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Edge of Enlightenment: The Akbar tradition and ‘universal toleration’ in British Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2019

JUSTIN BIEL
JUSTIN BIEL*
Affiliation:
Minnesota State University, Mankato Email: justin.biel@mnsu.edu
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Abstract

‘Toleration’ is a notoriously slippery concept, and yet, as recent scholarship on the historical roots of Indian secularism has implied, it was a guiderail for East India Company decision-making in Bengal in the late eighteenth century. What, then, was the outcome when Europeans encountered what they were quick to regard as South Asian patterns of ‘toleration’? This article argues, first, that a medley of competing policy visions emerged from this interaction and, second, that where these visions overlapped was in perceiving political gain to ensue from facilitating existing South Asian devotional practices. A corollary consequence of this still-emergent policy framework was that most East India Company personnel were loath to intervene in any way but a reactive one when conflicts between devotees of Durga on parade and observers of the Shia Muslim holy day ashura escalated into reprisals and street violence in Calcutta in September 1789.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1956 - 2006
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [29 September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia (Ames), MSS B114/6, p. 41, spelling and punctuation as in original.

2 Testimony of Captain William Counsell in trial of Shaik Futty Mohammed and Shaik Mohammad Moonain, 22 December 1789, in Judicial Notebooks of John Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers (microfilm), Kolkata, Victoria Memorial Hall, Hyde Papers, vol. 27, ‘9 December 1789 to 10 March 1790’; ‘Doorga Pooja’, Calcutta Chronicle and General Advertiser, 1 October 1789; ‘Calcutta’, Calcutta Gazette, 1 October 1789, in British Encounters with India, 1750–1830: A Sourcebook, ed. Tim Keirn and Norbert Schürer (Basingstoke, 2011), 133–34 and nn. 53–54. I am especially grateful to Michael Franklin for the transcript from Justice John Hyde's notebook.

3 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [29 September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, Ames MSS B114/6, pp. 36–38.

4 Richard Johnson to his sister, n.d., Phillipps Collection of East India Company Papers, Manchester, John Rylands University Library (JRUL), Eng MS 191/66, spelling, punctuation, and emphasis as in original.

5 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Gassendi's morals collected by Bernier, 1699’, n.d. [March 1790], Phillipps MS 17,185, Ames MSS B114/2, p. 47 See also Anna Clark, ‘Richard Johnson and the imperial self’, in Alternative Histories of the Self (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

6 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [29 September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, Ames MSS B114/6, p. 49; [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on William Robertson's History of Charles V, 11 March 1790, Phillipps MS 17,185, Ames MSS B114/2, p. 38.

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8 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘The Koran’, n.d. [Fall 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, Ames MSS B114/6, pp. 61–62.

9 On Jones's universalism, see Franklin, Michael J., ‘Orientalist Jones’: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford, 2011), 107–09, 173–74, 273–75, 343–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Regulation III of 1793, Section 1, in Regulations Passed by the Governor General in Council of Bengal, 3 vols. (London, 1828), 1:21Google Scholar, emphasis added. The full sentence reads: ‘The many valuable privileges and immunities which have been conferred upon the natives of these provinces, evince the solicitude of the British Government to promote their welfare, and must satisfy them that the Regulations which may be adopted for the internal government of the country, will be calculated to preserve them the laws of the Shaster and the Koran, in matters to which they have been invariably applied—to protect them in the free exercise of their religion—and to afford security to their persons and property.’

11 For example, see Forster, George, Sketches of the Mythology and Customs of the Hindoos (London, 1785), 4Google Scholar: ‘At a distance of eight miles from the city of Banaris, … the eye is attracted by the view of two lofty minarets, which were erected by the order of Aurangzebe, on the foundation of an ancient Hindoo temple, dedicated to the Mhah Deve, or the God Eishwer. The raising on such sacred ruins, this towering Mahometan pile, which from its elevated height, seems to look down with triumph and exaltation on the fallen state of a city so profoundly revered by the Hindoos, would appear to have been prompted to the mind of Aurungzebe by a bigoted and intemperate desire of insulting their religion.’ See also Orme, Robert, Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan from the year MDCLIX (London, 1783), 101Google Scholar: ‘the hypocrisy of Aurengzebe increased with his power; and in order to palliate to his Mahomedan subjects, the crimes by which he had become their sovereign, he determined to enforce the conversion of the HINDOOS throughout his empire by the severest penalties, and even threatened the sword; as if the blood of his subjects were to wash away the stains, with which he was imbrued by the blood of his family.’ But see Moin, Azfar, ‘Sovereign violence: temple destruction in India and shrine desecration in Iran and Central Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 2 (April 2015): 467–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for insightful, perspective-altering contextualization; see also forthcoming, Audrey Trutschke's Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most controversial King (Stanford, 2017)Google Scholar.

12 ‘Indulgence’ toward ‘all persuasions’ comes from Robert Orme's brief characterization of Shah Jahan. ‘Clemency’ comes from Alexander Dow's translation of the Persian historian Firishta's assessment of Akbar in the early seventeenth-century Tarikh-i-Firishta. Dow's translation also says of Akbar that ‘he tolerated all religions’. Orme, Historical Fragments, 101; Dow, Alexander, The History of Hindostan from the Earliest Account of Time to the Death of Akbar; Translated from the Persian of Mahummud Casim Ferishta of Delhi, 3 vols. (London, 1768–72), 2:297, 3:104Google Scholar.

13 See Outram, Dorinda, The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005), 38–39, 114–17, 124–25Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, Martin, ‘Toleration and the Enlightenment Movement’, in Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Grell, Ole Peter and Porter, Roy (Cambridge, 2000), 23–68Google Scholar; Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Intolerance, the virtue of princes and radicals’, in ibid., 86–101; Collins, Jeffrey, ‘Redeeming the Enlightenment: new histories of religious toleration’, Journal of Modern History 81, no. 3 (2009): 607–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Popkin, Richard and Goldie, Mark, ‘Scepticism, priestcraft, and toleration’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Goldie, Mark and Wokler, Robert (Cambridge, 2006): 79–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17 To cite one example, in his chapter on ‘Religious liberty and toleration’ in the Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), Joseph Priestley, heir to a Presbyterian and Unitarian outlook that emphasized the moral duty of each individual to read and interpret Scripture as guided by one's conscience, could, with equal facility, justify ‘toleration’ on the highly utilitarian ground that ‘if all the modes of religion were equally protected by the civil magistrate, they would all vie with one another, which should best deserve that protection’. Priestley, Joseph, An Essay on the First Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (Dublin, 1768), 120–21Google Scholar. For the idea that most pre-nineteenth-century instantiations of ‘tolerance’ were essentially sovereigns’ edicts indicative of a suspension of a presumed predisposition to persecute, see Brown, Wendy, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, 2006), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23 This was Philip Francis's wording in his 1776 ‘Plan for a settlement of the revenues of Bengal, Bahar, and Orixa’, in Original Minutes of the Governor-General and Council of Fort William on the Settlement and Collection of the Revenues of Bengal: With a Plan of Settlement, Recommended to the Court of Directors in January, 1776 (London, 1782), 23–70, at 29–30Google Scholar. The full passage holds ‘that the governing power should stand paramount, and hold the sword over the rest, watching the administration of every subordinate department, contented with a gross but moderate tribute, proportioned to their necessary expence, and guarding the country from being ruined in detail by Europeans. On these terms, the natives should be left undisturbed in the full enjoyment of their own laws, customs, prejudices, and religion.’ It is here that, seemingly out of nowhere and yet somehow unsurprisingly, transactional claims for the plan emerge: ‘On these terms, they would as readily submit to our dominion as to any other, nor could it ever be lost, but by foreign conquest.’

24 See Marshall, P. J., ‘Warren Hastings as scholar and patron’, in Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. Whiteman, Anne, Bromley, J. S., and Dickson, P. G. M. (Oxford, 1973), 242–62Google Scholar. Hastings and his cohort of civil servants in Bengal are often presented as the kinder, more ‘tolerant’ colonialists who preceded wave upon wave of more aggressive reformers at the head of subsequent British Indian governments. Scholars tend, particularly, to favour Hastings over his successor the earl Charles Cornwallis because Hastings placed a clear emphasis on ruling Bengal and the rest of British Indian territory in accordance with Indian norms—whereas Cornwallis's major act as governor general proposed to transform Bengal's largest indigenous landholders, the zamindars, into English-style ‘improving’ landlords. For the argument that ‘tolerance’ was the ‘mainspring’ of the Bengal Civil Service's ‘cultural relativism’ under Hastings, see Kopf, David, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, CA, 1969), 22–24Google Scholar. On Cornwallis's drive to remake rural Bengal in the image of the English countryside, the classic work is Guha's, Ranajit A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, 2nd ed. (New Delhi, 1982 [1963])Google Scholar. See also Stokes, Eric, English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), 3–4Google Scholar; Sen, Sudipta, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia, 1998)Google Scholar. For a viewpoint that tends to stress limits to the extent to which British administrators were capable of transforming South Asian traditions and institutions, see Bayly, C. A., Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Bayly, C. A., Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stein, Burton, ‘State formation and economy reconsidered’, Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 387–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Eighteenth century India: another view’, Studies in History 5, no. 1 (February 1989): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Washbrook, D. A., ‘Progress and problems: South Asian economic and social history, c. 1750–1830’, Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 57–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Seeking some middle ground in this debate, Michael Franklin has called Hastings's regime a ‘neo-Mughal’, enlightened ‘despotism’. Franklin, Orientalist Jones.

25 See, for example, Kopf, British Orientalism, 20–26.

26 On the scholarly drive to pluralize Enlightenment(s), see Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, 2003), esp. xii, 260–66Google Scholar; Sheehan, Jonathan, ‘Enlightenment, religion, and the enigma of secularization: a review essay’, American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1061–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 2001), 1–10Google Scholar.

27 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Dr. Sharp's declaration of the people's natural right to a share in the legislature’ [1774], 23 March 1789, Phillipps MS 17,185, Ames MSS B114/2, p. 1.

28 See especially Mukherjee, S. N., Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar; Cannon, Garland, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; and Kopf, British Orientalism, 3–5.

29 Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), 7–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But, for an opposing viewpoint, see Sen, Sudipta, ‘Colonial frontiers of the Georgian state: East India Company's rule in India’, Journal of Historical Sociology 7, no. 4 (December 1994): 368–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sen, Empire of Free Trade, esp. 1–17, 90–165; Sen, Sudipta, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York and London, 2002)Google Scholar. See also Cohn, Bernard, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar; Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: an essay in reading the archives’, History and Theory 24, no. 3 (October 1985): 247–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dirks, Nicholas, ‘Postcolonialism and its discontents: history, anthropology, and postcolonial critique’, in Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretative Social Science, ed. Scott, Joan W. and Keates, Debra (Princeton, 2001), 227–51Google Scholar; Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of mind: colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar. Some recent work on British rule in India has sought to chart a course between the school of thought that emphasizes the epistemic violence wrought by British hegemony over representations of Indian life and the school of thought that emphasizes the continuing vitality of Indian intermediary groups in the consolidation of British power. See, for example—in addition to Travers's Ideology and Empire—Barrow, Ian and Haynes, Douglas, ‘The colonial transition: South Asia, 1780–1840’, Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004): 469–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bayly, C. A., ‘The British military-fiscal state on the periphery’, in Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, ed. Bayly, C. A. (New Delhi, 1998), 238–75Google Scholar; and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Frank submissions: the Company and the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris’, in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. Bowen, H. V., Lincoln, Margarette, and Rigby, Nigel (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2002): 69–96, esp. 93–94Google Scholar. See also Lata Mani's formulation: ‘although indigenous persons were integrally involved in the production of colonial knowledge, their writings were recast in specific ways, making their discourse a structurally subordinate one.’ Mani, Contentious Traditions, 192–93, at 193.

30 See Travers, Ideology and Empire, 48–51. My reading of Travers's argument with a heavy accent on the Montesquieuian racial register that was popular among eighteenth-century Britons derives not only from Travers, but also from Richard Bourke's magisterial excavation of the mindframe of a rather sophisticated user of the Montesquieuian ethnological schema: Edmund Burke. Burke is a touchstone figure for British ‘ancient constitutionalism’ and late eighteenth-century imperial ideology throughout Travers's book. See Bourke, Richard, ‘Edmund Burke and the politics of conquest’, Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 3 (November 2007): 403–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bourke, Richard, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, 2015), esp. 16–24Google Scholar. On Montesquieu's popularity with the British reading public, see Fletcher, F. T. H., Montesquieu and English Politics (London, 1939)Google Scholar.

31 As any reader of The Invention of Tradition would expect, and as is suggested in Bernard Cohn's contribution: ‘Representing authority in Victorian India’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (Cambridge, 1983), 165–209, esp. 171–73Google Scholar.

32 Roover, Jakob de and Balagangadhara, S. N., ‘Liberty, tyranny, and the will of God: the principle of toleration in early modern Europe and colonial India’, History of Political Thought 30, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 111–39Google Scholar.

33 Dow, History of Hindostan, 2:Appendix, p. 95.

34 Ibid., 3:35–36.

35 Grewal, J. S., Muslim Rule in India: The Assessments of British Historians (Delhi and Oxford, 1970), 7Google Scholar.

36 For the Jehangir years, Dow said that he used two texts ‘at this moment in [his] hands’: ‘The Jehangire Namma; or, the History of the Emperor Jegangire. By Matimid Chan of Delhi’ and the ‘Mirat ul Waridat; or, The Mirror of Occurrences, written by Mahommed Shufia of Delhi’. Dow, History of Hindostan, 3:Advertisement.

37 Alexander Dow, ‘Dissertation concerning the religion and philosophy of the Brahmins’, in History of Hindostan, 1:xxv, xxxiii.

38 Alexander Dow, ‘Enquiry into the state of Bengal, with a plan for restoring that kingdom to its former prosperity and splendour’, in History of Hindostan, 3:cxxviii–cxxvix.

39 Grewal, Muslim Rule, 18, 34–35. See Jonathan Scott's preface to the Memoirs of Eradut Khan (London, 1786). Grewal reports that Scott became Warren Hastings's Persian Secretary in 1778.

40 Dow, History of Hindostan, 3:104.

41 [Robert Orme], Commonplace Book, n.d., Orme Manuscripts, British Library (BL), Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection (APAC) Mss Eur Orme OV. 134, p. 285.

42 Dow, ‘Dissertation’, 1:xxi–lxix, esp. xxxviiii–lv, lxviii, lxxvi. See also Grewal, Muslim Rule, 13–14; Marshall, P. J., ‘Introduction’, in The British Discovery of Hinduism, ed. Marshall, P. J. (Cambridge, 1970), 1–44, at 27–28Google Scholar; Smith, Jonathan Z., ‘Religion, religions, religious’, in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Taylor, Mark (Chicago, 1998), 269–84, esp. 272–74Google Scholar; Byrne, Peter, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

43 [Robert Orme], Commonplace Book, n.d., Orme Manuscripts, BL, APAC Mss Eur Orme OV. 134, p. 285.

44 Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangueir, Written by Himself, and Translated from a Persian Manuscript by Major David Price, of the Bombay Army (London, 1829), 15Google Scholar. Somewhat surprisingly, this exchange between Jehangir and Akbar on the father's decision not to do what Jehangir's grandson, Aurangzeb, would eventually do to the Bengares temple was not selected by James Anderson for his ‘Extracts from the Toozuké Jehangeery, or Memoirs of Jehangeer’, published in the second volume of the Asiatick Miscellany in Calcutta in 1786. Gladwin, Francis, ed., ‘Extracts from the Toozuké Jehangeery, or Memoirs of Jehangeer, Written by Himself, and Containing a History of the Transactions of the First Thirteen Years of his Reign—Translated by James Anderson, Esq’., in The Asiatick Miscellany, Volume the Second (Calcutta, 1786)Google Scholar.

45 Modern scholars of the Mughal period incline more toward Dow's view than Orme's.

46 Marshall, ‘Introduction’, 43.

47 This was the case even though Dow published his History in full knowledge that it would mainly reach a domestic audience. This factor leads Grewal to distinguish Dow's work, in general, from that of the following generation of Company translator/redactors: ‘whereas Dow had addressed his work to the British nation, his late eighteenth-century successors either addressed themselves to the East India Company or wrote their work on its behalf.’ Grewal, Muslim Rule, 42.

48 Dow, ‘Dissertation’, 1:xv.

49 Dow, ‘Enquiry into the state of Bengal’, 3:cxxix, emphasis added.

50 Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey, ‘Translator's preface’, in A Code of Gentoo Laws, or Ordinations of the Pundits, from a Persian Translation, Made from the Original, Written in the Shanscrit Language, trans. and ed. Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey (London, 1776), ix–xGoogle Scholar, emphasis added.

51 His brother, Aurangzeb, had him declared a heretic, imprisoned, and eventually executed in 1659. For a good, concise introduction to Dara Shukoh's ‘metaphysical and mystical’ oeuvre, see Ernst, Carl W., ‘Muslim studies of Hinduism? A reconsideration of Persian and Arabic translations from Indian languages’, Iranian Studies 36, no. 2 (June 2003): 173–95, at 183–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ernst's article (pp. 187–91) also gives a good indication of where the demand for works like Halhed's translations came from: particularly in the years before Charles Wilkins issued his translation of the Bhagavad Gita ‘from the original Shanskreet’ in 1785, British officials relied extensively on Persian translations of Indian-language texts to generate their understandings of Hindu law, religion, and custom.

52 [Nathaniel Brassey Halhed], ‘Upăneeshhăd, translated into Persian by Dàrà Shekoh's order’, May 1787, Oriental Manuscripts, BL, APAC Mss Add. 5658, fol. 15.

53 Ibid., fol. 15.

54 Ibid., fol. 16.

55 Rieu, Charles, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London, 1879–83), 1:57, 60, 63–64Google Scholar. Halhed's abstract of the Mahabharata fills the first 18 folios of BL, APAC Mss Add. 5657.

56 Rieu, Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts, 1:57.

57 Dow, ‘Dissertation’, 1:xxxvii. For a modern concurrence with Dow on this point, see Irfan Habib, ‘Introduction: commemorating Akbar’, in Khan, Akbar and His Age, xi–xvi.

58 Dow, ‘Dissertation’, 1:xv.

59 Dow, History of Hindostan, 2:209–98, 231, 256–59, 259 n.

60 Ibid., 2:297–98. For the full contrast in portrayals, compare Dow, ‘Dissertation’, xv: ‘Muhammad Akbar, being a prince of elevated and extensive ideas, was totally divested of those prejudices for his own religion, which men of inferior parts not only imbibe with their mother's milk, but retain throughout their lives. Though bred in the strictness of the Mahommedan faith, his great soul in his riper years, broke those chains of superstition and credulity, with which his tutors had, in his early youth, fettered his mind. With a design to chuse his own religion, or rather from curiosity, he made it his business to enquire minutely into all the systems of divinity, which prevailed among mankind.’

61 Ibid.

62 Latitudinarianism was a theological position articulated by a group of (mostly Cambridge-trained) Anglican clergymen in the latter half of the seventeenth century. They wished to avoid doctrinal controversy by stressing that reasonable reflection on creedal issues might produce variance in conclusions but was justifiable on account of being a type of ‘religious’ activity intended for humans by God (by way of the gift of rationality). The important thing to remember, Latitudinarians argued, was that such theological speculation could not logically stray so far as to underwrite immorality in the practical world. The authoritative account remains Martin I. Griffin, J. Jr., Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, ed. Freedman, Lila (Leiden, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Müller, Patrick, Latitudinarianism and Didacticism in Eighteenth Century Literature: Moral Theology in Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith (Frankfurt, 2009), 15–44Google Scholar.

63 Marshall, ‘Warren Hastings as scholar and patron’, 256.

64 As is well known, this strategy turned out to be more damaging than helpful to Hastings's reputation when, during his impeachment trial, Hastings read a speech in his own defence that Halhed had written for him. The thrust of the speech was that, in a country where the people are accustomed to ‘Oriental despotism’, a ruler has to act the part of a despot himself to accomplish anything. This was grist to Burke's mill. See Rocher, Rosane, Orientalism, Poetry and the Millenium: The Checkered Life of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, 1751–1830 (Delhi, 1987), 134Google Scholar; Clark, Anna, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, 2004), 95Google Scholar; Dirks, Nicholas, Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 107–08CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Travers, Ideology and Empire, 218.

65 See Wilson, Domination of Strangers, 52, citing Hastings, Warren, Memoirs Relative to the State of India (London, 1787), 68Google Scholar; Hastings to Lord Shelburne, 13 December 1782, quoted in Marshall, P. J., The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), 263Google Scholar; and Hastings's preface to Wilkins, Charles, The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon: In Eighteen Lectures (London, 1785), 13Google Scholar.

66 On Locke as an advocate for ‘universal religious toleration’, see Marshall, John, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern Europe and ‘Early Enlightenment’ Europe (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar. Locke articulated this model of religious toleration in his famous Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Kirstie McClure and Saba Mahmood (citing McClure) have stressed that the caveat that accompanies the right to believe as one wants in the Lockean system is its call for a quasi-mechanical adherence to empiricist protocols to assess the risk of worldly harm. McClure, Kirstie, ‘Difference, diversity, and the limits of toleration’, Political Theory 18, no. 3 (August 1990): 361–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mahmood, Saba, ‘Religious reason and secular affect: an incommensurable divide?’, Critical Inquiry, no. 35 (Summer 2009): 836–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Thomas Jefferson as an extender of Locke's argument, see Marshall, Locke, Toleration, 13.

67 Dow, ‘Enquiry into the state of Bengal’, 3:cxvi, cxxviii. If the British came by their official agnosticism naturally (like Dow's Akbar), then so much the better, he seemed to imply.

68 See Mani, Contentious Traditions, esp. 11–41, at 15. Ironically, it was evangelical missionaries who most frequently mobilized Dow's Lockean argument from ‘humanity’ in the 1810s and 1820s. See ibid., 121–57, at 154.

69 Dow, ‘Enquiry into the state of Bengal’, 3:cxxviii; Wilson, Domination of Strangers, esp. 133–94.

70 As Wilson argues in his early chapters, this was so in both eighteenth-century Bengal and eighteenth-century Britain. Wilson, Domination of Strangers, 19–54, esp. 52–53.

71 Scott, David, ‘Colonial governmentality’, Social Text, no. 43 (Autumn 1995): 191–220, esp. 202–05CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Throughout her work, Nancy Gardner Cassels makes much of ‘the compact’, which she sees enshrined in the Cornwallis Code's Regulation 3, that East India Company servants presumed they were duty-bound to uphold toward their native subjects as an encapsulation of Company ‘social policy’ as a whole. See Cassels, ‘“Compact” and Pilgrim tax’; Cassels, Religion and Pilgrim Tax, esp. 1–15, 147–55; and Cassels, Nancy Gardner, ‘John Stuart Mill, religion, and law in the examiner's office’, in J. S. Mill's Encounter with India, ed. Moir, Martin, Peers, Douglas, and Zastoupil, Lynn (Toronto, 1999), 173–97Google Scholar.

73 [Lord William Bentinck], Extract of governor's minute on the condition of native Christians in the Madras presidency, 27 June 1807, Home Miscellaneous Series, BL, APAC IOR H/59, p. 335, emphasis added.

74 Tucker was Commissioner of the Court of Requests in Calcutta from 6 December 1792 to 1 May 1793, at which time he was appointed Register of the Dewanny Adawlut of Rajeshahi. Alphabetical List of the Honourable East India Company's Bengal Civil Servants, from the Year 1780 to the Year 1838, comp. Dodwell, Edward and Miles, James Samuel (London, 1839), 532–33Google Scholar.

75 Tucker, Henry St. George, ‘Religious ceremonies and endowments’, written in 1838, in Memorials of Indian Government: Being a Selection from the Papers of Henry St. George Tucker (London, 1853), 354–55Google Scholar, emphases in original.

76 Where Tucker supplied the institutional memory, John Stuart Mill provided the institutional enforcement of the Company's guarantee of ‘free and unmolested exercise and enjoyment of their own religion’ to the people of India. One of the dispatches he drafted in the Office of the Examiner of Correspondence prevented a ladies’ evangelical society based in Calcutta from getting money for educating Indian youths. He argued that protecting the natives’ free exercise of their religion meant intervening to stop proselytization. Proselytism, after all, would hinder the quiet enjoyment of Hindu and Muslim religious practice. Court of Directors to Bengal in the Public Department, 13 December 1826, BL, APAC IOR E/4/718, pp. 451–55, cited in Penelope Carson, ‘Golden casket or pebbles and trash? J. S. Mill and the Anglicist/Orientalist controversy’, and in Nancy Gardner Cassels, ‘Mill, religion, and law’, in J. S. Mill's Encounter with India, 149–72, at 160–61, and 173–97, at 176–77, respectively.

77 And, indeed, there is no shortage of evidence in existence of Cornwallis's own desire to promote himself and, by extension, the Company's government, as an active promoter of pilgrimages in British Bengal. For examples of Cornwallis's interest in facilitating Hindu and Muslim pilgrimages to sites under British management, see Governor (Cornwallis) in Council to Court of Directors, 15 August 1790, Letters Received from Bengal—Political, BL, APAC IOR E/4/49, p. 96; Governor Council to Court of Directors in the Political Department, 1 December 1791, Letters Received from Bengal—Political, BL, APAC IOR E/4/50, p. 554; Translation of Nawab of Arcot to Governor General in Council, 12 October 1791, Bengal Political Consultations, 26 October 1791, BL, APAC IOR P/114/52, pp. 456–57; Jonathan Duncan, Resident at Banaras, to Governor General Cornwallis in Council, 3 October 1789, Bengal Revenue Consultations, 23 October 1789, BL, APAC IOR P/51/50, pp. 1–6; Governor in Council to Court of Directors, 5 November 1789, Letters Received from Bengal—Revenue, BL, APAC IOR E/4/48, pp. 432–33.

78 Seven of Johnson's journals, commonplace books, and translation notebooks form an important part of the manuscripts collection at the University of Minnesota's Ames Library of South Asia. However, the library catalogues have always identified these documents as Warren Hastings's journals and commonplace books. Several years ago, while working on a book chapter on the Warren Hastings impeachment trial, Professor Anna Clark discovered that these fascinating manuscripts belonged not to Hastings, but to Johnson. Observing that the author of the notebooks regretted several aspects of Hastings's policies, and noticing that he departed India for England aboard the ship Pigot in 1790 (five years after Hastings's recall), Professor Clark decided to check the passenger lists for the Pigot in the India Office Records. She saw Richard Johnson's name there, recognized that the dating of his shipboard commonplace book entries was fitting, and then compared handwriting samples with Johnson's letters to Hastings in the British Library. The handwriting was a match. The seven notebooks in the Ames Library were once a part of the massive collection of manuscripts built up by the nineteenth-century ‘vello-maniac’ Sir Thomas Phillipps. The rest of Phillipps's East India Company-related materials are at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, comprising about 27 separate volumes and bundles. The vast majority of that collection originated with Johnson, as well. On Phillipps, see Barker, Nicolas J., Portrait of an Obsession: The Life of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the World's Greatest Book Collector, Adapted from the Five Volumes of ‘Phillipps Studies’ by A. N. L. Munby (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

79 Part of the difficulty here, as John MacKenzie, and Tim Keirn and Norbert Shürer have noted, is that students of the British Raj have often used the term ‘Orientalist’, as Thomas Trautmann does, to describe both a certain type of intellectual pursuit and a programme or agenda for colonial governance. See Trautmann, Aryans, 17, 22. Orientalists were individuals who learned about Asian people and cultures by studying texts in the original languages in which they were written. Whatever motive—instrumental or academic—deserves pride of place in understanding why any one Orientalist engaged in his or her particular studies, the implication has often been that people like Richard Johnson and Sir William Jones bore the standard for a more consultative method of governing Indians than the authoritarian approach that characterized British rule as the nineteenth century unfolded. Thus, in British empire historiography, ‘Orientalist’ colonialism is usually contrasted with harder-line ‘Anglicist’ colonialism, which was advocated by the likes of Charles Grant and Thomas Macaulay. See MacKenzie, John M., Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), 2–3Google Scholar; and Tim Keirn and Norbert Schürer, ‘Introduction’, in British Encounters, 12–19, esp. 13. Sir William Jones's biographers, in particular, have been at pains to show that he took his interest in Indian languages, culture, and religion for humanitarian reasons that far exceeded the will to consolidate British power in the subcontinent. See Cannon, Oriental Jones, esp. xiii–xvii; Franklin, Orientalist Jones, esp. 39, 226. Cannon (p. xiii) says that Jones ‘always resisted any political aspects of scholarship’. Franklin does not go so far as to think we should expect Jones to have disavowed the instrumental applications of his scholarship: ‘Said's indictment of Jones's ambition to obtain a “perfect knowledge of India” as complicit with imperial power states the blindingly obvious.’ Franklin, Orientalist Jones, 19, citing Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York, 1979), 36Google Scholar. For the suggestion that higher levels of interest in Indian cultural forms and people should have translated into ‘Orientalist’ political preferences, see Dalrymple, William, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-century India (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Jasanoff, Maya, ‘Collectors of empire: objects, conquests and imperial self-fashioning’, Past and Present, no. 184 (August 2004): 109–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 ‘Indirect rule’ is Sudipta Sen's term for the way in which this period of Company rule has been characterized by other scholars. Sen, Empire of Free Trade, for example at 3.

81 On the extent of Johnson's collection of manuscripts acquired in India (1,100 volumes), see Cohn, Colonialism, 98; and Falk, Toby and Archer, Mildred, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library (London, 1981), 27Google Scholar. On Johnson's patronage of artists and poets in Lucknow, see Falk and Archer, Indian Miniatures, 17–20; and Jasanoff, Maya, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York, 2005), 52–78Google Scholar.

82 See the preferment-seeking letter Johnson's father authored on his son's behalf in 1785, enclosed in George Dempster to Henry Dundas, 5 September 1785, Melville Papers, JRUL, R 68997, VIII, items 555–556. I am indebted to P. J. Marshall's entry on Johnson in the ODNB and the biographical sketch by Toby Falk and Mildred Archer in their illustrated catalogue of the Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library for several of the biographical features highlighted here. Marshall, P. J., ‘Johnson, Richard (1753–1807)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004Google Scholar [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/63514, accessed 1 June 2007]. Falk and Archer, Indian Miniatures, 15–29.

83 Falk and Archer, Indian Miniatures, 16.

84 Cannon, Oriental Jones, 203.

85 Jones to [Richard Johnson], 22 June 1784, in The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. Cannon, Garland, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1970), 2:652Google Scholar.

86 Sir William Jones to Sir Joseph Banks, 10 January 1790, in Letters of Sir William Jones, 2:854.

87 See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation, vol. 2: The Science of Freedom, 319–95. See also Legay, Marie-Laure, ‘The beginnings of public management: administrative science and political choices in the eighteenth century in France, Austria, and the Austrian Netherlands’, The Journal of Modern History 81, no. 2 (June 2009): 253–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1784 [1776]), 27, 29Google Scholar, quoted in [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Cultivation of the Sea Coast Sunderbunds’, n.d. [late March 1789], Phillipps MS 17,185, Ames MSS B114/2, pp. 9–10; and [Johnson], ‘Cultivation of the Sea Coast Sunderbunds’, p. 10.

89 Anna Clark and Aaron Windel, ‘The early roots of liberal imperialism: the “science of a legislator” in eighteenth-century India’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, no. 2 (Summer 2013) [https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.mnsu.edu/article/513261, accessed 24 May 2016]. My thinking in the next several paragraphs reflects the influence of Clark and Windel's work with the Richard Johnson manuscripts at the Ames Library of South Asia.

90 Richard Johnson, Draft memorandum beginning, ‘You do me the honor to call upon me to consider the subject of the management of the Revenues of these provinces’, n.d. [Fall 1786?], Phillipps Collection of East India Company Papers, JRUL, Eng MS 177/1/6, unfoliated. On 12 December 1786, Johnson refers to an interview he has recently had with Cornwallis at which the two discussed a plan for helping shore up the Company debt situation with a more efficient method of paying the Company's servants. Draft of Richard Johnson to Earl Cornwallis, 12 December 1786, Phillipps Collection of East India Company Papers, JRUL, Eng MS 183/6, unfoliated.

91 See Rothschild, Emma, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2001), Chapters 3–5 (72–156)Google Scholar; Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005), Chapter 2 (25–58)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 See Foucault, Michel, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter (Chicago, 1991), 87–104, esp. 87–99Google Scholar; Colin Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’, in The Foucault Effect, 1–51, esp. 8–12; and Pasquale Pasquino, ‘Theatricum Politicum: the genealogy of capital—police and the state of prosperity’, in The Foucault Effect, 105–18.

93 Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality’, 16. See also Clark and Windel, ‘Early roots of liberal imperialism’, n. 17.

94 Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality’, 16.

95 For a good survey of Enlightenment-era and earlier European responses and reactions to Machiavellian reason-of-state, see Outram, Enlightenment, 28–46.

96 Helvétius, A Treatise on Man, His Intellectual Faculties, and His Education, trans. Hooper, William (London, 1777), 207–13Google Scholar.

97 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entries on ‘Helvetius’, [late March 1790], Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library, MSS B114/2, pp. 51–53, 55, 59, emphasis in original.

98 Helvétius, Treatise on Man, 120, quoted in [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Helvetius p. 120’, Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library, MSS B114/2, p. 53.

99 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Helvetius p. 120’, Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library, MSS B114/2, p. 53.

100 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Government: what should be its principles?’, n.d. [March 1790?], Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/2, pp. 41–43.

101 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry ‘Upon the passions’, n.d. [March 1790?], Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/2, p. 35.

102 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [late September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/6, p. 43. Years later, he repeated the point in language that sounds positively Macaulayan in a letter he wrote to Sir James Mackintosh at Bombay, in which he looked forward to a ‘time when our books shall be read by the natives’. This would ‘instill into their minds not only attachment and gratitude towards us, but lay the foundation of the first principles of their future happiness, by instructing them in the grounds of it. To enable them to peruse this, & hence to disseminate it among others, the mind is naturally led to think of their education …. What they may learn from us, is to obtain antidotes to their poisons, to exchange ignorance for knowledge, to establish happiness upon misery. Supposing that through their education in our language & knowledge we could only so far improve their feelings & morals, as to make them shudder at offering human sacrifices of children men & women to Deities who, were they what they are supposed to be, cannot be satisfied by them. What a conquest, what a triumph would this prove!’ Johnson to Mackintosh, 20 February 1805, BL, MS Add. 52451 B, fols. 70–71, spelling, punctuation, and grammar as in original.

103 Hirschmann, A. O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), 22–28, 129–34Google Scholar.

104 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [late September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/6, pp. 38, 41; [Richard Johnson], ‘Notes on the Debbestan’, n.d., Phillipps MS 17,208, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/3, p. 7.

105 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Government: what should be its principles?’, n.d. [March 1790?], Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/2, pp. 41–43.

106 Wilson, Domination of Strangers.

107 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Government: what should be its principles?’, n.d. [March 1790?], Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/2, p. 42.

108 Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume the First, 2nd ed. (London, 1776), 33Google Scholar.

109 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Natural religion’, n.d. [near 11 March 1790], Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/2, p. 39.

110 For the publication history, see Womersley, David, ‘Introduction’, in Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Womersley, David, 3 vols. (London, 1994),1:xi–cvi, at lxviiiGoogle Scholar.

111 Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), 94, 194–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 Pocock, J. G. A., ‘Superstition and enthusiasm in Gibbon's history of religion’, Eighteenth-Century Life 8, no. 1 (October 1982): 83–94Google Scholar. For Hume, the destabilizing dangers of enthusiasm became all the more combustible under ‘modern’ conditions: that is, printing, powerful territorial princes (and popes) pursuing Machiavellian reason-of-state, gunpowder, and the flush of money in circulation that followed on the heels of Spanish conquests in America. Pocock, Narratives of Civil Government, 225–38, 208–17.

113 Pocock, Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 305–06.

114 Hume, David, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688: A New Edition, Corrected, 6 vols. (London, 1762), 5:389–90Google Scholar. The fifth volume of the 1762 edition of Hume's History of England had originally been published in 1754 as vol. 1 of his History of Great Britain, followed by vol. 2 in 1756, which became the History of England’s sixth and final volume in 1762. See also Pocock, Narratives of Civil Government, 193, 246.

115 Hume, History of England, 3:117–18, quoted in Pocock, Narratives of Civil Government, 226. See also Pocock's commentary here on how ‘religious toleration, in Hume's view, served exactly the same purpose as religious establishment: that of policing and lobotomizing religion, but cutting off at source its tendency to disputatiousness’ and on how Hume and Thomas Jefferson would never have seen eye to eye on how to achieve such ends; ibid.

116 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [late September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B/114, p. 50.

117 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on William Robertson's History of Charles V, 11 March 1790, Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/2, p. 38.

118 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on Thomas Reid's Active Powers of Man, n.d. [Summer 1790?], Phillipps MS 17,184, University of Minnesota, Ames Library, MSS B114/1, unpaginated portion.

119 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Chastellux's travels into America’, May 1789, Phillipps MS 17,185, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/2, p. 17.

120 King, Richard, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the ‘Mystic’ East (London, 1999), 120Google Scholar.

121 He translated them from the Persian rendition compiled at the insistence of Dara Shukoh. Duperron, Anquetil, Oupnek'hat id Est, Secretum Tegendum (Paris, 1801), 1:viiiGoogle Scholar, quoted in King, Orientalism, 120.

122 Jones, William, ‘Kneel to the Goddess whom all men adore’, in Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Franklin, Michael J. (Cardiff, 1995), 58Google Scholar.

123 Sir William Jones, ‘Plans of knowledge’, [1789], New York University, Fales Library, Jones Mss 1:20, cited in Franklin, Orientalist Jones, ix, and in Cannon, Oriental Jones, 310, emphasis in original.

124 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [late September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/6, pp. 36, 44.

125 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [late September 1789, Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/6, p. 45.

126 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [late September 1789, Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/6, p. 38.

127 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on Thomas Reid's Active Powers of Man, n.d. [Summer 1790?], Phillipps MS 17,184, Ames MSS B114/1, unpaginated portion, emphasis added.

128 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [late September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, Ames MSS B114/6, p. 41.

129 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [late September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/6, p. 42.

130 He thought that he was in full agreement with the text's author, which is why he was excited to label the Virginia Act ‘[one] of the finest & most liberal arguments’ ‘in favor of general toleration’ ever ‘published by any body assembled’. [Richard Johnson], ‘Journal from Calcutta to Chittagong & Patna, March 1789 & Nov, January 1790’, 18 November 1789, Phillipps MS 17184, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/1, p. 47.

131 [Thomas Jefferson], The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786) [http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/vaact.html, accessed 15 May 2012].

132 [Richard Johnson], ‘Journal from Calcutta to Chittagong & Patna, March 1789 & Nov, January 1790’, 18 November 1789, Phillipps MS 17184, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/1, p. 47.

133 In fact, Jefferson has very little to say about worship at all. Even where he suggests that all financial contributions to religious establishments should be voluntary, he seems to prefer to render these as ‘contributions of money for the propagation of opinions’ or ‘to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion’ or ‘to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness’. The statute does guarantee that ‘no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever’, but this announcement in negative form quickly recedes before the more positively formatted declaration ‘that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same [opinions] shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities’. Jefferson, Virginia Act, emphases added.

134 Lord George Auckland, Governor General's Minute on pilgrim taxes at the Temple of Jagannath, 17 November 1838, Auckland Minute Books, vol. 3, BL, MS Add. 37,711, fol. 4.

135 [Lord William Bentinck], Extract of the Governor General's minute on the administration of roads in the Bengal Presidency from Bengal Judicial Consultations, 25 March 1831, Board's Collections, BL, APAC IOR F/4/1306/51856, pp. 251–52.

136 [Lord John Elphinstone], Remarks on the Bishop of London's Speech in the House of Lords on Idolatry in India, [17 November 1839], John Cam Hobhouse Papers, BL, APAC MS Eur F213/88.

137 Lord John Elphinstone to Sir John Cam Hobhouse, President of the Board of Control, 19 April 1837, Hobhouse Letter Book, BL, APAC MS Eur F213/6, pp. 71, 142. Spelling and punctuation updated for smooth reading.

138 John Cam Hobhouse to Lord John Elphinstone, 30 August 1837, Hobhouse letterbook, 1836–37, BL, APAC MS Eur F213/6, p. 116, emphasis in original.

139 Ibid.

140 Editorial Section, India Gazette; or Calcutta Public Advertiser, 29 October 1787.

141 Bayly, C. A., ‘The pre-history of “communalism”? Religious conflict in India, 1700–1860’, Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 2 (1985): 177–203, esp. 194, 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

142 ‘Military intelligence’, Calcutta Gazette; or Oriental Advertiser, 25 October 1787. ‘Nothing’, the editorial remarked, ‘can be a stronger proof of the great oppression suffered by the Hindoos and of the bigotry and intolerant spirit of the Mussulmans. Happy for the mild natives of Hindostan that the equitable and enlarged Government of Great Britain has succeeded that of those barbarous conquerors!’

143 In 2015, the West Bengal state government instructed Durga Puja organizers in Kolkata to prohibit the immersion of Durga idols on 23 and 24 October, citing the need to promote communal peace ‘as the dates clash with Muharram’. See ‘No Immersion of Durga Idols on 23–24 Oct Due to Muharram’, Newsmen, 19 September 2015 [http://www.newsmen.in/news-item/no-immersion-of-durga-idols-in-kolkata-on-23-24-oct-due-to-muharram/, accessed 25 August 2016]. For a longer history of Durga Puja celebrations in late Mughal Bengal, see Bhattacharya, Tithi, ‘Tracking the Goddess: religion, community, and identity in the Durga Puja ceremonies of nineteenth-century Calcutta’, Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 4 (November 2007): 919–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

144 Editorial section, Calcutta Gazette; or Oriental Advertiser, 9 October 1788.

145 Although its original form was a letter to the Court of Directors recommending that they oversee the text's publication, Hastings must have expected his preface to be included in the front matter. The same had been done with the Code of Gentoo Laws.

146 Warren Hastings, Letter to Nathaniel Smith, Esq., 4 October 1784, in Bhăgvăt-Gēēta, 14. Also cited in Kopf, British Orientalism, 18; Marshall, ‘Warren Hastings as scholar and patron’, 258, 261; Peers, Douglas M., ‘Review article: Rediscovering India under the British’, The International History Review 12, no. 3 (August 1990): 548–62, at 551CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Domination of Strangers, 52; Bernard Cohn, ‘The command of language and the language of command’, in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 45.

147 Hastings, Letter to Nathaniel Smith, 11.

148 Ibid., 16–17, emphasis added.

149 See Travers, Ideology and Empire, 186–200, 224–34.

150 Ibid., 222.

151 Bhăgvăt-Gēēta, 17.

152 [Richard Johnson], Commonplace book entry on ‘Various religions’, n.d. [29 September 1789], Phillipps MS 17,535, University of Minnesota, Ames Library of South Asia, MSS B114/6, p. 36.

153 Chatterjee, Making of Indian Secularism, 2, and discussion, 2–7.

154 Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2012), 50, 35–36Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

155 Collet, Sophia Dobson, The Life and Letters of Rammohan Roy, ed. Biswas, D. K. and Ganguli, P. C. (Calcutta, 1962), 33Google Scholar, quoted in Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 50. The continuation of the quote, as Collet has it, is ‘Different teachers have different opinions, but the essence of every religion is to adopt the true path’.

156 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 16.

157 Ibid., 48–49.

158 Bentinck's Minute, 8 November 1829, BL, APAC IOR P/139/34, pp. 12–13, emphasis added.

159 It seems unlikely that Roy, whose first Persian book, the Tufat-ul-Muwahiddin, had attempted to prove that Vedanta philosophy and Islamic monotheism shared much common ground, would have acquiesced so easily in the potted British history of Mughal persecution that Bentinck attributed to him. See Robertson, Bruce Carlisle, Raja Rammohan Roy: The Father of Modern India (Delhi, 1995)Google Scholar; and Zastoupil, Lynn, Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. At the same time, Roy may have resorted to a type of argument that he knew Bentinck would find convincing—in the interest of advancing his own agenda, which was to prevent a legislative abolition of sati. Roy, as Jon Wilson points out, stands at the beginning of a trajectory in Bengali political thought wherein ‘the category of Indian “society” was articulated by Indian political thinkers to protect the autonomy of Bengali practice against the colonial state and other potentially malign, interfering forces. … For writers articulating this liberal political rationality in the middle 50 years of the nineteenth century, the country's social institutions were supposed to offer a realm of rule-bound yet free sociability, ruled not by external force but by consent’. Wilson, Domination of Strangers, 164, and, for Rammohan Roy's exemplification of this argument, 165–74.

160 The language here, which is representative of that very strategy of ‘protecting the autonomy of Bengali practice’, of which Wilson considers Rammohan Roy a pioneer, comes not from Roy, but rather from some of his Brahmo Samaj successors shortly after his death: Letter to the editor from ‘A Bengalee’ and editorial on ‘Hindoo Holidays’, Bengal Hurkaru, 9 May 1834; Petition of Hindu merchants and inhabitants of Calcutta to governing council in Bengal, 12 June 1834, Board's Collections, BL, APAC IOR F/4/1560/63880, pp. 176–79.

161 Zastoupil, Rammohun Roy, 25–26.