I

Chaos reigns – at least in the historiography of the Raj. It was once the consensus among historians that British imperial authority in the Indian subcontinent was secure for at least the century-and-a-half before the Second World War. Recently, however, this narrative has drawn a range of challenges.Footnote ¹ Prominently, Mark Condos and Jon Wilson have held that British imperial authority was chronically insecure. In their view, the irrational anxiety of generations of British officials produced a chaotic administration with minimal social purchase or ideological coherence. Instead of a confident state capable of acting as it chose, these historians have limned a psychologically embattled one incapable of acting except in the abstract, small scale, or short term. Their bold revision succeeds in dispelling the aura of indomitability that has often surrounded the Raj, and in directing attention to its overlooked discontents and weaknesses. Yet their characterization of the British regime as constantly and pervasively anxious is more an article of faith than a conclusion warranted by evidence. Nor do they explain how, if the regime suffered from permanent ‘chaos’ or ‘insecurity’, it managed to survive for some two hundred years. At the heart of Condos's and Wilson's approach is an effort to bypass texts that results, instead, in misreading them. It is largely by re-emphasizing rigorous textual methods, therefore, that Durba Ghosh offers a compelling alternative approach to the history of state vulnerability and disorder.

II

The anxious–chaotic trend has been long in the making. While it might be tempting to ascribe this trend to recent upheavals in liberal democracies, it was well underway before the Brexit referendum or the ascents of Narendra Modi and Donald Trump.Footnote ² Condos's study began as a doctoral thesis of 2013; Wilson's generalizes from a monograph of 2008 likewise based on a dissertation. Rather than tentative forays, these works should be seen as mature products of a decade-long interplay between two lines of historical inquiry.

The first line concerns the British Empire in South Asia. By the time Condos and Wilson were formulating their ideas, this historical field in Britain had become oriented around a ‘Cambridge School’ that included their respective supervisors, C. A. Bayly and David Washbrook.Footnote ³ The definitive argument of the Cambridge School was that the Raj was built upon and sustained by the resources of Indian society. This meant not only that British officials required Indian collaborators, but also that their power was circumscribed as a result.Footnote ⁴ One corollary, advanced by Bayly, was that these officials were prone to occasional bouts of panic when the limits of their power were exposed.Footnote ⁵ Nevertheless, in at least two respects, Bayly and the Cambridge School reinforced a picture of imperial stability. First, they set British rule in India in a long historical context, plotting its emergence from, and continuities with, earlier traditions and structures of government. Second, and consequently, they directed attention to the Raj's origins and rise rather than its decline and fall. In emphasizing the limits of British power, these historians furnished materials with which to challenge a conventional narrative of its stability. In simultaneously upholding this narrative, they made it all the more conspicuous a target for revision.

Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to the framing of counter-narratives was the extensive record of confident, often triumphalist statements by British imperial officials. By Condos's and Wilson's time, however, rising discontent with the linguistic turn and interest in intuitive experience suggested ways to surmount this obstacle.Footnote ⁶ The second, very broad, line of historical inquiry with which Condos and Wilson engage is one that challenges the primacy of language by privileging other modes of human encounter with the world. While this approach would be uncontroversial in many disciplines, it raises particular difficulties for a discipline whose sources and attendant methods are predominately textual. Whether or not the accounts of Condos and Wilson convince must depend largely on whether they resolve these difficulties.

The accounts of the two London-based historians are consonant, diverging significantly in scope alone. Whereas Condos examines British rule in Punjab over the long nineteenth century, Wilson traces the modern history of the subcontinent at large, from the arrival of the East India Company in the seventeenth century through the partition and independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Along with this principal difference certain smaller ones can also be detected. Whereas Wilson entirely discounts the importance of ideology in shaping practice, for instance, Condos merely downplays ideology by reference to its ‘dark underside’ in practice (Condos, p. 220). All such differences between the two authors are dwarfed, however, by their essentially shared argument for the anxious and chaotic nature of the Raj. In advancing this argument both raise conceptual and methodological problems that they do not sufficiently address.

The largest problem concerns how to identify and delimit ‘anxiety’. Despite figuring centrally in both works the concept is barely probed in either. Instead of an oversight, this evidently marks a deliberate choice. Condos and Wilson seem to think that they know anxiety when they see it, and that by interspersing synonyms like ‘fear’ and ‘precariousness’ they have adequately defined it. More broadly, they imply that close attention to language is more prone to mislead than to illuminate. Condos insists that the utterances of British officials have ‘tended to obscure the…colonial experience’ (Condos, p. 218); Wilson agrees that ‘too many historians’ have been deceived by the false ‘projections’ of these individuals (Wilson, p. 4). The two thus propose in unison to investigate – rather than language or texts – ambient moods and underlying practices.Footnote ⁷ Following this approach purportedly yields the conclusion that British rule in India was ‘fundamentally anxious’ (Condos, p. 3), riven by ‘anxiety from beginning to end’ (Wilson, p. 5). By making their case in this way, Condos and Wilson expose it to several major criticisms.

Most fundamentally, dismissing language and texts does not allow Condos and Wilson to transcend them, but merely impoverishes their analysis. Scholars have extensively debated the respective relations between language and practice; texts and contexts; and agents and structures. The debates are knotty, perhaps ultimately unresolvable, but this does not warrant the conclusion that they can safely be ignored. In fairness, Wilson at least has previously grappled with some of the relevant issues, and to treat them at length in India conquered might have narrowed the book's audience. Nonetheless, the decision not to treat them at all has rendered the book's theoretical moorings ambiguous. Meanwhile, the commitments that Wilson has expressed elsewhere are difficult to countenance. In his earlier monograph, Wilson endorsed the Heideggerian phenomenological stance that action precedes and frequently eludes thought. On this basis, he argued that British officials dealt in abstractions, not to consolidate their position in Indian society, but rather to palliate their dislocation from it. Far from being guided by conscious designs, according to Wilson, these officials little ‘knew their own minds’ or intentions. Thus, the language they used and the texts they produced seldom corresponded to practices on the ground. How was a historian to recover such practices? To correct an ‘over-emphasis on the role of language or discourse’, Wilson launched ‘an empirical study of the archive of everyday…administration and encounter’.Footnote ⁸ Yet archives are largely if not entirely made up of texts, which, in turn, are made up of language. Even granting that language fails to capture experience fully, it must be admitted that it is usually the best – often the only – available guide to past experience. Neither Condos nor Wilson advances an argument for using non-textual sources. Nor does turning from formal or occasional to ‘everyday’ texts mitigate the need to interpret them. The genre of a text may shape the method one adopts to interpret it, but, reflectively or not, one always adopts some method. There are dangers, therefore, in throwing out the well-honed tools of textual analysis for an allegedly straightforward ‘empirical’ or ‘practically-oriented approach’.Footnote ⁹ Of particular concern is that what seems to be the ‘practical’ meaning of a text may simply be the meaning that is most convenient for one's purposes. Seeing what one wants to see is a danger from which neither Condos nor Wilson is immune.

Indeed, the strong claim that Condos and Wilson make for anxiety rests ultimately on assumption. In their readings of sources, these historians alternate at will between credulity and suspicion. At times, they find anxiety basking in plain sight, requiring little more than a glance to identify and comprehend. They unhesitatingly credit British assertions of peril,Footnote ¹⁰ and see them prominently advertised in public forums.Footnote ¹¹ Yet at other times, the authors portray anxiety as a hidden, even unconscious disposition, to access which layers of obfuscation must be stripped away. Accordingly, they dismiss British assertions of strength or confidence, misconstruing the language of officials to cast doubt on their sincerity and self-awareness.Footnote ¹² It is likely that officials were more forthcoming in some situations than others and, in general, that they expressed emotions differently in different contexts.Footnote ¹³ But Condos and Wilson do not clearly or consistently distinguish between contexts. As a result, they sometimes put contradictory constructions upon a single object of analysis.Footnote ¹⁴ More often they simply forgo analysis for assertion, labelling officials as anxious on the vague grounds that they ‘seem’ to have been so, or on no grounds at all. In his introduction to The insecurity state Condos gives the game away, listing as ‘one of the main assumptions of this book’ that the British acted from a ‘sense of colonial fragility’ (Condos, p. 23). Needless to say, it is circular to ‘argue that British colonial rule in India was…fundamentally anxious’ when one has already taken this for granted (Condos, p. 3). It might be said, perhaps, that fragility is not quite the same thing as anxiety, but such interpretive charity only underscores the problem that anxiety has not been defined. While Condos and Wilson reject the textual methods employed by other historians, neither offers a viable alternative.

Even historiographical fields that share aspects of Condos's and Wilson's orientation tend to challenge rather than reinforce their analysis. One such field is social history, whose emphasis on mundane events and distrust of the pronouncements of the powerful chime with these authors’ avowals. Yet while social histories of the Raj have made extensive use of personal papers, The insecurity state and India conquered rely largely on official ones.Footnote ¹⁵ And while the former have attended closely to forums of Indo-British negotiation and accommodation, the latter dismiss such inconvenient evidence out of hand.Footnote ¹⁶ One result of these departures is that Condos and Wilson reveal little about the daily lives of British officials, particularly their intercourse with Indians. The problem is not a lack of Indian actors, as some reviewers have charged, but rather a disjuncture between Indian and British actions. Treating the inner lives of each group hermetically, the authors neither ask whether Indians perceived Britons as anxious nor, if so, how they responded in turn. Such inquiries might have lent valuable support to their arguments, or, more likely, compelled substantial revisions. On the basis of personal papers, often including those of Indian commentators, other recent studies have reached very different conclusions. Few have seen Britons in India as prisoners of their own minds. Some have found that their prevailing mood, far from anxiety, was boredom.Footnote ¹⁷ It might be hypothesized that anxiety and boredom co-existed in the Raj, and swelled or shrank in relation to each other – and to other impulses – at different times. Yet Condos and Wilson explicitly foreclose any such compromise by insisting that anxiety was ‘pervasive and constant’ rather than ‘merely episodic’ (Condos, pp. 220, 223; see Wilson, pp. 5, 499). Here, the authors depart from one of their influences, Bayly's notion of fitful ‘information panics’. They also depart from recent work in the history of emotions.

Like social history, the history of emotions lends more opposition than support to Condos's and Wilson's analysis.Footnote ¹⁸ Its guiding precept is that emotions have not been historically static, but rather have been expressed and conceptualized in myriad ways.Footnote ¹⁹ It is therefore hard to imagine a historian of emotions accepting, either, that anxiety means the same thing now as it did for officials of the Raj, or, that it meant the same thing across generations of such officials. Studies of fear, relatedly, have found that past conceptions of that emotion now often seem bizarre, having undergone seismic shifts in the previous century alone.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, Condos and Wilson portray the ‘anxiety’ of their subjects as instantly familiar and virtually unchanged in the course of multiple centuries. As Condos puts it, ‘while the particular form that dangers to the colonial order [took] might have shifted’, British officials invariably exhibited the same response (Condos, p. 64). Thus, Wilson elaborates, they were anxious at the early threat of French invasion, anxious at the later threat of ‘thuggee’ (banditry), and anxious at the supposedly perennial threat of revolt (Wilson, p. 186). Both authors project this disposition into the present. The anxiety of British officials of old, they suggest, lives on among South Asian publics and political establishments (Condos, pp. 231–4; Wilson, p. 485). Since the history of emotions surely comprises continuities as well as breaks, it may somehow be possible to justify such claims. To do so, however, would require a much more detailed, more dynamic picture of human emotional life than Condos or Wilson provides. The lack here can be ascribed again to the authors’ disavowal of textual methods, which at least one leading historian of emotions has located at the heart of the field.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, although the history of emotions has borrowed much from other disciplines, its chief insights have come from exactly such methods.

While this article has questioned the underpinnings of The insecurity state and India conquered, its criticisms should not obscure the merits of these works. Most importantly, Condos and Wilson unsettle notions of the British regime's mastery of India, producing examples instead of its dysfunctionality and vulnerability. Often, these examples digress from the authors’ main arguments. Sometimes, they belie them. Condos, in his middle chapters, weaves a finely textured history of the development of pacification and suppression tactics in Punjab. Yet his observation that many officials ‘bitterly’ rejected these tactics, including their alarmist premises, is at odds with his claim that ‘systemic anxieties…wracked the colonial administration’ (Condos, pp. 97, 149). Wilson, equally engagingly, draws out the significance of a series of late nineteenth-century confrontations in mobilizing middle-class Indian discontents. He mounts a convincing case that Vasudev Balwant Phadke's revolt of 1878–9 ‘inaugurated the modern history of anti-imperial protest’. Yet Wilson's own evidence suggests that British officials hardly reacted with the panic he repeatedly ascribes to them. Instead, they belittled ‘Phadke's actions as a series of mere “gang robberies”’ (Wilson, p. 295). Here, as elsewhere, Condos's and Wilson's most incisive points do not support their overall interpretation, but rather hold up in spite of it.

Just as Condos's and Wilson's case-studies do not evince rampant ‘anxiety’, nor do they add up to the intended portrait of ‘chaos’ or ‘insecurity’.Footnote ²² To make such concepts meaningful would require careful explication, which these authors forgo in their bid to circumvent issues of language. Their bald invocation of chaos/insecurity might be unobjectionable were it meant merely as a provocation or narrative conceit.Footnote ²³ As the basis of a historical argument, however, it prompts many of the same objections as their sweeping diagnosis of anxiety. In addition, neither author explains how a state of chaos/insecurity could have lasted for some two hundred years. If the British in India were continually at risk of defeat, or crippled by paranoia at the possibility, how did they hold onto power for so long?Footnote ²⁴ Wilson was posed this question in a roundtable and did not respond.Footnote ²⁵ Condos acknowledges that ‘British rule remained remarkably durable’, but does not account for the fact (Condos, p. 13). Having downplayed the regime's interest in, and aptitude for, negotiation, the authors might have chosen to play up its strategic use of violence. Yet as an impetuous response to irrational fears, in their account, violence was itself a prime source and manifestation of dysfunction. Finally, if a static depiction of chaos/insecurity makes it hard to explain how the Raj survived, it also makes it hard to explain how the Raj ultimately fell. For all this, nonetheless, by shifting focus from the regime's might to its vulnerability, Condos and Wilson do suggest a foundation from which to reappraise its survival and fall alike. It is upon such a foundation that Durba Ghosh builds in Gentlemanly terrorists.

III

Ghosh arrives at questions about state vulnerability and disorder by a different route than Condos and Wilson. Ghosh was trained in the United States, where, by the 1990s, the field of South Asian history was seen to be riven between the Cambridge School and Postcolonial Studies.Footnote ²⁶ In reality, the landscape was more diverse. Among the many historians of the Raj who belonged to neither faction was Ghosh's adviser at Berkeley, Thomas Metcalf. Whereas the Cambridge School was rooted in social history, and Postcolonial Studies in the cultural turn, Metcalf had come to focus on the study of ideas and ideologies.Footnote ²⁷ The close concern this entailed with texts and textual meaning seems to have informed Ghosh's methods. Her first book, Sex and the family in colonial India (2006), followed the Cambridge School in placing emphasis on an early period and on Indian agency. Its central themes of race, class, and gender, meanwhile, reflected the preoccupations of Postcolonial Studies and the allied New Imperial History. Yet the book could be distinguished from these traditions by its sensitive approach to language and texts.Footnote ²⁸ Ghosh used close readings of a panoply of written sources to show how inter-racial relationships impacted the Raj's norms and institutions. If this rigorous textual approach prevented Ghosh from conjecturing on the inner lives of her subjects, it also allowed her, given sufficient evidence, to draw out their nuance and variety.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, instead of the monolithic, chaos-producing ‘anxiety’ of Condos and Wilson, Ghosh discovered in British imperial thought plural ‘anxieties’, whose practical force was complex and often ambivalent. Much the same rigorous textual approach is on display in Gentlemanly terrorists.

While British India did not have a revolution, Ghosh observes, it had a great many revolutionaries (Ghosh, p. 244). Ghosh's new study centres on one set in particular – elite Hindu men and women in Bengal – and on their engagements with the interwar state. On the one hand, these ‘gentlemanly terrorists’ (bhadralok dacoits) failed in attempts to radicalize the Indian nationalist movement and hasten British withdrawal from the subcontinent. On the other hand, according to Ghosh, their actions had an unintended consequence: they spurred the British regime to build up its repressive apparatus, even as it increasingly laid the groundwork for independence. Each time the government passed liberal constitutional reforms, Ghosh shows, it paired these with emergency laws to safeguard its authority. The growth of political participation thus went hand-in-hand with the suppression of political activism seen as giving cover or quarter to violence. Significantly, Ghosh argues that this paradoxical pattern survived the end of the Raj. She finds democracy and repression still intertwined in India today, animating a ‘postcolonial citizenship…in which patriotism requires political agreement with the state’ (Ghosh, p. 245).

Ghosh's account presents a number of salutary contrasts with The insecurity state and India conquered. Most fundamentally, Ghosh understands state vulnerability not as a fixation of the official mind, but rather as a dimension of politics.Footnote ³⁰ This departure has at least three important consequences. First, Ghosh recognizes that British officials and Indian revolutionaries were capable of engaging with each other. Violence on either side, she suggests, represented a part of such engagement rather than its opposite. Second, Ghosh highlights the concepts that these political actors themselves did. Accordingly, her analysis privileges terrorism and emergency rather than anxiety and chaos/insecurity. Third, Ghosh deftly uses the textual methods that Condos and Wilson disdain, closely reading texts ranging from legislation to personal memoirs. There is nothing radically new about the approach that results from these commitments – nor does Ghosh claim otherwise – but it allows her to advance insights as well as avoid pitfalls. Notably, Ghosh relocates women, Bengal, and the interwar from the margins to the centre of the history of revolutionary violence in India. Moreover, she contributes to the project of a number of recent scholars to demonstrate the importance of this history to that of Indian nationalism at large. Despite adopting a narrower focus than Condos or Wilson, Ghosh opens up broader possibilities.

At the broadest level, Ghosh suggests that the Raj, instead of a historical aberration – a madhouse or charnel house of unique proportions – in many ways resembled the nation-states of today (Ghosh, pp. x–xi). This is a line of thought with which Wilson once agreed, holding in his first book that the British regime's distance from its Indian subjects rendered it an archetype of the modern state.Footnote ³¹ Neither Ghosh's account nor Wilson's should be taken as an apology for that regime. On the contrary, both extend the critical scrutiny long directed at the British empire and other empires to the states that ostensibly threw off their mantles. To trace continuities in the passage from the old world of empires to the current one of states is a fitting task for historians at a time when the latter itself appears to be in flux. After all, it has become a question whether multinational corporations, supranational unions, and other alternatives to the state are more apt to curb or to exacerbate its ills. It may help to consider, as do the three works under review, to what extent states inherited repressive or dysfunctional tendencies from empires. The very survival of ‘colonial’ disorder in ‘postcolonial’ states, however, might suggest that there was nothing specifically ‘colonial’ about it. Ghosh's insight that terrorism and emergency have been integral to politics in various times and places provides the starting point for a larger investigation. Tracing these concepts’ deep origins and diverse trajectories may ultimately furnish a story less about the legacy of empires than about something more troubling because more intractable: the constitutive role of oppression in human society.