4 - Between human intelligence and colonial knowledge

Summary

The next three chapters concern the information order of north India in the early nineteenth century. This chapter considers the strengths and weaknesses of internal surveillance and information collection by the Company's government after 1790. Chapter Five examines the nature of Indian indigenous debate and communications during the transition to colonial dominance. Chapter Six concerns the engagement between British and Indian public debate in the 1830s and 1840s, when statistics, information and education became ideological motifs for an avowedly reforming imperial government.

An impressive range of historical studies have considered the impact of European ideologies on India and the fashioning by the British of categories of difference and backwardness to describe its people, so justifying their dominion. As these studies have grown more sophisticated, historians have come to accept that colonial ideologies were varied, unstable and contradictory; and that they owed as much to debates in European intellectual history as they did to particular Indian circumstances. Equally, British ‘constructions’ of Indian society were determined by the form and limitations of British military and economic power in the subcontinent and outside. India's alienness could never be too crudely asserted by a government dependent on an army of Indian subordinate servants. It was difficult to sustain an ‘apartheid’ ideology stressing ineluctable racial difference in a subcontinent where Indians continued to control – albeit under severe constraint – the vast bulk of capital and almost the whole means of agricultural production. Colonial officials, missionaries and businessmen were forced to register the voices of native informants in ideology and heed them in practice even if they despised and misrepresented them.