions—of our bodies, our speech-acts, our habitats, our conflicts and desires, our politics, our socialites and sexualities—in fields as various as ethnography, fiction, photography, linguistics, political science— that the colonial discourse was able to classify and ideologically master the colonial subject, enabling itself to transform the descriptively verifiable multiplicity and difference into the ideologically felt hierarchy of value (1987, 6). This form of classification which is intrinsic to colonial dialogue is a way of owning or dominating by naming; the voracious creation of knowledge by supposedly naming and classifying, fenced off[,] or appropriated symbolically, that which it had named for the imperial power. But what was evolving within the Renaissance was ‘inadequately understood through received wisdom’. An example of this incomprehension and yet desire to classify is seen in how society, in India and Britain, viewed Rammohun’s own religiosity. He was seen as having broken away from his own religion and become a Christian, or a Muslim or a different kind of Hindu. To return to Kopf: Rammohun Roy, and his friends had sought a compromise between traditional Hinduism and Western ideas, between old and new. It was evidently an uneasy compromise which resulted in a contradiction between thought and action. This was reflected in the personal life of Rammohun Roy. Thus while theoretically denouncing caste prejudices and rituals, he actually observed them, at least in public (1979, 101).

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However, Rammohun said of himself in 1827 ‘Because I feel already weary of the doctrine of man-god or god-man, frequently inculcated by the Brahmins in pursuance of their corrupt traditions, the same doctrine of mangod though preached by another body of priests, better dressed, provided for and eminently elevated by virtue of conquest cannot effectually tend to excite my interest’ (1901, 63). This contradiction again appears in 1830, when Rammohun gave material support to the ‘young Scottish missionary Duff in his crusade against “godless” education’ (Sen 1946, 6). Although Rammohun tried to establish a singular doctrine of divinity, there was ‘an incommensurability’, his focus may have been to build a bridge towards a doctrinal discourses but more importantly he engendered discussion and debate about the socio-religious culture of early nineteenth century Bengal that was outwith the normative and primary spaces of discourse. He said, ‘[t]his raised such a feeling against me, that I was at last deserted by every person except two or three Scotch friends, to whom, and to the nation to which they belong, I always feel grateful (1901, 498). There is no comforting familiarity to Rammohun’s religiosity, in fact, he was determinedly not what received wisdom kept trying to make him. It is in this discomforting and unfamiliar third space that the Renaissance and its effects are most productively revealed. Bhabha states that The leveraged linkages (overdetermination) that structure symbolic and symptomatic relations across the metonymic chain of ideology, discourse, power, institution, enunciation, are of an ambidextrous character. On the one hand, they produce openings for the establishment of hegemonic formations under the sway of the state; on the other hand, and at the same time, they create marginal or interstitial spaces that empower counterhegemonic radical movements’ (2015, 6). It is in these ‘marginal or interstitial spaces’ that the Renaissance in Bengal grew. The Bengal Renaissance was the harbinger of a new age, its figurehead Rammohun - whether consciously or unconsciously - created a third space of interaction, an environment which allowed for the growth of new ideas at once nationalist, transnational and cosmopolitan - created in spite of, and because of, the unquestionable influence of the British and the growth of an educated Bengali aristocracy and middle class, although the syncretic socio-cultural practices that emerged could not actually be shaped by those who were there at their formation. Thus whilst Dwarkanath was, for a time the most powerful indigenous Bengali within commercial practice,

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he did not and could not decide exactly how future business interactions would occur. Though he did famously state when becoming a Freeman of Edinburgh that he wanted ‘many others of my countrymen to follow my example, and have the effect of uniting still more closely, in the bonds of mutual interest, acquaintanceship, and good feeling, the natives of the most distant parts of her Majesty’s possessions’ (‘Presentation of the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh to Dwarkanath Tagore, Esq. of Calcutta.’ 1842). Likewise, Rammohun could question and challenge the government and society on the theoretical and literal importance of freedom of religion and education but he could not delineate the boundaries of the discussion. These men are examples of something beyond beinguniversalist. The ‘webs of influence’ of the Bengal Renaissance were both tied to and disenfranchised from that which they came out of. Reflecting the dynamic nature of history, this socio-cultural analysis shies away from the definite article and instead, as is inherent to the third space, focuses on the density of the information revealed by an examination of the site, context, and situation of the text. In both Rammohun’s and Dwarkanath’s case the information is revealed in their unique interactions with British, Scottish, Indian and Bengali. They were, as Kripalani notes, ‘two stalwarts [who] stood side by side, not only as friends but as the earliest path-finders of modern India—Rammohun generated an awareness of religious, moral and social reform, and Dwarkanath initiating a new era in native commercial and industrial enterprise’ (1981, 59). There is a thickly descriptive turn to what Kripalani notes. Thick description being that which enables a researcher to set ‘down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found’ (Geertz 2000, 27). Rammohun was a socio­ cultural philosopher, who instigated ‘an awareness of religious, moral and social reform’, the fact that he was Indian yet worked with the British infrastructure and communicated in multiple languages and had the social cache which included him in cultural circles most people did not have access to, meant his ‘particular social actions’ had a resonance which many could not hope to effect; Dwarkanath in ‘initiating a new era in native commercial and industrial enterprise’ engaged with the Scottish and imperial cultures through a position of fiscal power. Rammohun and Dwarkanath believed they had the power and agency to enact discourse. The Renaissance itself was their achievement in socio­

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cultural progression. To put it simply, people started to strongly question what they wanted, who they were, what they believed in and why. It may not have had an impact which reverberated throughout many levels of society, but it engendered ‘discourses of affiliation’ in an ever growing ‘interstitial or marginal space’ within the socio-cultural framework of colonial India. Dwarkanath and Rammohun had an autonomous power over their own lives, in a way very similar to that noted by Stephen Greenblatt in his study of the English renaissance. He suggests that ‘middle-class and aristocratic males [of the English renaissance felt] they possessed [autonomous] shaping power over their lives,’ whilst also being, ‘the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular renaissance’ (1980, 256). An example of how these relations of power are manifested is evident when Dwarkanath and Rammohun’s Indian male agency reveals itself, when it has something to respond or reply to. This is evidenced by Dwarkanath’s letter to Lord Bentinck in 1834 as Kling notes: ‘Soon after he launched his firm on the 1st of August 1834, Dwarkanath wrote to the governor-general, Lord Bentinck, predicting that his house would be an instrument of national regeneration and a model to be emulated by his countrymen’ (1981, 73). The significance of Dwarkanath’s role cannot be under emphasised, notably as he acquired Oriental Life, the insurance company in 1834, which he then reorganised and operated as New Oriental Life (Borscheid and Haueter 2015). In being one of the first non-Europeans at the head of a large insurance company, Dwarkanath was a pathfinder of modern Indian commerce. He led the way for the subsequent late nineteenth-century impetus for an indigenous insurance industry, an industry grounded in ‘British educational institutions and influenced by Western liberal thought’ (Borscheid and Haueter 2015, 225). The socio-cultural weight of Dwarkanath and his companies proved greater than the sum of their parts. The actions of Rammohun and Dwarkanath created a new environment which came out of but was neither tied to their own historical cultures nor to that of the Western interloper. Their self-fashioning from their ambiguous socio-cultural backgrounds and from their very ‘autonomousness’ was a third space of interaction. Karunakaran states: Apart from the content of Rammohun Roy’s demand for social and religious reforms, his activities indicated that he was making innovations in the nature of conducting an agitation. We have already referred to his attempt to translate the sacred books of

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the Hindus into vernacular languages, and thus breaking the monopoly of knowledge which the priests and other leisured people had in this field (1969, 38). Rammohun un-writes the British colonial narrative, and the hierarchical structures of Hinduism to such an extent that his work is pulled out of the imperial discourse and becomes malleable, it moves into the third space. Rabindranath Tagore says Ram Mohun Roy had that comprehensiveness of mind to be able to realize the fundamental unity of spirit in the Hindu, Muhammadan and Christian cultures. Therefore he represented India in the fullness of truth; and this truth is based, not upon rejection, but on perfect comprehension. Ram Mohun Roy could be perfectly natural in his acceptance of the West, only because his education had been perfectly Eastern – he had the full inheritance of the Indian wisdom. He was never a schoolboy of the West, and therefore he had the dignity to be a friend of the West (2007, VII:306). To return to Bhabha, ‘The anxiety of confluence [seen in Rammohun’s socio-religious agitation] is a way of understanding what it means to construct discourses of affiliation across the conflicting jurisdictions [Indian and British] and contested boundaries [colonial and local] that have to be negotiated repeatedly in the designation of communities of difference’ (2015, 9). The power or agency generated by the environment of the third space, in some ways reappropriates the discourse of colonialism. Rammohun and Dwarkanath incarnate ‘the cultural hybridity produced by the colonial condition and appropriated for postcolonial self-fashioning’ (Parry 1994). The cultural authority of power becomes mutable and ambiguous, and both Rammohun and Dwarkanath can be understood as part of the socio-political background to what ultimately became nationalist selffashioning. Rammohun and Dwarkanath were progressive pioneers. The new environment being created was not only one of cultural diversity which reflected both socio-national groups, but it was a culturally distinct environment out of which came sentiments which were neither Indian nor British. A self-determination out of which one might argue came the grain of modern Indian nationalism which would be worked over and worked over until it became the pearl of India’s Independence in 1947. As Geertz

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notes ‘It is a loss of orientation that most directly gives rise to ideological activity, an inability, for lack of usable models, to comprehend the universe of civic rights and responsibilities in which one finds oneself located’ (2000, 219). The cultural and religious traditions that unconsciously regulated each side of the encounter did not override the freedom inherent within the third-space, in fact they consciously negated each other. Although we cannot help but attempt to craft a super-imposition of institutional form, the Bengal Renaissance as a process of amalgamation and hybridity may be seen today as both separate from contemporary events while being a reflection of their times, signifying a critical dialogue between the colonised and the Western interloper. This chapter has explicitly focussed on showing Rammohun and Dwarkanath’s fashioning of socio-cultural freedom being rooted in a ‘third space’. It has not attempted to weigh Rammohun and Dwarkanath’s achievements or judge their impact during their time and in subsequent decades, but instead to show the validity of the ‘space’ they created as a result of their colonial encounter with British hegemonic structures and Scottish educational and business enterprise. 65 years after Dwarkanath was made a Freeman of the City of Edinburgh, The Scotsman wrote ‘the Indian Renaissance … has produced a new national consciousness and political aspirations not long since undreamed of ’ (1907). The Renaissance became a manifest realisation of the power of dialogue between West and East.

References 1. Ahmad, Aijaz. 1987. ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’. Social Text, no. 17: 3–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/466475. 2. Bhabha, Homi K. 2015. ‘“The Beginning of Their Real Enunciation”: Stuart Hall and the Work of Culture’. Critical Inquiry 42: 1–30. 3. Borscheid, Peter, and Niels-ViggoHaueter. 2015. ‘Institutional Transfer: The Beginnings of Insurance in Southeast Asia’. Business History Review 89 (2): 207–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680515000331. 4. Brantlinger, Patrick. 2009. Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 5. Burton, Antoinette. 2000. ‘Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury’s “Black Man” and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy’. Comparative Studies in Soci­ ety and History 42 (3): 632–61. 6. Chakraborty, Sanchayita Paul. 2017. ‘Crossing the Threshold: Women in Colonial City Space’. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 3 (2): 127–65.

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7. Constable, Philip. 2007. ‘Scottish Missionaries, “Protestant Hinduism” and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century India’. The Scottish Historical Review LXXXVI (October): 278–313. 8. Datta, Dipannita. 2018. ‘Connecting Cultures: Rethinking Rabindranath Tagore’s “Ideals of Education”’. Social Identities 24 (3): 412–23. https://doi. org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1387042. 9. Fackenheim, Emil L. 1994. To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holo­ caust Jewish Thought. 1st Midland Book ed. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. 10. Fraser, Bashabi. 2015. ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s Global Vision’. Literature Compass 12 (5): 161–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12231. 11. Fraser, Bashabi. 2018. ‘Scottish Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: An Introduction’ In Scottish Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Continuum of Ideas. Edinburgh: Luath Press. 12. Geertz, Clifford. 2000. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Perseus Books Group. 13. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning; From More to Shakespeare. London: University of Chicago Press. 14. Joshi, V. C. 1975. Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in In­ dia. Delhi: Vikas Pub. House. 15. Karunakaran, Kotta P. 1969. Religion and Political Awakening in India. Meerut: MeenakshiPrakashan. 16. Kling, Blair B. 1981. Partner in Empire : Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India. Repr. Calcutta: Firma KLM Private. 17. Kopf, David. 1979. The BrahmoSamaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indi­ an Mind. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 18. Kripalani, Krishna. 1981. Dwarkanath Tagore. New Delhi: National Book Trust. 19. Mackenzie, John M. 1993. ‘Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and the Em­ pire’. The International History Review 15 (4): 714–39. 20. Majumdar, R. C., and Jadunath Sarkar, eds. 2003. The History of Bengal. Delhi: B.R. Pub. Corp. 21. Mazumdar, Vina. 1999. ‘A Heritage of Heresy within Tradi­ tion’. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 6 (2): 291–309. https://doi. org/10.1177/097152159900600209. 22. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge. 23. Parry, Benita. 1994. ‘Some Provisional Speculations on the Critique of “Re­ sistance” Literature’. In Altered State? Writing and South Africa, 11–24. New South Wales: Dangaroo Press.

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24. ‘Presentation of the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh to Dwarkanath Tagore, Esq. of Calcutta.’ 1842. Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection. JSTOR. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/60228266. 25. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2014. ‘Decolonising the Discourse of Environmen­ tal Knowledge in Settler Societies’. University of Technology Sydney EPress, January. https://doi.org/10.5130/978-0-9872369-1-3.n. 26. Roy, Rammohun. 1901. The English Works of Raja Ram Mohun Roy. Edited by J. C. Ghose. Calcutta: Srikanta Roy. 27. Rutherford, Jonathan, and HomiBhabha. 1990. ‘The Third Space: Inter­ view with HomiBhabha’. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference., edit­ ed by Jonathan Rutherford, 207–21. London: Lawrence and Wishart. 28. Samaddar, R. N. 1911. Raja Ram Mohun Roy. Calcutta, I. A Isaac. Acessed at Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.39764. 29. Samanta, Soumyyajit. 2008. ‘The Bengal Reniassance: A Critique.’ In 20th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies. Manchester. http:// crossasia-repository.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/151/1/Samanta_BengalRenais­ sance.pdf 30. Scott, Sir Walter. 1833. The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott: With a Bi­ ography, and His Last Additions and Illustrations. Conner & Cooke. 31. Sen, Amit. 1946. Notes on the Bengal Renaissance. Bombay: People’s Pub­ lishing House. 32. Tagore, Devendranath. 1914. The Autobiography of MaharshiDevendranath Tagore: Translated from the Original Bengali by Satyendranath Tagore and Indira Devi. Translated by Satyendranath Tagore. London: Macmillan. 33. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2007. The English Writing of Rabindranath Tagore. Vol. VII. Atlantic. 34. The Scotsman (1817-1858); Edinburgh, Scotland. 1842. ‘Dwarkanath Tagore’, 31 August 1842. 35. The Scotsman (1817-1858); Edinburgh Scotland. 1907. ‘United Church of Scotland and United Free Church Missions’. 36. Weber, Max. 1956. ‘The Nature of Social Action in Wirtschaft Und Ge­ sellschaft’. In Max Weber: Selections in Translation, edited by W. E. Runci­ man, translated by E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 37. William Wederburn. 1913. Allan Octavian Hume. http://archive.org/de­ tails/in.ernet.dli.2015.201357.

“When you see millions of the mouth less dead”: Scottish Poetry of the Great War (1914-18)

Argha Kumar Banerjee In his war sonnet “When you see millions of the mouthless dead”, Charles Hamilton Sorley issues a veiled caveat to his readers: “Say not soft things as other men have said” (Sorley 1985, 91). Sorley’s poetic indignation is in sharp contrast to some of his earlier poems, most of which, in tune with the prevalent mood of the early years of the war, tend to portray a romanticized notion of the war, much akin to the war sonnets of Rupert Brooke. Sorley’s covert admonition tends to repudiate all forms of poetic commemoration, as it forbids any form of eulogy for the deceased. First published in Marlborough and Other Poems (1916), this sonnet, as his biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson points out, was found in his kit sent home from France following his death. Yet this lyric marks a departure in more than one way. As Elizabeth Vandiver rightly observes in her essay “Early Poets of the First World War”: The strongly spondaic rhythm and the preference for Anglo-Saxon rather than Latinate words give the poem both its solemnity and its bluntness, effects encapsulated in the final two lines where the heavy thud of monosyllables builds to the culminating and devastating ‘evermore’. The poem’s rejection of sentimentality pivots on the crucial words ‘Yet many a better one has died before’, a direct reference to Iliad 21.106-7. Just before killing the young Trojan Lycaon, who has pled for mercy, Achilles says: ‘So, friend, die also. Why do you lament so about it? / Patroclus also has died, who was far better than you’ (Vandiver 2013, 77). Sorley’s allusion to Achilles reverses the classical romantic grandeur associated with the bloody warfare by focusing on the anonymity and obscurity of a contemporary soldier’s death in the battle field: “Sorley’s quotation of Homer of course brings to mind the famous wrath of Achilles, but the sonnet itself repudiates anger as it repudiates glory or pride”(Vandiver 2013, 78). The conventional means of succor have already been discarded by the poet. No form of consolation can justify the relentless march of the inevitable loss of young lives at the Front. The stark images of Sorley’s later war poetry, portraying the reality of the brutal war, provide

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a sharp poignant contrast to Sorley’s earlier poems like “All the Hills and Vales Along”, “Marlborough”, “Autumn Dawn” among several others. Sorley’s poetic voice is emblematic of the important role played by Scottish poets during the First World War. During the four year tenure of the conflict, Scottish men and women contributed immensely to the war effort. Focusing on the verse composed by some of the male and female writers, this essay tries to capture the wide gamut of Scottish poetic responses to the Great War. Besides combatants, that took an active part in all decisive military engagements on the Western front, the Scots distinguished themselves in allied forms of activities as well. As Yvonne McEwen observes, the cumulative Scottish war effort testified to the conviction that the “Robert Burn’s ideal of a shared humanity was still at Scotland’s heart” (McEwen 2015, 105). During the initial months of the outbreak of the war, like England, Scotland too witnessed an unprecedented response to the recruitment appeals: “According to the Glasgow Herald, in Glasgow alone 30,000 able-bodied young men enlisted during the first ten weeks of the war. In Aberdeen, the evening newspaper carried a quote from Lord Provost, claiming, ‘He was proud of the splendid response to the mobilization call, and all the citizens have the utmost confidence that our Territorial Force will play their part in the present national crisis”’ (McEwen 2015, 3). Many Scottish writers too, quite akin to their British counterpart, enlisted for the Great War with a great deal of initial enthusiasm. As David Goldie and Roderick Watson point out in the introduction to their edited anthology From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914-1945: “Rupert Brooke famously distilled the thrill of enlistment into an image of ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’, characterizing the volunteering soldier as one who leaves behind him ‘the sick hearts that honor could not move’, the ‘half-men’, and even ‘all the little emptiness of love’” (Goldie and Watson 2014, xiii). Scottish poets like Charles Sorley and Ewart Alan Mackintosh who succumbed to the war, were inspired by this initial romantic notion of sacrifice and martyrdom in the conflict. Though Sorley was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, he lived in Cambridge since he was five years old as his father taught philosophy at the university. In contrast to Sorley, Ewart Alan Mackintosh, in spite of his shared ancestry (Scottish father – hailing from Inverness-shire and Ross-shire – and English mother) was extremely proud of his Scottish heritage, moving on to learn to speak in Gaelic and even playing pipes in his leisure. At the outbreak of hostilities, Mackintosh was reading classics at Oxford University. After his initial efforts at enlistment were rejected on

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account of his poor eyesight, his reapplication was successful and he was given a commission as a Second lieutenant in the Fifth Battalion Seaforth Highlanders. Awarded a Military Cross in May 1916, he was killed in action in October 1917 during the Battle of Cambrai, fighting for the Fourth Seaforth Highlanders. Mackintosh’s war poetry is confined to two volumes of verse: A Highland Regiment and Other Poems (1917) and War, The Liberator and Other Poems published posthumously in 1918. “The persona that emerges in his poetry” as David Goldie argues in his essay “Archipelagic Poetry of the First World War”, “is that of a fatalist, drawing on a long tradition of Scottish defeat and lamentation to prepare himself for the sublime trial and inescapable suffering of war”(Goldie 2013, 166). This resignation to fate is evident in the poem “Recruiting”, especially in the lines: “Take your risk of life and death / Underneath the open sky. / Live clean or go out quick--/ Lads you’re wanted. Come and die” (Mackintosh 1918, 17). “The German and the Gael” too echoes similar sentiments, as the unostentatious Gaelic troops are described as being stoic and reconciled to their fate: “But we go darkly out to meet/ The fate we cannot see” (Mackintosh 1918, 18-19). The Scottish volunteers participating in the war had to combine their mental agility with their physical prowess in the combat experience. Mackintosh’s “The Volunteer” wonderfully captures the gradual transformation of the mind of a recruit: “Oh, innocence and lost desire, / I strive to kindle it in vain, /Dead embers of a greying fire. / I cannot melt my heart again” (Mackintosh 1917, 47). The irretrievable impact of the violent war had to be reconciled by the war generation. Mackintosh captures the horrors of the war in poems like “Ghosts of War”, “Death” and “Mines”. In tune with Wilfred Owen’s use of religious imagery, Mackintosh’s “Ghosts of War” re-enacts the ritual of baptism while describing the violence of war: “This is our Earth baptized / With the red wine of War. / Horror and courage hand in hand / Shall brood upon the stricken land/ In silence evermore” (Mackintosh 1918, 39). Unlike Mackintosh, the popular Scottish poet Joseph Lee does not discard the influence of contemporary Edwardian popular verse. His war poetry simplifies language “creating a terseness close to that of Imagism or Kipling’s wartime epigrams” as it is evident in a short poem “The Bullet”: “Every bullet has its billet; / Many bullets more than one: / God! Perhaps I killed a mother / When I killed a mother’s son” (Lee 1916, 21). Hailing from Dundee, Lee enlisted as a private in the 4th Battalion of the Black Watch in 1914, rising to the rank of sergeant and in 1917 received a commission in the 10th King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Lee’s age (being 40 years old) and health (being

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a patient of asthma) did not deter him from volunteering. In tune with his spirit of fortitude, Lee’s “Soldier, soldier” glorifies Britain’s ancient martial glory in the traditional vein: “Rookie, rookie, boots and buttons clean; / Mustachios waxing stronger; military mien. / Rookie, rookie, drilling in the square, / Britain’s ancient glory in your martial air” (Lee 1916, 35). The irrevocability of death is asserted in the conclusion of the poem: “Soldier, soldier, with a smile of grace, / Breaking through the grime and grit on your blood-swept face. / Soldier, soldier, sound will be your sleep, / You will never waken, though you hear her weep” (Lee 1916, 35). Yet his deep sense of anguish at loss of young lives tend to recur as a refrain in several of his poems, the most notable being “The Green Grass” where the single voices of the victims amalgamate into a collective whole at the end: “The dead spake together last night, / And each to the other said, / ‘Why are we dead?” (Lee 1916, 22). Lee’s “The Mother” poignantly visualizes the union of the combatant with his dead mother. Beyond its apparent sentimentality, the poem heartrendingly captures the spirit of the hour. The first stanza creates a trance like beatific scene of comfort: “My mother rose from her grave last night, / And bent above my bed, / And laid a warm kiss on my lips, / A cool hand on my head; / And ‘Come to me and come to me, / My bonny boy’, she said” (Lee 1916, 77). The latter part of the poem conveys the shocking reality of the violent war: “And when they found him at the dawn, / His brow with blood defiled, / And gently laid him in the earth, / They wondered why he smiled” (Lee 1916, 77). Of all the combatant Scottish poets of the Great War, Joseph Lee is perhaps the only one to devote a large number of poems in Work-A-Day Warriors to the civilian and women’s experience at home. The poems “The Haggis” and “The Song of the Sock” laud the objects sent to the Front by the Scottish women at home. The former celebrates the Famous Scottish dish haggis, contrasting the simple delicacy of the Scottish meal with the elaborate ornate French cuisine: “A Haggis; a Haggis, / An honest Scottish Haggis! / Let Frenchmen make a loud to-do / About the length of their menu – / New-fangled fricassee, ragout, / And sic like dishes – / Auld Scotia’s simple brag is / Her ancient Haggis!” (Lee 1917, 65). Given the lyrical felicity of Lee’s verse, some of his poems have been set to music by the Dundee musician J.F. Heyde during the years of the war. According to Goldie, “resignation” and “lamentation” tend to “dominate the wartime Scots dialect poetry produced as part of the Doric revival in north-eastern Scotland” (Goldie 2013, 167). The Anglo-Scottish poet John Buchan published dialect poems to articulate his experience of the war: “Puir Jamie’s killed. A better lad / Ye wadna find to busk a flee / Or burn a pule or

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wield a gad / Frae Berwick to the Clints o’ Dee” (Buchan 1917, 69). Though considered unfit for active military service, Buchan was commissioned as an officer in the Intelligence Corps in 1916, being appointed the Director of the nascent Department of Information the following year. Buchan’s distinctive Scottish response was further explored by other Scottish poets like Violet Jacob, Charles Murray and Hugh MacDiarmid. Charles Murray, who served in the 2nd Boer War, and as Director of Works in the South African Defence Force in the First World War, records the impact the conflict of the war on the ordinary country folk in his verse. In “A Sough o’ War” Murray evokes the rural world to portray the experience of the war: “An’ buirdly men, fae strath an ‘geln, / An’ shephers fae the bucht an’ hill, / Will show them a’, whate’er befa’, /Auld Scotland counts for something still” (Murray 1917, 13). Most of the “Doric wartime writing”, however, as Goldie rightly affirms, “remained stuck in the promotion of Scottish rustic stereotypes of canniness and stoical patriotism” (Goldie 2013, 167). Neil Munro’s “Hey, Jock, are ye glad ye ‘listed?” captures the rustic spirit in the true Scottish light. In the same spirit, in his war lyric “When will the war be by?” Murray asks: ‘“This year, neist year, sometime, never,” / A lanely lass, bringing hame the kye, / Pu’s at a floo’er wi’ a weary sigh, / An’ laich, laich, she is coontin’ ever / “This year, neist year, sometime, never, / When will the war be by?”’ (Murray 1917, 36). Munro reported extensively on the conflict, visiting the Front four times during the war, besides suffering the personal bereavement of losing his son Hugh at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Among the Scottish war poets, William Dixon Cocker, is more reputed today for his journalism with the Daily Record in the post war period. He served in the war with the 9th Highland Light Infantry (the Glasgow Highlanders) and the Royal Scots (from 1915) and was taken as a prisoner in 1917 (being imprisoned at Enger, near Minden) at the start of the Passchendaele offensive. Cocker’s poem “The Sniper” chillingly recreates the killing executed with precision at the Front: “Two hundred yards away he saw his head; / He raised his rifle, took quick aim and shot him. / Two hundred yards away the man dropped dead; / With bright exulting eye he turned and said, / ‘By Jove, I got him!’”(Cocker 1920, 26). Cocker’s “Sonnets in Captivity” captures the wide range of emotions that testify to his deep inner struggle and mental resilience: “Endurance! that’s the one outstanding wonder! / What finely tempered steel we mortals are! / What man endures! What trials he goes under / When tested in the crucible of War, / And all the unknown strength and hardihood / Latent within him is made manifest!”(Cocker 1920, 37). Like Cocker, Roderick Watson Kerr

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too excelled as a journalist in the post war period with dailies like Scotsman and Liverpool Daily Post. Serving as a 2nd Lieutenant in the First World War in the Second Royal Tank Corps, his collection of war poems War Daubs was published in 1919. Through poems like “From the Line”, “A Dead Man”, “Faith”, “Denial”, “June, 1918”, “Home” among several others, Kerr captures poignantly his personal experience of the war. Kerr’s “Home” is an ironic depiction of the soldier’s existence at the Front. The “picturesque disorder” in the poem consists of a “wooden bed”, “mattressed with small heaps of straw”, “shreds of wood” and is aptly described as “a sty of food and tins and drink” (Kerr 1919, 28). The only access to the sky is via a “stair-cased rough­ shod shafts steep and high.” Kerr’s poem “The Corpse” is grotesque in its portrayal of gruesome details at the Front. Reminiscent of Wilfred Owen’s “Futility”, Kerr’s poem evokes the futility of nature’s resuscitative potency in infusing life in a corpse: “It lay on the hill, / A sack on its face, / Collarless, / Stiff and still, / Its two feet bare / And very white; / Its tunic tossed in sight / And not a button there – / Small trace / Of clothes upon its back – / Thank God! It had a sack / Upon its face!” (Kerr 1919, 7). Scottish poetic response to the Great War was by no means restricted to male poets alone. Female poets like May Cannan, Margaret Sackville, Mary Symon, Mary Webster, Naomi Mitchison, Jean Guthrie-Smith and Violet Jacob among several others too articulated their war time experiences in verse. These responses were wide ranging, from fervent advocacy of the war to launching pacifist protests in verse. Among the female poets, Mary Symon was one of the earliest writers to predict the futility of the ongoing conflict in her long poem “The Glen’s Muster-Roll”, which was initially published in the Aberdeen University Review (February 1916): “Not mine but yours to question now! You lift unhappy eyes – / ‘Ah, Maister, tell’s fat a’this means.’ And I, ye thocht sae wise, / Maun answer wi’ the bairn words ye said tae me langsyne: / ‘I dinna ken, I dinna Ken.’ Fa does, oh, Loons o’ Mine?” (Symons 2020, 63). However, the futility of the violent war gathers a more personal touch in the elegies of Naomi Mitchison and Violet Jacob. Naomi Mitchison who worked as a V.A.D. at St Thomas’s Hospital in London mourned the loss of a generation in “Green Boughs”: “My young, dear friends are dead, / All my own generation. / Pity a youthless nation, / Pity the girls unwed, / Whose young lovers are dead” (Mitchison 1926, 59-60). Like her male counterpart Charles Murray and Hugh MacDiarmid, Violet Jacob excelled in Scottish vernacular poetry. A leading exponent of

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the Doric revival, Violet Jacob lost her twenty-one year old lone son Harry in the Battle of Somme (1916). Her verse conveyed the pain, bereavement and anguish, typically articulated in the language of the soil: “But miles on miles from Scottish soil / You sleep, pat war and scaith, / Your country’s freedman, loosed from toil, / In honour and in faith” (Jacob 1918, 9). Like Violet Jacob, Mary Symon too experimented with her verse and empathized with the suffering back home, especially in her poems like “The Soldiers’ Cairn”, “After Neuve Chapelle” and “A Whiff o’ Hame”. Hailing from a small landowning family of Pittyvaich in Dufftown, Mary Symon spent most of her life in Dufftown, lecturing and writing on Banffshire dialects, people and customs. Her lyric “The Soldiers” Cairn’ poignantly captures the loss of young lives: “Lads in your plaidies lyin’ still, / In lands we’ll never see, /This lanely cairn on a hameland hill / Is a’that oor love can dee; / An’ fine an’ braw we’ll mak’ it a’, / But oh, my Bairn, my Bairn, / It’s a cradle’s croon that’ll aye blaw doon / To me fae the Soldiers’ Cairn” (Symons 2020, 61). Symon, along with several other writers, were devastated by the vicious monstrosity and horror of the battle of Neuve Chapelle (10-13th March 1915) in the early days of the prolonged conflict. The war witnessed a huge number of casualties on either side, on most occasions, for little or no territorial gains. Working with the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service, Sister Millicent Bruce Peterkin from Edinburgh, observed “some of the men have the most terrible wounds, poor wretches. They say it is perfectly awful at the front just now. Some of them also say that things are not quite as good as the papers would have us believe” (Peterkin, 1915). The poem “Dark Neuve Chapelle” composed by the combatants participating in the battle, mourns the loss of Scottish soldiers: Oh, lads o’ the tartan, no more ye’ll be turnin’ To the land where your dyin’ eyes looked as ye fell, But there’s mony a woe he’rt in Scotland is mournin’ For the lads that are lyin’ at dark Neuve Chapelle. (Argyll and Sutherland Highlander 1915) The deep elegiac undertone of this poem is echoed in Mary Symon’s “After Neuve Chapelle”: “My bairns’ll never blush for me; my teem sark­ sleeve’ll tell / I did my bit for hame an’ them ae day at Neuve Chapelle” (Symons 2020, 70). Horrors of individual battles find remembrance in verse from several other writers as well. Mary Webster’s “Gallipoli” serves as a perfect instance of such lyrical commemoration of the Dardanelles campaign: “Ghosts man the phantom ships that ply between. / White ships

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with sails of mist and bleaching prows, / Ply through the night, with freight of unkept vows/ And haggard men” (Webster 1922, 31). Beyond personalized poetic responses, Scottish women poets also gained a lot of popularity and critical acclaim through their verse. The most notable instances lay in the poems composed by writers like May Cannan and Margaret Sackville. In this context, May Cannan’s verse deserves special mention; more so, as Cannan’s romantic obsession with the British Empire remained a lifelong preoccupation in her writings. In fact her war poems come alive when read as ideological products or cultural paradigms of the historical conditions specific to her generation. In most of her war poems, cultural and ideological representations aid to imitate, corroborate and disseminate the power structures of political domination and subordination that characterized the British polity during the period of the First World War. In spite of the criticism hurled against Cannan’s war verse, it is interesting to note that her poetic perspective of the war years, earned her the exclusive distinction of being the only female poet of the Great War to be selected by Philip Larkin for inclusion in The Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century Verse (1978). As Claire Tylee points out, “this is remarkable since very few poems of that war by women were republished before Catherine Reilly’s anthology in 1981” (Tylee 1990, 80). Romanticized notion of the British Empire, personal experience of love and war are fused in most of her poems to provide a unique rendering in verse, often poignantly capturing the mood and the spirit of the time. Cannan’s “Lamplight”, written in December 1916, is one of the finest examples of this extraordinary cult. Conventionally referred to as “the year of the ‘big push’’’, 1916 was a year of continuing struggle at Verdun and the Battle of the Somme. Behind the explicit political notion of the empire in the poem, lies dormant the tragic poetic voice, unreconciled to the notion of a fragmented dream of tragic personal destiny and the looming loss of an empire. The notion of the “Empire” in the poem carries both a macrocosmic and a microcosmic significance. Hidden behind the kernel and dream of the expanding political world is the empire of personal dream with its steadfast loyalty and devotion to the militarist/ imperialist ideology of the time: “We planned to shake the world together, you and I / Being young, and very wise;/...My Dear, against your name” (Cannan 1917, 70-71). As Judith Kazantzis argues: “if we don’t remember the archaic glow of belief in the Imperial task, we lose the idealistic moving force behind ‘‘Lamplight’’’ (Kazantzis 1981, xviii).

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The “Lamplight” effectively combines the “archaic glow of belief in the Imperial task” with the personal experience of love. Unlike May Cannan, however, rooted in the traditional forms of poetic discourse, the Scottish poet Lady Margaret Sackville espoused the pacifist cause in verse to protest against the patriarchal ideology in vogue. Lady Margaret Sackville’s pacifist verse not only discards and denounces the notion of war as predominantly a “male institution”, but also fosters female solidarity by advocating feminist internationalism through glorification of motherhood. Behind the Christian pacifist religious agenda, her verse also fashions a critique of female principles for not being able to prevent a violent war. During the years of the war, Sackville was acquainted with both Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, meeting them during their recuperation at the Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh. In fact she presented her compilation of war poems, The Pageant of War (published in 1916), to both of them. Most of the compiled poems were earlier published in The Nation, Everyman, The Sphere, Form and The Times. The collection was appreciated by Wilfred Owen besides receiving a lengthy review of praise in the Times Literary Supplement. In addition, exploring the issue of “permanent peace” in verse, she also explores other war related themes, especially the tribulations of war refugees and the psychological impact of the war on women. The title poem “The Pageant of War” clearly ‘dispels any misconceptions about the glory or gallantry of war’ (Womack 2001, 235). The personified “War” is portrayed as riding “into a town whose roads have been left ‘starkly white’ by the ground ‘bones of children, bones of men’” (Womack 2001, 235). The poem underlines that the described pageant is one of death and destruction, and the message of carnage ironically comes during the season of hope and splendour in nature. The “shimmer of pure gold” that imparts a touch of heavenly bliss to human life on earth is threatened by this ominous march of death and annihilation: “It was a day/ In early Spring; the cold/ Gaunt houses stood enhazed/In a shimmer of pure gold, /...Such soft and kindly weather/Was a magic link a thread/By which were earth and heaven wed/In holy bonds together” (Sackville 1916, 9-10). The following description of the pageant makes use of the onomatopoeic effect concentrating on the gradual approach of a “million and a million feet”. The heralding sound of “trumpets, bugles” create a martial atmosphere of cataclysmic grandeur, as journeying “magnificently down the white road”, the resplendent pageant ostensibly chants the slogan of the “war”, symbolic

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of the impending doom. The march of personified “War” in the pageant has been depicted as being synonymous with that of “Death”. The atmosphere evoked by the poet is one of apprehension and horror, as the pale face of “death” threatens to “shrink’ anyone “in loathing and fear”: “He was like Death sitting astride/A pale and neighing horse, /Only he swayed from side to side/...That obscene countenance too near, /The heart of every human being/Should shrink in loathing and in fear, /And turn upon this thing and slay it there” (Sackville 1916, 12). The vision of death as conjured by Sackville in the title poem is strikingly akin to that of William Orpen’s painting Thiepval (1917) depicting the devastation of the Battle of Somme Thiepval in 1916. Orpen’s painting portrays a bright day, a background similar to that in Sackville’s poem, with sparse vegetation emerging from the stark chalk white backdrop of anonymous skeletons. The white chalk ground and skeletons of Orpen’s oil on canvas is reminiscent of Sackville’s “white’ vision of ‘dust and bones’”. Both creations of art freeze human life at a historic moment of utter destruction and chaos, imparting a surrealistic dimension to the horrors of the war: “Unless they should rise up, these bones! /Meanwhile/ They are silent let them so remain, / These very humble folk, these quiet slain, /And let the living smile/Until they too shall suffer the same pain. / Whilst the long pageant stretches mile on mile/As though these innocents had died in vain” (Sackville 1916, 20-21). Critics have also interpreted Sackville’s war pageant, in light of the medieval tradition of the Morality plays. The pride embodied by the pageant of war carries with it the inevitable message of death and destruction. The seven deadly sins: Pride, Wrath, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Avarice and Lust have all been symbolised through various images in the poem conveying the message of an impending catastrophe. Sackville continues her earnest plea for peace in several of her other poems. Expanding on her pacifist message, in “Reconciliation”, Sackville relates with the suffering of the larger womankind. The poem preaches love, peace and humanism, by bringing together mourning women of the warring nations, “each asking pardon from the other one/ For her dead son” (Sackville 1916, 50). The lyric envisages a post war world of larger compassion and universal brotherhood. Advocating the cause of peace and larger sisterhood among women of the warring nations, Sackville goes on to criticise women for not being more politically active in preventing the violent war. Her startling attack in “Nostra Culpa” is somewhat scathing, relentless and unprecedented. Women’s failure to concretize “silent

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wisdom” is the primary focus of the poem. The criticism of female passivity or spiritual “slumber” is an ironic one: “That silent wisdom which was ours we kept/ Deep-buried, thousands perished; still we slept”. The lyric gives a clarion wake up call to all women to act more responsibly to ameliorate the larger suffering of the world, instead of being a ‘mute, passive’ acquiescent to the patriarchal ‘scheme of things’(Khan 1988, 86): “Shadows and echoes, harlots! We betrayed/Our sons; because men laughed we were afraid. /That silent wisdom which was ours we kept/Deep-buried; thousands perished; still we slept. /Children were slaughtered, women raped, the weak/Down trodden. Very quiet was our sleep” (Sackville 1916, 37-38). The political inactivity or “slumber” of women of the war generation, according to Sackville, is synonymous with espousing the role of being “murderers of mankind”. According to her, mothers are guilty and they do not have any right to grieve the loss of their sons, as by opting for “an easier way” of “slumber”, they themselves sowed and nurtured the seeds of violence and death: “Oh! Sisters in our choice were we not wise? /...This is the flesh we might have saved – our hands/ Our hands prepared these blood -drenched/ dreadful lands. /What shall we plead? That we were deaf and blind? / We mothers and we murderers of mankind” (Sackville 1916, 38-39). While conveying her pacifist message, Sackville “self-consciously protests the idealization of a male soldier’s heroism and valour”, mostly by shifting her poetic focus to the impact of the war on women’s lives (Buck 2005, 92). A poem like “Refugees” narrates a war-devastated situation describing the plight of a mother. Uninhabited in pressing circumstances of hunger and the cold of the night, she has no other option but to leave one of her daughters behind before embarking on her escape journey. The traditional symbolism associated with the outbreak of dawn is subverted in the poem, as the poet associates images of death, stolidity and impassivity with it: “When day broke quiet as a stone/ My sister lay but we trudged on. /Soon it was mother and I alone, /For there was nothing to be done! /Since some must die and some must live/‘Or trespasses, Lord, as we forgive!’’’(Sackville 1916, 35). Pacifism, as the voices of the dead combatants in Sackville’s verse articulate, is a sacred legacy, repeatedly trodden upon at the altar of selfish motives and evil political designs of human beings. While reviewing her compilation, the Times Literary Supplement best summed up the message of The Pageant of War: “The bitterest recrimination in this book is not against the Prussian, but against those who deny the possibility of a permanent peace, those who of old ‘poisoned Socrates’ and crucified Christ” (1916, 233).

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Unlike other poetic responses to the Great War, Scottish war verse resonates with a rich linguistic diversity with poems written in English, Gaelic, Doric and Lallans Scots dialects. The choice of a particular poetic medium in turn indicates a self-conscious decision about identity. As Billy Mills observes in the recent write up “Scottish war poetry fights for both sides in the independence battle”, inherent in the Scottish First World poetry is the “primary tension”, “between the poets’ sense of their Scottishness as a distinct identity and their duty to defend a greater Britain” (Mills 2014). It is this divide that perhaps contrasts poets like May Cannan, Charles Sorley, Margaret Sackville on the one hand with the strong advocates of the vernacular like John Buchan, Violet Jacob, Charles Murray, J.B. Salmond and Mary Symon on the other. Scottish poetry of the First World War, be it professional or amateur, hailing from the home or the Front, irrespective of gender, articulated the language of anguish, pain, protest and loss. Charles Sorley who died in the Battle of Loos in 1915 had anticipated the price that had to be paid before peace could be given a chance in his short lyric “To Germany”: When it is peace, then we may view again With new-won eyes each other’s truer form And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain, When it is peace. But until peace, the storm The darkness and the thunder and the rain (Sorley 1985, 70). A close perusal of the themes of Scottish war verse echoes the same pattern and range of thought of the British counterpart. Like the British war poets, the Scottish poets too no longer related to the conflict in terms of gallantry, heroism, sacrifice and jingoism as the war continue to drag on. The initial euphoria gradually irretrievably gave away to loss, agony, horror and a deep sense of futility. The lengthy fatality lists published in the national and local dailies confirmed the dreadful veracity of the prolonged violent technological war. A deep sense of lassitude and cynicism pervaded the home front in reaction to the protracted tenure of the conflict and the ever multiplying Scottish casualty lists.

References 1. Argyll and Sutherland Highlander. 1915. “Dark Neuve Chapelle.” The Alloa Journal, May 8, 1915. “Scotland’s War”. https://www.scotlandswar.ed.ac. uk/Clackmannan/Communication/Dark-Neuve-Chapelle.

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2. Buchan, John. 1917. Poems, Scots and English. London and Edinburgh: TC & EC Jack Ltd. 3. Buck, Claire. 2005. “British Women’s Writing of the Great War.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, edited by Vincent Sherry, 85-112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 4. Cannan, May Wedderburn. 1917.In War Time: Poems. Oxford: B.H. Blackwell. 5. Cocker, W.D. 1920. The Dreamer and Other Poems. London and Glasgow: Gowans & Gray. 6. Goldie, David. 2013. “Archipelagic Poetry of the First World War.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, edited by San­ tanu Das, 159-172. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 7. Goldie, David and Watson, Roderick ed. 2014. From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914-1945. Glasgow: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. 8. Jacob, Violet. 1918. More Songs of Angus, and Others. London: George Newnes; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 9. Kazantzis, Judith. 1981. “Preface.” In Scars upon my Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War, edited by Catherine Reilly, xv – xxiv. London: Virago Press. 10. Kerr, Watson Roderick. 1919. War Daubs: Poems. London and New York: John Lane. 11. Khan, Nosheen. 1988.Women’s Poetry of the First World War. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 12. Lee, Joseph. 1916.Ballads of Battle. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 13. 1917. Work-A-Day Warriors. London: John Murray Albemarle Street W. 14. McEwen, Yvonne (Commentaries), Strachan, Hew (Foreword), MacGre­ gor, Lizzie, ed. 2015.Beneath Troubled Skies: Poems of Scotland at War, 1914-1918. Edinburgh: The Scottish Poetry Library and Polygon. 15. Mackintosh, E.A. 1918.War, the Liberator and other Pieces. London and New York: John Lane. 16. Mackintosh, E. A. 1917. A Highland Regiment. London and New York: John Lane. 17. Mills, Billy. “Scottish war poetry fights for both sides in the independence battle.” The Guardian, May 13, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/books/ booksblog/2014/may/13/scottih-war-poetry-independence-battle. 18. Mitchison, Naomi. 1926. The Laburnum Branch: Poems. London: J Cape. 19. Murray, Charles. 1917. A Sough O’ War. London: Constable and Co Ltd. 20. Peterkin, M.B. War Diary 1915, Imperial War Museum, Catalogue No 7058

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21. Sackville, Lady Margaret. 1916.The Pageant of War .London: Simpkin Mar­ shall, Hamilton, Kent & Co Ltd. 22. Sorley, Charles Hamilton. 1985.The Collected Poems edited by Jean Moorcroft Wilson. London: Cecil Woolf. 23. Symon, Mary. 2020. Collected Poems edited by Fred Freeman and Ian Spring. Perth: Rymour Books / Hog’s Back. 24. The Times Literary Supplement, May 18, 1916, p. 233. 25. Tylee, C.M. 1990.The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914-64. London: Mac­ millan. 26. Vandiver, Elizabeth. 2013. “Early Poets of the First World War.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World Waredited by Santanu Das, 69 - 80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 27. Webster, Mary Morison. 1922. Tomorrow: A Book of Poems. London: The Poetry Bookshop. 28. Whitney Womack. 2001. “Lady Margaret Sackville: 1881 -1963.” In Dictio­ nary of Literary Biography: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century British Women Poets, edited by William B Thesing, vol. 240. London, Bos­ ton, San Francisco, Detroit: The Gale Group & A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book.

A Cakewalk between Asansol and Dundee: Material

Manifestations of A Colonial Thirdspace in a Bengali

Industrial Town

Santanu Banerjee, Suvojit Chatterjee Edward Hollis and Hemonta Mondal

Figure 1: the Minar Bakery c. Ed Hollis

This chapter should be a “cake walk” – at least, it began with one. On a Christmas Eve stroll in 2015, a banner was found hanging in front of the Minar Bakery in the Bastin Bazaar of Asansol, West Bengal.

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Neatly printed on it were the words: Dundee for Sale – Rs 150 a pound. They referred to a cake, whose recipe originated thousands of miles away, in a city on the East Coast of Scotland. The authors of this essay set themselves to finding out about this exotic occidental delicacy; and here, the ‘Asansol Dundee’ will be used to frame ways of understanding relationships between Bengal and Scotland, the distinctive spatial and cultural ecology produced by the processes of colonial/ industrial urbanisation, the architecture of particular buildings, and, indeed, the baking of cakes. These are seen throughout this chapter as various dimensions of the one and the same post-colonial experience which strongly relates to both the Scottish and the Bengali cultures. Firstly, to structure the oveall argument of this chapter. It has been noticed that the renowned postcolonial thinker Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) presents an apparent contradiction. ‘The essence of Orientalism’ he writes, ‘is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority...’ (Said 1996, 42) and, indeed, the story of the Asansol Dundee cake, of its postcolonial persistence, and of the town in which it is baked, could be written as one of Western culinary hegemony over the orient. However, Said continues, “Cultures are too mixed, their contents and histories are too interdependent and hybrid to subject them to surgical operations that isolate large-scale opposition, basically ideological, such as East and West’ (Said 1996, 42) In this chapter, we will build on this second observation, to explore how not just a cake, but the town that produces it, are the result of more nuanced relations. We also invoke Said’s challenge in Culture and Imperialism (1993) to an occidental (and indeed, a binary East-and-West) gaze to question the ways in which Bengali and Scottish people were both agents and objects of the colonial process, and produced in Asansol something – in the words of Edward Soja, a ‘Thirdspace’ (Soja 1996)- that belonged to both and neither of them at the same time. Finally, the chapter will turn that imperial gaze backwards, in reflection, to Scotland itself, an entity quite distinct from ‘Britain’ both then and now, to consider how, through the stories of the people who built Asansol and cooked its cakes, Scotland (and indeed Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’) might itself be understood as both colony and coloniser at the same time – a Thirdspace of a different sort.

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This paper has been written by the Asansol Heritage Research Group, an informal grouping of university academics and teachers, who have, since their encounter with the Dundee cake of the Bastin Bazaar, been reading the artefacts, structures and spaces of their town as cultural texts, bundles of histories, memories and stories, created and narrated over long periods of time. Instead of looking at them separately, as objects occupying undifferentiated space the AHRG have, following Henri Lefebvre (1974), been reading them together as constituting an appropriated space, both produced by and for colonial/industrial (and as we shall see, more complex) processes, and a medium of and for representation, as we often do while studying chapters of a long narrative. Gone are the colonial times, and over the last seven decades the citizens of Asansol have quite successfully occupied those spaces and made them part and parcel of our own heritage. But as we make use of that heritage; it still talks to us and tells loudly of the time past, passing, or to come. We know that this tale is bound to be unfinished, since our relation with those buildings is not ended. Hence, we go on exploring layers of signification in an unfinished biography of colonial Asansol. Preservation has been an important issue for us; but we do not propose museums to be made out of these living structures. We hope to protect them at the same time as providing the necessary support for them to live a much longer life, without officializing and restricting their current use. We understand that we can contribute to this protection as follows: a. By learning and sharing more about the complexities of colonial urbanisation. We have started a public Facebook group named “Asansol Heritage” that we regularly update with relevant information. The Asansol Municipal Corporation we also enthused to begin a special tourist-bus service twice-a-week so that the interested local inhabitants and tourists alike could be given the scope of knowing their city. b. By collecting oral and written narratives on the process of urbanisation and built spaces, especially those which tell on how those built spaces have been utilised by both colonisers and colonised. We have already involved postgraduate students of Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol to prepare their semester-end term papers on highly interesting narratives. These include the history and heritage related to the shrine of Ghaghar Buri - a tribal deity appropriated by the Hindu high

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culture; the establishment of missionary schools at Asansol during colonial times and introduction of English language and literature in their curriculum; and the role of Durand Institute as an important heritage landmark in both colonial and postcolonial Asansol. We also got the chance to focus on the bakers of Asansol in connection with Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poet of Bangladesh who was born at Churulia, a village only fourteen kilometres away from the city and who worked during his early career at a famous baker’s shop in the bazaar which people today have almost forgotten.

Figure 2: The Asansol Heritage Research Group on site at Narankoori

January 2020

Image by Ed Hollis

Firstly, then, to our situation of enquiry. Interviewing the baker of the Asansol Dundee Cake, it became clear to us that their family knowledge of baking came from their own traditions and the households of colonial railway officers. The Europeans of Asansol used to reside in the Officer’s Colony of the East Indian Railways which was at a stone’s throw from this bakers’ shop. It was, indeed, in the Bastin Bazaar, which developed later than the original Pucca, or Munshi Bazaars. Close to the Church and the town square, it catered the need of the customers who were residing in those European settlements. Perhaps the first Dundee cake that was commercially baked by a native in Asansol was meant for one of those customers.

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Figure 3: The Railway Station c. Ed Hollis

From the Bastin Bazaar and the Cake Shop we began walking in the erstwhile ‘European’ officer’s colony of the East Indian Railways in which, we supposed, the cake was baked to be consumed. We walked further on roads linked with European (and also Scottish) surnames – Young Road, Hutton Road, Leighton Street, Drysdale Street, Strachey Road, Yule Road. The Asansol town we explored seemed to have been planned with the logic, the sense of uniformity, the discipline and the might of the Raj. By the late seventeenth century, globalising theories and patterns of urbanism had emerged, consolidated around the so-called ‘Grand Modell’ of town planning that established characteristic features of British colonial settlement throughout the world. Alongside a policy of deliberate urbanization, the ‘modell’ included streets widely laid out in geometric, usually grid-iron form; land rights allocated in  standardized rectangular plots; and besides space reserved for public purposes, such as public squares (Home and King 2016, 57-59). Our walks through Asansol led us to the buildings of ‘civil lines’ which housed the European civilian ‘managers’ of colonized society; for example the judge, district officer, missionary, civil surgeon, schoolmaster, and the engineer. This civil station was located at a distance from and upwind of the native settlements, theories of defence, public health and also white superiority being used to justify the sequestration. The basis of all town planning practice in both the cantonment and civil station was the ostensible and often stated aim of always maintaining public health, underpinned for decades by the underlying (and erroneous) belief that disease, especially malaria, was caused by ‘bad air’ (miasma), and the environmental conditions causing it. This belief ideally determined

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location, site, and layout of settlements and buildings in relation to the prevailing winds and the indigenous settlement, seen as the source of disease. This also determined the low density of buildings, and the generous space allocation between them (Home & King 2016, 74). In addition, the colonial buildings were often situated on higher ground, as a sign of colonial status and power. This separation between coloniser and colonised is evidenced not just by the form of the town plan itself but also by the form and location of key individual buildings in the town of Asansol, a couple of which we examine in more detail below. For instance, the ‘European Institute’ and the ‘Native Institute’ – both social clubs for railway workers - were constructed far away from one another, facing in opposite directions, and using very different styles of Victorian architecture. The European Institute was built in the middle of the railway officer’s colony as a neo-gothic basilica, plastered both outside and in, ornamented with aisles of pointed arches, and an apse at both ends. A bell tower was added in the 1920’s along with a memorial to the fallen of the first World War – almost exclusively British, although a handful of ‘native’ soldiers were also named (though many more must well have died). It is surrounded by extensive grounds that once provided a tennis court, a swimming pool, a billiard room, and a bar. By contrast the ‘native institute’, although it had to cater for a much larger population (and although it is similar in plan) is much smaller, constructed out of unplastered brick (now painted). Doors and windows eschew the grandeur of gothic arches for the more functional flattened lintels of Victorian railway engineering. The building sits facing the native town, right on the Grand Trunk Road (by the current bus station) with very little open space around it. The difference between the two buildings has played out even in the post-colonial period. Both buildings, but particularly the European institute, have undergone agonies of re-identification after the Europeans departed: it was renamed three times: first as the Durand Institute after a (European) railway engineer, second as the Vivekananda Institute after the religious/nationalist thinker of the late nineteenth century, and thirdly as the Vivekananda-Durand Institute. It has recently been restored by

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the Eastern Railway as a setting for great occasions. The Native institute, though renamed as Subhas Institute and recently renovated, is used partly for indoor badminton court and partly as a warehouse, confirming, even a century after its construction, its more lowly status.

Figure 4: The DurandInstitute, Asansol d. Ed Hollis

Figure 5: the ‘Native’ Institute, Asansol

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Subhash_ Institute%2C_Asansol.jpg These three interwoven stories:, one about a cake, one about town planning, and one about two individual buildings support one reading of Asansol – as the product of a process of external colonisation: of the imposition of one set of cultural and economic norms over another. The sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod wrote:

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The major metropolis in almost every newly-industrializing country is not a single unified city but, in fact, two quite different cities . . . physically juxtaposed but architecturally and socially distinct. . . . These dual cities have usually been a legacy from the colonial past. (Home and King 2016, 52) And this view is supported by histories of the production of the space of Asansol during the nineteenth century. Much of what we know about historic Asansol, dates from 1910, when J.C.K. Peterson, a civil servant of the Raj wrote about it in the Burdwan volume of the Bengal District Gazetteers. Peterson depicted, with a wonderful economy of words, its transformation from a ‘wilderness’ into a modernised, industrialised and colonized space: …A hundred years ago the whole of this tract was a wilderness of forest and jungle, dotted at long intervals with tiny clearings and settlements. For centuries it had been a sort of debatable land between the Jharkhand, or the great western forest, inhabited by the aboriginal tribes of the Hindus classed indiscriminately as Chuars, and the settled country to the east: and even at the end of the eighteenth century it was the haunt and refuge of bands of broken and outlawed men who, taking advantage of the unsettled state of the land, ravaged and plundered the country-side. The tract contained the famous Raniganj coal-field. It is now one of the busiest centres of industry in the Indian continent and its coal and iron fields are filled with a throng of busy and prosperous miners and artisans. (Peterson 1910, 183) Interestingly, it was a Scotsman – George Turnbull, Chief Engineer of the East Indian Railway Company (following another important Scot – Sir Rowland Macdonald Stephenson) – who played an instrumental role by escaping his own family fate as a bleacher and dyer by the banks of the River Tay, to develop railways in this part of India in the 1850s and 1860s. One reason for the colonial government’s efforts to link Kolkata to Delhi through the shortest possible railway route was to access the coal reserves of the Raniganj area so as to fuel industrial development. The other was to avoid any post-1857 agitations. These railways had to pass through Asansol, and so the colonial town began to emerge in between those rail tracks and the Grand Trunk Road. It took shape in well-planned streets and lanes; law courts and railway station; hospital and schools; hotel and recreational centres, a Freemasons’ lodge, offices, various big and small bungalows, villas and quarters;

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graveyards, churches, presbytery and vicars’ residences; clubs, post office, jails, and buildings of the civil lines and also the police lines. Though a simplified version of Gothic-Revivalist, Company Classical and other nativised-European styles such built spaces seem fabulous even today. This town and these railways were built in India to serve British-owned industrial growth, and also to strengthen colonial control in the post-1857 years, not remote from the time of Dadabhai Naoroji. Naoroji did not find any fault with the so-called cultural supremacy of the British. The British rule was to Naoroji “a blessing to India and a glory to England, a result worthy of the foremost and most humane nation on the face of the earth.” (Masani 1960, 74-85); but his analysis of money flowing out of India to Britain actually spoke against those policies of the rulers that must be considered as notoriously un-British. And so colonial Asansol may be understood in classically Lefebvrian terms as a space produced by, and for colonial capitalism. As he writes (of his own, later time): Capitalism and neo-capitalism have produced an abstract space that is a reflection of the world of business on both a national and international level, as well as the power of money and the politique of the state. This abstract space depends on vast networks of banks, businesses, and great centres of production. There also is the spatial intervention of highways, airports, and information networks. (Lefrebvre 2009, 187) But this view is itself something of a colonial one, even if it declares itself inimical to the operations and divisions produced by colonial power. In Culture and Imperialism (Said 1993) Edward Said writes of the novelist Joseph Conrad, that all he can write is a world totally dominated by the Atlantic west, in which very opposi­ tion to the West only confirms the West’s wicked power. What Conrad cannot see is an alternative to this cruel tautology. He could neither understand that India, Africa and South America also had lives and cultures with integrities not totally controlled by the gringo imperial­ ists and reformers this world, not allow himself to believe that imperi­ alist movements were not all corrupt and in the pay of puppet masters in London or Washington….these works…argue that the spruce if the worlds significant action and life up in the west, whose representa­ tive seem at liberty to visit their fantasies and philanthropies upon a mind-deadened third world. (Said 1993, XIX- XXI)

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Paul Carter has argued how the spatial formations through which the culture of the colonialists declares its presence and ‘space is transformed symbolically into a place... a space with a history’ (Home and King 2016, 68). But the ‘native’ culture it overlays can never remain unmixed: ‘space’ and ‘history’ cannot be properly read without paying heed to the active roles of the colonized as well as the coloniser And so a more attentive eye can observe how Asansol is not just as space of production or extraction – to invoke Lefebvre’s triad - a physical space and a representation of one (in geological maps and property boundaries), but a lived one, too, in which all sorts of people – not only rapacious extractive colonists, and innocent passive ‘natives’ live and, importantly, eat. Indeed, a closer look reveals how ‘native’ interests played a key role in negotiating the form and location of the colonial settlements, buildings and cuisine of Asansol. For example, the mines at Narankuri in the east of the district were the possession of a joint coloniser/colonised concern: Carr Tagore and Co. the colonial stereotype undermined by the fact that the operative on the ground was British: a certain Charles Taylor, while the ‘boss’ was native: the Prince (as the British, but not the Indians called him then) Dwarkanath Tagore, one of the first natives of India to visit Scotland, and to receive, there, the freedom of its capital city in 1842. In an ironic twist, this entrepreneurial, enthusiastic supporter of Empire was the grandfather of India’s national poet Rabindranath Tagore. Similarly, the land upon which the railway was built was granted to the East Indian Railway company by the Rajahs of Panchakot – the ‘native’ rulers. Like their zamindari neighbours, the Pandits of Searsole, who also applied for an extension of the railway through their land, they stood to benefit from an increase in coal traffic. Like them, they both treated with the colonial railway company and (according to their descendants, and India House records)1 secretly funnelled funds to the rebels of the 1857 uprising. These negotiations bore fruit in the form of the town: divided between a ‘native’ town to the south of the Grand Trunk Road, and ‘colonies’ to the east, north (the railway), and west. Of particular interest here is the new town immediately to the west of the native centre – divided from it by the Scottish-named Hutton Road. This district is composed largely of churches, schools and hospitals run by

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organisations which had, in themselves hybrid roots and motives. Loreto School for girls, founded in 1877, and St Patricks School for boys, founded in 1891, were both established for the education of children who would not, in Victorian Britain, have been regarded as ‘really’ British. Many of them were, in fact, Anglo-Indian (the result of mixed marriages). The religion under which education was offered was Roman Catholicism – still regarded with suspicion in Britain at this time (and especially in Scotland). Additionally, the nuns and the Christian brothers who established and ran these organisations were Irish. They were often driven into relative security of holy orders by chronic famine – the result (like the earlier Bengal famines) of imperial policy as much as natural catastrophe. They were subjects from the first colony of the British Empire, and the first to achieve, through rebellion, its own independence in 1917. The effects of their work are profound – rare is it, at any educated gathering in Bengal, to meet someone who has not been educated at Loreto or St Pat’s. This hybridity also made its way into the architecture of the town, subverting the binary divisions of its ‘Grand Modell’. For example, white-skinned officers and engineers (some names such as Burn and Co. seem to be of Scottish origin) provided architectural and engineering advice to the native well-to­ dos. Victorian stylistic influence may this be discerned in palatial buildings including Kedar Nath Mukherjee’s residence at M.L. Raha Lane, Raibhahadur J. N. Roy’s house at N. S. Road, Sasthi Narayan Gorai’s mansion at S. B.Gorai road, Dr.Sarat Mitra’s building at Hutton Road; and even in temple-architecture (for example the Graam Devi temple at G.T. Road- Samiran Roy Road junction, or the Boro Durga Mandir at Asansol Village.) The JyotiVilas Palace of the Rajas of Panchakot (the ancient dynasty that originally ruled over the land) at Kashipur now in the neighbouring district of Purulia was, in 1917, ordered, lock stock and barrel from the Kolkata industrial suppliers Martin Burn and Company, whose very name denotes the Scottish origins of its founder. All of its chandeliers were ordered from Ossler’s in Birmingham, and the guns for the rajah’s shoot from Purdey’s in London. Burn and Co. was, in fact run by an entrepreneurial Mukherjee dynasty from Kolkata, who built themselves a neoclassical mansion in Kulti, at the western end of the district. Conversely, there could be ample evidence of native contractors (P. N. Roy, Kedarnath Mukherjee, Ramchandra Banerjee etc.) masons, and labourers working for the East Indian Railway Company in setting up the Asansol town.

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Figure 6: Bengali Italian Baroque Dr.Sarat Mitra’s House, Hutton Road, Asansol c. Ed Hollis The evidence for this co-dependence may even be found in the structure of individual buildings. The Nilkantheswar Jiu temple within the heart of the native town is dedicated to Shiva, and built of cast iron rail components. Indeed, the original structure was built by the railway in compensation for others that had to be demolished since they lay along the route of the line.

And this process of hybridisation contributes to the story of the Asansol Dundee Cake itself. Perhaps Naoroji was right as far the big native entrepreneurs suffering in the monopoly practiced by British colonialism went; but the bakers at Asansol tell of the contrary. They were small businessmen, and their trade was caused at local level only when the railway station and town were established at Asansol. The Muslim family who manage the Minar Bakery Shop originally came from a remote village of the neighbouring state in order to work as labourers in the East Indian Railway Company. They believe that someone of their own religion, better-off and more established in Asansol than they were, provided them with the early help to start their business. Hindu, Sikh, or even Christian bakers are still rare in Asansol. The Muslims, however, were in an advantageous position to enter into the European kitchens as khansamas in Asansol. They had more tolerant views of European food habit than their fellow Hindus. They learnt the European recipes there and in due course adopted them. In this business particularly the Muslims prevailed due to the reason that they successfully turned

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their craft of cooking into a small-scale industry for processed foods at a significant juncture of Indian history. As suggested earlier, Naoroji was perhaps unaware of the ways in which a colonial institution like the railways, despite its imperial logic, changed ordinary people’s lives. The landless and impoverished, transported from far-off places, the founders of the Minar Bakery among them, perhaps first decided to change their traditional occupations thanks to the railway.Like the (similarly landless) Irish (and, as we shall see, Scots) migrating from one end of the Empire to another, the founders of the Minar bakery may be understood as one of many hybrid, interstitial and mobile groups of exploited people who took advantage of the new, unstable circumstances presented by rapid colonisation and industrialisation. In this sense, Asansol represented not just colonial domination, or resistance against it, but something else, too – what Edward Soja calls a Thirdspace – neither and both orient and occident – truly global, and imperial. Soja writes: Thirdspace itself…is rooted in just such a recombinatorial and radically open perspective. In what I will call a critical strategy of ‘thirding as othering’ I try to open up our spatial imaginaries to ways of thinking and acting politically that response to all binaries…by interjecting an-Other set of choices. In this critical thriving, the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely, but is subjected to a creative process of restricting that draws selectively and strategically from the two opposing categories to open new alternatives. (Soja 1996, 5-6) This essay has interpreted the form of a town, its buildings, and its cake, in two different ways: firstly, as the result of passive ‘native’ acquiescence in colonisation by another active ‘foreign’ power; and secondly as the result of cultural exchanges between hybrid and interstitial populations. In conclusion, we shall turn our attention to Scotland itself, in these two terms. In his history of Imperial Gothic architecture, Alex Bremner notes an historiographic issue: the complex and as yet unresolved relationship between the historiography of ‘British’ architecture on the one hand, and that of ‘British Colonial’ architecture on the other. Typically the two subjects have been treated separately….but are they separate subjects or can they be seen as integrated or even indivisible? (Bremner 2013, xii)

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Indeed, he continues, his study aims to take the discussion of British colonial architecture beyond binary categories of ‘self ’/‘other’, European/non-European, and coloniser/ colonised to present a more nuanced, complex and even fractured picture of colonial agency and its architectural manifestations. (Bremner 2013, xiii) The concluding section of this essay will extend Bremner’s enquiry to consider a more nuanced and fractured picture of not just the colonised space of Asansol, but the colonising power of Britain – all too often understood (from the outside anyway) as monolithic and unitary. By way of illustration, we present the story of the (Scots)man who ‘through the medium of East Indian Railway, brought Asansol into existence: George Turnbull. Turnbull’s memoirs were published after his death in 1893. His background was humble: born in 1809, he was brought up at Huntingtower, about 50 miles west of Dundee, where his family ran a bleaching field. When his father died, he inherited nothing – what was left being saved for his unmarried sisters and his mother. Since his interests were practical, Turnbull never completed his studies of the classics at the University of Edinburgh. Instead, he developed a career under the engineers Thomas Telford, and William Cubitt, working on key projects of British modernisation: docks in Middlesborough and Cardiff, the Southeastern railway among them. In 1850, Turnbull made the voyage to India to lead the construction of the East Indian Railway out of Calcutta, his salary being fixed at £2000 per annum. It is not the aim of this essay to recount what Turnbull did for India, or indeed, his stays in Asansol (then a jungle village) during the building of the railway, but rather to explore what it did for him, as a rural Scot, a selfmade man, without a university education, working in the new industrial technologies of iron and steel. In 1862 his posting finished (the line to Benares being complete) he returned to Britain, with a parting gift of £1230, which Turnbull records, ‘was duly expended in a splendid service of silver plate, necklace, bracelet, and earrings for Mrs Turnbull and a portrait of myself, painted by Eddis’ (Turnbull 1893,176).

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Back in London, Turnbull was offered a knighthood in recognition of his services to Empire, but his response to the offer is telling: With respect to a knighthood, there is no disgrace in owning that I am not rich enough to sustain the title in the way that it should be sustained, as I think; and I am not even sure that I would be very ambitious of it even if I had money enough.

… My professional salary was my only source of supply, and having devoted all my time, and thoughts, to my daily work on the railway, I have nothing to live on now but the interest of the savings out of my pay; my railway salary having ceased on the 9th February last. I am therefore obliged to live in a quiet, economical way, and would willingly increase my income by some professional work (Turnbull 1893, 208-209). That is to say that Turnbull still felt himself to be – and was - an outsider to the British establishment, despite all the opportunities that India had offered him. Turnbull’s experience is reflected in countless other stories of Scots and Empire, from that of James Tod, the historiographer of Rajasthan (Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan) to the explorer of Africa Dr. David Livingstone. Like that of the Irish missionaries who established Loreto and St Patricks, or, indeed the Muslim bakers of the Bastin Bazaar, it is one of people, seeking opportunities to escape their limited and poor homes for other more promising ones. These motivations should be set in the context of Scotland in the nineteenth century – a land starkly divided between cities whose rapid industrialisation was fuelled by Empire (the connection between Glasgow and Caribbean sugar has already been noted; there is another between Dundee and Bengali jute) and a ‘Highlands’ which was suffering a process of what could be interpreted as colonisation. This had several stages. The repression of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions was achieved firstly with military force, and secondly with construction of roads that were, like the railways of post 1857 India, devised largely for the military movement. Subsequently Highlands were subjected to what would elsewhere in the Empire, be called plantationisation: the turning of the land from complex subsistence farming to monoculture (in

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Scotland, largely sheep, forestry and aristocratic shooting for pleasure), with the attendant depopulation. This process, known in Scotland as the ‘clearances’, resulted, it has been argued, in the departure of many Highlanders for the new worlds of the Americas and Australasia – and of course, India, too. The effect of these processes on the land and its people is documented in contemporary texts including Dr Johnsons Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland of 1775. At the same time, those same Highlands were reconstructed in the imagination – most famously in the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott – a lawyer, safely ensconced in Edinburgh, writing from 1814 to 1832. In his novels, Highland life and culture is described in terms not so different to those used by Peterson, in 1910, to describe the ‘tribals’ who inhabited the ‘debatable land’ that was to become Asansol. Scott’s imaginary nation – contemporary and oddly similar to James Todd’s Rajasthan - is beautifully explored in Stuart Kelly’s monograph ‘Scott-Land’ of 2015. It could be argued that Scotland was no less subject to the British imperial project than India. Indeed, Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1707­ 1837 makes a case that Britain was not a geographical idea (the island of Britain) but an imperial one, (re)formed during the eighteenth century. This new idea of ‘Britain’ was both disruptive: challenging English as well as Scots senses of identity and it was collaborative: the armies that suppressed the Highlanders in 1745, for example, were enthusiastically supported by the Lowlanders of the Scottish cities; and Walter Scott was a strong supporter of the Union of the two countries. The austere Scotland that Turnbull left to make his fortune was, then, as much an imperial imaginary as oriental India itself, or as we have already observed, Asansol: places of ‘foreign’ (i.e. British) domination and of hybridising cultural exchanges. That, too, is the Scotland of which some railway engineer must have been thinking, as, one afternoon in nineteenth century Asansol, he asked his khansama to bake him a cake. Which, raises, finally, the Dundee cake itself. It has an exotic history in its own right, that tells the story of Scotland’s connections with the wider world. Its mythical origins lie in a story that Mary Queen of Scots preferred almonds to glace (sugared) cherries in her cake – a story that tells us about the expensive tastes of a monarch who had been brought up not in the

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barren north, but in the courts of France: almonds were a Spanish delicacy, impossible to grow in Scotland. Similarly, the sultanas and candied orange peel that also go into the cake are dried fruits: the only way Scots would ever have of tasting a grape, or an orange, before rapid transport or refrigeration. Indeed, Dundee cake was first put into mass production in the nineteenth century by Keiller’s, a company whose main concern was the manufacture of Marmalade – a British way of preserving Seville oranges that were grown thousands of miles south in Spain, and shipped north unripe – as a bitter breakfast jam. Of course, the other exotic foreign ingredient in both the jam and the cake is the bitter-sweetest of all – sugar – whose production both drove and was driven by the sine qua non of the global colonial project: the slave trade: a trade that made it mark in Scotland in the wealth of cities like Dundee and Glasgow,2 and in India through indentured labour and Caribbean transportation.3 This cake walk has helped us think on and with the Asansol-Dundee whether it was generated out of imitating the authentic Scottish Dundee Cakes. The Asansol-Dundee is produced here by the native Indians no less historically and originally than it was when first mass produced by Keillers’ in Dundee. One variant of so called “authentic” Scottish Dundee is the Asansol-Dundee which has originated and nurtured here out of India’s colonial encounter with Scotland, perhaps two hundred years ago. In these two centuries the people of Asansol/Bengal/India have successfully made the Scottish Dundee their own: omitting the alcohol content and the orange peel, and making a softer, lighter cake. The Dundee­ seller in the Bastin Bazar had told the Asansol Heritage Research Group amusingly, “One need not think in Asansol the Scottish Dundee Cakes, but the Dundee Cakes one likes, or for certain reasons he or she is made to like it. We have been baking it through three generations, and we know what you exactly want here in Asansol. Shall we stand in comparison? How can I tell you! Cut my cake and you will feel the difference.”

Notes: 1. See, for example: Nilmony Sing Deo, Sree, Zemindar of Pancheto, title of Ra­ jah withheld from on non-compliance with requisitions to come to Raniganj India Office Records and Private Papers  IOR/Z/E/4/33/N274: 1858 (Coll 8). 2. See, for example Stephen Mullen Glasgow “Sugar Aristocracy in the Brit­

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ish-Atlantic World, 1776-1838” in New Historical Perspectives (Institute of Historical Research: 2020). 3. See, for example: 18th August 1858: Public department: emigration in continuation of our dispatches noted in the margin, on the subject of the mortality on board emigrant ships from Calcutta to the West Indies, we forward a no. in the packet, a copy of a further correspondence which we have received relating to the passages of the ships ‘Cambodia’ and ‘Saladin’ to the colonies of British Guiana and Trinidad. These papers you will refer, in continuation of the previous correspondence to the committee appoint­ ed to enquire into the general subject of the mortality on coolie chips, and we desire that attention may be especially directed to the question of the substitution of Choorah for the Biscuit now used on board emigrant ves­ sels. The Governor General of India in Council Public Department No 131 of 1858 p. 133 1042

References ‘Baking for Britain: Marmalade’ http://bakingforbritain.blogspot.com/2006/03/marmalade-part-2-and­ dundee-cake.html (accessed 17th April 2020) Bremner, Alex. 2013 Imperial Gothic: Religious architecture and High Anglican Culture run the British Empire 1840-1870 New Haven : Yale University Press Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale University Press. D’Souza, Florence. 2015.Knowledge, Mediation, and Empire: James Tod’s Jour­ neys among the Rajputs. Manchester: MUP. Home, Robert and Anthony D. King. 2016. “Urbanism and Master Planning: Configuring the Colonial City”. In Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, edited by Alex Bremner, pp42 – pp81. Oxford: OUP. Johnson, Samuel. 1775.Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. London. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2064 (accessed 20th April 2017) Kelly, Stuart. 2015.Scott-Land. Edinburgh: Polygon. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991.The Production of Space translated by Nicolson Smith, Donald Oxford: Blackwell Lefebvre, Henri.2009. State, space, world : Selected essays edited by Brenner, Neil and Elden, Stuart; translated by Moore, Gerald, Brenner, Neil and Elden, Stuart Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press. Masani, R.P. 1960. Builders of Modern India: Dadabhai Naoroji.New Delhi:

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Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India. Mullen, Stephen. 2020. Glasgow’s Sugar Aristocracy in the British-Atlantic World, 1776-1838(New Historical Perspectives): Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775-1838  London: University of London Press :2020 Peterson, J.C.K. 1910. Bengal District Gazetteers. Burdwan. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York City: Pantheon. Said, Edward. 1996. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Soja, Edward. 1996.Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imag­ ined places Cambridge, Mass. ; Oxford : Blackwell. Tod, James. 1832. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. London: Elder Press. Turnbull, George. 1893. The Memoirs of George Turnbull 1809-78. London: Cooke and Co. Nilmony Sing Deo, Sree, Zemindar of Pancheto, title of Rajah withheld from on non-compliance with requisitions to come to Raniganj. India Office Records and PrivatePapers IOR/Z/E/4/33/N274: 1858  Presentation of the freedom of the city of Edinburgh to Dwarkanath Tagore, Esq. of Calcutta.1842 https://www.jstor.org/stable/60228266 (Accessed 26th February 2019)

From Alexander Hamilton to Patrick Geddes: New

Nature Writing and India

Debarati Bandyopadhyay New nature writing is considered to be a relatively recent literary phenomenon even though both nature writing and travel-narrative have an ancient heritage and remain integrally related to it. In traditional travel and nature writing, visit to a new place and description of its society and scenic beauty, flora and fauna, respectively, are considered to be relevant. In new nature writing, over and above these descriptions, the understanding of the ecological conditions, the politics governing these and the malady besetting a place being visited or inhabited, however temporarily, and often the reflection of the environmental/ ecological activism undertaken on behalf of that geographical space and the people in literature, remain significant.  Scottish travellers to and inhabitants of India have consistently recorded their experience of the country. They have sometimes paid close attention to the condition of a particular place, in order to extol the virtues of its natural and human conditions, or, more often than not, to critique the degradation. Sometimes a fine environmental and ecological ethos found conscious or unconscious expression in their description or record of these completely opposite situations. In  A New Account of the East Indies1688 to 1723, published in two volumes, the Scottish sailor Alexander Hamilton recorded the experiences of his travel from Europe to India via the Arab countries (first volume) and travel in Bengal and other parts of Asia lying east of Bengal (second volume). In the nineteenth century, Francis Buchanan (afterwards known as Hamilton) wrote commissioned investigative reports about the customs and conditions of various parts of India. A Journey from Madras through the countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, in three volumes, was published in 1807. Buchanan’s famous survey reports regarding eastern India were complemented by writings like his Journal regarding Patna and Gaya in 1811-1812. In the twentieth century, Patrick Geddes has worked on and written about the maladies besetting urban and suburban India and suggested practical, ecologically sustainable improvements. Patrick Geddes in India, edited by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, is a compilation of prominent reports and plans prepared by Geddes regarding certain cities in India. Thus, each of these gentlemen, visiting and residing in India for different spans of

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time, in three consecutive centuries, could be considered as a prominent representative of the Scottish link with India. In this chapter, there is an attempt to explore the trajectory of these three Scots writing about India, to evaluate the possibility of the existence of elements pertaining to new nature writing in their work in journals, travel-accounts, reports, plans and pageants.

1 First, distinguishing new nature writing from nature writing earlier is necessary. Traditional nature writing is usually nostalgic or wistful about the romantic beauty of a place. In contrast, in 2008, the ‘New Nature Writing’ issue of Granta spelt out something new. In the Editor’s Letter, Jason Cowley pointed out the differences between the old and the new approaches: The new nature writing, rather than being pastoral or descriptive or simply a natural history essay, has got to be couched in stories – whether fiction or non-fiction – where we as humans are present. Not only as observers, but as intrinsic elements (2008,12). In Cowley’s description, new nature writing postulates that the human being has to come into the centre of the situation actively. Earlier, in nature writing, it would be considered adequate to be a careful observer, witnessing and recording a natural phenomenon or a scene. Scientific objectivity in the sense of detachment would be necessary for natural historians trying to describe the species or minerals found in a place. Activism of any kind would not be necessary for the composition of such essays and records. In new nature writing, the writer often joins the fray and records her/his experience thereafter, in a narrative. So, another important feature of new nature writing is the necessity of narrating the story one experiences. Literary articulation is as essential to dissemination of the knowledge about an emergent environmental or ecological condition or problem as the attempt to address it. To illustrate the difference between travel and nature writing earlier and new nature writing now, let us imagine a traveller reaching a new place where trees are being felled. The traditional nature writer would perhaps begin to count the number of rings observed in the cross-section of the felled tree and based on this inspection, write about its age and the distinctive features of the species with respect to the place or, possibly, on the other hand, romanticize about the situation by lamenting the diminution of the beauty of the landscape. A new nature writer, travelling

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into a similar situation, would try to prevent the cutting down of the tree if it is alive. S/he would, quite probably, embrace the tree spontaneously to resist this act of destruction and begin to teach the tree-cutters why it should be saved, and might court arrest willingly for this intervention, if necessary, to prove the point. The record of this encounter would become the story to be narrated, in the hands of the new nature writer. This is both random and extreme as an instance of the distinct character of new nature writing; but it is not rare. New nature writers also serve the ecological cause by recording life-enhancing practices and condemning the destructive work. The urgency and immediacy that they convey in their writing helps the cause most effectively. Joe Moran has traced the cultural history of new nature writing in Britain since its emergence merely a few decades earlier. In the process, he has found that the relevant writers share a concern about the ‘human disconnection from natural processes’ and write in various ways about their abiding interest in ‘small scale and quotidian encounters with nature’ (Moran 2014, 50). Place is important, then, in all its ramifications, to new nature writers, not merely to the extent that it serves any human purpose but also for what it naturally is and ought to be, despite human beings generally causing its destruction and degeneration. In this sense, visiting a place even for a short while, and residing there for different time-periods, more so, can prompt an eco-conscious response in the new nature writer. This does not require a grand panoramic view, an awe-inspiring place, or an aesthetically bewitching, carefully-crafted landscape. The simplest and humblest existence in nature, in the new nature writer’s experience, germinates into a story, most often quite real and personal. New nature writers often write, not about any visit to an exotic or beautiful natural space, but the urban or suburban locality which is generally thought of as quite humdrum. New nature writers appear to believe that as most societies have moved away from nature or have been built by exploiting it, a search for wildness is in order. This search for wildness does not mean mere lamentation for the lost wilderness or an attempt to recreate it in contemporary life. Wildness suggests a simultaneous awareness of the self and the world. The wildness in the self is the spontaneous, natural existence within that resists exploitation of both this self and nature. It seeks freedom and agency on the one hand and sustainability on the other. Robert Macfarlane, arguably the most famous new nature writer in Britain today, has explored the nature of wild

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places in the historical and geographical contexts and also concentrated on the minutely local and neglected existence, usually considered to be all too familiar and pedestrian, in The Wild Places. The significance of this concern with wildness lies in the duality of the idea itself. The wild needs to be brought under control for the establishment of order and the human civilization itself and yet, it also remains necessary as assertive of a raw energy that has immense and largely untapped creative potential. Moreover, human presence across the world has eroded the possibility of an existence of the really wild in nature. Acknowledging this as a historical truth, new nature writers still seek to unearth ways of reconnecting with those ideals that help the human to relate with the natural, the people with the place. As Graham Huggan noted: The wild means different things to different people: a quality of self, a relation to the world, an atavistic memory. The ‘new nature writing’ explores the broken connections between these, reinterpreting them in the light of a global environmental crisis characterized by a destructively changing climate and by devastating species loss (2016,165). In this, new nature writing proves to be an attempt at a conscientious performance of the basic ecological ideal of interrelated and sustained coexistence. At this point, the logical approach would be to formulate a question about the possibility of the existence of elements of new nature writing in the works of three Scottish visitors to India. New nature writing takes into consideration the contemporary global environmental degradation and erosion of ecological values. Did such crises exist during the times of, say, Alexander Hamilton? The second objection could be that the new nature writers regularly seek to establish a link between the personal/local and the national and of both with the global conditions. Is it possible to find these links in the writings of the Scottish gentlemen in India, so long ago, based on their perception of an Indian locality and its natural and human concerns? In order to address these pertinent issues, it is necessary to begin an analysis of the Scottish writing in question.

2 The first volume of the two-volume A New Account of the East Indies Being the Observations and Remarks of Capt. Alexander Hamilton from the Year

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1688-1723 Trading and Travelling by Sea and Land, to Most of the Countries and Islands of Commerce and Navigation, between the Cape of Good Hope and the Island of Japan has a Dedication to James, Duke of Hamilton that sets out the parameters of the Scottish gentleman’s journey to, and through India and Asia: I have seen the elaborate Works of several ingenious Pens, who had travelled thro’ many Countries, in Maps, that I have travelled to by Sea and Land; […] yet, few (if any) ever had the living Acquaintances that I have had, to inform or instruct them in many Particulars relating to the ancient, or present State of their Countries, whose vernacular Languages can best illustrate their Histories, some of which I understood. […] Those Five, or Six and thirty Years that I spent in the East Indies, strolling from Place to Place, gave me Opportunities to know some topographical, historical, and theogonal Parts of this work, from the Natives, of their respective Countries, who may be presumed to be better acquainted with their own Traditions and Customs, than Strangers, who are often at a loss for want of Language (Hamilton 1995, v-vii). It becomes evident from the tone of Hamilton’s declaration that he is supremely confident about the contents of his book. First, the armchair travel-writers have been critiqued to highlight Hamilton’s own qualification as a man who has actually traversed the terrain for above thirty-five years and recorded his experiences with sincerity, to write about the East Indies. Second, he clearly indicates first-hand acquaintance with the country and its customs as he has been present in the middle of these situations directly. Third and last, it is important that he claims to decipher (at least partially) some Indian language, thereby bolstering his claim of understanding the nature and custom of a place. With our contemporary knowledge of the way in which new nature writers think and work, it is possible to estimate Hamilton as one who had adequate ground-level experience and the penchant to write about it, to critique the condition of a place and the people there. Hamilton makes it clear that he suffered from inadequacy of written records to form a ready estimate of a place: My task in compiling this had been much lighter, and my Performance perhaps been better, if Gazetts, and other useful

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publick Papers were used in those Countries where I travelled, or if I could read their different Histories in their various vernacular Languages, then the general Accounts of their […] material Observations, had been much fuller and exacter than now they are, but such helps could not be had (1995, xvii). The element that Hamilton laments as an absence turns out to be a boon, as he had to painstakingly seek to understand the condition of the place and the people in order to write about them and this gives an immediacy to his writing which is also observed in new nature writing in our times. In the course of his travel across India, Hamilton recorded his observations about two important aspects of the place, wherever possible. First, sometimes he tried to evaluate the customs of the native population their attitude towards their native place and second, he would also critique the activities of the Europeans regarding their handling of a place and the native population. In the process, there emerged instances where lifeenhancing environmental practices observed among certain sections of the East Indians merited his praise. Tatta City stands about two miles from the River Indus, in a spacious Plain, and they have Canals cut from the River, that bring Water to the City, and some for the Use of their Gardens. […] For three Years before I came there, no rain had fallen, which caused a severe Plague to affect the Town and circumjacent Country, to such a Degree, that, in the City only, above 80000 died of it, that manufactured Cotton and Silk, and above one Half of the City was deserted and left empty. And that was one reason why the Nabob had placed his Camp in that Place that I went to visit him at. The Figure of the Camp was a regular Tetragon, and ditched about with a Trench about 3 Yards broad, and 2 deep. […] Each Side of the Tetragon was about 6 or 700 Paces in Length and the Ditches could be filled with Water from the Indus, and let out at Pleasure, into a large Marish about two Miles off the Camp (Hamilton 1995, 121-22). The efficacy of this solution to the problem of the arid environment became evident to Hamilton as soon as he visited Tatta: The King’s Gardens were in pretty good condition in Anno 1699 and were well stored with excellent Fruits and Flowers, particularly the most delicious Pomegranates that I ever tasted. (Hamilton 1995, 121-22).

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As in new nature writing, so in Hamilton’s narrative centuries ago, the personal experience of a place with a significant environmental tale that needs to be conveyed to the larger audience, finds representation in a nonfictional story. There is an instance of Hamilton’s ability to observe, record and inspire positive comments on an Indian practice fostering life (in the Canara region) that new nature writers today, too, would find necessary, ecologically: Onoar is its northernmost Port […] The Religion, by Law established, here, as well as in Sundah, is the Pagan. And there is a Pagod or Temple, called Ramtrut, that is visited by great Numbers of Pilgrims. Close by the Temple there is a fine Cistern or Tank, of a square oblong figure. It is continually furnished with good water[…] The Tank is about three Fathoms deep in the Middle, and is stored with Plenty of pretty brown Fish, with a white Stroke from their Head to Tail, on each side of the Back-bone. And when any musical Instrument is played on the Sides of the Tank, they come in such Numbers towards the Musick, that they may be taken up in Baskets; but none dare meddle with them, because they are consecrated to the Pagod (Hamilton 1995, 275-76). From a Christian man, appreciation of a pagan religious practice would require considerable powers of observation. The next best thing to an act of environmental activism recorded by a new nature writer is the respectful record of an observation of such activism (even for the sake of an alien religion) in others. And this is not the only instance of such a record of a place and the customs and practices thereof in Hamilton’s writings: To the Southward […] on a plain Road that leads to Mangulore, are planted four Rows of Trees, on the Sides of a Walk about eight or ten Miles long, which being very large, and having spreading Branches ever green all the Summer, serve for Umbrellas to Passengers that travel that Road. And, on several Places, there are Huts built, where some old People stay in the Day-time, with Jars of fine clear Water for the Passengers to drink gratis at the charge of the State (1995, 281). Hamilton could not have had any prior knowledge of the existence of such customs in India from ancient times, and hence his tone of approval regarding the State’s attempts to maintain shade by the roadside and offer

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clean drinking water gratis, all too necessary in a hot and humid tropical country, is genuinely enthusiastic. This makes another humane story. The third and last instance that needs to be analysed in this connection, comes from Hamilton’s visit to the eastern Indian state of Odisha that he refers to as Orixa: In the year 1708 I had Occasion to travel from Ganjam to Bal­ lasore, by Land […] Our next Stage was at the famous Temple of Jagarynot […] In our way we saw great Numbers of Deer and Antilopes, so tame, that they would not move out of our Way, till we approach within five or six Yards of them. Water wild Fowl were also numerous and fearless, for none dares kill them under Pain of Excommunication […] Poultry there is plentiful, but cannot be killed by the Pagans, because they worship them; nor can Strangers purchase them, only the Mahometans, who make no Account of their canon Laws, make bold to sacrifice them, and Fish too, as we do in Great Britain (Hamilton 1995, 380-81). This reads like a comparative religious and cultural history in affirmative ecological practice. It is to be noted, though, that in the huge volume of Hamilton’s work, these are noticeably few instances of positive environmental intervention. The rest is about abundance versus scarcity of the essential ingredients of life, the availability of these being based on one’s race, religion, political and economic position. In the second volume of A New Account of the East Indies by Hamilton, there is an instance of his vehemently subjective and critical estimate of an inhuman and environmentally wrong practice, in contradistinction to the positive environmental activism described in the first volume. Regarding Calcutta, later to become the capital of the British rule, and its formal choice as central to the activities of the East India Company, by Job Charnock, whom he refers to as Channock, Hamilton wrote: The English settled there about the Year 1690[…] Mr Job Chan­ nock being then the Company’s Agent in Bengal, he had Liberty to settle an Emporium in any Part of the River’s Side below Hughly, and for the sake of a large shaddy Tree chose that Place, tho’ he could not have chosen a more unhealthful Place on all the River; for three Miles to the North-eastward, is a Salt-water Lake that overflows in September and October, and then prodigious

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Numbers of Fish resort thither, but in November and December when the Floods are dissipated, those Fishes are left dry, and with their Putrefaction affect the Air […] which the North-east Winds bring with them to Fort William […] One Year I was there, and there were reckoned in August about 1200 English […] lying at the Town, and before the Beginning of January there were four hundred and sixty Burials registered in the Clerk’s Book of Mortality (1930, 5). The burden of Hamilton’s complaint against Charnock appears to be based upon the fact that a paucity of research and knowledge about the horror of the environment of the place is compounded with the lack of foresight necessary to institute a proper drainage system that could prevent unnecessary loss of a large proportion of life in Fort William. But this is not the end of the story. Mr. Channock choosing the Ground of the Colony, where it now is, reigned more absolute than a Rajah, only he wanted much of their Humanity, for when any ignorant Native transgressed his Laws, they were sure to undergo a severe Whipping for a Penalty, and the Execution was generally done when he was at Dinner, so near his Dining-room that the Grones and Cries of the poor Delinquents served him for Musick (Hamilton 1930, 5). It is understood that to Hamilton, this would appear to be a far cry from the healthy and humane religious and government policies that he found in performance in the course of his journey in India, where even the fish had safety and music provided to them conscientiously. However, in terms of environmental activism and new nature writing, what appears to be noteworthy is Hamilton’s refusal to spare his compatriot. The intensely self-critical approach was made essential by the contemporary situation of global environmental degradation in new nature writing. In Hamilton, this unsparing criticism of the wrong environmental policy and inhuman treatment of the local population by the British self, proves to be of immense eco-ethical significance today.

3 In the nineteenth century, Dr. Francis Buchanan (1762-1829) had come to India and worked in different capacities. By profession, he was a medical practitioner, an M.D. employed by the East India Company

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in Bengal Medical Service. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Society of Antiquaries in London and the Asiatic Society Calcutta. In India he had adorned many posts, including that of the Superintendent of the Botanic Garden in Calcutta. But he is best remembered for the detailed survey of and official reports regarding southern and especially, eastern India. In 1800-1801 Buchanan prepared a record of the topography and social conditions evident to him in A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, Performed under the Orders of the Most Noble the Marquis Wellesley Governor General of India, for the Express Purpose of Investigating the State of Agriculture, Arts, and Commerce; the Religion, Manners and Customs; the History of Natural and Civil, and Antiquities, in the Dominions of the Rajah of Mysore, and the Countries Acquired by the Honourable East India Company, in the Late and Former Wars, from Tippoo Sultaun. This was published in 1807 in London authorized by and under the patronage of the East India Company. In the third and last volume of Buchanan’s Journey, he noted that according to the Tahsildar or Collector under the Rajah, the rice-lands near the sea produced one annual crop yielding up to 25 bushels per acre while inland there would be a single crop of 24 to (more than) 37 bushels per acre yield and the land that produced two crops annually, would produce an equal quantity in the first, and from 20 to 25 bushels later and the overall production of grains exceeded the needs of the small population of the place (Buchanan 1807, 13). This description is as it should be in the writing based on the report of the local official but already, it will be noted, a naturalist’s training becomes evident in the attempt to record the exact limit and extent of the crops. In one of Buchanan’s entries in the Journey, consistently maintained as a journal, there is a detailed estimate of the place he traversed that day: 19th January. - I went to a temple dedicated to Iswara, at a place called Pulla. The first part of my journey was over a sandy spit, separating a salt water lake from the sea. Beyond this, the country rises into open rising lands, all the way to Chandra-giririver, which is the northern boundary of Malayala. The rising land is in very few places too steep for the plough, and these places are in general rocky. The whole of this land is totally waste, and looks very ill, being covered with long withered grass. There are traces of its having been formerly cultivated; and, no doubt, with

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manure it would be productive of dry grains. For the cultivation of rice, tanks or reservoirs might easily be constructed; but, with the paucity of inhabitants, it would be madness to cultivate any thing, except the richest spots. Intermixed with this rising land are a few plots of rice-ground, surrounded by palm gardens and the houses of the Nairs; but the proportion of this rich land does not seem to be above a hundredth part of the country (1807, 14-15). Buchanan’s observation of the topography and the nature of the land is succinctly and objectively presented initially, as befits a surveyor and geographer, coming as it does, from a natural scientist by training. However, there is a great subjective estimate too a little later, in the sense that Buchanan does not stop with the description of the contour of the land. He goes on to comment pithily on the ways in which the waste land could be restored. Where only a tiny fraction of the land was capable of a rich yield, Buchanan’s frustration at the sight of the reclaimable land lying waste, indicates systematic thinking no doubt, but, from the perspective of new nature writing, it appears to be even more significant. Buchanan was moving far beyond the ambit of the dry rigours of his survey-record regarding agricultural land. The linguistic register (‘no doubt’, ‘easily’ and ‘madness’) indicates a personal tone with both the excitement and the frustration equally palpable. This personal reading of the situation, and the enthusiastic assessment of the ways and means of reclamation of the spoilt land could remind the new nature writer of the contemporary exploration of the latent possibilities of the wild. In writing about his journey through Tulava, Buchanan noted: In this country, the hill ground is never cultivated, except for gardens […] The rice land is of three kinds; Bylu, Majelu, and Batta. Bylu ground is that in the lower part of vallies which are watered by small streams, from whence canals are dug to convey the water to the fields, which by the irrigation are able to give annually two crops. The Majelu land is higher than the Bylu, and is provided with small reservoirs, which ensure one crop, even when the rains last only two or three months. From some of these reservoirs, water is let out by a sluice. It is raised from others by means of the Yatam, or by a basket suspended between ropes. The Betta land is the highest part of the ground, and is provided with

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neither streams nor reservoir; so that the crop depends entirely on the rain. In some places there is another kind of rice ground called Potla. During the rainy season, it is so inundated, that it cannot then be cultivated; and, as the water dries, the rice is transplanted. On the Bylu land there are three crops in the year (1807, 37). Buchanan’s enumeration of the nature of the ground, irrigation and resultant crops produced with different degrees of hardship were a part of his job in the preparation of the report and the government officials were undoubtedly looking for information about the cultivable land. However, from the point of view of new nature writing, it is interesting that the detailed account of the land and the traditional Indian irrigation systems appear to reveal the temporary sojourner’s enthusiasm for positive environmental practices and that also, in a far-flung place with a very mundane existence, in another country. New nature writers relate to the local existence, however humble, all the time. In the last example from Buchanan’s Journey chosen here, we continue to learn about the way in which the rice is planted: The kinds of rice that are transplanted for the Yenalu crop on Bylu land are cultivated as follows. Between the 14th of May and the 14th of June, water the ground intended for raising the seedlings for two days, and then plough it twice; all the water, except two inches in depth, being let off at each ploughing. […] The field, before the last ploughing, is manured with ashes, and with dung, in which, while in the cow-house, the leaves of every kind of bush and tree have been mixed. The mud is then smoothed with the Mutu Pallay, or plank drawn by oxen […] The seed, prepared by causing it to sprout, is then sown very thick, the water being three inches deep. Next day the water is let off. On the fifth day, when the shots come up, they get as much water as covers the half next the ground; and, every day, as the plants grow, the quantity of water is increased […] If worms affect the plants, about the end of the third week the water is again let off for three days, and some ashes are sprinkled over the field to kill these destructive animals. The seedlings must be transplanted between the 30th and the 35th days (1807, 38). And this precise, systematic description of the correct process of planting each kind of seeds continues in Buchanan’s writing. We remember

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that neither Buchanan nor any other expert had had an opportunity to edit the Journey before its publication in 1807 in London. Hence, the immediacy of his experiences recorded in this journal-form of record is conveyed to the readers directly. Apart from its affinity with the natural historian’s eye for detail and the ability to relate to mundane local practices noted earlier, what helps us recollect one of the basic functions of contemporary new nature writing in this part of Buchanan’s composition is the idea of it as a lovingly chosen, self-imposed ethic of work. In this case, he reveals a fine sensitivity to the possibilities of the place, achieved traditionally in the past and perfect for the future, that might be fulfilled if a balance is maintained in handling local land conditions, the locally-produced manure and a strict, intelligent and careful timetable for tilling, planting of seeds, irrigation, manuring, weeding and transplantation of seedlings. The mundane details acquire a note of sound environmental and humane concern for the sake of sustainability of the best agricultural practices in his Indian workplace. In Bengal and Bihar, every year, Buchanan had painstakingly visited and amassed records about the topography, history and social conditions of many urban and rural locations during 1807 - 1815. His official survey-records are complemented by the immaculately recorded Journals as personal record of his travel and both were published by the British Government subsequently. A succinct point of reference could be the Journal of Francis Buchanan (Afterwards Hamilton) Kept During the Survey of the Districts of Patna and Gaya in 1811-12 in which the exact nature and composition of each town and village is juxtaposed carefully with detailed analysis of the stones and minerals the region is so rich in, found in the wilderness he had to cross to reach human habitation during the entire period, truly like a natural historian. How effective this came to be finds an adequate record in 1923, when V. H. Jackson, entrusted with its publication, noted about the Journals in the Introduction to the Journal of Patna and Gaya: They principally differ from the Reports in giving a detailed description of the route which Buchanan actually followed, without which it is at the present day very difficult to identify some of the places described in the Reports, particularly the various hills, and the mines, quarries, caves and springs associated with them. Many examples of this which have come within my own observation could be quoted, but the following will suffice: […] in the Patna Report (Vol.I, pp.254-56) the interesting description of the cave ‘at a place called Hangriyo’ in the southern range

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of the Rajgir Hills from which silajit was procured, was not sufficient to enable me to identify this cave without reference to the Journal for January 14th, 1812. This showed that the cave was not the Rajpind Cave in the Jethian valley, as I had been inclined to suppose, but one in the southern face of the Hanria Hill, the existence of which is kept as secret as possible owing to the value of the silajitstilll obtained from it; and an examination of this cave has served to clear up several difficulties connected with Hiuen Tsang’s route between Bodh Gaya and Rajgir, and has shown that the Hanria Hill itself was Hiuen Tsang’s Buddhavana Mountain (1925, vii-viii). Jackson’s account highlights the fact that the personal experiences narrated in the Journal remained valid and essential for not only the government but also later official and unofficial explorers of the region and historians. Throughout the Journal, Buchanan described the differential composition and evolution of each mineral in this region. In contrast, Silajit is an exotic and rare natural resource. Buchanan’s exact personal research into the local, mundane as well as exotic history, geography and geology of this place serves as a beacon to naturalists, historians and possibly, new nature writers. We are reminded of Macfarlane’s description of a ‘geo-logic’ and the ‘strong mineral skeleton’ of Britain that he concentrated on as a new nature writer in Wild Places (2007, 242-44). Further, in Buchanan’s act of locating and corroborating the existence of the place recorded by Hiuen Tsang as a traveler in ancient India, in the wild areas of Bihar, this becomes all the more significant, as Huggan mentioned that for many ‘“new nature writers” wildness is as much a temporal as a spatial category’ (2016, 157). In the Journal, Buchanan, on his way to Patna, referred to a place called Futwah. He found Jafier Khan’s garden and a handsome Siv temple on his way and recorded in the entry dated 3 November: Between this garden wall and the road is a terrace covered with plaster and shaded with trees for the refreshment of passengers. A merchant has also dug a tank near Jafier Khan’s garden and lined it on four sides with brick, but it is a very poor rude work, the steps on the descent being about two feet high and the banks quite rough (1925, 5). We are reminded of Alexander Hamilton’s congratulatory tone towards performance of an eco-ethical deed in the repeated references to the trees

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and tanks maintained by religious institutions or the State for the benefit of common travelers about a hundred years before Buchanan wrote this apparently similar account. But there is a huge difference in their attitude, which is historically speaking, natural enough, considering that as a sailor, Hamilton praised these humane activities that were quite novel to him, uncritically, in a tone indicating genuine wonder, and that during Buchanan’s time, these activities were well known to be a part and parcel of India since the ancient period and the wonder would be lost. However, more significant is the critical neutrality in Buchanan’s tone as he recognizes the intrinsic ecological merit of the act of planting trees and constructing tanks for others on the one hand, and debunks the shoddy aesthetics and quality of the work. The frustration that surfaces in his tone regarding the possibilities of the place and the lack and lacunae in the implementation of a proper work-ethic to fulfil these is worthy of the introspection and selfreflexivity in new nature writing on the one hand, and an anticipation of the eco-activism of Patrick Geddes from Edinburgh, in India, in the twentieth century, on the other.

4 Sir Patrick Geddes FRSE (1854-1932), the biologist, sociologist and geographer-turned-town planner from Edinburgh came to India on the invitation of the Governor of Madras for urban planning and in spite of the exhibits getting sunk in transit, recreated an Exhibition on the subject in 1915 in the Senate hall of Madras University. In extracts made of his urban planning reports regarding various Indian cities and towns in Patrick Geddes in India edited by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in 1947, we learn about his penchant for diagnosing the problems in the urban area first, and then opting for conservative surgery. The diagnosis that Geddes made in “The Diagnostic Survey” was: Tagore’s criticism at the beginning of his ‘Sadhana’ that Man and Nature in the west have come to be viewed apart is indeed unanswerable. […] Yet it was not always thus. The Greek City was at first merely the cultural centre of the rural life of the City State; and the Roman ‘Civitas’, despite the excessive metropolitanism of Rome, […] included the rural region with the town (1947, 28). At one stroke, Geddes raised the issue of human and natural, and urban and rural hiatus from the local and the national, to encompass the ancient and the global and this is the basis of new nature writing too.

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The economical and eco-friendly alternative, as ‘conservative surgery’, to the proposed new gridiron of streets in Madras lay in ‘enlarging the existing lanes’, ‘addition of some vacant lots’ and ‘removal of ’ the ‘most dilapidated and insanitary houses’ according to Geddes in “Conservative Surgery” and it would cost one-sixth of the proposed cost and every house would have better access to fresh air and sanitation too (Geddes1947, 41). Urban tanks were sought by him in “Planning for Health” for maintaining the waterlevel in dry season, controlling inundation and for natural cooling despite the danger of malarial mosquitoes, as neither ‘impractical aesthete’ nor ‘perverse sentimentalist’ but as a ‘naturalist’ examining malaria since 1878: I deliver the most definite challenge to sanitarians and engineers in India concerning tank conservation […] the treatment I propose for tanks and reservoirs is to clean them thoroughly and then stock them with sufficient fish and duck to keep down the Anopheles (Geddes 1947, 79-80). As in new nature writing today, passionate environmental activism was important to Geddes a century ago. Its culmination came in his Indore pageant to eradicate plague. With the permission of the Holkar ruler and the mayor, he turned ‘Maharajah’, inspiring the citizens to thoroughly clean their house and neighborhood for the innovative Diwali procession. Following the tableau of Agriculture and Lakshmi, the Diwali demon to be destroyed appeared as the ‘Giant of Dirt’ followed by the ‘Rat of Plague’ and ‘huge model mosquitoes’, while the leader of the four hundred untouchable sweepers in spotless white livery had Geddes taking ‘a marigold for his button-hole from the old man’s broom-garland’, treating them ‘as equals’ (Boardman 1947, 98-100). Indore was cured. The proper tribute to Geddes came from Lewis Mumford: To the town planner’s art, Geddes brought the rural virtues: […] the patience of the peasant, and the sense that orderly growth is more important than order at the expense of growth. He saw both cities and human beings as wholes; […] the processes of repair, renewal, and rebirth as natural phenomena of development (1947, 11). The local and universal, contemporary and perennial ecological and human values converge in such work, in Geddes earlier, and in new nature writing now. To conclude, it is perfectly logical to argue that new nature writing is a strictly recent literary phenomenon. Yet, with different degrees of involvement,

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criticism and activism, Hamilton, Buchanan and Geddes, the three Scottish gentlemen in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, evinced an eco-ethical enthusiasm involving place-sense in India in the context of their awareness of universal conditions, both spatial and temporal, that form the underpinning of new nature writing today. Their work brought Scotland and India, and nature and culture closer.

References 1. Boardman, Philip. 1947. “Maharajah For A Day”. In Patrick Geddes in In­ dia, edited by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 96 – 101. London: Lund Humphries. 2. Buchanan, Francis. 1807. A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar Vol. III. London: W. Bulmer. 3. Buchanan, Francis. 1925. Journal of Francis Buchanan (afterwards Hamil­ ton) Patna and Gaya in 1811-1812. Patna: Government Printing. 4. Cowley, Jason. 2008. “Editor’s Letter”. Granta: New Nature Writing 102 (July): 7 – 12. 5. Geddes, Patrick. 1947. “The Diagonistic Survey”. In Patrick Geddes in In­ dia, edited by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 24 – 39. London: Lund Humphries. 6. Geddes, Patrick. 1947. “Conservative Surgery”. In Patrick Geddes in India, edited by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 40 - 49. London: Lund Humphries. 7. Geddes, Patrick. 1947. “Planning for Health”. In Patrick Geddes in India, edited by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 66 – 83. London: Lund Humphries. 8. Hamilton, Alexander. 1930. A New Account of the East Indies Vol. II. Lon­ don: Argonaut Press. 9. Hamilton, Alexander. 1995. A New Account of the East Indies Vol. I. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. 10. Huggan, Graham. 2016. “Back to the Future: The ‘New Nature Writing’, Ecological Boredom, and the Recall of the Wild”. Prose Studies 38.2: 152 – 171. 11. Jackson, V. H. 1925. Introduction. Journal of Francis Buchanan (afterwards Hamilton) Patna and Gaya in 1811-1812, i – xxvi. Patna: Government Printing. 12. Macfarlane, Robert. 2007. The Wild Places. London: Granta. 13. Moran, Joe. 2014. “A Cultural History of the New Nature Writing”. Litera­ ture and History 23.1 (Spring): 49 – 63. 14. Mumford, Lewis. 1947. Introduction. In Patrick Geddes in India, edited by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 7 – 13. London: Lund Humphries.

The Ambivalence of Tolerance: William Wilson

Hunter and the Rise of Surveillance Literature in

Colonial Bengal

Pritam Mukherjee Assistant Professor of English Abhedananda Mahavidyalaya, Sainthia.

Scotland’s engagement with India dates back to the time of British colonial expansion in the subcontinent. It is true that the scope of a free and open dialogue between the coloniser and the colonised was extremely narrow in those days. However, the nature of this engagement was not always defined by hostile conflicts. True value of this encounter demands post­ colonial scholars to focus also on the crucial processes of negotiations, collaborations, and mediations that followed the coming together of competing cultures and peoples in the colonial time. Distinguished Scotsman William Wilson Hunter’s (1840 – 1900) continuing influence in the sphere of Bengali culture and social science even today is a classic example of such negotiations during the colonial time. Hunter was an eminent member of Indian Civil Service (ICS), his­ torian, statistician and imperial publicist. He played a decisive role in the creation of an effective and all pervasive information network in late-nine­ teenth-century Bengal which resulted in the production of a huge imperial surveillance literature about the land and its people. The ultimate objective of his epistemic endeavour was to develop an insight into the minds of the Indians. He sincerely believed that a much informed and careful coloni­ al authority could better exercise its power over the colonised nation. His basic idea was always to avoid military action which inevitably resulted in further alienating Indian people. It was this understanding that led Hunter to acknowledge and appreciate the friendship of his Bengali counterparts. Unlike other officers from his service, Hunter always maintained an inti­ mate relationship with the Bengali intellectuals of his time. The history of Scotland’s engagement in India would remain incomplete without a proper attention to the life and works of William Wilson Hunter. Hunter’s writings, even though a product of imperialist discourse had been able to inspire new hope, create a consensus around its intended

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positive effects and gave momentum to many important public debates of the time. In the late-nineteenth-century Bengal, imperial authority increasingly sought its legitimacy from the effective functioning of the modern institutions of the state. One of most important motifs of this changing nature of imperial governance was discovery and practice of ‘tolerance’. This is nowhere more evident than in the liberal rhetoric that Hunter practised and propagated through his own writings. Hunter’s writings tried to reconcile the challenges of running an absolutist empire with the increasing demands of effective modernization. This tension in Hunter’s works captured the essence of imperial crises in Bengal. This chapter attempts to discover how Hunter’s epistemic endeavours and liberal rhetoric impacted the Bengali cultural sphere, including its literature, theatre, life style and perhaps more importantly, its perceptions of life and the world. However, the reception of Hunter’s writings was not plain and simple. In fact, it saw in its wake an intense intellectual battle of mediations, rejections and acceptance. This chapter makes an attempt to understand, reflect upon and qualify our knowledge on these issues. It seeks to address these issues in two parts: firstly, it will try to situate William Wilson Hunter as an individual and then it will try to relate his opinions and observations with his later development as an expert on Indian matters. The idea is to locate, identify and analyse both personal inclinations and objective needs that governed the rise of surveillance literature in colonial Bengal.

Growth of a Colonial Intellectual Francis Henry Skrine in his excellent and incisive biography of William Wilson Hunter summed up the value of Hunter’s life thus: It is that of one who, without the adventitious aids of birth or fortune, attained the highest eminence in a society which is still dominated by semi-feudal conceptions of caste and privilege. It proves that a man may compass great things in spite of constant ill-health, of poignant sorrows, of the jealousy and intrigues of rivals; and may retain to the end a truly Christian charity – an infinite toleration of the faults and failings of others (1901, xi-xii). Throughout his highly important biography of Hunter, Skrine upheld and celebrated him as an iconic figure of middleclass values, Smilesean aspirations, and a champion of the oppressed. Though written in the conventional model of the Victorian improvement plot, Skrine’s biography successfully leads us to some of the most interesting and yet less visible

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traits of an individual personality which significantly also qualify our sense of the time. It does give us a fair idea about the formation of a liberating mind who continually questioned the very system that he himself embraced as an individual. Perhaps the key to this questioning tendency is located in his early childhood and training. William Wilson Hunter was the second of three sons of Andrew Hunter and Isabella Wilson Hunter. He was born on 15th July, 1840 in Glasgow (Skrine 1901, 4). Though Andrew Hunter never enjoyed financial security due to fluctuating fortune in his chemical business he knew chemistry well enough to write several articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Skrine 1901, 1). At home his wife took special care in the education of the children. William Wilson Hunter’s formal education began in 1854, when he was admitted to Queenswood, Hampshire. After completing one year at this famous school Hunter joined Glasgow Academy, he showed particular interest in various subjects which included Chemistry, Logic, Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Moral Philosophy and Ethics. In April 1860 Hunter obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Glasgow (Skrine 1901, 18). It is not clear why he did not aspire for honours in any subject. William Wilson Hunter’s childhood, however, was not a particularly happy one. In his biography Skrine admired the strength of Hunter’s native character that helped him to overcome the challenges of a difficult childhood. In fact, Skrine thought it was Hunter’s own personal experience during those early days that ‘… inspired …a deep affection for the weak and helpless’ (1901, 5). Early into his life Hunter had shown striking characteristics of a true humanist. His opinions on wars fought in foreign lands revealed his compassion, kindness and generosity of spirit. In 1856, when he was only sixteen, Hunter wrote on the Chinese question: We are told that the Chinese are barbarians, and not therefore, entitled to the privileges of a civilised country. But the Chinese are men, and I contend that every man and every nation have a right to participate in the justice which is due to each member of our race (Skrine 1901, 10). It clearly shows Hunter’s ability to acknowledge and appreciate difference and diversity. An unwavering faith in an idea of inclusive humanism can be seen developing at an early stage of Hunter’s life. Amidst the highly charged atmosphere filled with battle cries during the Crimean campaign, a young Hunter wrote:

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[…] tell tales of Battles in such a manner as to awaken the interest and delight of their hearers. It is this that not only vitiates a country at the close of every war, but predisposes it for another by creating a thirst for new bloodshed, new adventures, and future glory (Skrine 1901, 11). True value of these comments, observations and opinions of a young boy becomes all the more evident when we place them against the general background of racial tension and hatred. It is this sensitive nature of his character that defined his liberal principles. Hunter firmly believed that his formal education in Glasgow did have further positive impact on him in developing his deep sense of self and individual creativity, which English public schools and University did not always support in their students (Skrine 1901, 19). In his university days, William Wilson Hunter aspired to be an independent author. He had shown enough early promise in his works to harbour such a dream. However, his hope of becoming a free intellectual was rudely shaken by the harsh realities of the Great Britain of the midnineteenth century. His family’s fortune dipped gradually to such a level that it forced Hunter to contemplate other career options. It was Dr Thomas Murray, his family friend and would be father-in-law, who suggested him to appear for the Indian Civil Service examination (Skrine 1901, 32). Importantly, the British authority made some crucial changes in their recruitment policy for the covenanted officers for the Indian administration at that point in time. One of the most fundamental decisions was to hold an open competition for all the covenanted posts of Indian Civil Service. It was a radical break from the earlier closed door policy of recruiting high officers through recommendations and bribes. It was also the time when Hunter abandoned his efforts at writing a campus novel, entitled Frank Ormiston, a Tale of University Life. It proved to be a disappointment to young Hunter (Skrine 1901, 31). He realised that his talent in the field of creative writing wasn’t quite enough to take him to a position of financial security anytime soon. In early 1860s Hunter devoted all his intellectual energy in securing a place in the coveted Indian civil administration. His efforts were duly rewarded when he stood first amongst all the aspirants of Indian Civil Service examination, 1862. However, both Hunter’s inclusive approach and generous outlook came under massive challenge when he arrived in India in November 1862. Rising racial tension between the rulers and ruled defined the time when Hunter started his career in India. A series

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of rebellions in the 1850s shook the foundation of the colonial authority. It drove the state to contemplate over the nature and direction of colonial rule. Civil and judicial administrations were going through momentous changes to adjust to the rising voice of Indian dissent. Placed against this changing time, all of Hunter’s works unfold into full significance. His fresh and independent voice was seen as a welcome change even for the British authority. An influential section of the colonial state machinery found in young Hunter a much-needed intellectual voice for the emerging new reality of colonial Bengal. Imperial knowledge makers of an earlier era were highly conservative in their choice and treatment of the subjects. Hunter freed the imperial knowledge formation from the prejudices of previous era of the Macaulays and Mills and introduced an inclusive and tolerant approach. His books proved major successes not only in challenging and in expanding the horizon of imperial knowledge but also bridged the increasing gulf between the rulers and ruled. This personal approach was also at the heart of almost all the significant imperial projects of knowledge formation in late-nineteenth century Bengal that he spearheaded. In 1868 came Hunter’s first book, The Annals of Rural Bengal. It triumphantly announced the arrival of a great intellect in the sphere of colonial knowledge formation. Written in the tradition of annals Hunter’s first book was, in many ways, a loosely structured exploration into the past of a remote district. However, in his choice of subject and its treatment Hunter was refreshingly new and his liberal attitude helped him to establish his reputation. The publication of The Annals of Rural Bengal was closely followed by Hunter’s epoch-making attempt at lexicography. Inspired by Brian Hodgson’s initial works in this particular area, Hunter worked relentlessly to produce A Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia (1868). This was probably the first attempt to create a dictionary of words used by the tribal people of the Bengal Presidency. Along with The Annals of Rural Bengal, much of Hunter’s early reputation as a scholar rested on the success of this dictionary. Hunter’s initial success in writing history or compiling a dictionary evoked mixed reactions in the official circles of the British Empire. While he was cornered by his immediate superiors, his talent did not go completely unnoticed. Lord Mayo found in him an ideological counterpart and a dedicated scholar worthy of a high post. In 1869, Lord Mayo appointed Hunter as the Director-General of Statistics to the Government of India. This appointment proved to be the turning point of Hunter’s administrative career as he played a pivotal role in executing one of the most important imperial projects of British India.

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In the early 1870s, Hunter published another very important book on regional history – Orissa volumes 1 & 2 (1872). Hunter’s Orissa reveals the gradual consolidation of a new structure of enquiry which was still in its formative stage in The Annals of Rural Bengal. In between The Annals of Rural Bengal and Orissa Hunter produced a highly relevant study on the condition of the Muslims in post-1857 India – Indian Musalmans (1871). Published at the time of Wahabi unrest, Hunter’s Indian Musalmans continues to be one of his most important books on the condition of the Muslims in late-nineteenth-century India. It was Hunter’s perceptive analysis of the plight of the Muslims that brought the whole issue of the aspirations of the community into public discussion. Hunter’s Indian Musalmans also turned out be one of the earliest examples of colonial intervention in identity politics. Hunter also wrote three separate books on the general history of India which included Indian Empire: Its People, History and Products (1881), A Brief History of the Indian People (1882), and his unfinished History of India. His biographies include A Life of the Earl of Mayo (1875), The Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson (1895), etc. He also supervised, compiled, edited and partially wrote The Statistical Account of Bengal. This is undoubtedly one of the most important imperial projects that aspired to closely know the land and its people according to the ‘enumerative technologies of power’ (Dirks 2004, 355). The Statistical Account of Bengal was published in twenty-two volumes between 1875 and 1879. The Statistical Account of Bengal emerged as the model for Hunter’s most ambitious project – the Imperial Gazetteer of India. Hunter finished the compilation of the Imperial Gazetteer of India in 1881 in nine volumes. Hunter’s extraordinarily rich and vast body of works is one of the best examples of surveillance literature in colonial Bengal. He was highly successful in making a mark for himself as an expert voice on many aspects of Bengali life. It is even more interesting to note here how he continues to hold a significant position in the realms of modern Bengali social science even today.

Hunter’s Empire of Minds \However, the secret of Hunter’s phenomenal success in making a position for himself in the sphere of Bengali cultural life can be found in his personality and his close relations with the Bengali intellectuals. One of the key aspects of his prose is his quality of doubt and introspection. After having closely seen rapid growth of public works across the Indian

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subcontinent a young Hunter in his one of the early major books – Orissa – wrote: This volume has dealt with the material results of our administration, and the physical difficulties which surround it. But an account of Bengal province would be one-sided and misleading, which did not distinctly recognise the existence of another aspect of Anglo-Indian Rule. The great public works with which we have dotted the country will last our time and disappear. The silt of delta will cover our roads and railways, as it has covered over the temples and palaces of preceding dynasties. The fortresses on which science has lavished her ingenuity will noiselessly sink down into jungle-buried, shapeless heaps of brick. The rivers will swallow up our iron-girded bridges, or leave them high and dry across their deserted beds – massive screwpile monuments of a Cyclopean age, scarring the bright face of the rice-crop. The canals themselves will fill up and lie level with the surrounding fields, like the irrigation works of the Babylonian and Assyrian monarchies before them. The deltas and dry places which English capital and science have covered with homesteads would then return to arid wastes or swamps and travellers may one day question whether these malarious regions ever supported a human population, just as at present they speculate on the deserted cities of Tigris. We call these our ‘Reproductive Public Works’, but the slenderest blade of grass has more elements of reproduction and duration in it than our most solid edifice of iron and stone. It is by what we have implanted in the living people, rather than by what we have built upon the dead earth, that our name will survive (1872, 200-201). The passage, written at a time when Hunter had just began to show his true potential as a scholar, is in many ways one of the finest examples of his prose style. Probably it is not difficult to understand what the young ICS officer desired to achieve in his Indian career but to express it in so unambiguous a manner and so early into one’s service does give the readers a glimpse into the liberating mind of a different kind of imperialist. The way he prepared the ground to assert his conclusive verdict is also quite startling. In early 1870s, when British Empire in India was probably at its peak, a young official had the courage of his conviction to think aloud in a

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rare contemplative prose regarding the ephemerality of their great colonial enterprise. This sense of doubt in his own sphere of service gave Hunter a cutting edge over most of his contemporaries. Right from the days when he wrote his first book – The Annals of Rural Bengal – Hunter developed a new language of imperial control which is essentially reflective, contemplative and doubtful. The sudden realisation of nothingness of public works had been placed against an acute desire to build, what Rimi B. Chatterjee called in a somewhat different context, an ‘empire of minds’ (2006, 4). Dramatic public admission of a desire to establish living relationship with the colonised people, mixed with a sense of incertitude, Hunter’s prose ambitiously sought to redefine the imperial discursive practice in India. This cannot simply be dismissed as a magnificent paternalistic attitude. Individuals with their choices, opinions, admissions, doubts, and desires sometimes do seek to challenge and expand the dominant trends and tendencies of the age. Hunter’s contemplative prose style is no doubt a classic case in point. This unique imperial language had an immediate impact on the Bengali readers of his time. Hunter was not simply content of writing books about India and Indians. Right from the beginning of his Indian career he was very keen to develop a personal relationship with his Bengali counterparts. This resulted in a curious encounter which was decidedly different from the kind of encounters that we witness in Fanny Parkes’s early nineteenth century journals (2003, 103-104, 126-129). While trying to become friendly with the colonised, Hunter did not go ‘native’ or forsake his imperial stance. Yet he was eager to find a way into the minds of the educated Bengalis. It is this eagerness that characterises many of his intellectual efforts.

Saving Private Capital Though aware of the futility of the imperial mission Hunter always believed that it could play a major part in the progress and prosperity of the colonised people. He saw in this no moral contradiction. In fact, he championed the colonial rule as a tool for conscious change. However, the basis of Hunter’s imperial governance was located not in military power but in the power emanating out of knowledge of the land and its people. So in a way Hunter’s works indicate the changing demands of imperial governance too. Hunter’s liberal attitude and introspective prose had played a vital part in giving shape and direction to imperial epistemic operations in Bengal. One of the significant aspects of Hunter’s writings was his sincere desire to seek advancement of the people of Bengal through gradual rationalisation

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of imperial institutions. He genuinely believed that the British colonial system could effectively bring about momentous positive changes in the lives of colonised people by locating, identifying and assessing the areas of weakness. However, the whole process needed the effective establishment of a well-organised information network. Hunter considered information as the single most important factor in developing insight about the land and its people. He also knew the value of various social science disciplines, such as geography, demography, statistics and so on, in developing a better understanding of the received information. However, when Hunter arrived in Bengal, imperial information network was probably at its weakest. At that time, the British intellectual interests in India were limited to certain specific areas. The colonial authority remained oblivious to the land’s diversity and complex challenges. Hunter began his famous work, The Annals of Rural Bengal, by pointing to the flaws in the imperial epistemic investigations: Eloquent and elaborate narratives have indeed been written of the British ascendency in the East; but such narratives are the records of the English Governors of India, not histories of the Indian people. The silent millions who bear our yoke have found no annalist ([1868] 1996, 4). Proper attention had not been paid to remote regions like Birbhum and its people until it rose in rebellion in 1855. These flaws in the state’s information machinery not only weakened its authority over the land but also became one of the prime reasons for its failure in securing the ‘improvement’ of the people. This spirit of enquiry lies at the heart of another of Hunter’s very important publications – The Indian Musalmans. In his ‘Dedication’, Hunter quite elaborately explained the motive behind this academic endeavour: You [Hodgson], of all scholars whom our service has produced, have most fully recognised the duty of studying people. The greatest wrong that the English can do to their Asiatic subjects is not to understand them. The chronic peril which environs the British power in India is the gap between the Rulers and the Ruled ([1871] 2004, ‘Dedication’). This politically charged ‘Dedication’ to Hodgson for his role in imperial knowledge formation clearly spells out not only the nature of imperial academic disciplines but also the psychological state of being of the Raj

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officers. It appears that men like Hunter were always living under the cloud of fear and suspicion. It was widely felt that a solid information network would enable the colonial state to rise up to the challenges of the land which in turn would earn the faith of their capitalist masters back in Europe. By the middle of the nineteenth century, European capitalists had invested heavily in every area of the Indian empire, such as mining, agriculture, irrigation, railways and so on. Therefore, any act of popular unrest was seen as an alarming sign to their rapidly increasing interests in Indian wealth. So maintaining peace and order in the entire region was one of the main challenges of the colonial state which it strove to achieve with all sincerity. It should also be mentioned here that the politics of imperial administration also involved a sense of pragmatic financial decisions and proper management of the resources. Previous experience told the colonial authority that a timely intervention in certain matters might help the administration in saving both money and men. The lack of information on many occasions was responsible for disasters that could have been easily avoided otherwise: ‘A few well-aimed arrests would have saved us [the British Raj] nearly a thousand soldiers killed or wounded in the Ambeyla Pass, and many hundred thousand pounds’(Hunter [1871] 2004, 95-96). In the same breath, Hunter reminds his normative readers of the crude fact of capitalist interests in Empire: The enormous stake that England has in India, and millions sterling which British capitalists have annually invested in railways, canals, and other reproductive works since the country passed under the crown, would now render even a temporary displacement of our authority an appalling calamity ([1871] 2004, 96). Safeguarding the capitalist interests were also crucial for creating more jobs for the educated Indian middle class whose support to the colonial rule was considered key to the Raj’s survival. British officials like Hunter could well sense the growing dissatisfaction of the unemployed youth with the system. Hunter wrote in this context: […]English capital should be enlisted in easing the growing pressure of the Indian population on the land; and in rendering as painless as possible, the transition from the purely agricultural state to those more complex forms of society, on which India has now entered (1870, 40-41).

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Hunter knew the importance of this imperial investigative project. The basic idea behind all such epistemic endeavours was to ‘know’ India. It is the logic of capital that necessitated the rise of surveillance literature in colonial Bengal. When William Wilson Hunter in his Plan for an Imperial Gazetteer wrote, ‘Nothing is more costly to a Government than ignorance’ (1870, 39), he was obviously contemplating over the British authority’s failures to produce systematic information regarding the Indian subcontinent. It was quite evident to Hunter and his generation that ‘an essential condition for the safe exercise’ (1881, viii) of colonial control, under the new system of governance, was to have an ‘accurate and accessible information regarding India’ (1881, vii). So it is abundantly clear that the necessity of an information network arose out of the British imperialism’s own internal demands. As a part of the imperial project of knowing ‘India,’ Hunter devoted all his time to write and compile the first complete grand narrative of the province of Bengal. In his now famous A Statistical Account of Bengal, Hunter’s job was not merely to produce information but also to analyse and understand them. One of the most important aspects of Hunter’s enquiry was to find an appropriate method for this social change. In the end, every work had to prove its worth in terms of its utility to the empire.

Information and Insight After seven years of extreme toil, Hunter brought out the first volume of A Statistical Account of Bengal in 1875. In the next two years, Hunter subsequently published nineteen more volumes of A Statistical Account of Bengal. This massive intellectual operation, according to Hunter’s own calculation, covered an estimated area of 192,942 square miles comprising 47 different administrative and geographical units of the province of Bengal and a population of 62,815,370 souls (1881, xii). Twenty-volume A Statistical Account of Bengal was most certainly the largest imperial work on any Indian province by a huge margin. It contained no less than 8,246 pages of information, which is one-fourth of the total printed pages of district accounts produced till 1881 for the whole of India (Hunter 1881, xii). Madras, for which no individual provincial compiler was selected, came second best; its nine volumes of statistical accounts had 5000 pages in aggregate. However, the publication of A Statistical Account of Bengal was spoiled by some controversies. Certain passages on some religious sects of Nadia and Dacca became the source of controversy. S. B. Chaudhuri informs in this regard: ‘Some remarks about the Muhammadan community were insulting to the whole class, and similarly the paragraph on Brahmans

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and Kulinism was likely to cause annoyance’ (1964, 87). In an attempt to avoid such controversy, colonial state had by then established a Special Committee for the supervision of the project. Hunter was criticised for exceeding his brief. The government advised Hunter to adhere to the main objective of the work by focusing solely on the accumulation of facts (Chaudhury 1964, 87). One of the greatest casualties was his introductory volume, which was found inappropriate for an official publication and was therefore recomposed. It is of further interest that Hunter was not allowed to publish his volume on Calcutta under mysterious circumstances. It is not clear as to the nature of the problem. However, one can safely surmise from internal textual evidences from the first published volume of A Statistical Account of Bengal that he had previously an ‘account of Calcutta’ ready for publication (1875, 25, 75-79). In one of his references to his Statistical Account on Calcutta Hunter, in fact, tried to give his readers a justification for a separate volume on the great city: In an account of the District, which includes Calcutta, it may seem that some description should be given of the city itself. But anything like a detailed account of Calcutta would occupy as many pages as the entire space which I have devoted to this volume. I propose, therefore, to reserve my description of the Indian Metropolis for a separate and subsequent book (1875, 78). However no such volume on Calcutta ever got published. Till today it is shrouded in mystery. No scholar has been able to shed any light on the possible reasons for its suppression. If ever anyone discovers the manuscript of that volume, it will have serious import for those who are interested in the politics of colonial knowledge. In his ‘preface’ to volume 20 of A Statistical Account of Bengal, a visibly frustrated Hunter sums up his situation thus: This volume concludes the Statistical Account of Bengal. In sending forth a work which has occupied the last seven years of my life, I have painful consciousness of its shortcomings. The condition under which it was executed render it silent on several points on which information might have fairly been expected, and leave much to be desired with regard to others (1877, iii). Hunter’s bitter realisation of incomplete and fragmentary nature of his work got even further accentuated due to imperial government’s regular interference with his work. The confessional note of the ‘preface’ to the

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last volume of A Statistical Account of Bengal points to Hunter’s failures to reconcile with the lapses in his own project: Historical disquisitions, or opinions on the social and economic conditions of the people, were deemed unsuitable in a work which was to be revised by Government, and to receive its official imprimatur. A general introductory volume was, after being set up in type, withdrawn for this reason ... (1877, iii-iv). At the end of it all Hunter was not entirely dissatisfied with his endeavour which yielded some excellent and exciting results. It effectively put an end to a series of failed imperial efforts at producing knowledge of the country and its inhabitants in an accessible form. In the Final Order on A Statistical Account of Bengal, the Lieutenant Governor congratulated Hunter in no uncertain terms: The thanks of the Government of Bengal are emphatically due to you [Hunter] for the vigour and energy with which you have accomplished the collection of such diverse and varied information, and for the ability and literary skill which you have uniformly displayed in dealing with, sifting, analysing, and arranging materials supplied to you from so many quarters (as cited in Hunter 1877, v-vi). A Statistical Account of Bengal was the product of a very good teamwork. Out of the forty-seven units of the then Bengal which included districts of both Bihar and Orissa, Hunter was directly involved in the compilation of twentyseven units; for rest of the units his job was limited to general supervision. Main job of compiling Statistical Account of districts of Bihar was done by Hunter’s four assistants – D. B. Allen, A. W. Mackie, C. J. O’Donnel and H. H. Risley. For Orissa Hunter’s own knowledge of the place was sufficient. Fresh from the success of his book Orissa Hunter himself compiled Volume 18 and 19, which dealt with the three districts and various tributary states of Orissa. Statistical Account for the Districts and tributary states of the Chittagong division was prepared by H. M. Kisch. He was also involved in the compilation of Statistical Account of Pabna. C. J. O’Donnell, another assistant of Hunter, compiled Statistical Account of Bogra. However, Hunter never forgot to mention his group of Bengali scholars, such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee, T. N. Mukharjee, and so on, whose intellectual support proved essential in the success of his entire project.

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Publication of Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Bengal gave the readers an opportunity to witness how information can be turned into insights. It also clearly indicated how human beings and the area which they inhabit were getting transformed into objects of intense and intimate study. The process of objectification that gained huge momentum during Hunter’s time in colonial Bengal, brings us close to Bernard Cohn’s perceptive and brilliant analysis of this imperial method of knowing the land and the people on the basis of statistical enumeration (2004, 224-225). It also gives an opportunity to measure the strength of some of Michel Foucault’s most influential principles of modern governance, such as ‘governmentality’, ‘power’ and ‘bio-power’, against the backdrop of colonial Bengal. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the British imperial policy makers acknowledged that it was no longer possible to rule the land by military force alone; as a result of this the colonial state began to seek its legitimacy through ‘positive influence’(Foucault 1998, 137) of its power. In order to exert the ‘positive influence’ of power the state must acquire knowledge. Colonial state, with all its mechanism of objectification, imposed its very own type of ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 1984, 73) on Bengal, embodied in its production of information. Though, Michel Foucault’s highly influential theoretical observations are based on his study and experience of the western capitalist world, it is interesting to note here that imperialist forces indeed emulated, to a certain degree, these principles of governance thinking it to be the ideal form of managing the affairs of the state. All this has been done, however, by invoking the beneficial aspects of power. Hunter was a true protagonist of this changing imperial attitude about governance. The arrival of his books signalled the beginning of an era when ‘power’ of the colonial state, like what had happened in Europe since the eighteenth century, started to get more and more diffused, embodied, and enacted. It is important here to note how Hunter aspired to draw his strength from discursive practices rather than purely coercive military tactic of the previous Company regime. Lord Mayo, who himself got killed by a Pathan, played a significant role in the policy change (Hunter 1876a, 237,246). It was he who wanted to establish ‘a system of watchful defence’ (Hunter 1876a, 236). Hunter was one of the most important supporters of Mayo’s ‘passive policy’ (1876a, 273). The success of this emerging policy, though, depended much on the smooth functioning of imperial information network. An informed and effective government, Hunter thought, is better

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suited to rise to the challenges of colonial India (1870, 37). Both Mayo and Hunter saw the use of force as the last option in ruling the state and proposed ‘improvement’ as the most effective deterrent (1876a, 272-273). One of the primary objectives of Hunter’s mammoth imperial narratives, such as A Statistical Account of Bengal was to establish an effective and wellinformed governance system, which would bring in actual changes in the lives of the people. It is this idea of improvement that led the colonial state to take more interest in assimilating human activities in its ambit of imperial knowledge. It is also important to acknowledge here how they increasingly viewed ‘the population as a whole as a resource’ (Mills 2007, 83). There was a concerted attempt to direct all the forces of the colonial state to optimize the potential of the population and natural resources. Following Michel Foucault’s influ­ ential observations on the ‘bio-politics of the population’ (1998, 135-145) we can safely surmise that the idea was to preserve, maintain and foster life in colonial Bengal. A close look at ‘famine warnings’ in various volumes of A Statistical Account of Bengal can give an idea about the changing at­ titude of the imperial government. In an attempt to meet the challenges of famine in Bengal Hunter invented a new alert system based on a close monitoring of prices of the food (1875, 162-163). In this connection, he also tried to assess the average earnings of a day labourer of that particular district (1875, 162-163). Furthermore, he added that on an average the day labourer needed four pounds of rice every day to feed his family of four.1 These accounts also give us a fair idea of the condition of the peasantry across the province. Relative nature of their earnings helps readers to draw a map of economic condition of the people of Bengal. However, the colonial rulers were not always in agreement when they looked to fix the ‘famine rates’ of food prices of the districts. A natural tendency was to push the famine rates as high as possible. In this context, Hunter informed, ‘The Magistrate of Howrah … is of opinion that Government aid would not be needed before rice was selling at 13s. a hundredweight’(1876b, 367). The District Collector of Bankura gave a different opinion to Hunter though:

1 In this connection, Hunter assumed that a common day labourer of Bengal has a family consisting of four members only. This no doubt is a fallacious consideration as the large and joint family was norm of the day in the nineteenth century Bengal. See, Hunter, Account of Bengal, vol.1, 162 – 163 and Hunter, Account of Bengal, vol.3, 366 – 367.

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Coarse rice selling at Rs. 2/8 a maund, or 6s. 10d. a hundredweight, in January or February, soon after the reaping of the winter harvest, should be considered as warning of the approach of famine later in the year (as cited in Hunter 1876c, 274). Two completely different pictures of two districts emerged from Hunter’s narrative. The introduction of enumeration in every sphere of Bengali life was seen as a necessary tool of effective governance. Gradual rationalisation of governance was also projected as a deterrent in preventing any kind of popular unrest against the colonial rule.

In place of a Conclusion Hunter’s success perhaps lies in his ability to question the same institutions that he served throughout his life. It is interesting to note how his personal opinions and ideas made their ways into this huge body of imperial literature. In his writings, we also witness a unique understanding of inadequacy and incompleteness in all things that he did. His narratives often throw up un­ expected admissions of uncertain and indefinite nature. However imperial ‘regime of truth’ and its language of control, though imperfect and continuously trying to expand its territories, were enormously influential as controlling mediums of ‘power’. There can be no doubt whatsoever that despite being uncertain and fragmentary on certain occasions it had played a pivotal role in shaping and directing Bengal’s modernity. Rather than destabilising the foundation of the Empire, Hunter’s tolerant and liberal approach made further inroads into the minds of the Bengali intellectuals. His fragmentary language of power was strong enough to invade the intellectual domain of the colonised people and force them to reproduce this model of information. It could be safely claimed that Hunter’s great body of surveillance literature forever changed Bengal’s very own ways of viewing, observing and knowing an area and its people. Since the emergence of Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Bengal there has evolved no other alternative way of describing the land and its inhabitants in India. Scholars might have introduced a new patriotic and nationalist element in their narratives but the fundamental structure of their books did not differ too much from the plan laid down by Hunter in his Plan for an Imperial Gazetteer of India. In more senses than one William Wilson Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Bengal narrates the story of gradual rationalisation of modern institutions of the state, a defining and eventful

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moment in the formation of modern Bengal. In his series of district accounts Hunter celebrated consolidation of colonial power, spread of standard systems of measurement, aggressive search for natural resources, growth in western mode of knowledge and technologies, increasing revenues as well as welfare of the general public. By the end of 1880s, as has been noted, modernisation had become the basic component of the colonial rule. During this time British colonial power perhaps enjoyed an unprecedented and unchallenged supremacy over the Indian subcontinent. The iron grip of British Empire appeared unshakable and absolute. Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Bengal does not only mark the absolute control of British colonial rule over Bengal but is also a triumphant announcement of rational principles of statecraft in every corner of the globe. A product of its time, Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Bengal caught and fixed forever the enormous potential of the social sciences in the actual governance of the land for the first time.

Bibliography 1. Chatterjee, Rimi B. 2006. Empires of the Mind: A History of Oxford Univer­ sity Press in India under the Raj. New Delhi: Oxford. 2. Chaudhuri, S. B. 1964. History of the Gazetteers of India. New Delhi: Min­ istry of Education. 3. Cohn, Bernard. 2004. An Anthropologist Amongst the Historians and Oth­ er Essays. In The Bernard Cohn Omnibus. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 4. Dirks, Nicholas. 2004. “South Asian Studies: Futures Past.” In The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David Szanton, 341-85. California: U of California P. 5. Foucault, Michel. 1998. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. 6. Foucault, Michel.1984. “Truth and Power.” In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon. 7. Hunter, William Wilson.1876a. A Life of the Earl of Mayo. Vol.1. London: Smith, Elder. 8. ———. 1875. A Statistical Account of Bengal. Vol.1. London: Trubner. 9. ———. 1876b. A Statistical Account of Bengal. Vol.3. London: Trubner. 10. ———. 1876c. A Statistical Account of Bengal. Vol.4. London: Trubner. 11. ———. 1877. A Statistical Account of Bengal. Vol.20. London: Trubner. 12. ———. 1881. Imperial Gazetteer of India. Vol. 1. London: Trubner & Co.

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13. ———. (1871) 2004. Indian Musalmans. New Delhi: Rupa& Co. 14. ———. 1872. Orissa. Vol.2. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 15. ———. 1870. Plan for an Imperial Gazetteer of India. Calcutta: Home Sec­ retariat Press. 16. ———. (1868) 1996. The Annals of Rural Bengal. Calcutta: West Bengal District Gazetteers. 17. Mills, Sara. 2007. Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. 18. Parkes, Fanny. 2003. Bengums, Thugs & Englishmen: The Journals of Fanny Parkes. Selected and introduced by William Dalrymple. New Delhi: Pen­ guin. 19. Skrine, Francis Henry.1901. Life of Sir William Wilson Hunter. London: Longmans, Green.

Telling the Tale of the Garden Zoological: Exploring

Scottish Animal Stories of Andrew Lang through an

Ecological Lens

Ritushree Sengupta Assistant Professor Department of English Patrasayer Mahavidyalaya Bankura

Since the beginning of the generic evolution of Children’s literature as a stable signifier of human civilization, its predominant engagement with a complex interplay of reality and imagination has been observed. It has been marked that this tendency has been found in various works of literature across multiple genres as well as continental borders. The history of children’s literature asserts that from the early period of its advent, the content of the works of fiction mostly involved supernatural and superhuman creatures like fairies and goblins either helping and assisting or disturbing the human characters in various ways, and it has also been observed that animals and non-humans have been visibly prioritised in the genre. 13th century children’s literature can be broadly categorised into two types of patterned tales namely Restoration tales and Rise tales, both of which followed a particular structural pattern with visibly minimal alterations in terms of their primary structure. In most of the Restoration tales, the narrative would focus on a protagonist who due to his profession becomes a part of the royal household and his journey from grim to unexpected happiness with controlled supernatural assistance provided by fairies or a single powerful unearthly fairy ‘other’. For instance, Grimm’s ‘Twelve Brothers’ would be a classic example of the Restoration tale. Classic fairy tale authors of 16th, 17th and 18th century such as Straparola in Venice, Basil in Naples or Perrault in Paris were champions of restoration fairy tales but with certain variations in terms of their narrative construction as well as the art of characterisation. However, the Rise fairy tales which were equally in vogue at that period of time, usually framed the narrative structure following the story of the rapid rise of a poverty-stricken individual towards success, wealth and fame through an array of difficult challenges. On this difficult course of adventure the protagonist however, becomes victorious with the help of magic. Straparola’s ‘Puss in Boots’ is one of the earliest and definitely the best example of this genre.

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A common functioning trait can be observed in several stories that developed in these periods, which is the active presence of talking non­ human characters who are also blessed with intellect, wit and even magical powers in certain cases. In a few stories, non-human characters were also shown in the negative light to make the readers aware of the dangerous world outside. Although the best representation of Charles Perrault is undoubtedly found in his ‘donkey skin’ narratives, another story ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ written by the same author, reveals a rather dark representation of an animal character, an evil fox which can be instrumental in introducing a child to outwardly violence. However, in the real world that functions on the basis of binaries such as nature vs. culture, it is only possible for the human child representing the otherwise corrupt human species to associate with a large number of non-human characters in an interplay of harmonious co-existence, as long as they are temporarily distanced from the constructed rubrics of human civilization and residing or existing in an ideal or make believe representation of nature. Therefore, it is possible to comment that a considerable number of literary texts marked as works of children’s literature potentially display ecological aesthetics and successfully upholds a possible image of (un)-anthropocentric coexistence of both human and non-human entities. The picturesque quality of the topography of Scotland perfectly caters to one’s imagination of its scenic beauty with visions of unending mountains, lush green valleys and deep waters. The images not only represent Scotland as a terrain of abundant natural resources but also maintains its image as a prelapsarian haven, still untouched and unaffected by corrupt urbanity. The procrastination of such an image is not only evident in the most popular literary works of Scottish writers such as Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, George MacDonald and several others but the fancy of such representation have also been found among the painters. The popularity of John Cunningham’s work ‘The Cuillins, Evenin, April 1964’ as a truly timeless artistic recreation of Scottish scenic beauty has justified its journey of faithfully representing the natural view of the land by ornamenting the cover page illustration of Alan Riach’s acclaimed literary work, What is Scottish Literature? (2009). The association of these two works from specifically different genres emphasise the fact that the images of Scotland which have been provided for the mass perusal has been that of a land preserving nature at its best, forever keeping the urban readers longing for its serene and tranquil bliss.

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The political history of Scotland shared with Britain its imperial glory, since the two nations were united in 1603 and the respective parliaments of London and Edinburgh merged in the year of 1707. Interestingly, despite her political liaison with England, Scotland has successfully refrained from merging her cultural identities with their otherwise hand in glove neighbouring land. The Scots not only take immense pride in upholding their Scottish dialect, music and food but desperately maintain a separate socio-cultural identity from Britain which moreover supports their claim of singularity worldwide. A similarly unique quality of Scottish art and aesthetics are their intense and prominent association with nature, which is further reflected in their exploration of ecological harmony in the domains of the real as well as the fantastic. Within the purview of this idea, it is possible to understand the popular work of nineteenth century children’s literature, The Red Book of Animal Stories (1899) by Andrew Lang, which within its significant number of stories upholds the idea of collective survival and co-existence among human and non-human creatures, an idea which was later acknowledged by the school of Ecocriticism to be of utmost importance for the wellbeing of our planet and its inhabitants. Ecocriticism addresses how human beings are related to and affect their surrounding environment as represented in literature. Greg Garrard in Ecocriticism (2004) described the various arms of ecocriticism such as environmentalism, deep ecology, ecofeminism and social ecology. Joseph Meeker’s idea of literary ecology as discussed in The Comedy of Survival (1974), suggests that creation of literature is a unique human function which assists in comprehending ecological relations and the effect that it has on the welfare and survival of humanity and ecology. Literary ecology is the analytical assessment or detailed study of the biological themes and relationships that appear in the works of literature. It is a serious attempt to comprehend the functional role that has been played by literature in the ecology of the human species. Multiple erudite disciplines have their continuing contributions in the field of ecology. An attempt to locate in the literary forms and structures, a stable connection with the forms of nature has been accomplished, keeping an account of their relation with human perception of balance and beauty. Interestingly, contemporary ecology tends to analyse literary characters as typical or atypical human or non­ human representatives and their behavioural patterns accordingly. The human tendency to visualize nature as per their cultural ideas also gives rise to a certain conflict as well as crisis in the same field. But most importantly, literary ecology brings forward a possible field of studying the function

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of literary art as it contributes to the process of survival and natural well­ being of the enlightened species. According to Meeker, certain human activities are favourable for survival while some of them are destructive at the individual as well as collective levels. To Meeker, acts of destruction are tragic and acts and instincts leading to survival are comic. While tragedy brings a cathartic end indirectly promoting an acceptance of mortal destiny, comedy is different. While traits such as pride, physical strength, mental zeal, high spiritedness are all crucial for a tragic hero, it is survival that is the prime concern for a comic one. By any means, the comic hero must keep on living, even if that essence of security is momentary or temporal, but it is the spirit of life that is more intensely encoded in comedy. He states that animals prioritize survival while human beings often prove destructive and suicidal. Joseph Meeker’s idea of literary ecology as discussed in The Comedy of Survival appropriates Lang’s work in several ways. There has always been a cultural tendency to associate children with nature due to their uncorrupted state of existence, still far from being an absolute part of the adult anthropocentric world. It can also be said that due to their closeness and attachment to nature, children often possess a better and responsible ecological understanding which considerably reduces their chances of harbouring tendencies of exploiting nature. The upbringing of a child as believed by the philosophers of Naturalist School of Education such as Rabindranath Tagore, also emphasised the importance of educating children amidst nature to provide each of them with the knowledge of ecological harmony and collective sustenance. An oeuvre of literary works which promotes similar ideologies by perfectly representing such ecologically balanced values often are also marked for their quality to become perfect reads for children across generations. Andrew Lang’s The Red Book of Animal Stories is one such collection of narratives that perfectly upholds certain ecological values, some of which were narrated to him by his wife Leonora Blanche Alleyne, Sir Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas. The stories allow the animal characters to exhibit human qualities and behavioural traits which assists them in communicating with the human characters. However, another thing that is common in most of the stories of the collection is that there is a genuine attempt towards encouraging a ecologically righteous behaviour in children, which Lang clearly states at the very beginning of the book: If this book has any moral at all, it is to be kind to all sorts and conditions of animals- that will let you…Now, in London, we

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often see the little street boys making friends with every cat they meet, but this is not so common in the country. If anything in this book amuses a boy, let him be kind to poor puss, and protect her (Lang 1899, ix). The author’s positive contribution towards disseminating an ecological knowledge runs parallel to his other intention of harbouring humane emotions in his readers such as kindness and compassion for their fellow non-human others irrespective of their species. The Scottish animal stories composed as well as collected by Lang not only promote positive human emotions and behavioural tendencies but also intend to create a generation of ecologically responsible human beings. Among various non­ human characters in Lang’s book of animal stories, there are a few mythical creatures such as phoenix, griffins and unicorns other than the more realistic ones like lion, kangaroo or orang-outang. Through his powerful characterisation, Lang deliberately attempts to present a broad idea of the world of animals, as an innate part of the environment, shared by both human and non-human creatures. He uses the trope of anthropomorphism to appeal to a wider group of young readers, to enrich them with a deeper understanding of non-humans as their co-inhabitants, an equal part of the nature. This sense of coexistence and collective sustenance has been found at the heart of every ecological discourse and text adhering to its principles. Lang’s collection of stories can be divided on the basis of the type of ecological message that they provide the readers with. While a number of stories represent human and non-human communication, some are about animal ethology. Also, there are stories in the book which can be read as specimens of nature writing. The author carefully initiates the readers towards understanding the complexities of the relationship between human and non-human existence in the form of narratives dealing with capturing, taming and even hunting of animals. It needs to be noted that most of the stories in the book helps the readers to understand the need to grow an ecological sensitization and develop an ecocentric perspective towards existence. From the point of view of Joseph Meeker’s ideology of Literary Ecology, most of the stories of Lang attempts to generate ecologically sensible behaviour among the readers and through their versatile characterisation they also differentiate between tragic and comic behaviour in terms of individual and collective survival. As Meeker asserts that human beings are the only literary species on earth, they have the responsibility to use it in a positive way for the greater good of the

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planet, in Lang’s stories one can see how the authors initiates towards the literary initiation of the same. For instance, the story titled ‘Kanny, the Kangaroo’ can be appropriated in terms of Meeker’s idea of Literary Ecology. The plot introduces us to a kangaroo who has been brought to England as a gift to two little children. The issue of ecological displacement can surely be addressed in favour of the non-human character but what is equally striking is the way in which he adapts to his new surroundings. The animal not only accommodates himself within the new setting but also befriends his human and the other non-human acquaintances around him. The simple narrative shows that the behaviour shown by the kangaroo is comic for it does not resist to become a part of the situation but tries to make the best out of it to ensure its survival and also contribute towards the happiness of others. Of course, the children are extremely kind to him, which taking the author’s cue from the beginning of the book is self-explanatory. The story shows how beautifully a connection of kindness, love and mutual respect can be developed between different species. Another story named, ‘Collies, or Sheep Dogs’ also offers a wonderful narrative about the shepherd’s dogs, a popular breed of Scotland. “…’collie’ as he is called in Scotland…is a very quick runner…his duty is to follow the sheep into all sorts of rough places, where no man could ever keep his footing.” (Lang 1899, 266) The story shows how amidst the extreme cold and damp weather, Hector, a collie assists his master Hogg to manage the herd of the sheep. However, parallel to the narrative of a loyal and faithful dog, the story also shows the concern and love of the human master for his animals. Their mutual dependence works in the favour of their individual survival and in the process equally benefits the concerned ‘other’. Their behaviour, thus can be identified as comic in terms of Meeker’s idea of Literary Ecology. Such literary representation, which reflects the ideal interrelationship between human and non-human beings can help in promoting ecocentric principles and guide mankind towards the greater good of the environment. In the nineteenth century, the cult of nature writing had become extremely popular. The practice of natural science was in fashion and attracted both male and female practitioners across England. In Lang’s work, there is a specimen of nature writing which though is different from conventional nature writing which emphasises on the pastoral, which can be interpreted as alternative nature writing. The story which can also be seen as a piece of nature writing

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has been named as ‘When the world was young’, where the author has tried to introduce the readers to the history of the plant they inhabit. Lang beautifully merges natural science with fiction and tells about mammoths, dinosaurs and other animals that had once inhabited the earth. Such literary attempts not only impress the young readers but also triggers in them a natural curiosity towards their planet. The otherwise complex scientific representation, however has been reduced to a childlike tell-a-tale narrative pattern; but it is possible to find in the narrative a genuine attempt of the author to offer a rich ecological knowledge to his readers which can be perfectly observed in terms of his chosen style of narration as well as content. Lang writes: “Not that our little plant was empty and silent, because men were not there to shout and clamour…all these seas and continents were the homes of vast numbers of creatures…” (Lang 1899, 176). Thus, evidently there can be observed in Lang, a tendency to present before his readers a picture of ecological harmony. Although, this particular story explores an alternative pattern of nature writing, follows a different way of observing and articulating natural science, study of fossils and the working of nature, it does lack the typical linguistic framework followed in case of scientific writing about nature or the environment. In this context, it must be noted that the language of science, born out of the discourse of enlightenment does not preferably accommodate alternative pockets of knowledge, a practice which has been resisted by the various branches of ecocriticism. Deep Ecologists have attempted to reduce the restrictive pattern of the hierarchies existing in nature or the representation of nature, and also to accord value to all human and non-human lives. A similar tendency of negating the hierarchies altogether is also found in the work of ecofeminists that has Val Plumwood as an active member, who has also voiced against such compartmentalization of knowledge. Although when Andrew Lang had written the book, the school of Ecocriticism did not exist, but through his writing it is possible to understand his inclination towards establishing an alternative body of ecological knowledge emancipated from restrictive manners of scientific writing. Lang explores various kinds of relationship shared by the human beings and their non-human counterparts in the collection of the stories and thereby informs the readers about the same. In an anthropocentric world, there has always been a hierarchical structure in terms of understanding the ecology. Therefore, the practice of reducing the animals to objects of hunting had also been a normative practice of the man centred world. In

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the story ‘Elephant Shooting’ we are introduced to a section of English hunters who are expert elephant hunters. The first hunter that the author introduces as Baker kills two elephants apparently in order to drive the rest of the herd away from the village. The author by no means represent the animals as dangerous or on a killing spree and their only intention was to cross a river. The hunter too is represented as an otherwise simple individual, but it appears that the demand of the situation makes him proceed towards killing those two beasts. However, while for the villagers the killing ensured a lot of meat to be consumed, the hunter wanted to bask in the glory of his wild game. “The two heads and the task were all that Baker wanted, so he was pleased to gratify the villagers who crowded round begging for the meat, which they are very fond of.” (Lang 1899, 240). The relationship between the human and non-human species is also marked by mercenary interests, which remains a concern for the animal rights activists. However, there has always existed a cultural tendency to denounce the innate value of the animals, an issue repeatedly raised by the Deep Ecologists. Lang’s story exposes how such unequal relationships are established as normative practices in an anthropocentric world order. Elephants are very particular what they eat…In their turn their flesh is much prized by the people, partly on account of the fat, which is not only eaten but smeared all over their bodies. The ivory tusks are, of course, used as an article of trade (Lang 1899, 242-243). Throughout the story, Lang describes various measures of elephant hunting and the reasons behind voluntarily encountering such huge adventures. The tendency of using elephants as means of war has also been raised here. ‘The beast which hath between its eyes a serpent for a hand,’ was much used in battles in those days, and when steady and welltrained, was most useful, both in charging the enemy, and in carrying a kind of fort filled with light armed men on its back (Lang 1899, 247-248). A harsher picture of human dominance over the animals trained for warfare is also depicted in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), in a story titled ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ where Kipling’s play with anthropomorphism

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reaches a different level. Instead of robbing the animals of their respective behavioural traits and voices using the trope of anthropomorphism, it actually empowers the animals to speak for themselves and their experiences in the hands of their human masters within the story. The story evidently contains satirical elements and very interestingly, has a human listener who is a passive witness to an informal meeting of the animals. However, Kipling in the guise of presenting before his readers an ongoing discussion among the animals reveals their plight. A character of an elephant in the regiment is painfully represented in the story, which echoes the Victorian tradition of subjugating non-humans for the cruellest of human purposes. The practice of not considering the animals as objects of nature to be preserved was not uncommon in the Victorian period. Rather, it was taken for granted that their rights over the animals were sanctified as they were nothing but machines, which further was supported by the assertions of Cartesian philosophy. It actually took decades to accept the fact that animals also can feel pain like their human counterparts. Similarly, in another story of Kipling, titled ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ the issue of elephant hunting and elephant taming was addressed. In George Orwell’s short story, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, it can also be seen how the ‘burden’ of the colonial white man compels him to kill an animal. Such narratives can be understood in terms of Speciesism, an idea propounded by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1975), which upholds the idea of human superiority over other non­ human creatures can be seen as working behind such actions. The history of colonial domination has revealed how not only human beings but also animals from the colonised nation were subjected to oppressive captures and leisure hunting. Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan in Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2006) asserts the necessity of looking at animals, like the human subjects, within the frame of colonial history, and initiated a stance not ‘anti-developmental’ but ‘counter­ developmental’ by taking into account several works of writer-activists that validated their proposed idea. The non-human creatures have always been categorized in terms of their values, measured in a system structured by human beings which has timelessly denied them their innate value, a claim that has also been addressed by the Deep Ecologists. It is possible to observe in select stories of Andrew Lang, how in several ways his characters prioritise survival. Being the only literary creature on earth, according to Meeker therefore, Lang as a true human literary representative tries to contribute to the body of knowledge at large, his

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vision of co-existence and collective well-being of all the human and non­ human creatures. Meeker as an ecological thinker writes that: “Into the foundations of Western Culture was built the idea that personal greatness is achieved at the cost of great destruction[…]Tragedy is ultimately metaphysical, and it is always evident that biological problems of survival and welfare are of small concern” (The Comedy of Survival 1974, 30). And in The Comedy of Survival, Meeker also advocates the need to move away from such constructs and advance towards exploring alternate traditions that acknowledges the necessity of ecological coexistence. Andrew Lang’s collection of animal stories, which has been traditionally acknowledged as a work of children’s fiction, can also be recognised as an ecological text; as a significant part of the alternate tradition as proposed by Meeker that does not prioritise traditional and cultural expectation over existence and survival. A steady transition from creating and worshiping heroic figures and their respective actions which are often tragic, can be seen in comic literary traditions which celebrates the very existence of life above any other aspiration. It is this spirit of existence that Meeker addresses in his work and thus earns the reputation of one of the most pragmatic ecocritical philosophers who not only assessed human behaviour in its entirety, but also studied it in terms of tragic and comic components. Borrowing the perspective of Meeker’s idea of Literary Ecology, Andrew Lang’s The Red Book of Animal Stories with an oeuvre of short narratives can be seen as an attempt of the author to present before his readers an opportunity to develop an ecological consciousness and instil in them a sense of responsibility towards ensuring individual as well as collective progress and survival to serve the greater interest of promoting environmental sensitisation, a much needed counter standpoint in the world of mechanical anthropocentrism. Meeker’s work has visibly paved the way for several others to reconsider the position of animals in terms of their relationship with the human beings. As the time has come to reconsider not only the constructed idea of human superiority over the other species, it has also come upon us to find multiple ways to contribute towards the benefit and betterment of the environment. Andrew Lang’s literary text is definitely one of those rare works of children’s literature which educates them towards a better understanding of their own environment. It is a fact that like several other texts involving non-human characterisation, Lang’s Red Book of Animal Stories can also be criticised

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for using the trope of anthropomorphism, an idea severely criticised by the animal rights activists. The texts, indeed are anthropomorphic in their presentation of non-human figures, but are also animal-centric to a large extent. Though anthropomorphism has been criticized by the champions of animal rights such as Peter Singer, its balances peruse can also be understood in a different light. Positive anthropomorphism and its benefits as asserted by Mary Midgley (115) can be taken into consideration while reading the animal stories of Andrew Lang. That is, in many of the narratives, there is a significant amount of attention given to the version of the animals, to their perceptions and also in other times a tendency has been observed to represent ecological relationships through human-animal dialogue which are also often restricted to animal to animal conversation. Mary Midgley in Animals and Why They Matter: a Journey Around the Species Barrier (1983) categorically identifies the difference between positive and negative anthropomorphism. While anthropomorphism attempts to attribute human qualities to the non-humans, at the same time it denies them of their natural non-human qualities. Therefore, anthropomorphism as a trope is criticised for denying the rightful animality of the animals in different genres of literature and art. According to Midgley, while addressing the issue of anthropomorphism, it is important to maintain the rightful difference between positive and negative anthropomorphism in terms of their effects on human and non-human existence. Andrew Lang’s stories testify to his engagement with positive anthropomorphism, according to the idea of Midgley, and thus provides the non-humans with human characteristics. It is true that in the collection of stories, the author bestows upon the animal stories certain human traits, but the motive is only to make his readers understand that their voice just like their existence is as valuable as their human counterparts, thereby upholding a message of balanced ecological existence beyond the hierarchies of speciesism. Blessed with abundant natural resources and scenic beauty, Scotland has always maintained a picturesque image in the domain of art and literature. Politically united, yet significantly distant from the urbanity of Britain, Scotland in the nineteenth century was not severely affected by the industrial grime, a direct result of the Industrial Revolution followed by uncontrolled urbanisation and unchecked population boom. Andrew Lang, quite sure of his predictable readership wanted to ensure that the younger generations be educated responsibly to maintain the uncorrupted image of Scotland and also live up to it, by harbouring a deeper and sensible

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understanding of nature and a genuine intention to experience a balanced ecological existence by peacefully cohabiting with the non-human creatures. His stories also perfectly display an ideal and balanced amalgamation of education and entertainment, thus ensuring their position within the hybrid genre of edutainment, an extremely valued contemporary educational trope which also influences the cognitive development of children. Most of the stories successfully impart an environmental knowledge among the readers concerned. The stories of Andrew Lang, thus, are ideal narratives to promote ecological consciousness among the children, and almost each of them is capable of positively contributing towards shaping them into responsible members of the ecosystem that is collectively inhabited by both human and non-human beings.

References 1. S mart.W. Eight Modern Essayists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 2. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2012. 3. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm. The Ecocriticism Reader: Land­ marks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. 4. Grimm, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm, Matt Haig, and George Cruikshank. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. London: Puffin Books, 2016. 5. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. New Delhi: Fingerprint! Classics, 2016. 6. ---. The Second Jungle Book. London: Macmillan,2016. 7. Lang, Andrews, and Henry J. Ford. The Red Book of Animal Stories 1899. Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2010. 8. Meeker, Joseph.W. The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic. Arizona: U of Arizona P, 1997. 9. Midgley, Mary. Animals and Why They Matter: A Journey Around the Spe­ cies Barrier. Hormondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1983. 10. Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed, 2014. 11. Riach, Alan. What is Scottish Literature?. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2008.

The Scottish Church College and the Scots

Missionaries: Continuities and Influences

Dr. Kaberi Chatterjee Associate Professor, Dept. of English Scottish Church College Kolkata, India

Epilogue: “Nec Tamen Consumebator” It is significant to note that the crest at the doorway of the entrance to the headquarters of the National Church of Scotland in Edinburgh, Scotland, is found to be the same as the crest at the Assembly Hall of the Scottish Church College, Kolkata, India. The other two institutions set up by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, in the presidencies of Madras and Bombay, at about the same time, had initially begun with a similar crest; but they had adapted it, at a later date, to reflect the change of proprietorship. It is the Calcutta institution that continued to carry forward this legacy and does so even today. We may speculate on the reasons for this continuity and explain it with reference to the special impact of the work of the Scots missionaries in Calcutta. It is possible also to speculate and accept the idea that their work had become integral to the intellectual fabric of the city, the region and the state and, hence, the legatees had not felt a need to establish a new identity. So deep had been the intellectual incursion by the Scottish missionaries into the psyche of the average Bengali, that Rabindra Nath Tagore uses the name of Dr. Duff as a metaphor in his short story Ramkanaier Nirbuddhita (1891 rept. in Golpo Gucchho vol 1, 1972, 27) while describing the character of Gurucharan as ‘dof shaheber chhatro’ (student of Duff, my translation) to denote an innate radical leaning against conventional social mores and orthodox Hinduism among the youth of those days. When an educator/ missionary becomes a metaphor used by the greatest literary luminary of that society then we may conclude that the ‘teaching’ had outstripped the original intention of ‘preaching’ the gospel to the ‘natives’ that had initially inspired this foray into India. I borrow this illustration from Professor Alok Ray, and following him, accept this indirect connection between these two

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educators viz. Tagore and Duff (Ray 2010, 124). Tagore’s use establishes the idea of the ubiquitous presence of Rev. Alexander Duff and the Scots missionaries in the intellectual and cultural space of the Bengali ‘bhadralok’ (loosely translated would mean an educated gentleman) of nineteenth century Bengal. An interesting ‘continuity’ would be the fact that the Scottish Church College Students’ Inter- college Annual Competition is still called “Caledonia” and the students often refer to themselves as the ‘Caledonians’, both terms a throw-back to a distant umbilical cord which carries on despite geographical and political boundaries. The other reference that may be mentioned, at this juncture, to speak of a relational continuum will be more contemporary in time. The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Alloway, Scotland had curated an exhibition in 2012 to celebrate Burns and Tagore, the national poets of the two countries respectively. Scottish Church College, Kolkata, had hosted this month-long Burns-Tagore Exhibition, concurrently with the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Alloway, Scotland in India (SCC Magazine 2011-2012, 16-17). This draws attention to the fact that the College, that still bears the name of a religious denomination of which it is not a direct part, does continue to have links in continuum with it and Scotland and that these links are dynamic rather than so much of historical memory only.

1 To look back at the history of an educational institution set up during the colonial times by a group of minority evangelists(Scottish) from our contemporary ‘post-colonial’ perspective is bound to be a pursuit fraught with complexities. The complexities arise from the historical interstices that undercut what could have been a simple narrative of the establishment, in 1830, of the General Assembly’s Institution (now called the Scottish Church College) and its continued existence till date, covering a span of almost two hundred years including the current post-independence phase. The history of this institution, for obvious reasons, cannot be read in isolation and needs to be viewed against the backdrop of the major narrative of the spread of western education across the presidencies of the then British Government in India, of which it was a part. But at the same time one should be aware that it was, first and foremost, a part of a burgeoning evangelical enterprise and, thus, would need a different lens.

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2

It would be entirely appropriate, as has been observed by Paton (1922, 46) to begin in the year 1813. The Charter Act of 1813 was possibly an indirect reason for the Church of Scotland’s renewed interest in introducing missionary activities in India. Added to that was the intervention by Rev. James Bryce, the first Chaplain of the Church of Scotland in Calcutta, who presented a petition to the General Assembly in Scotland directing “the attention of the Church of Scotland to British India as a field for missionary exertions” (Chakarvarty 1935, 46). In this effort Rev. Bryce was encouraged by Raja Rammohun Roy, the other luminary associated with the establishment of the General Assembly’s Institution in Calcutta. While other Christian denominations had already established some kind of activity in India, the Church of Scotland was, perhaps, one of the last to join this enterprise. “Calcutta was the field in which the Church of Scotland first set her hand to the missionary plough,” observes James M. Macphail (1905, 54). When Dr. Duff had been selected and sent as the first overseas missionary of the Church of Scotland his brief had been clear and precise and it had been to open an educational institution close to Calcutta but not in Calcutta itself. Duff refers to this in his letter dated 23rd August 1830’…in the report of 1829 it is stated the Committee resolved that “the site of the proposed institution would be in the province of Bengal and though not in the city of Calcutta, within such a distance of it as may admit of the institution being occasionally visited by some of our countrymen, servants of the Company who are resident in the city or its neighbourhood”’ (MS 75, Folio 26). Duff ’s explanation for deviating from this mandate was clear in the same letter itself. No such area could be found with suitable population or residential facilities to enable the missionaries to carry on their work, he wrote. This explained his selection of Calcutta as the location for his institution. The selection of Rev. Duff to spearhead the ground-breaking enterprise for missionary activities was probably one of the most felicitous decisions that the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland took in the year 1829. Though they had on an earlier occasion offered him this post Dr. Duff had refused on the ground that he was not “ready” but he accepted it, when offered a second time, then (Smith 1879, 1: 32). It is true that when he finally did accept this task, he was totally committed to it and his letter to his mentor back home, three months after he landed in Calcutta and almost a month after the opening of his institution on 13 July, 1830,1 bears testimony to this commitment. He wrote “to attempt furnishing

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you with a detail, or even the most meagre[sic] outline of all the visitings (sic), interviews, enquiries and conversations of the three last busy months, were, from their numbers and diversity utterly impracticable” (Duff ‘s letter, MS 75, Folio26). From this one realises the missionary’s meticulous and painstaking approach to the work at hand. Since this enquiry is to look at the establishment of a particular institution it will not involve the arguments that Gauri Vishwanathan (1990) raises about the British agenda for the introduction and spread of English Studies or to look at the political underpinnings of the use of English Literature as a means of establishing what in today’s parlance would be called the use of soft culture to establish a hegemony. Vishwanathan, in her introduction quotes Gramsci’s idea of ‘cultural domination’ (1990, 1) and connects it to what she sees as “the imperial mission of introducing western education to strengthen western cultural hegemony in various complex ways” (1990, 2). This paper, by following the chronological history of one institution in Calcutta, would tend to take a median stand between the purely laudatory and the exclusively critical because it is going to foreground the positives of the Scottish missionary enterprise to account for the continuity of this educational engagement.

3 Interestingly enough, as one progresses with the narrative of a chronological history of a single institution, it never really remains a simple story but inevitably turns into a complex socio-cultural discourse. It has to embrace and take into account the nuances of the Orientalist/Anglicist debate that held sway over the question of education in nineteenth century colonial India. At the same time it has to acknowledge the contribution of the missionaries as educators while critically analysing the government’s role in validating Macaulay’s (in) famous Minutes of 1835 which relegated the entire corpus of Sanskrit and Arabic literature to less than a bookshelf of British Literature (Minutes on Education, 1835). Hence the justification of the initial observation that this ‘history’ was going to be a perilous journey. When Rev. and Mrs. Alexander Duff had set forth on their journey to India on the Lady Holland they had not envisaged how ‘perilous’ their journey was going to be. They suffered two major ship-wrecks before arriving at Calcutta on 27 May, 1830. The second shipwreck was devastating in its impact and left them with only Duff ’s personal copy of the Bible. The shipwrecks, the physical trauma notwithstanding, left the young evangelist more resolute

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to carry on the propagation of the Gospel as he saw in these sufferings and in the saving of the Bible God’s direction as to his future as an emissary to spread the “Word” among a “heathen” lot. I propose that though initially it was to ‘preach’ rather than ‘teach’ that the Scottish missionary enterprise was begun it very soon became a balanced programme of ‘preach and teach’; and long before the final transfer of power during India’s independence Scottish Church College had evolved into a reputed seat of higher education run by Scottish missionaries where knowledge dissemination became a ‘priority’ rather than a default by-product of an evangelical engagement. The Church of Scotland had established three institutions, in the three presidency towns in India, which were later expanded to include college sections too. “The institution in Calcutta [General Assembly’s] is the oldest in connection with the Church. It is also the largest and most advanced” says the India Mission report of February 1, 1870 (Tulloch 1870, 581) Rev. William Sinclair Mackay was the first to join Dr. Duff and the Calcutta institution in 1831. Duff and Mackay were joined by Rev. David Ewart in 1834. Rev. John Macdonald came over in 1838 and Rev. Thomas Smith in 1839 (Macphail 1905, 55). The journey of the General Assembly’s Institution in Calcutta began in two small rooms in Upper Chitpore Road, in rented premises made available to Duff through the generous intervention of Raja Rammohun Roy. The house belonged to Firingi Kamal Bose (who had earned the sobriquet ‘firingi’ not through his religion but for his business association with a Portuguese mercantile firm called Messrs. D. Souza& Co.), and had been rented by Raja Rammohun Roy, in 1828, for his Brahmo Sabha. But in January, 1830, Rammohun Roy shifted to his own premises at 55 Upper Chitpore Road. So, fortuitously, when Alexander Duff approached him, he willingly arranged for the latter’s school to function from these available rooms (Mitra, 1997, 45). From here the Institution shifted to Gorachand Basak’s house in Garanhata (also remembered for having initially housed the Presidency College for a while) before finally shifting to the present premises at 1 and 3 Urquhart Square (formerly known as Cornwallis Square) in 1838 (COS, AR 00177 v.1, 166).2 The first five students present on the inaugural day at the Upper Chitpore Road address were all from elite families. Out of the five, one later became a professor at Presidency College, and was fortunate to attend the fifty years’ celebration at the Free Church Institution in 1880. The Cornwallis Square campus (where the current Scottish Church College stands today), was developed under the stewardship of Rev. W. S.

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Mackay and David Ewart since at that time Dr. Duff was away from Calcutta on account of ill health. We first hear of the proposal for a ‘permanent edifice with room for eventual enlargement” being mentioned by Rev. Alex Brunton, Convener, in a letter dated 25th February, 1835 (COS, AR 00177 v. 1, 151). Rev. Mackay was entrusted with forwarding suggestions as to their requirements for the institution but were advised that the building should have “an external appearance as appropriate as possible to the purpose for which intended- that of a Public School and College for the Education of Youth” (Wilson and Bryce Report, June 8, 1835 COS, AR 00177 v.1, 88). So, the purpose was the ‘education of youth’ and not only Christianization of the local population. The site selected, on the north side of Cornwallis Square, was public property and under the Lottery Committee. Initially the Lottery Committee had demanded Rs. 36,000/- for the land. The Church made a special application to the Governor of Bengal by highlighting the educational service provided by the institution to the’ Native population’. It was only after the valuation provided by the Civil Architect, Captain Fitzgerald, matched the offer price of the Corresponding Board that the Governor’s office instructed the Lottery Committee to release the site for the erection of the Church Institution. The Corresponding Board bought the land for Rs. 16000/- only (COS, AR 00177, v. 1, 103-105). The building was erected by Burn &co., styled by John Grey (the first plan by Architect John Vos had been rejected by the Foreign Mission Committee), superintended by John Thomson of the East India Company’s Engineers and the foundation stone was laid on 23rd February, 1837 (COS, AR 00177 v. 1, 151).

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Interestingly the Disruption of 1843, which led to the separation of the Established Church of Scotland and the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland, had far reaching consequences in India as witnessed in the very acrimonious separation of the Church assets in Calcutta. The General Assembly’s Institution which had begun functioning under the stewardship of Alexander Duff, suffered a major fallout of this event. “All the missionaries [at the General Assembly’s Institution], except one lady [Miss Savile], threw in their lot with the Free Church. Few among her ministers were called upon to make a greater sacrifice. All the buildings they had erected, save the dwelling-house in Cornwallis Square, which was Dr. Duff ’s personal property (COS, AR 00178, v2,57-58),3 the library and scientific apparatus, were claimed by the Establishment (Macphail 1905, 56). Dr. Duff, with his followers, had to begin again from scratch to build a new institution which he did at Nimtollah.

This Free Church Institution (later renamed the Duff College after its founder-Principal) “opened in March, 1844 with 791 students on the rolls. The General Assembly’s Institution was closed” (COS, AR 00178 v. 2, 56). The premises where the Free Church Institution first began its journey, at 68 Nimtollah, belonged to Mathuramohun Sen. The college later shifted to its own premises at 94, Nimtollah Ghat Street in 1857 (Mitra 1997, 71). We understand from Radharaman Mitra’s description that this building was enormous with 28 rooms that could accommodate 1000 to 1200 students; had 3 halls and two galleries that could seat 450 and 700 students respectively. It also had a library and laboratory for science teaching. This building was later sold to the Government and the money was invested.

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The General Assembly’s Institution, which was closed after the Disruption, re-opened in 1846 with Rev. James Ogilvie at the helm.” We are happy to learn that the aggregate number of names on the list of the General Assembly’s Institution in two days amounts to 751.As it is openly avowed and perfectly well-known that the object of this institution is to combine religious with secular knowledge (ital mine), and that precisely the same kind of instruction is to be imparted which has led to many students of the Free Church Institution to embrace Christianity, this rush of students demonstrates how little impression the anti-missionary party has been able to make on the Native Community in Calcutta”. This was a report from the Friend of India, Thursday, January, 15, 1846 (Ray Chowdhury 1978, 88) and tells us of the resurgence of the ‘teaching and preaching’ at this, the first institution opened by the Church of Scotland in India.

4 ‘History ‘, says Sanjeev Sanyal, quoting an African proverb ‘will always glorify the hunter ‘until’ the lion’s have their own story-teller’ (Sanyal 2016). But when we read the writing of some of the Scotsmen involved with the Scottish Churches colleges in Calcutta a different view emerges. In his Life of Kenneth S. Macdonald, James A. Macphail sheds light on Bentinck’s’ policy of education’. While critiquing Bentinck’s acceptance of Macaulay’s ideas and pointing out the inconsistencies that led to a skewed educational policy, he also readily agrees that “the Government of India have always readily acknowledged that in this decision [of not funding vernacular education] they were to a large extent influenced by the work of the early missionaries (1905, 55 ital. mine). So here we have a Scotsman interpreting contemporary history without a bias. In a similar vein from a report sent’ home’ in 1847 to which was attached a letter by Rev. James Ogilvie, dated Calcutta, 27th January, 1847, carrying ‘gratifying information’ on the annual examination of the General Assembly’s Institution we learn that the situation at the Institution, ‘just after its re-opening precisely twelve months ago’ was indeed a cause for thanksgiving to the Lord. The reason for such gratitude is explained by referring to the various reports that appeared in the local press commending’ the soundness of the system of education followed in the institution ‘ and the ‘great proficiency which has been exhibited by the pupils’. We are also told that a report from the local newspaper, the ‘Bengal Harkuru’ (published on 21st January, 1847) was being attached with it. “...instead of sending you an account of this examination drawn up by ourselves, it has appeared to

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us to be much preferable to furnish you with one of these public reports” [Extract from the Bengal Harkuru] for they felt that in an outsider’s view there would be less chance of a bias towards the institution and more chance of the ‘plain truth’ (Home and Foreign Missionary Records 1847,48­ 50). This shows an awareness of the ‘other’ voice in the consciousness of the Scottish missionaries which belies the taint of the ‘imperial’ brush often used to describe their evangelical/educational intentions. The avowed and primary goal of the Institution, in keeping with its missionary credentials, was the “imparting of that knowledge which can alone make ‘wise unto salvation”’(Home and Foreign Missionary Records 1847, 49). This was never in any doubt. But that academic proficiency was also a recognised goal of the Institution, is made manifest in the holding of Annual Examinations from the first year of its establishment. Sceptics may argue that by being held at the Town Hall with Government dignitaries in attendance, the purpose was more advertorial rather than attainment of academic excellence. But the presence of well-known educators and theological personalities made it a challenge for the students and consequently ensured that only the very serious and committed continued the programme. At this point it would be of interest to read the observations of Rev. James Ogilvie, the Principal, on the examination. While commending the students on their proficiency in Scripture and Literary Studies he draws attention to their lack of interest in the ‘vernacular’ and promises that ‘ measures, therefore, will be taken to render this department more efficient’ (Home and Foreign Missionary Records 1847, 49). As inducement he offers the idea of constituting a prize to be awarded ‘to the pupil who is most distinguished for his skill in the Bengalee and Sanscrit languages’ (Home and Foreign Missionary Records 1847, 49). So though the initial plan offered by Duff was teaching through English, we understand that the missionaries did not exclude the teaching and learning of Indian languages in their institution. In the beginning it was expected that ‘native’ teachers would have the responsibility of teaching the local languages to the students since the overseas faculty would not be conversant with them. Later all overseas missionaries were expected to learn the local language and to prove their proficiency were subject to regular evaluations. That this emphasis on ‘ local language efficiency’ for overseas faculty continued till the post-independence times in Scottish Church College has been highlighted by Rev. Margaret Macgregor and Prof. Kitty Scoular, both formerly associated with the College, in personal interviews.4

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The University of Calcutta had been established in 1857.From the Report of the Established Church Deputation to India, available as an extract in the Church of Scotland Home and Foreign Missionary Record of February 1, 1870 (Tulloch 1870, 580-583), we come to know that the college had been affiliated with the University of Calcutta since ‘four years’ and that the institution had sent up the first batch who had performed commendably. The point of pride was the mention that the first graduate for the year, in order of merit, was from the Presidency College and the second was from the General Assembly’s Institution. Since this affiliation just meant that the students would be evaluated by an external agency and conferred degrees it did not in any way augment their proselytizing goals. Yet the fact that the college sought this affiliation once again proves their academic tilt. This also foregrounds the fact that the College was being administered by “educational missionaries.” Educational missionaries “are men who have fitted themselves by careful study just like other professors for a definite and special branch of learning” says a Church Mission report in 1893 (COS, AR 00170, 165). This terminology will assume significance when we read the report of the Board meeting held on 7th July, 1894.The agenda was the imminent transfer of Andrew Blair Wann to the Madras Institute. The Calcutta College wanted to retain Wann and the reasons forwarded to the General Assembly in Scotland for such a request inform us that the institution was primarily looking at the educational aspect rather than its evangelical interest. Rev. John Morrison and Rev. John Lamb had written to the General Assembly of the National Church, that, keeping in mind Mr. Wann’s capabilities and experience as a teacher of Philosophy, it would be in the interest of the College to retain him especially ‘since a general Philosophy syllabus in place of a text book has been prescribed by the University and the syllabus” now traverses more ground than the corresponding course in any of the Scottish universities”’ (COS, AR 00170, 165). So, the missionaries felt that the move to transfer Wann would be detrimental to the institution. The term “educational missionaries”, thus, subsumes within it the twin aspects of “teach and preach” and by openly discussing this concept the Scots missionaries at the General Assembly’s Institution were highlighting their deviance from the other missions who focused only on the evangelical aspect. The ecclesiastical division, post the Disruption of 1843 in Scotland, had led to the formation of two institutions from one in Calcutta. But these two

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church colleges unite in 1908 to form the Scottish Churches College. This union of the two Scottish Church Colleges seem baffling because it does not reflect any change at the ‘home’ level. The Church administration at Edinburgh still continued on separate lines. To know about this baffling episode in the life of the institution we need to go back to a joint report submitted to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and the General assembly of the United Free Church of Scotland (United Free Church Records 1908 Special Report, India Mission Council 1907, 18). We come to know that the two institutions were in conference regarding a proposal for the ‘union’ of these two institutions from January 1903. What intrigues us is the fact that it was a near unanimous request from the Council of the General Assembly’s Institution and the Senatus of the United Free Church College (which was then called the Duff College, after its founding Principal). The considerations that energized this movement for union, approved of by the parent Churches, are interesting. The first reason offered was the fact of a Christian united front for the local population. The second, and this was interesting in the given circumstances, was the fact of enhanced educational efficiency keeping in mind the new Calcutta University Regulations where the rules had become more stringent especially for the teaching of the science streams. The third reason offered was of course from the financial point of view. Once again we are presented with a strong academic tilt in favouring such a union. This union of the two colleges, at the local level, led to the notion of a United Church College later named The Scottish Churches College. One had to wait for the final union of the churches in Scotland in 1929 to have our very own Scottish Church College (COS, AR 00186, 7). If as Elleke Boehmer observes “the crux of post-colonial debates about cultural authenticity, hybridity and resistance is most prominently drawn at the point of language choice” and “recovery of history” (2005, 197) then any narrative about the establishment of an English language institution during colonial times by outsiders has to be necessarily predicated on these and may, in a certain way, be considered against nationalist resistance perceptions. But as Boehmer says, borrowing from Aijaz Ahmed, “to subtract English [now] from South Asian cultural life would be as absurdly pointless as boycotting the railways” (2005, 200). Hence the importance of the influence of the Scottish missionaries and the institutions started by them.

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To argue in favour of the Scottish missionaries and their continued influence through the educational institutions established by them I would use Boehmer’s distinction between the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘colonialist’ (2005, 200). While the Scottish missionaries were part of the colonial world order, encompassed as they were by the geo-political contemporary situation, they were not active champions of ‘Rule Britannia.’ This is constantly borne out by their deviance from the mainstream and their espousal of cases contrary to the official stand point. By teaching the local youth the English language the endeavour of the Scots missionaries was to provide the students with an alternative ‘articulacy’5(Punter 2005, 39) in the space left vacant by the lack of a speaking voice due to the colonial incursion and attendant repression in the nation-state.

Notes: 1. There may be a controversy with this date. The accepted date, following Smith, is 13th July. But in the copy of the Minutes of a Meeting of 1st December, 1834(8th Meeting of the Corresponding Board) held at St. An­ drew’s Church, Minutes Book of 1832- 1841 of the Corresponding Board of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland for the Propagation of the Gospels in Foreign Parts (handwritten copy), AR00177 (v. 1) Min10/ COS, Archives, Bishop’s College, Kolkata it is recorded as August, 1830. This was in connection with an application to the Government for ‘pecu­ niary support for the General Assembly’s School that had started in Au­ gust 1830’. In James Macphail’s biography of K. S. Macdonald it says Au­ gust,1830. but in the same the fifty years’ celebration is on 13th July 1880. The college follows the accepted date of 13th July, 1830. 2. Mackay mentioned that the lease at the present location would expire on 31 December, 1837 and he proposed to “open the new building on 2nd January”, 1838.Copy of Minutes Book of 1832-41 (v.1), AR00177,168. This is also mentioned in the 19th meeting of the Corresponding Board on Dec.1837at the Session Room at St. Andrew’s Church, Kolkata, AR 00177Archives of Bishop’s College Kolkata, India, 166 3. AR00178, vol.2, 57-58. Duff ’s dwelling, which was contiguous to the Col­ lege property, leased from the owners for 3 years in Dec.1842 was in the name of “Duff or his colleagues or his successors”. Hence the claim of the Free Church of this portion of the land after the disruption of 1843. 4. Personal Interviews at Oxford, UK and Edinburgh, Scotland in Septem­ ber2016.I was fortunate to be able to discuss this aspect with both Prof. Kitty Scoular and Rev. Margaret Macgregor and was informed that the pol­ icy was to make the overseas teachers learn the local language so that they could communicate with the students freely.

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5. Since his discussion is not related to mine I only borrow the idea of an ‘alternative articulacy’ from him.

References 1. Boehmer, Elleke. 2005.Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2. Chakravarty, Satis Chandra, ed. 1935. The Life of Rammohun Roy: The Fa­ ther of Modern India: Commemoration Volume of the Rammohun Roy Cen­ tenary Celebrations. Kolkata: Brahmo Press. 3. Church of Scotland Records (COS), AR00177-Min 10/COS. v. 1. Bishop’s College Archives, Kolkata, India. 4. Church of Scotland Records (COS), AR00178-Min 11/COS. v. 2. Bishop’s College Archives, Kolkata, India. 5. Church of Scotland Records (COS), AR00186-Min16/COS, 1930-1941. Bishop’s College Archives, Kolkata, India. 6. Church Of Scotland Records (COS), AR00170- Min 3/COS,1886-1897. Bishop’s College Archives, Kolkata, India. 7. Duff, Alexander. Letter, 1830. MS 75, Folio 26. National Library of Scot­ land Archives, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, Scotland. 8. Home and Foreign Missionary Records for the Church of Scotland. 1847. No. 4 vol. iv. Kolkata: Scottish Church College Library. 9. Images. Scottish Church College Magazine. 2011-2012. (99): 16-17. 10. Macphail, James M. 1905. Kenneth S. Macdonald: Missionary of the Free Church of Scotland, Calcutta. Edinburgh and London: Oliphant, Anderson &Ferrier. 11. Mitra, Radharaman. 1997. Kalikata Darpan. Rev. Part 1. Kolkata: Sub­ arnarekha. 12. Paton, William. 1922.  Alexander Duff: Pioneer of Missionary Education. New York: George H. Doran Company. 13. Principal, Tulloch, D. D. ed.1870. Home and Foreign Missionary Records for the Church of Scotland. Vol. LXXX11. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood & Sons. 14. Punter, David. 2005. Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Or­ der. New Delhi: Atlantic. 15. Ray, Alok. 2009-2010. “College Assembly Hall e Rabindranath.” Scottish Church College Magazine (97): 124 - 129. 16. Roy Chowdhury, Ranabir. 1978. Glimpses of Old Calcutta. Reprint. Kolk­ ata: Nachiketa Publications.

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17. Sanyal, Sanjeev. 11 August 2016. “Distortion or Depreciation: The Prob­ lems Facing Indian History Writing.” Hindustan Times. https://www.hin­ dustantimes.com/columns/distortion-or-depreciation-the-problems-fac­ ing-indian-history-writing/story 4RcnRvkzJUImo7DlhsW6pJ.html 18. Smith, George. 1879.  The Life of Alexander Duff. Vol. 1. New York And Toronto: A.C. Armstrong & Son and James Campbell & Son. 19. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1891, rept.1972. “Ramkanaier Nirbudhhita” in Gol­ po Guchha. Vol. 1. Kolkata: Visva Bharati Granthan Bibhag. 20. United Free Church of Scotland.1908. Special Report of the Foreign Mis­ sion Committee, India, Bengal Mission Council, May1907. VB. 18-19. Ed­ inburgh: T. and A. Constable 21. Viswanathan, Gauri. 1990.  Mask of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. London: Faber and Faber.

The Kinetic Mission of Kalimpong: The Enduring Legacy of Reverend Dr. John Anderson Graham and Dr. Graham’s Homes in the History of Scottish Foreign Missions

Dr. Subhadeep Paul Assistant Professor Department of English School of Literature, Language and Cultural Studies Bankura University

The personal archive of the Very Rev. John Anderson Graham, the patronfounder of the Kalimpong Homes and the general archive of the institution, a set of loaded repository material of prized historical data, is held at the National Library of Scotland(Archives Hub, n.d.). It museumises the essence of the Grahamite ministry from the inception (1889) until the year 1972. The records (a compilation of accumulated data from 1889 to 1972), include a physical preserve of nineteen boxes, serialised and classified numerically. The archive-hub mentions that these memorabilia offer a detailed account of “the early development and later growth and organisation of one of the great Scottish mission centres in India, and in the light it throws on the social and educational problems of the Anglo-Indians which the Homes were designed partly to alleviate” (Ibid.). A total of four boxes contains the original letters that transpired between Rev. Graham and his wife Catherine. Epistolary communication was maintained most thoroughly, not only as a means of long-distance snail mail but also as what might have constituted as today’s short messaging services through data packs, e-mails and online social media communiqué. They speak volumes, not only of a wonderful spousal relationship, but also a professional partnership that depicts how the circadian affairs of managing an institution founded on a visionary zeal, was conducted in the early years. Archival statistics throw light on the fact that Dr. Graham was acutely sensitive to the steeplechases that lay ahead of him in making the Homes a dream educational and cultural destination, while simultaneously acknowledging the resources he could utilise to make the dream come true. Dr. Graham’s work was twin-fold: bolstering fund raising in Great Britain, while also mobilising local help to expedite his

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plans to fructifying action. The founder’s diaries, letters (both official and personal), and other documents, offer a unique record of the challenges of the Anglo-Indian community during the post-Independence years in the subcontinent, the history of Kalimpong till the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the exchanges between sponsors and donors with John Purdie, affairs pertaining to Bhutan, and the formative Graham fraternity. Reverend Graham’s biography is as interesting as is his illustrious administrative career. Born on September 8, 1861, John Anderson was the son of David Graham, formerly of HM Customs, London, latterly of Cardross, NB. According to Alison Metcalfe, writing for the NLS Blog ‘Dr. Graham’s Kalimpong Homes’, Rev. John Anderson initially worked as a clerk and a minor civil servant from 1877 to 1882, serving under the Home Civil Service in Edinburgh. But the course of his life took a detour when “he attended Edinburgh University in preparation for entering the ministry” (Metcalfe 2016), in the context of which, he was introduced to Katherine McConachie, who was also working for poor children in the West Port area of Edinburgh. In between 1931-32, Dr. Graham was the Moderator of the Church of Scotland. 1889 was a decisive year because John Anderson graduated from Divinity Hall, solemnised his marriage with Lady Katherine and proceeded to India. Appointed as the first foreign missionary of the Church of Scotland’s Young Men’s Guild, the power couple transformed a secluded and undeveloped hilly town of North Bengal, “into what has been described as ‘the power station’ of the Himalayas” (McKay 2007, 71). A select portion of an eastern Himalayan ridge of the then British Sikkim at an elevation of four thousand feet was soon transmuted into a cultural paradise, housing a neo-Gothic church, a hospital, a series of rural dispensaries, schools and even a TTI (Teachers’ Training Institute) that attracted young minds from Bhutan and Nepal. The years from 1892 to 1920 were productive for female literacy because under the initiative of Lady Graham, a girls’ school was introduced and scope for female teacher training was bolstered. The Grahams had six children – two sons and four daughters. The Grahams received their early education from the Cardross Parish and Glasgow High Schools respectively. The founding of St. Andrew’s Colonial Homes (later renamed Dr. Graham’s Homes) at Topkhana, Kalimpong (name the location) was thus a monumental feat for Cardross Parish School; Glasgow High School because the experience of the Grahams was put to test and started from scratch. As Missionary of the Church of Scotland at Kalimpong since 1898,

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as well as Hon. Superintendent of the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes, Dr. Graham proved himself to be a luminary, whose trajectory of “an all-round value-oriented education” (refer to the Prospectus of the school), was highly appreciated and emulated down the line. In fact, on one occasion, John Anderson even went to Madras and lectured on the uniqueness and success of the Kalimpong experiment. The fruition of this occasion was the setting up of parallel Homes in 1911 in Kodaikanal that was named St. George’s Homes. The motivated educationalist Rev. John Breeden, an English Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society missionary in the Madras Presidency, advocated the necessity for an orphanage-cum-school for abandoned and deprived Eurasian children, who were officially disparaged by the educational and governmental policies of the British Raj and socially stigmatised mostly by the mainstream European and occasionally by the native population, on grounds of miscegenation and illegitimacy. Breeden’s flock were often the unacknowledged children of British Raj soldiers and civil servants. While indigenous Indian children were debarred from European schools in India, mixed-race children were an eyesore for racist and racially-prejudiced British parents who did not want their wards to rub shoulders with them, whom they considered inferior and polluted. The gradual arrival of British women on Indian soil impelled these liaisons to go underground. Intimate compromises were radically made, which of course led to much malicious gossip. If the Anglo-Indian community found itself ostracised, the worst sufferers were the children. These unwanted offspring of the employees on the payroll of the British East India Company (mostly English and American men but also of other European nationalities) could assert no official identification or affiliation to a given paternity or nationality and often landed up in slums and ghettoes of Calcutta and Madras, with almost no formal education. In the Madras Missionary Conference of 1910, Rev. John Breeden cited the model of St. Andrew’s Colonial Homes and the enterprise of John Anderson Graham, to highlight his opinion that the Anglo-Indian progeny could not thrive on private alms alone but needed government patronage for their upliftment. In fact, Dr. Graham’s visit to Madras in 1911 and championing Rev. Breeden’s dreams proved instrumental. The foundation of St. George’s Homes was laid and Sir Arthur Lawley, the then Governor of Madras, became the President of the Homes, promising to grant a thousand-acre land in Kodaikanal for the afore-mentioned purpose. The school was later shifted to Ketti and renamed as The Laidlaw Memorial School and a Junior College was also set up.

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Medicine, education and the pulpit formed the trio that determined Christian missionary activity, almost everywhere in the world. The Church of Scotland Mission took this with utmost zeal and solemnity, thereby becoming, what Alex McKay described as “the most significant group” outshining the other missions “established around the DarjeelingKalimpong region” (69). Mention must be made of the fact that the first CSM missionary who left Scotland in 1865, William Macfarlane, was keener on evangelism than teaching. Very soon he realised that medical aid and educational instruction were the best modalities among all the novel means to appeal to the indigenes, most probably because they exercised immediate welfare. Macfarlane assisted the Kalimpong locals with medicines during epidemics, such as a cholera outbreak in June 1876, compelling him to procure medicines from Darjeeling. The seeds were sown for gaining access to local homes for reading and praying, smoothening the path to religious conversion. Macfarlane also established the Training Institute at Kalimpong, rescuing the local populace from the sheer lack of employable skills. While the Institute functioned in normal course to drill preachers and teachers alike, the Grahams bolstered missionary activity multifold times by setting up the girls’ school and dispensary within the mission bounds. More ambitious was the establishment of the Charteris Hospital in between 1892 and 1894, financed by the Woman’s Guild in Scotland and assisted by the very qualified Dr. C.F. Ponder, Mrs Graham and a Bengali nurse, treating thousands of patients from Lepcha children to Sikkimese Buddhist monks. It must be emphasised time and again that most of the plans could fructify in these challenging conditions, majorly because of the personal influence of Dr. Graham. It would not be at all an exaggeration to assert that Dr. Graham had created a cult personality – an exemplar for ages to follow; someone whose name itself would suffice as a fundraiser because of the exemplary output that he had delivered. In the initial decade, with Dr. Graham still around physically, Kalimpong, initially an obscure Lepcha hamlet, now became more cosmopolitan, multicultural and internationalised. Since Darjeeling was an official post and a political centre, missionary activity had a demarcated locus of operation. In Kalimpong, the situation was different, perhaps also owing to the fact that the Scotch [sic] Presbyterian mission owned large tracts of land, on which all the significant buildings were erected. Dr. Graham made Kalimpong matter, despite it being, neither a traditional trade centre, nor of any other strategic importance. The following observation offers an unbiased testimonial of sorts:

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The senior missionaries, therefore, form the local aristocracy, overawing even the British-Indian officials; and Dr. Graham, the head of the mission, is the uncrowned king of Kalimpong, the arbiter and dispenser of justice even to those not inside the Christian fold (McGovern 1924, 21-22). Even today, the prospectus of the school available on the official website page, notes 24th September, 1900 as the foundation day of the Homes that promises to provide its inducted children an egalitarian approach to education, where academic achievement and vocational training are both emphasised, depending on the student’s aptitude. The Mission Statement promises to deliver a comprehensive, all-round education to its pupils, and in particular to care for and provide sponsorship for “needy children including those with learning and behavioural difficulties” (refer to the Prospectus of the school)–which not only carries the baton of the Founder’s vision but also stands for good faith, as far as ethics of disability-support is concerned. The seed-idea of the Founder is presently referred to as the ‘Children’s city of the Himalayas’ (refer to the Prospectus of the school), since it all began with the wish to materialise the welfare of six destitute Eurasian children whom Dr. Graham found in the surrounding tea gardens. He was moved by the plight of a generation of Anglo-Indian children at Darjeeling, the Dooars and Terai. At present it is recognised as an Anglo-Indian school, offering secondary education and higher secondary education for Science, Commerce and Arts Streams in the I.C.S.E. and I.S.C. Board curriculums, ensuring regular Board toppers who get felicitated by the Christian Association for Bengal (CAB). The school has taken up an initiative entitled ‘The Quest for Excellence’ that stresses on sports and modern Indian languages. Almost all major sports and outdoor athletics are facilitated with practice and the Grahamites are known to excel in a miscellany of hobbies. The school boasts of a vibrant choir and crusaders of music that have won various accolades. The Choir is punctual about its annual performance during Christmas at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Calcutta and other venues. The UK Chapter of the school notes that the choir had triumphed even on international podia: “In 2007, the Choir was invited to tour the U.K. (thirteen venues ranging from Southern England to Northern Scotland, in particular St Paul’s Church, also known as the Actors’ Church in Convent Garden) and received rave reviews. A group of Homes’ violinists visited Japan in January 2006 at the invitation of the Japan Committee to play alongside children of the

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Miyazaki Junior Orchestra” (Dr Graham’s Homes). On the same occasion, the choir sang live for B.B.C. The Choir also performed at the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle, in front of musical giants like Sir Elton John and Justin Timberlake, although the composition based on the patriotic title song by A.R. Rahman, namely ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’, from the folk-rock album Vande Mataram, was the show stopper. The original piece containing a massive instrumental medley of percussion, oboe, violin, santoor, acoustic and bass guitars, shehnai, saxophone and the sitar to back up the vocal crescendo, obviously achieves surreal proportions in a choir rendition. Even before that, in 2004, the Choir performed at the ITC Maurya (New Delhi) the British High Commission of India, the Y.M.C.A. International, St. Columbus School and Sacred Heart Cathedral. On a more domestic front, the Choir continues the fundraising initiatives (some others being a walkathon, seminars, webinars, the Bike Bengal, Jars for Change, annual subscriptions, raffles, dinner dances, ‘save the environment’ and ‘walk away from drugs’ campaigns, besides the habitual trust- funds and sponsorship) doggedly pursued by Dr. Graham and this is how the idea of the ‘Children’s City in Concert’ fructified. What began as inter-cottage competitions within the precincts of the Homes has expanded its base as an annual winter event in the cultural capital of India i.e., Calcutta (presently Kolkata). It is not only a muchanticipated affair but also a cultural confluence of the hills and the plains. The school’s website rightly applauds the renown and the accomplishments of the choir, formed of children aged between five to eighteen: “Such have been the achievements of the children of the Homes that it is befitting to conclude by singing in chorus ‘The Hills are alive with the Sound of Music” (Dr. Graham’s Homes, Kalimpong, n.d.). Apart from this, every year in November, the carol service is also held just before the end of the academic year. The school’s marching band boasts of its drummers and bagpipers, who are applauded every year during the Mela Ground performances. The Homes Pipe Band, as it is affectionately called, dons the Edinburgh military tattoo. The school song – ‘Forward O’ Youth Forever Advancing’ (a hymn from Songs of Praise) originally by Les Gonsales, preaches internationalism, oneness, liberty, peace, truth and equality of human rights. Up to the 1960s, the Rallying Song that was in vogue as the anthem, was equally popular. Choir Masters like Mr. Shane Saviel and singers like Wendy Reynolds ensure that the Homes remain perpetually enveloped by music. No wonder, the inductees and the alumni alike become the ambassadors who crusade

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‘Daddy Graham’s cause, thereby proving that not all progressive post­ millennial multicultural schools of repute are capitalist corporations. In fact, the ones that still retain and cherish the values and traditions of the past, are usually missionary schools. The Homes, in particular, are indebted to incredible sponsors from Great Britain, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden and Switzerland, who have meaningfully forged lasting relationships between sponsor and child. The OGB’s, an acronym for the DGH-alumni, maintains a charitable trust to sustain the dream of their founder. OGB branch-outs extend to Sikkim, Nepal, Canada and the UK and they form the Supporters of ‘The Homes Worldwide’. Going down memory lane, one can well-nigh understand how budgetary constraints keep affecting missionary work at every step. Apart from a reformative zeal, John Anderson is also credited today for his innovative mindset. Both John and Katherine Graham ensured during their prolonged forays abroad, that they would write letters each week to their children and send them pocket money as well. In fact, the later-day practice of regularly exchanging inland letters between guardians and their wards, was meant to ensure that distance did not slacken familial and generational ties. When the Homes progeny were questioned by some Aussie sceptics and Kiwi critics because of their non-unilinear national affiliations, Dr. Graham’s legacy spoke for itself. The reliability and resourcefulness of the AngloIndian community was proved during the First World War because around a hundred and fifty ex-Grahamites participated on all war-fronts. Despite staff shortages and escalating food prices, the expansion of the Homes went unimpeded. Inevitably therefore, the school motto ‘Thorough’ justifies this spirit of unfettered progression in all aspects of life. It is this meticulousness that is dedicated to the pursuit of an all-round education that makes Homes a cherished alma mater. The Homes Crests have also changed over time. The original crest from 1901-1946 featured a lion. The Post-Independence era (1947-64) featured ‘Harmony and Learning’. The present crest, continuing from 1965, features the Bengal Tiger. The crests symbolically enunciate the idea that the Homes have sailed through smooth and turbulent phases of history and because of its wonderful cultural adaptability and pluralism, withstood the ravages of time. The setting up of the Cottage System of residential education was aimed to provide the children with a “home” and teaching them all cardinal and collaborative virtues. The model of the Quarrier’s Bridge of Weir Cottages was adapted to bear monsoon

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inclemency. These edifices were individually supervised by Dr. Graham during construction. It shows that Dr. Graham was perfectly attuned to the novelties in Scotland because William Quarrier’s main goal, like his very own, was to rescue destitute children from urban thoroughfares and provide them easy and affordable shelter. Dr. Graham preferred the cottage system of homes because they were far more cost effective than traditional mansions. In order to bolster glocality (Blatter 2013), these cottages were given Scottish names on Indian soil. The first cottage was inaugurated in 1901 was named Woodburn Cottage, named after the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal. The cottages that were constructed and launched subsequently were named after the prime benefactors. In this regard, Elliot and Campbell Cottages were opened – the latter named after Dr. J.A. Campbell, a Member of Parliament. Mention must be made of Sir Robert Laidlaw of Whiteway, Laidlaw & Co., who had commercial strongholds in tea and rubber, and who, on his death, had bestowed money on the Homes. The fact that in his lifetime, Dr. Graham constructed forty-four buildings for his dream project, goes to show that whatever he pre-conceived was entirely for the long-term. The Homes Mission would not have seen the light of the day, had it not been for the three props who never denied him assistance – namely, James Simpson (the HM), James Purdie (administrator) and Dr. Graham’s mainstay – his beloved spouse Katherine. It was indeed a misfortune for the Homes enterprise that Katherine died relatively early in 1919, following which the Katherine Graham Memorial Chapel was completed in 1925, which incidentally, also coincided with the Homes Silver Jubilee birthday. The construction of the chapel was a shelved dream that Dr. Graham revived, following the untimely demise of his wife. In 1938, the kindergarten was completed. In 1939, the following year, Dr. Graham completed his personal Jubilee year (1889-1939) and logically his well-wishers from all over the world contributed to the building of the Principal’s Bungalow inside the precincts of the school compound. Dr. Graham passed away on 15th May, 1942 and quite rightfully, was buried in the Garden of Remembrance, on the Homes compound, alongside his beloved spouse. When India gained independence from the British Raj in 1947, St. Andrew’s Colonial Homes was renamed Dr. Graham’s Homes, in honour of the founder, without whom this legacy would, by no means, have been left behind. What began as an initial hundred-acre lease from the Government of Bengal, would eventually, over the years, expand multi-fold times. The slash below Deolo Hill started off with a rented cottage and six children.

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Eventually, the intake would escalate a hundred times, making it obligatory to include the hospital, a gymnasium and a farm. More cottages would follow over the years–Wales Lodge, Mansfield, McGregor, Fraser, Bene, Thorburn, and Murry–mostly named after the benefactors who were accountable for their construction in some way or the other. Dr. Graham cherished the idea of the cottage system of accommodation because he wanted to do away with the idea of a formal boarding house. Each cottage with the supervision and physical presence of House Parents would ideally provide the parents with a ‘Home’ and inculcate in them the spirit of care and collaboration. The fact that the Grahams were compelled to stay away from their own biological children for long durations, while they attended the Homes’ children, goes miles to show how much of a personal sense of belonging existed between the founders and the institution. But such were the natures of the Grahams that they never allowed any child – be it their own, a regular boarder staying away from his or her parents or a sponsored child, to feel neglected or secluded in any way. Truly like a ‘home away from a home’, younger children are nurtured by their older brethren to participate in mutual interdependence and even jointly cook meals in the cottage kitchen on weekends. The role of the superintendents, often a married couple, addressed as Uncle and Aunty, is not simply to officiate guardianship but extend parenting to the kids, many of them being estranged from or having lost their biological parents. Most of the cottages had their own landmarks and idiosyncrasies that became cultural icons in their own right. For instance, Assam Cottage featured its very famous lollypop tree that could be seen from the steps that led up to SMC, which in turn is known as Jacob’s Ladder. Two movies filmed in the 1970s featured the tree. Sir Cliff Richard had narrated the version. Again, the school playfield opposite Jarvie Hall ends at a juncture called Honeymoon Hill from where a breath-taking view of Mt. Kangchenjunga is perceivable on occasions that promise a clear sky. Ronald Selby Wright rightly observes that this intimate touch that judged no child by differences of identity, was unmistakably clear to all and sundry: “I had a very nice time in Kalimpong and saw with my own eyes the love of Christ that Dr. Graham had radiated to people irrespective of caste, creed, colour or nationality; it is that love that shines there still” (Dr. Graham’s Homes, Kalimpong, n.d.). Indeed, even regular pass outs who had officially cleared all exams and go out in the wider world to make a mark for themselves in respective fields, feel that they have never left the precincts of the Homes forever. There is a sense of

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deep longing to return to roots – a déjà vu, that accounts for a profound desire for homecoming. Dr. Graham wanted the alumni to stay in touch with one another and cherish their childhood nostalgia, as well as make advancements for the future of the Homes. Keeping this vision alive, the James Purdie Holiday Home was built in 1939 and subsequently, another holiday home named Ahava was constructed for missionaries and friends. The Education World Survey gives a high ranking to the school in terms of academic reputation, competence of faculty and co-curricular, sports and life-skills education. It also commends the increasing thrust given to teacher welfare and development, internationalism and special needs education. The Survey credits the institution for the importance it lays on creating “value centered leaders who are driven by academic brilliance” (Education World, 2020). The Homes have also won The Telegraph School Award for Outstanding Extra Curricular Achievement by a School. Despite so much of dedication and involvement in social welfare, Dr. Graham had to bear a fair share of criticism, much of which, in retrospect, seems undeservedly meted out to him. Yet John Anderson took them in his stride because, as ‘Daddy Graham’, he was father to all whom he mentored. To pour salt on his wounds, a certain section of Nepali-Christians bore resentment against the founder because they felt that they were slighted while the Anglo-Indians were favoured. A certain section of the Lepcha Christian community also complained that they were intentionally geared towards vocational pursuits, instead of being directed towards business and trade. The fact remains that the lives of the Lepchas and the Nepalese were quite tough before the Grahams arrived. The Women of these communities were straddled with impediments like early marriage, successive child bearing and almost no cash reserve of their own. The growth of cottage industries pioneered by the Grahams stands as a milestone in the history of Indian local employment enterprises, completely different in character from the MNC Corporations of today. A weaving school, a lace school, poultry rearing, turkey breeding, craft instruction, carpentry, wood carving, silver work–became avenues for men and women of the Himalayan areas to ensure sustainable income sources. Traditional Tibetan handiwork was patronised by the British army members and families and employees of tea plantations. This collectively came under ‘The Arts and Crafts’ section, was under the charge of Bunty and Norman Odling, Dr. Graham’s daughter and son-in­ law, from 1924 to a little before India’s independence. Towards the end of his life, Dr. Graham developed a deeper understanding of the views of Gandhi

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and Tagore, although he also had his own political views in perspective. In his notes, Dr. Graham offered his highest obeisance to the Gandhian philosophy of life. With Tagore, the relationship was more personal, all the more because Tagore often came to Kalimpong for therapeutic reasons and stayed at his son’s house there. The duo interacted well. After Tagore’s death in 1941, Dr. Graham extolled him as a poet, musician, dramatist, revolutionary thinker and social reformer. However, it was Dr. Graham’s personal standing that an equitable partnership between the British Raj and native Indians, in terms of dominion status and participation – both political and social, would stand both countries in good stead. Since he himself always cherished a pragmatic, holistic and all-inclusive approach to things, Dr. Graham could almost always surmount partisan views and sectarian bindings. The Foreign Missions Committee was concerned by the rapid expansion of the Homes since budgetary constraints made them rethink proposals. But Dr. Graham always believed that funds would come when faith was strong. Thanks to James Purdie, a former welfare worker in Glasgow prison, Dr. Graham found a good accountant to nurse the budgetary dovetailing for the Homes, utilising finances efficiently, setting up investments and stocking reserves to ensure a constant emergency-cum-miscellaneous endowment. Purdie would also assist Dr. Graham to take the older boys for treks to Sikkim. The duo knew that the alumni would have to come to the capital city of Calcutta in search of employment and would require accommodation in the city. A hostel named after Sir Archibald Birkmyre in Calcutta for the boys of Kalimpong was a great help and it was subsequently named after the patron. Dr. Graham’s Homes was not just a foray into missionary education founded on a cosmopolitan outlook to life. It was also a social experiment that turned out to be highly successful and thereby emulated by educationists the world over. Mixed-sex education or what is also alternatively known as mixed-gender or co-education is actively promoted and discrimination on any ground–gender, disability, cultural lineage or familial background are strictly discouraged. Keeping in mind, the original Grahamite vision, at least twenty percent of students selected for schooling in this institution, are from the non-creamy sections of society. What might have started off as a need to address the “poor white problem” (Viehbeck, 2017), eventually expanded to accommodate depravity by a much broader brim.

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$ ORW RI OLWHUDWXUH LV DVVRFLDWHG ZLWK WKH +RPHV WKDW RIIHUV ERWK ¿UVW hand data and secondary reference about the century and a decade old institution. Dr. Graham is himself credited for penning several books. It ZDVLQWKDW'U*UDKDPZURWHKLV¿UVWERRNOn the Threshold of Three Closed Lands – referring to Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan, whose problems seeped into the Homes time and again, in ways more than one, because of their extreme proximity to Kalimpong. This book details the Homes mission, cartographical facets of the hilly countryside during that era and aspects of the lives of the various tribes who dwelt around this region. In 1898, his second book The Missionary Expansion of the Reformed Churches was published, with a greater focus on radical evangelism. These books came out during Dr. Graham’s 1895 visit to Scotland, where he became a regular at the Young Men’s Guild Network. Dr. Graham was inclusive in religious matters and was said to have been particularly LQÀXHQFHGE\WKHSKLORVRSKLFDOSUHDFKLQJRI5DPDNULVKQD3DUDPDKDPVD the Indian Hindu mystic revered by many in nineteenth century Bengal as an ‘avatar’. The work Stray Thoughts on the Possibility of a Universal Religion and the Feasibility of Teaching It in Our Schools came out in 1887 and was presented in a Bengal Teachers’ Conference. Dr. Graham’s own biography was written in 1910 by a Church of Scotland missionary, named Aeneas Francon Williams, who later became the Bursar and along with KLVZLIH&ODUD$QQH5HQGDOOVWD\HGDQGWDXJKWDW6W$QGUHZ¶V&RORQLDO +RPHV,WLVD¿WWLQJWULEXWHWRDSHUVRQDOLW\RI'U*UDKDP¶VVWDWXUHWKDW a prodigy like Williams, who donned many hats as a missionary, minister, chaplain, teacher, writer and poet, should write Dr. Graham’s biography. 0RUHUHFHQWO\%HUQDUG7%URRNVZKRZDVERWK+0DQG3ULQFLSDORIWKH Homes from 1958 to 1988, wrote Footprints of The First One Hundred Years: The Kalimpong Homes (1900-2000) that was released at Oxford Bookstore, Kolkata. The book is replete with anecdotal references that enable a nostalgic time travel to a bygone golden era of aspirations dreamt by the genial, blue-eyed John Anderson. Brooks mentions that Dr. Graham had introduced two magazines for the children and, on the basis of these magazines, donations used to come in, which were utilised for institutional construction activities. Brooks also emphasised on Dr. Graham’s memoirs as the most precious possessions in his personal custody. Brooks’s documentation of events and episodes concerning the Homes Chapter is YLWDOEHFDXVHKHZDVD¿UVWSHUVRQZLWQHVVRIWKHVHFXODUWXUQWKHVFKRRO had taken in the thirty years of his administration. Other interesting but somewhat offbeat books are Chris Ahoy’s The Boy From Kalimpong and

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Dantan Balaram’s Tales from the Homes: A Basket Full of Memories. Come Walk with Me… Dr. Graham was a man of magnanimity and innovativeness. Professor Charteris spoke of Reverend Dr. John Anderson Graham as a person who had the “brain of a statesman, the heart of a little child and the record of a hero” (Dr. Graham’s Homes, Kalimpong, n.d.). Dr. Graham proved that if one had an abundance of love, other deficiencies could very well be compensated for. The glory of Kanchenjunga was heightened because Dr. Graham regarded the glory of God above everything else. This doxology stood him in good stead through all adverse situation. J.H. Proctor in his article ‘Scottish Missionaries in India: An Inquiry into Motivation,’ opines that despite charges of missionary activity being predominantly propelled by political expediency and religious conversion, philanthropic action is never easy to rationalize, and would certainly not have materialized, had the missionaries themselves not been insightful and vocal. The life story of Dr. Graham is most fitting to the afore-mentioned observation. Dr. Graham began with the Church and after his formal retirement from the Kalimpong Mission in 1931, after forty-two years of service, he was called to the Moderator’s Chair of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland – in fact, the first missionary of the Church of Scotland to assume this position. In 1932, he preached at the Anglican Liverpool Cathedral at the invitation of Bishop Albert, despite himself being a Presbyterian. The Kaiser-i-Hind, the first public award that Dr. Graham received in 1903 and the Degree of Doctor of Divinity from the University of Edinburgh that he received in 1904, were rightfully deserved, for a lifetime of selfless service and humanitarian upliftment. The Homes remains an enduring testimony to the fact that even progressive twenty first century multicultural schools of repute that still retain and cherish the values and traditions of the past, do so because of a generosity of vision and not just of the purse. Dr. Graham breathed his last on 15th May, 1942. For himself, he had taken the simplest epitaphs that needs no elucidation. The Garden of Remembrances still features these words, etched on his tombstone: “Dr. Graham who loved children founded these Homes in 1900” (Ibid.).

References 1. Archives Hubs. n.d. “Kalimpong Papers.” Accessed May 30, 2020. https:// archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb233-kal.

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2. Blatter, J. 2013. “Glocalization.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.bri­ tannica.com/topic/glocalization. 3. Dr Graham’s Homes. n.d. “About the Homes.” Accessed May 30, 2020. https://www.drgrahamshomes.co.uk/about-us/about-the-homes/ “Reverend John Anderson: Founder of the Homes.” Accessed May 30, 2020. https://www.drgrahamshomes.net/reverend-john-anderson-gra­ ham.php. “School Choir.”Accessed May 30, 2020. http://www.drgrahamshomes.net/ school-choir.php. 4. Education World. 2020. “Dr. Graham’s Homes, Kalimpong.” Last modified 2020. Accessed May 30, 2020. https://www.educationworld.in/dr-graha­ ms-homes-kalimpong/. 5. McKay, Alex. 2007. “Missionary Medicine and the Rise of Kalimpong.” In Their Footprints Remain: Biomedical Beginnings Across the Indo-Tibetan Frontier, by Alex McKay, 69-71. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n0qk.8. 6. McGovern, William. 1924. To Lhasa in Disguise: A Secret Expedition through Mysterious Tibet, New York: Grosset & Dunlop. 7. Metcafe, Alison. 2016. “Dr. Graham’s Kalimpong Homes.” National Library Scotland (blog). https://blog.nls.uk. 8. Proctor, J.H. 1990. “Scottish Missionaries in India: An Inquiry into Motivation.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 13 (1): 43-61. doi:10.1080/00856409008723134. 9. Viehbeck, Markus. 2017. Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Bor­ derlands: Kalimpong as a “Contact Zone”. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Univer­ sity Publishing. doi:https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.301.409.

Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar and Scottish Transactions

in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya Professor Department of English and Culture Studies The University of Burdwan, West Bengal India [email protected]

This essay explores the specificities of Scottish/Victorian and Bengali/Indian educational transactions, while focussing upon the figures of Ishwarchandra Sharma otherwise known as Bidyasagar1 (1820-1891) in colonial Bengal and the phrenological ideologue, George Combe (1788-1858) of Scotland. It explores Combe’s educational ideas as they were transmitted through the knowledge-texts of the Scottish publisher duo, William and Robert Chambers (1800—1883 and 1802-1871) and as received by Bidyasagar and nineteenth- century Bengal. I begin in a somewhat anecdotal fashion, with a reference to Sondra Cooney’s dissertation, exploring the lives and times of Robert and William Chambers, the Scottish “publishers for the people”2 as this essay is profoundly indebted to Cooney’s investigations. However, while her investigations of Robert and William Chambers-the publisher sibling duoand the sheer impact of their published material (primarily pedagogic) in Victorian Britain is richly nuanced, Cooney expends a single, unexplained, unauthenticated line stating that some Chambers’ educational material (The Moral Class Book) was “translated into Marhatta” and “used in India”! (Cooney 1970, 211).3 Not only does the orientalised spelling of Marathi as “Marhatta (coming as this dissertation does, as late as in the 1970s) dilute the gravitas of Cooney’s investigations, her utter lack of scholarly attention towards the impact of Chambers’ publications in ‘educating the subjects’ of the empire (and especially those in Scotland’s ‘cornchest’)4 reduces her study to a mere exploration of nineteenth- century Scottish cultural history. The earliest and most well-known reception of The Moral Class Book is its adaptation in Bengali by Ishwarchandra Bidyasagar and Rajkrishna Bandopadhyay as Nitibodh. The “Scottish Victorianism” that Cooney claims for the Chambers brothers in her dissertation, was, in the ultimate analysis a global movement

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and ideal, sustained/produced by the British empire’s colonising structures. It cannot be understood without being sensitive towards the Scottish publishers’ reach and relevance in the Indian subcontinent,5 or for that matter, in other parts of the British empire, such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and parts of South East Asia.6 I contend that, the Indian and especially the Bengali-Indian case merits particular attention while charting this transactional history. The arrival of Chambers’ pedagogic material via the colonial encounter and its Scottish administrative-educationist spearheads in the Indian subcontinent, elicited a complex reception and a creative recasting on a scale, that was hardly witnessed anywhere else in the British empire.

ii A Scottish Presbytarian Affair Investigations regarding such transactions could be situated within a larger Scottish investment in the colonial enterprise. While agreeing broadly with E.W. Thompson’s thesis that the education enterprise in nineteenth-century India was a primarily Scottish Presbytarian affair, one must be sensitive to the incredibly layered, complex nature of the project with intersecting strands, ambivalent and contradictory desires. The push for a transition from pathshala kind of undifferentiated-by-classrooms-schooling, to a uniform European style of schooling was initiated, so to say, through the Scottish William Adam’s detailed Report on the State of Education in Bengal and Behar (1838) comprising of reports of 1835, 1836, and 1838, that outlined the need for pathshala reform, on the basis of Adam’s empirical mapping of 10,000 elementary schools in the Bengal Presidency. Adam had, to a great extent, been influenced by the Scottish evangelist Charles Grant’s Observations (1813). Grant was incidentally also the Vice Provost of the Fort William College, Calcutta, the seat of colonial learning. The empire’s project of ‘critical’ anglicisation-vernacularisation of Indian languages,7 was worked out through Scottish educationist-administrator figures such as James Mill, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Trevelyan, John Murdoch. Scottish scholar administrators such as Thomas Munroe (1761-1827) John Muir, James Todd, Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) who had strong Orientalist inclinations, and enriched classical Persian and Sanskrit studies through translation and revival of ancient texts. The empire’s specific project of valorising European culture (and English

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studies) as largely informed by Protestant Presbytarian ideology was taken up by several Scottish missionaries such as Alexander Duff (1806-1878), David Hare, John Wilson (1804-1875), and John Anderson (1805-1855). All of them went on to establish schools and colleges, the General Assembly or Scottish Church College in Calcutta by Reverend Alexander Duff, Madras Christian College by Reverend Anderson in Madras, and Reverend John Wilson the Wilson College, the University of Bombay and the Asiatic Society of Bombay by Reverend Wilson in Bombay.8 However, it is in the particularities of Ishwarchandra Bidyasagar and his Scottish transactions that I would confine my investigations to, as it is that brightest point, that luminous junction through which this multipointed refraction of Scottish/Bengali ideals of education may be perceived. While studies regarding Bidyasagar’s Scottish connections have been mostly confined to an examination of the Ishwarchandra’s translation of the Chambers’ educational texts,9 I propose a more expansive and layered approach to this issue, and identify the refraction of Combian phrenological ideologies through the Chambers’ knowledge-texts, and Ishwarchandra Bidyasagar’s complex reception of the same.

iii “[…] the most advanced views.” I pay the greatest of attention to the manifesto-like “Introduction” of the Chambers’ Educational Course as its key to the Scottish-Victorian approach to education and the nature of these transactions. The “Introduction” declares that the Chambers brothers “have just commenced the publication of a series of educational works, designed to embrace education, physical, moral and intellectual according to the most advanced views”; that their intent is to “introduce young people to our best authors and books of all ages” and that, “to all appearances this will also be a successful undertaking” (emphases mine, ii). When the Chambers siblings note that their publication process is coloured by “advanced views” they are referring particularly to phrenological belief in the evolutionary possibilities of learners. The statement “education, physical, moral and intellectual” is a typically Combian, used severally in George Combe’s The Constitution of Man: Considered in Relation to External Objects. (1828). Combe’s Constitution along with his Lectures on Popular Education (1848), his promoting of radical Normal Infant Schools

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in Scotland, all underlined the innate intellectual capabilities of a child and those idioms of improvability.10 The task of the educator was to arouse those capacities rather than to inscribe upon on an ignorant mind, train and/or discipline a quasi-deviant one. The Chambers’ Educational Course restates the phrenological position that education enables learners to take a holistic view of their lives, take charge of the same, and improve their chances of achieving material and spiritual happiness. The Bengali educationist, and teacher of Debendranath Tagore established Tatwabodhini Pathshala, and a close associate of Ishwarchandra Bidyasagar, Akshaykumar Dutt (1820-1886) translates the idea exactly as “sharirer o monobritti sakal chalana na korile sukhlabher ar dwitiya path nai” (there is no other way to happiness except the combined use of intellectual and physical capacities, Bajhya bastur sahit manab prakritier sambandha bichar: pratham bhag, “Manushyer sukhotpottir bishay” Chapter 3, 83) as early as in 1851. Even as late as in 1861, Herbert Spenser uses the Combian phrase Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical to entitle his book. The long- lasting influence of Combian ideas about organically connected education that sees the physical being as linked to the intellectual and as producing the moral cannot be underestimated so far as the emergent Scottish education system was concerned. Neither can its impact be trifled with, in so far as it contested a dominant Evangelist determinism regarding the learners’ capacities (or the lack thereof) and suspicion of a child’s innate culpability. For Combe such “advanced views” also constituted of a secular approach to pedagogy. Such an approach not only meant emphasising a natural, humanistic and value-based approach to the Christian religion, as opposed to its deterministic, revealed, miraculous aspects in earlier educational texts, but also insisted upon a statist takeover of the education system rather than assigning the task of education in the hands of the Church. If there is any ideological glue that binds together the vast and layered pedagogic material that the Chambers’ produced in their Educational Course, it would be the phrenological approach to education as learner centric, organically integrated and as having material life-changing capacities. The Chambers’ siblings (and especially Robert) considered George Combe as their ideological mentor and serialised Combe’s Lectures on Popular Education in the Chambers’ Edinburg Journal in 1833. Robert Chambers remained Combe’s ardent admirer throughout his life and later the Chambers publishing company’s combined with George Combe to

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publish a vastly popular edition of the Constitution for a mere one shilling and six pence. By 1838 this had made Combe’s book a best seller on par with The Bible, A Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe. Robert Chambers’ Vestiges (that was published anonymously) was yet another bestseller and remarkable as an ‘afterlife’11 of the Constitution. Such “advanced views” in European education had many progenitors including the most well- known of Continental educators, the Swiss, Johan Pestalozzi (1746-1827).12 The love-infused Pestalozzian system (where a mother like Gertrude’s teaching methods serve as a pedagogic model)13 was meant to arouse the learner’s sensitivities through Anschauung or a sense perception of the material world. More popularly known as object lessons, this method was remarkably close to the Combe-initiated, learner-centric pedagogic system. A Foucauldian scholar would notice in these pedagogic turns, a break from an older monitorial, rote-based, discipline and punishinformed pedagogic system, to a more learner centric one. This new subtle dispersal of the teaching- learning process, would now place the onus of education upon the learner. It was primed to arouse the learner’s intellectual capacities, while transforming the teacher as a self-less, motherlike enabler. It was also a process that sought to replace religious icon-ideals (read Protestant Christianity) infusing pedagogic material with such material that enunciated secular humanistic values. The learners were now encouraged to empathise with fellow beings, the less privileged, the non-human world; differentiate between good and evil conduct and understand their real-life consequences of their actions. The transactional lines between Pestalozzi-Combe-Chambers and Ishwarchandra Bidyasagar-Akshay Chandra Dutt-Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay mark this rupture between the older systems of top down education. While it was Akshaykumar Dutt who actually translated Combe’s The Constitution of Man as Bajhya bastur sahit manab prakritir sambandha bichar, and adapted parts of Combe’s Lectures on Popular Education in his Charupath (Entertaining Lessons, part III, 1859), and Bhudeb Mukhopadhay commended for his ability to “arouse interest in students” through advanced teaching methods; it is Bidyasagar’s translations of the Chambers’ knowledge texts (First and Second Books of Reading as Barnaparichay Pratham o Dwitiya bhag; Rudiments of Knowledge as Bodhodoy, Eminent Lives as Charitabali, The Moral Class Book as Nitibodh) that actually introduced a radical pedagogic shift in the Bengal presidency.

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The secularising turn in Combe’s educational philosophies was bitterly resented and this shift was neither simple and uncomplicated in Britain, nor in Bengal where it was received. Combe was rejected for trying to push through a “godless” education system and reduced to a persona non grata in Edinburgh even as his prestige in North America and the Continent continued to rise. Nor was the shift simple in Bengal as traditionalists such as the playwright Amritalal De resented Ishwarchandra Bidyasagar’s Charitabali replacing of the traditional pathshala textbooks enumerating hagiographies of Narayan, an avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu. Charitabali according to traditionalists was promoting study of culturally dissonant and human lives of Europeans such as Charles Duval and Copernicus, as opposed to a more desirable study of Hindu god ‘lives.’ The complications involved in such radical shifts may be appreciated in the John MurdochBidyasagar debate over the contents of Bodhodoy, a text that was an adaptation of Chambers’ Rudiments of Knowledge. Murdoch, even after being a direct student of the Scottish David Stow (and Stowe being the inceptor of Pestalozzian methods in his famous Normal School of Glasgow) was most unhappy that Bidyasagar’s textbooks (especially his recasting of the Chambers’ texts) were completely bereft of god-belief. The Scottish traditionalist resentment towards secularising tendencies of Combian educational philosophies were repeated with a difference in Bengal.

iv “[…] how conduct and happiness are joined” Combe’s address to David Welsh, the President of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society of 1820 is important in so far as it transfers the reins of control from the teacher-educator to the learner-student and enables learners’ intellectual and emotive capacities: Let [the children] see from their infancy the real situation in which they stand as created beings; and point out to what extent they are arbiters of their own fate, or at least how conduct and happiness are joined (Cooney 1970, 157). That education aids formation of good “conduct” and good conduct in turn to “happiness” is the informing principle of the nineteenth- century Scottish educational enterprise. “If then” Combe notes, the human being is “an improvable being,” he then “must be educated” to achieve his potential (Combe 1848, 10). By the same logic “parents who neglect education of their

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children” rivet the chains of dependence about their necks forever” (Combe 1848, 27). The rhyming lines in Madanmohun Sharma Tarkalankar’s (one of the closest collaborators of Bidyasagar in his education enterprise) Bengali primer Sishu Shiksha-“Lekha poda kore jei /gadi ghoda chode shei” (the one who studies well, rides cars and carriages, Shishu Siksha pratham bhag, 1850, lesson 27, 209) echo the Scottish Victorian belief in the life-changing capacities of formal education. Akshaykumar Dutt’s repeats these exact Combian ideas, in rather convoluted Bengali, in an essay entitled “Susikhita o asikhshita loker sukher tarotamya” “The difference between the happiness of a well-educated and an uneducated person.” The similarity is not so surprising given that Dutt’s essay is an adaptation of Combe’s Lectures on popular Education: […] susikkhita byakti jnyanjanita o dharmotpadya porishuddha sukh sambhog kariya, apnake bhulok opekshae utkrishtatara bhuban adhibasher upajukta karite thaken (the well-educated person’s enjoys his intellectual, moral development-induced happiness and continues to evolve so as to inhabit an even better place than the one she presently resides in” Charupath, III 132). Barnaparichay affirms that “je chatra pratyaha pathshale giye lekha poda shikhe se sakaler priya hoe” (the student that attends school and learns lessons regularly comes to be loved by all, 17).14 Both the primers Shishu Siksha and Barnaparichay15 are littered with simple rhymes, little prose pieces and anecdotes affirming the “happiness” that will come from educating oneself with good conduct and the grief that might ensue from the lack thereof. Bidyasagar’s own improvement, from being a son of an impoverished bill-collector of a Calcutta aratdar (a whole seller merchant), compelled to walk from Birsingha in Medinipur to Kolkata for lack of means to hire carriages, and with absolutely nothing but the cultural capital of being affiliated to a respected Brahmin pundit family, his rise in terms of social prestige and material wealth to qualify for Madhusudan’s appellation as the “first man among Bengalis,” during his lifetime, was nothing short of spectacular. His last will and testament by which Bidyasagar provided for forty-five families/people related to him by blood, similar or more numbers of his acquaintances, and made funds available for various trusts, endowments, schools, even after his death, proves the capital-earning potential of education.16 Bidyasagar was able to return a loan of 600 rupees (that he had taken to buy a wooden second-hand printing machine for setting up the Sanskrit Jantra or Press) within a month at a time when ten

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to fifteen rupees was the average wage of Bengali kerani. He was also able to deposit a princely sum of five-thousand rupees as caution money to become head sheresitidar and pundit of Fort William College. While the first material feat (the return of a loan of six hundred rupees) was made possible because Bidyasagar had struck up a deal with Colonel Marshall about Fort William College buying a hundred copies of a ‘purified edition’ of Bharatchandra Raygunakar’s Annadamangal at a steep, six rupees-per­ book, price, it is his enormous energies, optimism and vision that made him a success in his publishing ventures.17

v […] life is a series of processes The flipside of the Combian insistence on a pedagogic system primed to arouse learners and make them aware of their innate capabilities, was that they were simultaneously sensitised, very early in their lives, to the consequences of their conduct, allowing little or no latitude for childlikeplayfulness. Combe notes that they (that is the learners) “should be taught to try experiments and note the consequences” and “be trained to perceive and comprehend that life is a series of processes,” and that “each of which has an inevitable consequence of good or evil attached to it […].” It is here that the Scottish system (and its Bengali reception in the Bidyasagar produced primers and readers) differed from the Continental and especially Pestalozzian insistence on a love-infused teaching learning space. Combe’s educational theories, for all their trust reposed in the learners’ abilities were darkened by shadows of Combe’s personal memories regarding the prevailing Calvinistic determinism in the Scottish pedagogic system, and the harshness of disciplining lashes in his childhood schools. The terrible fate of Jadab, whose father, disgusted by his son’s continual defiance, and slacking in studies, ultimately gives up on him, refusing to buy his books or allowing Jadab within his house in Bidyasagar’s Barnaparichay (dwitiya bhag, lesson 3), is a lesson in persons/relations such as father, mother, the pathshala, guru mohashoy, willing learners and class mates such ass Abhay and Bhuban, as opposed to the slacker Jadab, as well as a valuable lesson about life being a “series of processes, each of which has an inevitable consequence of good or evil attached to it.” Madanmohun Tarkalankar’s Shishu Siksha portrays slackers and liars in the figures of Harihar and Krishnadas, and punishment that ensues from their bad conduct. Madanmohun also portrays his sushilas, the good girls, Sama and Bama, even

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as their conduct is reported to a supposedly duhsheel (bad) boy Rakhal in Shishu Siksha. Madanmohun’s fictive world is, however, a far happier one when compared to that of Bidyasagar. Bidyasagar’s primer, Barnaparichay presents grim threats as examples, rather than opportunities for happiness. Callousness, neglect of offered education opportunities and repeated defiance of parental and institutional authority, brings the character of Rakhal to utter grief, as he is rejected by both his parents and his neighbourhood and must roam around begging for sustenance. Bhuban, the other bad boy in Barnaparichay (dwitiya bhag), is ultimately hanged for his evil deeds but not before he has bitten off his aunt’s earlobe, for it is his aunt that Bhuban blames, for not restraining him, and not imparting conduct- lessons when he was still her ward. The greatest importance given to parental and parentlike teacher’s guidance in improving their ward’s conduct through education and enhancing their chances of happiness cannot be missed. Nor can one forget, mostly from Bidyasagar’s younger contemporary Chandicharan Bandopadhyay’s biography of Ishwarchandra, the harshness that Thakurdas Bandopadhyay inflicted upon the young Ishwarchandra whenever the child showed the slightest signs of slacking in his studies in his Kolkata dwellings. The merciless beatings, and rigorous, often inhuman regime of learning that Thakurdas subjected Ishwar to, stood his boy in good stead throughout his life. His ability to write out an Upakramanica (a simplified Sanskrit grammar book, enabling new and easily-intimidated learners, a quick and easy way of learning Sanskrit grammar) within a week; perform the onerous task of a principal of Sanskrit College and inspector of district schools while excelling in practically every modern genre in production of Bengali literature, packing in the Sanskrit cultural moorings and European knowledge to create a vibrant and robust vernacular, that is Bengali, were the result of those lesson-learning rigours, that he as Thakurdas’ ward, was forced to undergo. As a child of an impoverished Brahmin pundit that was working as a clerk in a shop for mere ten rupees, Ishwarchandra was more than aware that the only option that the subjected Indians had to improve their condition and attain “happiness,” was to educate themselves, to use learning as a weapon.

vi “[…] this will also be a successful undertaking”: Knowledge as enterprise. I shift again to the Chambers’ “Introduction” to the Educational Course where it emphasises that “this will also be a successful undertaking.” This statement

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presupposes that their Educational Course creation efforts will be as successful an enterprise as their publishing of The Edinburgh Journal, and echoes the Scottish Victorian belief in the capital making possibilities of formal education. Significantly, much of the Chambers’ profits came from their incredibly successful publication of Combe’s Constitution, the global popularity of their knowledge texts that propagated those “advanced views” regarding education and Robert Chambers’ Vestiges, a phrenology inspired text. Central to such an enterprise was the recognition of formal education as precious, a-near fetishized capital within the ambit of print modernity and with limitless capital earning possibilities. Though such capital was understood as cultural, a clear-eyed recognition that such cultural capital could be monetised, informed the education-as-enterprise project. The Chambers’ publishing enterprise, as a rags-to-riches story18 in which textbook-making and publishing that became new modes of capital making were of course predicated upon an emergent technostate comprising of steam powered printing machines, cheaper and faster binding techniques, commissioning printed matter through wider network of railways and steamships, and ever-widening bases of reading community at home and abroad. Britain’s global reach, through imperial subordination of diverse people and cultures to the English language and European knowledge systems, made such technostates viable. The Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal was constituted in bringing together the writings of the best minds of the period, and especially those of Combe and collateral material of phrenology at an astonishingly cheap price, and created fertile grounds in which their Educational Course material would flourish. While the Edinburgh Journal style (though not its affordability) was simulated in Rajendralal Mitra in his Bibidartha Sangraha,19 at the Scottish publishers established was demand/need for knowledge texts. Bidyasagar’s prescient gauging of the possibilities of a publishing hub, complete with a reputed educationist-administrator (that is the Pundit himself) at its helm, collaboration of creative educationists such as Madanmohun Tarkalankar, a book shop-distribution centre near College Street, at a time when North Calcutta (in an area popularly known as Battala was the centre of publishing) made him successful. Ashish Khastagir notes that Bidyasagar was the only one after the Calcutta School Book Society of Mission Press to have a book depository of his own.20 What added to the prestige of Bidyasagar’s success as a publisher was his ability to turn the tide of sensational and entertaining matter-publishing (a hallmark of

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Battala publishing) to the production of pedagogic material as bestsellers. That one could actually make money by selling educational texts was a novel idea and Bidyasagar’s pioneering efforts in Bengal owe a great deal to the Chambers’ model and the Scottish creation of an enormous market and demand for knowledge texts. To this must be added Bidyasagar’s missionary zeal in fashioning a robust literary Bengali language, and using that modernised vernacular to create every possible genre ranging from mythology (Betal Panchabingsati, based on Raja Shivaprasad’s Hindi Betal Paichasi ), folklore (Kathamala based on Aesop’s Fables), histories (Banglar Itihas, based on Marshman’s History of Bengal) narratives from epic matter (Sitar Banabas, based on Bhababhurti’s Uttarramcharit, and Shakuntala based on Adiparva of Mahabharata and Kalidasa’s Abhijyana Shakuntala), dramatic compositions (Bhrantibilas, based on Shakespeare’s English A Comedy of Errors), primers (Barnaparichay, Pratham o Dwitiya bhag, based on Chambers’ First and Second Books of Reading), readers (Bodhodoy based on Chambers’ Rudiments of Knowledge, Charitabali, based on Chambers’ Eminent Lives, Nitibodh based on Chambers’ Moral Class Book), grammar books (Upakramanica), polemical tracts (Bidhaba bibaha howa uchit kina etadbishayak prastab, ek o dui). That he could travel to Krishnagar Maharaja’s estate to obtain a corrupted copy of Annadamangal, purify/edit, annotate, gloss to produce a respectable edition in record time for the reading pleasure of civil servant aspirants of Fort William College; the inhuman rigour that the pundit could subject himself to to produce his text books, made him centre of a knowledge industry. Book historian Ashish Khastagir authenticates that Barnaparichay (pratham bhag), ran into eleven editions and sold a total of 97,000 copies whereas Barnaparichay (Dwitiya bhag) ran into eight editions and sold to the tune of 63,000 copies, during Ishwarchandra’s lifetime. While this is in no way comparable to the enormous wealth that the Chambers’ accrued in their lifetime, employing five hundred employees at a time, having imposing office buildings in Edinburgh, London and New York, a stable of expensive steam powered printing machines, and a publishing business that was transnational in dimension, Ishwarchandra’s achievement within the debilitating circumstances of a colonial economy was not inconsiderable. More significantly, the money he earned as an independent publisher and his book royalties allowed Bidyasagar the freedom to fight his cause for widow remarriage, fund such weddings, support many widows, and agitate for eradication of polygamy. This great social reform was made possible by a spirited human being but also by a prescient producer of capital.

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One must however, when deploying comparatives frames, also take note of the terrible differences and asymmetries between the Chambers’ brothers transatlantic knowledge production hub and Ishwarchandra’s trajectory as an entrepreneur. Bidyasagar has been as late as in the 1980s been accused of harbouring a banik monobritti that is a trader mentality in a pejorative sense, as a publisher. The Bengali glorification of genteel poverty has led Bengali critics to resent Bidyasagar’s material success as a publisher and denigrate it in the worst possible ways. Bidyasagar was forced to write a tract entitled Nishkritilabhprayas to emerge out of the tangled web of accusations, court proceedings regarding the ownership of his press and the royalties accruing from books written-published by collaborators such as Madanmohan Tarkalankar. His associations with British administrators have been called out and derisively as the only cause for his success as a publisher and his publishing career riddled by accusations of lack of originality and borrowing from others. Apart from Tagore, very few Bengali intellectuals understood the importance of adaptation, translation, collaboration as a creative process. While Tagore coined a word ananyatantrata21 or uniqueness, to describe this creative mode in his Bidyasagarcharit, the iconic Bangadarshan journal and especially Bankimchandra remained mercilessly critical about Bidyasagar’s success as textbook writer and a borrower of others thoughts. Tulanae Samalochon, perhaps the most vitriolic piece came from the pen of Akshaychandra Sarkar in the second year of Bangadarshan’s publication history, compared Bidyasagar to a mint, that operated on the principle of mindless borrowing.22 The creative aspect of translation-adaptation especially at a moment when national languages were being born, the role of translation/adaptation in creating knowledge texts to establish a readinginterpretative community were critical frames unavailable to the ghost of creativity-ridden Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and his contemporaries.

vii Anschauung: Reading with Scots As already stated, many of these “advanced views”, that the Chambers’ refer to in their “Introduction” are not only phrenological in denomination, but adhering to the Swiss educator Johan Pestalozzi’s theories of Anschauung, or sense impression-sense perception. Pestalozzi felt that children should be exposed to the natural world, learn through sense impressions, and thus cultivate their own logical powers.23

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Pestalozzian ideas came into Britain in general and Scotland in particular via Charles and Elizabeth Mayo’s Home and Colonial Infant Training Society in Cheam in Surrey, and David Stowe’ s Normal School in Glasgow. Mention may also be made of figures such as James Kay Shuttleworth of Edinburgh University who travelled to the Continent to imbibe such ideas. However, it is in Combe that they find a clear articulation and direction. I quote from Combe’s Lectures to prove how close phrenological and Pestalozzian ideas were with regards to education through object lessons, and sense perceptions as opposed to abstract rote learning: Children should be taught to examine every object minutely, and to mark its hardness or softness, its solidity, its form, size, weight, colour, the number of its parts, its place of growth or production, its liability to suffer change from the influence of other objects, and its powers of producing changes in them. They should be taught to try experiments and note the consequences and be trained to perceive and comprehend that life is a series of processes […] (Combe 1848, 43). It is this combination of Pestalozzian imparting of object lessons to enable a learner to understand rather than teach top down, and Combe’s belief that education is arousal of human efforts in achieving good conduct, that Bidyasagar imparts in his primers. Barnaparichay (pratham bhag) consciously deploys such object lesson methods in lines such as megh dake, jal pode (thunder rolls, rains fall, lesson 3, 18) notun ghoti, purano bati (new pot, old bowl) kalo pathar, sada kapad (black stone, white cloth) chowda kopat choto duar, (broad doorframes, narrow doorway) sheetal jal (cool waters, lesson 5, 19). This method of acquainting a learner with objects that they can sense, mark its shape, solidity, measure, colour, numbers makes them radical and opposed to rote learning. It was the same object lesson method of both Pestalozzian and Combian denominations that Rabindranath would deploy even more successfully in his primer, Sahaj Path (the easy reader). I will end my musings on Scottish-Bengali transactions with a reference to the heart of object lessons, and phrenological insistence on pedagogic processes that would arouse in the learner the ability to perceive the charge of a word or phrase, to ‘see’ the significance of a word. This conquest of the dead word by the improved mind/sensibility of the learner could only be achieved through reading. Reading thus becomes central to the new Scottish

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pedagogic process, and reading feelingly as opposed to reading mindlessly like parrots after a monitor as the pivot of the new system of education as enabling self-improvement. The replacement of the monitorial system with the system of a sensitive and empathetic teacher committed to arousal of a learner’s cognitive abilities, the ability to imagine is what lies at the centre of such newness, of by improving one’s mind through a continuous process. As the Chambers note in the Preface to the Second Book of Reading: […] the sounds are best taught by showing their powers in words […] Let the vowels be sounded boldly, and consonants with a considerable emission of breath to make the child really understand the idea represented by the word employed (1874, ii). Bidyasagar notes in Barnaparichay (dwitiya bhag) for example: Jakhan je shabda uccharan korivbe spashto koriya uccharan koribe. Sposhto uccharon na korile keho bujhite paribe na. (Pronounce each word clearly whenever you pronounce it. No one will understand the meaning unless you clearly pronounce words, lesson 5, part 4, 22). The joyous beauty of Bidyasagar’s textual world comes in his readers. Apu, the central figure in Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhay’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1929) is Bidyasagar’s Seetar Banabas. When first admitted to a village pathshala the sensitive child Apu is appalled by the presence of irate and indifferent guru mahashoy who sits upon a raised platform selling grocery items while deputing the task of teaching to a sardar podo or monitor. The monitor shouts out the lessons in distorted pronunciation (ku-swar) to students squatting on the floor, who in turn, repeat those already mangled words mindlessly. Naturally such students that are so indifferently taught are disinterested, but punished frequently for their lack of attention. However, all these mindless exercises and fear of the guru’s caning fits, vanish and the pathshala space transformed into a one of imaginative joy when a peripatetic friend of the guru mohashoy visits and regales students with stories of his travels to distant lands. It is even better when the guru mohashoy (in a better mood) bids his students to write down a shrutilikhan (dictation) from some of the most phonic, the onomatopoeic parts of Bidyasagar’s Seetar Banabas24: Ei sei janasthan madhyabarti prasrabangiri. Ei girir shikhardesh akashpathe satata sancharomanjaladharapotolsanjoge nirantar nibeer neelimae alankreeta; adhityakapradesh ghanosannibishta bibidha bonopadosamuke acchanna thakate, satata snigdha, sheetal

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o ramaniya padodeshe prasannasalila godabaree tarangabistar koriya prabal bege gomon koriteche (1873, 16 - 17). Even as Apu is not quite sure of what those Sanskritised conjoined words (spoken by Lakkhan to Seeta) mean, he is alive to their power, to their ability to evoke the beauty of those unseen waterfall-ridden mountains, whose majestic heights are darkened with rain clouds; peaks which are forever blue with clouds even as the dense green of forests dot their sides, and the torrential Godabari river flows at its feet. Apu who is the putative artist, a narrator in the making, learns to read with feeling and make words palpably animated, from his childhood pathshala in the humble Nischindipur by reading Bidyasagar’s prose. Even as we remember Rabindranath expressing his debts to Barnaparichay’s object lessons jal pode/pata node as first arousing his instincts about the power of words,25 Bidyasagar imparts to the Bengali, the glory and beauty of language, which arouses her finest instincts, which nudges her to read, not mindlessly but as making words come to life.

Notes 1. All spellings of Bengali names have been phonetically transliterated in this essay and hence I use Bidyasagar, instead of Vidyasagar. 2. Sondra Cooney, “Publishers for the People: Robert and William Cham­ bers, The Early Years, 1832-1850”. William Chambers’s Memoir of Robert Chambers with Autobiographic Reminiscences of William Chambers; Aileen Fyfe’s “Steam and the Landscape of Knowledge: W. and R. Chambers in the 1830s-1850s”. 3. A similar statement, mentioning “Marhatta” translation of Chambers’ course is to be detected in Iris Macfarlane’s book Robert Chambers of Ed­ inburgh: Victorian Polymath and Educator (2020). This book seems to have been written much earlier by both Alan and Iris Macfarlane (made avail­ able as unpublished material) and may have used the same sources as did Sondra Cooney. 4. Walter Scott refers to India as a career for the impoverished gentry of Scot­ land as they send their youngest sons to make a living in India, and de­ scribes India as the cornchest of Scotland. 5. Refer to Parna Sengupta’s essay “An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedago­ gy”, Parna Sengupta’s Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, Hayden J.A. Bellenoit’s Mis­ sionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India 1860-1920 and Jana Tschurenev’s Empire, Civil Society and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India.

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6. Refer to Helen Ludlow’s “The Government teacher as mediator of a ‘supe­ rior’ education in Colseberg, 1849” for Scottish educational interventions in Cape Town, in South Africa. Also refer to T.M. Devine and Angela McCarthy edited The Scottish Experience in Asia for more on this. 7. The term ‘critical’ anglicisation-vernacularisation directs attention to­ wards the ambivalent responses of colonial educators and the desire to introduce modern vernaculars informed by European ideals and knowl­ edge and limited dissemination of English studies. Refer to Brian Hatcher’s Idioms of Improvement and Nandini Bhattacharya’s essay, “Anglicised-San­ skritised-Vernacularised.” 8. My study of Scottish educational enterprise has benefitted from a reading of George Elder Davie’s The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Univer­ sities in the Nineteenth Century, Devine and Angela McCarthy edited The Scottish Experience in Asia, C 1700 to the Present: Settlers and Sojourners (2017). 9. Refer to Akshaychandra Sarkar’s essay “Tulanae Samalochon” in the sec­ ond issue in the second year of Bangadarshan where he trashes Bidyasagar’s tendency to “borrow” from the Chambers (and all other ‘original sources. Sumit Sarkar’s essay “Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society” is the first, nu­ anced though slight discussion regarding the implications of Bidyasagar’s translations of the Chambers’ texts. Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay Sikshabidhay­ ak Prastava: An Introduction to the Art of Teaching (Calcutta: 1856). 10. Improvement (or the possibilities thereof) is a pivotal to phrenological thought and Brian Hatcher’s application of this phrase, “Idioms of Im­ provement”, to entitle his monograph on Bidyasagar (1996), does not pay sufficient attention to the Scottish phrenological roots of those ‘improve­ ment’ idioms. 11. I use ‘afterlife’ in Walter Benjamin’s sense as describing a translation giving new life to a text in a different time and cultural context. 12. Refer to H. Holman’s Pestalozzi: An account of his Life and work, Kate Sibler Pestalozzi: The Man and his Work, and Stephen Tomlinson’s Head Masters: Phrenology Secular Education and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought. Tus­ caloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 13. Refer to Johan Pestalozzi’s fictive peasant mother figure in How Gertrude teaches her Children: An Attempt to help Mothers to Teach their Own Chil­ dren and an account of the Method. A Report of the Society of Education, Burgdorf (1894) to enunciate his radical education ideas. 14. I cannot but refer to the tongue -in- cheek humour of Satyajit Ray’s parod­ ic inversion of Madanmohun Tarkalankar’s lines in the second movie of his directed Goopie Bagha series, Hirak Rajar Deshe (in the land of King

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Hirak, 1980): “lekha poda kore jei/anahare more sei” (the one who studies, dies of hunger!”). 15. All references to Shishu Siksha and Barnaparichay are from Ashish Kast­ agir edited Bangla Primer Sangraha 1816-1855, and all page numbers are from that edition. 16. Refer to Bidyasagar’s last will and testament as appended in Indra Mitra’s Karurasagar Bidyasagar (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1969). 17. I am indebted to Abhijit Nandy’s essay “Boiparar Bidyasagar”. 18. Refer to Robert Chamber’s biography, to Sondra Cooney and Alan and Iris Macfarlane’s narration of the spectacular rise of the Chambers’ brothers af­ ter the death of their father. Apparently, Dickens used the figure of William Chambers as inspiration for the cad Bounderby in his novel Hard Times to poke fun at the exaggerations inherent in such Victorian self-made man stories! 19. This ability to bring together diverse thought for the common reader and create a knowledge society was greatly appreciated by Rabindranath Tago­ re and it is this collaborative style of knowledge dissemination to create the young Bengali reader that he attempted in the journals Balak and Bharati. 20. Refer to Khastagir’s essay “Unish Shatake Bangla Boier Bajar”. 21. Refer to Tagore’s description of ananyatantrata as Bidyasagar’s distinction, in his essay “Bidyasagarcharit” as anthologized in Tagore’s Charitrapuja. 22. Refer to Akshaychandra Sarkar’s essay “Tulanae Samalochon” (Compari­ tive Studies). 23. Refer to Dieter Jedan’s Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi and the Pestalozzian meth­ od of Language Teaching (Bern: Peter Lang, 1981). 24. Refer to Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhaya’s “Am Antir Bhepu” part in his novel Pather Panchali, in Chapter 14, 68. 25. There are no such rhyming lines such as jal pode/pata node in Barna­ parichay and jal pode in the pratham bhag of Barnaparichay is preceded by megh dake. Tagore must have quoted from memory about his first reading as an infant, but the basic contention that, these little rhyming lines when read with feeling, animate and vivify them, remains true.

References 1. Adam, William, and Rev. James Long. 1868. Report on Vernacular Edu­ cation in Bengal and Behar, Submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838: With a Brief View of its Past and Present Condition. Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press. 2. Bandopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan. 1994. Panther Panchali in Bibhuti Ra­ chanabali. Vol. 1. 03- 235. Kolkata: Mitra O Ghosh.

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3. Bandopadhyay, Chandicharan. 1895. Bidyasagar. Kolkata: Abinash Chan­ dra Mukhopadhyay. 4. Basu, Swapan. 1959. Samakale Bidyasagar. Kolkata: Anupkumar Mahinder Pustak Bipani. 5. Bellenoit, Hayden J. A. 2007. Missionary Education and Empire in Late Co­ lonial India 1860-1920. London: Pickering and Chatto. 6. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations. Translated by Hannah Arendt, 69 – 82. New York: Harcourt Brace Jova­ novitch. 7. Bhattacharya, Nandini. 2017. “Anglicised-Sanskritised-Vernacularised.” In Language Policy and Education in India: Documents, Contexts and Debates, edited by M. Shridhar and Sunita Mishra, 166-183. London: Routledge. 8. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1852. Rudiments of Knowledge or Bod­ hodoy. Calcutta: Sanskrit Press. 9. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1852. Banglar Itihas. Calcutta: San­ skrit Press. 10. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 2000. Barnaparichay Pratham Bhag, 1858, Barnaparichay Dwitiya Bhag 1858. In Bangla Primer Sangraha, ed­ ited by Ashish Khastagir, 253-281. Kolkata: Pashchimbanga Bangla Aka­ demi. 11. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1873. Seetar Banabas or the Exile of Seeta. Calcutta: Sanskrit Press. 12. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1852. Rudiments of Knowledge or Bod­ hodoy. Calcutta: Sanskrit Press. 13. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1869. Charitabali. Calcutta: Sanskrit Press. 14. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1851. Neetibodh. Calcutta: Sanskrit Press. 15. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1884. Bidhababibaha prachalita howa Uchit kina etadbishayak Prastab. Calcutta: Sanskrit Press. 16. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1959. Nishkritilabhproyas. In Bidyasa­ gar Rachana Sangraha, Sahitya o Bibidha, edited by Satyndranath Sen and Gopal Haldar, 437 - 452. Kolkata: Bidyasagar Smarak Jatiya Samiti, Mukti­ pada Ray, Saksharata Prakashan. 17. Bidyasagar, Ishwarchandra Sharma. 1959. Bidyasagarer Will. In Bidyasa­ gar Rachana Sangraha, Sahitya o Bibidha, edited by Satyndranath Sen and Gopal Haldar, 540-544. Kolkata: Bidyasagar Smarak Jatiya Samiti, Mukti­ pada Ray, Saksharata Prakashan. 18. Brown, Callum G. 1997. Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707. Edin­ burgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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19. Chambers, Robert. 1844. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. John Churchill. 20. Chambers, William. 1872. Memoir of Robert Chambers with Autobiograph­ ic Reminiscences of William Chambers. Edinburgh and London: W and R Chambers. 21. Chambers, William and Robert. 1874. Chambers’ Educational Course. Comprising of First Book of Reading, Second Book of Reading, Rudiments of Knowledge or the Third Book of Reading, Eminent Lives, The Moral Class Book. London and Edinburgh: W and R Chambers. 22. Coombe, George. 2009. The Constitution of man Considered in Relation to External Objects. 1828. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 23. Coombe, George. 1848. Lectures on Popular Education; delivered to the Ed­ inburgh Philosophical Association in April and November, 1833. Edinburgh: Maclahan, Stewart and Co. 24. Cooney, Sondra. 1970. “Publishers for the People: Robert and William Chambers, The Early Years, 1832-1850.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. 25. Cox, Jeffrey. 2002. Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India., 1818-1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 26. Davie, George Elder. 1961. The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Uni­ versities in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 27. Devine, and Angela McCarthy ed. 2017. The Scottish Experience in Asia, C 1700 to the Present: Settlers and Sojourners: Cambridge Imperial and Post­ colonial Studies. Edinburgh and London: Palgrave Macmillan. 28. Dutt, Akshay Kumar. 1887. Bajhya bastur sahit manab prakritir samband­ ha bichar. Pratham Bhag. Calcutta: Metropolitan Press, Sanskrit Press De­ pository. 29. Dutt, Akshay Kumar. 1912. “Sushikshita o Ashikshita Loker Sukher Taro­ tamya.” In Entertaining Lessons in Science and Literature Part III, Charu­ path Tritiya Bhag. 1847, 132-141. Calcutta: Jogendranath Mukherji at the Sanskrit Press Depository. 30. Fyfe, Aileen. 2010. “Steam and the Landscape of Knowledge: W. and R. Chambers in the 1830s-1850s.” In Geographies of the Book, edited by Miles Ogborn and Withers Charles, 51-78. Aldershot: Ashgate. 31. Grant, Charles. 1813. Observations On the State of Society among the Asi­ atic Subjects of great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals; and on the Means of improving it-Written chiefly in the year 1792. Great Britain: House of Commons. 32. Hatcher, Brian. 1996. Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and the Cultural Encounter in Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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33. Holman, H. 1908. Pestalozzi: An account of his Life and work. London: Longmans, Green and Co. 34. Jedan, Dieter. 1981. Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi and the Pestalozzian method of Language Teaching Bern: Peter Lang. 35. Khastagir, Ashish. 2007. “Unish Shatake Bangla Boier Bajar.” In Mudraner Samgskriti o Bangla Boi, edited by Swapan Chakravarty, 47-78. Calcutta: Abobhas. 36. Ludlow, Helen. 2012. “The Government teacher as mediator of a ‘superior’ education in Colesberg, 1849” Historia 57, no.1 (May): 141 – 164. 37. Macfarlane, Iris. 2020. Robert Chambers of Edinburgh: Victorian Polymath and Educator. London: Routledge. 38. Mitra, Indra. 1969. Karurasagar Bidyasagar. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers. 39. Nandy, Abhijit. 2007. “Boiparar Bidyasagar.” In Mudraner Samgskriti o Bangla Boi, edited by Swapan Chakravarty, 79-107. Calcutta: Abobhas. 40. Pestalozzi, Johan. 1894. How Gertrude teaches her Children: An Attempt to help Mothers to Teach their Own Children and an account of the Method. A Report of the Society of Education, Burgdorf. Edited by Ebenzer Cooke. Translated by Lucy E. Holland and Francis C. Turner. London: Swan Son­ nenchein and Co. Syracuse. 41. Ray, Satyajit. 1980. Hirak Rajar Deshe. Bengali movie. 42. Sarkar, Akshay Chandra. 1873. “Tulanae Samalochon.” In Bangadarshan: Masik Patrika o Samalochon. Dwitiya khanda, edited by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, 36-42. Katalpara: Bangadarshan Jantra. 43. Sarkar, Sumit. 2008. “Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society.” In Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader, edited by Sumit Sarkar and Tan­ ika Sarkar, 118-145. Bloomington: India University Press. 44. Sengupta, Parna. 2003. “An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy.” Compar­ ative Studies in Society and History 45, no.1 (January): 96 - 121. 45. Sengupta, Parna. 2011. Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. Berkeley: University of Cal­ ifornia Press. 46. Sibler, Kate. 1973. Pestalozzi: The Man and his Work. New York: Shocken Books. 47. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1907. “Bidyasagarcharit.” In Charitrapuja, 9-85. Kolkata: Visva Bharati Granthan Bibhag. 48. Tarkalankar, Madanmohun. Sharma, Shishu Siksha parts one 1849, two 1850, and three 1850. In Bangla Primer Sangraha, edited by Ashish Khast­ agir, 193-252. Kolkata: Paschim Bangya Bangla Akademy. 49. Tomlinson, Stephen. 2005. Head Masters: Phrenology Secular Education and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

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50. Tschurenev, Jana. 2019. Empire, Civil Society and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 51. Trohler, Daniel. 2013. Pestalozzi and the Educationalization of the World. New York: Palgrave Pivot.

The Transnational Poet: Renegotiating the

Dichotomy of Homeland and Hostland

Bashabi Fraser This chapter reflects on the continuity that a shared history offers to the Scottish itinerant in India1 and diasporic communities from South Asia in Scotland in a study of verse by transnational poets through a postcolonial reappraisal. It considers the nuanced but interlinked interpretations of ‘trans’ (across) in the transnational, the transperipheral and the transnation as it considers roots and routes, departures and arrivals, the continuities and fractures as the perspective moves between the elsewhere and the somewhere, the here and the there in poets who carry multiple nations/ cultures within their consciousness. For the purposes of understanding migrant perspectives on their land of origin where their journeys begin, and their response to the place where the migrant arrives, this study will use the definition of diaspora that is not often used in diaspora studies. The difference in the diasporic experiences of poets writing across colonial and postcolonial times will be scrutinised to understand how they renegotiate the duality of the homeland and hostland, temporary or otherwise in ‘voices from other shores.’2 Most studies of diasporic communities refer to those who have moved from a homeland to a hostland and settled there which accepts the root word of the verb diaspiero - speiro (an agricultural reference) as ‘to sow’ as key to an understanding of diaspora. Such a definition focusses on communities which have been displaced and have had to relocate somewhere, and they inevitably carry the ‘elsewhere’ to the ‘somewhere’ where they relocate, maintaining a cultural continuity in their everyday lives while adjusting to their new locale. As new roots are sent down, the ‘homeland’ becomes a place one recalls with longing and nostalgia, and remains for many, unreachable, almost to the point of no return. However, the other meaning of spiero - ‘to scatter’ or ‘disperse’ needs to be taken into consideration, which is pertinent here as it enables a wider and more nuanced understanding of the dispersion of a people across nation-state borders in sporadic movements effected by economic, political or familial circumstances. Most historical estimations of Scots spread across the one-time British Empire are related to an understanding of ‘diaspora’ as the sowing of seeds in foreign lands (Devine 2011). But Scots in India require the alternative

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interpretation of the Greek verb diasperio: to scatter/ disperse. Scots in the ‘Old World’ (in this case, India), unlike their counterparts in the ‘New World’ (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), were not ‘settlers’ but temporary economic migrants, sojourners (Siu 1954, 34 – 44) or itinerants (Fry 2001) who shared the belief that the homeland awaited them at the end of their tenure in India. In 1991, William Safran in the first issue of Diaspora (Safran 1991, 83 - 99) identified six criteria which characterise diasporic communities as described in the endnote.3 This is an important attempt at defining diasporic communities, but several realities interrupt and challenge the validity of asserting that all moving/migrating communities adhere to a coherent mould as there can be no one size fits all theory that marks the fluidity of certain diasporic communities. This chapter will show how a ‘collective’ sense of loyalty to and longing for a nation becomes a shifting terrain for the Scottish poet; however, the hostland too takes hold of the poetic imaginary as a sense of affinity and even appreciation become evident. The Scots were scattered across India in diverse positions, adhering to the colonial enterprise which did not necessarily allow them to espouse and clarify their Scottish identity in their itinerant status. In order to unpack the experience and expression of diasporic writing by people from the sub-continent, Musarrat Shameem notes that the journey of the Indian diaspora has been a sporadic one, spread over time, engendered by a scattering of its population rather that a sowing in a place from which there was no possibility of return to the homeland (Shameem 2016). This would mean that the trauma of a vast exodus at one point in time, leading to the search for a safe haven, has not marked the Indian communities abroad. For them, the transnational journeys across sub­ continental borders, intra-national borders and continents have occurred involving multiple departures and arrivals. While a longing to return to the homeland was prevalent amongst the Scots in India in colonial times, Indians in Scotland have not experienced the same urge to make this reverse journey. For Indians who have moved in recent times to the UK, while their homeland remains their ‘centre’ of origin, they have, in postcolonial terms, moved from the periphery to the metropolitan centre (Said 1978; Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin 1989), yet they remain on the margins of society by their minority status, which makes their positioning an ambivalent one. Scots in India in the past and today, have been there in very small numbers, yet they are never identified by the minority status as this is a positioning reserved for migrants to the Global North/developed nations from the

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Global South. The minority status forever marks the marginalised (usually underprivileged groups) in developed nations,4 problematising the sense of belonging in the hostland. Indians residing in and travelling to Scotland, are aware of their outsider status, but have found ways to claim a space, confident in their in-betweenness5 with their dual identity. In Scotland, the generational differences amongst the Indian diaspora become apparent. For the older generations the homeland can be a place of no return, as their roots are often are in pre-Partitioned India from which they have been forcibly displaced as they were on the ‘wrong’ side of a capricious border; their idea of a homeland is thus imbued with the mythical imaginary, across an uncrossable political border. But for second and third generations and recent migrants from India, the familial and economic ties and the possibility of frequent travel to their ancestral roots, signify a renewal of homeland and hostland bonds that lends the Indian migrant a special in-betweenness that celebrates difference. This reality has the advantage of a transnationalism that allows multiple crossings across nation-state boundaries by individuals from a diaspora in a postcolonial world with an ease that softens the wrench of an uprooting that has signified/signifies many diasporic communities. This study initially notes a linear development in Indo-Scottish poetry determined by a chronological historical route map in colonial times. However, a progressive study of emergent poetic voices points to a circular pattern with roots and routes signifying arrivals and departures that do not remain clear cut or defined, but with time, allow the passage to and from India to attain a circularity, with journeys ending where they began, the image of the homing bird hovering between two worlds. The choices made in publication and anthologisation which influence canonisation of Scottish and South Asian poetry, continue to reflect the centre/periphery of colonial constructs. A book project which addresses decisions of exclusion and omission, is a multicultural anthology of poets and artists in Scotland, co-edited by Kevin MacNeil and Alec Finlay, Wish I Was Here (2000). In the ‘Introduction, MacNeil notes, ‘Each of the writers in this book has their own special reasons for exploring aspects of identity’ and goes on to show how ‘Place, longing, belonging, exile, worldview...tension, tradition...and language itself are ... issues deftly - sometimes shockinglyexamined in this surprisingly peerless anthology’ and concludes: There is no Scotland, I began more fully to comprehend. There are Scotlands (McNeil and Finlay 2000, 17).6

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Mary Ellis Gibson7 address a gap in critiques of Indian Poetry in English by Indian scholars, who, as Gibson points out, omit British born poets (Gibson 2011a, 2), an exclusion she has sought to rectify in her compendium volumes in which she has brought together both British and Indian Anglophone poets of the long nineteenth century. In Gibson’s books, the year 1913 denoting the end of the long nineteenth century is significant, as it is the year in which Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize for Literature (writing in English and Bengali), the first non-Westerner to do so. The bilingualism that signifies this bookending date is pertinent to this account of poetry which encompasses two nations and the linguistic multiculturalism that marks transnational poetry which negotiates the idea of nation(s) and multi-dimensional identity/ies. Thali Katori: Scottish and South Asian Anthology (2017) is the first anthology which breaks the centre/periphery dichotomisation, taking forward the work done by Gibson as Thali Katori gives primacy to the Scottish-sub-continental response to the here and there in poets, in voices from other shores which negotiate the home within and the hostland without on their multiple journeys: physical, emotional and imaginary. Gibson speaks of the linguistic knowledge and facility of educated men from both Britain and India in colonial times, which meant they knew one classical language (Sanskrit, Persian, Latin or Greek) and a modern language which the ‘polyglot environment of urban India’ provided in the long nineteenth century, giving rise to ‘a new kind of poetry’ (Gibson 2011a, 3) in what was ‘a multilingual space’ (Gibson 2011a, 4). A certain multilingualism informs poetry in Scotland as inevitable, given the trilingual reality of the presence of Scots, Gaelic and English in Scotland and the multilingual originary of the sub-continent amongst South Asian Scottish poets.

Peripheries of the Nation The poets of the East India Company era were known as the Poets of John Company (18th century till 1857) followed by poets of the Raj (1858­ 1947). They wrote within the British colonial frame of reference; however, their regional nationalist loyalties and thoughts were evident in the social networks they maintained and the memories of ‘home’ that they retained as expressed in verse. Gibson (2011) calls this ambivalence as ‘transperipheral’ (Gibson 2011a, 14 – 15; Gibson 2011b, 7), complicating the ‘trans’ of ‘transnationalism’ to include the peripheries that nations (Scotland, Wales and Ireland) within a nation inhabit, while England remained the dominant nation/ centre for the Anglophone poets. As Bechhofer and McCrone note,

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‘States have several nations within them. They are multi-ethnic states’ (Bechhofer and McCrone 2009, 3). These poets were imbued with a sense of what Homi K. Bhabha calls, ‘unhomeliness’ which ‘is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations’ (Bhabha 1994, 13) for ‘[t]o be unhomed is not to be homeless’ (Bhabha 1994, 13). It is ‘that displacement, [where] the borders between home and world become confused...and the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting’ (Bhabha 1994, 13). Scottish poets in India voiced a sense of exile which was intimately tied to their concept of ‘home’ - their nation within a nation - signifying what she stood for, that place of longing and recovery during their days of wandering and serving on foreign shores. The transperipheral positioning of Scottish poets in India can create a distancing from the economic exigencies of political dominance acquired on the plea for trading rights for the British in India, leading to an acutely critical perspective on colonial ambitions as seen in John Leyden’s ‘Ode to an Indian Gold Coin’ where the lure of ‘gold’ enslaves the narrator Slave of the dark and dirty mine! What vanity brought thee here? How can I love to see thee shine So bright, whom I have bought so dear? (Fraser and Riach 2017, 33) Caught in an unhomely terrain where ‘jackal’s shriek bursts’ into his nights spent under flapping tent-ropes signifying a life of roving restlessness, his mind is haunted by ‘sweet visions’ of ‘Teviot, an ‘Eden’ by the Esk where ‘loves of youth and friendships smiled, to which his ‘lonely widowed heart turns’ while he ‘scorns’ the ‘yellow dross’ of his current reality. Leyden’s scholarly linguistic interests led him to search for and acquire manuscripts in Eastern languages, yet in his poetry, he turned to My native stream, my native vale, And you, green meads of Teviotdale’ For while the ...rosy sun-beams lie In thin streaks o’er the eastern sky (Gibson 2011a, 68). He finds himself roaming ‘Beside my native stream’ - turning to his homeland for solace and succour even when pursuing his avid interest in and love of knowledge held in Eastern texts in his hostland.

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The Indian Revolt in 1857-1858 ended with Company Rule being terminated with the crown taking over Indian possessions in 1858 in what became known as the Raj. Mary Eliza Leslie was twenty-three at the time of the Revolt and was a witness to the violence, which brought out a nationalist response as expressed in her sonnets in Sorrow, Aspirations, and Legends. The grief in encountering the violence that challenges the glory of British domination is voiced in the sonnets as in XXXV, ‘1857, continued’, To think of our first glorious Hundred Years of rule, aye widening under Eastern skies, Not ending with loud, jubilant heart-cheers, But with deep grief, and wailings, and low sighs (Gibson 2011a, 274). Leslie spent all her life in India (apart from a few months in Britain during her childhood) and was deeply involved in the education of Indian women which she considered Christian calling. Her religious devotion finds expression in her poems in Heart Echoes from the East. The spiritual yearning and search in these poems make them comparable with the poetry of the metaphysical poet George Herbert (1593-1633) and Pre-Raphaelite poet, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). She remained rooted in India, her missionary zeal making it her homeland, the land she was born into and the only one she had known intimately from birth till death. But in other Scottish poets, thoughts of home ‘triumph o’er exile-day’ as in ‘The Exile’s Tribute’ by George Anderson Vetch, who is Condemn’d ‘neath tropic skies to roam Where scorching winds o’ver deserts blew And finds solace as he turns in his mind’s eye to The mountain daisy bathed in dew, Restored the hills and streams of home. Transperipheral nationalism is strong here, for .. .when to war the trumpet rung, With what a high, exulting glow The sons of Scotia met the foe As men from Bruce and Wallace sprung! (Gibson 2011a, 94 – 95). India is not always a place viewed with alienation by Scottish poets. In ‘Moonlight Scene’, James Ross Hutchinson is moved by the beauty of the landscape,

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On Ganges’ stream the moon shines bright. And all is fair and still, at rest.. A tranquillity sweeps over the narrator on this foreign shore: There is stillness in the hour, There is a magic in the scene, That oer the spirit hath a power, To wake the thought of what hath been (Gibson 2011a, 136). Just as place rouses admiration and a peace springing from a sense of affinity in Hutchinson’s narrator, a place of rest in the land of wanderings can elicit empathy in the itinerant Scot. Violet Jacob’s addresses as ‘O friend’ in ‘The Resting-place’, whose tomb she encounters on a forgotten jungle track. He is a ‘Son of the ‘Prophet’, the ‘Mahommedan’ whom Jacob hails a as kindred spirit across cultural, religious and political borders, identifying herself as Thy passing guest By these accepts from thee this meed of rest Salaam, O Bhai (Fraser and Riach 2017, 51) offering her respects, while acknowledging the hospitality from a ‘Bhai’/ brother. Jacob witnesses the noontime prayer offered by a devotee at a ‘little mosque’ and muses on the brotherhood of man that is celebrated as ‘Soldier and prince and clod’ gather together to acknowledge ‘There is no god but God’ and ‘God is Great’. The poem begins and ends with the familiar Islamic declaration, Allah hu akhbar! Allah hu akhbar! La ilaha illalah! (Fraser and Riach 2017, 53). The narrator greets ‘Islam’s men in field and street’ and muses on the world around the praying man. Jacob’s universalist acceptance is evident in ‘The Distant Temple’, where the branch of the henna-tree has been blown down in a temple garden. In the unfading East across the sea where the champa white flower has been blown onto the pavement where ‘dusky feet’ have walked. Here the narrator would [happily/willingly?] lie down and give my soul to-night could I but breathe your sweet (Fraser and Riach 2017, 56).

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evoking the appealing fragrance of the eastern blossom. The temple gong’s ‘nightly music’ and ‘Sound of the drum’ are recalled ‘And joy itself grows old’ in ‘Heart of the East, my heart’, the personal pronoun signifying an identification with ‘remembrance’[s] which lie heavy on a heart which ‘may not rest’ now but stay with her even after her meanderings, as Through the long years your voice is never dumb,

Calling, at sundown, from the temple-gate

To me, who cannot come (Fraser and Riach 2017, 56)

to what was Jacob’s onetime hostland.

Beyond Empire The Second World War saw many Scottish veterans who had served in India return home, yet India remained an indelible memory, often viewed with a longing marked by a disorientation born of a sense of displacement, as in Rev. Kenneth Ross’s ‘Wartime Exile in India’, ‘Torwood’ sounding through the temples of Benares

And the spectre of Healaval on Nanga Parbat

(Fraser and Riach 2017, 67).

And India is carried from a colonial childhood through postcolonial journeys and returns in space and time in the poetry of Tessa Ransford. In ‘With gratitude to India’; she affirms I was a baby in India

born among dark eyes and thin limbs

handled by slim fingers

bounced by bangles

and held high among the turbans,

surrounded by the light sari...

suggestion of spice

wrapped up only those songs.

She recalls her immersion in India I was part of the parties, parades,

The bazaar....

But she remains grateful

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To have first found the world in abundant India (Fraser and Riach 2017, 72 – 73) which she deems is her ‘life’s greatest privilege’. In ‘Two way’ Ransford says, ‘I think of India and yearn for my childhood’ and India remains her ‘promised land’ (‘Going nowhere’) which she has to give up as the ‘present’ brings urgent duties to her ‘hands’. Yet India never leaves Ransford as her confessional poem ‘My Indian Self ’ confirms, a dual identity born of her childhood home which she carries after her return to Scotland within her, like a sustaining flame Let me be

myself my

Indian self

that goes to extremes

from garland to ashes

Himalaya to desert

Mango to maize

For her, Happiness is tropical and love is a house with wide verandas (Fraser and Riach 2017, 75 – 76). It is a ‘home’ she carries within her, where she has never been a ‘guest’, but integrated into the social fabric by affectionate carers, at home in the Indian public space which is warm, vast and generous.

Inter-positioning and Perpetuity In Bill Ashcroft’s chapter, ‘Globalisation, Transnation and Utopia’ the reference to the contact zone occupied by postcolonial studies is where the idea and ideal, observation and hope exist and where the once colonised seek liberation through a transformation that alters a history of repression, allowing once submerged voices to appropriate and wield English as a language of debate and redefinition. In this enterprise the local evokes and engages with the global, allowing a ‘flow’ between the two as individuals assume agency and dynamism. This reality dissipates the centre-periphery binarism in the late twentieth and twenty first centuries as heterogeneity, hybridity, fluidity and movement mark the ‘transformation’ that enables local cultures to permeate and affect the global in an epoch-breaking contemporaneity that has been engendered by ‘diasporic circulation’

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Ashcroft believes that the twenty first century will be affected by the culture of China and India which are signified by a ‘horizontal reality’ very different from the ‘vertical authority of the state’ that marks the top-down cultural effect of Eurocentric ideology propagated by the domination of nation-state regimes. This is where he brings in the idea of the transnation which begins within the nation and moves outside it through the perpetuity of translation. The prime example of the transnation is the Indian reality, its ‘inter’ positioning, its ‘in-between’ space without boundaries/borders, where, as Robert Borofsky says, ‘You can reconstruct yourself ’ (Borofsky 2000, 97). The postcolonial links have been picked up and explored by Valerie Gillies when she chooses the University of Mysore as her destination to study Commonwealth Literature as a Commonwealth Scholar. India has, since then, led to several poems emanating from Gillies’ Indian encounter. In ‘Seringapatam, Mysore State’ she is told the story of the betrayal of the Sultan, ‘a national hero’. Treachery leads to his death and the capture of his sons with British victory at Seringapatam, narrated by her fellow Muslim students on a visit to the site. Yet years later in Scotland, Gillies’ grandfather tells her the other side of the story, of her great grand uncle who ‘focht’ there, as They met wi the braw tiger troops haun to haun, In the river up the brae, wi mony died (Fraser and Riach 2017, 113) The heilanders played the pipes in the breach where the enemy was let in. The amulet Tipu Sultan wore commemorated in ‘Tipu’s Amulet in Edinburgh Castle’ was ‘Given to wear with love’. ‘He fastened the talisman of destiny to him. Captain Young, who found Tipu’s body still ‘warm’ after he was killed in battle, ‘untied it from his arm. Now, in Gillies’ homeland, ‘The angel’s writing [on the amulet] is shut up among crowded gems in glass cases’ and the poet reaches out to her onetime hostland in a proposal to return the captured artefact: This one relic which can restore A hero, a future, to the state of Mysore (Fraser and Riach 2017, 111). The transnational guest, following in the footsteps of her once dispersed compatriots in India, zooms through the ...south on the black Norton together, [her]...crash-helmet an oven.

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Her guide is her Afghan friend, Manzoor, a transperipheral who takes her into the heart of the country, through rural landscapes where most of India still lives, and Gillies concedes that in these journeys, Yes, I had a great view of India: It was all your broad back. And villagers waving to the black bike (Fraser and Riach 2017, 115). and of course, to the itinerant pillion rider whom they are happy to greet and speed on. Remnants of the Raj remain in the pianos that have been left behind by their once scattered owners and are still cherished in far flung Indian homes. A piano tuner travels two hundred miles to ‘peer(ed)...into its monsoon-warped bowels’ from which he coaxes as old nearly forgotten melody that tune of ‘Beautiful Dreamer, a melody seized from yellowed ivories and rotting wood. Both the instrument and the tuner are relics of imperial time: the Anglo-Indian and the old knockabout... His sounds were pidgin. He was altogether piebald (Fraser and Riach 2017, 119). The cultural hybridity is captured as the colonial and postcolonial merge at multiple levels in this post-independence encounter - the piano, the tuner, the music and communication in a derivative tongue. Like Valerie Gillies, Christine de Luca, Ian Brown and Alan Riach travel back on the same track that colonial Scots had taken to India, not across ocean waves, but daring airmiles in the twenty first century. Temples that Violet Jacob stumbles onto on her remote wanderings, are sought out destinations in Bishnupur for Ian Brown who is willing to ‘open’ his ‘eyes and mind’ in ‘A Tourist in Bishnupur’, In this terracotta temple town, Massive ceremonial sites and monumental gateways to what is here Taken for granted, to visitors revelation. He comes with a new reverence to a free India with a willingness to be transported, Respect kept me out of the temple’s heart, But, circulating round, the building’s images lifted my spirit.

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Brown is able to see resonances of the tales from this temporary hostland with those from his homeland It made me think for a moment

Of Columba and the Loch Ness Monster,

But such a parallel at once seemed glib,

Trying to appropriate what’s powerful - akin, but distinct (Fraser and

Riach 2017, 94).

Different, diverse but moving in the sense of wonder they evoke. Alan Riach traces the footsteps of his father in India. He stands at the historic docks ‘I: Calcutta’ and moves back in time, My father has been here before. It is a dream. What happens to you later Cannot be predicted. Kidderpore Docks. The refrain continues My father has been here before me. At the start of the world and after the end of the war, The Merchant Navy Clanline brought him in, Standing on the bridge, a young man, First Mate, Leaning into the world for the first time then. Time alters. The world turns. Colonials return. The old world continues. And so Riach muses, What world is this, to hold us all? What happens to you later cannot be predicted. But this is not a dream. These lives are real, the river, bridge, the people the commerce and the currents take us all (Fraser and Riach 2017, 159 – 161). A final poignant thought that brings the past and present together, of the now and then in a poem about arrivals from other shores and each fresh encounter is followed by inevitable departures bound for home.

Post-Partition Arrivals Christine de Luca has travelled to India and written about her transnational encounters, but before her journeys she records the arrival,

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assimilation and integration of the Sikh community in Edinburgh in ‘Blending In’, Edinburgh was a cold host half a century ago for the tailor from Amritsar; a grey place for a Sikh who had looked on a golden temple. Three generations later, the weave of their cultural identity is integrated into their new Singh tartan with the ‘hot hues’ from the land of five rivers. De Luca asks what the reaction of the Amritsar tailor would have been to witness this, Would he have laughed or cried or criticised the weave or stitching? And looking at the telephone directory, she observes the ‘Singh column’ which ‘reveals/new city threads’ that ‘blend in’, augmenting their ‘new histories to tartan Edinburgh.’ (Fraser and Riach 2017, 105 – 106) And this is the new history that marks the relocated scattered diaspora of South Asians in Scotland, the group whom Bashir Maan calls the ‘New Scots’ (Maan 1992). Suhayl Saadi goes back to those historic sea journeys that meant irreversible departures from the homeland and the obliteration of identity from enforced migration in ‘Slave’, A boat, departing slowly over black water I, nothing (MacNeil and Finlay 2000, 93). The transperipheral in Indian poets in Scotland takes on a different undertone. The first and second generation poets discussed here carry the post-memory (Hirsch 2012) of Partition from their parents and grandparents’ generation who belong to a pre-Partition continuity before the rupture caused by a political border drove them to become the peripheral citizens in what became another country. The journey(s) across continents are signified by an unhomeliness till they reach their final destination in their chosen hostland. Today the descendents of migrant communities have the confidence of the transnational citizen for whom travel is no longer tedious or arduous, as transcontinental air travel and electronic communication allow affiliations, sympathies and contacts that defy nation-state boundaries’ (Fraser 2016, 231 – 232). The loss of identity is noted by Hamid Shami in ‘Lost’ who quotes a friend, ‘A man with no culture has no identity.’

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With a dual identity ­ Father was Scottish, Mother Pakistani, His in-betweenness causes countless arguments between his parents, as Father wanted him brought up A Catholic; mother wanted a Muslim. Was the only boy on our street who went To mosque on Fridays and chapel on Sundays Till he sets out on his personal quest for self-realization in the mountains where God’s sure to find him (Fraser and Riach 2017, 222). Gerry Singh, like the protagonist in Shami’s ‘Lost’, is of mixed parentage. Brought up by foster parents, his sense of belonging is with the Scottish Highlands. His Scottish identity permeates his being, ‘hidden within’ and ‘painted on my face’. However, India is part of his consciousness and his two worlds converge as images of the here and there are brought together in unlikely juxtapositions, The noon sun over Delhi Lit up the M8... Looking towards the Lomonds I saw a lama On the cooling heights of Shimla Walking in a cloud of dust. He meets ‘strangers’ on the railway platform at Varanasi, ‘who had been here before’; he has seen them bathing Where Emperors had stood Not hearing the thundering clatter Of the Raj (Fraser and Riach 2017, 166). The colonial past and the postcolonial present merge in a reflection in the flood waters in a ‘lovely child of both’ - born with the appeal of transnational hybridity. Like Gerry Singh and Suhayl Saadi, Irfan Merchant, Shampa Ray, Jameela Muneer, Tariq Latif are the ‘New Scots’with ancestral roots in the sub-continent,. Their parents or they, have crossed borders of nation/ state,

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the transnational citizen who crosses political borders without experiencing the pangs of partitions their parents/grandparents may have witnessed. Nalini Paul’s parents crossed the Atlantic from the Punjab in India, and settled in Canada, from where Paul came to Scotland - her ‘The Third and Final Continent’ (Lahiri 1999). My grandparents and parents were displaced by Partition and were refugees from east Bengal in India, and I have lived with the post-memory of the repercussions of this relentless border and the fractured identity that displacement/dislocation entail. My parents have been itinerants in Britain as researchers in London, when I accompanied them there and where I encountered the magic of English verse. I remain a first generation migrant in Scotland, effected by my third journey to Britain and like many women from the subcontinent (and elsewhere), I am a marital migrant. In ‘Paradise Gardens Carpet’ written for the National Museums of Scotland, Saadi’s migrant mothers disembark from a ship with their ‘laughing children’ and enter a deserted town of ‘cold stone mute, where their ‘limbs grew cold and blue’. They are ‘the Mothers of the Vanished/... [they] lost everything’ in a place where their refuge is provided by the ‘stone walls of community centres,’ (Fraser and Riach 2017, 118) where they weave and knot strands from another narrative on another shore in a new amalgam of stories with the magic to transport and transform. The second generation in Irfan Merchant, do not laugh with abandon as they play for their football team in a school match, where a miss invites a deluge of abuse for one who is ‘Always the odd one out’, as his schoolmates shout ‘Eerie-Fanny Get Yer Arse in Gear’ (Or it was Earwig, Irvine, Fanny-Face; or Paki-Bastard, Shoe-Shine boy, Get Back Home: Merchant muses in his aside in ‘National Colours’ the mysterious dervish name from Persia whirled on the thick-set tongue of Ayrshire)…. However the old loyalties of a divided homeland are renewed ‘at home’ where Football was just not cricket; My dad wanted me to bat for India Or England, depending who was beating Pakistan (Fraser and Riach 2017, 227 - 229).

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Merchant, like many diasporic Indians in Scotland, does travel to India as a visitor to ‘The Other Arthur’s Seat, experiencing the ... exile’s return, pilgrims of beauty spots, cousins and aunts, our family more peopled than even a peepul tree whose dreadlocked long branches grow back to earth becoming the roots of a younger tree.’ The pun on people/peepul is explored in an extended metaphor of new roots branching out from an older tree in a younger generation, somewhere else, where Arthur’s Seat8 is a lived reality in a familiar landscape. Yet place names collide in memories which entwine the past with the present, Parsee Point - Bombay Point - Sidney Point - Wilson Point ­ Tiger Spring - Tableland - Arthur’s Seat - Duke’s Nose ... (Fraser and Riach 2017, 232 - 235). as the here and the there become a necklace of beads of connectivity. In the western world, 9/11 gave legal and social sanction to the fear and suspicion of the Other, and the ‘broon Scot’ was no exception to being the recipient of the hostland’s subliminal hostility. In ‘The Scottish Way’, Jameela Muneer tells the story of a schoolgirl, who in retaliation to her sense of alienation, turns to religion and finds her reply in ‘Hijab’ When violent abuse was hurled

And latent racism unfurled.

It was

Strictly her own decision

as her parents look on with consternation at this transformed daughter of theirs Shamima Begum unleashed? and silently allow her ‘Free Will’ to unfold, she, like a river, not finding resistance to her course as she is ‘ignored’ and ‘No one made a fuss’ at home or in school, she stopped of her own accord. We heaved a sign of relief Life carried on as before (Fraser and Riach 2017, 194). The stereotype, once embraced, is willingly dismantled by the migrant. Migrant agency here is evident in the desire to stand out or blend in. Yet

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when a nation tries to pigeonhole the sub-continental migrant, Muneer declares ‘I’m an Asian Woman but...’ Don’t patronise me

categorise me

finalise me

I’m an Asian woman but I’m ME

She confirms all the things she is not, flouting assumptions the hostland’s mainstream make about her. She is not working class Parents never kept a shop

Didn’t leave school at sixteen

She is Not stamped ‘Made in Glasgow’

Banhgra is not [her].. birthright.

Did not apply for Medicine She is

not what you promote.

And she goes on to question and affirm Caught between two cultures?

No Damn it. That’s where you are

You’ve got an ethnic template

I won’t get very far (Fraser and Riach 2017, 199 - 200).

So she remains an Asian Woman, very much her own distinctive and confident self, she is as she stresses, ‘ME.’ The blending in through intercultural marriages in the second generation is the subject of Tariq Latif ’s ‘Punjabi Wedding’, where the cuisine from the elsewhere is spread out before a mixed community. The narrator muses on the generations who gather at diasporic weddings, where thoughts of the ancestral land imbue hope for a future of continuity in the adopted country, ...Basmati rice

from the Punjab is served at weddings in

Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Gravesend

where the adults eat the food rich with spice

as children run round tables in Berlin,

Paris, Rome; speaking Punjabi that send

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hope to the future generations; Their mothers and fathers sink into chairs and talk of the homeland. They hope their grand-children arrive on cue (Fraser and Riach 2017, 203 - 204). Memories keep the world of older generations alive in the succeeding generations, as in Shampa Ray’s ‘Scent of Memory’ where a stone turned over reveals Dampness lived in the hollow where stories are told, so quietly to themselves, we miss them... print of gathered past (Fraser and Riach 2017, 209). But Ray has merged her present and presence with her Scottish landscape in peat country as she confirms in ‘Red Moss’, conceding I’ve gone this way before, Looked out at lochs and felt enveloped by the land’s ‘peaty reticence’ and confesses You are the story I would walk on (Fraser and Riach 2017, 208). The hostland is part of the diasporic poet’s own story and as Latif asserts, the Indian diaspora in Scotland, is ‘Here to Stay’. This sense of a search for and an acceptance of the ultimate destination drives Nalini Paul’s poetry where she connects with her ‘Third and Final Continent’, the transperipheral consciousness of the nation and its fragments, finding voice in transnational journeys which have ended in Scotland. In ‘Shadows in Colour’ her postcolonial musing is apparent, As you watch all the destinies you may never visit make the journey, starry eyed every frame a memory of some other place myths are created with every foreign face. We copy, they mimic From Arabia to India. Echo wears their jewels in her crown. And up and down the country we watch blackened faces speak in accents that trip off the tongue.

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And she assures her audience, using her vernacular tongue, Arre yaar,9 look at me and don’t turn away: I’m only your reflection (Fraser and Riach 2017, 218 - 219). The assimilation and integration are complete as imperial constructs come full circle, with the mimicry of the once colonised dismantled in the recognition of the ‘Other’ as the Self. But Ray has merged her present and presence with her Scottish landscape in peat country as she confirms in ‘Red Moss’, conceding I’ve gone this way before, Looked out at lochs and felt enveloped by the land’s ‘peaty reticence’ and confesses You are the story I would walk on (Fraser and Riach 2017, 208). The hostland is part of the diasporic poet’s own story and as Latif asserts, the Indian diaspora in Scotland, is ‘Here to Stay’. This sense of a search for and an acceptance of the ultimate destination, drives Nalini Paul’s poetry where she connects with her ‘Third and Final Continent’, the transperipheral consciousness of the nation and its fragments, finding voice in transnational journeys which have ended in Scotland. In ‘Shadows in Colour’ her postcolonial musing is apparent, As you watch all the destinies you may never visit make the journey, starry eyed every frame a memory of some other place myths are created with every foreign face. We copy, they mimic From Arabia to India. Echo wears their jewels in her crown. And up and down the country we watch blackened faces speak in accents that trip off the tongue. And she assures her audience, using her vernacular tongue, Arre yaar,9 look at me and don’t turn away: I’m only your reflection (Fraser and Riach 2017, 218 - 219).

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The assimilation and integration are complete as imperial constructs come full circle, with the mimicry of the once colonised dismantled in the recognition of the ‘Other’ as the Self. In my epic poem, From the Ganga to the Tay (2009), the two rivers converse on their shared history, reflecting on the colonial Scots who sought careers in India and later of Indians who came to Scotland, who are ‘here’ because they (the Scots) were once there. The rivers assume anthropomorphic identity, witnessing the unfolding reality of migration from across continents along their banks. The bridges and bungalows of a colonial infrastructure are recalled and the current reality of the influx of people bringing flavours from the land where the Ganga flows to the land watered by the Tay, is affirmed in a reverse migration that marks postcolonial diasporas. The circle of journeys is complete when Indians come to a country which they have lived in through literature, the transperipheral nation where Sarbojit Biswas addresses Sir Walter Scott ‘From where you came to mine’ in ‘One Step and Another’, You came to me in pages I read you with childish wonder and now as Biswas climbs the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, he pays his homage ­ I traversed the sky on a bird Climbed to touch your sky. There is a sense of homecoming as the narrator understands Your sky loves me now Your pages beckon still... I still remain small On top On the Scott memorial (Fraser and Riach 2017, 239 - 240). Subhadeep Paul recollects Scots in India who Transported me to a timeless realm Where Scottish soldiers fed visitors from their sacks of oatmeal

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And ‘overtime’ he has taken a ‘fancy for haggis neeps and tatties’, Scottish tastes which have ‘won my heart’. (Fraser and Riach 2017, 241). The Scots had played a crucial role as educationists in India in key figures like Revd David Hare, David Drummond and Alexander Duff. Today Scottish Literature has been introduced as part of a Master’s degree at Bankura University, to which the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) has gifted the entire library of Scottish Literature, History and Culture amassed by the much respected Schools Inspector, Jim Alison, on whose death, his family requested ASLS to find a home for this rich collection. The Scottish Government paid for the transportation of these 8,000 books to India. Debnarayan Bandyopadhayay, the entrepreneurial educational pioneer in Scottish Studies in India, in ‘Homage to Jim Alison’ says, Who says Jim is no more? Wrong, He journeyed from Scotland to Bankura Like a cloud, like a wave, like a floating green leaf.... There is a knock at the door of the library In Bankura I open the door: ‘Welcome home, Jim, my friend!’ (Fraser and Riach 2017, 125). Mario Relich, reviewing my collection, The Homing Bird comments, ‘The title-poem, headed ‘Kolkata’ and ‘Edinburgh’, gives us a panoramic view of how these two cities have shaped her consciousness and imagination. She is, indeed, a citizen of both, and these world-renowned cities anchor her dual identity as Indian and British, bearing in mind that they are also distinctive capital cities, Kolkata of West Bengal, and Edinburgh of Scotland’ (Relich 2017, 1). Relich affirms, the poem illuminates two aspects of the poet’s psyche, how her consciousness was shaped by Kolkata and her imagination by Edinburgh, relatively speaking, because consciousness and imagination cannot really be separated (Relich 2017, 3). The poet from Scotland in India and from India in Scotland carries the memories and postmemories of the nation of origin, a transperipheral consciousness of a place which shapes her/his identity of the nation within

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a nation. It is through remembrances that the poet is able move from the nation within to the nation without through the process of the transnation. The poets of a dispersed group find an in-between space in the hostland where a multivalent identity is negotiated through the imagination, and the self is reconstructed by transnational poets who challenge borders and boundaries and celebrate the diversity of the adopted nation which they have contributed to building through their migrant embrace.

Endnotes 1. The reference to India and the Indian diaspora in this chapter refers to the subcontinental reality of a shared past, albeit disrupted by a mindless border which has ruptured, but not obliterated generational memories of place and its deep-rooted associations. 2. ‘Voices from Other Shores’ is the title of a paper presented on invitation on a panel of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) at the ‘English: Shared Futures’ Conference held in Newcastle in 2017. 3. Safran’s six criteria which mark diasporic communities consider the fol­ lowing facts, that they have (1) moved from a ‘centre’ of origin to two or more ‘peripheral’ foreign regions; (2) they have a shared collective memo­ ry of a common homeland; (3) they remain outsiders as they are never ful­ ly accepted by their host community where they have relocated; (4) their vision and memory of the homeland take on mythical significance and they are sustained by a desire to return to it; (5) they collectively nurture a sense of a duty and loyalty to their homeland in a tie which binds them together as a community and to their nation of origin; (6) and they strive to maintain and perpetuate links with their country of origin. 4. However, in developing nations like India, minorities are also the under­ privileged, e.g., the scheduled castes and tribes who dwell on the margins of India’s burgeoning mainstream. 5. As Bhabha explicates, “in-between spaces” provide the terrain for elaborat­ ing strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself (Bhabha 1994). 6. Alan Riach and Douglas Gifford, Eds., endorse this view in Scotlands: Po­ ets and the Nation (2004) which includes three South Asian poets: Hamid Shami, Irfan Merchant and me. Julie Johnston’s delightful anthology, Things that Mattered Most: Scottish Poems for Children (2006), has no po­ ems by South Asian and Black writers, apart from my, ‘My Mum’s Sari’. Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets (2012) Ed. Jackie Kay et al., is an anthology of minority voices in Britain, providing a distinctive platform

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for poetry of the periphery. 7. Scottish poets in India have been recognized by Mary Ellis Gibson as be­ longing to the territory of Anglophone Poetry, alongside Indian poets who wrote in and from the colonial periphery in India in two companion vol­ umes: Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913 (2011) and Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore (2011). 8. A hill in Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park, which like the Castle, is one of the city’s landmarks, visible from afar. 9. Arre yaar (Hindi), means ‘hey friend’.

References 1. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writers Back. London and New York: Routledge. 2. Ashcroft, Bill. 2010a. “Transnation.” In Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Di­ rections for the New Millennium, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 72 – 85. London and New York: Routledge. 3. Ashcroft, Bill. 2010b. “Globalisation, Transnation and Utopia.” In Locating Transnational Ideals, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, 13 – 29. New York and London: Routledge. 4. Bechhofer, Frank, and David McCrone, eds. 2009. National Identity, Na­ tionalism and Constitutional Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 5. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. 6. Borofsky, R. 2000. Remembrance of Pacific Past: An Invitation to Remake History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 7. Chatterjee, Debjani, ed. 2000. The Redbeck Anthology of British South Asian Poetry. Bradford: Redbeck Press. 8. Devine, T. M. 2011. To the Ends of the Earth, Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750-2010. London: Allen Lane. 9. Dunn, Theodore Douglas. 1921. Poets of John Company. Calcutta and Sim­ la: Thacker, Spinks & Co. 10. Fraser, Bashabi. 2009. From the Ganga to the Tay. Edinburgh: Luath Press. 11. Fraser, Bashabi. 2016. “The New Scots: Migration and Diaspora in Scottish South Asian Poetry.” In Community in Modern Scottish Literature, edited by Scott Lyall, 214 – 234. Leiden, Boston: Brill, Rodopi. 12. Fraser, Bashabi. 2017. The Homing Bird. Devonshore: Indigo Dreams. 13. Fraser, Bashabi, and Alan Riach, ed. 2017. Thali Katori: An Anthology of Scottish South Asian Poetry. Edinburgh: Luath Press. 14. Fry, Michael. 2001. The Scottish Empire. Edinburgh: Tuckwell, Birlinn. 15. Gibson, Mary Ellis. 2011a. Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780­

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1913. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 16. Gibson, Mary Ellis. 2011b. Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 17. Goebel, Walter, and Saskia Schabio, eds. 2010. Locating Transnational Ide­ als. New York and London: Routledge. 18. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Post-Memory: Writing and Vi­ sual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. 19. Johnston, Julie. 2006. Things that Mattered Most: Scottish Poems for Chil­ dren. Edinburgh: Scottish Poetry Library and Black and White Publishing. 20. Kay, Jackie, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson. 2012. Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. 21. Lahiri, Jhumpa. 1999. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston: Haughton Mifflin. 22. Maan, Bashir. 1992. The New Scots: The Story of South Asians in Scotland. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers. 23. McNeil, Kevin and Alex Finlay. 2000. Wish I Was Here. Edinburgh: Pock­ etbooks. 24. Relich, Marion. 2017. “The Homing Bird, Review.” Transnational Litera­ ture 10, no. 1 (November): 1 - 3. 25. Riach, Alan, and Douglas Gifford, eds. 2004. Scotlands: Poets and the Na­ tion. Edinburgh and Scottish Poetry Library: Carcanet. 26. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 27. Safran, William. 1991. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Home­ land and Return.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring): 83 – 99. 28. Shameem, Musarrat. 2016. “Narrative of Indian Diasporic Writing: A New Perspective on the Women Writers of the Diaspora.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities VIII, no. 1: pages. 29. Siu, Paul C. P. 1952. “The Sojourner.” American Journal of Sociology 58, no. 1 (July): 34 - 44. 30. Wilson, Janet, Cristina Sandra, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds. 2010. Re­ routing the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium. London and New York: Routledge.

“Disruptions”: Rise of Free Church of Scotland and

its Impact on Bengali Intelligentsia in the Nineteenth

Century Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay I Missiology and Scotland The cultural linkages between colonial India and Scotland in the domain of administration, education and missionary activities are well-known. In the essay“The Impact of the Victorian Empire”, Esther Breitenbach points out that after the introduction to Indian Civil Services in the mid-nineteenth century, “Scots achieved prominence as senior colonial administrators, making up a third of colonial Governor General between 1850-1939. Even some family dynasties were represented in such positions. The Elgins (father and son), became Viceroys; the Mintos (the great grandfather and the great grandson) became the Governors General of Bengal and the latter became even the Viceroy of India” (Breitenbach 2012, 542). The role of Scottish missionaries in the development of education in colonial India is a much debated issue. The Scottish Enlightenment was probably initiated with the Union of 1707 and it seemed to have continued till mid-nineteenth century along with vibrant economic development and the gradual shift from the rigidity of Calvinism. This can be regarded as a relevant issue in terms of the gradual Scottish cultural ascendancy. The Union of 1707 brought peace, stability and order conducive to the creation of a new cultural climate. John Knox’s idea of establishing a school in every parish largely helped the availability of basic education throughout Scotland. The system of parish schools and that of meritocracy determining the university education gradually helped even the commoners to aspire for higher education. Whileuniversities in London only admitted Anglican students, Edinburgh accommodated the Scottish as well as Irish Presbyterians; this produced more graduates than they could accommodate. Kate Simpson argues that the Scottish children spoke Gaelic mainly and the church ministers spoke English in most cases; it was therefore considered a distinct obstacle in the dissemination of Christian gospel. As a result, the importance of learning

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English and sending the children to schools wereregarded as a necessity. This dualism in terms of language in Scotland therefore largely facilitated the growth of education. Simpson comments: Part of the solution was to send children to schools when they were young to enable them to learn English; then they would be able to hear the word of God from all preachers, not just those who could speak Gaelic (Simpson 2016). In the eighteenth century, Smollette rightly described Scotland as a “hotbed of genius”; but in the nineteenth century Edinburgh was gradually being looked upon as a city emptied of its great intellectuals moving to London.It has been argued that Scottish scholars had to make careers outside Scotland and, as Cairn Craig points out, [T]his outward mobility was given religious confirmation by the founding of the Free Church in 1843, which produced two competing versions of the National Church, each galvanised by a missionary zeal for which not Scotland but the world is the field” (Craig 2011, 84). It is this outward mobility that perhaps led the Scottish scholars and teachers to move to India. It may therefore be regarded as the Scottish intellectual diaspora in colonial India. Rev Robert Hunter wrote a book called History of the Missions of the Free Church of Scotland in 1873 and he mentioned the special importance of sending missionaries to Calcutta, though the Missionary Society of Scotland was initially opposed to the idea of sending Scottish missions. Hunter refers to Mr George Hamilton’s strong anti-missionary speech in 1796: “To spread abroad the knowledge of the gospels among barbarous and heathen nations seems to be highly preposterous, in so far as it anticipates, nay, it even reverses, the order of nature” (Hunter 1873, 4). As against Hamilton’s opposition to the idea of disseminating the gospel among the Indians, Hunter cites the statement of William M Bean: “It is humbly overtured to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, that in respect a very laudable zeal for spreading the gospel to heathen countries has appeared both in Scotland and England, the Assembly should encourage this most important and desirable object” (Hunter 1873, 4). This led to a tremendous controversy and debate. As a result, the Scottish Missionary Society sent out a circular across Scotland and in consequence as many as three submissions of overtures were made to the General Assembly of 1796: from the Synod of Fife, the Synod of

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Moray and from an individual William M’Bean: all three favouring the dissemination of the gospel among the heathen nations (Hunter 1873, 2-4).In an Editorial essay published in The Scottish Christian Herald, it is affirmed that the British empire should establish missionary activities in India: “Twenty years before, Bishop Wilson, in a sermon preached before the House of Lords, had hinted the propriety of paying regard to the propagation of the Gospel in India. Dr Proteus also, the worthy Bishop of London, had been long impressed with the necessity of extendingthe means of grace to our countrymen in the East” (Editor 1811, 467). Dana L. Robert in her introductory essay of Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706-1914 affirms the importance of William Carey in the missiological tradition. She points out: Drawing upon the model of the trading company, Carey suggested that voluntary societies be founded to which the interested individuals would subscribe for the purpose of raising money for sending missionaries to the non-Christian world (Robert 2008, 9). Since the eighteenth century, many different missionary societies began to be founded. Brian Stanley in Christians Missions and the Enlightenment considers missiology as an early form of globalisation movement and therefore related to the order of modernity. This was made possible through the missionary movement as a distinctive Protestant evangelical phenomenon: It broadly supports the now established consensus that this milieu was essentially one formed by the intellectual contours of the Enlightenment (Stanley 2013, 4). Dana L. Robert therefore describes a couple of missionary societies gradually being established for the dissemination of the Gospel. She connects this missionary activism in India as part of multiple social changes developing from entrepreneurial capitalism. By the end of eighteenth century, missionary societies began to develop in the United Kingdom and spread themselves out into many different directions. This was largely inspired by Carey’s An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792). In 1792 the Baptist Missionary Society was formed. Following Carey’s example, missionary societies began to be established:

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In 1795 Non-conformists in London founded the London Missionary Society which soon dispatched missionaries to the South Pacific and South Africa. Evangelical Anglicans … founded the Church Missionary Society in 1799. During the first few decades of the 1800s, the voluntaristic impulse for missionary organisation spread throughout European and North American Protestantism, and different denominations or regional groupings founded their own societies (Robert 2008, 10). Calcutta gradually became the centre of interest in terms of the dissemination of Christianity. Rev Robert Hunter in his book History of the Free Church of Scotland briefly refers to the emergence of Calcutta in this respect: “The same year (1824) an important memorial arrived from the East, bearing date Calcutta, December 1823, and signed by Mr, afterwards Dr Bryce. It urged the Church to establish a mission in Calcutta, and ultimately proved of historic importance, for it powerfully turned the attention of the Church to India, the most eligible missionary field, we hesitate not to say, in the whole world” (Hunter 1873, 9-10). But the question of native representation in the dissemination of the Gospel came to be an important part of the Scottish missiological history in colonial Calcutta. Since the time of the first convert Krishna Pal in 1800, there was a growing need of the native Christians to support this colonial agenda. Many of these early converts belonged to the lower stratum of Hindu society, but they gradually assumed a significant role. Krishna Pal belonged to the family of carpenters and his monthly income was just Rs 4. But Krishna Pal took active role in several stations where he was posted by the Serampore Baptist Mission. Lal Behari Dey, the son of a money lender, was actively involved with the Free Church of Scotland Mission as its missionary and minister. Eleanor Jackson in her essay “From Krishna Pal to Lal Behari Dey: Indian Builders of the Church in India or Native Agency in Bengal, 1800-1880” has succinctly documented the missiological history in terms of the contributions of the native Christians. Jackson refers to a lady convert called Jayamoni and briefly discusses her missiological activism: …Joymooni (Jeyamuni?), an active unpaid evangelist who threw aside the traditions of semi-seclusion of her jati, visited Chanderpur to attempt to persuade her sister-in-law and tramped the roads around Serampore accosting Brahmins and telling them to repent, reminds one of how many converts were active to a greater or lesser degree in evangelism (Jackson 2008, 170).

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II Disruption in Scotland and India This paper proposes to examine the impact of the “Disruption”, a non­ intrusionist religious movement in Scotland on the rise of the spirit of liberal individualism in 19th century Bengal. Though the Scottish alignment with the British empire-building is looked upon as essentially a part of the monolithic colonial design, the dissemination of liberal, humanist education largely contributed to the Bengal Renaissance. George Smith’s biography of Duff very distinctively underlines the new Renaissance arriving in the cultural climate of India. In two specific chapters (Chapters VII and VIII), “The Renaissance in India: the English Language and the Church” and “The Renaissance in India: Science and Letters” he shows the contributions of Charles Trevelyan, Brian H Hodgson, James Prinsep, Macaulay and Duff in creating the permeation of two distinctive cultural forms. George Smith therefore comments: With the culture that had marked the whole school and university studies, he recognised the attractions of a genuine oriental scholarship, and reproached his countrymen for their indifference to it (Smith 1879, 197). After the “Disruption” of the established Church of Scotland in 1843 and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland, the members of the Free Church became proactive in missionary activities abroad, especially in India. While championing the causes of religion as against the intervention of the state apparatus, it perhaps disseminated a spirit of European Enlightenment. The non-intrusionist movement was first initiated by Thomas Chalmers. In 1823 Chalmers published his controversial book Political Economy in which he raised the issues of church reform and initiated the break with the Established Church of Scotland. But it came to take the shape of a new movement in Scottish ecclesiastical historywith the participation of Robert Smith Candlish in the religious debate in 1839. In the meeting of the General Assembly held in Torn Church, he rose to prominence by his famous speech. William Wilson in his Memorials of Robert Smith Candlish writes: “It was in the General Assembly 1839 that Mr Candlish made his first speech. It was towards the close of a long and keen debate and when he rose in one of the back benches of the Torn Church… there were unmistakable indications of an indisposition to hear him… he became excited, began a speech which at once gained him a foremost place among Assembly debaters” (Wilson

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1880, 77). Later on, Candlish recommended Hugh Miller as the editor of a proposed Edinburgh newspaper which would particularly consider the debates of the church. This led to the establishment of The Witness which played a vital role in the Disruption. Peter Bayne in his Preface to Hugh Miller’s Witness Papers emphatically comments: “The struggle between the Church of Scotland and the civil authority, …ended in Disruption” (Miller 1865, xi). Two major issues of this debate were: 1. The right of the people of Scotland in the appointment of their ministers 2. Independence of the church in spiritual matters, including issues of liberty, despotism etc. On 18 May, 1843, Thomas Chalmers along with 450 ministers left the Church of Scotland and moved to the Church of St Andrew, George Street in Edinburgh and formed the Free Church of Scotland. As a result of Disruption, as many as two-fifths of its ministers as well as members left the established Church of Scotland. It was in fact a protest against church-sponsored mechanism of control and surveillance.

What was its immediate impact in Calcutta? At that time, there was no railroad nor electric telegraph in India. As result of distance, it was difficult in Calcutta to know that the Disruption had occurred at all. Rev Hunter says: “At last replies came from the nearest of the Indian stations—Bombay andPoonah—stating that all the missionaries there adhered to the Free Church. Subsequent mails brought in letters from Calcutta, from Madras, and from Caffraria, conveying the adherence of all the missionaries there” (Hunter 1873, 20). Macphail in his biography of Kenneth Macdonald gives a brief overview of the impact of Disruption in Calcutta: “At the Disruption in 1843 all the missionaries, with the exception of one lady, threw in their lot with the Free Church. Few among her ministers were called upon to make a greater sacrifice. All the buildings they had erected, save the dwelling-house in Cornwallis Square, which was Dr Duff ’s personal property, the library and scientific apparatus, were claimed by the Establishment, and the missionaries had particularly to begin again from the beginning. This they cheerfully did, and in March 1844 the new building at Nimtollah, now known as the Duff College, was opened with 791 names on the roll. The General Assembly’s Institution was closed” (Macphail 1905, 56).

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III Re-fashioning the Mind With the mission of disseminating rational education, the teachers of the Free Church School used to devote much of their time to taking classes for long hours. For instance, Duff used to teach Philosophy. Mr Fyfe used to teach English, while Macdonald took Mathematics. Macdonald was later joined by Mr Martin Mowat who relieved Macdonald of part of his work. After Duff went back to Scotland, Macdonald began to teach Logic and Philosophy as well. A native professor used to take classes on history. Macdonald also published a volume called Problems in Dynamics which became immensely popular among the native students and even began to be used as a text book in some government colleges. For developing a truly philosophical mind, he also translated Reid’s Enquiry into the Human Mind and Abercrombie’s Intellectual Powers. Duff was extremely particular about the methodology of education so as to create an epistemic articulation. George Smith in his Life of Alexander Duff writes: “Dr Duff lectured on the methods of teaching pursued in Scotland, in Switzerland, in Germany, in Prussia; and expounded the system of Stow, of Fellenberg, and of Pestalozzi. Two things were greatly insisted on throughout the classes- a clear conception of the idea in the mind, and the expression of that conception in words”(Smith 1879, 455). Rev Lal Behari Dey comments that Duff ’s methods of teaching encouraged independent thinking among the native learners and points out how “cramming” was regarded as a mode of resistance to the process of rational thinking. He writes: “We therefore took no notes of explanations given by the professors; indeed no notes were given in the class, under the apprehension that they might contribute to cramming” (Cited Smith 1879, 456). The awakening of rational consciousness was largely based on the syllabus formed by the Scottish missionaries of the Free Church, especially by Duff. George Smith notes down a couple of subjects and texts taught in Duff ’s institution: “In Theology: the Bible, Scriptural doctrines with textual proofs, Grreek Testament, Taylor’s “Transmissionof Ancient Books,” Paley’s “ Horse Paulinse.” In English: Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Young, Bacon’s Essays and. “Novum Organum,” Foster’s Essays. In Psychology: Brown’s Lectures, Whately’s Logic and Rhetoric. In Mathematics: analytical geometry, spherical trigonometry, conic sections, the differential calculus, optics. In Physics: geology, magnetism, steam navigation. In Sanscrit: the Mugdhaboda. In Persian: the Gulistan and Bostau” (Smith 1879, 455).

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After the Disruption, the Free Church made a surprising advancement in establishing a substantial body of middle-class intelligentsia. “The number of English-speaking students and ex-students in the city and suburbs was estimated to be about thirty thousand” (Macphail 1905,127). The following statement of Macdonald is significant: “As a class they are at least as clever, intelligent and intellectual, and as welleducated as the average Englishman or even Scotsman” (Macphail 1905, 127). Alexander Duff, despite his zeal for conversion, was immensely devoted to the service of spreading education even among the poorer sections of Calcutta. For instance, one of his students Rev Krishna Mohun Banerjea who later played a very important role in Indian politics, belonged to a very poor family. Again, Rev Lal Behari Dey who later became famous for his novelette Gobinda Samanta and Folk Tales of Bengal, also belonged to a poor banker class in a remote village of Burdwan. It has been pointed out by Duff ’s biographer William Paton that Duff was largely inspired by the training he received from Prof Chalmers at St Andrews where Chalmers used to hold Sabbath schools for the very poor, downtrodden students (Paton 1923, 38).And what was his intention? As his biographer Paton underlines his intention: “One of the effects of the missionary’s teaching was to liberate the mind of his students so that they could form judgements for themselves” (Paton 1923, 73). The emergence of liberalism is evident in an anecdote described by Paton. Once a large number of students kept away from his school because of the publication of an article in a newspaper Chandrikawhich threatened to make the students attending Duff ’s school religious outcasts. But this did not work: “Calcutta Hindus were perhaps too much accustomed by this time to the rationalist temper to be greatly disturbed by it” (Paton 1923, 74). The Scottish missionaries who began to operate from the Free Church became particularly functional in generating a distinct sense of national culture among the Indians. Macphail in his biography of Macdonald describes the active role of Macdonald in generating “national and patriotic sentiment”: Macdonald was able to appeal with force to national and patriotic sentiment. …As a result of strenuous efforts to improve the moral tone of public life, a definite advance was from time to time recorded (Macphail 1905, 70).

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He even involved himself with the protest movements of the Bengali intelligentsia. For instance, he openly criticised the Vernacular Press Act. Macphail in his biography describes it in the following manner: “A meeting of protest, held in the Town Hall, on 17th April, 1878, was believed to be largest gathering of its kind ever held in Calcutta. At least 5000 persons were present. The chair was taken by the Rev Krishna Mohan Banerjea… and a distinguished Sanskrit scholar. Mr Macdonald, the solitary European on the platform, moved the first resolution. He pointed out with effect that Milton’s Areopagitica, in defence of “the liberty of unlicensed printing”, was at that very time among the text books prescribed by Government for the examinations in connection with Calcutta University” (Macphail1905, 121). We may also refer to the role played by Macdonald in the Ilbert Bill of 1883. It was branded as the Black Act, because it promoted racial discrimination. Macdonald severely opposed the Bill and his sympathies lay with the natives of India: “He maintained that justice demanded that native civilians, who had shown themselves in every way worthy of the confidence of the Government and of the public, should be invested with the same powers as Europeans of the same rank and qualifications” (Macphail 1905, 132). The Shalgram dispute is also a case in point. In a family dispute to be settled in the court, the judge ordered the sacred Shalgram to be produced in the court. This raised a tremendous protest among the native Hindus. When Surendra Nath Banerjea, the editor of the Bengali and the leader of patriotic party of Bengal, vehemently protested against this decision, Mr Justice Norris of Calcutta High Court ordered his imprisonment for contempt of court. Immediately Macdonald stood in support of SurendraNath Banerjee: “The Shalgram, he explained, was one of the three things essential to daily worship in an orthodox Hindu house, the cow and the tulsi or basil plant, being the other two...And there was no doubt that in this case the Shalgram had been hopelessly defiled by the ordeal to which it had been subjected by a judge ignorant of the customs and prejudices of the people of Bengal” (Macphail 1905, 133). It is true that there had been in-betweenness among the natives of Bengal.Thus, a Bengali Hindu Brahmin (J-N-B) of 32/6 Beadon Street, wrote a letter to Macdonald on 28th June, 1880 expressing his desire to be converted under the following conditions: 1. That the baptiser must not eat with those who are not Brahmin Christians.

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2. That I shall not eat beef, and be allowed to wear the Asram dress, and the holy thread, and be not made to eat with the lower caste men; and 3. That the baptiser must be a Brahmin of this country, or a European of the Free Church of Scotland, or a miracle worker; and 4. That the document must be registered in a Government office (Macphail 1905, 136). While a section of urban, intellectually aligned Bengali society moved towards English as the new Court language as against the erstwhile Persian, the missionaries gradually discovered change and transformation in the traditional Bengali society. The role of Rev Duff, Rev Ogilvie and Rev Jardine attached to General Assembly Institution of Calcutta may particularly be considered. Rev Duff moved away from the General Assembly and established a new school called Free Church Institution after the “Disruption”. Rev Duff ’s exit from the traditional church and his decision to establish the new school in a thickly populated native area of Calcutta brought him closer to the indigenous community. This might have generated a sense of individualism among some of his pupils like Rev Lal Behari De and Rev Krishna Mohun Banerjee. Lal Behari, despite his conversion to Christianity, re-interrogated the folk resources of Bengal. Krishna Mohun resisted the British empire building in India and became one of the founder members of the Indian National Congress. On the other hand, Rev Jardin largely appreciated the rationalistic spirit evident in his Letters written to the enlightened Bengalis or in his lectures on BrahmoSamaj in Allahabad.

References 1. Beitenbach, Esther. 2012. “The Impact of the Victorian Empire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, edited byT. M. Devine and Jenny Wormald, 533 - 551. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2. Craig, Cairns.2011. “Empire of Intellect: The Scottish Enlightenment and Scotland’s Intellectual Migrants.” In Scotland and The British Empire, edit­ ed by John M. Mackenzie & T. M. Devine, 84 – 117. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press. 3. Simpson, Kate. 2016. “Understanding Disruption and Renaissance in Nineteenth Century Bengal.” The Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies. scot­ stagore.org/tag/alexander-duff/ accessed 09.11.2021 4. Hunter, Robert Rev. 1873. History of the Missions of the Free Church of Scotland in India and Africa. London. T Nelson & Sons, Paternoster Row.

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5.

Editorial. 1840. “Christianity in India.” The Scottish Christian HeraldII, no. 82 (July): 465 – 469. 6. Wilson, William. 1880.Memorials of Robert Smith Candlish. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. 7. Miller, Hugh. 1865. The Witness Papers. Boston: Gould and Lincoln. 8. Macphail, James M. 1905. Kenneth S MacDonald: Missionary of the Free Church of Scotland,Calcutta. Edinburgh and London: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier.

9. Robert Dana L. 2008. “Introduction.” InConverting Colonial­ ism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706-1914, edited by Dana L Robert, 1-20.Michigan: Wm. B. Fredmans Publish­ ing Co. 10. Jackson, Eleanor. 2008. “From Krishna Pal to Lal Behari Dey: Indian Builders of the Church in Bengal, 1800-1894.”In Con­ verting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706-1914, edited by Dana L Robert, 166- 205. Michigan: Wm. B. Fredmans Publishing Co. 11. Stanley, Brian. 2013. “Christian Missions and the Enlighten­ ment: A Revaluation.” In Christian Missions and the Enlight­ enment, edited by Brian Stanley, 1-21.New York: Routledge. 12. Smith, George. 1879. The Life of Alexander Duff. Vol. I. New York: A C Armstrong & Son. 13. Paton, William. 1923. Alexander Duff: Pioneer of Missionary Education. Edinburgh: Turnbull & Spears.

David Hare and Patrick Geddes: The Scottish

Legacy in Bengal1

Saptarshi Mallick Assistant Professor for English Sukanta Mahavidyalaya University of North Bengal

Introduction Man is a self-revealer, who on realizing his inherent divine dignity, the great human truth embedded in her/his self amidst the sphere of spontaneity comprehends the intrinsic desire of existence (Tagore 1978, 20) by moving beyond the portals of one’s own self to unravel the wider world, enrich­ ing it and ensuring a “pure enjoyment of his knowledge” as “knowledge is freedom” upon which “his science and philosophy thrive” (Tagore 2007, 7 – 8). This manifestation of consciousness through “science, philosophy and the arts, in social ethics” bear an “ultimate value in themselves” as they are coordinated through “one great religion of Man, representing his ceaseless endeavour to reach the perfect through great thoughts and deeds” (Tagore 2005, 46) through which humanity explores the inherent universal facul­ ties (Tagore 1996, 530), an enlightened realisation (Tagore 2005, 55), en­ abling Man to transcend his own self beyond the conventions and beliefs, and the limits of mortality to emerge as “the world-worker” (Tagore 2005, 55). Such a consciousness was similar to the ideals of the Scottish Enlight­ enment which emphasized man as the fruit of history and a life-form of his environment, along with the importance of his thirst for knowledge and the willingness to question orthodoxy. Being inspired by the liberal humanism of the Scottish philosopher, Francis Hutcheson and historian William Robertson, and the liberal optimism of Dugald Stewart, all Scot­ tish Orientalists, who along with the social thinkers, philosophers, human­ itarians, educationists of Bengal, ushered in a socio-cultural, psychological and intellectual realisation, piloting the advent of the spirit of an awakening in nineteenth-century Bengal to eradicate the decadent habits which had engulfed society. Through the quintessence of self-criticism and progress this awakening facilitated an intellectual revival as well as a moral force which rejuvenated the perspectives of life and society. It was inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment and paved the way towards a change in Bengal/

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India and set her in motion on the inevitable path to the modern period. This Indo-Scottish interface conjured a continuation of ideas as is vindi­ cated through the pioneers of the Bengal Renaissance, who worked closely with the Scottish Orientalists, initiating the development of ‘contact zones’ in Bengal that furthered an effective interchange within the socio-cultural practices (Pratt 1991, 34). The Scottish Orientalists, being the legatees of the Scottish Enlightenment, acted as pattern-building human beings who could easily acculturate themselves within their world with a sense of iden­ tity and of orientation (Antor 2010, 3) enabling their ideas to be universal. They were able to avoid the pitfalls of fragmentation and a trend towards a “non-centric and anti-essentialist umbrella paradigm” of existence which is “differentiating and non- hegemonic universalism” (Antor 2010, 4). These Orientalists deciphered the necessity to change “the modes of perception, conceptualization, discourse, and, most important of all, of practice” (Antor 2010, 8) to realize the necessity of a strategic essentialism necessary for an understanding of the increasingly global cultural processes in association with the global and the local with the parameters of interculturalism, mul­ ticulturalism as an extension of transculturalism. Their ideal interventions affected religious thinking, education and as a consequence, Bengali society was saved not “through Christianity, as other European imperialisms had claimed to do, but in material terms” (Herman 2003, 338).

The Scottish Orientalists, Constructive Orientalism and Bengal Renaissance Dugald Stewart, the polymath, the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1785, advanced the intellectual bridge between the Scottish Enlightenment and the Victorian era by putting “the disparate works of the Scottish school together as a system...of classic liberalism” (Powell 2010, 9). The influence of Stewart’s liberal optimism upon the British [Scots] visiting the Indian empire was extensive, and encouraged them “to transform India into a more humane, orderly and modern society” (Herman 2003, 338) through “conceptual tools [which] could [be] use[d] as a framework for their analysis of Asian cultures, creating a distinctive Scottish paradigm of empire” (Powell 2010, 9) as Andrew Carnegie stated, that without Scotland the modern world would be a very abject evidence (Herman 2003, vii). The primary motif of this paradigm was a great insight which was the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment and its legacy shaping the basic proposition of modernity, vindicating at once the importance of ‘human beings’ who need to be free from the dogmas and be educated in

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order to perceive the world as it is. Through its rationalism and a solid dose of Scottish practicality (Dasgupta 2011, 146) the Scottish Enlightenment interrogated the constructed ‘inferior’ notions regarding India without the actual interaction with the people and knowledge regarding their lives, as well as questioned the myth of barbarism stigmatizing India in contrast with the notion of Western rationality and superiority. The stereotyped perspectives engineered through the catalytic misrepresentation of India by James Mill in his six volumes The History of British India (1817) were dismantled and challenged by John Crawfurd’s History of the Indian Archipelago (1820) and A View of the Present State and Future Prospects of the Free Trade and Colonisation of India (1828). These accounts augmented the decisive role played by the Scots in the civil, military and medical services towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially in Calcutta (Powell 2010, 6). Michael Dodson’s Orientalism, Empire and National Culture: India 1770 - 1880 (2007) corroborated that the West “appropriate[d] the Orient, speaking for it, and ruling over” (Dodson 2007, 2). However the emissaries of the Scottish Enlightenment were nursed on liberal and humanistic ideals, and their activities in Bengal/India may be explored in the context of pre-Saidian Orientalism which can be reviewed today as signifiers challenging the ‘container theory’ of national cultures as separate entities (beck 1997, 50), and justifying the principle of “the hybrid interlocking interdependence of cultures in the age of globalization” (Antor 2010, 11 – 12) for accelerating a peaceful, productive and mutually enriching encounter between human beings from diverse backgrounds. This school initiated a self- fulfilling scholarly venture for the Scottish Orientalists with the Indian reformers, being oriented towards a ‘constructive orientalism’ which was best represented by the insight of J. R. Ballantyne, Principal of the Banaras Sanskrit College (Speech 1853). This was “neo-orientalism” (Fraser 2018a, 17) which ensured an “‘engraftment’, emphasizing the importance of explicitly adapting Indian languages and knowledge, as well as social structures, within a universal developmental framework” (Dodson 2007, 80). This intercultural perspective of the Scottish Orientalists proved to be more enduring and persuasive in deducing the succeeding parameters of the educational measures to be adopted in India, and unequivocally, the ensuing methods of purposeful cognitive debates at the centre of the Indian empire, than Macaulay’s advocated perusals directly demarcating numerous objections, including that anglicist policy which denied Indians the opportunity to compare “their falsehoods with [the] truth” (Tytler 1835, 103 – 109).

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The distinctive endeavours of the Scottish Orientalists along with the Indian reformers proved to be a turning point in India due to their a discrete Scottish attitude to empire linked in general to the intellectual climate through the undertakings of high ranking Company officials, as Governor General Lord Minto and other provincial governors.2 They attempted to establish a science of government on the foundations of the political teachings, philosophical history and liberalism that owes a great deal to David Hume and William Robertson (Bayly 1989, 85 - 86, 115). This “Scottish School” (McLaren 2001, 1) of Indian governance had “a compassion for [India’s] fallen greatness”, and sincerely strived to reinstitute its lost glory by restoring the ‘native institutions’ through the richness of the Indian knowledge along with the Western knowledge “conveyed in the vernacular for the education of the masses” to negate the steady decline and restore India’s moral independence (Powell 2010, 7). However the idea of this ‘Scottish School’, its distinctiveness has been interrogated by Jane Rendall in her essay “Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill” where she states that between Robertson and Mill there was “a generation of Scottish writers on India, whose history perhaps illuminates the background to the retreat of orientalism in Britain...‘Scottish orientalists’ did not in any way form a school. They shared a common European assumption of superiority, but not Mill’s dogmatic rejection of all that constituted Indian culture” (Rendall 1982, 44). Rendall discusses the ‘second generation’ of Scots like Alexander Hamilton, James Mackintosh, William Erskine, John Crawfurd, Vans Kennedy and Mountstuart Elphinstone who were inspired by Robertson’s liberal humanism and the “philosophical historians” on matters Indian. They were able to offer “a conceptual framework for the understanding” (Rendall 1982, 69) of India through a strong “philological input to which neither Robertson nor Mill pretended” (Powell 2010, 9). Recent studies in Martha McLaren’s British India and British Scotland, 1780 - 1830: Career Building, Empire Building and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (2001) and Michael Fry’s The Scottish Empire (2001) vindicate a distinct Scottish orientalist school that followed a constructive orientalist perspective in their pursuits along with the reformers in augmenting the renaissance in nineteenth century India/ Bengal which not only exposed the weaknesses inherent deep within the fathoms of the society but also appreciated the “new life” (Sarkar 1979, 69), the advent of progressive thoughts and ideas in Bengal. McLaren’s thesis is justified through the attitudes and polices of the Scots towards the empire and their activities, especially governance and education involving

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a cultural exchange with the Indians. Following Clifford Geertz, we can deduce that in order to understand the meaning within cultures, we need to understand its development, perception and interpretation. This essay will illustrate the “webs of significance” (Geertz 2000, 5) through an analysis of the contributions of two eminent Scots, David Hare (1775 - 1842) and Patrick Geddes (1854 - 1932), who dedicated their lives towards the development of education and augmented an effective interaction with the people (Bhabha 2004, 133) and a coherent socio-cultural interchange in nineteenth and twentieth century Bengal/India.

David Hare: The Scottish Watchmaker Educationist3 The Bengal renaissance initiated an acculturation of the cultures of India and the West (Dasgupta 2011, 3) through an active participation and a constructive orientalist point of view of some large-hearted Scots who being inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment went ahead to develop and enrich Bengal through their selfless endeavours - education being an important sector. David Hare, a large-hearted Scotsman, worked selflessly to address the destitution of education and initiate educational ventures for the welfare of the natives that remains significant in the history of Bengal. Though a foreigner, Hare settled and felt at home in India. Hare dedicated the best part of his life in Calcutta, for over four decades (1800 - 1842) to the welfare of the people of Bengal (Ray 2000, 6). He was one of the main architects of the new education, initiated by the Charter Act of 1813, heralding the renaissance in nineteenth century Bengal (Sarkar 1979, 97). As a dynamic philanthropist, Hare was not only pained to observe the socio-cultural, moral and intellectual degeneration of the Indians, but also pondered over its causes and worked upon the suitable remedies (Mitra 1968, 2). He turned the clock of Bengal’s education (Fraser 2012, np), by his conviction of propagating liberal Western education through the European Sciences and Literature among the natives, urging the necessity of the introduction of an English system of education of higher standards (Mitra 1968, 2). He discovered that “education was requisite... and exerted [his] humble abilities to further the interest of India and.to promote the cause of education” (“Asiatic Intelligence” 1831, 55), initiating the history of the beginning of modern Western system of scientific education in India (Mittra 1877, vii – viii). Inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment, and supported by enthusiastic natives David Hare diverted his attention from his watchmaking trade

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(Fraser 2012, np) towards the necessity of progressive modern education in India. His first initiative was proposing the idea and preparing a scheme for the establishment of the Hindoo College in 1815 (Mitra 1968, 3) which would accelerate modern, rational education for the native youths and thereby illuminate their understanding and purge their minds of pernicious cants (Mittra 1877, xii). On May 14, 1816, at a conference at the house of Chief Justice Sir Edward Hyde East to set up a centre of liberal English education as an educational institution of the highest degree on the plan of David Hare was apparently backed by Raja Rammohan Roy (Presidency College 1955, 293); the resolution being resolved on May 21, 1816 (Mitra 1968, 3) the Hindoo College for teaching “English and Indian languages and in the literature and science of Europe and Asia” (“A Sketch” 1832, 72) was opened in Goranhata on January 20, 1817 (Mittra 1877, xiii, 7). Having “envisaged the prospects and possibilities of English education in India” (Bagal 1955, 300). David Hare provided a concrete shape to the proposal on the necessity of establishing an educational institution for imparting instruction on the richness of the English literature to the younger generations. In spite of the bitter controversy between Sir Edward Hyde East and Dr Horace Hayman Wilson in 1830 “it was agreed by almost everybody that the ‘originator’ of the College...was David Hare... the idea of such an institution at first originated with him... [he also] prepared the plan for the Hindu College. It was on the basis of this plan that subsequent efforts were made” (Bagal 1955, 300). “A Sketch of the Origin, Rise and Progress of the Hindoo College” published in the first three issues (June - August 1832) of The Calcutta Christian Observer ascribe the merit of originating the Hindoo College to David Hare (Information 1925, 16) and states in the June 1832 issue that: a paper, both author and originator of which was Mr. Hare, and the purport of which was, a proposal for the establishment of a College, was handed to Sir Hyde East by a Native for his countenance and support...giving support or sanction to a measure proposed by any one is not the same thing with originating that measure. Mr. Hare did first conceive the plan in his mind, and then circulated it, in writing, amongst the Natives. The merit of originating the Hindoo College must in justice be ascribed to Mr. HARE (“A Sketch” 1832a, 17). This report was not convincing to some of the people so it was further elaborated in the July 1832 issue of The Calcutta Christian Observer where it was reported that:

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Mr. H. [David Hare] himself prepared a paper, containing proposals for the establishment of the College...’ The circular was after a time put into the hands of Sir E. H. East, who was very much pleased with the proposal, and offered his most cordial aid in the promotion of its objects. He soon after called a meeting at his house, and it was then resolved, “That an establishment be formed for the education of native youth” (“A Sketch” 1832b, 68, 69). These reports affirm the role of David Hare as the originator of the Hindu College; however besides Peary Chand Mitra’s biography of David Hare, Sir Edward Hyde East’s letter to J. H. Harrington written on May 18, 1816 and the reports published in the July 8, 1831 issue of Samachar Darpan affirm that Raja Rammohun Roy was closely associated with David Hare.4 Some of their friends in conversing the “plan of the College to their opulent as well as learned countrymen” (Bagal 1955, 300) in spite of being objected by orthodox pundits regarding his [Roy’s] association with the recommended institution, which is why Roy withdrew from his direct connection with the Hindu College Being educated on modern science and social philosophy eminent students5 from the Hindu College, including the Young Bengals ushered in a social movement “sending cold tremors to hollow spines of the seasoned conservatives” (Mittra 1877, xiii, xiv) followed by an acculturation of the East and the West realizing Hare’s paradigms of modern English education within the edifying forge and heritage of Bengal/India. On the occasion of the centenary of the Presidency College (1855 - 1955), Dr Jatischandra Sengupta, the Principal of the Hindu College at the Centenary Commemoration Meeting on June 15, 1955 offered his respect to David Hare as the “founder of the Hindu College” (Mallick 2018a, 85 – 86). Hare was also enthusiastically associated with the Calcutta School Book Society which was founded by several humane Europeans on July 4, 1817 for “the preparation, publication and cheap or gratuitous supply of works useful in schools and seminaries” (“Calcutta School Book” 1841, 352) and thereby not only aided their improvement but also established and supported the establishment of schools and seminaries with an aim towards a more general diffusion of useful knowledge amongst the inhabitants of India (“Asiatic Intelligence” 1829, 341). The Second Report of the Calcutta

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School Book Society stated the importance upon the Society’s publications among “the natives who [will] value them for their own use or that of their families” to a great effect (The Second Report 1819, 26 – 27), and emphasized their proper distribution among the needy and Radhakanta Dev was in charge (Mittra 1877, 56). Periodical examinations were held at the house of the Babu (“Letter respecting” 1819, 416) and prizes were offered to students and teachers (Mittra 1877, 56); for the efficient functioning and supervision of the schools the city was also divided into four districts (“Letter respecting” 1819, 413 - 414). The members of the Calcutta School Book Society established the Calcutta School Society on September 1, 1818 with the aim: to assist and improve existing schools and to establish and support any further schools and seminaries and to seek pupils of distinguished talents and merits from elementary and other schools and to provide for their instruction in seminaries of a higher degree with the view of forming a body of qualified Teachers and Translators who may be instrumental in enlightening their countrymen and improving the general system of education (“Foreign Intelligence” 1819, 224). Hare’s The School Society played a pioneering role in establishing five regular vernacular schools and two English schools for all students, the first being at Arpooly opposite to the Kali Temple at Thanthania (Mitra 1968, 8, 11), where Rev. Krishna Mohan Banerjea was a student before moving to Pataldanga school and to the Hindu college (Mittra 1877, 57). Education through the Arpooly School bore “the best proof that can be offered of the estimation in which it is held” (“Asiatic Intelligence” 1829, 341). The reports authenticate that both the societies aimed at the education for all sections of people in the society. Hare also established and personally managed the schools at Simla, Pataldanga [‘The Calcutta School Society’s School’ or ‘Mr Hare’s School’ later ‘Hare School’] and at Arpooly for imparting free education (Mittra 1877, xviii) among the poor students. With the passage of time the number of students in these schools increased; they were taught different subjects by a pundit and four native teachers and were divided into eleven classes very similar to an English school (“Asiatic Intelligence” 1829, 341). The School Society appointed three sub-committees for the establishment and support of schools (Mittra 1877, 54) where Hare may have accepted the model that Dr. Bell had tried in his Military Orphan Asylum of Madras in 1791 (“Letter respecting” 1819, 417), and the model

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of Robert May who established schools around Chinsurah (Mallick 2018b, 80). Classes were graded and meritorious students taught the juniors in the ‘monitorial’ method. The schools were established with the aim to be selfsufficient both in funds and personal exertions in order to disseminate the benefits of the Society among the masses in the days ahead (“Literary and Philosophical Intelligence” 1820, 368). For the efficiency of the educational institutions, Hare regularly visited, inspected the Society’s schools, the Hindoo College6 and the Calcutta Medical College which was established on February 1, 1835 (Hare 1838, 267, 268) and he was also its first Secretary (Mitra 1996, 464). Dr Bramley in his report stated that “without Mr Hare’s influence, any attempt to form a Hindu Medical College would have been futile...the cause of Native Medical Education, owes to that gentleman [David Hare]” (Report of the General Committee 1837, 34 – 35). Hare lived for his educational institutions as he served the country as an educator and contributed towards the socio­ political amelioration of Bengal, evident from his petitioning the GovernorGeneral to repeal the press regulations of 1824 (Mittra 1877, 75). Though Hare had not actively undertaken any measure for the development of the education for the females, and was a subscriber of the Calcutta Female Juvenile Society whose name was changed into the Ladies’ Society for Native Female Education.7 The Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction (1835) mentioned that Bengal will always be indebted to David Hare for introducing a balanced education for the native children (279). Hare stressed the proficiency in the liberal western education and the Bengali language (Mittra 1877, 59 – 60). He also aimed at an introspective enlargement as his daily schedule was a moral teaching and an inspiration for the age, benefitting young men and inspiring subsequent generations (Chakravarti 1976, 118). Hare’s generosity was equally felt and through his philanthropic service for the welfare of the youth he emerged as “the worldworker” (Tagore 2005, 55). James Kerr’s A Review of Public Instruction in the Bengal Presidency, From 1835 to 1851 (1852) provides a heart-warming account of David Hare’s disinterested benevolence revered by Bengal with an affectionate gratitude (Mitra 1996, 24). His life was an “infinite source of love, power and wisdom” (Mittra 1877, 150) as evident through D. L. Richardson’s tribute and the inscription upon his tombstone (Mallick 2018b, 91). David Hare’s humane efforts for the development of education in nineteenth century Bengal emerge as “webs of significance” (Geertz

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2000, 5) or “motives” (Weber 1956, 21) from a Scott towards developing a new phase in the intellectual history of the people which steadied the path for the unity and continuity of the Bengali culture (Dasgupta 2002, xxii) in the days ahead.

Patrick Geddes: The Scottish Polymath8 The Scottish legacy of taking measures to improve education and moral life of the people of Bengal along with the native reformers as initiated by David Hare through his progressive and munificent devotion gets further augmented in the late nineteenth century through Rev. Alexander Duff and much later by Patrick Geddes, the Scottish polymath, who worked in India for 9 years. Geddes came to India to associate with Rabindranath Tagore at Visva Bharati at Shantiniketan which aimed towards attaining and re-emphasizing the importance of the Lord of One’s Being i.e. Tagore’s ‘Jibandebota’ interrogating all divisive forces through an education which is liberal and compassionate; and with Jagadis Chandra Bose in his experiments to affirm “the immemorial Hindu belief in the fundamental and essential unity not only of all life, but of all that exists, and the absence of barriers between spirit and matter” (Bharucha 1932, 224). Geddes was a strong Scottish patriot but his mind transcended all frontiers (Mairet 1957, 62) embracing cultures as a humanist intellectual. Introduced by C. F. Andrews, the meeting of Geddes and Tagore was a creative assimilation of scientific ideas carrying ahead the legacy of an intellectual exchange between the two pathfinders of Scotland and India. Geddes was an educationist and a socio-ecologist who had the scientist’s accuracy and the artist’s perspective to make his ideas obvious through symbols (Fraser 2004, 12). His ideas on effective education, the necessity for a close association with Nature, village reconstruction and regeneration of the land brought him close to Tagore and this influenced their lives through a “fullness of their personality” (Fraser and Fraser 2018b, 9). Both of them believed the need for the harmony of education and environment - a holistic approach towards education where the student is taught interdisciplinary over compartmentalized study of humanities and sciences. The common pursuit of truth that Geddes sought, like Tagore, was universal education through an ideal international university where the minds would meet and encourage an academic exchange through mutual respect, “coordination and cooperation” (Fraser and Fraser 2018b, 13). The Tagore - Geddes Correspondence, compiled, edited and introduced by

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Bashabi Fraser was published for the first time from Edinburgh in 2002.9 This astounding archival collection of letters exchanged between these two seers of India and Scotland respectively is highly commendable and introduces their signal association and perspectives on education, environment, rural reconstruction and land management. Though Tagore and Geddes had similar ideas on education, here I will focus only on Geddes’s ideas instead of a comparative study between them, as a scholar of Tagore will easily decipher the similarity in the ideas of the two great minds. Geddes was very critical of the methods employed in imparting education in the schools as they did not nurture the imaginative faculty of the students. In his essay “The World Without And The World Within” (1905) he emphasized the need for the “thinking lesson” (Geddes 1905, 1) instead of rote learning and interrogates an education system lacking in humanism. A lesson which encourages students to cogitate will nurture their creative faculty and enable them to connect their thoughts with the outer world (Geddes 1905, 2). Here Geddes lays down his educational principles which aim towards “good education” (Geddes 1905, 17) through which the students will develop to be “thinking machines” (Geddes 1905, 16) effectively connecting the whole circle of operations where there is the In-World of memories and plans with the Out-World of facts and acts schematically portrayed in two halves and four quarters (Geddes 1905, 9). That “sciences bespeaks not only a return to nature, but the indispensable renewal of education” (Geddes 2018a, 120) is evident through Geddes’s “The Fifth Talk from my Outlook Tower: Our City of Thought” where every science and art has an essentially profound equal importance towards constructive peace (Geddes 2018a, 117 - 118). In spite of Geddes’s method of diagnostic survey, he complains how education only facilitated “hedonistic psychology” and “utilitarian economics” (Geddes 2018a, 121). Through this essay Geddes forwards his ideas regarding “change” and “progress” of a society through a proper biological and sociological education and observations, i.e. an actual understanding of the sciences essential for life to be simpler and more evolved through growths and phases (Geddes 2018a, 119). This process of education outlined also helps with understanding the subject historically which is not “mere keeping annals” as “it is more than general philosophy of history” (Geddes 2018a, 117) healing the “poverty of average intelligence” (Geddes 2018a, 124). He vindicated the use of the mother tongue for the medium of instruction, as education through a foreign tongue is not effective for the freedom of thought and creation. The eminence of education is successfully earned when a student’s close

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association with Nature is attained and it is worthwhile for a life to be active and thoughtful necessary for the evolution of human civilisation. In this context he refers to Precursors, Initiators and Continuators contributing towards the rhythm of progress through a process of surveys which is the “very essence of all research” (Geddes 2018a, 118 - 119), and the result of an education which negates rote over thoughts. Throughout his life Geddes justified the need of a “living teacher” who would be able to guide his/her students regarding the continuity of “life’s immediate experience, taking stock of one’s surroundings and deriving knowledge from them” (Fraser 2004, 23). In his Outlook Tower, Geddes put into practice “Huxley’s instinctive teaching method of personal survey of the learner’s own immediate environment” (Mairet 1957, 72). As a scientist he found science [knowledge] meaningless unless it could be utilized for the advancement of man...[to] cultivate its higher faculties... [to] constantly and consciously seek, strive for, and achieve mastery over “things of the earth, earthy” and liberate more and more the spirit...[to] pursue its eternal course towards infinite self-perfection” (Bharucha 1932, 225). Geddes critiqued the existing system of education and the British system of standardizing schools through his ideas on regional and occupational education (Geddes 2018a, 125). “The Education of Two Boys” is his blueprint for education put into practice through his son and himself. It has been an evidence of growth, not bound by the scheme of things but through a “stimulation of surprises” (Fraser 2004, 27) justifying the need to emancipate the students’ minds from all barriers enabling them to be a creative force to express the changes. The architectonic magnitude of Geddes’s mind enabled him to emphasize the need for an education which will ensure a “spiritual unity of human races” as advocated in his Edinburgh Summer School from 1887 to 1900, except the one revival in 1903 (Mairet 1957, 67) and at the Scots College and the Indian College at Montpellier from 1923, both the institutions were imbued with an international perspective. Discussing an individual’s sincere efforts to be successful, Geddes refers to “the dream of ‘getting rich quickly’, without effort or labour” to “demoralize production that no moderately sane community can afford to encourage it” (Geddes 2018b, 127). The occupations he had undertaken since his youth and also by his children emphasize how being skillful through proper education and training “strengthens character to self-reliance and responsibility” (Geddes 2018b, 127). Such an education happens to manoeuvre our lives in a manner that it gets “vaccinated” and “the later life is immunized” and “the

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‘catharsis’ is successful” (Geddes 2018b, 128). Since his childhood Geddes has been passionate regarding the garden of his family home leading to his love for nature study and botany. He states, “we had real daily work, efficient in household and gardening with more of music and song, and more of acting plays...excursions and nature studies” (Geddes 2018b, 132). He was also attentive towards experimental methods of study, as a town planner, involving the collection of data through a scientific survey steering his ingenuity on the “precise observation of the city in details” (Geddes 2018b, 130). Therefore, his thoughts on education are based “essentially in and from and among the nature-occupations” and they distinctly pave the “elemental range of activity which thus grows more effective, more vital indeed, with each increasing and extending span of action on environment” (Geddes 2018b, 138). His ramblings with nature fostered in his family garden in Perth and the landscape beyond along the Tay proliferated his faculty of examination from his intimate interconnection with his surroundings i.e. “the fundamental significance of early experiences and impressions upon later life” (Geddes 2018b, 130), making him a naturalist and a humanist. Through these ideas Geddes prepares the blue print of his home-school which would be progressive through a principle more than yet usual of regional survey; and...occupational education in the context of nature (Geddes 2018b, 132) which will extend to the student a “fresh game of life, full of interest as well as of strenuousness, filling him with a new exhilaration and joy of life, radiant too to others” (Geddes 2018b, 134) and initiate the development of “talent” and “ability”. Along with its contribution towards the society Geddes’s scheme and method of education primarily aimed towards individual development through practical and efficient education involving a proper knowledge of subjects like history, biology especially the facts of life and sex, and the development of moral courage (Geddes 2018b, 137). This would prepare his students to “go anywhere and do anything; and to know where they were, and how to make the best of it” (Geddes 2018b, 137). Such an endeavour and training will open “the elemental range of activity to each young life, which thus grows more effective with each increasing and extending span of action on environment” (Geddes 2018b, 138). Geddes was a scientist, an unusually gifted ‘evolutionist’ who perceived everything through his theories as part of an endless process subscribing to the Hegelian theory of ‘Becoming, Being and Having been’. He saw “a plant, an animal, a human type, a social organisation, a historic crisis, not

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merely as something which had evolved, but as something that had evolved in a particular way and was still evolving” (Bharucha 1932, 225). It was an important contribution towards the laws of social evolution, placing him after Comte and Le Play. Geddes and his son Arthur Geddes vindicated a process of learning based on the interdependence of various disciplines. The “The Notation of Life” embarks on the necessity of assimilating all subjects “into a living unison” (Geddes 2018c, 40) which he had selfillustrated through a diagram called a “Thinking Machine”10 establishing the inter-relatedness of Place - Work - Folk with Geography, Economics and Anthropology, respectively to be “united into a compact outline of Sociology” (Geddes 2018c, 140).

Through this diagram we can perceive the connection between Sense, Experience, Feeling with Place, Work and Folk. Geddes wanted to instill into the education system an “increasing clearness and interests with increasing syntheses with other thoughts, ideas become emotionalized towards action” emulated as Synthesis + Synergy + Imagination = Collective Action + Deed + Prefigure leading to Achievement (Geddes 2018c, 142). As a sociologist, Geddes justified his thesis through his letter to Rabindranath Tagore on April 15, 1922 where he details the “special theories and technical applications...the mobilization of the resources of the

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University” [as the] “miniature outline of the University’s resources, applied towards clearer social thought, and better civic practice” (Geddes 2004a, 59 – 60). Tagore perceived ‘unity’ through a different perspective involving “the power that confers unity and significance on all the joy and sorrow and circumstance of my [his] life, weaving onto one strand the myriad forms of myself [himself] and my [his] chain of lives, through which I [he] can feel the unity within the universe” (Tagore 2009, 7) i.e. Jibandebata. As a result, in his reply to Geddes on May 9, 1922, Tagore stated his university to be “a living growth” where the mantra is “to emancipate children’s minds from the dead grip of a mechanical method and a narrow purpose” (Tagore 2004, 64). However, Geddes perceived the “Achievement” as the “new Chord of Life”, ensuring his idea of the “unity of Life” to be the action of a truly educated individual “reshape [ing] the world anew, more near to the heart’s desire” and successfully attaining the unity with his surroundings through his deeds (Geddes 2018c, 142). These were two perspectives on education by the two seers of Scotland and India leading towards the enrichment of humanity. Geddes’s letter to Tagore on March 12, 1927 reveals the unfaltering resilience of the education theorist in him when he states his thesis of the life, thought and purpose to be symbolized by “three doves, in vital order as Sympathy, Synergy and Synthesis - Heart, Hand and Head - Good, Beautiful and True,” affirming “Vivendo discimus” to establish “Studia Synthetica” in harmony and interaction with “Agenda Synergica” (Geddes 2004b, 133). Being a creative visionary he had an innovative programme for the better coordination of universities, including disciplines, nomenclature and library systems. His principles attract young minds and fire their imagination through heuristic methods of education involving the study of the sciences and the social sciences. This education is comprehensive, and it aims for “life teaching” (Kitchen 1975, 24) and attaining the ideal of inclusive humanism for the society (Fraser 2004, 43). Geddes’s plan for a university is further stated in his “Scottish University Needs and Aims”. Here he refers to the “profound political importance” (Geddes 1890, 7) a university has in ushering a revival in the country. Exploring the history through the two sections of this essay, Geddes writes, “while the Scotsman has often led the age, Scotland has no less indeed reach Ultima Thule sooner or later” (Geddes 1890, 6). Therefore, a necessary modification of the spirit of the University is of utmost importance, like curriculum, staff, students’ life on campus, their residence [University halls]

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and also extending opportunities and possibilities “to enlarge and deepen its student life and culture” in Scottish cities which are “less attractive as an academic city” (Geddes 1890, 12). Besides advocating surveys, Geddes wanted his students to undertake a programme through foreign travel on scholarships to study, work and research in a new environment which will enrich them with knowledge, and foster in them social harmony and racial sympathies. This would instill in them the feeling that they “represent not one country but civilisation common to all cultures” (Fraser 2004, 44) corroborating Tagore’s universal man. Geddes developed a modus operandi on education as he believed that modern man seeking to utilise science for social application and assistance would certify the re-emergence of “little bits of Cosmos” (Fraser 2004, 44) through [Rabindranath Tagore’s] Visva Bharati at Shantiniketan, [Patrick Geddes’s] the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh and the Scots College with its Indian College at Montpellier. Their aim being towards a sustainable future of humanity through harmony and sympathy through a union that connects man with nature, interrogates the divisive forces of life through educational institutions which play an engaging role towards the development of humanity through universal education.

Conclusion Inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment and the ideals of constructive orientalism, David Hare and Patrick Geddes addressed the sociocultural and educational challenges of their times in Bengal and Scotland through their visionary endeavours i.e. the “webs of significance” which ensured a continuity through their evaluated tradition in order to welcome modernity. They dedicated themselves for the development of the people of Bengal/ India carrying ahead the legacy of the Scotland-India interface through their enlightened ideas and philanthropic services which enabled them, unknowingly, to be the living epitome of the “universal man” or Tagore’s visvakarma, “the world-worker” (Tagore 2005, 55) through their pragmatic endeavours for the enlargement of education in Bengal which remains an enduring legacy in the history of India.

Notes: 1. This essay is for Dr Norman Aselmeyer for his enduring love and abiding support. 2. Thomas Munro, John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone.

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3. The archival documents on David Hare have been obtained from the Pres­ idency University Library, the National Library of India, the National Li­ brary of Scotland and the British Library. 4. Roy and Hare aimed towards the “cultivation of English literature and Eu­ ropean science rather than Hindu theology or metaphysics” (Banerjee and Mukherji 1996, 2). 5. Dakhinaranjan Mookherjee, Ram Gopal Ghose, Tarachand Chakravarty, Krishnamohan Banerjee. 6. Hare was appointed the visitor and superintendent of the Hindoo College from June 12, 1819, besides being the Superintendent of the School Society (Mitra 1996, 11). 7. The ‘Ladies’ Society for Native Female Education’ was established in 1824. Hare believed that if he would have lived for ten years more then he would have surely endeavoured measures for active female education in Bengal (Mitra 1996, 15). 8. The manuscripts and archival documents on/by Patrick Geddes have been obtained from the National Library of Scotland, Archives at the Univer­ sity of Dundee and Archives and Special Collection at the University of Strathclyde Library. I had researched in these archives and libraries as an UKIERI Fellow and Associate Staff of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), Edinburgh Napier University in 2016. 9. The Tagore - Geddes Correspondence compiled and edited with an ex­ haustive introduction by Bashabi Fraser was first published from Edin­ burgh by Edinburgh Review Book Series in 2002. The second edition of this book was published in Kolkata by Visva Bharati in 2004. The third re­ vised edition entitled A Meeting of Two Minds: the Geddes Tagore Letters was published from Edinburgh by Wordpower Books in 2005. The fourth revised edition of this book is in the press. 10. The Charting of Life, “The Thinking Machine” by Patrick Geddes, Recs A/289/38 - 66 G - M, Archives and Special Collection, University of Strathclyde Library.

Works cited: 1. “A Sketch of the Origin, Rise, and Progress of the Hindoo College.” 1832. The Calcutta Christian Observer, I (June): 14 - 17. 2. “A Sketch of the Origin, Rise, and Progress of the Hindoo College.” 1832. The Calcutta Christian Observer, II (July): 68 - 76. 3. “A Sketch of the Origin, Rise, and Progress of the Hindoo College.” 1832. The Calcutta Christian Observer, III (August): 115 - 129.

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4. Antor, Heinz. 2010. “From Postcolonialism and Interculturalism to the Ethics of Transculturalism in The Age of Globalization.” In From Inter­ culturalism to Transculturalism: Mediating Encounters in Cosmopolitan Contexts, edited by Heinz Antor, Matthias Merkl, Klaus Stierstorfer and Laurenz Volk-mann, 1 - 13. Germany: Universitatsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg. 5. “Asiatic Intelligence.” 1831. The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register For British and Foreign India, China and Australasia, VI (October): 49 - 104. 6. “Asiatic Intelligence - Calcutta.” 1829. The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Reg­ ister For British India and its Dependencies XXVIII (September): 329 - 345. 7. Bagal, Jogeschandra. 1955. “The Origins of the Hindu College.” In Presi­ dency College Calcutta Centenary Volume 1955, 299 - 305. West Bengal: West Bengal Government Press. 8. Banerjee, Ajoy Chandra, and Asoke Kumar Mukherji. 1996. “General His­ tory of the College.” In 175th Anniversary Commemoration Volume 1992, edited by Amal Kumar Mukhopadhyay, 1 - 56. Calcutta: Presidency Col­ lege. 9. Bayly, Christopher A. 1989. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780 to 1830. London: Longman. 10. Beck, Ulrich. 1997. Was ist Globalisierung? Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp. 11. Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge. 12. Bharucha, Pheroze. 1932. “Professor Patrick Geddes.” Journal of the Asiat­ ic Society of Bombay 1, no. 1: 224 - 228. 13. “Calcutta School Book Society.” 1841. The Bengal and Agra Guide and Gazetteer for 1841 1, no. 3: 352. 14. Chakravarti, Hiralal. 1976. “Bengal Renaissance and David Hare.” In Da­ vid Hare Bicentenary Volume 1975-76, edited by Rakhal Bhattacharya, 109 - 118. Calcutta: David Hare Bicentenary of Birth Celebration Committee. 15. Dasgupta, Rabindra Kumar. 2002. Introduction. Studies in the Bengal Renaissance, xx - xxiv. Kolkata: National Council of Education. 16. Dasgupta, Subrata. 2011. Awakening: The Story of the Bengal Renaissance. Noida: Random House. 17. Dodson, Michael S. 2007. Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: In­ dia, 1770 - 1880. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 18. “Foreign Intelligence.” 1819. The Missionary Register for MDCCC XIX. Containing the Principal Transactions of the Various Institutions for Propa­ gating the Gospel: With The Proceedings, At Large, Of The Church Mission­ ary Society (May): 220 - 225.

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19. Fraser, Bashabi. 2004. Introduction. In The Tagore - Geddes Correspon­ dence, edited by Bashabi Fraser, 1 - 45. Kolkata: Visva Bharati. 20. Fraser, Bashabi. 2012. Scots Beneath The Banyan Tree: Stories From Ben­ gal. Edinburgh: Luarth Press. 21. Fraser, Bashabi. 2018. “Scottish Orientalists and the Bengal Renaissance: An Introduction.” In Scottish Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance, edited by Bashabi Fraser, Tapati Mukherjee and Amrit Sen, 13 - 34. Edin­ burgh: Luath Press. 22. Fraser, Neil, and Bashabi Fraser. 2018. “Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes: An Introduction to their Ideas on Education and the Environ­ ment.” In A Confluence of Minds: The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and Environment, edited by Bashabi Fraser, Tapati Mukherjee and Amrit Sen, 9 - 22. Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited. 23. Geddes, Patrick. “The Charting of Life”, Recs A/289/38 - 66 G - M. Archives and Special Collection, University of Strathclyde Library, Strathclyde. 24. Geddes, Patrick. 1890. Scottish University Needs and Aims. University Col­ lege, Dundee, Closing Address for 1889 - 90. Dundee Advertiser: John Leng and Co. 25. Geddes, Patrick. 1905. The World Without And The World Within. Sunday Talks With My Children. London: George Allen. 26. Geddes, Patrick. 2004. Letter to Rabindranath Tagore, 15 April 1922. In The Tagore - Geddes Correspondence, edited by Bashabi Fraser, 59 - 62. Kolkata: Visva Bharati. 27. Geddes, Patrick. 2004. Letter to Rabindranath Tagore, 12 March 1927. In The Tagore - Geddes Correspondence, edited by Bashabi Fraser, 132 - 136. Kolkata: Visva Bharati. 28. Geddes, Patrick. 2018. “The Fifth Talk from my Outlook Tower: Our City of Thought” In A Confluence of Minds: The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and Environment, edited by Bash­ abi Fraser, Tapati Mukherjee and Amrit Sen, 112 - 125. Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited. 29. Geddes, Patrick. 2018. “The Education of Two Boys” In A Confluence of Minds: The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Educa­ tion and Environment, edited by Bashabi Fraser, Tapati Mukherjee and Amrit Sen, 126 - 138. Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited. 30. Geddes, Patrick. 2018. “The Notation of Life” In A Confluence of Minds: The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and Environment, edited by Bashabi Fraser, Tapati Mukherjee and Amrit Sen, 139 - 143. Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited.

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31. Geertz, Clifford. 2000. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Perseus Books Group. 32. Hare, David. 1838. “Medical College, Calcutta.” Paburys Oriental Herald and Colonial Intelligencer II. (9): 267 - 268. 33. Herman, Arthur. 2003. The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scot’s Invention of the Modern World. Great Britain: Fourth Estate. 34. Information concerning Presidency College, Calcutta. 1925. Calcutta: Ben­ gal Government Press. 35. Kitchen, Paddy. 1975. A Most Unsettling Person. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. 36. “Letter respecting the Calcutta School Society.” 1819. The Friend of India, Containing Information Relative to the State of Religion and Literature in India, with occasional Intelligence from Europe and America for the Year 1819 (II): 405 - 419. 37. “Literary and Philosophical Intelligence.” 1820. The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and its Dependencies X (October): 367 - 375. 38. Macaulay Papers, OIOC, Mss Eur E301/2. British Library, London. 39. Mairet, Philip. 1957. Pioneer of Sociology: The Life and Letters of Patrick Geddes. London: Lund Humphries. 40. Mallick, Saptarshi. 2018. “Serampore Missionaries and David Hare: On the Penury of Education in Nineteenth Century Bengal.” In Scottish Orien­ talism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Continnum of Ideas, edited by Bashabi Fraser, Tapati Mukherjee and Amrit Sen, 71 - 87. Edinburgh: Lu­ ath Press. 41. Mallick, Saptarshi. 2018. “A Scottish Watchmaker - Educationist and Ben­ gal Renaissance.” Journal of the Asiatic Society LX, no. 4 (January): 79 - 96. 42. McLaren, Martha. 2001. British India and British Scotland, 1780 - 1830: Career Building, Empire Building and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance. Akron: University of Akron. 43. Mitra, Radharaman. 1968. David Hare: His Life and Work. Calcutta: Man­ isha Granthalay. 44. Mitra, Ramesh Chandra. 1967. “Education.” In The History of Bengal (1757 - 1905), edited by Narendra Krishna Sinha, 429 - 471. Calcutta: Uni­ versity of Calcutta. 45. Mittra, Peary Chand. 1877. A Biographical Sketch of David Hare. Calcutta: W. Newman & Co. 46. Powell, Averil A. 2010. Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire. United Kingdom: Boydell Press.

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47. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession: 33 - 40. 48. Presidency College, Calcutta Centenary Volume 1955. 1955. West Bengal: West Bengal Government Press. 49. Ray, Sibnarayan. 2000. Bengal Renaissance: The First Phase. Calcutta: Minerva Associates. 50. Rendall, Jane. 1982. “Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill” The Historical Journal 25, no. 1 (March): 43 - 69. 51. Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal, For the Year 1836. 1837. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. 52. Sarkar, Susobhan. 1979. On The Bengal Renaissance. Calcutta: Papyrus. 53. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1978. Angel of Surplus: Some Essays and Addresses on Aesthetics. Calcutta: Visva-Bharati. 54. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1996. “East and West.” In The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore Volume II, edited by Sisir Kumar Das, 530 - 537. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 55. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2004. Letter to Patrick Geddes, 9 May 1922. In The Tagore - Geddes Correspondence, edited by Bashabi Fraser, 63 - 64. Kolk­ ata: Visva Bharati. 56. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2005. The Religion of Man. New Delhi: Rupa Pub­ lications India Pvt. Ltd. 57. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2007. Personality. New Delhi: Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd. 58. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2009. Of Myself. Translated by Devadatta Joardar and Joe Winter. Kolkata: Visva Bharati. 59. Thomason, James. 1853. “Speech of the Hon’ble Lt. Gov NWP at the Open­ ing of the Benares New College on 11 January 1853.” OIOC, V/23/128, Art. British Library, London. 60. The Second Report of the Calcutta School-Book Society’s Proceedings. Second Year, 1818 - 19. With An Appendix, The Accounts of the Institution, &c. &c. Read the 21st September, 1819. 1819. Calcutta: The School and Mission Press. 61. Weber, Max. 1956. Max Weber: Selections in Translation. Edited by W. G. Runciman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Of Rights to Expression & Information under the

Indian and Scottish Legal Systems: A Comparative

Analysis

Prof. (Dr.) Subir Kumar Roy & Prof. Jayanta Kumar Saha Freedom of Information: A basic postulate of democratic governance Freedom of speech and expression is an inalienable and natural right of human beings. As a necessary corollary this right comprises the right to impart and receive information and ideas. A free flow of information and ideas enriches our cognitive faculty and knowledge systems and helps us create a democratic society. Freedom of information creates the bedrock for an effective participatory democracy and enables the people to remain involved in the decision-making process in a meaningful and pragmatic way. Right to know is the basic postulate of freedom of information that helps the people avoid an authoritative regime and create an enabling environment for those who want to ensure justice in fields social, economic and political. The world is witnessing an unprecedented erosion of democratic mechanisms today which may be remedied by legal pluralism ensuring maximum integrity. Though democracy is a political term, it has acquired cultural connotations, resonant with values leading towards the making of a ‘good society’. Patronage of any specific philosophy and rejection of the principle of pluralism are antagonistic to a democratic system. The cardinal component of democracy is to ensure freedom of speech and respect for the view of others. Thinking, speaking and voicing public opinion are the bulwark of a democratic government. According to Vivekananda, thinking beings must differ in their vision and imagination as this divergence is the first sign of thought and thoughtful people will prefer to live amongst their peers such that differences of opinion thrive. He holds each religion to not contradict but rather supplement the other with one more part of the great universal truth. Every idea contributes to another idea. People do not proceed from error to truth, but rather from a lesser to a higher truth and thus the whole system becomes geared towards an evolution of humanity (Mumukshananda 1995, 366 - 367).

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It is axiomatic from the above that right to information may quench the thirst for knowledge which in its turn ensures the progress of civilization in a matrix of democratic values. Democracy is not about the tyranny of majority, rather it is premised on the cardinal principle of registering, respecting the views of others, whereby people feel and realize their importance and role in society and work for its further development so as to attain a higher standard of life. Freedom of information, inculcation of the right to know, sharing of ideas etc. work as tools of sensitization in giving importance to the opinion of others and thus helps the people in saving themselves from being targeted by the tyranny of the majority. People’s participation in the polity of a state is sine qua non for a democracy and only a properly informed person may make that participation meaningful and effective. Otherwise, democracy may turn into either a mobocracy or an ochlocracy. One sided information, disinformation, misinformation and non-information all are equally responsible in creating an uninformed citizenry, antagonistic to democratic values since it makes democracy into a farce (Secretary 1995). A democratic polity on the other hand allows the people to know about the affairs of a polity created by their free will. An informed citizenry qualitatively evaluates the policies and performances of the government and if needed, may contribute to the realm of affairs by airing suggestions to make it more purposive. As Justice Bernnan aptly stated in Richmond Newspaper v. Virginia 448 U.S. 555, 587-588(1980), ““The structural model links the First Amendment to that process of communication necessary for a democracy to survive, and thus entails solicitude not only for communication itself, but also for the indispensable conditions of meaningful communication” (Cooper 1986, 622 – 628). A democratic society honours the opinion and values of the people comprising its polity and the cardinal duty of a democratic government is to ensure the well-being of the people by offering an enabling environment so that the citizens may enjoy agency and design a quality life for themselves. Democratic governance ensures a value based socio-political system to ensure justice to all sections of society and minimize the disparities. The litmus test of whether a democratic polity is geared towards attaining the above end or not, is whether the government in question derives its power from the consent of the governed. It is also required to observe if the political system is paying respect towards opinions across a spectrum of divergence. To give consent and validation to the functioning of a system is an inalienable right of the people and simultaneously, an important tenet

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of democracy. The legitimacy of a government depends upon the validation derived from the masses and that validation is a conditional one i.e. based upon the subjective satisfaction of the people. Democracy is ultimately considered a ‘global entitlement’, whereby governments yearn for validation in order to obtain legitimacy (Frank 1992, 49). Legitimacy bears evidence of that peculiar quality of a rule or system that nudges both rule makers and those addressed by the rules towards voluntary compliance (Frank 1992, 49). The quality of governance thus influences the legitimacy of a democratic regime and since the final endorsement towards the above ends comes from the governed, it requires an aware and vigilant public to make a legitimate democracy. A truly democratic system generates, conserves and protects values concerning freedoms and the liberty of the people, pluralism, rule of law, human rights and a participatory approach in the decision-making process. However, democracy is a very fragile word/world and the autocrats, authoritarians, anarchists or populists may hijack the system in their favour by befooling the people at any point of time. None but an informed citizenry may save a democracy. David Held claims that individual autonomy is possible only in the public sphere, where wide, participatory action is the best mechanism for the reconciliation of diverse, and potentially conflicting, values (Barry 2000, 305). Right to know is not a mere moral imperative but a potent weapon to fight corruption, maladministration and poor governance. Right to know helps in getting information about the realm of affairs and its many obscure delusive turns, which in turn helps to promote transparency in policy making and its operation. The prosperity of the nation-state and wellbeing of an individual are intrinsically related and largely depend upon the policy of the government. In a democratic system, a government is liable to inform the citizen about policies likely to be introduced, and to take citizens’ approval for the same. An informed citizenry may protect the foundation of a democratic system, the government of a state is forced to be accountable and sensitive towards the aspirations of the people. ‘Openness’ and ‘secrecy’ are contrary categories; secrecy could birth and gestate tyranny and corruption whereas openness restrains or lessens these negative imperatives of secrecy. Under the freedom of information regime, information is supplied vide two methods - one is to supply information upon the request of an information seeker and another is the ‘disclosure law’, whereby the government supplies information on its own in order to legitimize its policies as entitlement. In

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democratic governance, the disclosure of information must be considered as rule and secrecy an exception. Governance refers to myriad interactions among formal and informal institutions and actors within society so as to ensure participatory developments through inviting social relationships within the matrix of a political entity. Good governance involves all actors in society in order to promote equity, transparency, greater accountability, pluralism, rule of law with a true democratic spirit and to restrain corruption, violence, poverty etc. which may be attained only through informed citizenry. Democracy gains beauty and valency in giving equal weightage to the view of others, in showing tolerance, empathy and recognizing the dignity of those others. Freedom of thought, conscience, worship etc. constitute the foundation of democracy. In Kokkinakis v/s Greece1 it has been held by the European Court of Human Rights that pluralism is indissociable from a democratic society, which has been dearly won over centuries. Free flow of information and ideas is not only necessary to protect democratic values but also to conserve the citizens’ human rights since most incidents of abuse and breach of human rights happen under the shield of secrecy. Due to this grim reality Art.19 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 recognises freedom of speech and expression as an important human right.2 It involves the right of the masses to know about different welfare measures and schemes undertaken by their government and claim the benefits, if any, albeit limited by their respective criteria or stipulations, since the benefits are initiated after all by expending public money. Similarly, the state is under obligation to disclose the reasons, whenever any of its measures affects the rights of the masses or of an individual, otherwise it may be held liable for infringing the fundamental rights of the people. The decision of the states must be backed by reason as reasoned decision is an important facet of natural justice. The openness of the society controls and checks every act of abuse, mismanagement, oppression and undemocratic function of authorities. The right to information has many facets like the right to acquire information about public affairs from different public authorities, right to privacy, obligations on the part of state authorities to disclose and publish information for knowledge and awareness of the people, right to information in the matter of environment, information for protecting and strengthening human rights, data protection and the information behind creation of algorithms, say on social media etc. Many modern constitutions are acknowledging the right to know and right to get information as

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important tributaries of freedom of speech and expression so as to protect the fundamental rights of life, liberty, security, property etc. and the number is gradually on the rise.

Scope of Rights to Information & Knowledge, and their Dissemination in the Indian Legal System The Indian Constitution validates the Indian polity as sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic and republic, ensures justice in fields social, economic and political, advocates in favour of the liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith, worship and promotes notions of equality, fraternity, dignity etc. so as to make an informed citizenry and constitute a democratic governance. Specifically, Art.19 (1) (a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression which logically extends to the right to get information, right to know, freedom of press etc. and posits a polity with a democratic rubric. With the passage of time these rights have attained different dimensions, further reinforcing the right to seek, receive and disseminate knowledge. In the case of Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India & Ors. V/s Cricket association of Bengal & Another,3 the Supreme Court decided that without having proper information about the realm of affairs of the state, the right to participate in the decision-making process would be meaningless. Democracy would be reduced toa farce if the medium of information is either monopolized by a partisan central authority or by private individuals or oligarchical organizations. However, no right can be absolute as in itself such a condition negates the enjoyment of any right. Freedom of speech and expression is also subject to reasonable restrictions provided under Art.19 (2) of the Indian Constitution, which comprises security of the state, friendly relation with the foreign states, public order, decency of morality, contempt of court, defamation, incitement to an offence, sovereignty and the integrity of India. Apart from the restrictions mentioned above, the right to privacy guaranteed under Art.21.10 imposes another restriction on right to information. No such information will be shared, disclosed nor any one compelled to disclose that which may unreasonably inflict or infringe upon the privacy of any person. Right to privacy has many attributes and dimensions and apart from other factors, it may also be intruded by violating the fundamental freedoms provided in Art.19 in an arbitrary manner, ignoring the reasonability clauses inbuilt within this article and also violating the equality norms

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prescribed under Art.14 of the Indian Constitution. In the Maneka Gandhi case,4 it had been made clear by the Supreme Court verdict endorsing the dissenting judgment of Justice Subba Rao in Kharak Singh Case5 given almost fifty-six years ago that the jurisprudential foundation of fundamental rights comprises liberty and dignity and some facets of liberty as distinctly protected rights under Art. 19 do not denude Art.21 of its gamut. The validity of law which infringes the fundamental rights guaranteed to its citizens will not be tested with regard to the object of the state but always with reference to the impact of such law on the freedoms guaranteed to the citizen. It has been further stated that Art. 14 enjoins that state action must not be arbitrary, unreasonable and must not be contrary to the very object for which the fundamental rights have been granted in part-III of the Constitution. In case of Rajagopal,6 the Supreme Court had to decide whether a person could prevent another from writing the life history of the former. In this case it is held that right to privacy is implicit under Art.21 of the Indian Constitution in the sense of the ‘right to be let alone’ and nothing may be published impairing the above right. However, if such publication is based on public records then the aforesaid rule will not apply. Any publication not based on any fact or statement which is not true, will not automatically be liable to be punished with damages unless it is proved that the publication has been made, completely disregarding the truth. At the same time, the author is only required to prove that he has taken reasonable care during publication and is not under further obligation to prove the authenticity of content. However, the real ways remain scope on the part of the plaintiff to prove malice of intent or personal animosity of the defendant behind such publication. In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v/s Union of India,7 it has been finally affirmed that the right to privacy is protected as an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Art.21 and as part of the freedom provided in part-III of the Constitution. There remains an inherent tension between freedom of speech, right to have information etc. and reasonable restrictions applicable with other constitutional limitations – unfettered rights are always dangerous to the democratic fabric but at the same time under the pretext of the above, the state on various occasions vests itself with unlimited power to thwart the voice of the people and to create a vacuum in the domain of sharing information. The word “reasonable” implies an intelligible care and deliberation but often power diminishes its true colour and meaning till absolute power corrupts absolutely. In Modern Dental College & Research Centre V/s State of Madhya Pradesh,8 the court has preferred to adopt

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harmonious construction in resolving the conflict between the right and its limitations. The court in the above case has followed the doctrine of proportionality which states that a limitation on constitutional right is said to be constitutional only when it is designated for a proper purpose, a commensurate rational linkage between the measures taken to curb the freedom and the purpose of the right exercised being the only solution. In K.S. Puttaswamy (Retired) V/s Union of India9 and in a catena of judgments the Supreme Court evolved and endorsed the concept of proportionality by maintaining that the measure of the state to restrict freedom should not have disproportionate impact on the rights holder. In Anuradha Bhasin case10 too, the Supreme Court has held that proportionality is the key tool to achieve judicial balance. Based on constitutional jurisprudence, Indian Parliament enacted a comprehensive legislation in Right to Information Act, 2005 which provides the statutory recognition to the concept of ‘open society’ and ‘open government’. Besides empowering the citizen with the right to secure and access information, it also contains the provision of certain aspects of disclosure laws as enjoined under sec.4 of the Act. However, the obligation of disclosure of information by the State has received very insignificant attention and in absence of the mechanism of protection of the life and liberty of whistleblowers, the Act has practically become the last potent means to fight against injustice, corruptions and crimes, especially when normativised, hegemonised by the powers that be. In Ram Jethmalani V/s Union of India the Supreme Court said that it is imperative on the part of the state to disclose the information possessed by it. Though Parliament enacted the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014 in order to receive complaints related to disclosure of any allegation regarding corruption or misuse of power or faulty application of discretionary power by the authority and to inquire into such allegations as also provide protection to the whistleblower against being victimized, the Central Government, curiously is yet to notify the enforcement of the above Act till date.

Right To Information Regime in Scotland: A Comparative Analysis with India Freedom of speech and expression and its extent of penetration within society partially depend upon the political entity and form of government of a country. Guarantee of freedoms is in itself not an adequate talisman unless the people get to feel and experience such freedoms, including in the

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upliftment of their status. Economic empowerment is not enough unless a system recognizes, protects and respects dignity, feelings, views of others with a notion of positive equality. Keeping in view the above normative proposition, we shall discuss the scope of freedom of speech and expression in Scotland and explore the depth of right to information and right to know available in that polity. Scotland is neither a sovereign country nor considered a separate nation but possesses a distinct entity with separate legal jurisdiction in divergence from that of England. In the 1980s, during the regime of Thatcher, the political rift had widened between Scotland and England due to the politics of polarisation and failure of the then ruling party of England to win the trust of the Scottish people for many reasons, mainly, the hardships felt in Scotland in the manufacturing sector and increase in the percentage of unemployment as UK was then in recession. Apart from the above, reform of the welfare state, the miners’ strike and the introduction of poll tax were considered attacks on the integrity of the Scottish society and deteriorated the relationship further. Gradually the Conservatives lost popularity and the Labour Party came into power during the general election held in 1997. The Labour party had unambiguously supported the devolution and promised to introduce referendum on home rule if they came in power. Accordingly, the Labour Government of UK published the White Paper, “Scotland’s Parliament” and the referendum for devolution in favour of Scotland received the mandate of Scottish people with landslide favour on 11th September, 1997. Afterwards, the Parliament of UK passed the Scotland Bill, which received the royal assent on 19th November, 1998.11 The above Devolution Act officially known as Scotland Act 1998 makes provision for establishment of Scottish Parliament and Administration and other changes in the Scottish Government, changes in the constitution and function of certain public authorities, to amend the constituencies in Scotland and other allied matters.12 Apart from matters reserved for the UK Parliament as specified by The Scotland Act, 1998, the Parliament of Scotland has the power to make laws in order to address matters related to the needs and aspirations of its people including fixation of the rate of income tax of the Scottish tax payers etc. The legislations passed by the Scottish Parliament have the full force of law and the Scottish law may usually be sourced back to Roman law. As per the provision of The Scotland Act, 1998, the administration of Scotland would be run by the Scottish Executive which in turn is known as ‘Scottish Ministers’ and again in 2007 the nomenclature of Scottish Executive has been converted to ‘Scottish Government’.13

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However, the politics of polarisation between Scotland and England continued and since 2007 the Scottish National Party (SNP) started to gain popularity and support of the people and continued their ascension in the Scottish Parliament. The mandate in favour of SNP was not only for its agenda of Scottish nationalism but more for its allegiance to popular leftist policies and competency, however the pro-nationalist approach has been further consolidated since then. Due to the above reasons, the UK government allowed for the 2014 independence referendum but the SNP and “yes campaign” to which it remained politically aligned received 45 percent of the vote and lost, but this huge margin reinvigorated the stand of the nationalists (Nugent 2020). A kind of constitutional crisis hovers in Scotland since the Brexit referendum took place in June, 2016 whereby 52 percent of voters in England supported Brexit but 62 percent of Scottish voters rejected it, voting to stay with Europe instead (Philip 2020). This episode raised the constitutional issue as to whether Scotland and its people should be compelled to accept a UK-foisted political policy which had been rejected by the majority. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, termed the Brexit as the latest example of imposition of a policy without the consent of the Scottish people. Responding to the material change in circumstances, SNP demanded for a second independence ballot in 2020 which is now being rejected by Prime Minister Johnson by his alluding to the 2014 referendum as a ‘once in a generation’ event. The prime constitutional crisis in Scotland is of course related to freedom of speech and expression associated with the existing differences in the sub-/national and international politics of Scotland and England. Scottish society is an open society whereby openness relates to the free flow of information and reflects guarantee of the freedom of information. Some salutary legislations, rules, regulations etc. have been incorporated in the Scottish legal system like Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA)& Freedom of Information Act, 2000 of UK which are applicable to the information of Scotland preserved in the repositories and deposited by the UK wide public authorities, Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004, The INSPIRE (Scotland) Regulations 2009, General Data Protection Regulation &Data Protection Act 2018, Access to Health Records Act 1990, Access to Medical Reports Act 1988, Public Interest Disclosure Act, 1998 etc. These Acts enable the Scottish people to access from Scottish public authorities a wide range of information affecting their lives and that of the society they inhabit and create. The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) mandates to disclose the information held by

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the Scottish public authorities or by persons providing service for them. This Act came into force in Scotland in 2005. FOISA like in India empowers not just the citizen of Scotland to ask for information, but any person from any part of the globe may request for the same as a matter of right. The right to information in Scotland is not only available to the natural person but also to the juristic person and there is no restriction on the right by nationality, citizenship or place of residence. Unlike in India where there exists the plural commissioner model, Scotland follows the singular commissioner model whereby the office of the Information Commission is headed by one commissioner, which makes the provision of appeal swift and simplified. Failure to comply with the decision of the Information Commissioner is practically considered as contempt of court in Scotland whereas in India a fine is imposed for defying the order. Public Interest Disclosure Act, 1998 provides statutory protection against victimisation and dismissal, to workers who raised their voices against corruption and malpractices. The disclosure may however be a protected disclosure to a stipulated body.14 It has already been mentioned that in India we still lack the provision for legal protection to whistle-blowers. Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 allows for seeking environmental information that could involve any component of nature including interactions among its vast and varied elements, any substance the discharge, emission or release of which may affect the environment, any legislation, policy, programme, treaty, measure which may influence the environment, matters related to cost-benefit and other economic analysis, matters related to human health and safety, cultural sites and heritages etc., and this information is available against any organization having public, private or public-private nature. This Act is considered an important piece of legislation for maintaining sustainable and meaningful development in Scotland. Unfortunately, law makers in India are still are not considering it essential to disseminate information on this crucial front. The Scottish Information Commissioner is accountable for ensuring free flow of information not only under FOISA but also under Public Interest Disclosure Act and Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations. General Data Protection Regulation & Data Protection Act 2018 together regulate the processing of personal data in UK from 25th May, 2018 replacing the former Data Protection Act, 1998. The Data Protection Act, 2018 regulates how the personal information of a person will be used by organisations, businesses or the government. Everyone responsible for

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using personal data should use it in a lawful, fair and transparent way and must maintain privacy and security of data.15 In India we do not have any stringent and comprehensive law regarding Data Protection. Though The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 was introduced, it is yet to attain the status of an Act. Access to Health Records Act 1990 and Access to Medical Reports Act 1988 in Scotland ensure the protection of information related to the health of the individual as well as to deceased persons and thus create their own set of privacy legislations. Data as to individual is given sacrosanct status in Scotland which is salutary and could be worth learning from, in the context of India.

Conclusion Democracy entails freedom of speech, expression and free flow of information. Knowledge curbs ignorance and the right to know fosters a democratic society premised on the disclosure of information and sharing and acquiring the same by any citizen. Whether a society follows democratic norms or not largely depends on whether it allows the people to enjoy such freedoms and access justice. From the aspect of scientific socialism, freedom translates into “the capacity of the people to make decisions, founded on cognised necessity, to act with knowledge of the subject, and it also means man’s control over nature, social relationships and over himself... the conscious utilisation of the laws of social development and the attainment of progressive social results bring genuine freedom” (Zakharov 1985). Socialists believe that this can be attained only when the development of man and society ensures the harmonious development of each individual and enables her to consciously coordinate social and personal aims (Zakharov 1985). An authoritarian regime violates freedom by denying civil and political rights of its people and through the imposition of arbitrary restrictions on freedom to participate in the social, political and economic life of society (Sen 2000). Professor Sen highlighted the core connections that exist between individual freedom and the achievement of social development, observing that the development of people depends on economic opportunities, political liberties, social powers, enabling environment for good health, education, encouragement and inculcation of qualities influenced by the exercise of people’s freedoms, liberty to participate in social choice and in the making of public decisions which ensure their upliftment (Sen 2000, 5). Freedom of development of cognition and guarantee of enabling its conducive conditions thus cannot simply be ensured by the black-lettered print of law. Economic, social, political

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conditions along with the social values and prevailing norms of a society influence the freedoms available to its people. It is in the backdrop of the above that we have to compare the state of freedom of information and expression of the two countries. No doubt, Scotland has a plethora of laws to ensure freedom of information but it remains ribbed at the same time with tension regarding divergence of its political stance with the UK and the devolution rule versus socio-political aspirations of the people for independence. So far as India is concerned, existing poverty, illiteracy, corruption, exploitation besides an ambivalent legal jurisprudence define the present hurdles to an equitable society with an accountable, transparent design of governance, government as envisioned in its own RTI Act.

Notes: 1. 31 Series A no.260-A and Buscarini and others v/s San Marino [GC], no. 24645/94, 34, ECHR 1999-I (25 May 1993). 2. 31 Series A no.260-A and Buscarini and others v/s San Marino [GC], no. 24645/94, 34, ECHR 1999-I (25 May 1993). 3. (1995) 2SCC 161. 4. (1978) 1 SCC 248. 5. (1964) 1 SCR 332. 6. (1995) AIR 264. 7. Writ Petition (Civil) No 494 of 2012 and decided on August 24, 2017. 8. (2016) 7 SCC 353. 9. (2019) 1SCC. 10. Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1031 of 2019, Judgment deliv­ ered on January 10, 2020. https://main.sci.gov.in/supremecou rt/2019/28817/28817_2019_2_1501_19350_Judgement_10-Jan-2020.pdf. 11. http://www.parliament.scot/global/games/education-timeline/timelinejs/ index.html. 12. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/46/introduction. 13. Supra Note at 19. 14. See https://www.unison-scotland.org.uk/briefings/whistle.html. 15. See https://www.gov.uk/data-protection.

Works Cited: 1. 31 Series A no.260-A and Buscarini and others v/s San Marino [GC], no. 24645/94, 34, ECHR 1999-I (25 May 1993).

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2. Barry, Norman. 2000. An Introduction To Modern Political Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 3. Cooper, Phillip J. 1986 “The Supreme Court, the First Amendment, and Freedom of Information.” Public Administration Review 46, no. 6 (Nov. Dec.): 622-628. 4. Frank, Thomas M. 1992. “The Emerging Right to Democratic Gover­ nance.” The American Journal of International Law 86, no.1 (January): 49.https://www.jstor.org/stable/2203138. 5. Nugent, Ciara. 2020 “The U.K. Has Officially Left the European Union. But Could Scotland End Up Back in It?” Time, (Feb. 5 th). https://time.com/5778350/will-scotland-rejoin-eu/. 6. Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India & Others v. Cricket Association of Bengal & Anr. (1995) 2 SCC 161. 7. Sen, Amartya. 2000. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. 8. Sim, Philip. 2020. “Scottish Independence: Could a New Referendum Still Be Held?” BBC News, (Jan. 31).https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scot­ land-scotland-politics-50813510. 9. Swami Mumukshananda.1995. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda- Vol-II, ed. Kolkata: Swapna Printing Works(P) Limited. 366-367. 10. Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1031 of 2019. Judgment deliv­ ered on January 10, 2020. https://main.sci.gov.in/supremecou rt/2019/28817/28817_2019_2_1501_19350_Judgement_10-Jan-2020.pdf. 11. Zakharov, F.I. 1985. Philosophical Foundations of Scientific Socialism. Moscow: Institute of Social Sciences, Progress Publishers.