E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) was my initial introduction to the universe of colonial India, the British Raj and the curious forms and customs surrounding both: the cantonment, the Club, rigid English racial attitudes, the seasonal monsoons, Hinduism, the Anglo-Indians, the famed Indian Civil Service, etc.
For the sake of historical nerdiness, the British Raj refers to the period of direct British crown rule of India from 1859 to 1947. Before this, the country was run by a private English trading company, the East India Company (imagine Apple administering, say, Indonesia). The EIC, as it was known, employed its own civil service and a private military [check out The Anarchy (2019) by William Dalrymple for all the corporate mayhem and plundering].
Forster is a key 20th Century English novelist who has fallen out of favor; not surprisingly, since he writes about wealthy white people acting rather superior while abroad (we can’t have any of that!). His last gasp of posthumous fame occurred in the 1980s with several rather lush cinematic treatments of his novels.
James Ivory directed wonderful films of Howard’s End and A Room with a View, while the legendary David Lean directed A Passage to India, which doesn’t hold up well, I’m afraid. It’s more than just the silly choice of Alec Guinness playing an Indian brahmin (brown makeup, cringe), but more specifically its overall sense of staginess, which failed me.
Skip the movie, adore the book.
Down with famous western personages!
I was in a U.S. bookstore not long ago, when in the next aisle two slobbish, jabbering college students were pompously commenting on the rows of history books before them. They, of course, knew all about these books and the personages described therein, easily dismissing several of them as products of “western racism.”
I was struck by their absolute conviction that anyone who was white, powerful, and existed in the 20th century or earlier, must have been active, or at least acquiescent, to a ravenous system of rapine and greed.
Although it’s hard to imagine this duo reading anything more than Tik Tok comments, they felt confident dismissing Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt, or whomever the hell they were discussing, without any nuance whatsoever.
Simple ideas for simple minds.
This worldview comes from a number of academic, progressive, and intellectual strains over the last 50 years, and it does what all ideologies ultimately do: they try to make our complex, often contradictory world, simple to understand.
This current faddish reduction goes like this: you can divide the world into the powerful and the weak, or in racial terms, those who are white, and those who are “people of color,” a revolting phrase that does such an injustice to the lovely and varied skin tones (and distinct cultures) of people from India, Japan, Iran, the Arab world, Africa, etc.
This well-meaning (though still ridiculous) POV has two main advantages for its adherents: 1) you don’t have to think or read or investigate history for yourself, and 2) because it has come from academia, it has (at least to those who use it) a veneer of insight, or better yet, a pretension of knowledge.
It also allows your average simpleton to dismiss you, because they know: “the very thing you think you know, is actually wrong.”
For example, because Winston Churchill was devoted to empire, and wrote some terrible things about Indian people in his letters (not surprising for an English aristocrat born in 1874), his military, political, rhetorical, and literary accomplishments are therefore canceled, as if he were the host of some vacuous podcast, and not one of the greatest figures of the 20th Century.
Pro tip: if you want saints instead of dynamic leaders, scientists, artists and the like, drop your aggressive secularism and pick up Catholicism; they’ve got 2,000 years of saints you can study and pray to—none of whom will disappoint you (at least until Chrisopher Hitchens gets a hold of them).
Not everyone was a colonist.
In case this post is being trolled by one of the handful of white nationalist-types who are actually literate (God help us from them), it should be stated quite clearly: colonialism is morally repulsive, for the simple fact that nobody wants to be ruled by another people. It’s just common sense. The Brits were wrong to be in India, and they knew it well before they actually left; the writing was on the wall in the 19th Century, but they dragged their feet, stiff upper lip, greed, the two world wars, and all that.
Yet, this does not mean there was no good done by the English in India, or that there were no sincere engineers, doctors, teachers, and the sort, who truly served India through their professional and moral aptitudes.
The historian David Gilmour, author of The British in India: A Social History of the Raj, has pushed back on the idiocy that all Brits in India were ipso facto bad because they were in India.
He points out only 1% of British India were members of the Indian Civil Service (which you could safely call committed colonialists) and reminds us [minute 2:45 in the video below] that the vast majority of Brits in India had no ambitions (or faculties) to govern, conquer, or get rich; in fact, most soldiers, as well as the wives of military personnel and children born in India (like Kipling), had no choice in the matter.
In the video interview with Gilmour [above], which took place in India, it’s fascinating to hear an Indian member of the audience [minute 40:30] say, “In today’s Britian we see a remarkable lack of remorse for colonialism and the excesses of the Raj . . .” Listening to this, I thought, “Wow! This guy couldn’t be more wrong.” Gilmour had the same reaction. He thought there was remorse, and that “British academics today are endlessly critical of Raj policies.”
If English elites are truly sorry, I think they need to make sure the Indian descendants of these colonized people know about it, instead of simply badgering contemporary Britons, who care about the country’s crumbling social welfare system far more than the sins of the Raj.
Home is where the heart is.
As a I mentioned in my first post, I’ve been enjoying Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, which is constructed on a literary foundation whereby the complexity of human beings, human institutions, beliefs, actions, etc., is the story. That’s the story, that’s the fun of this book (and, quite often, of life itself).
I say . . . let’s not let the prudes, politicians, Tik Tok influencers, journalists, ministers, whomever, take the joy and complexity out of living and learning. Be human. Always human. Think for yourself.
There is a lovely passage in the second book of the Raj Quartet, The Day of the Scorpion, that addresses the love that many of the English felt for India (and yes, Indian people), from their years of living there. It wasn’t exactly home, as Indians would experience it (the reality of colonialism made some of that impossible), but human feelings cannot be controlled or eradicated by a social or governing system.
In the book, Colonel Layton is the English commanding officer of the Pankot Rifles, which is an Indian Army Regiment. He has been serving in the country for years. His father served as a district official in the ICS and was beloved by many local people for his kindness. Col. Layton often spends his free time hiking the hills, where he accepts invitations from Indian people to join them for food and drink, many of whom fondly remember his father.
After a particularly lovely night of eating and storytelling with some villagers, he goes to bed feeling satisfied and thinks to himself: “‘Well, home is here,’ and knew that for English people in India there was no home in the sense of brick and mortar, orchard and pasture, but that it was lodged mysteriously in the heart.”
In the heart . . . where neither ideologues nor simpletons can discredit or remove it. Amen to that.