Introduction
‘Bonyera Bone Sundar; Shishura Matrikrore’ [Savages are as beautiful in forests as are babies in their mothers’ laps] wrote Sanjeev Chandra Chattopadhayay in his much-celebrated travel account Palamou Bhraman [Travels in Palamou], which was serialized in the highly regarded Bengali literary journal Banga Darshan between 1287 and 1289 BS [Bangya Skabda] (CE 1881–83).Footnote 1 Palamou is a thickly-wooded, hilly region located in what is now known as the Indian state of Jharkhand, and Sanjeev Chandra, a native of suburban Calcutta, lived there for a brief period as a revenue collector for the colonial government.Footnote 2 The word ‘bonya’ [singular], which I translate as ‘savage’, here refers to the Kol people, a forest group. Sanjeev Chandra was trying to locate the Kol people in a putative hierarchy of human civilization and compared them in his travelogue with the ‘declining aboriginal people of Canada, US, New Zealand and Tasmania.’Footnote 3
Sanjeev Chandra was obviously borrowing here from the modern colonial genre of travel writing. As Johannes Fabian and Ussama Makdisi have pointed out, under conditions of modernity, these narratives often involve the story of the European man travelling from a modern metropolis to colonial peripheries where he actually distances himself from native inhabitants. This move is made possible by juxtaposing his own notion of secular time with what he perceives as the stagnant time of the colonized, indigenous person, and thus, using time-space distancing, he denies that he and the indigenous person are, in fact, coeval.Footnote 4 Sanjeev Chandra's writing could be read as a similar manoeuvre of time-space distancing, through a careful juxtaposition of the perceived primitiveness of ‘forest people’ in relation to his supposed colonial modernity. In the extant literature on the subject, such time-space distancing had been presented as the core component of the Bengali nationalist project of claiming historical subjectivity. Trapped between the secular universalist temporal order of colonial rulers and the diverse quotidian temporalities of Indians, it has been argued that Bengali writers used such juxtaposition of primitiveness and modernity to claim historical subjectivity for themselvesFootnote 5. This paper moves beyond the time-space distancing evident in the writings of Bengali writers and uses comments of Sanjeev Chandra to access the Bengali literati's concept of race, hierarchy of human civilizations, and claims of citizenship in the imagined territorial nation-state of India.
Based on the study of geography text books written in Bengali in the late-nineteenth century, this paper argues that the introduction of the new discipline of geography in school curricula introduced race as a systematic theme in understanding human civilization as hierarchical. In the 1840s, such ideas appeared as scattershot commentaries on race but by the 1880s they had cohered into a theory of race. Though school-educated elites constituted a minuscule minority of the province,Footnote 6 it was still a significant group in terms of their impact upon local politics and culture. More importantly, even though since the early nineteenth century the Bengali literati was familiar with theories of race, through phrenology etc.,Footnote 7 this was the first time ‘scientific’ racial discourses were employed by Indians to claim that colonial territory was primarily a homeland of Hindu Aryans who were perceived to be far higher on the civilizational ladder in comparison to ‘pre-Aryan aboriginals’ as internal others.
Drawing upon existing theories of racial hierarchy of humankind, writers of Bengali geography textbooks placed Britain, India, and sometimes China, at the apex of a hierarchy of global civilization, with Africa at the bottom. Following a similar discursive terrain in the Indian context, Bengali writers highlighted the supposed superiority of Aryans, interchangeably described as ‘Hindu Caucasians’, over ‘aboriginal autochthons’ within the Indian empire.Footnote 8 Through invocations of the supposedly glorious ancient Hindu heritage of Bharatvarsha and its comparison to Yavana (Muslim) intolerance and the backwardness of the ‘aboriginal savage’ [variously described as asabhya (uncivilized), rakhsahs (demons), asura (demon)],Footnote 9 the implicit tenor of such writings was to nationalize the territorial spaces conquered by the British. Through invocations of myths, legends, and the territorialization of history,Footnote 10 these writers sought to secure the claims of an emerging western-educated Hindu middle-class as a group of innovative civilizing citizens in relation to the ‘uncivilized pre-Aryan’ population inhabiting the boundary of the new territory. More importantly, the new geographic knowledge system cannot be perceived as a sharp break from the precolonial era as it has been argued in the context of historical writings.Footnote 11 Instead, this phenomenon might be suggested as a dialectical process whereby various strands within the precolonial knowledge system resisted the intrusion of European knowledge and led to a synthesis that selectively sorted through, then out, the new knowledge about rankings of humanity and applied it within the colonial territorial context of India.
Interestingly, while the Bengali Hindu literati reconstructed the ethno-cultural identity of the land, they ignored racial backwardness attributed to Indians in various colonial anthropometric literatures,Footnote 12 and thus engaged in a selective adoption and adaptation of colonial ‘scientific’ writing. On the one hand, this adoption established the claim of Hindu Indian citizens over a putative national terrain to contest the colonial notion of conquest and, on the other, it marginalized various internal others who claimed parts of the colonial territory as their national homeland.
Curiously enough, this vast corpus of geographic literature has escaped the notice of historians. Except for the work of Christopher Bayly,Footnote 13 Manu Goswami,Footnote 14 and Sumathi Ramaswamy,Footnote 15 the evolution of geography as a disciplinary genre remained exiled from the attention of Indian historians. Even those who analyzed the new disciplinary genre of geography remained silent about the ranking of human civilization and its implications for Indian identity in relation to territoriality that the discipline enabled. For instance, Manu Goswami, who has expanded our understanding of the role of territorial expanse of the colonial state in the formulation of nationalist discourses, is silent about the hierarchy of human civilizations based on race, progress of technology, and culture as articulated in geography textbooks. The study of geography text books is critical, as text books within the colonial education system naturalized such knowledge as axiomatic truthFootnote 16. Yet even Bayly, who has pioneered the research on geography textbooks and undoubtedly provided the most insightful analysis of the role of geography in the making of the colonial information order in India, has refrained from engaging with this hierarchization of human civilizations. Though Bayly refers to ‘racial stereotypes’ introduced by British authors of geography textbooks, he refrains from analyzing the vivid portrayal of racial hierarchy of human civilizations by many Indian authors. This paper, while drawing upon Bayly's formulation of contestations between the European and the (various) strands of indigenous knowledge systems, further expands the field to analyze how Bengali elites reconstructed the notion of hierarchy of civilizations.Footnote 17 Susan Bayly has pointed out how Indian nationalist writers adopted racial theories from colonial sources and internalized their implications.Footnote 18 This paper agrees with her assertion about the nationalist appropriation of racial ideologies articulated by colonial elites. Following her argument, this paper asserts that this adoption was not a straightforward process and, instead, it was characterized by a dialectical process whereby the Bengali literati rejected certain particular implications of racial backwardness attributed to Indians but accepted others. Furthermore, this article claims that this hierarchization of civilization constituted the yardstick through which Bengali writers adjudicated claims of different Indian communities about their homeland that would later inform the interconnections between nationality and territorial claims of the putative national state. High caste Hindu Bengali elites established their hegemony over the colonial education system, using education to mark their superior social status. To echo Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, this ‘hierarchy’ signified their class privileges and was transferred across generations.Footnote 19
The significance of the construction of a hierarchy of human civilizations and its implications in the Indian context can be better understood through a comparative analysis of modern geographical discourse and its impact on ethnography. For example, historians of East Asia, particularly China, have engaged with an ethnocentric notion of maps in Chinese culture in the early modern era. Laura Hostetler, for example, argues that Emperor Kangxi (1662–1722) in China employed Jesuits to survey and map much of the empire in the same way as the Russians and French did in the early modern era during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, the Manchu rulers from the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) also followed a similar pattern of developing ethnographic knowledge of the ‘other.’ According to Hostetler these efforts at gathering empirical information about the subjects constituted a critical epistemological break with the past. For the Qing rulers, because they belonged to the minority ethnic community of Manchus, a knowledge of territory and population was essential to their exercise of power. All these factors indicated that Qing rulers displayed the similar early modern imperial mentality of using ethnographic and geographic information to control populations.Footnote 20 Thus cultural superiority could be negotiated through geographic information systems.
Similarly, Susan Blum has pointed out how Han students essentialized minority ethnic groups dispersed over different spatial regions of China.Footnote 21 Recent studies, such as that of Patricia Kelley, have also demonstrated that the civilizing missions among ethnic minorities constitute a crucial hallmark of the policies of the socialist state of Vietnam.Footnote 22 In congruence with the research of Blum and Kelley, my work attempts to understand how claims regarding civilization and national territories were negotiated in geography textbooks written by Bengali authors in the late nineteenth century. But I also examine how the dialectical process of contestation between strands of precolonial knowledge and the colonial information order produced a new synthesis that provides clues regarding anxieties about human rankings among the colonized intellectuals in India and their attempts to allay these anxieties.
Michael Adas identifies technology as the ideological source of a European sense of superiority and delineates the racist notions that were its by-product.Footnote 23 Though his arguments provide a vast canvas and possibly a classic explanation of the ideological mindset of European ruling elites in the late-nineteenth century, he does not deal with Asian and African understandings of racial theories of the nineteenth century in his comparative framework. In contrast to Adas's findings, my research into geography textbooks written in Bengal demonstrates that their authors believed that racial characteristics of a particular branch of humanity were the reasons for technological backwardness. This paper thus deals with the rankings of human kind from a Bengali-Indian perspective. I argue that to colonized Bengali elites the ideology of race was filtered through concerns about self-identity and thus generated their desire to claim genealogical proximity to ruling European imperial elites. In this context, the organizing capacity of intellectual rationalizations of theories of fictive ethnicity were structurally tied to the internal contradictions of the process of transition from the colonial imperial state to the nation-state.
To further this argument about the selective articulation of a racialized Hindu discourse of progress of human civilization by the Bengali literati, I draw upon Balibar. I argue here that as colonized subjects, a sense of powerlessness played a critical role in such imaginings of a global hierarchy. According to Etienne Balibar, the political modernity of Europe was characterized by the notion of citizen-subject.Footnote 24 I use here Bhaskar Mukhopadhaya's interpretation of Balibar which claims that the amalgamation of rationality and capital has brought into existence a citizen-subject whose citizenship is articulated through the nation-state which rendered him/her a true subject of history.Footnote 25 By investigating the Bengali literati's perceptions of their own colonized world, I argue that under British rule the colonized literati became increasingly aware of their precarious position whereby they were denied citizen-subject status because of colonial domination. To claim such a citizen-subject status, one needs to be a member of a nation-state, and these colonized elite perceived the attainment of such a citizen-subject status as a way of facilitating the individual's participation in a process of self-emancipation from all forms of collective domination.Footnote 26 Such a nation-state, according to the colonial discourse, is the privilege of advanced civilizations claiming heritage to classical antiquity, cultivated Christian masculinity, and the ethno-environmental traits of a ruling race from a colder climate zone.Footnote 27 Globally the colonial ideology of governance drew upon particular aspects of European enlightenment traditions that sought to link race, caste, and environment with the progress of civilization and human liberty along a hierarchical ladder.Footnote 28 Putative locations within such a hierarchy obviously condition, in the perception of colonial elites, the human ability to self-govern or make claims to modern notions of citizenship.
To the Bengali Hindu literati of the middle of the nineteenth century, it increasingly became apparent that they did not belong to a nation-state and could not, therefore, successfully claim the status of a citizen-subject. The idea of a nation state here also corresponded to the idea of territoriality of a nation.Footnote 29 It is within this context, and based on the ‘new science’ of geography, mapping and ethnography, that the Bengali Hindu colonial literati were making claims for themselves as a civilized social entity and thus became willing ideological participants in reconstructing a racial notion of a hierarchy of civilizations at the discursive level while challenging colonial notions of territorial space at the politico-cultural level.
Mapping India: From Hindu Cosmography to a Colonial Science of Geography
Maps and geographic knowledge systems are central to the idea of a state and more precisely a nation-state.Footnote 30 Early maps provided a visual image of the outline of a territory controlled by a state. This visual image of the state as a fixed, given territorial unit enabled people to imagine their habitat in a new way.Footnote 31 India was no exception to this process. Colonel William Lambton's proposal for The Great Trigonometric survey in December 1799 triggered the real romance of scientific surveying and mapping, indicating the beginning of a discursive rupture with the earlier process and production of a well-framed map of the colonial territory.Footnote 32 As colonial rulers transformed natural frontiers of the Indian subcontinent into borders,Footnote 33 the mapping of their territorial possessions created a clearly discernable state space,Footnote 34 and with it, came the desire for a community located within the mapped and bounded space.
Century-long mapping and surveying techniques contributed to the institutionalization of the knowledge of geography as a scientific discipline in late nineteenth-century India. Maps of districts, provinces, imperial borders of India, the Asiatic continent and the world became prominent features of newly emerging western-style classrooms in presidency towns. Colonial officials also promoted maps in classrooms.Footnote 35 In India, maps increasingly became a visible novelty for the people because of the Indian railways from the 1850s onwards. They also generated further curiosity for the mapping process among educated elites. Indeed, through mapping and geography textbooks educated Indians became familiar with the geopolitical apparatus of a territorial state which constituted a critical premise of the desire for a nation-state. Bengali writers developed their understanding of geography primarily through the available Western textbooks of geography. Based on such works, they wrote textbooks in Bengali (and other languages) both to meet the needs of the newly introduced school curriculum and to fulfill their own intellectual curiosity.Footnote 36
Not surprisingly, Bengali public intellectuals concentrated on writing geography textbooks to familiarize Indian students with the idea of the physical shape of the earth, the meaning of territorial states, and ethnocultural characteristics of nationalities inhabiting such states. This was evident in the pioneering geography textbook written in Bengali in 1841 entitled ‘Bhugol’ (geography). The book's author, Akshay Kumar Dutta, sought to familiarize readers with contemporary global society. He produced a list of Asian countries and cited the number of inhabitants for each. Among Asian countries, he listed the Russian empire, an Independent Tartar State, Syria and Greater Palestine, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Hindustan, Burma, Siam, Great China, and Japan. Hindustan was described as homeland (desh). Interestingly, as British control was not yet firmly established over Baluchistan, a territory located in modern day Pakistan, it was presented as a neighbouring small state and thus colonial territory became synonymous with ‘desh’ (homeland).
To further introduce the new concept of territorial sovereignty, ‘Bhugol’ defined words, such as ‘capital’, as the place where ruling monarchs had their palaces and housed the headquarters of the judiciary. Thus, the book demonstrated the Bengali literati's new ideological venture into the world of geopolitics, mapping, and the transformation of kingdoms into bordered territorial states.
In Sanskrit, ‘bhu’ means earth and ‘gol’, or round shape, indicates the earth's physical feature. Dutta described ‘Bhugol’ as a science that enables people to learn about every possible space on the earth's surface. In an era when positivism was the supreme reigning principle in the world of knowledge formation, the word ‘science’ connotated a powerful sense of inviolability.
Scientific assertions about geographic knowledge remained the core component of this new ideological venture. From the beginning, authors of Bengali textbooks asserted the superiority of scientific knowledge of the world over indigenous Hindu knowledge systems. This was clearly reflected in the first geography textbooks written in Bengali by Reverend W.H. Pearce, entitled Bhugol Britanta, published in 1846.Footnote 37 The book was published in several editions and over the years sold 9,000 copies.Footnote 38 This work, while introducing basic physical features of the earth and its movements, refers to the story of conflicts between the Church and scientists, like Galileo and Copernicus, in early modern Europe.Footnote 39 The author referred to the contestation between the Church and scientists over the shape of the earth in order to overcome local Brahamanical opposition to new notions of geography.
This obviously indicates the tension between the Brahamanical discourse of geography and the ‘scientific’ geography that Europeans sought to introduce. Indeed, in response to the introduction of western cartography, a Bengali Brahmin sought to prove the falsity of the new ideas of the round shape of the earth by referring to puranic notions of cosmography in Brahamanical traditions.Footnote 40 Thus Dwarkanath Vidyaratna wrote that the earth originated from the navel of the creator in the shape of a lotus.Footnote 41 This shape of the earth was evident in the Bedbyas's description of seven hells (sapta patal) and in the prayer of the (monkey) King Bali to the god in the form of lamentations for the loss of his kingdom due to his own fatal errors.Footnote 42 In a tome, written in Sanskrit and Bengali, Vidyanrav referred to an existing early tradition of Indic cosmography.
In response to such opposition, the defenders of the new science of geography sought to refute earlier traditions selectively, and thereby synthesized new and old discourses of geography. This is evident in the writings of Kalidas Moitra of Sreerampore who wrote quite emphatically:
Many so called sages (Rishi) who claimed to have knowledge of three ages (Trikal) described how a serpent called Ananta (eternity) held the earth on its head sitting on the back of tortoise. At the same time, four elephants are believed to be upholding the four corners of the earth. In other words, according to these authors of classical religious texts (Sastras), the earth is not hanging in space but is balanced on various forms of animals.Footnote 43 [Translation mine.]
Moitra then produced his trump card by arguing that ‘[i]ndeed to suggest that the world is held by the Creator's own creations may actually indicate that the Creator is unable to hold the earth on His own.’ Since the ‘Creator is omnipotent and omnipresent’, Moitra asserted, ‘He does not need to rely on His creations to hold the earth. Indeed, the earth is hanging in perfect balance in space (Sunya)’.Footnote 44 Having arrived at this conclusion, Moitra proposed a synthesis by claiming that classical religious texts (Sastras) refer to Ananta, the serpent, as a symbol of eternity—as the word Ananta means ‘no beginning or no end.’ Thus, the Sastras, Moitra claims, allegorically acknowledged that eternity or the Creator has placed the earth in space. With this observation, Moitra proceeded to narrate the history of geography as a scientific discipline from Ptolemy to Copernicus and Galileo with obvious emphasis on the contestations between the Church and scientists over the meaning of scientific truth.Footnote 45 Maitra was not an exception. In most nineteenth-century textbooks, the authors, after a brief description of Hindu cosmography at the introduction of their work, painstakingly followed newly circulating physical geography textbooks written in mid-nineteenth century Europe.Footnote 46 This was thus a synthesis between puranic ideals (precolonial knowledge) and European science. Indeed, it had been determined that students should also be exposed to the scientific ‘truths’ concerning the earth's physical formation and movements. Thus an examination question in middle-school in Bengali in 1864 asked students: ‘What are the proofs for the round shape of the earth? What are the types of motions of the earth? What causes season change?’Footnote 47
Students answering such questions had to selectively refute puranic cosmographic concepts but could use the new synthesis offered by Bengali writers that directly rejected earlier notions. Thus, the uneven marriage between Hindu cosmography and Western science leaned towards the new science but did not totally discard earlier notions.
Following positivist progressive notions of colonial science, geography became a tool to understand economic, political, and social progress of civilizations. Geography textbooks looked at the discipline of geography as a means to understand and analyze politics and developmental economics in order to explain human progress. For example, Gopal Chunder Bandopadhayay, headmaster of Calcutta Normal School, in his book on teaching methodologies published in 1872, noted that:
Many scholars recognize that history and political science require substantial input from geography. This can be proved particularly in reference to politics. As parents look after the welfare of their children, kings and queens similarly should look after the welfare of their subjects. To identify the needs of subjects as well as to undertake measures to improve their conditions, a specialized knowledge of the territory of their habitation is required. Such knowledge comes from geography. Therefore, the knowledge concerning natural and social features of a country should be studied. The location of a country on the earth's surface, its physical, atmospheric, territorial boundaries, the extent of coastal areas, nature of river systems, quality of land, mineral resources and other factors are regarded as natural geography, whereas the marriage system of people, education, principles of government, commerce industry, agriculture, language, science, religion, moral advancement, and behavioral features fall into the category of social geography. A good knowledge of all these issues can create conditions for the improvement of a land and its people. Geography provides that knowledge.Footnote 48 [Translation mine.]
The above quote reflects a clear combination of a colonial paternalistic philosophy of governance and the developmental economic aspirations of colonized subjects. To Bengali authors, physical geography became the critical key to open the door for economic development, while social geography provided a holistic interpretation of human progress through classification of human civilizations, and thus assisted in fixing such developmental goals. Yet the new knowledge did not entirely refute precolonial ideas—rather, through a selective dialectical process of contestation and negotiation, Bengali authors synthesized the two.
Mapping Ethnicity: The Science of Geography and the Racial Ranking of Humankind
Authors of geography textbooks in the nineteenth century constantly looked at human civilizations through a hierarchical lens often tinged with rather open racial prejudices. Interestingly, while describing Europe these writers relied more on the moral criterion of civilizational progress and national stereotypes, but in describing Asia and Africa they resorted to racial stereotypes.
Akshay Kumar'sFootnote 49 description of Europe, for instance, did not reflect an autonomous indigenous knowledge system. The author maintained that as there were no geography textbooks in Bengali, he consulted primarily English texts. He refers to Clift's ‘First Geography’,Footnote 50 Michelle's ‘Geography’, and Hamilton's India ‘Gazette.’Footnote 51 Indeed, careful scrutiny of contemporary British geography school textbooks reveals that these stereotypes about different European nationalities are not so uncommon in that period. For example, a Scottish geography textbook written in 1840 clearly states that ‘[t]he Scotts are industrious, hardy and frugal’Footnote 52 but calls ‘Spaniards proud, indolent and bigoted'Footnote 53 or describes Italians as ‘superstitious and revengeful.’Footnote 54 Dutta's view of European society, thus, reproduced contemporary perceptions among British elites about the hierarchy of civilizations in Europe. However, while British textbooks presented such ideas in a scattered manner, Dutta (re)produced them in a consolidated form. Dutta was not alone among Bengali intellectuals in articulating such views about European civilization. Nearly 12 years after Dutta, in 1857, Sourindra Mohan Tagore (a scion of Calcutta's landed aristocracy and an erudite scholar of European music), echoed similar opinions in Bhugol o Itihas Ghotito Brityanta (Accounts of Geography and History). He presented England as the most advanced civilization. To him the French appeared to be equally advanced but complicated, unsettled, and egoistic. He described Italians as artistically oriented and lovers of music, but also revenge-seeking. Russia was perceived to be a civilization advancing from a rather uncivilized and illiterate state, whilst the Irish were labelled as lacking in moral fiber.Footnote 55
Why did Dutta and Tagore reproduce these notions? Dutta, in particular, did not even subscribe to many colonial notions about India and Bengalis.Footnote 56 For Dutta, Britons became masters of the world not because of their inherent racial superiority but because of their cultural, societal, and moral attributes. Europe was not simply a homogenous whole but, instead, a highly variegated society with many nations requiring civilizing missions from outsiders. The implicit assumption was that, just as India was growing and prospering under colonial tutelage, so too would various European nationalities. In the European context, the idea of progress was perceived in terms of social virtues. Dutta's notion of Europe was (to borrow the phrase from Chatterjee's seminal workFootnote 57), a derivative discourse, that was refracted through the Indian concern about how different civilizations at different stages of moral evolution require different degrees of civilizing missions.
In the Asian and African contexts, Indian writers of geography textbooks deployed a far more racial understanding of civilization's progress. They often placed China a notch higher than other Asian countries. Thus, in a book called Description of Asia (Asiar Biboron) published in 1868, author Haranchandra Mukhopadahay described Burmese people as ‘copper colored, mean minded complex people who were addicted to Opium and gambling.’ Malays were described as ‘clever but cruel untrustworthy short-height, thick lipped black people who were savage pirates.’ However, the Chinese were described as ‘yellow-skinned,’ ‘slanty-eyed,’ ‘flat-nosed’ but ‘highly intelligent, hard working, self restrained and law abiding’ people.Footnote 58 There is an interesting decoupling in the context of China between the supposed physical features of the Chinese and their moral and intellectual attributes. This attempt to place China on a higher pedestal was clearly visible in later works too. Tarini Charan Chattopadhyay, in his textbook Bhugol Biboron (1865) narrated with pride how the Chinese had manufactured gun powder, printed books, and even invented the compass, when Europeans were still hunting with bows and arrows and had nothing to wear but animal skins. He then proceeded to lament that the Chinese education system had remained static for a thousand years while Europeans exhibited enormous dynamism that resulted in their domination over the world.Footnote 59 Africa, however, was viewed as the antipode of China in terms of progress of civilization.
As in Asia, civilization in Africa was also viewed through a racial lens by early nineteenth-century writers, although, initially, these descriptions were more eclectic. Dutta, the well known public intellectual, described in detail differences between North African Berbers, Egyptian Copts, and sub-Saharan Africans. Dutta provided various random descriptions of the physical appearance of Africans and then sought to explain their cultural traits and historical experience in line with nineteenth-century practices of racial ethnography. Thus, Dutta wrote that:
‘Negro’ people reside in the middle of Africa. They are ‘black-skinned, thick-lipped and curly haired.’ Some among them are ‘good’ natured and others are rather ‘evil spirited.’ At one time, they were sold like animals and Europeans used to buy them or captured them by force and dispatched them to the Americas for agricultural work. Recently, this practice has stopped. [Translation mine.]Footnote 60
Akshay Kumar Dutta's text was followed by Kalidas Maitra's Bhugol Vivarana (Description of Geography) (1857), Gopal Chandra Basu's Bhugol Sutra (1867), Nilkamala Ghosal's Bhu Chitrabali (World Atlas) (1868), Satish Chandra Chaudhuri's Prathama Bhugola (Primary Geography) (1870), Chandrakanta Gangopadhaya's Bhugola (Geography) in 1871, and Shaymadas Mazumdar's Saral Bhugol (Simple Geography) (1871). Many of these authors acknowledged their debts to Dutta.Footnote 61 These texts contain rather arbitrary racial classifications of populations and yet, on occasion, they express sympathy for African people scattered worldwide.
These eclectic and complex descriptions of world populations were put into a more clearly formulaic and ‘scientific’ racial classification by a great nineteenth century Bengali writer Rajendralal Mitra who wrote quite prolifically about ancient Indian society and Sanskrit literature in scholarly journals. In 1871, in the fifth edition of his popular geography textbook, borrowing from the works of German medical scientist, natural historian and physical anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, he provided a brief summary of the debates between the monogenesis and polygenesis theories of human origin.Footnote 62 He also took into account theories that looked at the impact of the environment on human appearance, though he indicated that environment alone could not be responsible for craniological differences among different types of human beings. Instead of taking sides in these debates he argued that these issues could not be resolved in the short space of his tome. He then used a five-fold classification of humankind: Caucasian, Mongolian, African/Ethiopian and the Malayan, based on the third edition of Blumenbach's well known thesis, De generis humani varietate nativa liber, (On the Natural Varieties of Mankind). Mitra claimed that Arabs, Jews, Indians, as well as Europeans and Euro-Americans, fell under the category of Caucasian (Kokkesio) races.Footnote 63 He conveniently ignored Blumenbach's comment in a footnote of his thesis ‘Hindus may be considered as a subdivision or secondary race, distinct from the Caucasians.’Footnote 64 More importantly, Mitra argued quite assertively that Caucasians had progressed far beyond other races in civilizational terms and had established military supremacy over all other races in the world. For him the supremacy of Caucasians was evident in science, fine arts, and culture.
Following Mitra, such ‘scientific’ notions of racial hierarchy of human civilization became the principle mode of classification of humankind in Bengali textbooks. For example, Rajani Kanta Ghosh, manager of the government-aided school at Kati Para Jashohor, announced in his textbook Bhugol Vidyasar that the book contained ‘[a] general account of Asia, Europe, Africa, America and Oceania . . . compiled from recent authorities.’Footnote 65 He quoted alongside Blumenbach, James Cowley Prichard as his source. He identified three pure races: Caucasians, Mongoloids, and Kafri. He argued that other races such as Malay (Malai) Australian, inhabitants of Papua and ‘aboriginal Americans’ emerged out of interactions of all these races. He also maintained the strict racial hierarchy which invariably placed Caucasians at the top. Within the Caucasian category he also included Indians.Footnote 66 For Bengali Hindus, as for anyone else in the world, the ideology of race was filtered through concerns about self-identity and claims of genealogical proximity to a ‘ruling race.’ To echo Balibar again, this is an indication of the organizing capacity of intellectual rationalizations that use theories of fictive ethnicity and are structurally tied to the internal contradictions of the process of transition from imperial state to nation state.Footnote 67
This new science of geography also sought to classify inhabitants of the Indian empire. This was critical for colonial governance as well as for putative understandings of Indian society. The relationship between imperial governance and the colonial science of geography was evident in the writings of Walter Hamilton whose pioneering two volume work (1820), A Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and Adjacent Countries, was frequently quoted by Bengali geography textbook writers.Footnote 68 Hamilton wrote candidly at the beginning of his book:
Hindostan . . . must not now be viewed as a mere assemblage of nabobs, Sultans and Rajas, but as a component portion of the British Empire, changed and modified in its territorial distribution by the effects of British domination, and in its internal economy by the promulgation of British laws and regulations.Footnote 69
Acquisition of geographical knowledge about India thus became crucially linked with imperial interests. The process of construction of geographic knowledge also involved critical analysis of the ethnographic composition of different inhabitants of different environmental spaces. He also constructed a hierarchy of civilizational progress among different types of inhabitants of India and thus wrote:
The great mass of the Hindoo and Mohameddan population throughout Hindostan has nearly attained the same stage of civilization, but intermixed with them are certain races of mountaineers, probably the true aborigines, whose languages have little affinity with Sanscrit [sic], and whose customs retain all their primitive barbarity [sic]. The most remarkable of these tribes are the Gonds, Bheels and Coolies; but there are many others of less note, such as the hill people of Boglipur [sic], and Kookies [sic] of Chittagong.Footnote 70
Colonial writers restructured entitlements of various ethnicities to the land and ranked them in accordance with a globally constructed framework of racial hierarchy. Thus, James Cowley Prichard also wrote quite evocatively about ‘aborigines in India’ in terms of Aryan theory:
Of the aboriginal races of India I propose to include under this term a variety of distinct races, or numerous tribes of people having different languages, and betraying no evident indications of mutual affinity, who are spread through various parts of India. All these races are distinct from the Hindoos, who belong to the Indo-European or Arian [sic] stock, and they were probably spread through the countries which they now inhabit though perhaps thinly scattered, long before the anchestors [sic] of the Hindoos first passed the river Indus.Footnote 71
The works of both Hamilton and Prichard are important in unlocking the mind of the Bengali literati (Prichard's, a reconstruction of the knowledge of India through a combination of colonial perspectives and their own understandings about different ethnicities in India). In the spread of geography textbooks written in the Bengali language we can find clear references to their classifications of the Indian population and attempts to territorialize ethnicity. This enabled Hamilton and Prichard to claim Hindus to be the primary citizens of the colonial territory because of their contribution to progress, and such progress was perceived to be related to the racialized identity of the Hindu population. Thus Rajanikanta Ghosh described the inhabitants of hill areas surrounding Bengal—such as the Santhals on the West, the Khasis who lived north of Sylhet, Garos on the east, and the Kukis, north of the Chattagram region in the South East—as savages who could be separated from Hindus by their language, religion, and, more importantly, their physical features.Footnote 72 According to him, these ethnicities were arrested in the early stages of primitive barbarity. Such classifications became routine in geography textbooks. Yet, it would be inaccurate to say that Bengali scholars reproduced everything that colonial scientific ethnography proposed about India. Instead, they did so selectively. For instance, they did not echo at any time census commissioner Risley's conviction that, while Euro-Aryans progressed from tribe to nation, Indians moved from tribe to caste and remained in an arrested state of development.Footnote 73
Bengali authors had their own agenda in interpreting what they regarded as the science of geography. They argued for the recognition of an Indian nation within British colonial territory where Hindu citizens had primary claims to their homeland. This was done through the assertion that Hindus constituted a numerical majority in the region. Geography textbooks sought to present a detailed numerical breakdown of the Indian population in terms of religion long before the formal beginning of Indian censuses in 1871. They used various pre-census localized surveys for that purpose.
I do not suggest that by using the term Hindu, Bengali writers assumed that all Hindus were homogenous in character. The construction of a pan-Indian Hindu identity could not gloss over various ethno-linguistic and regional diversities. In framing regional identities, Bengali authors accorded importance to class, language, and religion, which together demarcated the primary identity of different Indian linguistic groups, including the Bengali population. For example, Rajani Ghosh wrote without ambiguity that among inhabitants of Bengal, Hindus spoke Bengali and Muslim gentlemen spoke Urdu. He further maintained that low caste Hindus and Muslims of Cachar, Sylhet, and Chattagram spoke very corrupted and low quality (Kadarja) Bengali.Footnote 74 In addition to class, language, and religion, they also used certain gendered notions of masculine valour in demarcating regional identities. This was amply reflected in the assertion that Bengalis as a people were weak and lacking in initiative but were peace-loving.Footnote 75 Rajputs were described as the best among Hindus for their supposed military skills, a stereotype that gained credence through the colonial reconstruction of history, most notably through Todd's Rajasthan.Footnote 76 These new colonial constructions did not completely gloss over earlier regional animosities. Marathas, for example, were regarded as ‘greedy.’Footnote 77 The disdain for Maratha ‘plunderers’ could be located in the popular historical memory of repeated invasions of Bengal by Maratha armies in the eighteenth century.
The vast kaleidoscope of the Indian population was now viewed through racial and ethno-cultural lenses, establishing different types of entitlement for different groups of Indians to regional and pan-Indian identities. Though many of these stereotypes were precolonial, and it would be ahistorical to argue for a romanticized notion of seamless harmony among Indians in the precolonial past, the Bengali Hindu version of the colonial science of geography extended scientific validity to various types of existing regional stereotypes and re-conceptualized some differences in terms of ethno-civilizational characteristics. This is the new synthesis that the dialectical interaction between the precolonial and the colonial knowledge systems produced. Maps and a geographic information system produced in interaction with the ethnographic/ethnocentric colonial state had created a mindset for Bengali writers to territorialize people into certain ethno-environmental racialized spaces that also validated their own prejudices in new scientific terms. Thus precolonial notions of internal frontiers, whereby forest dwellers were imagined to be different from Hindu sedentary cultivators, were now viewed through presumed racial differences between ‘Hindu Caucasians’ and ‘aborigines arrested at a certain stage of civilizational progress.’ Frontiers on the Northeast and the Northwest were imagined as wild territorial borderlands. This was evident in the way the new geography textbooks referred to Garos, Kukis (Mizos) and the Khasi population groups.
Re-invigorating the Puranic Ideal of Bharat: Bharat as a Homeland of the Hindu Population
New notions of distinctions between Hindus and internal ‘Others’ were epitomized through the synthetic category of Aryan or Hindu Caucasians. In early medieval India, the word ‘Arya’, for example, had been used to indicate the aristocratic status of a person; in a later period it came to signify an identity concerning language and even race. More importantly, this notion of the Aryan race was increasingly grounded in historical narratives of the past as each geography textbook included a section on history. This past was also territorialized as the term Ayravarta (Land of Aryans) increasingly signified core regions in the Indo-Gangetic plains of north India. Gradually, Indian history textbooks showed borders of colonial territory in South Asia as a given geographic boundary of India. . This indicated the beginning of a process of what Poulantzas called ‘territorialization of history and historicization of territory.’Footnote 78 As territorialization of history progressed, the Indo-Gangetic plain of north India was imagined as the centre of Indian civilization, the original habitat of Hindu Aryans. Again, this was a synthesis of old puranic notions, and the new science of geography.
The notion of Aryavarta (land of Aryans) was premised upon a particular Brahamanical understanding of Indian geo-history. A dominant strand in colonial discourse concerning the ethno-cultural identity of British Indian territorial space drew upon a hegemonic Brahamanical Hindu perspective. Again, there is an interesting interplay between the colonial adaptation of a Brahamanical discourse regarding Indian space in search of an authentic ethno-spatial identity of the British conquered territories, and the Bengali literati's selective invocation of that particular aspect of the colonial discourse of space in order to establish the claim that Hindus were the primary citizens of India.
In geography textbooks written by Bengalis, not only did Bharat become the prominent identity/name for the landmass but various puranic names were also used to introduce different regions within India. Thus Shashibhusan Chattopadhaya wrote that, in ancient times in the northwest of Delhi, the land between the rivers Saraswati and Driswadati was called Bramhaborto which, according to the Manu Samhita, was the original land of the Hindus. Between Bramhaborto and the river Jamuna there used to be a land called Bramharshi which included many ancient kingdoms. He went on to describe Delhi (Dilli) as Indraprastha, the capital of Judhisthir, the legendary king of The Mahabharata. Gujjar [Gujarat] state, he claimed, was established by Lord Shri Krishna, an incarnation of the Hindu God, Vishnu.Footnote 79 It would be wrong to dismiss such renderings, as an isolated narration of puranic geography, as history. Indeed, in 1865 a question in the examination for scholarship candidates for middle schools across Bengal categorically instructed the candidates to, ‘Draw a map of Madhyadesh in Ayravarta and also show in the map the thirteen important countries and main rivers located in that region.’Footnote 80
Obviously, this indicates that school students had to memorize Hindu myths and legends, and their geo-spatial locations within the modern territorial map of India, in order to successfully pass tests. The history of space became the given history of a land that could not be researched but only narrated as a body of information derived from the Puranas (whose authenticity could not be challenged). By simply ascribing puranic names and accounts for these places, these scholars transformed India into a land of primarily Hindu citizens. As the nineteenth century progressed, this became a far more established trend.
Conclusion
The mapping of the Indian subcontinent and the birth of a territorially bounded space pushed forth a new discourse of geography as a science. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the routine practice of teaching a geographic information system and textualizing the process in relation to colonial educational institutions could not be divorced from the wider processes of the Bengali literati's encounter with modernity through colonial agency. It is within these contexts that the Bengali literati sought to appropriate, redefine, and incorporate a geographic information system in order to find a place within a global hierarchy of civilizations and races. This new hierarchy was accepted from a sense of powerlessness as the literati increasingly became aware that colonial political modernity would not allow any agent/subject, other than the citizen-subject, to claim the colonial territorial space as their homeland. Politically, the citizen-subject had to be represented within the framework of a territorially defined nation-state, which Bengalis realized they did not have. This unhappy awareness accompanied the process of the cartographic construction of a new India. Thus, when Bengalis became engaged in writing geography textbooks, they happily appropriated the idea of civilizational hierarchy. This also assisted them in problematizing any straightforward notion of European racial superiority. Drawing from contemporary British writings, these authors ‘provincialized’, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty's term, Europe.Footnote 81 But, in the context of Asia and Africa they reproduced various racialized discourses about the relationship between the physical appearance of local populations and their level of civilizational progress. They portrayed Europe as a continent of nations, Asia and Africa as continents inhabited by tribes and inferior races, except for Aryan Hindus. This position attributed to Indians actually reflected their concerns about their own position in the hierarchy of civilizations and races.
As they became involved in constructing such a hierarchy, these writers selectively adopted and redeployed scientific notions of ethnography and colonial geography in order to establish the claim of modern Hindus as primary citizens of the land and inheritors of an ancient Aryan civilization. Yet, this process led them to create a hierarchy of internal ‘Others’ whereby puranic ideals were combined with notions of science predicated on the enlightenment in Europe.
Contestations between Hindus and Muslims around the idea of a ‘homeland’ were inevitable as the Bengali literati continued to delineate India as a Hindu space. Muslim elites could not accept such a hegemonic discourse of India. Indeed, such discourses would have ramifications in the future, particularly around the turn of the twentieth century when virulently majoritarian understandings of homeland animated violent religious riots in the country. At the same time, racial terminology used in accepting and reinforcing a colonial category of pre-Aryan aborigines in the Indian context created the ideological conditions of internal colonization of imagined subordinate ‘Others’ by supposedly civilizing Hindu citizens. The logic of the notion of civilizational hierarchy actually contributed towards the building-up of a sub-imperial hierarchy. Thus, within the strategy of self-emancipation through the construction of this hierarchy, there was always an implicit danger of recreating the same mode of colonial domination, albeit in a different form. The democratization of the nationalist movement under Gandhi had to contest these modernized scientific but primeval notions of a territorially bounded homeland, and in the end India had to cope with the trauma of partition. The entire process was thus not a derivative discourse but a result of the dialectical interaction and the synthesis between puranic cosmography and the new science of geography.
