English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory Comments
on Gauri Viswanathan's "Lessons of History" Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 Gauri Viswanathan's chapter "Lessons of History" is a good example of the breadth available to cultural studies. Viswanathan attempts to explain the attempt by nineteenth-century British imperial governors and educators to school Indians in a manner most favorable to colonization. She shows how the British, in order to achieve their goal as colonial rulers, needed to adapt their methods to the ancient and sophisticated culture and country they wanted to develop along Western lines. What Viswanathan offers is an image of domination markedly different from what we might expect, though not necessarily superior to the usual plan in terms of morality or objective. We are reminded in reading her work of Raymond Williams' point about the need for flexibility on the part of an hegemonic group in its attempt to control events and people. Viswanathan's starting point is the opinion of Warren Hastings, the first governor of India after Lord North passed a Regulatory Act in 1773 modifying the power of the East India Company. Hastings had said that a culture ought to be judged by empirical standards--standards drawn from its own elements and not imposed arbitrarily by foreigners. The Utilitarian writer James Mill, who held a post in India for some time, agreed with that view but in somewhat altered fashion: he said that one should interpret the literary works of a given culture with a view to preserving what is of social utility and dismissing what is not. Westerners of Mill's opinion, of course, found distasteful the Indian (and to some extent Western) practice of reading works like the Bagavad Gita or the Mahabarata for their spiritual significance rather than as commentary on social practices, especially when those practices happen to be repugnant to Western readers. As Viswanathan says, Mill did not like this kind of "mediation," to use later author Claude Levi-Strauss' term for the attempt to resolve self-contradictions and explain distasteful customs in terms of myth and other literary genres. It would appear that the colonial educators largely agreed with James Mill. According to Viswanathan, the British favored an historicist approach based not so much on Christian assumptions about human nature as on a need to study one's culture in the light of history. Christianity, following the doctrine of Original Sin, sees human nature as fallen from an originally good state. Gauri also mentions Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith, author of the early capitalist defense The Wealth of Nations, who developed a Protestant moral theory that relied on this Christian dualism between the natural (i.e. fallen) and the regenerate man. Smith wrote that ethical judgments are made by an inner "impartial spectator"--a fair, rational, dispassionate part of the self that is able to judge, almost as if from the outside looking in, what we do and say. Historicism tends to undo that kind of dualism since, of course, it does not posit a fall from grace as Christian theory does. In the British educational scheme, to be sure, Smith-like ethical judgments play a role, but the judgment sought after is the one to be made by Indian students against their supposedly corrupt political traditions, not against some corrupt state of human nature. The British promoted the idea that Indians were innately a good people but that they suffered in the present the ill effects of both past and current authoritarianism and corruption in their political and economic affairs. The way to expose the corruption, according to British educators, was to study one's own culture and history intensely and objectively, much as Smith's "impartial spectator" would. To achieve the goal of a pro-western critique, it was not necessary to impose what we might now call "Western Civilization" course upon Indian students--a tactic that would surely have generated much resentment. Supplementing this historicist program, writes Gauri, was the British emphasis on the ideas of early seventeenth-century scientist and statesman Sir Francis Bacon, a man generally considered the founder of the modern scientific or inductive method. Bacon's view of the scientific project was that mastering nature would lead to material progress, to amelioration of the human condition. (It should be noted that unlike the historicist view promoted by British educators in India, the Baconian view is explicitly Christian.) Gauri's critical view of what the British colonialists did in India leads her to point out how successfully they led Indian students to internalize the principles and lessons most favorable to continuing colonial rule: mainly that India needed to modernize its culture, its politics, and its economy. That, of course, is exactly what would promote British imperial aims--a westernized India able to contribute to Great Britain's economic well-being rather than being a drain on its resources. And one indeed finds such views stated in the student essays Gauri quotes. To some extent, then, the British succeeded in their aim of more or less subtly leading the Crown's Indian subjects toward willing identification with the rulers. Indian students, historicizing their own culture and political system, come to support the western notion that India must awake from its long eastern slumber and join the mainstream of history. It is easy to see from our current perspective that the British program did not succeed so well as those early educators could have wished. Mohandas Gandhi's millions of non-violent supporters were not comprised of students who had fully internalized western ideas. Gandhi himself, though educated in the western style, doggedly pursued Indian independence from the Crown, and India (like many other colonies of Great Britain) attained that independence not long after the end of World War II. As with most countries beset by colonialist invaders, the post-independence scene is complex--even though citizens may find a renewed appreciation of their heritage, no newly independent former colony completely jettisons the language, culture, economics, or politics of its onetime rulers. Colonial occupation leaves a permanent trace in whatever culture it touches, inflecting it in directions different from where it might have gone and demanding a sophisticated negotiation on the citizens' part between two very different, yet coexistent, cultures--if, as seems unlikely, one may still speak of those cultures as fully separable in the former colony.
|