Broken Customs and Repairing Histories

Contradictions between “tradition” and “change” in Bhudeb's polemic can be resolved only partially by pointing to his incrementalism, which allowed novelty to enter society within established parameters but not as radical disjuncture (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 173). His simultaneous critiques of egalitarianism and gross inequality, typical of anti-colonial conservatism, required a more complex reconciliation, which Bhudeb located in the dharma or nature of Hindu society. They required, moreover, a dual vision of nature: what is natural (like inequality) is good, but nature is also uncivilized and unjust, necessitating containment. Education—understood as adaptation to history—in colonial India had to keep that duality viable. It was the increase of capability (of individuals and institutions) and compatibility (between institutions and society) that enabled the conservation of a community, Bhudeb wrote (220–25). By recommending an explicitly quantitative and implicitly qualitative change, he opened the door to experiments and innovations that were more radically conservative than he could bring himself to acknowledge.

Bhudeb anchored his reinforced nature in narratives of science and the scientific Self, seeking to bring Indian subjectivity into new relationships with itself and society. His conviction that racially identifiable populations and individuals were decaying visibly and invisibly at the level of the body, even as society progressed inexorably, was very much within the wider post-Darwin anxiety about modernity and degeneration that Daniel Pick (Reference Pick1993) and Dilip Menon (Reference Menon2014) have described. When Bhudeb posited the recovery of national feeling as the regeneration of the race, he reflected a cluster of near-contemporary movements, all implicated in the history of right-wing politics: eugenics, “white anxiety” after Gobineau, even Zionism (Devji Reference Devji2012, Reference Devji2013; Hughes Reference Hughes1977). But while he was “global” in that respect, his vision of education was usually anti-humanist, anti-universalist, and anti-liberal: he rejected narratives of one race, one state (even one empire), one religion (although a non-dualism shared across religions could be entertained), no religion, and no war (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 218).

Such anti-utopianism was a key aspect of the conservatism Bhudeb represented. Justice and common ground were important, but they had to be pursued through the management, not the rejection, of difference and hierarchy. Society needs traditions even if they must be produced, he declared in an essay on education: the school should equip the student to make good what is lacking in society (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 62). The identification of a relationship of need between society and tradition is distinctly untraditional: reformism comes into it willy-nilly, especially when the educator is tasked with devising how the student can repair society. That self-controlled, self-improving, and hence individuated subjectivity became the basis—and the nature—of the repaired national Self, and of a population that recognized the reality of national tradition, its decline through mimicry, and the need for its regeneration through a culture of discipline in which science and “custom” converged.

For the rakshansheel intellectual, what Andrew Sartori (Reference Sartori2009) has described as a new “Indian culture,” or sanskriti, was anchored in a didactic triangle of family, population, and custom. These were held together by an idiom of health, in which to be healthy was to understand and control, rather than deny, individual claims on happiness. Culture was otherwise empty, defined by conservatism itself: whatever aided in the “conservation” of a community and body of difference was culturally correct (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 271–77). Custom might supply the content of culture, but it could not be received passively or unquestioningly, because custom was shot through with superstition, and superstition blocked the progress of society (75–77). Progress was itself not straightforwardly desirable. On the one hand, Bhudeb was an evolutionist, but on the other, he denied that things naturally get better: the nineteenth century had not produced betterment for all (91). The tension between the two positions generated a language of history, work, and education that was not entirely coherent. It seemed, at times, to reject the separation of past and present that underlies a linear notion of history (Benjamin [Reference Benjamin1940] Reference Benjamin2005). More commonly, it cast change as the historical norm: decline was only negative progress, and whether change was positive or negative depended upon the pedagogical work a society undertook in its own interest. The loss of culture in degeneration produced an imperative to work on what remained, as a “living” twist on the museological modality of colonialism (Cohn Reference Cohn1996).

In either case, there was a rejection of the self-serving liberal-imperial rhetoric in which “European” progress constituted the vanguard of world history. In a two-part essay on progressiveness, Bhudeb began by noting that the modern ideology of progress was inseparable from the conviction that Europe is the end-point of advancement, and came with an incitement to abuse the non-European (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 170–73). The European narrative, he went on, also assumed that human ideals become progressively more refined, when in reality, different times and circumstances imposed different notions of what is desirable. It was, therefore, best to look upon the ideals and judgments of past generations with respect. What was new must be compared carefully with the old, and accepted only when it enhanced the wisdom of the old. This, he wrote, was the substance of rakshansheelata. Bhudeb's Puranic past—the national archive of customs—was, nevertheless, resolutely historical, based on archaeology as well as literature (354). Contemporaneous with the early excavations in the Indus Valley and the first integration of Puranic stories into the corpus of Indian art, this “old” was an editable text to incorporate into the curriculum of Indian nature, held in abeyance within society rather than deployed in the state (Lahiri Reference Lahiri2013; Mitter Reference Mitter1995).

Custom, for Bhudeb, denoted received practices without an apparent rational or utilitarian function. He insisted on giving them precisely that value: worthy customs disciplined and also produced a healthy human being. Rakshansheelata was not the invention of fraudulent traditions, or even the deployment of “real” traditions for new purposes (Hobsbawm and Ranger [Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983] Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger2012; Rudolph and Rudolph Reference Rudolph and Rudolph1987). Its reformulation of culture as a pedagogy of nature supported a vision of civilization-as-restraint that would have been recognizable to Victorians; it evoked also the indigenous notion of abhyas (Gay Reference Gay1993; Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 304). The latter indicates “habit” as well as “practice”: the internalization of behavior that is not initially natural.

At the intersection of these discourses sat the modern householder-yogi. The yogi's body, Bhudeb wrote, was muscle and nerve improved by education, instinctively capable of utilizing technology in addition to its own powers (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 586). It was not only scientific evidence of the animal nature of man, but also evidence of the possibility of mastering nature through science. Any apparent incongruity between the emphasis on instinct and the insistence on control over involuntary bodily functions is misleading. Bhudeb was positing a new instinct, which was born from the establishment of control over the body. Instinct then worked at two levels: there was an animal instinct that had to be transcended, and a human (or “improved animal”) instinct produced by transcendence.

Bhudeb intervened, here, in the Hegelian discourse of habit and history that underlay colonialism (Hegel Reference Hegel2004). When he insisted that knowledge must become the basis of habit, he rejected the habituality of the Oriental, in which the native had neither willpower nor self-control. For the regenerated Indian, habit was entirely positive, formed by the will to self-control. It set him apart from Europeans and from animals, identifying him not only universally as a new kind of man, but also specifically as a creature of race. In a colonized society in a state of decay evidenced by subjugation itself, this regenerative vision was an alternative and a challenge to the technological achievements of the West, and a frame within which science and technology could be assimilated.

Comparing societies around the world, Bhudeb articulated a diversity of natures, of which Hindus (peace-loving, hard-working, patient, and unselfish) possessed the best (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 149–51). Europeans were energetic, tyrannical, pleasure-loving, and sadistic, which was why their contact with non-Europeans was marked by aggression, murder, and rape. Their main economic arrangement, capitalism, was inseparable from piracy and debauchery. This, he argued, was the consequence of the lack of karmic ideology in European thought: actions had no logical moral consequences. Muslims shared the aggressive and illogical elements, but these were balanced by self-restraint, egalitarianism, disavowal of brigandage, and generosity toward converts. Grafting the customs of one land upon another distorted nature and was inevitably harmful. Europeans had not benefited by adopting the Semitic religion of Christianity, he observed: it had devastated their society and turned their lower classes into animals. Because Indian customs were relatively intact, Indians had preserved some of their higher nature, but it was threatened by the circumstances of colonial life, with its incitements to mimicry that alienated the individual from the race (566).

Here, Bhudeb's attempt to articulate Indian nature reflects another bifurcation in his outlook. The nature of the individual was inherently bestial: controlling it was basic to civilization. But the nature of the nation or race, which may or may not be bestial, had no automatic necessity of control. It simply was, and could be recognized with either pride or objectivity. It was what the nationalist worked with, and also worked on. That combination of “working with” and “working on” race underlay Bhudeb's conservatism as well as his nationalism.

Before a later generation of Indian nationalists came to imagine the activist state (awakening at midnight) as the paradoxical achievement of something ancient, Bhudeb thus laid a part of the foundation, separating nationality, which was innate, from nationalism or national feeling, which had to be acquired by grasping, practicing, and improving the innate truth. Indians must follow the dharmic exhortation to detached action, and through exercise (anushilan), cultivate their nationality. Failure would not be contrary to the ordinary nature of humans (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 141–42). Since detached action was unnatural, Indian nationality was “unnatural” also, and as such, a fact of civilization. What Indians were urged to cultivate was thus not just their nature, but cultivation itself: to maintain a higher (national) nature of continuous struggle against lower (individual) nature.

The idea of an Indianness based on struggle was not Bhudeb's peculiar eccentricity. Faisal Devji (Reference Devji2012) has argued that Gandhi in South Africa posited something similar. The near-contemporaneous writings suggest the appeal of the idea to nationalists of different but overlapping stripes. One set, not having invested in the sovereign nation-state and accustomed to a political milieu (a diasporic India, or the Empire itself) without a deployable majority, had no use for majoritarian politics and looked elsewhere for the substance of identity. The other, bemoaning mimicry but refusing to turn away from Europe, both embraced and struggled against history, and therefore felt bound to struggle against themselves. The absence of struggle indicated not stability but stagnation and death. Not even English-educated Indians could be as unselfconsciously selfish as the English, Bhudeb wrote, and then warned Indians against mimicking English selfishness, the assertion of stable difference followed immediately by the warning of disaster (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 169–70). That simultaneity was, at one level, merely the deployment of two opposed but equally valuable polemics. But at another level, the contradiction had to be resolved in racial cultivation. Nature was real and resilient, but not invulnerable: it could change, and it could be learned. The task of the conservative was the teaching of custom as the content and the medicine of a colonized race.

The Science of a Pedagogy

Over the course of his career, Bhudeb rose to become a school inspector and one of the best-connected, highest-paid Indians in the colonial education bureaucracy (Raychaudhuri Reference Raychaudhuri2002). It was a contentious location. Since the clashes surrounding the “Young Bengal” phenomenon of the 1820s and 1830s, schooling in British India had produced escalating confrontations over race, generation, caste, and class, to say nothing of gender. In the late nineteenth century, both sides of the teacher's desk were central to the aspirations and anxieties of an economically and politically weak bhadralok class. Simultaneously, the schools that taught T. B. Macaulay's curriculum fed a racist colonial discourse of “crammers” and baboos: natives who were intellectually empty and politically “seditious” (Sen Reference Sen2007; Viswanathan Reference Viswanathan1990). It was from within this ongoing mêlée that Bhudeb complained about the moral decrepitude of contemporary educators, and argued also that the schoolteacher was the indispensable national savior (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 263).

That polemic contained a deep ambivalence about colonial education. Bhudeb had no desire to dismantle Macaulay's curriculum; he wanted more government-affiliated schools (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 552). Yet he understood the limited nature of Macaulay's transformative intentions. Colonial rulers cannot want to make their subjects innovative, he wrote; their intervention produced mainly mimicry (258). That duality of mimicry (lazy, thoughtless, feeble) and innovation (self-initiated, self-assessed, rational) reflected his desire for an education that transforms. The modern Indian emphasis on educating children was unprecedented, he wrote; whereas pathshala-based literacy and restrictions on misbehavior had once satisfied parents’ sense of their responsibility, contemporary parents sought to make all experience educational and avoided teaching restrictions. He did not want a return to the pathshala, writing instead that proper education imparted a discipline that made the teacher redundant (60–61). The internalization of restraint was the meaning and means of self-government. Bentham could not have put it better (Foucault Reference Foucault1990, Reference Foucault1995). Colonial pedagogy, with its emphasis on reading hundreds of books, was counterproductive; positivists did not understand this, Bhudeb declared. “Cramming” might be reparable in Europe, but it was bound to be pernicious where power was alien (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 587). Simultaneously disruptive and inadequate, Macaulay had made it essential that Indians compensate for him—and complement him—with the well-informed, well-considered inculcation of new habits in the free spaces of native society.

What was free in the colony? In an essay on free thought, responding to “liberated” Indians who rejected custom and scripture as “illogical,” Bhudeb retorted that those who resorted to the logic of others were not free in the eyes of their countrymen (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 556). The identity of the observing, judging compatriots remained fuzzy. He had in mind a generalized and flexible “people” that lay just below the conservative vanguard. An idealized version of the lower-middle-class constituency of the Congress Extremists, they were the brakes on elite preoccupations that would otherwise transcend nationality into cosmopolitanism. One generation of colonial education had shaken millennia of religious nature-making, Bhudeb complained: English-educated Indian youth were disrespectful (owing to their excessive egalitarianism), intellectually obtuse (with no karmic sense of cause and effect), and for all their nationalist protestations, in love with the British, who rejected their servile loyalty (165–66). They were unfree, but not beyond self-liberation. Complicating his disparagement of the “bestial” nature of Europeans, Bhudeb listed seven traits of the European sensibility: selfishness, progressiveness, egalitarianism, worldliness, autonomy or sovereignty, scientific temperament, and the jurisdiction of the government over society (167). This was useful as a foil against which Indianness could be defined and deployed, but except for “selfishness,” the traits were neutral, even admirable. What was truly objectionable and oppressive about Europe was the automatic admiration its culture commanded among Indians of his class.

Bhudeb suggested that the power and glamor associated with colonial education, more than its content, had turned Indians into dazed mimics and fools (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 301–2). Mimicry indicated not only a loss of confidence, but also a kind of madness. Together, these constituted a peculiarly colonial demoralization, connecting education, poverty, and health. The demoralization (uddyamhinata) of Bengal was a direct consequence of a reluctance to engage in trade or agriculture: Bengalis feared work more than anything else, and based their entire social standing upon the acquisition of degrees (561). The cure included European knowledge, to be imbibed deeply but critically; the British themselves were the best example of people who had achieved an effective combination of customs and constitutions. More than Indians, they understood that the fit between a race and its appropriate body of custom could be identified through science. In a three-part essay on the scientific spirit, Bhudeb wrote that the beauty of science, with its emphasis on demonstration and proof, was that it made truth clearly visible, eliminating the need to deploy the imagination. There was little that the lower classes (chhotolokera) of Bengal could not imagine, he added irritably (188–89).

Crucially, Bhudeb also rejected the content of European race-science. Its application to imperialism was illogical and dishonest, he argued with exaggerated scientific and logical rigor, using Darwin against the white man's claim to be the culmination of human evolution, and seeking an additional scientific tradition in Indian myths and customs, including yoga (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 170–71, 336–37). Europeans had studied the external world more effectively than had Indians, but the latter had shown greater skill in investigating the interior world. The formulation is not the familiar Indian-nationalist outer/inner, material/spiritual division of sovereignties (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993). For the native to be the better scientist of race was inherently anti-colonial; it was also novel. Bhudeb's attempts to reconcile mythology with Darwin, deep time, geology, and anthropology indicate a conviction that mythology must adapt to science, usually as metaphor, even as modernity took on mystical overtones (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 492–95). When difficult questions arose (why were there no giants in the human fossil record?), he did not claim to know the answers. The uncertainty was exciting and inviting to the scientist. He was deploying an alternative science, not an anti-science, of the body, its needs, and its value. Natives and Europeans remained racialized; race remained a signifier of nature. But they were differently racialized, not so much throwing out the old evidence (climate, soil, diet) as turning it into proof of the fraudulence of European authority (152–53).

Science, Bhudeb wrote in another multi-part essay, had allowed Europeans to penetrate continents at will, no matter how great the distances or the native resistance. He mentioned H. M. Stanley, then at the peak of his celebrity, as an example of this power (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 185–87). The wry admiration came less than a decade before Joseph Conrad's narrative of technological absurdity in the jungle. Bhudeb had not reached that ironic awareness of the limits of white power. But in his narratives of environmental influence, miscegenation, and racial change, there is an echo of Gobineau: race was natural and also vulnerable to nature. He borrowed the imperial white man as a cautionary model of amoral self-indulgence, which Indians imitated at their own peril (225–27). He insisted, however, that human nature, that is, the nature reflected in society and civilization, was a contrary force, pushing against the flattening possibilities of science and history (217, 234–35). The preservation of racial difference was thus a social priority: human nature resisting Nature. In this polemic of rebellion against scientific fatalism, custom and society were dynamic means of teaching, controlling, and utilizing science toward ends that were not themselves determined by science. “True” customs, supported by experience (history), thus allowed interventions—pedagogies—that were almost entirely open-ended.

Bhudeb was an early advocate of an industrial “mentality” in India, articulated as unnati (progress) and imagined as an education—and a national life—suffused with an ethos of technological and moral improvement (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 191–92; Zachariah Reference Zachariah2012). His enthusiasm for manufacture and import substitution anticipated Swadeshi, and remarkably, included the protection of industrial workers (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 275–76). Describing industrial justice as a bypassing of the colonial courts, he foreshadowed the economic-political-moral project of Hind Swaraj. The un-Gandhian enthusiasm about industry was directly opposed to an unrestrained profit-seeking that afflicted colonial society. It was, in fact, a scheme of self-restraint, with restraint functioning as both a sign and a means of national health. It was through this scientific education, Bhudeb wrote, that the national savior would emerge: a learned man committed simultaneously to modern and ancient knowledges. His hero has an explicit echo of Kalki; this was science that resonated with a Hindu idiom of legitimate transformation (258–61).

Bhudeb did not, however, expect such heroes to be religious figures. He preferred a rational-scientific-militarist model of leadership that would have been recognizable to those who championed Swadeshi politics and national education a generation later, and who were, in that sense, his ideological descendants (S. Sarkar Reference Sarkar2010). Charismatic leadership was formulated in opposition to a perverse Indian inclination toward mediocrity, which—in a standard maneuver of nineteenth-century conservatism—Bhudeb equated with democracy (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 258–64). The counterintuitive imputation of democracy to Indianness was a strand within the vanguardism of anti-colonial nationhood: nationalism was not just an awareness, but organization itself. The learning of organization could be discursively wedded to religious terminology like tapasya, but as with right-wing nationalists from Bankim to Savarkar, there is little in such religiosity that cannot be reconciled with secular preoccupations. In teaching children to be clean, Bhudeb combined narratives of healthy bodies, ritual purity, progress, and national recovery (59–60). Purity was indistinguishable from health, and the Self/Other distinction consistently had primacy over the content of religion and custom (309–11). Knowledge, he suggested, must be a nationally exclusive category, to be reconquered from European investigators by an Indian cadre (349).

This was also, however, a universalizing strategy. Science was a pillar of civilization itself, which colonial education had weakened in India (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 271–74). We are returned thus to a familiar vacillation: British rule was both degenerative and regenerative. Bhudeb was in the vanguard of a larger, longer Indian project of “restoring the nation” to a world of race, history, and knowledge (Sen Reference Sen2015). His vision of learning-from-Britain represented a particular model of international contact: assimilating knowledge without genuflecting. The British themselves borrowed technology from the French, Americans, Dutch, and Germans, he noted, attacking the bhakti that English-educated Indians felt toward England (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 166–67). Not only was technology universal, it represented mastery over external nature, which was insignificant compared to the conquest of man's own nature. Being insignificant, technological borrowing was acceptable. The polemic of learning science thus contained, in every sense, problems and resolutions about how to respond to alien contact: it was threatening but insignificant, foreign but universal, humiliating but necessary, denaturing but a fait accompli.

Aware that Indian students who went abroad to study science often studied agriculture (a waste of time, because India—an agricultural society—had little to learn in this area), Bhudeb complained that even those students returned home to become bureaucrats (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 191–92). It was a critique of the professional priorities of colonial society, and an accusation of fraud and waste. He looked for a different model of learning, and was one of the first Indians who found it in Japan, well before the watershed moment of the Russo-Japanese War (Mishra Reference Mishra2013). The strategy of technical education initiated in Japan in the Meiji period fit Bhudeb's preference for going abroad to study such things. Colonial schools were compromised by their colonial nature: not only were the British indifferent educators, but also the alienation of the surface of Indian society from the uneducated core could only distort the goals and outcomes of education (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 552). This was a remarkable stance for an education bureaucrat to take, underlining Bhudeb's status as a prickly insider who nevertheless believed that colonial rule had supplied a weakened people with universal texts of nature, which could be utilized for their particular interests in the name of conservation.

From Family to Population

When Bhudeb imagined India as an agricultural nation, he pictured a food-growing civilization supported on the one hand by science, and on the other by the upper-caste joint family. The alternative, he observed darkly, was a society of laborers: workers without land, security, or culture (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 543). He forgot that agricultural India was, in fact, a society of laboring peasants. That cognitive dissonance underlay the conservative vision of the rural nationhood, which slid toward a post-feudal European model of yeoman farming without actually addressing land relations. The joint family that Bhudeb defended—and that, Rochona Majumdar (Reference Majumdar2009) has shown, was new—was basic to the slippage. His sense of financial well-being was partially Victorian middle class with visible Calvinist roots. In India, these became indigenized as the ethic of a salaried class that wanted financial security but lacked the infrastructure of investment, especially after the banking crisis that hit Bengal in 1848 (Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya2005). Self-control and delayed gratification, in addition to living scientifically, constituted a recuperative “discipline.”

Discipline was apparently opposed to happiness. The pursuit of happiness, Bhudeb intoned, could not be the objective of dharma (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 268–69). The disavowal of an easy connection between dharma and happiness was a dismissal of liberal priorities, supporting a “hard” dharma that was not only more compatible with the hardened nationalism of the Bankim-Tilak years, but also reflective of the hard circumstances of a class for which privation had to have moral significance. The contemporary canonizing of the Gita as national scripture was intertwined with this nationhood of suffering and self-restraint (Chaturvedi Reference Chaturvedi2010). So was Bhudeb's valorization of an alternative model of “how the English live”: he had heard that in England they lived frugal lives different from those of Anglo-Indians (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 270). This allowed him to imagine another Europe, based on a modest middle-class domesticity. The Indian attitude to the pursuit of wealth, he argued, must be informed by twinned ideas of restraint and detachment: the first symbolizing civilization, and the second Upanishadic Hinduism (308–11). This resolution was crucial to the authority acquired by Upanishadic thought within Indian nationalism (Sartori Reference Sartori2009).

It was crucial also to the imagining of domesticity as a new curriculum. In his instructions on family life, Bhudeb turned every act and hour of the day into a “ritual” (kritya). Everything was locked into a framework of rules in a way that was “fundamentalist” but not especially theological. English-educated Indians disdained rituals, he remarked, but they failed to recognize that the European military drill is nothing but disciplining ritual. He wanted a well-drilled society and new fundamentals of living as a Hindu, in which a new time (the colonial clock) and a new space (the maddhabitta home) were organized and learned through new languages of health and a strong community. Sex and sleep must both be eschewed in daytime, he intoned: “One destroys punya (moral credit) and the other shortens ayu (lifespan)” (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 345–53). His insistence that sex education within the family must be a part of child-rearing invoked an immunized sexual body: formal education could not disrupt its discipline, which was tied up with national identity (373–85).

Bhudeb's intervention in “the Indian family” began with a reimagining of the patriarch and patriarchy: an updating that was reactionary in its explicit intentions, but almost radical in its implications. Indian modernity, Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, privileged the patriarch over liberal considerations of rights-bearing individuality (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2007). Bhudeb conventionally insisted that the householder was the king of his domain, entitled to reverence (bhakti), responsible for the peace and moral well-being of the family, and a shield against the rule (shashon) of external agencies such as government and even society (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 43, 79, 81). Yet his householder, who taught his female and juvenile relatives, himself had much to learn. He had a formal monopoly on authority within the family but, in practice, shared that authority with his wife. In an essay on quarreling spouses, Bhudeb advised both parties to resolve their differences diplomatically, taking each other's feelings seriously. There was no insistence that the husband must prevail (17–20). His conservative household inexorably incubated democratic forces, seeking, typically, to manage them.

Clearly, a new conjugality was central to that vision of the restrained and restraining household (Majumdar Reference Majumdar2009). It rested on a gendered division of nature borrowed from middle-class Victoriana: the bestial nature of men required the civilizing touch of feminine nature, with its capacity for shame and innate divinity (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 20–22). The reactionary implications are inescapable. After the legalization of remarriage for Hindu widows, Bhudeb sided with the orthodoxy that had opposed Vidyasagar (Hatcher Reference Hatcher2014, Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 70–72). His reasoning was unorthodox, however: he argued that rapid aging in hot climates made widows unmarriageable (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 253). When defending child marriage, he insisted that early marriage was essential to a resilient conjugal bond. It was a sentiment that, Majumdar (Reference Majumdar2009) has suggested, left a stubborn residue of regret within modern Indian marriage. But Bhudeb backed sentiment with social science, noting that societies in which girls married late had high rates of divorce, and producing psychological, physiological, and statistical arguments in support of his position (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 7–10).

Even in his overtly anti-reformist mode, the rakshansheel ideologue made concessions. As dowry emerged as a divisive reality of the new “marriage market” of Bengal, Bhudeb straddled the divide, defending dowry as a parental right but urging parents to be modest in their demands, and identifying the transactions with wider patterns of competition and irresponsibility that threatened the respectable status of maddhabitta families (Majumdar Reference Majumdar2009; Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 27–28, 47–48, 51–53). Marriage, for Bhudeb, was not a natural institution. It was a taming of nature, teaching modes of living that were resisted by the essentially selfish, undisciplined instincts (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 10). A working marriage indicated the successful containment of those instincts in new, social individuals. That sensitivity and openness to artifice is why Bhudeb can be considered one of the first Indian social scientists. The scientifically oriented householder could see that new norms of kinship had emerged in his society, and improvise new artifices for interacting with strangers and relatives, who were not always distinct (30–35, 53).

It is here that the simultaneity of restriction and liberation in the conservative family is most evident. Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2007) and Majumdar (Reference Majumdar2009) have, I think, overemphasized constraint in their vision of the “new patriarchy” of Bengal. By imagining the wife as a desiring subject and partner, Bhudeb pushed the envelope of the “nationalist resolution” (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993; Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 9–10). Wives had needs that went beyond the “social,” he insisted, granting even widows a certain wholeness: they must not be shunned or subjected to innumerable punishing restrictions, but included in the affective life of the household and taught Sanskrit (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 12–13, 70–72). While the last was a restraining tactic, it was also a pedagogical innovation that utilized the space opened up within the family by widowhood itself, which, by disrupting the normal claims upon a woman's time and interests, generated new possibilities of “growth.” His widow was undeniably an individual, whose right to happiness was admitted through back doors labeled “education” and “health.” Marital happiness, he insisted, was essential to a healthy family (54).

The liberating possibilities of this teachable happiness excited a wide range of contemporary Indian men, from Rabindranath Tagore to Mumtaz Ali and Gandhi (Minault Reference Minault1999). Those possibilities included not only a different kind of wife, but the modern concept of dampatya or companionate marriage, in which the spousal tie was itself transformed (Forbes Reference Forbes2007; Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 9–10, 17–20). Bhudeb sought to normalize a reciprocal, permanent, and exclusive emotional relationship in which husbands were solicitous of the aspirations and morale of their wives (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 23–25). Utilizing an “indigenous” moral discourse that overlapped evangelical critiques of Indian custom, he rejected polygamy, arguing that while it was possible to love several wives, it was an inferior form of love (69–70). The inability to commit to one woman reflected a moral defect and a bestial nature; the family could correct both.

An essay on widowers added a vital corollary. It laid out a vision of fairness, balancing the insistence on permanent widowhood with the rejection of remarriage for widowers. The widower, Bhudeb went on, had lost his reason for being and must learn to cope. This was a modification of sannyas by a modern marital predicament. A dead wife was unique and irreplaceable, molded by a husband who had fully become himself only through his relationship with her. It was immoral, and ultimately unnatural, to violate that uniqueness and mutuality of personhood by remarrying (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 65–68).

Even embedded within the joint family, then, Bhudeb's couple formed a limited unit of mutual solidarity, remaking Indians to cope with a hyper-competitive society. He promoted active financial roles for wives and a notion of conjugal property: women should understand and manage household finances, and advise their husbands when it came to earning, spending, and saving money (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 24, 40). Husbands were themselves transformed by such “assistance.” The new conjugality was, among other things, a hands-on, do-it-yourself domesticity. Husbands should possess basic carpenter's and mason's tools and know how to use them, Bhudeb declared (84–86). This was a typical late nineteenth-century protest against the novelty of an elite-native lifestyle signaled by unmanned husbands and frivolous wives, suggesting a desire to “return” to the past, but it was also forward-looking and outward-looking, informed by admiration of metropolitan English domesticity. The vision of bhadralok with saws and hammers foreshadowed Benoy Sarkar's insistence that “mistrification”—cultivating a mechanically adept subjectivity—was a necessity of modernity and independence (Sen Reference Sen2015). Like Sarkar, Bhudeb was articulating a relationship with technology and efficiency that was both natural and new. He was also positing a notion of self-motivated work at home that liberated the native: men from the demoralizing work of the kerani, and women from suffocating anonymity and wasted personhood (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 87; S. Sarkar Reference Sarkar2006). He was taking not only the wife but also the patriarch into the terrain of professional housekeeping; domestic work was infused with the prestige of work, not its drudgery and insignificance. Your own work has always been Swadeshi, he reminded readers, meaning that it could be Swadeshi (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 87). The record-keeping housewife undergirded the reimagining of the home as a micro-state with a theory of social responsibility and individual rights, training Indians in the detailed, exact, exacting stuff of citizenship.

Because this reformulated home taught a new relationship with one's own nature, it was a project of health. Health was a measure of civilization in a competitive racial arena, and medical language could outline the everyday life of the conservative. The everyday, Ben Highmore (Reference Highmore2001) suggested, is not a given: it is a construction of community-through-experience that produces not only commonalities, but also differences. Bhudeb deployed theories of contagion, mortality, and eugenics to outline the “traditions” that might define and revitalize the national community: caste discrimination, food, sex, and childcare (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 45–46, 54, 79–80). Colonial timetables of work and school, he believed, had disrupted native diets, bodies, and health (103). This extended commonplace anxieties about the clock in nineteenth-century Bengal, but the unease was two-fold (S. Sarkar Reference Sarkar2002). On the one hand, Bhudeb saw a threat to nature, for example, to the human body that needed to eat at reasonable (natural) times. On the other hand, he perceived a threat to culture, that is, to the cultivated and distinguishing habits of the race. Food and its rituals could open the door to (and signify) worse, degenerative appetites of the body: “Those who eat anything and with anyone will also ignore caste in their sexual desires” (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 537). He made compensatory recommendations that covered the ritual and content of the meal, giving precise instructions regarding serving utensils, the depth to which the fingers should touch the food, the inclusion of children at meals, the making of conservation, decorous chewing, and season-specific diets. This rectitude, he argued, was healthier and more satisfying than either European dining habits (which were bestial) or disorderly colonial-Indian meals (101–3, 334–37). He thus advanced a moral science of etiquette and nature, constructing a repertoire of foods and habits that was recognizably Indian, and a viable Indian body undergirded by shastric references and medical, physiological, and genetic knowledge. He posited, moreover, a relationship of natural predestination between the eater and of the food: morally strong people would want food that made them healthy, and healthy people were best able to lead moral lives that distinguished them from other peoples. The family meal was racial therapy.

Marriage too was therapeutic: without it, humans would be undisciplined, evil, and most pertinently, nonviable (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 159–60). In an essay on standards of living, he compared India and Europe, providing statistics that showed that a higher percentage of Indian women of reproductive age were married. It was, he remarked, a scientific truth that adult women who were not diseased should marry; ergo, Indian society was more scientific and healthier than its European counterparts (252). But it was also highly vulnerable, in need of corrections that took the form of sexual happiness, family planning, and natal health. Child-marriage, which he generally defended, needed specific reforms: pregnancies should come later and less frequently, to protect the health of mothers and babies. Young men headed for administrative and scientific careers—the entire national vanguard—should postpone marriage itself, remembering their racial capacity for brahmacharya (54, 544).

Bhudeb's investment in a national population reflected the wider politics of public health in Bengal, including the alarm over rampant malaria (Harrison Reference Harrison1994; Samanta Reference Samanta2002). The connections between morality and dirt were as apparent to him as they would be to Gandhi, but his priorities lay elsewhere. Jews were viable as a population in spite of their scattered and persecuted condition, Bhudeb wrote in an essay on neatness (parichchannata), because hygiene is a requirement of their race: when Jews preserved one, they also maintained the other (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 35). Self-evident connections could thus be posited between public order, public health, ritual, and racial conservation. Penning a physiology of evacuative health, Bhudeb spelled out the rules of defecation: mornings were best, and there should be no talking or lingering in the toilet (317–18). He specified what type of soil and water could be used to clean oneself. (Soap was banned; ashes were better.) These rules, he insisted, were both scientifically and scripturally correct. Similarly, he articulated an Indian science of tooth-brushing, comparing it favorably with European practice, which, he wrote, was still catching up (319–20). Advising wealthy Indians on how to spend their money in a colony damaged by conspicuous consumption and waste, he emphasized a philanthropy of clean water and public health (275).

These polemics were obviously a form of cultural competition: Bhudeb was engaging Victorians at their own game of soapy civilization (McClintock Reference McClintock1995). In the process, he outlined a strategy of self-government in a national crisis that could be diagnosed and treated. The strategy contained an accusation of cynical impoverishment directed at the colonial government, in a nutritional variant of contemporary drain-of-wealth discourse (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 252–53; Naoroji Reference Naoroji2010). Particular colonial enclaves, like prisons, provided Bhudeb with models and data: he concluded that the unhealthy convict population was a reliable reflection of the diseased nation (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 251–52). Convicts—surveilled, enumerated, categorized, and governed—were an acceptable facsimile of a population, and colonial administrators typically used them to argue that Indians were well-fed, healthy, and pampered (Sen Reference Sen2012). Bhudeb turned the image of the weight-gaining Indian prisoner on its head: the colony was a badly managed jail.

Faced with a sick and unfree population, Bhudeb imagined governance with reference to the extension of lifespans. He had recourse to the indigenous discourse of ayu, which described mythical eras when people lived long lives and general well-being prevailed. But mythology was not enough. A fertile population, like fertile soil, needed scientific management to remain productive, and Bhudeb cited an unnamed British expert who had told him that whenever fertility rates fell in India or child mortality rose, he inferred that the cost of food had shot up and famine was imminent. Indian population growth was slower than the European, Bhudeb lamented, and infant mortality dragged down the average lifespan (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 254). He used the vocabulary of life-preservation, jibanraksha, to discuss both fertility and mortality, but the national calamity of infant mortality was partially autonomous of the colonial economy: even when food was available, children died at unacceptable rates. The malaise signified problems that were reflected in colonial subordination but internal to Indian society.

Bhudeb's position on population growth was inconsistent. While his usual inclination was a Malthusian alarm about global overpopulation, the “slow” Indian growth-rate also alarmed him (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 159–61). The reluctance to identify India as an overpopulated country, in spite of his obsession with a mismatch between population and food supply, was a fracture caused by the demands of nationalism: overpopulation remained an accusation directed at Europe. For India, it could only be implicit. Bhudeb argued that society by its very existence creates a crisis of health. The national demographer could fall into a dejected acceptance of mechanistic self-regulation by the population, akin to the self-regulation of the capitalist economy. Alternately, he could take a managerial stance based on family planning, working out a sustainable relationship of authority and control between the individual and society. Overpopulation (and infanticide) represented the failure of this relationship, and thus the failure of both disciplined self-hood and social discipline (160–61). A viable society would acknowledge the problem and develop countermeasures, building them into its norms of marriage and procreation. Because such innovations would spring from self-awareness, they would also consolidate the society as a population.

That population could compete with white power, which was itself tied up with the growing authority of allopathic medicine (Arnold Reference Arnold1993; Harrison Reference Harrison1994). For Bhudeb, only allopathic medicine was scientific and worthwhile (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 185–88, 233–34). Since allopathy was not fully hegemonic even within “Western medicine,” Bhudeb—like Gandhi—was able to use the uncertain authority and unclear boundaries creatively, sometimes extracting their elements, sometimes inserting his eccentricities and improvisations, proposing a guerrilla modernity distinct from the illegitimate priorities of the public domain (Alter Reference Alter2000). In his essays on yoga, he described modern anatomies and medical conditions (like self-induced comas), citing the English-language press for support (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 589–90).

Anglo-Indian acknowledgment mattered to Indians of his class, who opened their homes to white physicians so that sick family members could receive the most authoritative care. Doctors making “house calls” were often supercilious, unwilling to leave their race at the door. For Indian patriarchs, dealing with such doctors was charged with violated sovereignty and threatened dignity. Bhudeb recommended a medical posture that was both confrontational and cooperative. Indian care-givers must be patient, self-sacrificing, and above all self-controlled, hiding their distress from both the patient and the physician, and balancing the knowledgeable fear of contagion with love and courage (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2010, 96–100). He was, he wrote, so rational, systematic, and self-possessed, not only in his treatment of the sick relative but also as an informant to the visitor, that the doctor's arrogance gave way to grudging admiration. “White” medicine in the rakshansheel home was an everyday Indian practice, although—and because—Bhudeb insisted that European health-science was still catching up with shastra (336–37). It had become an exercise in conservative self-government.