Introduction
The nature of ‘colonial knowledge’—the information gathered by conquerors about subject peoples and territories to inform their government—for several decades has been a well-established area of study within the history of imperialism. Historians, anthropologists, and political philosophers have all debated the manner of its production, the motives of its producers, and the consequences for the peoples subjected to the assumptions and policies derived from such knowledge. Nor is it a field of research limited either to the modern era or to European powers. The highly developed bureaucracies of Ptolemaic Egypt and the Roman Republic, of Han Dynasty China, and the Inca empire provide ample evidence of the importance of colonial knowledge as an instrument of power.
However, one period and place in particular continues to attract considerable attention. The sheer volume of extant records on its information-gathering activities has focused interest on the British East India Company state from the later eighteenth century onwards. The Company was not simply concerned with the bare tallying of its subjects and surveying of its territories for revenue-extracting purposes. From the accession of Bengal in 1765, it sought to map out India culturally and socially too, and these elements feature strongly in the historical and antiquarian enquiries of its administrator-scholars.
The work of the anthropologist Bernard Cohn, from the 1960s onwards, was the first to draw significant attention to the far-reaching implications of the production of colonial knowledge in India. He demonstrated the manner in which the British, by attempting to categorize the caste system in order to make India more measurable and governable, actually distorted and crystallized a social identity which had hitherto been fluid.Footnote 2 From this point onwards, as Phillip Wagoner has suggested, the historiography of colonial knowledge production in India may be seen as divided into two camps.Footnote 3 A ‘post-colonial’ school (represented by Cohn and, among others, Nicholas Dirks, Ronald Inden, and, more broadly, Edward Said) has tended to see colonized subjects as merely passive sources of information for vigorous conquering powers.Footnote 4 A second school, strongly informed by the work of Eugene Irschick,Footnote 5 and expanded upon by the likes of Lynn Zastoupil,Footnote 6 Norbert Peabody,Footnote 7 and Wagoner himself, argues that Indians were able to shape the nature of colonial information-gathering, and that ‘a complex form of collaboration’ between Indians and British orientalists was the norm.Footnote 8 A prominent figure in this school is Christopher Bayly, who has shown that elite groups existed within Indian society which ‘could draw limits to the actions of government and also seek to impose their standards of belief and practice on the populace’.Footnote 9
The historiographical trend has moved firmly towards the latter interpretation of colonial knowledge production, and the close examination of the Company's administrator-scholars is central to advancing the debate. The monographs discussed below contribute to a thriving literature that takes a more biographical view of the Company's orientalists, from historians such as Martha McLaren, Avril Powell, Lynn Zastoupil, and, most recently, Ludo and Rosane Rocher.Footnote 10 As well as interrogating the motives of the orientalist figures who produced works on the history and culture of Indian peoples, the three studies reviewed here shed much light on the methodologies of the administrator-scholars and the long-term impact of their activities, as well as the role of Indians in inspiring and enabling their work.
James Tod: a Romantic historian
Jason Freitag's work on the Bengal army officer and political agent James Tod (1782–1835) seeks to encompass ‘the life and work [of Tod], the historical consequences of his actions, and the significance of his Annals Footnote 11 for both European and Indian understanding of his Rajput subjects’.Footnote 12 Freitag's primary interest lies in using Tod's work as a historian of Rajasthan as a means of assessing ‘the construction of British imperial discourse in the early nineteenth century, and the persistence, stability and legitimacy of this discourse over time’.Footnote 13 This entails not just a review of what caused Tod to write the Annals, but also the reception and appropriation of that work by various groups long after his death.
Serving Empire, Serving Nation sets Tod and his work on the Rajputs firmly within their historical context, and pays significant attention to both the pre- and early colonial periods. Freitag opens with an overview of the state of historical knowledge about Rajasthan before the nineteenth century, especially the accounts of early European travellers as well as Mughal imperial literature, so as to gauge the level of knowledge which the Company's servants brought to their opening encounters with the Rajputs. Tod himself is introduced in the second chapter, which contains most of the monograph's biographical information. Of particular interest here is Freitag's assessment of Tod's ‘psychological relationship’ with his subjects,Footnote 14 which argues that Tod identified much more with a highly romanticized understanding of the Rajputs’ distant forebears, with whom he believed that he, and all northern Europeans, shared ‘a common ancestry’, than he did with the Rajputs of his own time.Footnote 15 Tod's actions in central India provide the material for the third chapter, with a focus on his role in restoring the Mewar court to, in his eyes, ‘a present position worthy of its past glory’ through the reallocation of khalsa (crown lands) to the rana of Udaipur.Footnote 16 It also provides a familiar picture of such intervention resulting in the creation of a political structure ‘that was neither wholly Indian nor wholly British, but rather a hybrid…’.Footnote 17
The focus of the monograph then moves from the subcontinent to London, with the fourth chapter examining the 1832 parliamentary review of the Company's charter and the debate surrounding indirect rule, including Tod's arguments in favour of the Rajput princes’ retention of a limited sovereignty within the framework of the British colonial state. The fifth chapter is concerned with Tod's historical work on the Rajputs in the Annals, especially his presentation of them not only as the ancient ‘legitimate’ princes of India, but also as the holders of a shared racial heritage with North European Germanic peoples. Freitag argues here that the fact ‘that future audiences seriously responded to both aspects of the text provides a clue to the lasting power of the work as a whole’Footnote 18 since the Annals ‘acts as an oracular text that provides authority… to a number of audiences for a number of purposes’.Footnote 19 The penultimate chapter details the British reaction to Tod's work, and its use by commentators from across the political spectrum to buttress their arguments over the proper form of administration in India, as well as critical appraisals of the work in the early twentieth century. The final chapter examines the legacy of Tod's presentation of Rajasthan and the Rajputs after the later nineteenth century. It traces the manner in which his work, although it had faded into comparative obscurity in the Anglophone world by the 1870s, continued to be translated, summarized, and republished in India, used for textbooks in schools, and appropriated in various forms by Indian politicians.
Freitag's case for the importance of his study is a strong one. Although Tod continues to be a well-known figure who attracts serious scholarly attention (see, for example, Giles Tillotson's 2007 work on Tod's collection of central Indian paintings and coinsFootnote 20), the existing essays on Tod's life tend to be short and somewhat repetitive: ‘there are no full-length biographies’.Footnote 21 This is a serious omission, Freitag argues, because of the dominance that Tod exerts over the historiography: ‘the history of Rajasthan has one major source. This situation is attested over and over, both explicitly and implicitly in the notes and references of any work on the area within the last 170 years.’Footnote 22 That one source is Tod's Annals, and consequently it would seem important to know as much as possible about its author and the manner in which he performed his work. However, Freitag does not actually provide an exhaustive account of Tod's life, and only one chapter out of the monograph's seven is concerned with his biography. Instead, Freitag takes in a much broader sweep; he examines Tod's life and work, but he is also very much concerned with the ‘after life’ of his Annals, and especially with Tod's unexpectedly potent legacy as a historian of Rajasthan in the present day.
The most striking element of Freitag's monograph is this unpacking of Tod's extraordinary (and often hidden) impact on the historiography of Rajasthan and, by association, on the modern writing of Indian history. Freitag contends that Tod's romanticized depiction of the historical Rajputs not only informed much later notions of identity in Rajasthan, which are strongly felt up to the present day, but also (echoing Partha Chatterjee's arguments, and those of Norbert Peabody) fed directly into the body of folklore utilized by the movement for pan-Indian independence.Footnote 23 As Freitag states, ‘Tod, like many other administrator-scholars of his time, laid the groundwork for most of the work that was to come. Subsequent generations of scholars neither fundamentally questioned, nor even examined, the structure of Rajasthani historical work, and thereby unconsciously transmitted the imperial and orientalist paradigms.’Footnote 24
John Malcolm: history-writing as self-advertisement
Like Freitag, Jack Harrington is also concerned with the influence of a regional history written by a soldier-administrator in the Company's service, namely John Malcolm (1769–1833). During the course of his life Malcolm produced nine major works on Indian topics, as well as many articles and pamphlets, and even some poetry. Together with his Sketch of the Political History of India (1811) and the posthumous Life of Robert Lord Clive (1836), the best known of these are his History of the Sikhs (1810) and History of Persia (1815). These, Harrington argues, are ‘key texts in the intellectual history of the formation of British India’ during the first three decades of the nineteenth century,Footnote 25 and Malcolm himself, Harrington contends, was ‘not simply the leading ideologue of empire but also the preeminent shaper of British historical consciousness of Asia in this period of imperial consolidation’.Footnote 26
The Creation of British India is an intellectual biography of Malcolm, in that it is primarily concerned with his influences and output as an author, and with the impact of his publications, both on the colonial government's policies in India before 1857 and on wider British understanding of India in the same period. The fundamental aim of the monograph is to show ‘how Malcolm's ideas, as they were transmitted in published texts, shed light on different aspects of the British imperial experience’.Footnote 27
The monograph is divided into six chapters, which are a mixture of analyses of Malcolm's individual works and their significance, and more general overviews of his life and influences. The opening chapter contains the bulk of the monograph's biographical material, providing a synopsis of the major incidents of Malcolm's life and, importantly, prefiguring Harrington's arguments in succeeding chapters about the significance of Malcolm's early experiences in crisis-ridden Madras during the 1780s and their formative impact on his later political thinking. The second chapter begins the analysis of his work as an author, examining his first major publication—the Sketch of the Political History of India, an assessment of British diplomacy in India between 1784 and 1806, which promoted a policy of aggression on the part of the Company in its dealings with other subcontinental powers. Harrington sees this as ‘the historical vision of an ambitious soldier-diplomat in mid-career’, and argues that it sheds light on the fusion of personal and imperial aims during this period of consolidation, which are crystallized in Malcolm. Malcolm used the Sketch to express his sincere belief in the direction that British rule in India should take—in Harrington's words ‘fashion[ing] history into the foundations of empire building’— but it was also intended as a vehicle to advance his professional claim to be governor of Madras, or even governor-general of Bengal.Footnote 28 The third chapter deals with two of Malcolm's histories of Asian peoples, those of the Sikhs and the Persians. Here Harrington argues that, in a manner similar to Tod, Malcolm viewed himself as a ‘traveller-historian’ and that ‘his travel experiences gave the historical narrative authenticity, humanity, and romanticism’; he was ‘emotionally engage[d] with the ordinary people and the spaces where history took place’.Footnote 29
The similarity between the two men's concerns in writing their histories continues into the fourth chapter, which examines Malcolm's Memoir of Central India, a piece that invites even closer comparisons with Tod. As with Tod's treatment of the Rajputs in his Annals, Malcolm's Memoir used historical analysis to present the Marathas as ‘the natural rulers of a delicate mesh of political structures’, and forcefully argued that they be allowed to retain their own institutions and limited governmental powers under the umbrella of the Company state.Footnote 30 In keeping with the career-focused elements of Malcolm's personality, which run throughout the monograph, the Memoir can be seen as both ‘a blueprint for indirect rule’Footnote 31 and as a tool to be used in Malcolm's campaign to have Central India made into a discrete territory, with him as lieutenant-governor: ‘where Malcolm's earlier projects had been histories designed…to promote his ambitions as a diplomat, the Memoir was published to demonstrate his mastery of civil administration’.Footnote 32 Malcolm's talent for self-promotion is also central to the fifth chapter, which, in the context of his ‘burning desire to cap his Indian career with a major governorship’,Footnote 33 examines the general principles that he espoused for the future of British governance in India as whole, stressing the importance of indirect rule and the continuing centrality of the Company's army as a military police force after the 1810s. The final chapter, centred on the Life of Lord Clive, looks at Malcolm's intellectual milieu, and particularly the interplay of his ideas with those of Thomas Babington Macaulay and James Mill, before discussing the legacy of Malcolm's political thought for British imperial administrators during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Harrington's reappraisal of his subject is timely (it is the first substantial work that focuses solely on Malcolm since that of J.W. Kaye in 1856),Footnote 34 and his treatment of the material is both thoughtful and systematic. He provides a thorough review of Malcolm's influences and the manner in which he shaped the thinking of others, but is perhaps less strong on the impact of Malcolm's posthumous legacy (although this is of secondary importance in a biography, especially one of monograph length). The fluent manner in which Harrington links Malcolm's personal experiences and desires with his output as an ‘ideologue of empire’ is particularly impressive. The formative significance of the young Malcolm's scarring experiences in the economically troubled and militarily insecure Madras of the 1780s comes through clearly in Harrington's discussion of the primacy accorded to military force within his political thought. At the same time, by firmly placing Malcolm's works in the context of his career at the time of their composition, Harrington both humanizes his subject and reveals the personal subtexts of Malcolm's histories.
Colin Mackenzie: subaltern influences in the writing of history
As with the previous two authors, Rama Mantena takes as her starting point the orientalist pursuits of a Company army officer and colonial official, the first surveyor-general of India, Colin Mackenzie (1754–1821). Unlike those of Freitag and Harrington, however, the geographical focus of this study is South India and, importantly, Mackenzie himself is a more peripheral figure in the monograph than were Tod and Malcolm in those reviewed above. This is not intended as a biography of Mackenzie; rather Mantena uses Mackenzie's antiquarian interests—he was a noted collector of Indian historical materials—as a point of entry for her broader examination of history-writing practices in both pre- and early colonial South India. She is concerned with the interaction between the European positivist approach to history-writing, which accompanied the rise of the colonial state, and the existing Hindu, specifically Telegu, literary traditions which privileged genealogical or biographical modes of historical narrative over Western notions of ‘historical truth’.Footnote 35 As briefly mentioned above, earlier historians broadly accepted that European history-writing practices displaced these local traditions in the colonial construction of both India's past and its early nineteenth-century present, but this acceptance is precisely what Mantena sets out to challenge.
The monograph pursues this aim from several angles, the chapters varying from discussion of the state's motivations in acquiring knowledge of its subjects, to the examination of the methodology of key individuals, both Indian and British, as well as the role of philological study in the creation of the colonial archive.
The opening chapter examines the relationship between colonial conquest and the writing of history, focusing on the Company's decision to appoint itself as the guardian of India's cultural heritage following the decline of the courtly patronage of the Mughals, whom it had supplanted. Whereas the Mughals had favoured literary forms, the Company now concerned itself with the investigation of historical precedent to inform its actions ‘in order to make the transition to colonial rule as smooth as possible’.Footnote 36 However, Mantena argues, the shift from Mughal to Company patronage was not as marked as has been represented hitherto. The colonial emphasis on the accumulation of specifically historical knowledge could not ‘simply be collapsed as instrumental’ in supporting the newly emerging Company state; rather ‘there were larger epistemological gaps and refusals on the part of colonial historiography in their engagement with Indian conceptions of history’.Footnote 37 In essence, the Mughals too had lent their patronage to the writing of history, but the Company did not recognize Indian literary-historical texts as legitimate ‘history’; what information they contained was to be carefully scrutinized and cross-checked.
The second chapter details Mackenzie's accumulation of these texts as ‘raw material’, so that an archive of historical matter could be created and exposed to European methods of analysis, to aid the government authorities in Madras by providing detailed information about southern India's population and culture.Footnote 38 It examines Mackenzie's methods of collection and, crucially for Mantena's main argument regarding the persistence of Telegu historical traditions into the colonial period, it introduces the influential role played by Mackenzie's native assistants in determining what was included in the collection. This key point is expanded upon in the third chapter, which focuses on the two most prominent assistants working with Mackenzie, the Kavali brothers, Borayya and Lakshmaya. Mantena ably demonstrates the various ways in which they exercised influence over the project not simply as mediators between Mackenzie and the local communities from which he hoped to obtain his materials, but also in terms of what the assistants themselves considered to be ‘useful historical knowledge’.Footnote 39 Although these assistants were given scant recognition for their work in the colonial record, they did in fact perform ‘prominent roles in the archival project’.Footnote 40
In Chapter 4 Mantena turns her attention to a particular kind of historical material much favoured by Mackenzie, namely kaifiyats or village archives. These sources were accorded a privileged status since often they seemed to satisfy European notions of historical evidence, containing as they did information on agricultural production, temple accounts, and the genealogies of notable local families. However, as Mantena observes, they frequently lacked internal consistency, with the presence of ‘the verifiable (historical) and non-verifiable (mythic) within one document’ making precise categorization difficult.Footnote 41 So, despite their widespread adoption into the colonial archive, Mantena posits these documents as an example of the way in which a preference for Western styles of history-writing failed to subsume completely the existing Telegu traditions.
The final chapter examines the way in which the colonial assumption that India lacked a reliably chronicled past fed into the use of its languages as a historical source by Western philologists. Philology complemented the antiquarian tendencies of the colonial state by giving it ‘a new tool to access the Indian past’ in a period when ‘the Indian historical record looked poor and unruly to British scholar-officials’.Footnote 42 Mantena's argument is that this perception on the part of the British caused philology to become a ‘privileged method for understanding India's pasts through an intense engagement with its rich literary cultures’, another mechanism by which pre-colonial traditions of literary-historicism continued to have a profound impact in the colonial period.Footnote 43
Taken as a whole, the monograph is an impressive reappraisal of the encounter between European and Indian approaches towards history-writing in the early nineteenth-century colonial sphere and, appropriately, Mantena establishes herself well within the existing historiography in this field. Although influenced by the work of Cohn and Dirks, she rejects the primacy of imperial instrumentality of knowledge as a sufficient explanation of the processes underway in the early Company state. Instead she leans towards the model of collaboration between colonial officials and local informants in South India, as posited by Irschick's work on the region. Mantena's concern with examining this dialogue, and with questioning the power of imperial methodology, feeds directly into debates about the creation of the colonial archive and the manner in which that archive can be read most effectively by scholars today. Her findings underline the importance of the ‘archival turn’ in colonial studies, and she is in strong accord with Antoinette Burton's ideas on the necessity of considering ‘the fissures in the panoptical desires of the colonial state’ and of emphasizing the subaltern influences within the colonial archive.Footnote 44 Her main argument reflects this rejection of imperial dominance in favour of dialogue: European methods of history-writing did not displace local traditional practices, rather they merged to form a ‘new historical method’, a third way which encompassed elements of both approaches and became the ‘privileged mode’ in the creation of India's past.Footnote 45
Conclusions
What, then, is the significance of the historical works produced by these administrator-scholars? Can we perceive any common motivations behind their production? How was this material received and used at the time? And what is its legacy for writers of Indian history up to the present day?
During this period in the history of British India, the classification of ‘administrator-scholars’ covers a large group with disparate interests, but comparisons may still usefully be drawn between them, particularly between the orientalists who feature in the monographs reviewed above. Naturally, a prime impetus for the writing of history by these individuals, which is dealt with most explicitly by Mantena, was the desire for the accumulation of knowledge about India, whether as an instrument of government or for its own sake. A genuine scholarly interest often lay at the heart of this process, as with Mackenzie who, Mantena remarks, ‘exemplified the antiquarian impulse’; but sincerely felt or not, such scholarship found eager support from a colonial regime that was hungry for information about its new subjects.Footnote 46 McLaren, in her study of Malcolm, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Thomas Munro, contends that Company officials produced expert, scholarly reports on Indian history and culture as a means of advertising their qualities to their superiors, thereby securing rapid advancement within the service.Footnote 47 Freitag concurs that this was one of a raft of factors behind the writing of the Annals, and Peabody has argued that ‘Tod was not without self-interested goals’ and that his mode of presenting the Rajputs ‘furthered British imperial ambitions’.Footnote 48 Malcolm's repeated use of his histories not just as a means of espousing the centrality of military security, but also as instruments to promote his career aspirations, have been well documented.
An obvious connection between the three administrator-scholars—and one not yet touched upon—is that, in addition to serving the colonial regime in an administrative capacity, they were all officers in the Company's army. At first sight, this may not appear of immediate significance. In his discussion of Anglo-Indian militarism in the early nineteenth century, Douglas Peers observes that the civil and military authorities in India were ‘partners in empire’, and that the dividing line between them was highly ambiguous, not least because of the large number of army officers employed in civil roles, often in the political service.Footnote 49 The chances that any sample group of colonial administrators in this period included a substantial proportion of military men are quite high. Even so, the military identity of these scholars may be seen as significant in several ways. One of these is the manner in which military experience could influence the writing of history in early British India, which is particularly marked in the case of Malcolm. He was the main exponent of the ‘Empire of Opinion’ school of Indian governance, which held that Britain's eastern empire was perpetually threatened by the disaffection of its Indian subjects: British India could only be held by ensuring that there was widespread belief among the Indian public that it was both futile and physically dangerous to oppose the Company's rule. Consequently, the army was central to the security of the colonial state, and measures that damaged its ability to overawe dissident elements (such as cuts to the military establishment) had to be avoided at all costs. Malcolm depicted the army, in the words of Peers, as a ‘gendarmerie of last resort’.Footnote 50 It was also necessary, in Malcolm's view, to govern indirectly through indigenous institutions, so as to avoid provoking a cultural backlash within Indian society that might stretch the Company's capacity for physical coercion to breaking point.
Harrington has demonstrated convincingly that Malcolm's message, most prominently conveyed in his Political History of India (1823), was not simply the self-interested scaremongering of a military man arguing for the continued primacy of the army in a more peaceful age of retrenchment, it was grounded in his personal experiences as a soldier before the 1810s. Upon his arrival in Madras in 1782, Malcolm found an impoverished presidency, mired in a long-running, reverse-strewn military conflict with the neighbouring Indian state of Mysore, and a Company administration paralysed by a power struggle between the governor and the commander-in-chief. ‘The sense of the precariousness of British influence was unavoidable in Madras during the first twenty years of Malcolm's career,’Footnote 51 Harrington observes, and his ‘world-view changed little from his early days as a cadet.’Footnote 52 Had Malcolm's formative years been spent in the relatively affluent and stable Bengal, ‘then he might not have been such a strong advocate of government through native elites’, a career-long hallmark of his history-writing.Footnote 53
The significance of military identity also becomes apparent through an examination of the attitudes displayed by these writers (notably Malcolm and Tod) towards the peoples whose lives they sought to chronicle. It reveals a distinct appreciation of their more martial aspects, which may help us understand how these administrator-scholars selected their subjects and why they chose to represent them as they did. Harrington writes of Malcolm's ‘romantic admiration for the heroic and charismatic qualities of the great princes of Malwa’,Footnote 54 culminating in his portrayal of the Marathas as ‘freedom fighters’.Footnote 55 Likewise, Freitag sees Tod's depiction of the Rajputs as ‘romanticized and valorous’; he (Tod) firmly believed that the ‘martial Rajputs would fight on the side of their British overlords’.Footnote 56 Of course, not all orientalists who wrote histories of Indian peoples looked so favourably upon the military profession, but a perception of shared martial ideals between colonizer and colonized explains, albeit partially, the motivations of some of these administrator-scholars.
Freitag and Harrington argue that both men were ‘romantic conservatives’, products of the British reaction to the French Revolution and that this emerges clearly from their historical analyses, which promote their subjects as ‘natural rulers’. Both were firmly committed to the idea that it was necessary to tailor government to the prejudices of the governed and to work with existing social hierarchies rather than to impose a radical remodelling of society.Footnote 57 This identification with the soldierly qualities of their subjects was, as the quotations above suggest, tinged with a degree of romanticism. The notion of ‘martial races’ is one that has already been well covered in the historiography of British India, and the discourses of Malcolm and Tod on the topic parallel each other so closely that it cannot be ignored as an influence on their work. Freitag especially emphasizes how ‘the image of the staunch Highland Scot’ (itself a romantic imperial construct) informed the way in which Tod viewed and portrayed the Rajputs.Footnote 58 Significantly, he identified with the ancient Rajputs, or rather the ‘Scythians’ (as he called the people he believed to be the common racial ancestors of both the British and the modern Rajputs), rather than with those of his own time who, being immediately before his eyes, were less easily moulded into an idealized ‘type’.
Malcolm too was inclined to draw such comparisons. The Marathas, like the Highland Scots, were a martial race formed by a harsh physical environment; they were ‘natural rulers’, the possessors of ‘a glorious past’, and ‘ancient customs’.Footnote 59 Unlike Tod, Malcolm seems to have romanticized his subject deliberately, or at least to have been fully conscious of his romanticism. His historical works were, he wrote to a friend, ‘not mere dry matter’,Footnote 60 and he made a direct comparison between his representation of the Marathas in the Memoir of Central India and the depiction of the Highland clans in the novels of his fellow countryman and correspondent, Sir Walter Scott.Footnote 61 A heroic theme would appeal to the public, stimulating the circulation of his work, and thereby promoting his views more widely.
As well as the circumstances and motivations behind the creation of an Anglo-Indian historiography by these administrator-scholars, the contemporary reception and later legacy of these works are also of importance to the study of imperial and modern Indian history. Freitag in particular gives significant attention to the immediate and longer term ‘valuation’ of Tod's work in his monograph. Upon its appearance in 1829, the Annals immediately assumed ‘a position of prominence’ in the body of Anglo-Indian knowledge.Footnote 62 It received extremely favourable coverage in such publications as the Edinburgh Review, the Oriental Herald, and the Asiatic Journal—the latter deeming it ‘magnificent’—and this brought it to the attention of a popular audience in Britain.Footnote 63 These journals were both a means of generating public interest in Indian issues and providing a forum for debating conflicting ideas about Indian governance, thereby shaping colonial policy. Of those above, the Oriental Herald was broadly hostile to Company rule and the Asiatic Journal more closely in line with its interests, yet they both found material within the Annals to bolster their respective viewpoints. Tod's study ‘fed the requirements of the Company's political processes in India, as well as the British critics of the Company's administration…’.Footnote 64
Malcolm's work too was intended both to increase public enthusiasm for Indian matters, in order ‘to stimulate British commercial and imperial interest in Asia’, and to advocate his preferred direction for colonial rule.Footnote 65 A key example of his contemporary influence, which is related by Harrington, is the surprising adoption of his ideas on indirect rule by a young John Stuart Mill, the son of Malcolm's main ideological rival on Indian governance, James Mill.Footnote 66
By contrast, the immediate reaction to Mackenzie's archival project was, as might be expected, less intense than those of published works of narrative history made available to a popular readership. In fact, it was largely thanks to the descriptive catalogue of the archive, produced by Mackenzie's fellow orientalist, H.H. Wilson, that the collection was not forgotten by historians. As Mantena has shown, the archive only began to have a significant influence in the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, when South Indian intellectuals, such as noted playwright Gurzada Apparao, rediscovered it and realized that Telugu literary culture ‘was indebted to the work of Mackenzie and his assistants’.Footnote 67 For Mantena, the circulation of the materials collected by Mackenzie in the Telegu literary sphere ‘demonstrates the profound impact the project had on intellectual practices in south India’.Footnote 68
While Mantena argues that there was a continued transmission of indigenous historical modes into the colonial period and beyond, Freitag presents an opposite example, in which modern Indian history has ‘European imperial foundations’ at its base.Footnote 69 Scholars’ appropriation of Tod's work on the Rajputs (knowingly or otherwise) after the later nineteenth century, and particularly within Indian nationalist discourse, has been mentioned above. While Tod's influence on modern Indian historiography is, for Freitag, ‘overwhelming’,Footnote 70 the historical legacy of Malcolm's work appears to have been less enduring. He was the most prominent of the three administrator-scholars under examination and, arguably, the best known within his lifetime. Yet the main tenet of his political thought—the case for indirect rule—gradually lost popularity as the nineteenth century advanced and was all but extinguished by the time of the Rebellion of 1857. An example of this decline is embodied in the changing stance of John Stuart Mill, who from the 1830s onwards opposed further annexations in India and supported a continuance of princely rule, but who by the late 1840s and 1850s had become a firm supporter of Lord Dalhousie's ‘doctrine of lapse’.Footnote 71
The three monographs reviewed here answer many questions, but also provoke many more and suggest several potential avenues for future research themselves. Malcolm is presented by Harrington as a key shaper of Anglo-Indian governmental ideology until the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet his legacy after that, into the twentieth century, is less clear, and an investigation into whether, like Tod, he retains a ‘hidden influence’ in the historiography would be of great interest. Indeed, the posthumous legacies of the Company's orientalists, many of whom are now largely forgotten or remain unexamined in recent times, would certainly bear closer scrutiny.
A related, and equally rewarding, area for study would be the wider assessment of the information-gathering techniques of other scholar-administrators, in the way that historians like Peabody and Zastoupil have already started to do for Tod, and which Mantena has detailed so thoroughly for Mackenzie.Footnote 72
A comparative assessment of the manner in which a whole range of orientalists acquired and edited their material could well prove to be a fruitful exercise, extending our understanding of the processes of early colonial history-writing and, as a corollary of that, early colonial policy-making. Likewise, it would be fascinating to have a deeper insight into the influence of the central authorities in Calcutta in guiding, whether by accident or design, the subject matter and character of the histories written by its local officials. The life and works of Anglo-Indian administrator-scholars have provided rich and varied material for modern historians, but there are clearly many facets of their experience and influence left to explore.
