One of the primary scholarly draws of British Indian history is the opportunity to delve into a complicated and multifaceted historical relationship between cultures whose longevity has rarely been equaled in the modern era. Beginning with Sir Thomas Roe's embassy to Jahangir, and extending well beyond 1947, the epic nature of the Indo-British relationship, with its kaleidoscope of both change and continuity, has provided fertile territory for groundbreaking historical work for over fifty years.
With Call of Empire: From the Highlands to Hindostan and The Ruler's Gaze: A Study of British Rule over India from a Saidian Perspective, Alexander Charles Baillie and Arvind Sharma have, respectively, inserted themselves into longstanding debates over the nature of British rule in India, the motivations of the British who served in India, and legacies of this experience for both the colonizers and the colonized. For both authors, these books constitute an early foray into the history of British India and illustrate the variety of approaches and opportunities that are still found within the field as well as the potential pitfalls of overreliance on simplified historiographical interpretations. Baillie is the former chairman of Toronto Dominion Bank and the chancellor emeritus of Queen's University. Sharma, on the other hand, is the long-time Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University and the author of numerous studies of Hinduism and comparative religion. Their different backgrounds inform very different questions and approaches to the history of British rule in India.
Baillie's Call of Empire follows the fortunes of his Scottish forebearers in India from 1760 to 1816. Although a number of family members worked in India during this period, the book focuses on two men in particular, William Baillie of Dunain, a military officer, and John Baillie of Leys, an East India Company civil servant. The project was made possible by a large number of letters discovered in a chest that was recently donated to the Highland Archive Centre. Additional letters found at the Scottish National Archives, the British Library, and the University of Cambridge provide Baillie with an enviable archive on which to base what is clearly a labor of love. Using these sources, Baillie lays out William Baillie's background and reasons for leaving Scotland; his service in Madras; his financial concerns; and the various and convoluted wars the British fought in the second half of the eighteenth century against the French, the Marathas, and Tipu Sultan. Following William Baillie's death in 1782, the second half of the book follows his nephew, John, who went into the Company's diplomatic service and ended what was in many ways a glittering career in an acrimonious feud with the governor-general, Lord Moira, while serving as agent to the court of Avadh.
Overall, the book is essentially the story of one generation of impoverished Scottish gentry seeking to cash in on India's wealth, and the next generation expanding their professional remit to something beyond soldiering and larceny. Baillie, however, has larger ambitions to lay out a particular era in the history of British India through the lens of members of a specific family. In this sense, it ties into a well-established vein of traditional histories that explicitly emphasize the experience of British families, such as Humphrey Trevelyan's The India We Left and Ferdinand Mount's more recent The Tears of the Rajas.Footnote 1
There remains a place for European-centric family studies of British India, and Call of Empire provides a host of fascinating elements that shed light on the motivations of those who went out to India in this period. In the case of William Baillie, one notable aspect is that, despite his long Indian career and his deep connections to the subcontinent, he remained firmly planted—when corresponding with his relatives at least—in the provincial minutiae of his Scottish properties. Another interesting, if jarring, detail is found in John Baillie's apparent decision to jettison his aristocratic Indian wife of many years upon his dismissal from Avadh and return to Britain.
The book works well as an extended genealogical project with excellent primary sources. Baillie's attempts to provide context for his ancestors’ exploits is less successful, however. The book overlooks the recent explosion of exciting scholarship on the East India Company that complicates our understandings of some of the simple binaries emphasized in traditional histories. Although Baillie makes no claims to engage the most recent scholarship, the work would have been strengthened by a heavier use of works by William Dalrymple and Linda Colley that straddle the line between academic and popular history. This scholarship is referenced, but scant use is made of it in sections on Anglo-Indian intimacies and captivity that would have benefited immensely from its inclusion. Baillie makes ample use of John Keay's monumental history of the East India Company, but some of the passages read as if they were penned by the Victorian historian Sir John Kaye, such as “one of the most repugnant aspects of Hinduism was the caste system, which appears to date from the Aryan invasions of circa 2000 BC” (Baillie, p. 36). Similar statements about sati and assumptions about the benefits of British, rather than indigenous, land revenue systems suggest that the volume would have profited from greater exposure to and integration of the last forty years of major scholarship, ranging from Edward Said to Thomas Metcalf, Nicholas Dirks, and Kim Wagner. Pulling from this body of work would provide a theoretical underpinning to help us understand the mental universe of the protagonists of Baillie's study.
Understanding the ideologies of the British in India and their effects is the centerpiece of Sharma's The Ruler's Gaze. Sharma ostensibly builds his study on the last forty years of scholarship on Orientalism and British India. His admitted intention is to test Edward Said's famous thesis, which he describes as the “contention that the relationship between knowledge and power is central to the way the West depicts the non-West,” within the laboratory of British India. To do this, Sharma outlines how British views of India shifted as Britain's power waxed and waned, the ways that the British sought to justify the continuation of their rule, what the British tended to emphasize in the high noon of empire, and the ways in which Indians were “othered.” He also seeks to create something of a control sample for his test with an analysis of classical Greek perceptions of South Asia and later Muslim views of the subcontinent. The thesis is that Greek views will be divergent from the British, whereas the Muslim views will line up with those of the Raj.
Most of the study follows territory that has been well-worked by Dirks, Metcalf, and Mrinalini Sinha, among others, over the last three decades, and Sharma relies heavily upon these sources. He also makes ample use of primary published sources, such as Mill's History of British India and Vincent Arthur Smith's standard history of the subcontinent. Sharma synthesizes these sources with ease, but there are pitfalls as well. Crucially, many of the nuances that the best cultural and intellectual histories have emphasized are absent in this analysis. As Metcalf pointed out thirty years ago, although there were definite trends in the ideologies of the Raj, these were trends rather than monolithic discourses. Sir William Jones, with his classical comparisons, was not the sole voice of British officialdom during his career in Calcutta. Lord Cornwallis, the governor-general who presided during the final decade of Jones's life, was actively pushing Indians to the margins of the Company's administration at the same time that Jones was pursuing some of his most important work. Likewise, while Mill was writing his scathing critique of India, scholar-administrators like Elphinstone and Munro were dealing with Indian issues with a sympathetic, if flawed, approach.
After a discussion of British depictions of sati, thuggee, slavery, dowry, female infanticide, the caste system, and Indian illiteracy, Sharma devotes considerable space to a long exegesis on caste, varna, and jati. Echoing Ashis Nandy, there is a helpful discussion of the ways that Indian Indologists have consumed and internalized the traditional Orientalist portrayal of the history of caste and status in South Asia. It should be noted, however, that much of Sharma's evidence is grounded in the same sources used by the British Orientalists. In this, Sharma sometimes veers in the direction of what Richard Fox called, in his seminal 1992 essay on Gandhi and Saidian analysis, “wisdom-land,” an appraisal of Orientalism and Indian nationalism that is, surprisingly, not included in Sharma's work.Footnote 2
Sharma's section on ancient Greek and Muslim interpretations of South Asia, and, crucially, Hinduism, while understandable for his overall argument, is nevertheless somewhat puzzling. The ancient Greeks inhabited a vastly different mental and physical universe than the British in the nineteenth century, and associations are difficult. As much as he may have sought the comparison, Lord Dalhousie was no Alexander the Great. Greeks sometimes offered an elevated appraisal of the culture of the subcontinent, but the technological differences and the foundations of the separate information orders go far beyond a simple difference between domination or not. Nor was India immutable between 323 BCE and 1800 CE. A more revealing case study, though still problematic within Said's initial framework of Eastern otherness, could have been the German or French Orientalist appraisals of Indian society and religion. The significant recent body of work on the British, classical studies, and India are absent from this discussion. The decision to include Muslims in this comparison deepens the problem. Sharma argues that Muslims and British found themselves in a “similar power relation” to the Hindus (Sharma, p. 267). This is a highly debatable assertion based on too small a sample of sources—many of them from the eleventh century. Again, the approach threatens to strip away historical context, while veering towards a monolithic analysis of what constitutes “Hindu” and “Muslim” that British Orientalism did so much to exacerbate in the first place. Sharma is aware of this but does not entirely escape its influence.
Taken at face value, Baillie's and Sharma's books appear to stand on opposite sides of the cultural turn that has tended to bifurcate historical approaches to British India. Yet these two books mirror one another in several ways. Both are written by authors venturing into new territory and both would do well to cut down the large sections taken from other works. In Baillie's case, this is found in the expansive quotations of letters to and from William and John Baillie. For Sharma, it is extensive quotes from the plethora of secondary sources he brings to bear on the question. Ultimately, Baillie's and Sharma's books are both well-written volumes dealing with radically different questions about the nature of the British experience in India and its effect on the subcontinent's inhabitants. Both fulfill the briefs laid out by the authors in their opening pages, but both fall into the traps of oversimplification that can reside on both sides of the cultural turn.
